Why I'm working on this Cube?
The reason I'm working on this cube is that my playgroup is comprised of my best friends and close acquaintances that want a "zero compromise outside of meeting to play" affair, just like a board game, yet in our eyes no board game can ever compare to Magic; the mechanical intricacies, the art and the nostalgia it elicits in us simply cannot be overcome by Dixit, Dominion or any other substitute, all games were missing something magical.
The reason I'm working on this cube is that my playgroup is comprised of my best friends and close acquaintances that want a "zero compromise outside of meeting to play" affair, just like a board game, yet in our eyes no board game can ever compare to Magic; the mechanical intricacies, the art and the nostalgia it elicits in us simply cannot be overcome by Dixit, Dominion or any other substitute, all games were missing something magical.
We've never been a very competitive group, most of us did not care for standard, game stores in our country brought assorted booster boxes from all expansions, so you could go and buy a tempest tournament deck and an alliances booster so you would just go and and play with those. Our first contact with a constructed format after just randomly assembling piles of cards was Vintage (Type 1 as it was used to be called), and most of the tournaments we were involved in were organized by me at a a local game store that no longer exists, as we thought that Type 2 restrictions were stupid.
As life kept getting more complicated it became almost impossible for most of us to go to a game store during a weekend to trade and catch some games, and money became an issue when most of us went to university making it impossible to keep up with the Type 1 meta, so after a decade long hiatus starting with Mirrodin, we decided to get Commander decks and play that. Within a couple of months power creep got the best of us, some members of the group couldn't keep up and began to drop from the sessions.
It seemed that real life made impossible for us to play Magic again, until one day I was looking for content to watch on the GDC Channel and I stumbled upon a presentation by Mark Rosewater, and by happenstance after that video finished, Youtube decided to autoplay Color Commontary 95: The Cube Episode... my mind was blown, THIS IS IT! and thus the journey for theory and content began.
Since Youtube is the place where thought goes to die (as evidenced and exploited by "how to basic"), besides the basic introduction by the Tolarian Community College Profesor I only found endless draft videos of the MODO Cube, and being completely unseduced by the cheap "content", which could only be worse on Twitch or Mixer, I widened my search outside content platforms for lazy people.
The first source I found outside of streaming media was MTGS forums; lurked for a couple of days, saw a lot of "defining X, Y, Z" threads, a lot of card tier lists, and similar min-maxing exercises, so at first I shook my head thinking that those people don't get the potential of what we are dealing with in Cube, but I was mostly O K with them being naive, until I got saturated by overly negative and absolutely unsolicited replies in the casualest of threads (for example Your "Pet"-est card), and decided that participating wasn't worth it, as the crowd there is utterly obsessed with "defining" as a means to simplify the process of buying social validation, nor is the rest of the content worth parsing, as being a video game developer by trade I quickly realized that the whole dogma behind the Power Max Cube quickly devolves into just another consumer treadmill, and since I already don't play Asian MMOs or Mobile F2P games, I wasn't gonna fall for that.
Suddenly I remembered a Web 2.0 zombie platform called Blogger, where people wrote things that no one read, so there was a chance of finding individuality, searching there I found the aptly named: http://mtgcube.blogspot.com/ and read Every. Single. Post. I didn't agree with a lot of it, but it was a person, with an actual perspective that went above and beyond "this card sucks, this one is better". I was/am enthralled by this Nick Nobody person, there was hope in the world as I found at least one more person that didn't fall for an idiotic min-maxing exercise, but I wanted some back and forth.
Then I went back to social media, because I remembered that there is a place that while being another shitty "social" network, makes it pretty damn near impossible to become an "influencer" through sheer volume of shit posted, so content is average on average; Reddit. MTGCube there already had a more diverse clash of philosophies (or just complete lack of them) compared to the Power Max Dogma of MTGS, which really surprised me as Reddit is designed to foster group think. I kept reading but didn't participate as the conversation is quite basic, and I wasn't going to install additional shit on my cellphone only to avoid pesky pop ups urging me to install additional shit on my cellphone.
