General Embrace the Chaos / Cube Occasionals

In part 1 of this opinionated article, I will, in a disheartening tone, present two correlated cube design problems: overdesign and lack of variety. I’m confident these problems exist.

In part 2, I will, in a more optimistic tone, theorycraft a cube structure to mitigate these problems.


Part 1: Embrace the Chaos

The dictionary definitions of the terms variance and variety are similar to each other, and the concepts largely intersect. They have very different connotations, though.

Variance is a word negatively associated with “dumb luck trumping skill,” “RNG,” and mulligans to 4. Example of use: “sometimes you just lose to variance.”

Variety is a word positively associated with diverse experiences, the opposite of monotony, novelty. In a sentence: “my cube offers a great variety of strategies”

When an archetype, macro (like aggro) or micro (like reanimator) is not doing well in a cube, often the symptom is that sometimes it goes off and blows out the opponent, but most often it does not draw the right cards at the right time and fizzles. We blame variance for that. Aside: this is a much bigger issue for fast archetypes like the examples mentioned, as they have a smaller window and less opportunity to scry/draw/fetch for its required parts.

In the video “Hypergeometric Hype! Math Makes Magic Better”, Cultic Cube presents us with hypergeometric analysis, a mathematical tool to calculate how many slots are required in a cube to hit a desired threshold chance of drawing at least a certain number of a card group, such as lands or one-drops, after a certain amount of draws.




The generally accepted recipe to fix an inconsistent archetype that is losing because of variance is to add redundancy for the effects it requires. “Add more discard enablers.” “You need at least nine 1-drops to support white weenie.” These quotas enable decks to hit the thresholds to be consistent and be more than likely able to execute their game plan.

This brings the cube closer to the designer’s vision. The archetypes they designed will function well. The interactions they envisioned will happen. The experience will feel polished and carefully curated. Hard numbers will guarantee the games follow the designer’s vision.

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Cube started as a singleton format. It is still mostly singleton, though our own Jason Waddell demonstrated that the police does not knock on your door if you break the singleton rule. Or perhaps that’s why he moved countries. Hmmm.

“A draft with the best cards in Magic, where no two cards are the same.”

Cube Draft was a breakthrough in Magic: the Gathering. Limited at the time was less popular and not as polished as it is today. It was a format mostly about playing bad creatures, removal, and if you were lucky, a bomb. Casual constructed players who were used to playing crappy constructed decks in lopsided matchups (casual constructed has a lot of 80/20 and 90/10 matchups) saw many advantages in the new experience:
  • Zero cost: cube drafts were free!
  • Limited: many people didn’t play much limited for the lack of an LGS, or money. The zero marginal cost of cube allowed them to play limited, which is a completely different experience than constructed, and to many, more compelling.
  • Good Limited: booster draft at the time was not so fun. While a handful of draft environments like full Ravnica block were well-regarded, most retail limited environments had lots of unplayable cards and did not support macro or micro archetypes well. It was mostly playing (not-so-)goodstuff. It turned out that the most powerful Magic cards at the time made for a pretty good limited environment. [1]
  • Variety: each Cube Draft, everyone got a different deck. We just shuffled good cards and made packs, designed archetypes were uncommon - reanimator being a notable exception. There weren’t enough similar cards at a high power level to be redundant and consistent. Each deck was actually different, and itself inconsistent. Since there was only one of each card, draws varied a lot and each game was a different story.

Power maxing (running the best cards available) in 2010 made for a good limited environment, but I don’t believe it makes a good limited environment nowadays anymore. Power creep, especially in threats, has brought to powermax cubes many cards in the following categories:

Planeswalkers. Powermax cubes often run ~40 planeswalkers in a 360 cube. Elspeth, in February 2011, made me realize I did not want to powermax.



Bombs that demand immediate answer. The power of creatures and urgency with which they need to be removed scaled up dramatically, while the best answers are still Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Swords to Plowshares. Juzam Djinn was a legitimate cube card at the time, while now Nightmare Shepherd, is considered a “build around synergy card”.



Uninteractive cards. Old Magic design tended to be pretty conscious about threats not being too good, as if games were supposed to be difficult to win. Uninteractive meant… Blastoderm.



Complex, wordy cards. This category largely intersects the planeswalkers category. Complex cards heavily punish casual players for not knowing them by heart, especially aberrations like double-faced planeswalkers.



Though the singleton rule anchored cube at high variety for a long time, over the years the large amounts of new cards printed at a high power level negated it.

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Consistency is good for a deck’s win rate, and increasing the consistency of your deck is good for you, as a player, since you win and (presumably) get happy. However, increasing consistency of all decks is neutral for everyone’s win rates since Magic is a zero-sum game, and negative for the variety of gameplay. Decks feel more like constructed decks, rather than limited decks. Cards feel commoditized.

I believe the vast majority of people have more fun with more variety. There was a long thread in MTG Salvation, which I can’t find anymore, with the title (from memory) “It could only happen in Cube.” It was full of interesting, unique games, interactions between cards printed many years apart, and corner cases mattering.

That is how the cube experiences I have not curated much often felt. In a memorable game, two players were stuck at 1 life, no board except for lands and one Manabarbs. One player suggested to count the cards in their decks, to see who would mill out first. The other, though, had a Memnite in their deck, so he showed it wasn’t the last card and won.

Even the word “monotone” being equated with “dullness” suggests that one single tone is boring, multiple tones are fun.

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Some players thrive on competitive environments where they can hone their skills to be the best in that environment. Some groups have this competitive profile, and these players can enjoy cube as an environment to master. However, putting in a tremendous amount of effort to master a cube is the exception, not the rule. Especially when cube draft has become so popular, mastering someone else’s cube seems pointless. That’s the allure of the MTGO Vintage cube - it is THE cube, an actual format.

If you have the unlikely opportunity to design a cube like this for Spike players, variety might not be one of your design goals, but for most groups, it is a worthy one.

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Even the decrease of variance has one pernicious effect: it is worse for the lower-skilled players, who get beaten by well-oiled machines over and over.

Cube designers obviously tend to be very good at their owns cubes. They imbue their cubes with their own vision of the game, and know what all cards in their cube do, and all the archetypes and how well supported they are, and in which colors, and what are the payoffs, and what are the enablers... The more they tinker with their cube, the more their win rate increases. And in our own egocentric hearts, we believe that we are above-average players and the increased win rate comes from less variance. We then double down on the idea that lowering variance is rewarding skill, and that is a good thing, at the same time we further lower the win rates of the people who are least likely to come back.

