Edit: Cube renamed, redesigned, and re-linked.
Medium Complexity, 3-5 Player, 4 Color (no blue) Cube
Medium Complexity, 3-5 Player, 4 Color (no blue) Cube
I made a different cube for my small play group, and we tried our first draft with 3 players.
Four colors makes the draft more sensible with 3-4 players. I cut blue based on drafter's color preferences.
Color Representation
It's designed for 11 card packs. With small drafts, 13-15 card packs wheel too many times, and 9 card packs don't have all of the colors represented enough which results in too many dead picks. I wanted to have each mono-color represented about as much as it would be in a retail draft, which I find to be around 2.2 cards per color per pack. Hitting this number is a big reason for cutting a color from the cube. I avoided gold cards for this reason. If it was a 3 color cube, I'd add multicolored. (I'm interested in designing a 3 color cube)
Land
We are using proxy original dual lands (simplest), and 27 out of 198 cards are lands (13.6%). Players can trade in dual lands after the draft as long as the land they trade in shares a color with the one they're receiving. Now they can draft a higher percentage of the dual lands, similar to drafting fetch lands. This results in 7+ lands per drafter in a 3 player draft or 6 lands per drafter in 4 player, and most of those lands will go into the decks. The goal is for 2-3 color decks to have good mana that doesn't need search+shuffle time during games.
(Related side note: I played a 3 player commander game with a brand new player and an experienced player recently using precon decks. I watched the new player navigate a mana base that included various ETB tapped lands, a bounce land, and a filter land. It was an apt demonstration that a mana base can cause confusion and consume processing time.)
Having good mana available encourages 3rd color splashes, which helps to create better competition for the colors during the draft.
If everybody drafts a 2 color deck, one of two things will likely happen in a 3 player draft:
1) Two of the colors are drafted by only one player - kinda lame, and it gives those two players a big advantage.
2) One of the colors doesn't get drafted by anybody - also kinda lame.
Also, a small cube with simple cards can use all the help it can get to provide a nice variety of possible decks, and 3 color deck combinations help a lot in that area. The cube is oversized by 2-3 packs to add bit of variability*.
(*Actually, I made it 18 packs because I like the way that fits in the box.)
After one draft, the proportion of lands seemed alright.
Simple Card Criteria
This isn't a beginner cube, but past experience has shown that my particular drafters have more fun and do better when the card pool is more simple and elegant. They have MtG experience from the old times but not much in the past 15-20 years. But they're good gamers who can figure things out quickly enough, so the complexity might increase slightly over time if we can draft semi-regularly (which we want to do).
Most (>85%) of the cards have 5 lines of text or less. Overall, there are lots of cards that are fast and easy to understand, so the wordy cards become less taxing. Having one line dual lands helps.
Draft Decks
RWg Aggro
This drafter really likes burn and aggro. He would have done a few things differently in hindsight, but he still created a deck that was able to get a head of steam and deliver some pressure early in the game. Some of the tools he would have liked ended up being in the non-drafted extra packs. After seeing this list, I might want to add a more help for aggro archetypes in the non-red colors.
WB Blink / Death Triggers
This drafter made a nice deck that takes advantage of some of the available synergies in the cube list. We had a lengthy back and forth game between this deck and the BGr Graveyard deck, which the WB Blink deck ultimately won. He used [card]Selfless Spirit[/c] + Day of Judgment to wipe my board. I thought I was recovering nicely, but he ended up whittling me down with Blood Artist and some flying damage. That game also featured a hilariously impactful Miser's Shadow that shut down quite a few of the graveyard card effects
BGr Graveyard / Ramp
I was the only green drafter, so that helped. I was also the only one looking for graveyard stuff, so I got to make a nearly ideal rendition of this deck. It worked pretty well.
Challenges
The graveyard stuff is taking up more space than the other themes.
I'd like to improve the go-wide aggro theme in Boros, with a bit of support for branching out to the other colors.
I'm not sure if the red spells theme has enough to be viable, but it's also somewhat hard for me to just leave that out. My creature to spell ratio, by the way, is about 26 creatures to 11 spells per color. Maybe that's too creature heavy, but I did it that way because it's close to what I'd usually want a new drafter to run in a deck.
I want to make the sacrifice theme as big as the graveyard and blink themes, because that's something that all four colors could participate in.
I'd like red to have an opportunity to use its discard abilities a bit more to contribute to graveyard themes. I can picture some stuff with discard and madness (which is a separate issue from graveyard stuff that might not fit) and flashback. I'd like to get to the point where it makes sense to put Faithless Looting and Fiery Temper and Firebolt in there.
