Dom Harvey
Contributor
This is an idea that Jason (iirc) floated on the Google group but was never fleshed out any further. I think it's worth discussing though, even if only as a thought experiment. We've all run up against the problem of having to cut borderline Cube-worthy cards from our lists so as to not dilute the Cube too much. It's also much harder to justify including build-around-me cards when you can't control when they will show up in the draft: a Birthing Pod or Sneak Attack or whatever in pack 3 will almost always be glossed over unless someone happens to have picked up the right selection of cards beforehand. You can see this at work in retail draft formats, particularly with the reverse draft order - Burning Vengeance is probably the best recent example. Even when those cards are in the first pack, support for them is lacking in the other packs so the archetype is dead in the water in full block draft: see Furnace Celebration, Dampen Thought, and so on. As a custom draft format Cube lets us explore this design space in a way that we don't get to normally.
Naturally people's Cubes, especially here, differ to such an extent that there isn't a core of cards that definitely belong in the second pack or w/e, but we can discuss the general principles behind the choice of cards for each pack slot:
- Where possible, two-card combos shouldn't be in the same pack.
- I assume this also applies to cards that fill a generic role - you don't want all of your counterspells or burn clustered in one pack, for instance.
- One thing I've thought would be interesting for two-set retail formats like IID is to put the one pack in the middle, so you'd draft IDI instead. This would force you to reevaluate the same cards on the spot given the outcome of the second pack. This works better for some cards than others - Incinerate or Mana Leak are always going to be as functionally good no matter when drafted, the only question is whether you need more of that effect. One possibility is to split the duplicated archetype cards up like this: for example you could have 2 Gravecrawlers in pack 1, the other 2 in pack 3, and concentrate the cards that interact with the Zombie subtheme in pack 2. This also helps avoid the problem of putting cards that land you in niche archetypes in pack 1, which is that it becomes easy to scoop one up and go on cruise control for the rest of the draft, just taking whichever card obviously fits best in your deck.
Thoughts? I think this is a fascinating topic.
Naturally people's Cubes, especially here, differ to such an extent that there isn't a core of cards that definitely belong in the second pack or w/e, but we can discuss the general principles behind the choice of cards for each pack slot:
- Where possible, two-card combos shouldn't be in the same pack.
- I assume this also applies to cards that fill a generic role - you don't want all of your counterspells or burn clustered in one pack, for instance.
- One thing I've thought would be interesting for two-set retail formats like IID is to put the one pack in the middle, so you'd draft IDI instead. This would force you to reevaluate the same cards on the spot given the outcome of the second pack. This works better for some cards than others - Incinerate or Mana Leak are always going to be as functionally good no matter when drafted, the only question is whether you need more of that effect. One possibility is to split the duplicated archetype cards up like this: for example you could have 2 Gravecrawlers in pack 1, the other 2 in pack 3, and concentrate the cards that interact with the Zombie subtheme in pack 2. This also helps avoid the problem of putting cards that land you in niche archetypes in pack 1, which is that it becomes easy to scoop one up and go on cruise control for the rest of the draft, just taking whichever card obviously fits best in your deck.
Thoughts? I think this is a fascinating topic.