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Carefully curated cubes tend to follow the view of the cube designer. If they believe, for example, that Azorius is a control pair, and Boros is an aggro pair, the cube will inevitably reflect that, as their card choices comprise 100% of the cube.




If they believe aggro needs evasion to beat control, then there won’t be a lot of blocking. If they believe lifegain is a bad archetype, lifegain will not be a viable archetype.

Since these pseudo-constructed decks are designed by the cube designer, players feel like they are playing some version of a deck that was planted there by the designer, hoping it was balanced correctly - which is borderline impossible. They rarely discover cards that go well in a certain deck, because they cube designer designed all decks, and considered, for each single card in the cube, whether it is good in that deck or not.

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The most affected player by the lack of variety and the designed archetypes is perhaps the cube designer. I found myself being surprised less and less often by the interactions because I had designed them all.

I filled my cube with my own creativity, and left no space for my players’ creativity.

By having a smaller pool of cards, organized into archetypes, I had optimized the decks that used interaction that I predicted, but nerfed the decks that used interactions I did not predict.

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Overdesign is one of the biggest perils of cube archetype design. In Riptide Lab, the cubes skewed heavily towards being synergy-based, and it feels like in the latest years, cube design has largely swerved in this direction. That probably comes from the success of archetypes in retail limited, and perhaps we, RipLab, as a community, advanced this vision a little bit, too.

One way to combat overdesign is to maximize the combinatorial possibilities in your micro archetypes, using archetype shapes that maximize variety, like Penta archetypes or Tetra archetypes. Compare a Pair archetype to a Penta archetype:
  • With 20 slots, 10 in each of two colors you have 1 possible color combination in that archetype. Assuming 10 cards are enablers that combo with any 10 payoffs, there are 100 enabler-payoff combinations, 5 per slot.
  • With 50 slots, 10 in each of the five colors, you have 10 possible two-color combinations in that archetype. Assuming 25 cards are enablers that combo with any 25 payoffs, there are 625 enabler-payoff combinations, 12.5 per slot.
That helps, but there is more that can be done. Let’s get into the actual controversial opinions:

The best way to counter overdesign in our cubes is to give up control. We must think less about how it all fits together in a nicely crafted environment and embrace the chaos. We must fill a part of our cube with our creativity but leave space for the players to create, too.

This means have a much larger cube, enough that it is again credible that it cannot be a highly curated, perfected environment. Think 1000+ cards. When cards are unlikely to appear, your advantage as a cube designer is reduced since there is less certainty for you about what will show up in the next packs, like it always is for your drafters.

This goes completely against the general consensus about synergy cubes, though. How can you maintain micro archetype density in such a large cube? Wait, are you even supposed to?

Well, letting go of archetypes is a way to give up control and seems like it would create more weak combinations, but lead to the loss of strong ones. Let’s go one level up from cards combinations and think about how archetypes support deck variety.

Macro archetypes like aggro, control, midrange, and tempo are emergent by the design of the game, at certain proportions and choices of threats/answers and mana curves. Finding and maintaining these proportions choices maximizes variety in macro archetypes.

Micro archetypes like reanimator, aristocrats, and spellslinger are a prolific avenue to increase variety of gameplay. Cards having different values in different decks, and combos providing more value than the sums of their parts reward drafters for leaving good stuff local maxima and taking risks to find a deck that is better than the sum of the best parts available. More importantly, micro archetype decks have significantly different gameplay from each other.

Not supporting micro archetypes leads to a purely value cube, and to the loss of a large part of the experience of playing Magic. Worse, retails limited offers that now, and it is expected that a cube would offer it, too.

Part 2 proposes a cube structure to support micro archetypes in a very large cube.

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[1] Though not too relevant for this post, another point why cube felt better than retail limited circa 2010: since all cards in cube were good, the power band was much narrower in comparison with retail limited, which had great effects: drafting badly did not mean your night was miserable, as even a trainwrecked draft had access to good cards; and variance had a smaller effect, as bombs were easier to remove, or could be reliably met with other bombs. This is where the idea of “narrow power band” started. It was definitely good to be narrower than retail limited at the time, but we might have gone too far trying to hit flat power levels. Wider power bands have some advantages such as signaling, excitement, and variety.
 
Part 2: Cube Occasionals

Cube Occasionals are a part of the cube, a subset of its cards, which have a much lower chance of appearing in a draft than the Core Module. If the cube is sized, for example, so that each card in the Core Module has a 90% chance of appearing in an 8-person draft, the Occasionals could be such that each card has a 10% chance of appearing. It is, therefore, a relatively large card pool.


How to implement Cube Occasionals?

An average variance baseline is seeding each 15-card booster with 13 cards from the Core Module and 2 from Cube Occasionals. This is referred to as the split.

A lower variance/variety setting can be achieved with a 14/1 split. Higher splits will get you more variance/variety, but weaken the Core Module. If the Core is smaller (possible when the cube is less archetype-oriented), aggressive splits can be used (say, 9/6), but then balancing numbers in the Cube Occasionals becomes important because impact on as-fans are non-negligible. In the limit (0/15 split) you just have a gigantic cube.

I will focus on 13/2 splits for the rest of this write-up, but here are some examples (numbers for 8 person drafts):

Consistent large core, occasionals add average variation
13/2 split
Core Module: 312 cards (100% chance of each card appearing)
Cube Occasionals: 480 cards (10% chance of each card appearing)

Uncertain large core, occasionals add average variation
13/2 split
Core Module: 420 cards (80% chance of each card appearing)
Cube Occasionals: 480 cards (10% chance of each card appearing)

Consistent large core, occasionals add a bit of variation
14/1 split
Core Module: 336 cards (100% chance of each card appearing)
Cube Occasionals: 240 cards (10% chance of each card appearing)

Consistent small core, occasionals add a ton of variation
9/6 split
Core Module: 216 cards (100% chance of each card appearing)
Cube Occasionals: 960 cards (15% chance of each card appearing)


The Best of Both Worlds

The beauty of small cubes (defined as the chance of a card appearing is close to or 100%) is the possibility of curating consistent and balanced micro archetypes, following the philosophy of “decks, not cards”. An additional advantage is that knowledge transfers better from one draft to the next, as the same cards tend to appear again, and the same decks tend to be draftable.

The beauty of big cubes is the potential for interactions the cube designer could not have thought of to emerge, and allow players to actually play a larger subset of the vast pool of cards from Magic’s history than constructed formats allow. There is more variety from one draft to the other with large cubes.

