I have a lot of friends who I am in the process of teaching Magic. The end goal, of course, is to broaden my local cube community. However, I have a problem- my cube is too complicated for magic new players to fully enjoy. For example, I recently had one of my friends learn to play Magic to cube with my playgroup over the holidays. The week before the draft, we spent a few hours teaching him to play, and he watched some videos on how to draft and cube gameplay. When we got to the draft, he ended up doing fine- better than I expected, actually- but I could tell that the whole experience was a little overwhelming for him. Now, I have multiple people "in the pipeline" of learning Magic, but I am afraid of losing them to complexity. Unfortunately, decks that try to grind value on axes other than simple board dominance are a little bit confusing to new players. It's not apparently obvious that Life from the Loam is a better magic card than Storm Crow.
I have decided that my needs would be best met by constructing a new cube. This environment will focus on simple, easy to understand cards that can lead to complex decision trees. I want to strip Magic down to its fundamental pieces without putting the game on rails. The only problem- I've never built a cube like this before. That's where you, the reader, come in. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be working on building a tentative version of a "noob cube."
Design Goals For a cube like the Noob Cube, it is important to set strict design goals. I don't want to build a cube-ified version of a core set. Therefore, I have come up with the following outline for what I want this cube to end up looking like. -Simple cards with deep decision trees -Cards with reminder text for abilities wherever possible. -Multiples of the same card for "bread and butter" effects. -2-Color archetype focus. -Small gold section. -Mono-Color support. -Aggro support in every color. -Maintain a cube feel. -Medium Power Level.
Explanation of goals.
Simple cards with deep decision trees. What I mean by "simple cards with deep decision trees" is that I want to focus on cards that aren't hard to understand but provide a lot of options to the player. Take Magma Jet. This card does 2 damage, and then it lets you look at the top of your deck. It's not a hard card to digest and understand on first reading, but it does a lot in practice. It makes the player as questions about what they want to hit with their spell, and what cards they want to put on top of their deck.
Cards with reminder text for abilities wherever possible. I want to make ease of understanding the cards in this cube a top priority for design. The best way to do that in my evaluation is to have the cards themselves explain what they do. I don't want people not to take a good card during a draft because they don't know what vigilance does or something like that. Because I plan to focus on including reminder text where possible, I can also use non-evergreen mechanics such as flashback when designing this cube. Most cards with non-evergreen keywords have reminder text built into the card. This means that it can be easier to find a flashback card with reminder text than, say, a card with flying and reminder text.
Multiples of the same card for "bread and butter" effects. Most decks need a density of effects to work well. A blue control deck, for example, needs multiple counterspells to function optimally. I can cut comprehension complexity from the cube by using multiple copies of the same card for it's given type of slot. Instead of forcing players to read Llanowar Elves, [/c]Fyndhorn Elves[/c], and Elvish Mystic, I'll just use three copies of Llanowar Elves instead. There is no point to making a new player have to read 4 different cards if they all are meant to serve the same function.
2-Color archetype focus and small gold section. I want to help guide drafters through their new cube experience. One way of doing this is to make clear two-color decks. I plan to do this by using clear "signpost cards" in my gold slots. Each two-color pair will include 2 copies of a gold card meant to represent what that deck wants to be doing. These will be the only true gold cards in the cube. In addition to this, I will be including a slightly more flexible (but still on-theme) hybrid card in each color combination. For example, Blue/White might have 2 copies of Empyrean Eagle and a copy of Judge's Fammiliar to support and clearly signal a fliers deck. Each color should either be a part of four two-color decks that either play synergistically together or are not negatively affected by each other's presence.
Mono-Color support and Aggro support in every color. I want to make sure that someone who "took all the blue cards" isn't punished for making that draft decision. Therefore, I want to make sure that every color has the pieces it needs for a mono-color deck. As long as my main 2-color pair archetypes aren't too parasitic, cards from multiple decks should all fit into a mono-color deck. For example, a mono-white build can use pieces from a token deck and a fliers deck to build a "white weenie" strategy. In addition, I will seed each color with some cards that only work optimally in a mono-color aggressive strategy. Expedition Envoy is a fine white card, but it only truly excels when it's in mono-white.
