The 180 Beginner Cube (v3!)

[akj]

Hello again!

Over the past few years I've been working on a pile of 180 cards for teaching beginners. I’ve been playing Magic for donkey’s years now, and my favourite thing has always been teaching new people to play. I started with five ‘beginner decks’, which was fine, but I love limited and wanted to teach that too. This ended up with the now retired ‘Beginner Cube’.

I've added things and taken things away, and I'm now up to version 3, which is a pretty wholescale change. Here are my thoughts on building a cube for teaching magic, and I'd love to hear your feedback.

Rules:

1. Sealed/Constructed Flexibility. By having 30 of each colour, you can add twenty lands and have your constructed, 50-card beginner decks for teaching for the first ever time. To do limited, just add in the twenty gold and 10 artifacts and you’re at 180 – two sealed decks or four draft decks.
2. Cards are evocative of the colour.
3. Cards are simple. A few keyword abilities is best. Eviscerate is much better than Fatal Push.
4. No tokens or counters.

Development:
Versions 1 & 2 had one major problem. They were boring. There was so much vanilla and french vanilla that the only thing that really made a colour feel like a colour was the name and the art. Cubing was just choosing a colour and making a curve, with colours feeling inflexible.
Supporting archetypes felt awkward without dedicated cards, the majority of which felt too wordy.
So here's version 3. The changes are:

1. Each colour (not colour pair) has a special keyword - chosen for its relative simplicity and the way it 'feels' with regards to the colour. Black has exploit, Green has Landfall, Red has Raid, White has Exalted and Blue has (most problematically imo) Prowess. With a little heads up explanation, the ideas are simply and evocative - I really like this.
2. The gold cards now point you to an 'idea' within the colour pair - is it aggro, is it midrange, or is it grindy. These are my archetypes - are you the beatdown, or are you not?
3. There are more duplicate cards, and where there were two different cards doing basically the same thing I've tried to cut it down.

One drawback is a reduction in the number of straight up french-vanilla creatures. I might be risking moving away from 'beginner' to 'beginner+', but I am convinced it's possible.

If you have further suggestions please do let me know! I'll upload this post as I make further changes.

 

[Rowan_CB]

This is a great idea, and sorely needed. My wife is not a magic player, and when I tried to teach her, I threw together what I thought were relatively simple decks, but I included like 20 different keywords, and while she got the hang of it, it was a poor introduction. She has not been very interested in playing again! This looks like a much more thoughtful and streamlined introduction. Plus, what better way to introduce people to magic than cube draft, the best way to play?

Creature-heavy makes sense for an introduction to the game, but I wonder if you don't have room to include a few more noncreature spells? It looks you could afford to cut a 4+ CMC creature from most colors (save white, which has a top end closer to what I think you should strive for) to make room. This seems especially essential in blue with its prowess theme. Worth noting that prowess wants noncreature spells that don't have timing restrictions on them. The blue mage can't cast his or her counterspells unless there is a spell on the stack to counter, and is unlikely to get a meaningful prowess trigger from them. Chart a Course is a fine prowess enabler, but a new player is more likely to go out of their way to avoid the "drawback" of discarding a card, and play Chart a Course only during their second main phase, after attacking, thus wasting another opportunity for a prowess trigger.

With that said, prowess doesn't seem too problematic to me from a complexity level (but maybe you meant from a power level)?

Exploit however, strikes me as a tricky mechanic for a new player. The Exploit player is going to be frustrated if they aren't able to figure out the right balance between exploit creatures and exploit targets, which is something even a seasoned player might fumble. Plus, the fact that they have to kill their own creatures to get cool effects might seem counterintuitive, and unfair, in that other players can get bonuses by doing things that are inherently beneficial (attacking, casting instants and sorceries, playing lands). This could be mitigated somewhat by throwing in more creatures with death triggers in black, so those can be bright flashing signs to drafters that say EXPLOIT ME!.