Cube Occasionals are a tool to have it both ways. Most cards in a draft are from the Core Module, which behaves as a small cube. The rest of the cards are from the Cube Occasionals, which behaves as a very large cube.

The Core Module is handled as a regular small cube, and is responsible for maintaining the cube’s structure, caring about some subset of (depending on the cube design):
  • Consistency in archetypes
  • Tuned as-fans and mana curves
  • Dense cards (pivot between many archetypes)
  • Card and gameplay complexity
  • Avoidance of repetition
The Cube Occasionals, in contrast, can contain a lot of cards that can only be in small cubes in small amounts, but for which you want a larger variety to cycle between from draft to draft.

Important: Cube Occasionals still need to take into account power level! While the top-end of the power band can be put in the Cube Occasionals, a single Grave Titan can and will unbalance one draft in ten. Much better than 100% of drafts, and the excitement will be positive for some people, but take your playgroup into account. High-power answers that don’t warp the game around them, more like Lightning Bolt, are unlikely to be an issue.


More health benefits of Cube Occasionals

Stable Core Module

Keeping the Core Module stable is a way to reward drafters for learning the environment and reduces the cognitive burden on them over time, since they don’t have to relearn the cards.

Less maintenance of Core Module

Fewer changes to the Core Module also reduces the time you, cube designer, need to spend obsessing about it and balancing it. Probably. It should. Right?

This is related to the concept of “flex slots” which some designers use for testing cards while keeping the rest of the structure intact.

Cutting cards is less painful

Deciding to remove a card from a cube requires some measure of detachment. Even when it is right thing to do, it feels like a loss. Soft retiring them to Cube Occasionals is a way to keep them in the cube, and a potential reunion in the future will be nostalgic.

More replayability

Drafting with the same cards over and over may get stale with time. Retail limited already scratches the itch of “making the best out of these 250 cards.” Cube occupies a niche of high entropy, novel interactions, things that will never happen again - what people crave from a Chaos Draft (and often end up disappointed). Increasing the card pool addresses this.

The Variety of Retail

Unpopular opinion: the average small cube has less replayability than good retail sets. If modeled as a retail set, it is roughly a set of retail uncommons (which tend to show up about 0.9 per draft) without the variance of being able to see more than 1 of each and build around them. Cubes that use duplicates make some cards closer to retail commons, but only large cubes have cards appearing sparingly like retail rares or retail mythics.

Cube Occasionals are effectively Cube Rares. The only reason why I don’t call them that is the confusion it causes because it has no relation with the color of the expansion symbol.

Flexibility in # of players

Cube with archetypes designed for drafts with 8 players are significantly different when drafted in smaller pods (5-6 players), since synergy decks have a disproportionate reduction in quality compared to value decks. If they are tight around the number of players (e.g. 360 cards for 8 players, 100% appearance rate), then they simply can’t be drafted in 9 people.

Cube Occasionals can smooth out this issue by prioritizing Core Module cards when there are fewer players (for example dropping from 13/2 to a 15/0 or 14/1 split). The effects of fewer players are still there, but are mitigated. Conversely, including more Occasionals for more players (from example going to a 12/3 or 11/4 split) allows larger pods than usual without much dilution. Yes, your friend’s friend can come, there’s room for everyone!


What kinds of cards are good Cube Occasionals?


Cards removed to make space

Cubes have finite space, and new cards keep getting released (fortunately!). Every cube designer has had to cut cards that are fine simply for lack of space. They still own them. The cards play fine. The group is attached to it because of a story about it. It’s just that blue doesn’t need draw spell #8. These are good candidates to become Cube Occasionals.

Morphs



One of the issues with morphs in cube is that including a small number of them makes it pathetically predictable that that mysterious card is Exalted Angel, removing the best feature of morphs: their unpredictability. Using a larger number of morphs in Cube Occasionals make it significantly harder to guess what that Grey Ogre is.

Combat tricks



Since cubes need to be designed with a lower density of instant speed removal for combat tricks to be playable, it is a part of Magic that is often overlooked. Even at relatively low power levels, not many combat tricks are worth playing. This restriction means that 1. people won’t play a lot of combat tricks; 2. running too few combat tricks makes them worse since it is easier to figure out which ones they are. Including combat tricks as Cube Occasionals keeps people on their toes, and makes them collectively better and harder to play around. A larger variety can be include with fewer virtual slots. 20 different combat tricks at 10% only really take up 2 slots in the draft.

Finishers

Finishers are commodities - largely interchangeable. An expensive creature that will win the game if not dealt with. Despite that, finishers can also be unique, since at high mana costs the sky is the limit for mechanical variety.



Not too many slots can be dedicated for them, though. Aggro and aggro-control decks outright don’t want them. Midrange decks might run a few. Control decks will need a handful. Like combat tricks, having different finishers available in each draft but spending a few slots in the boosters is highly beneficial to variety.

Single card archetypes

Some cards are worth drafting a deck around. The deck around them is functional without them, but exceptional when the card is present. Here is a thread on RipLab about Single card archetypes.



Archetype intersections

We’re all about finding cards that are usable in multiple archetypes (also called pivots, or dense cards) to avoid the poison principle. Some cards look like they are usable in two archetypes, but only really belong to only one of them, as they aren’t usable in the others without the first archetype.



These cards tie together two themes, and if included in the cube will be a bridge between those archetypes, skewing them to be played together. It is more interesting if, in each draft, the bridges are laid out differently and it pays off to combine archetypes differently.

Weird cards

There are cards you want some play sometimes and have a laugh, but don’t want it to be a large part of your cube’s meta. Cube Occasionals are perfect to make these show up rarely, and be something special when they are cast.



Repetitive play patterns

Many cards have repetitive play patterns, but at the same time present interesting decisions. If the repetition is occasional, they become more palatable.




Will you ever learn...?

Hey, I've learned a lot, ok?

Polycubes

In 2014, Jason wrote an article on Polycubes, which are effectively a superset of this proposal (and a subset of pretty much any weird cube layout…)

https://www.channelfireball.com/all-strategy/articles/cube-design-size-and-swords/

The problems to solve are the same.

“My Cube started small, but as it grew from 360 cards to 450 cards and beyond, the Cube experience became unwieldy. I had a diminishing feeling of control over the environment, and because of my then-use of a singleton rule, I found it difficult to build a balanced pool of cards. The depth of control and midrange cards exceeded their aggro counterparts.”