Maintain a Cube feel at a Medium Power Level Above all else, this cube is meant to be a cube, first and foremost. I don't want this to feel like an awful core set draft experience that just also has cards with flashback. Therefore, I would like to maintain a medium power level across the board where I can. The only caveat here is in the power level of the finisher cards for midrange and control decks. I'm going to avoid too many splashy finishers. This is for two reasons. For a start, big splashy creatures ("baneslayers") aren't always great in cube, and I don't want to get my drafters into the habit of running into traps. Otherwise, I want the focus of this environment to be on synergies between cards and not "my big dragon ate your face."
Conclusion. The Noob Cube is going to be an adventure to be sure. Although many people have tried to design cubes for newbies before, many don't have as strict design goals and feel like a corse set in a box or a watered-down legacy cube. That approach isn't bad per-say, but I want to introduce my friends to my favorite game with a format that feels like my preferred format, not a core set. Please feel free to include comments either here on the RTL forums or through any other methods you have of reaching me.
I'll be posting a tentative list here once I have at least a partial cube populated.
Mono-Color support and Aggro support in every color. I want to make sure that someone who "took all the blue cards" isn't punished for making that draft decision. Therefore, I want to make sure that every color has the pieces it needs for a mono-color deck. As long as my main 2-color pair archetypes aren't too parasitic, cards from multiple decks should all fit into a mono-color deck. For example, a mono-white build can use pieces from a token deck and a fliers deck to build a "white weenie" strategy. In addition, I will seed each color with some cards that only work optimally in a mono-color aggressive strategy. Expedition Envoy is a fine white card, but it only truly excels when it's in mono-white.
Are you going to include some nice monocolor reward cards? There's actually a bunch of CCC cards that are fairly straightforward, but still pushed enough to feel like a reward.
And of course devotion is a great way to reward monocolor decks!
Let's go over each of the 2 color archetypes in the cube. Each two-color pair has a set of two identical "signpost" gold cards meant to help signal what that deck wants to be doing. Each color pair also has a hybrid card meant to fit with the primary theme of the color pair but still be playable in either mono-color strategy.
W/U Fliers UW, has the simplest game plan, despite being a very complex color pair in normal cubes: go over them with fliers. There are a lot of small, evasive creatures that can go into this deck, with the rather linear strategy of beat them with birds until they stop moving. The golden Empyrean Eagle is a perfect signal for this deck, rewarding a curve of 1cc flier-> 2cc flier-> Eagle.
U/B Artifacts Black in this cube is very focused on gaining life and sacrificing permanents. As a result of this design choice, food tokens have ended up being an integral part of black's strategy. Luckily, blue has a glut of cards like Whirler Rogue that make artifact tokens and reward the drafter for playing artifacts. Although it is a bit unfortunate that signpost Contraband Kingpin doesn't have reminder text for either scry or lifelink, the engine-like capabilities of this card can not be ignored.
B/R Aristocrats I mulled long and hard over whether or not it made sense to include an aristocrats strategy in the Noob Cube. After all- most new players don't fully understand why they would want to be sacrificing creatures instead of just-having more creatures. Ultimately, I decided that an aristocrats deck worked well with the primary themes of the cube as long as I made sure the payoffs clearly indicated that sacrificing creatures is a correct thing to do. I decided to use a sacrifice payoff for my B/R decks in the form of Mayhem Devil instead of an enabler card like Brawl-Bash Ogre or Slaughter Priest of Mogis. Mayhem Devil is great because it has a pretty beefy body and works well with incidental sacrificing like Food Tokens. Even if one doesn't build a dedicated R/B sac deck, Mayhem Devil can still make the cut and maybe even telegraph that aristocrats is a good strategy for future reference.
R/G STOMP Originally, I was going to make R/G a Dinosaurs matter deck. I quickly realized that the density of playable Dinosaur cards that fit my simplicity criteria for this cube was too low to justify building an entire archetype around. Now, R/G has a little bit of a power 4 or greater theme, but really just rewards the drafter for playing big things and swinging in. For that reason, I left Raging Regisaur as my gold card. Regisaur helps clear the way for its own attacks by sniping the abundance of random tokens and small blockers found in R/W aggressive strategies.
