General Modular Cube

[japahn]

I've put a lot of effort in tuning my cube, making sure archetypes had critical mass, but more generic decks were at a similar power level. The cube is currently at 540 (12 players) and I found that 50% extra cards kept enough variance that drafts were unique, so this number is good for 8 players.

The problem is, I did this fine tuning for exactly 8 players. I ran a 5-man draft, and all archetypes were thin. And if you think about it, they were supposed to be. My 10 archetypes for 8 people are okay (especially with a lot of overlapping cards), but 10 archetypes for 5 people is terrible - only 3 were drafted and even with overlap, many cards were dead.

Since I don't have the option of always having 8 people, one solution is having a cube with a number of archetypes and card count that scales appropriately to the number of players. I could make something like a core cube of 360 and a 180 card expansion for 7-8 players, or, even better, make 3 modules of 180 cards that can be mixed and matched to get 180, 360 or 540 card cube. This scales well - if I want more archetypes in the future, I can add a new module - this works as long as modules have a similar power level, and makes it way harder to figure out the format.

2-4 players would use 1 module (50% to 100% of cube used), 5-6 players would use 2 modules (62.5% to 75% of cube used) and 7-8 players would draft 3 modules (58.3% to 66.7% of cube used).

The configuration I would use for my cube, for example, is this:

Module 1

• WUR Spells Matter
• WBG Enchantments
• R Burn

Module 2

• RG Lands
• WR Tokens
• BRG Sacrifice
• WU Skies

Module 3

• UBG Graveyard
• UR Artifacts
• WRG Counters

Does anyone have a modular cube? Does this solve the scaling problem in practice? How do you identify the cards from each module, stickers? Do you think it will work?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Ahadaban has a modular cube, and you can see his posts in the cube list part of the forum.

Your problem though is that 540 is huge, and can support way more than ten archetypes. It would be easier to go to 360, or maybe up to 400ish. That way you have a strong core to develope and have 40 or so flex slots.

 

[japahn]

My 540 is more of a 360 with +50% variance, so I need to keep the same amount of archetypes as a 360 could support.

 

[Florida Man]

I was thinking of doing something similar but with type of cube, not size. And yeah I was thinking stickers on the sleeves at the bottom left hand corner. That would probably work best.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Here you go guys, here is the link to his thread. Hope it helps.

 

[japahn]

Thanks for the link. This looks good and is close to what I'm doing. The main differences are:

• He has 5 modules with non-even color distributions, while I'm going for 3 modules of even distributions. A design choice here, his approach solves one of my problems, which is to make sure all colors have at least one archetype in each module but not too many.
• 100% of the whole modules that were chosen are drafted, while in my design 75% at most would be drafted. This is to promote diversity and to avoid people knowing that another card that combos with a given on will show up for sure.

The status of my refactoring is that the cube is now split into the 3 modules, with a single swap on the initial archetype distribution (I'll edit the original post to reflect that).
Now I need to mark them in Cube Tutor and run a test draft to find the rough edges, since I'm treading unknown territory here. I'll probably have to weaken a bit the archetypes in favor of good stuff, because some modules became too tight, and find a good archetype to fill Module 1.

 

[ahadabans]

I'm excited to see how your module design turns out as I think the concept has great potential especially for smaller groups that want a more focused draft. I've done two real drafts now with the modules and I have some early feedback on my design in particular:

• Drafting one module feels way too narrow. I did that with a friend just to see how it would go, and it felt overly simplified and forced even. I suspect partly because of the heavy color focus, but also because of the fact that the archetypes I'm supporting in each module do not overlap well. That second point I plan on addressing in my next update (better archetype overlap within modules). The good news is as soon as you throw a second module in this problem greatly diminishes. So the idea of breaking up by modules is sound I believe, I just need to do a better job with how I'm grouping cards together. My goal will be trying to make one basic (very general) mechanic be the central theme of the entire module with each shard/wedge having a different slant on how to use it.
• The best module I built was the white one where i had a strong token theme throughout. Mardu wanted to sacrifce them, Bant wanted to blink them and white weenie just wanted to pump them and swing. The crossover with this was excellent though because you could very easily combine these into any combination and have a deck that was at least compatible with itself. That was not true of the Green module where I had a self mill theme, ramp (which wasn't useful in self mill) and land fall (fine with ramp but even more useless to self mill). So you either built a ramp/landfall deck or you built the self mill deck and ignored all the other cards in the pool. If there is one thing you want to avoid, it's this.
• I'm still really unhappy with how the lands are setup in each module. A few were super narrow which I knew they would be, but they just felt like wasted slots during the draft. How I distributed fixing lands in each module seemed like a good idea too but after drafting it I think it needs some work (second set of fetches? More even distribution? I can't quite put my finger on it). I'm also thinking about putting bouncelands back in but that requires a great deal of redesign so I'm not sure yet. Funny story on the bounceland thing, I had Izzet Boilerworks as a stand-in for the upcoming Izzet manland. But when I played it as a bounce land in my Grixis deck, it was such a powerful play. I had forgotten how good these can be in slower formats (which mine definitely is). So I started thinking maybe I should re-add the whole cycle. Then doubts came in when it got hit by SmallPox, but at the same time I really appreciated the play when it happened and see a nice dynamic there with mana denial strategies which have become pretty weak overall. I'd love a reason to re-add Boomerang to my cube, but I digress.
• Narrow enablers work well when you have a focused theme and you draft all the cards for that theme (which modular drafting enables). Hardened Scales is the best example of this. That card does absolutely nothing without at least half a dozen support cards in your deck. In a normal cube, I would not touch that card with a 50 foot pole. But it's not hard to draft the support cards and build a deck around it with a modular design, and scales is the best card in this particular deck (making it worth drafting around). I don't want to over support this though. Ion Storm for example felt slow in the +1/+1 deck, but that partly has to do with bullet point one above. There wasn't enough overlap in one module to support different versions of the +1/+1 deck. It was aggressive or nothing. Ion Storm I think works better in a more midrange/control style build which I had no support for in the module with Ion Storm.

So glad others are experimenting with this idea though. I'll be following your progress closely.