Proxies and the Card Back
If you (like me) proxy your cards via makeplayingcards or a similar service, and if you (like me) largely avoid double-faced cards for clunkiness and accessibility reasons, you might find yourself (like me) printing the default mpcfill lotus cardback many hundreds of times. And it's a beautiful card back, but it's a lot of printing that you paid for, just to hide it in a sleeve forever.I am here to suggest one obvious way and two not-so-obvious ways that we can leverage backprinting (printing two cards back to back on one piece of cardstock) to pack more cube into fewer physical cards, to get more bang for your buck and/or reduce the size of the backpack you carry to cube night every week.
1: Back-to-Back Cubes
Here's the obvious one. If you are printing a 450 cube, why not print two 450 cubes? Find a cube you've always been curious about that matches the size of the primary cube you are printing and load it into MPC autofill. Worst case scenario, you never draft it and it costs you nothing. Sure, flipping every card when you want to switch from cube A to cube B takes some time, but you can always ask drafters to help out. And back-to-back cubes even have some advantages over two separate cubes: they fit in a smaller box if you want to bring both options to an event, and you only need to buy one set of sleeves. While you're at it, go ahead and print 36 of each basic land for a land box the two cubes share, and on the back of those lands print your favorite microformat, like a set of Dandân, or Descent into Avernus plus 40 treasure tokens. Now you have three cubes for the cost and carrying weight of one.
2: The Card Back is the Land Box
This one is for the minimalists out there. On the back of every card, print a land. The number of cards you draft is exactly equal to the deck size. When you make cuts, unsleeve the cards you don't want to run, flip them, and resleeve them as lands. Thus every physical object in the cube gets used in gameplay.So far, all the elegant executions I've found for this idea involve every card being backprinted with the same land. The easiest is a base-monocolor cube. If every card back is a Mountain, and all the cards are useable with red mana, you've just removed the need for a land box - and you still could run Myr or mana rocks to provide other colors. Another option would be a cube that largely ignores color, where every card back is an Everywhere or a Multiversal Passage. Finally, you could run some basics in the main cube, and have every card be backprinted with an Ash Barrens or similar card that can either fetch a basic or add
. This is my personal favorite execution of the idea, because it keeps the dynamics of the color pie mostly intact, and I have some ideas for a custom Ash Barrens-ish land that would play very cleanly.Because this use of card backs is so minimalist, I think it pairs well with bar cubes and with cubes where the minimum deck size is smaller, eg a 30 card deck size and a complete eight-player format contained in 240 cards. And because all the lands are identical, you can do this with WotC-printed cards too: just announce that any card flipped in its sleeve to have the Magic cardback face up is the cube's chosen land.
3: The Card Back is the Rare Module
My primary cube uses a rare module and I've found it a really great way to add controlled variance. Each booster pack contains thirteen cards from the core of my cube and two cards from the rare section. Rares tend to be exciting build-around cards with a high ceiling, and the core tends toward glue, interaction, and staple effects. By having the cards in my core appear in most drafts, I don't need to find lots of redundancy or duplicates for core effects, like fixing or removal at my desired rate. By having the cards in my rare module appear only occasionally, I create a lot of variance from draft to draft. Because the niche build-arounds only take up two slots per pack, I can support a lot of potential strategies without clogging packs with cards that most drafters aren't interested it. And because rares have a higher power ceiling and generally look exciting, it helps make p1p1 less overwheliming for newer players, while still giving two splashy options to choose between.This use of the card back allows massive amounts of variance to exist within only 360 sleeved cards. Design a 360-card core module and a 360-card rare module, and print them back to back. Shuffle the cube with every card sleeved core-side-up. When drafters open a pack, they take the top two cards, flip them into rares, then pick up the remaining thirteen. With this system, each rare card will appear in roughly 1/8 of drafts, while each core card appears in roughly 7/8 of drafts. All the benefits of a rare section and none of the extra cards to carry.
