My old 180 peasant Cube was kind of close to masters set limited, but it’s not like Midnight Hunt draft or anything.
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- Thread starter James Stevenson
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Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
My cube has been called retail power level. I would say it's a bit higher, but it's not far off when you look at the power level of my cards.
Retail
I'm looking for a cube that has a retail power level. One rare card in each pack etc.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
One rare in each pack is retail rarity distribution, but you can easily have a format with multiple rares per pack that still plays out like (modern) limited environments. If you mean a cube that mimics retail limited in both power level and rarity distribution, I think you're likely to end up with set/block cubes, like Rusje mentioned.
I don't want to argue about terms. Let me be precise what I want:
1. A low powered cube that leave the players with decks that are not stronger than any other Standard-legal (or Standard-legal in the past) draft deck. Imagine the power level of the most recent set, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.
2. One rare per pack. Three uncommons per pack. The rest commons.
3. Medium to low amount of mana fixing. Mostly mono-colored cards.
4. 15 cards per pack. Three packs per draft. Designed for 8 players.
5. Many cards with short, simple text. Even some vanilla and french vanilla creatures.
I probably forgot some things.
1. A low powered cube that leave the players with decks that are not stronger than any other Standard-legal (or Standard-legal in the past) draft deck. Imagine the power level of the most recent set, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.
2. One rare per pack. Three uncommons per pack. The rest commons.
3. Medium to low amount of mana fixing. Mostly mono-colored cards.
4. 15 cards per pack. Three packs per draft. Designed for 8 players.
5. Many cards with short, simple text. Even some vanilla and french vanilla creatures.
I probably forgot some things.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Yup, I think you're looking for set cubes. I once started a reimagining of Odyssey (https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/tgo), but haven't finished that one.
The formula is simple: take your favorite block/string of sets.
1. Cut the chaff (yes, also grbs mythics, and rares which are useless in such a draft.)
2. Double some mythics/rates
3. Double the uncommons. Some tripled.
4. Double all commens. Some tripled, and some even 4 or 5 times.
Seed the boosters as follows. Make a pile of the white rares/mythic, a pile of the white uncommons, a pile of the white commons. Do for every color. If desired do the same for artifacts/multicolored. Make another rare pile with a part or the rare/mythic piles of each color, if not in their own pile due to the low numbers add the artifacts and multicolored rares/mythics. Do for uncommen/common the same.
Pick such that you have a reasonable amount of each colored card in there. E.g. 2 of each color and 5 cards from the everything staple. Do this a bit randomly such that there is a slight imbalance in the colors of uncommons and rares every draft.
On a more serious note. Drop the rarity restriction. It requires a lot of additional cards, it complicates seeding, and the difference between the retail draft and this is negligible. Cutting the chaff has more impact and makes the decks play nicer. Nothing as bad as receiving a rare which is useless or a garbage uncommen which you will not play anyhow. If the power level of the decks becomes to high, the solution is to have boosters with less than 15 cards.
A very simple solution: buy 2 booster boxes. Draft them to get the retail experience and make a cube only out of these cards. Your cube will likely have a better experience than the retail
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Probably @Brad’s onslaught cube.Okay new question
Who has the lowest powered cube on this forum?
Alright. I could go ahead and make my own cube but I also like the idea of 'stealing' someone else's cube for my level 0 cards if they are low enough powered. I really like @ravnic 's cube but I wanted to be sure that I have seen all your low-powered cubes before I make my move. I don't want the level 0 cards to be set-specific. So for me I don't need an Urza's cube or Onslaught cube. Although I can truly, truly appreciate such cubes because they are retaining the set and they are honoring the set. I wish I would have done that for every set!
I was on Lucky Paper Radio y'all
You want vanilla creatures and so on. Maybe you should look at https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/lessons-from-a-block-cube.3372/
A block/set cube has not many keywords, which makes it much easier to grok for players unknown to the cube.
Mine's not retail distribution but I'd be unsurprised if the ratios are significantly closer than most cubes. It's also not all Onslaught cards. Rather, it expands on the themes of Onslaught to be less parasitic but flavorfully similar. Surely one of the lower powered lists here, but it might be designed in too weird of a space as a jumping off point.
