Would folks mind if I started trying to organize things? I may not be able to join in on a chatcast (I do most of this while malingering at work), but am happy to try and impose some order on these discussions. I feel quite strongly about budget cubing, having now built three of them, and find that the general cubosphere has
no idea of the real limitations involved. I was just listening to The Magic Box, whose suggested beginner 360 skeleton cube costs almost $3000, and wanted to scream. On MTGSalvation I received an amazing amount of advice when my cube was starting (and in fact, many folks shipped me cube staples for free, incredibly), but they also couldn't understand why I couldn't consider $1 cards like
Yavimaya Elder or
Fact or Fiction. I have greatly enjoyed persuing the unplayed $0.25 rotated rares for fun cards, and there is an entire galaxy of them out there. In other words, this should be a blast...
Here is my suggestion: I will start a google spreadsheet for a 360 budget cube, and a cubetutor cube that mirror it for practice drafts. I will use tcgplayer prices, tracked on the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet will also have a tab for suggested cards, so we can track the "on-deck" binder. We can all make and defend our ideas here on the forum (as in the post above). But you always need to post the price when suggesting a card!
We need to start somewhere, so I will probably post a cleaned-up version of my $50 MTGO cube with the expectation that it will get entirely torn apart. It is useful, however, to have a starting price so we can carefully decide when to break the budget with a $0.75 card.
First, however, we need to decide what we are building exactly. Are we building a budget cube that looks and plays as much like a "real" cube as we can afford? If so, we will have to budget for as many midpriced staples as possible that folks would expect to see--the cards like Fact or Fiction and Lightning Bolt and Mulldrifter. Our budget is unavoidably going to force us to play lots of cards no-one plays in any format, but we should decide if we are going to try all sorts of crazy archetypes as a result, or something less idiosyncratic. Is the expectation that this is a "starter cube" that folks will eventually grow into something more powerful and pricey, or a fixed, fun draft environment we're presenting? (Personally, I lean towards the former...)
I have one more suggestion: increase the price to $150 from $100. Why? At an average cost of $0.36 per card, every single $1 card wrecks our budget, and even $0.50 cards give us headaches. This means three things right off the bat: our lands are going to be painfully bad, many budget staples will be missing, and there will be no planeswalkers. I personally don't mind not playing with planeswalkers, but they are fan favorites and would make the budget cube more appealing to most. At the $100 level, the lands will either eat up 30-40% of our budget or all CITP tapped and hurt aggro strategies. I've priced a suite of painlands/bouncelands/fastlands/checklands/vivids, and it would be possible at the $150 level. And since that's pretty much what I've been using in my "real" cube (until the shocklands dropped in price during RTR), I can tell you that it works just fine.
What do folks think?