“I cut back to 360 and felt the improvement overnight. Over time, however, doubts crept in. There were elements of the larger Cube I missed. First and foremost, I missed cards. Sweet new planeswalkers like Jace, Architect of Thought and Domri Rade simply didn’t have a home in my 360”.

“Secondly, I missed variance. In large Cubes or retail draft sets, you see players throw together outrageous decks from time to time because the combination of cards present in the draft came together just right.”

“Thirdly, I missed granularity. In a 720-card Cube, each card you include only constitutes half a “slot” in the average draft. ”

Past attempts with archetype modules

I have tried modular cubes in multiple configurations. This post describes my attempts:

https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube.1940/#post-77549

The issue I found with modular cubes are mostly not present with a Cube Occasional module:

  1. Archetypes being in modules is an advantage to the cube designer over players. When I had big modules with the same number of cards and no core, and combined those big modules, I knew, just from looking at the first boosters, which modules were present and which archetypes were available. My players knew even less than they would when the archetypes were static. This is not a problem with Cube Occasionals, as seeing an Occasional card gives me no information about whether the others are present, and all archetypes remain static because they are supported in the Core Module.
  2. Archetypes in the same module showed up together every time, leading to less gameplay and drafting variety. This is not a problem with Cube Occasionals, since all archetypes appear in every draft.
  3. Multiple large modules were a nightmare to manage. Balancing as-fans and mana curves of one cube and of its micro archetypes is difficult. Balancing four cubes at the same time where swapping cards between modules affects both is insanely hard. Cube occasionals are not supposed to be difficult to manage. The Occasionals are a small part of the draft pool, which can be considered almost negligible for as-fans and mana curve. Balancing the Core Module is like balancing a normal cube, except you feel less the itch to change it for variety.
  4. Modules greatly diminish familiarity. A cube that puts archetypes in modules looks completely different depending on the modules included. This prevents players from getting familiar with the cube’s cards, its archetypes, at least at any normal rate of drafting, because it creates fundamental, systemic variety in the environment. The Core Module provides familiarity and dictates the environment, while Cube Occasionals introduce entropy within the familiar framework.


Past attempts with Rare Module

The last thing I tried with modules was having a Rare Module. The split between Core Module and Rare Module was 14/1, and the cards in the Rare Module were the top end of the power band I supported. These were cards I thought played well, but were above the power level band to which I had dropped. They were good first picks, and provided signalling - getting passed a red rare, for example, likely meant that your neighbor was not interested in red.

My Rare Module was composed of about 70 cards, which meant they had a 34% inclusion rate in 8-person drafts. The feedback was mixed, but some flaws made me scrap the idea.

  1. Marking the good first picks is insulting to your drafters. For sorting and signaling, I marked the rares with a yellow sticker inside the sleeve. Though it is effectively the same a golden expansion symbol, drafters don’t like to be told what is the optimal first pick.
  2. Drafters feel forced to first pick the rare. Some drafters just don’t want to play blue. Or they want to force elves but opened Wrath of God. Giving up your rare is a major feel bad.
  3. 34% did not feel too different from 80%. The rare did not feel rare. It had been my intention to have a larger pool for the rares, actually something similar to Cube Occasionals, around 10%. I just started with a minimal pool to test the concept without much risk, but it become clear that 34% did not feel like enough variety.
  4. The power level felt actually different. While a wide power level band is something I am exploring, whenever a rare took over the game, it felt cheap, and whenever it underperformed, I felt like I had overpromised.

None of these issues are a problem with Cube Occasionals. They are not objectively better than the Core Module cards, so having them marked does not cause bad feelings. 10% is where I would aim for Cube Occasionals, and this time you might want to get the cube size up, not down. Refreshing for a change.


Get started with your Cube Occasionals now!

First, you need of course a larger box. If you bring packs ready, you don’t need to carry the extra Occasionals around, only the small amount that will be in the draft. If shuffling and putting packs together is part of the ritual, bring them all, since showing what your cube can do with a small amount of its potential feels more impactful.

Second, you need a lot more sleeves. This will be double an issue for double sleevers, but as much as having a large cube. If it is a dealbreaker, you can store the occasionals unsleeved, or only in perfect fits.

Third, it is practical to mark either the Core Module or the Occasionals for easier sorting. Marking the sleeves a non-destructive way to do this (for the cards). Stickers inside the sleeve work well but are time consuming to put. An appropriate marker does not look as good but is trivial to use. On one hand, Core Module sleeves wear out faster, but on the other hand, Occasionals might scale more in number.

Lastly, we need a system to pick Occasionals at random. For unsleeved cards, you might not want to shuffle them and instead use another source of variance. Say, keep them in a binder face down, roll a d20 for which binder page, and a d20 for which card in the page (reroll on 19-20). For sleeved cards, shuffling all might seem like too much effort to pick 10%, so you might shuffle them only once and after that go through all the cards, which will take many draft, until you shuffle them again.


How sure is this?

Well, I haven’t tested it, besides generating a bunch of boosters and drafting against bots. This is all theorycrafting. I will when we’re out of this pandemic.
 
I agree with your premise, this is a very succinct summation of many of the thoughts I've had on cube for years. Might just be some extra thoughts I've had on my mind with recent threads and discussion over on r/mtgcube, but might as well flesh them out here. Save myself a potential future write-up. Please excuse my rambling ;)

I've long felt that the biggest issue I've seen with cube design over the years, ever since I first began exploring this format, is the tendency for designers to lean towards what I would call "reductive design". There's a desire to break down Magic into base components that are easily identifiable and try to optimize these. This is what leads to continual upgrading of cards and slots to superior cards, the need to hit certain quotas, and the dismissal of lesser options due to not reaching these heights. To me, this is the simplest way to design a cube and it's fine if it works for a given playgroup, but it just doesn't do anything for me personally. I think it's a decent starting point for exploratory design purposes, but I just don't think there's a whole lot of depth to it. It's part of why I was turned off from MTGS so many years ago, why I'm not a fan of the rise of hypergeometric distribution as a core tool for archetypal design, and why I think so many designers run into issues balancing environments correctly. If you're trying to curate a fun game experience, reducing the variance and variety of what this game has to offer is not the correct approach in my opinion.

Maximization of power and hitting a threshold for numbers doesn't get there for me. Hypergeo is fine as an exploratory tool, but I don't think it should take precedence over more important factors when it comes to the design of a gameplay experience. That is definitely an approach I would prioritize when trying to build a deck for a Constructed format to maximize my winning percentages, but that isn't my core desire in cube. I'm not looking for a card that performed best in multiple 3-0 lists over a period of weeks or the percentage of time that I'll see 4 one-drops by T3.