G/W Convoke Green and White ended up having little in common when I was outlining how I wanted each color to play in the Noob Cube. Green was trying to put all of its resources into generating mana to produce a few, high-quality creatures that can hopefully win the game by themselves. Meanwhile, White is focused on creating a fairly wide board state, hoping to close the game quickly with a large army. Despite these seemingly conflicting goals, my issues with Green White were fairly easy to solve: just use the Convoke mechanic! Convoke lets players effectively convert all of their random token creatures into mana to help rush out big creatures and spells like Seige Wurm. Hilariously, I was even able to find a home for Chord of Calling in this cube thanks to my convoke deck. The only real downside is that none of the G/W gold Convoke cards are very good. Right now, I am using Worldsoul Colossus, a card which I am heavily doubting since it is essentially a big idiot creature with no abilities. I could use Rosemane Centaur, but I don't think that card screams "build a deck around trying to play me." Autochthon Wurm could maybe work for this slot, but they're almost 5 dollars a pop, and I don't want to spend that much money on a random gold card for a cube which I don't even plan on drafting that often.
W/B Lifegain Dust off your Ajani's Pridemate and call up Ravnic, because White/Black is all about gaining life. This deck has a lot of great enablers, such as Nyx-Fleece Ram and the Black food cards, and some potent finishers such as Ajani's Pridemante and Bloodthirsty Arealist. Gold card Regal Bloodlord even helps the Lifegain player make an army for their efforts. Although I think this deck is perfect in terms of archetype fit and focus, I do worry about overloading the cube with ways to gain life. I don't want to reinforce the idea that "life gain is good" amongst new players. The last thing I want to have happen is someone who learns how to draft with the Noob Cube take a bad lifegain card over something like Demonic Tutor in a draft of my Highball cube.
B/G Food One of the things I wanted to avoid in the Noob Cube was graveyard dump and self-mill. I'm ok with graveyard interaction in terms of Gravedigger effects and spells with flashback, but I didn't think that this set was really the place for Grisly Salvage type effects. Newer players don't understand why putting cards directly into the graveyard can be beneificial. They'd rather not play mill instead of risk putting their best card directly into the bin. Because of this, I decided that Green/Black needed to have a gameplan that didn't involve throwing tons of cards into the bin. I toyed with the idea of expanding aristocrats into Green, but I didn't think that it fit too well compared to the other things Green was trying to do. Then, the answer became clear to me: Food.
The Food mechanic was introduced fairly recently at the time of this writing in Throne of Eldraine. Food tokens are artifacts that can be sacrificed to gain life. Food was a perfect fit for black, since it fit with the color's other three archetypes, Lifegain, Aristocrats, and Artifacts. Although the food cards fit a little less cleanly into Green, cards like Feirce Witchstalker and Feasting Troll King are decent ramp targets for any green deck, regardless of whether or not they care about food. Food's gold card of choice, Savvy Hunter is arguably one of the strongest build-arounds in the cube, allowing the food player to generate a ton of card advantage off of fairly common tokens.
I'll be honest, out of all the archetypes in the Noob Cube, Food is the one I am least sure about. Not because of it's integration, arguably making food fit is one of the cleanest things I've done in a cube in a while, but because of complexity. The single wordiest card in the cube right now is Trail of Crumbs, with 59 words in its rules text. The issue here isn't so much the complexity that the food archetype offers in game- just that the cards have so many words on them.
Maybe my urge to defend the inclusion of food in the Noob Cube is an indicator that it isn't the right choice, or maybe I am just overthinking this. Like I said, Food mechanically does everything black wants to be doing in this environment, and it doesn't negatively impact the green player in any manner. It's just really wordy.