That said, you could totally grab the retail counts on M/R/U/C and make your own 'retail' format. I've considered it, but you end up needing such a giant pile of commons that I abandoned the idea.
There's a lot of interesting things to be done with that structure. Notably, the rares slot serves nicely for build around that are going to be draft-leading first picks and the commons can be especially glue-y or generic to fill the decks out.
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Anyone have strong thoughts on the color pie? I'm doing a custom set with a different color scheme entirely, so I want to try to assess what's important and what isn't.
For example, I think card drawing is a key mechanic and blue historically having all of it was extremely flawed. Green having access to Adventurous Impulse, for example, is very important. That said, it's ok for blue to be best at card draw. White doesn't have any, but that's a cost of mono white, which feels ok.
But then it gets weird, in my mind, if you look at removal, for example. Blue can't remove, but it gets counter spells. Makes sense. What if you swapped Green's fight for Black's -N/-N? Other than the flavor of currently designed cards, does that matter at all?
There's some natural color pairs, like UB, where Black's removal and Blue's counters+draw align to control the game, so you'd want to avoid strong removal and counters in one color, probably. But it's not like UB is unbeatable, either, so maybe it's fine?
I could go on and on with examples, there's so many card effects. My main question, I guess, is: How much of the color pie actually matters? What if we shuffled the effects all over, gave every color a couple strengths and couple weaknesses? That'd probably sort itself out in testing, right?
For example, I think card drawing is a key mechanic and blue historically having all of it was extremely flawed. Green having access to Adventurous Impulse, for example, is very important. That said, it's ok for blue to be best at card draw. White doesn't have any, but that's a cost of mono white, which feels ok.
But then it gets weird, in my mind, if you look at removal, for example. Blue can't remove, but it gets counter spells. Makes sense. What if you swapped Green's fight for Black's -N/-N? Other than the flavor of currently designed cards, does that matter at all?
There's some natural color pairs, like UB, where Black's removal and Blue's counters+draw align to control the game, so you'd want to avoid strong removal and counters in one color, probably. But it's not like UB is unbeatable, either, so maybe it's fine?
I could go on and on with examples, there's so many card effects. My main question, I guess, is: How much of the color pie actually matters? What if we shuffled the effects all over, gave every color a couple strengths and couple weaknesses? That'd probably sort itself out in testing, right?
The main function of the color pie is to make sure players have a reason to play different colors and to make each color feel unique. As long as your Cube is a walled garden, giving every color a new set of strengths and weaknesses is likely an interesting concept, so long as the flavor of each color remains similar. For example, White having the ability to counter spells and Blue being able to give -N/-N as a polymorph type thing would make sense as the colors are currently defined from a flavor standpoint.
Right. You could take like 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses of each color, toss them into hats, and redraw them at random for reassignment and it would probably still be an interesting game. Each color would have new roles and you'd have to figure out how that fits from a flavor perspective. Double check for any glaringly lethal combinations like removal+draw+counterspells in the same color or something and run it. As long as everything has its own thing, it shouldn't matter too much?
It's actually Pokemon colors. Electric, Fighting, Fire, Grass, Water as the primary five. Dark, Fairy, Psychic, and Steel are special mana types. So it's looking at what big thematic components there are in the current pie and assigning them where they make flavorful sense. It'll probably make its way to the Customs thread once I feel better about it. Probably its own thread that I'd link in Customs, actually. The Pokemon all have a completed design, but I'm trying to tweak things to make the themes more distinct.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I mean, this is basically what Planar Chaos did
True! Unfortunately, Wizards often views Planar Chaos as a mistake because the color pie breaks had a permanent effect on eternal formats. Brad doesn’t need to worry about this for his project because it’s a totally controlled walled garden.I mean, this is basically what Planar Chaos did
Also be careful with combinations of strenghts/weaknesses which makes a color garbage. Green could do without creature destruction because its creatures where the biggest, cheapest, and so on. Sadly, this broke down when wotc decided to make creatures stronger overall in all colors.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I mean... mono green is a tier 1 (maybe tier 1.5) deck in the current Standard meta and it runs a spicy creature destruction spell