I just need players to have fun. I need them to be excited to pick a card. I want them to experience interactions and combinations that they haven't considered before. We're choosing to spend 3-4 hours playing cards with no prizes on the line, let's have some fucking fun with it.

You know that feeling when you're drafting a new Limited environment and you get to string a few picks together, feel excited about the possibilities, then cross your heart for that ONE card that you're looking for to complete your perfect machine? That's what I've always wanted to capture. You need to give players something to look forward to. When individual card designs are reduced to a base component for inclusion, that loses sight of what makes the draft and deckbuilding process so compelling.

When I see a list including Elite Vanguard to hit some number threshold for 1 drops, where there aren't any further relevant interactions with the card, I kind of cringe thinking that this is still seen as a viable inclusion nowadays. That card is straight up bad. Was it alright a decade ago when we had fewer options? Sure. But here in 2020? No way. Magic design has changed drastically, for better or for worse, and the days of a vanilla 2/1 being worth your time is just not realistic. Can you get there with a critical mass of cheap creatures and beat your opponent via sheer numbers in the early game? Possibly. But what happens once they stabilize the board? Your deck of 2/1 creatures and every subsequent topdeck just folds completely to any legitimate midrange beef and you end up relying upon bullshit like Armageddon or Swords to claw your way to a victory. Once in a while that can feel satisfying an exhilarating, but if that's just the go-to solution for your issues of making Aggro half decent, it's going to get stale fast. And it's going to feel especially bad when your player comes away thinking why the fuck did I even bother with this when I could have just played 4C goodstuff and actually been able to compete? Giving your players the tools to be able to compete is necessary to cultivate a good environment. If you cannot introduce alternative avenues to victory within the same archetype, that creates an environment that loses a lot of replayability.

I'm not going to remember the decks where I just assembled a variety of powerful threats and ran roughshod over the competition due to pure value. Was it cool at the time? Sure, maybe. Is it memorable? Not at all. On the other hand, I can still remember the sweet U/B Control deck I drafted 4+ years back where I won off the back of Laboratory Maniac multiple times that night. I remember that one time I was able to leverage Mesmeric Orb to mill out my opponent while using my counterspells and other pieces of interaction to hold off large threats and barely getting there. I remember that first time I assembled the Gravecrawler and Carrion Feeder loop to ping my opponent low with a Blood Artist or when I used the Raid trigger off Bloodsoaked Champion to sac + recast onto a Feeder to punch through lethal. The feeling of using a Gifts Ungiven as a ritual to power out an earlier Emrakul, The Promised End is something I'll never forget. There just needs to be more consideration when it comes to individual cards that are included in an environment, that's the easiest way to avoid the hole of reductive design in my opinion. These elements need to be present, these exploratory avenues need to exist, for players to feel engaged and accomplished when they can assemble something they get satisfaction from.

I'm preaching to the choir here at Riptide, but think of a card like The Gitrog Monster. It's one of our darlings, but a whole lot of people give it as much run as they should elsewhere. It's a sizable body as a 6/6 Deathtouch for 5 mana, rumbles just as hard as Grave Titan in combat, but unlike the Titan it does not completely warp a game around itself and has meaningful interactions with other cards. Fetchlands become extra card draw effects to help you dig deeper into your deck, help you find more lands for the Exploration effect to keep feeding your monster and keeping it present, and your opponent is also met with an interesting puzzle. Instead of being a remove me or die threat that continually increases board presence and locks the game up by reducing possible outs, Gitrog allows a greater window of interaction. Can I hold him off by chumping and hope to slowly eat away at my opponent's manabase? Can I race this head to head with sheer numbers? Can I get there by flying over it an avoiding the ground completely? It's a hell of a lot more interesting an include that generic removal spell in Golgari colors #2.

Like look at this little recap I had a few years back from a cube session:

I win the die roll and in the first game I just curved out with a Bloodsoaked Champion on T1, another threat on T2, and I locked him with a Tangle Wire on curve to keep beating in. He had played some dorks and fired off a triple mode Collective Brutality to take care of the Bloodsoaked, gain and drain 2 life, and also strip away removal spell from hand. Bought a little bit of time, but I later dropped a Mardu Strike Leader and dashing + filling the board with 2/1 bodies just allowed me to continue applying pressure with creatures and close it out.

Game 2 was more interesting because I had a lack of mana in hand for the colors I needed to curve out early. I had red and black sources, but two white cards stranded in hand. I had some early plays with Bloodsoaked Champion and Monastery Swiftspear to apply pressure, but he had begun establishing a board with dorks and early drops. He was unwilling to trade off a dork early because he was also stuck on lands and needed to ramp out a bigger threat. As a result, he just took a few chip shots as I whittled him down. He did stick a Pernicious Deed on the battlefield (came out the SB) which kept me from wanting to commit any more creatures to the board (had an Alesha sitting in my hand). Luckily, I had equipment in Bonesplitter which allowed me to suit up a big Swiftspear that he had to begin chumping because it would have brought him at too low a safe life total. Even with a chump block, he had reached enough mana to play out The Gitrog Monster whose 6/6 body could shut down the suited Swiftspear on the other end. That was until I played and equipped a Grafted Wargear the next turn. The prowess trigger made Swiftspear a 7/5 for the turn and I was more than eager to offer the trade and clear the giant roadblock. He instead took the damage and fell to 6. On my next turn, he blows up the Pernicious Deed for 3 and kills everything but the frog on board, I play out Alesha to start rebuilding my board and apply pressure. He doesn't draw into lands and the Gitrog Monster starts eating up his mana-base one by one on subsequent turns.

However, I'm unable to hit my 4th land and really get him with a Braids, Cabal Minion stranded in hand along with a Falkenrath Aristocrat. I can't really attack into a giant 6/6 with Deathtouch capable of just giving its best impression of The Abyss. I was leading in the game 13-6, but then he began to draw into lands and re-establish a board. I take a hit for 7 on a turn, drop down to 6, and then I'm forced into chump duty with subsequent small creature drops to avoid Gitrog just outright winning the game on a lethal attack. He fetches a few times in subsequent turns to hit land drops and also draw into more of his deck with Gitrog, dropping himself down to 3 in the process. Having not seen any burn from me in the previous games, I guess he was just trying to race and force me to have it or just lose, which was definitely the right play. At this point, with his board, I'm dead on the next turn no matter what I do with only one blocker back. I tap the top of the deck praying for a 4th land that comes into play untapped, draw my card and take a peek....and it's City of Brass! I quickly untap, play the City, deploy the Aristocrat and attack for the win. Phew!