G/U Ramp I decided to go back to my tried and true roots of Simic Ramp for my Green/Blue archetype. Blue has a lot of cool monsters and big spells that can win the game on the back of Green's mana production. Green/Blue is even the only gold section to have exclusive access to a mana dork in the form of Maraleaf Pixie. This color combination's biggest issue is a lack of a specific gameplan other than "play big massive idiots." I don't quite know what specific ramp enablers I can put in Blue for this list since I'm not doing an "untapping lands" theme like in my Highball cube. Maybe there are some Blue-specific mana rocks I can use like Midnight Clock? Either way, this archetype should be fun to play even if it isn't quite as fleshed out as the other decks.
U/R Flashback/Spells Matter Support for Blue/Red spells was one of the main factors that made me decide to lean so heavily on non-evergreen mechanics in the Noob Cube. The Flashback mechanic lets players trigger things with Prowess or "Spells Matter" cast triggers like Young Pyromancer twice with a single card. Crackling Drake is a good magic card. It acts as a finisher, but also cantrips, making it a very low-risk card to cast. I wanted to avoid creatures that have fluctuating stats after they come into play, save for growth. Because of this, Crackling Drake ended up being a great fit for the Noob Cube because it counts the number of Instant and Sorcery cards in the Graveyard and in exile. This means that flashback cards being exiled won't make it smaller, as is the case with it's similar (but simpler) cousin Enigma Drake.
R/W Tokens
Tokens was a great fit for Red/White. Red's aristocrats archetype meant that the color was going to want to flood the board with a lot of creatures. White also has a lot of good token production that could easily be weaved in with the color's other themes and archetypes. As such, Tokens was a bit of a no-brainer for the color pair. Skyknight Vanguard is absolutely great here, since it's an evasive creature that also acts as an army in a can of sorts. I do worry that there aren't enough cards that scream "HEY PLAY TOKENS" in this color pair, but I'm not sure that's super important- red White will just have a lot of token generation as-is.
I hope the amount of archetype weaving I've been trying to do here is at least somewhat obvious. I've put a lot of thought and care into making sure that as many cards as possible can go into more than just one specific deck. For example, Young Pyromancer is at it's best in Blue/Red spells, but it is also super effective in White/Red tokens and Red/Black aristocrats, as both of those decks play lots of instant and sorcery spells and appreciate the extra token generation. The role the pyromancer plays in each deck is different, but it can work in all of them.
Are you going to include some nice monocolor reward cards? There's actually a bunch of CCC cards that are fairly straightforward, but still pushed enough to feel like a reward.
That's a really good idea! I had been planning with using devotion payoffs already, but a cycle of CCC cost cards would be very helpful in pushing mono-color gameplay without necessarily being parasitic. I decided to go with Benalish Marshal, Tempest Djinn, Dread Shade, Goblin Chainwhirler, and Llanowar Tribe. Benalish Marshal doesn't clearly indicate "mono white" as well as Linden, Steadfast Queen does, so I may make that switch before I build this thing in paper. Linden plays into White's themes very well, but I don't know if she's actually more pwerful than Benalish Marshal. For now, I think I'll go with just Benalish Marshal, but I could see linden making the cut in the future. Llanowar Tribe may seem like a weird addition, since it isn't as obviously powerful as some of the other CCC cards, but the ramp the tribe provides is insane. Being able to slam a Feasting Troll King or Plated Slagwurm on turn three is game-winning in a lower-power format like this.
In addition, I have included a cycle of devotion payoff cards: Daybreak Chimera, Thassa's Rebuff, Gary, Merchant of Asphodel, Fanatic of Mogis, and Reverent Hunter. These are all fairly non-complex devotion payoffs. Gary, Merchant of Asphodel and Fanatic of Mogis are potent finishers for their respective decks, and I can see them being bumped up to two copies each if the Lifegain deck proves to be too hard for mono-color to beat. Daybreak Chimera is probably the weakest of the devotion payoffs, but it fits really well with White's aggressive fliers plan and can usually come down on turn three in mono-White.
Conclusion
With my archetypes defined and some mono-color considerations made, I had enough of a pathway to start building the Skeleton of the Noob Cube. Here is the link. The cube isn't done yet, and there is a lot of meat that can still be added to these bones. More on that later.
W/U Fliers