Welcome!
I have a LOT of trouble with that too.
It might be some aspect of perfectionism that I want to cram into my cube as many strategies and variety as it is possible to do so. Thinking about the realistic limits is helpful to counteract that.
The limits of cubing
The synergy limit
Think of your ideal, open-world, comprehensive cube as a subset of all the cards in Magic. Hell, let's start with a cube of all the cards! I couldn't find a list on CubeCobra, but the Chaos Draft Jason ran some weeks ago is not far off:
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/draft-sign-ups-chaos-draft.3273/#post-97276
It's hard to deny it has a huge variety of potential decks, but realistically, although it will provide a ton of variety in which cards are played, there won't be much variety in what sorts of strategies can be drafted. Mostly, you pick good cards. This leads to decent play patterns because Magic is a well-designed game, and the pieces are compatible and fairly open-ended. You note, though, that an element of gameplay and drafting that we got used to is missing: synergy.
The first attempts at synergy in cubes were including some combo pieces: Time Vault + Voltaic Key, Channel + Fireball.
Quickly, people realized that these combos are not quite optimal to draft because in a singleton environment with good counterspells and removal it's suboptimal to pick almost any of them. Focus shifted to packages of cards that synergized well with what was already run in cubes just for being good:
Wildfire to go with mana rocks,
Smokestack and
Braids, Cabal Minion to combo with token makers and recursive permanents.
Then, with the evolution in new sets to make synergy a real force in retail drafting, cubes saw the recipe and copied it: support a number of archetypes, each spread over a couple of colors, in which most cards in the archetype synergize with most other cards in it.
If you're familiar with graphs, imagine cards are nodes and there are edges between cards that synergize, weighted by how much they improve as a pair. At first, we had pairs or trios of cards that were strongly connected, but because they were so weakly connected to the rest, if was better to draft a deck from the rest of the smooth mass than having those two clunky pieces that didn't mix. Wildfire was a node that had strong links to mana rocks and weak ones to large creatures but not to much else. An archetype is a cluster of nodes that is particularly well-connected, like a weak clique.
The gold standard in building synergy in cubes is, at the moment, supporting a number of archetypes and avoid parasitism between them. Onderzeeboot wrote a great article about that:
https://riptidelab.com/forum/thread...id-the-pitfalls-of-parasitic-archetypes.3249/
Still, there is only space for so many different strategies.
Generously assuming each card can be played in 3 different archetypes on average, and 25 cards is enough for an archetype to be playable, a cube with 310 spell slots can support
37 archetypes.
Realistically, cards would need a LOT of text for a cube to support over, say,
25 different archetypes.
The maindeck limit
Drafting 3 15-card boosters gives you a pool of 45 cards. Out of those, you will choose about 23 spells, which means 22 of the cards will be either lands, sideboard cards, or left out unused. Assume each player runs, say, 5 non-basics. This means 28 cards are maindecked, and 17 cards are left out. Under these assumptions (which reflect most cubes), cards have a 62% average maindeck rate.
Should you aim for 100%? You could. Many designers have recently moved to a large amount of fixing, around 15-20% of cube cards. This pushes the maindeck rate towards 65-70%. Pushing a maindeck rate up can be also done by adding adding sideboard cards, utility lands, or reducing the number of picks. It has pros and cons. It forces players to be more scrappy and run cards they would be able to cut otherwise, reduces speculative picks, and curbs hate drafting.
The more strong good-stuff cards are included (the sort that makes maindecks most of the time, say, 80%), the weaker the synergy cards are. Replacing a card with 20% maindeck rate with one with 50% maindeck rate pushes all the others down.
On average, your cards will have somewhat close to 62% maindeck rate, and that is perhaps the least elastic aspect of designing a cube.
The environment limit
Some people see power band as a mininum and maximum limit of integers. It's more of a histogram of temperamental integer distributions. A card's power level depends on the other cards it's played with, so it's hard to assign a rating to a card. It was a lot easier when limited formats were less about synergy, but LSV's reviews, for example, have been including a bunch of "1.0 // 3.0" cards for a while now:
https://strategy.channelfireball.co.../throne-of-eldraine-limited-set-review-black/
I say "temperamental" because relatively small changes to the environment may significantly change how good a card is. Pyroclasm and Infest make x/2s a lot worse. Instant speed removal curbs combat tricks and beneficial auras. Magic environments are pretty chaotic systems and unintended consequences are extremely hard to control.
Most cards could get pushed into being maindeckable in the right environment, but it would require making a special environment somehow, and
you can only have one environment.
The power limit
That said, some cards' power distribution falls completely below what would get them a 23rd slot. Those aren't particularly harmful to a cube. They just sit in sideboards with a 0% maindeck rate. Bit of a waste, but harmless in small numbers.
The issue are the cards that are too good. In tiny numbers, they may create games that are unwinnable, but the real issue that in enough numbers, they depress the maindeck rate of all other cards and create environments where most strategies aren't viable. A
lower power band helps a lot with making strategies viable, and actually more cards as well. The drawbacks are that many favorites may need to be left out, and lower power cards are in general less known, and less resonant.
All limitations considered
- Finite number or archetypes, using dense cards allows for a high archetype limit, but limits which cards are runnable
- Maindeck rate limit that, if a vacuum is present, will be filled by worse cards, but overflows with too many good, generic cards
- One single environment where it all happens
- A single power band against which all cards are evaluated by players
Given all these constraints, you can't expect to run all cards you'd like, or all strategies there it's possible with a normal cube.
Don't give me problems, give me solutions
I've explored modular cubes (
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/modular-cube.1940/#post-77549) and I'm currently exploring occasionals (
https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/embrace-the-chaos-cube-occasionals.3134/) to expand the
archetype limitation.
My intuition is that there's space to improve on
maindeck rate limits, especially with different draft formats. I think Jason mentioned at some point a sort of adaptive draft that sees what you've picked and offers cards that would conceivably go well with it.
The
environment limitation is a tough one. Modules could help with that, but I've stopped for other reason before I got to "it was too hard to balance multiple environments".
The
power band I've found to be more fruitful is a lower power band, equivalent to 2021 uncommons, and I could see some sort of modular structure work well here. Retail draft uses rares actually to provide a wider power band but without making most commons unplayable.
Edit: sorry for misattribution Onder!
. However, I feel like what I need now is more coherent synergies within each color and throughout the cube. The problem is: currently I really love all the cards and mini-synergies! I'm having trouble picking a focus, I want to do it all.