You're not getting any of that story equity or the same highs from something like trying to aim a Maelstrom Pulse at pushed threat X or pushed threat Y.

I think the reduction of the potential chaos in cube is the quickest way to create an environment that might be balanced and neutral, but becomes bland as all hell when multiple pieces are just interchangeable. A highly refined and curated environment might give the impression of interaction and sequences that matter, but is there really all that much to ticking walkers up and down in a grindy value-fest? Is there anything interesting about going up against threat on T3 into threat on T4 when these cards are interchangeable with multiple others in that deck? Solving the puzzle of a planeswalker on board is engaging, but quickly turns to absolute ass when you run into a chain of something like Oko, Thief of Crowns (a card that really shouldn't be in anything put a Powered Cube) into generic 4 drop walker into generic 5 mana threat. When individual cards no longer matter the engagement one feels in the game, where one's choices actually matter, feel completely neutered.

The balancing act between synergistic and powerful design was a tenuous one for years, but the lines have definitely become more straddled in the last few years. This is both good and bad as we've had some wonderful individually "dense" card designs to help branch archetypes and ideas, but we've also had horrendously complex cards that were way too efficient and effective. It's up to each designer to determine which will fit the needs of their environment and accomplish their design goals. Right now, more than any other point that I can think, we have an incredible amount of great designs available to flesh out archetypes. So many avenues that were left on the backburner for years are suddenly viable and more and more of them are worth exploring.

TLDR; This is one of the best times to be a cube designer. Run wild and try out whatever the fuck you want, care about individual cards. Give your players the chance to explore and experience things. It's what makes Magic worth playing in the first place.
 

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
japahn, you're an absolute madman, and I applaud you for coming up with something that looks both elegant and refreshing! While I haven't experienced draft fatigue in my own cube, in part because I can't draft it even once a month, I can definitely see how much of a blast occasionals can be. I'll keep your idea in the back of my head, in case I do get tired of my current 450 setup :)
 
This is a great and - hoping I don't sound too dramatic - urgent thought. It slots itself into the timeless (recurring) discussion around the value of Serendipity, which we seem to always forget and then rediscover. In the Humanities I'm watching it happen right now, as people realise naively that no amount of archiving, tagging, search-engining, etc, etc, can replace the experience of the fortuitous encounter, such as when an academic - as Umberto Eco would describe - runs into the library to discover the book resting next to the one he went there to pick up.

And in Magic the same happens: we continue, somehow, to be surprised by fortuitous and surprising combinations of cards which have existed for years now. A cube is not all the Magic cards every printed, but its curating also allows for those encounters to take place, since one of the points of curating a cube is to make sure no card is obviously better than most (which doesn't mean interchangeable) - we want that experience of someone who drafts our cube discovering an interaction (even archetype!) which was invisible to us, the designer. We can try to manage that experience but most of the time it does better if it manages itself.

Like in the library - the fortuitous encounter is neither dictated nor eliminated by the inevitable organisation of the bookshelf. It exists at the margins.

Reductive design - as we periodically discover everywhere, not just Magic - aims for an impossible goal. But in the process of achieving that goal it's easy to find yourself with a boring and predictable environment.

Great article! Very happy to see someone articulating these thoughts and figuring out possible solutions!
 
Great post japahn!
Shamizy aggro is sometimes needed to prevent goodstufshitfest. However, it does not need to be bland 2/1. Even the battlecruiser format is in need for some aggro, but not the turn 1 kind.

Back on topic. Let's start by examining limited, who knows maybe we can learn something from it. Due to the way boosters are collated you have a base of commons and uncommons which compare to your core. In limited you pick 88 commons in 1 draft round (assuming 8 drafters). These commons are drawn from the common pool. Nowhere is there a mechanism which makes that all the commons appear. Some you will get in multiples, some you will not see at all in a draft. In other words, you only use a small part of your core in the draft. The remaining uncommons/rares are your occasionals. (Collating was a bitch, sometimes you saw a series of commons in a booster or none.)

So how do they do it? Simple, they stick with a few keywords, sprinkle some archetypes, some good stuff, some (weird) single build around cards, let the randomness do its job, and call it a day. E.g. urza block (non-exhaustive): cycling and echo as keywords, reanimate and enchantments as archetypes, somnophore and many others as random goodstuff, and smokestack as buildaround.

Lessons: have a large base which introduces variance, stick to a few keywords, introduce some archetypes which do not take up a lot of cards (reanimate, sleeperenchantments and a few payoff), and sprinkle a few occasionals.

How to execute this in cube? Just as you propose, but maybe a bigger base to include more variance, maybe make a number of archetype blocks and just like the base you add from a certain random number of blocks a certain amount of cards (e.g. from a morph block of 40 cards you randomly add 20?), and finally add a few occasionals.
 
I'm always flirting with overdesign...

Some things I've started to think about more closely:
  • Lowering the power level, and removing clear autopicks. I've elaborated here.
  • When I'm not taking all of a card's attributes into consideration. It's simple enough to throw Anax, Hardened in the Forge into any cube that supports sacrifice strategies, but am I giving attention to the other opportunities embedded in the card? Does my cube care whether it's an enchantment? Does it exploit the power matters angle in any meaningful way? Devotion? Can it be leveraged to be an active go-wide enabler rather than wrath insurance? I find that ignoring qualities of cards because it does one thing efficiently reduces the opportunity for intuitive exploration and creativity.
  • Rather than focusing in terms of archetypes strictly, I'm thinking about the prevalent themes I want to support, how they intersect, and how that intersection can manifest in all theaters of play. Say I identify that my graveyard cube has discard, dredge, sacrifice, land, and artifact themes present....How does each theme intersect with the others?....How does dredge intersect with land strategies? Now how does that intersection function within an aggro context or a combo context or a control context, etc? How many ways can I take advantage of the dynamics of this intersection?
  • Increasing the opportunities for intersection. Radical Idea over Think Twice...functionally similar, both trigger gravecast, provide multiple spell triggers, synergize with self-mill, but radical idea adds a discard matters component which my cube is heavily invested in whether it be through an Archfiend of Ifnir, or binning a reanimation target. It makes radical idea a much better pivot card than think twice in my cube. Another example, Miscalculation over Mana Leak or Dance with Devils over Hordeling Outburst. Obviously, your cube power level must be low enough to accommodate changes like this.
  • Paying attention to monocolored cards that are essentially guild slots. If Simic is the only pairing that can really support Skaab Ruinator, then Skaab Ruinator is functionally a a Simic card (and a fairly narrow one at that!). I was running into this phenomena where I was essentially running 8-9 guild cards due to how many cards that I included with limited utility across all colors. The real danger is that these are guild cards in disguise...which ties into the cube creator's inherent advantage....Player B doesn't know that Skaab Ruinator is not good in his Azorius deck. You have successfully designed a draft trap. I'm now going through the process of reducing the instances of cards like these, and making sure more cards appeal to at least three of the four other colors to increase intuitiveness. Obviously, some cards may prove valuable enough to ignore this rule, and you often have more than enough playables for a cube deck...I'm just considering these cards with a bit more awareness.
So I guess my solution to overdesigning is to design harder :D
Larger cubes are for the weak. :mad:
 