I'd consider imbalancing the colors. I think I'd make red bigger to give its spells section more room and give it a better chance to participate in each theme.
Duplicating some cards (beyond the lands) is an option.
Four colors makes the draft more sensible with 3-4 players. I cut blue based on drafter's color preferences.
Color Representation
It's designed for 11 card packs. With small drafts, 13-15 card packs wheel too many times, and 9 card packs don't have all of the colors represented enough which results in too many dead picks. I wanted to have each mono-color represented about as much as it would be in a retail draft, which I find to be around 2.2 cards per color per pack. Hitting this number is a big reason for cutting a color from the cube. I avoided gold cards for this reason. If it was a 3 color cube, I'd add multicolored. (I'm interested in designing a 3 color cube)
Land
We are using proxy original dual lands (simplest), and 27 out of 198 cards are lands (13.6%). Players can trade in dual lands after the draft as long as the land they trade in shares a color with the one they're receiving. Now they can draft a higher percentage of the dual lands, similar to drafting fetch lands. This results in 7+ lands per drafter in a 3 player draft or 6 lands per drafter in 4 player, and most of those lands will go into the decks. The goal is for 2-3 color decks to have good mana that doesn't need search+shuffle time during games.
(Related side note: I played a 3 player commander game with a brand new player and an experienced player recently using precon decks. I watched the new player navigate a mana base that included various ETB tapped lands, a bounce land, and a filter land. It was an apt demonstration that a mana base can cause confusion and consume processing time.)
Having good mana available encourages 3rd color splashes, which helps to create better competition for the colors during the draft.
If everybody drafts a 2 color deck, one of two things will likely happen in a 3 player draft:
1) Two of the colors are drafted by only one player - kinda lame, and it gives those two players a big advantage.
2) One of the colors doesn't get drafted by anybody - also kinda lame.
Also, a small cube with simple cards can use all the help it can get to provide a nice variety of possible decks, and 3 color deck combinations help a lot in that area. The cube is oversized by 2-3 packs to add bit of variability*.
(*Actually, I made it 18 packs because I like the way that fits in the box.)
After one draft, the proportion of lands seemed alright.
Simple Card Criteria
This isn't a beginner cube, but past experience has shown that my particular drafters have more fun and do better when the card pool is more simple and elegant. They have MtG experience from the old times but not much in the past 15-20 years. But they're good gamers who can figure things out quickly enough, so the complexity might increase slightly over time if we can draft semi-regularly (which we want to do).
Most (>85%) of the cards have 5 lines of text or less. Overall, there are lots of cards that are fast and easy to understand, so the wordy cards become less taxing. Having one line dual lands helps.
Draft Decks
RWg Aggro
This drafter really likes burn and aggro. He would have done a few things differently in hindsight, but he still created a deck that was able to get a head of steam and deliver some pressure early in the game. Some of the tools he would have liked ended up being in the non-drafted extra packs. After seeing this list, I might want to add a more help for aggro archetypes in the non-red colors.
WB Blink / Death Triggers
This drafter made a nice deck that takes advantage of some of the available synergies in the cube list. We had a lengthy back and forth game between this deck and the BGr Graveyard deck, which the WB Blink deck ultimately won. He used [card]Selfless Spirit[/c] + Day of Judgment to wipe my board. I thought I was recovering nicely, but he ended up whittling me down with Blood Artist and some flying damage. That game also featured a hilariously impactful Miser's Shadow that shut down quite a few of the graveyard card effects
BGr Graveyard / Ramp
I was the only green drafter, so that helped. I was also the only one looking for graveyard stuff, so I got to make a nearly ideal rendition of this deck. It worked pretty well.
Challenges
The graveyard stuff is taking up more space than the other themes.
I'd like to improve the go-wide aggro theme in Boros, with a bit of support for branching out to the other colors.
I'm not sure if the red spells theme has enough to be viable, but it's also somewhat hard for me to just leave that out. My creature to spell ratio, by the way, is about 26 creatures to 11 spells per color. Maybe that's too creature heavy, but I did it that way because it's close to what I'd usually want a new drafter to run in a deck.
I want to make the sacrifice theme as big as the graveyard and blink themes, because that's something that all four colors could participate in.
I'd like red to have an opportunity to use its discard abilities a bit more to contribute to graveyard themes. I can picture some stuff with discard and madness (which is a separate issue from graveyard stuff that might not fit) and flashback. I'd like to get to the point where it makes sense to put Faithless Looting and Fiery Temper and Firebolt in there.
I'd consider imbalancing the colors. I think I'd make red bigger to give its spells section more room and give it a better chance to participate in each theme.
Duplicating some cards (beyond the lands) is an option.
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