I kept longing for the whole "forum" experience, with long form posts, thoughtful responses and autistic essays that no one asked for, such as this one. Then one day while surfing older posts on reddit I saw a post where people were going ballistic over this Jason Waddell article. I thought "this person must have something interesting to say, people wouldn't feel so threatened otherwise". Read all of his articles, didn't think that he was saying anything THAT controversial, which made me realize that most people operate on a cargo cult level of comprehension, he just made them feel insecure about their dogma, as the articles themselves were pretty tame. Did some more googling and arrived here, lurked for quite a while, saw Grillo_Parlante's posts, CML stuff about the pro tour that resonated a lot with me, then there was the Alter Thread; I always loved the idea of alters, but I was on this speculative mindset that forebode me from "diminishing the value" of cards by defacing them, but that thread made me realize that the cube is for me and my friends, I own the cards, they don't own me, so I went ahead and "defaced" some cards and basically fell in love with the community, as it made me change one shitty thing about my own perception of the world
As life kept getting more complicated it became almost impossible for most of us to go to a game store during a weekend to trade and catch some games, and money became an issue when most of us went to university making it impossible to keep up with the Type 1 meta, so after a decade long hiatus starting with Mirrodin, we decided to get Commander decks and play that. Within a couple of months power creep got the best of us, some members of the group couldn't keep up and began to drop from the sessions.
It seemed that real life made impossible for us to play Magic again, until one day I was looking for content to watch on the GDC Channel and I stumbled upon a presentation by Mark Rosewater, and by happenstance after that video finished, Youtube decided to autoplay Color Commontary 95: The Cube Episode... my mind was blown, THIS IS IT! and thus the journey for theory and content began.
Since Youtube is the place where thought goes to die (as evidenced and exploited by "how to basic"), besides the basic introduction by the Tolarian Community College Profesor I only found endless draft videos of the MODO Cube, and being completely unseduced by the cheap "content", which could only be worse on Twitch or Mixer, I widened my search outside content platforms for lazy people.
The first source I found outside of streaming media was MTGS forums; lurked for a couple of days, saw a lot of "defining X, Y, Z" threads, a lot of card tier lists, and similar min-maxing exercises, so at first I shook my head thinking that those people don't get the potential of what we are dealing with in Cube, but I was mostly O K with them being naive, until I got saturated by overly negative and absolutely unsolicited replies in the casualest of threads (for example Your "Pet"-est card), and decided that participating wasn't worth it, as the crowd there is utterly obsessed with "defining" as a means to simplify the process of buying social validation, nor is the rest of the content worth parsing, as being a video game developer by trade I quickly realized that the whole dogma behind the Power Max Cube quickly devolves into just another consumer treadmill, and since I already don't play Asian MMOs or Mobile F2P games, I wasn't gonna fall for that.
Suddenly I remembered a Web 2.0 zombie platform called Blogger, where people wrote things that no one read, so there was a chance of finding individuality, searching there I found the aptly named: http://mtgcube.blogspot.com/ and read Every. Single. Post. I didn't agree with a lot of it, but it was a person, with an actual perspective that went above and beyond "this card sucks, this one is better". I was/am enthralled by this Nick Nobody person, there was hope in the world as I found at least one more person that didn't fall for an idiotic min-maxing exercise, but I wanted some back and forth.
Then I went back to social media, because I remembered that there is a place that while being another shitty "social" network, makes it pretty damn near impossible to become an "influencer" through sheer volume of shit posted, so content is average on average; Reddit. MTGCube there already had a more diverse clash of philosophies (or just complete lack of them) compared to the Power Max Dogma of MTGS, which really surprised me as Reddit is designed to foster group think. I kept reading but didn't participate as the conversation is quite basic, and I wasn't going to install additional shit on my cellphone only to avoid pesky pop ups urging me to install additional shit on my cellphone.
I kept longing for the whole "forum" experience, with long form posts, thoughtful responses and autistic essays that no one asked for, such as this one. Then one day while surfing older posts on reddit I saw a post where people were going ballistic over this Jason Waddell article. I thought "this person must have something interesting to say, people wouldn't feel so threatened otherwise". Read all of his articles, didn't think that he was saying anything THAT controversial, which made me realize that most people operate on a cargo cult level of comprehension, he just made them feel insecure about their dogma, as the articles themselves were pretty tame. Did some more googling and arrived here, lurked for quite a while, saw Grillo_Parlante's posts, CML stuff about the pro tour that resonated a lot with me, then there was the Alter Thread; I always loved the idea of alters, but I was on this speculative mindset that forebode me from "diminishing the value" of cards by defacing them, but that thread made me realize that the cube is for me and my friends, I own the cards, they don't own me, so I went ahead and "defaced" some cards and basically fell in love with the community, as it made me change one shitty thing about my own perception of the world