Who the hell is this guy? That's what comes to mind as I read this excellent post, along with a bunch of tangents to read the linked content, including the remarkable post about modular cubes. I came onto this forum this evening looking for something interesting and stimulating, and my brain is all over the place now. Thanks for writing this up and sharing.
 
Some things I've started to think about more closely:
  • Rather than focusing in terms of archetypes strictly, I'm thinking about the prevalent themes I want to support, how they intersect, and how that intersection can manifest in all theaters of play. Say I identify that my graveyard cube has discard, dredge, sacrifice, land, and artifact themes present....How does each theme intersect with the others?....How does dredge intersect with land strategies? Now how does that intersection function within an aggro context or a combo context or a control context, etc? How many ways can I take advantage of the dynamics of this intersection?
So I guess my solution to overdesigning is to design harder :D

Larger cubes are for the weak. :mad:

I've been implementing the other ideas you mentioned for years, and ultimately they weren't enough. Perhaps I've just fail at implementing them.

This point I quoted is promising space. If you have a couple of themes that are strongly interconnected, you've left the cards highly reactive with each other.

I like the design of your Graveyard Combo Cube, that's a list that that gets me excited to draft because it doesn't tell me what to do. Instead it gives me a bunch of parts and asks me to build something with them.


maybe make a number of archetype blocks and just like the base you add from a certain random number of blocks a certain amount of cards (e.g. from a morph block of 40 cards you randomly add 20?), and finally add a few occasionals.


That didn't work well for me, I wrote about my experience with modular cubes in the post, under "Past attempts with archetype modules". I imagine a lower chance of each card in the archetype module being included helps, though. Let's look at how it affects/solves the problems I described.

Archetypes being in modules is an advantage to the cube designer over players.
The cube designer has less of an advantage, since there is less certainty about whether a particular card is present. I'd say this problem is greatly improved by a large archetype module from which only some cards are included in the draft.
Archetypes in the same module showed up together every time. You can have modules with one theme, and the larger size means more variety. You may have issues with isolated themes, since with a larger pool means it's harder to weave interactions with other themes.
Multiple large modules were a nightmare to manage. Still a problem, since a significant part of the draft cards will come from the modules, you have to more or less balance them in terms of mana curve and as-fans.
Modules greatly diminish familiarity. Still an issue, maybe worse because the modules are variable as well.
It slots itself into the timeless (recurring) discussion around the value of Serendipity, which we seem to always forget and then rediscover.

TIL a word. Might steal this for a cube name. :D


In the Humanities I'm watching it happen right now, as people realise naively that no amount of archiving, tagging, search-engining, etc, etc, can replace the experience of the fortuitous encounter, such as when an academic - as Umberto Eco would describe - runs into the library to discover the book resting next to the one he went there to pick up.
[...]
Reductive design - as we periodically discover everywhere, not just Magic - aims for an impossible goal. But in the process of achieving that goal it's easy to find yourself with a boring and predictable environment.

Exact sciences, analytical people like me often have a misguided impression they can reduce human problems to math, but with a search space is so jagged and impossible to model, they arrive at completely wrong conclusions. Fun is incredibly hard to reduce to a math problem.
 
I'm gonna start by saying this was way too much text for my tiny monkey brain to read all of.
I like the design of your Graveyard Combo Cube, that's a list that that gets me excited to draft because it doesn't tell me what to do. Instead it gives me a bunch of parts and asks me to build something with them.

I did, however, read this. The idea of being given some parts is something I've noticed lately. Well, I've kind of noticed the opposite...

Just as an example, if this is your BG section, your players only really have ONE BG deck they can run. Any color pair that can't tie into a graveyard deck can't really play along as a three color deck, either. We like to knock tribal decks because it's drafting "on rails," but I think an overdesigned guild section can do the same thing.

Something like two of the aforementioned four plus Gitrog to tie into the yard in a different way and Casualties of War as a kind of wildcard pick that is cool in a midrange or control shell will still nudge your players towards the yard deck, but it won't force them into it.

That same yard deck could even Regrow or Witness some Casualties.
 
Those four are parts of the same deck, though, and have obviously been chosen to support an archetype with redundancy. What I'm saying in the OP is that if you provide more or less random parts that play well and are reactive, your drafters will themselves figure out what deck to build and have more fun in the process.

Guild sections are tricky since multicolored cards are narrower. They are good candidates for Cube Occasionals.
 
I needed this article badly. i’ve been building, tearing apart, and starting over on my new cube list for at least a couple weeks, in an attempt to fit a bunch of cool archetypes into a 360 or less shell. This concept of occasionals has sparked the solution for me: a simple “core set” shell with “occasional packs” that can be shuffled into the draft to provide support and payoff for new archetypes. This way i can just add new packs to my rotation rather than redesign the whole cube going forward. Thank you japahn!
 
a simple “core set” shell with “occasional packs” that can be shuffled into the draft to provide support and payoff for new archetypes. This way i can just add new packs to my rotation rather than redesign the whole cube going forward.

This is the v5: Sattelite modules approach I tried, described in:
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube.1940/#post-77549


It has many advantages and actually plays well. The biggest issue is that archetypes are so foundational to a cube that changing even this handful of cards each draft makes the cube feel like an entirely different one, and drafters get confused - until you play it a huge amount of drafts. You might see a Rite of Belzenlok and say "great, that means aristocrats is a thing in this draft!" Your drafters won't have these insights, which stacks the odds more strongly against them. When they face you, they say "Wow, I didn't know that deck was a thing. I might try it next time." But then, next time you see the Faith Unbroken and draft enchantments, while they pick Mogg War Marshal and wait for the rest of the deck, which isn't in the draft.
 