 

[akj]

This is a great idea, and sorely needed. My wife is not a magic player, and when I tried to teach her, I threw together what I thought were relatively simple decks, but I included like 20 different keywords, and while she got the hang of it, it was a poor introduction. She has not been very interested in playing again! This looks like a much more thoughtful and streamlined introduction. Plus, what better way to introduce people to magic than cube draft, the best way to play?

Creature-heavy makes sense for an introduction to the game, but I wonder if you don't have room to include a few more noncreature spells? It looks you could afford to cut a 4+ CMC creature from most colors (save white, which has a top end closer to what I think you should strive for) to make room. This seems especially essential in blue with its prowess theme. Worth noting that prowess wants noncreature spells that don't have timing restrictions on them. The blue mage can't cast his or her counterspells unless there is a spell on the stack to counter, and is unlikely to get a meaningful prowess trigger from them. Chart a Course is a fine prowess enabler, but a new player is more likely to go out of their way to avoid the "drawback" of discarding a card, and play Chart a Course only during their second main phase, after attacking, thus wasting another opportunity for a prowess trigger.

With that said, prowess doesn't seem too problematic to me from a complexity level (but maybe you meant from a power level)?

Exploit however, strikes me as a tricky mechanic for a new player. The Exploit player is going to be frustrated if they aren't able to figure out the right balance between exploit creatures and exploit targets, which is something even a seasoned player might fumble. Plus, the fact that they have to kill their own creatures to get cool effects might seem counterintuitive, and unfair, in that other players can get bonuses by doing things that are inherently beneficial (attacking, casting instants and sorceries, playing lands). This could be mitigated somewhat by throwing in more creatures with death triggers in black, so those can be bright flashing signs to drafters that say EXPLOIT ME!.

Thanks so much for the feedback and encouragement!

Creature heavy is the nature of starting out, but I do see your point. I haven't managed to fit in another noncreature spell in blue *but* you're right about the timing restrictions - I've swapped out an essence scatter for another disperse. If chart a course wasn't such a great card in every other colour pair I'd cut it - for the moment I'll leave it as a problem for blue players to worry about.

You point about exploit is great. I felt like what you were saying wasn't so much a reflection on the complexity of the wording on the mechanic, but on deciding whether to sacrifice a creature. I've made a few changes, the key one being:

-2 Exploiters, +2 targets. I've cut a vulturous aven and the minister and replaced them with some fodder. Fodder is hard to come by, but on your prompts I did some digging and I found an absolutely brilliant card for this beginner cube - Endless Cockroaches - the language in the Commander reprint is so simple and it's super evocative.

Thanks again - keep me posted if you think of any further changes!

 

[dbs]

Love this project, but in an extremely-Riptide response, I'm going to point out a few cards that seem like their significantly higher power-level than the other cards in the cube:



It feels like this has the potential to cause some feel-bad moments when people get blown out, but they aren't yet capable of doing accurate card assessment. I'm not sure if this has turned up in practice.

 

[NimbusToad]

I've done a little bit of micro-cubing (designing and playing), and I'd say that my advice would be to remove multi-coloured cards. Especially when you are drafting with just 2 players, you want as many cards as possible to present a possible pick. I found that cutting gold cards and using more guild-agnostic mana fixing (like you have) reduces the amount of useless last-pick cards.

Other than that, this sounds like a fun cube.

 

[akj]

Love this project, but in an extremely-Riptide response, I'm going to point out a few cards that seem like their significantly higher power-level than the other cards in the cube:



It feels like this has the potential to cause some feel-bad moments when people get blown out, but they aren't yet capable of doing accurate card assessment. I'm not sure if this has turned up in practice.

Ah, you don't come to Riptide for anything less! You're absolutely right - there are some very powerful cards in here and some much more underpowered stuff. I'm at least gratified that they're in 3 colours!

You picked out three built-in 2-for-1s. In the past I have taken them out as overly powerful, but there's nothing quite like that blowout moment to underline the importance of two-for-ones! I've had beginners look at a card like Ravenous Chupacabra and say 'okay, it's a 2/2 for four', but then a little later down the line the eyes widen and the brows furrow and magic cards all look a bit different.

That said, BG splash R in this cube seems a bit OTT. I'll think about how to bring it down a touch.