I don't think that has to be a problem. You can just support your 10+ archetypes in your core of let's say 300 cards. With enough overlapping support cards that's no problem. Then use the occassionals for single card build arounds, more fringe/exotic support for your core archetypes and other fun good stuff cards.

After fighting through these walls of text I came to the conclusion, that cube occasionals might be the solution to all my problems. No more stretching to support Gruul Madness, no more hesitation to run stupid, fun cards like Door to Nothingness! <3
 
Excellent opening post Japahn.

Just as an example, if this is your BG section, your players only really have ONE BG deck they can run. Any color pair that can't tie into a graveyard deck can't really play along as a three color deck, either. We like to knock tribal decks because it's drafting "on rails," but I think an overdesigned guild section can do the same thing.

I can say I've been prone to this as well! I've always tried to make the 3 cards I put in my guild section have some kind of cohesive theme. Might be worth trying the flip side of that and let each card have its own distinct theme, along with introducing more deck themes spread over 3 and 4 colors.

One thing I'm curious about though Japahn; If we were to not over design our 2-color guilds, what's your suggestion for risking under-representing themes in a particular guild? Is that a real risk? Ending up with a cube where some of color combinations are just lack luster, because there just isn't as much going on there. We designed 3 and 4 color themes but didn't make them evenly distributed, so the potential for discovery becomes lopsided?
 
I can say I've been prone to this as well! I've always tried to make the 3 cards I put in my guild section have some kind of cohesive theme. Might be worth trying the flip side of that and let each card have its own distinct theme, along with introducing more deck themes spread over 3 and 4 colors.

A danger of having distinct themes in each guild section card is that so many of them will be ignored, resulting in lots of dead cards in the draft. Not a dealbreaker, but Cube Occasionals are made to solve this problem.

If we were to not over design our 2-color guilds, what's your suggestion for risking under-representing themes in a particular guild? Is that a real risk?

If you're talking about the "guilds" as in "cards of either of these two colors", absolutely, for the archetype to be draftable you still need critical mass or cards that go in it. That's what the Core module is for.

If you refer to gold cards, the more signposts you have, the more obvious it is what the color combination will be about, and the fewer you have, the more you leave to your drafters to figure out. The nice thing about the core/occasional division is that you can put only the best and most needed pivots and signposts in the Core module and have space for less generic signposts, or just cool good stuff gold cards in the Occasionals.

Not including signposts and leaving it all to your drafters may be overwhelming. There is a fine balance between being too obvious and not giving any information at all.

Ending up with a cube where some of color combinations are just lack luster, because there just isn't as much going on there. We designed 3 and 4 color themes but didn't make them evenly distributed, so the potential for discovery becomes lopsided?

I've touched on this point about balancing colors in tetra and penta archetypes in this post: Archetype Shapes

It is a problem in these broader archetypes, but as long as they aren't poisonous it should be mostly self-balanced by the weaker colors being more open, allowing you to pick good stuff in those colors highly and wheel the archetype cards.

Overdesign exacerbates the problem of unbalanced guilds. If there is one single deck that can be drafted in a color, it tends to be consistently better or consistently worse than average, while more open archetypes gives color combinations to self-balance during the draft. Unbalanced individual card power levels are not as harmful as unbalanced archetype power levels, because the finer granularity allows the self-balancing to flow for smoothly than two drafters going for the best archetype and trainwrecking each other.
 
I did it guys, I finalized the first version of my cube with occasionals. I think japahns idea might change the whole cube game, it is the future!

https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/nightmare

I managed to fully support the 15 archetypes in the core cube of 360 cards. Maybe the support is a little more minimalistic, but I did test drafts of 3x12 with just the core and all the decks seemed solid. There are also 45 fixing lands. In the occasionals you'll find a bit of good stuff, combat tricks, many more morphs, more gold cards, even three colored ones, and lots of crazy buildarounds. If you feel like testing it, the default draft format is already set to 12/3!
 
This reminded me that I needed to post that there is a way to test draft on cube cobra with cube occasionals. It's annoying to set up, but totally worth it. What you do is import all of your occasionals into your main cube, and then mark each occasional with the same exact tag. Unfortunately Cube Cobra doesn't have an easy way to tag multiple cards at once, so you'll have to do all of them manually. But then in a custom draft setup you mark each card slot "tag:Tagthatyousetupforoccasional" for those that you do want as an occasional and "-tag:Tagthatyousetupforoccasional" for those that are not an occasional. If you don't mark every card slot then it'll pull from your whole cube (which could be fun if you wanted one slot to be 50/50 with the occasionals but probably not a desired outcome).
Pictures will probably explain it better.
step 1
XFhGAJw.png

step 2
nFInUWh.png

???
A0LOhJL.png

Profit
 
You can set it up without going card by card:

1. Click Mass Edit
2. Select the checkbox that selects all cards
3. Click Edit Selected
4. Add the tag "core" to all cards selected.
5. Import your occasionals
6. Click Mass Edit
7. Filter out all cards that were already there with "-tag:core"
8. Select the checkbox that selects all cards
9. Click Edit Selected
10. Add the tag "occasional" to all cards selected.
 
So you guys are actively using occasionals right now? Or have some of you before? In what distribution? With which philosophy? I went back to a regular 500 cards cube, as too many of my occasionals fell into either the "it's actually not worth it"-camp or the "I would like this more often"-camp. The experiment still gave me a lot of insights on flexibility and how I wasn't embracing it enough and I'd still consider revisiting it in the future.
 
Yeah, I've been using it and enjoying it, the only issue I've found is that if you play a low amount of removal in a distribution where you don't see the whole cube then the occasionals will cut into the draft, but that's something that I haven't really decided is a bug or a feature.
Right now I've been using the occasionals for cards that I'm either worried before testing are too strong, janky buildarounds, and some cards that are probably not as strong but provide glue for my other archetypes.
Basically I filled it with all the cards I've cut in my over-designs over the years.
It's a really broad power band, but I've been happy with it. The occasionals are mostly for me so I don't have a step over my players and to add more variance to Cube which is always fun as a curator because it means more opportunities where you're like "oh, I never planned for this nor did I see it coming".
 
How are you all physically separating your core vs your occasionals/modules?

The OP gives some suggestions in terms of stickers/marks, but I'm curious what's worked in practice for those who have implemented it!
 
I painted a small orange dot in the top right corner on the inner sleeve. That worked perfectly and I can now still use the sleeves for other purposes when I just turn them over.
 
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