https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/smooth
The Smooth Twin Cube is the second paper cube I’ve built. The Elegant Cube was assembled in 2010. Building a new paper cube is a big event in my hobby life.
It is a response to an even bigger event. My wife and I are expecting a baby (very very soon)! I anticipate having less free time and smaller chunks of it from now on, but I still want to play Magic. The Elegant Cube is designed to be played in larger groups, and drafts take at least 5 hours. I need a quicker format, a quicker cube.
Jumpstart isn’t exciting to me, however, and there are two main reasons why:
Jumpstart has “half decks” that are already built, and though that provides some variety of gameplay and a surprising amount of cross interactions, it bypasses an integral part of Magic: deckbuilding. Deckbuilding is the greatest appeal of the game for me, and the favorite of so many players too. Video games like Slay the Spire and board games like Thunderstone and Dominion capture the feeling well, and I would like this feeling to be part of the game, and not all left to the designer.
A core strength of Magic (and of card games in general) is modularity. The concept of building decks made of cards clearly delineates the design space where players can exercise creativity, mastery in tirelessly fine tuning lists, out-of-the box thinking in breaking a meta, and knowledge of cards, interactions, and evaluations. Cards composing decks are such an elegant and resonant concept, and Magic is an incredible implementation of it, in which tens of thousands of cards decades apart can be played together, and in different rulesets (booster draft, EDH, standard) and interactions work perfectly fine.
Of course, introducing the gameplay rules to new players is best done without asking them to go through deckbuilding - deckbuilding requires knowing the gameplay rules. Jumpstart is great for this, skipping the step completely! The Smooth Cube will take a page from Jumpstart and support a form of deck generation. However, that will be a secondary format; the primary format will include deckbuilding.
Many Jumpstart games I played had low agency and I think that’s both a byproduct of card choice, and of many half-decks being built around micro-archetypes. Balancing micro-archetypes is already hard with a self-correcting drafting section, or a self-correcting constructed meta. Doing so just by changing the decklists is effectively impossible. Jumpstart has half-decks that combine better and worse with others, and that kind of high variance in power leads to more low-agency matchups.
The Smooth Cube will not be focused on micro-archetypes; it will have elements of synergy, but the archetypes are expected to be macro-archetypes, that is, classified by general gameplan - aggro, midrange, control, aggro-control.
The card choice should also tend to be higher agency, which will need to be weighed against word count. I rely on tempo/card advantage dynamics and a focus on creature combat to try to achieve this goal.
“Parts” composed of 1 card would work perfectly well and not require any sort of marking to pull them apart. But that’s Sealed… and I don’t like Sealed. What was the problem with Sealed, again? Maybe I shouldn’t be drafting my cube and just playing sealed instead? Nah, it’s coming back to me.
1. The choices are overwhelming. Finding a 23-card deck in an 84-card sealed pool is looking at a universe of 84C23 = 2.5*10^20 possibilities. For comparison, drafting has fewer total possibilities, (15!)^3 = 1.3*10^12, and the decisions are broken down into steps in which you have much less information. Rares help a ton to narrow down the pool into a deck in either format, because a bomb rare will weigh the scales a lot in terms of color selection, though bombs reduce gameplay and deckbuilding agency. Tightening the power band (as most cubes do) results in even more difficult sealed pools to build than in retail sealed.
2. So much text. Reading through 84-90 cards is such a chore.
I barely have time to read through my pool in prereleases I go blind into, and have a much worse experience in these prereleases compared to when I have gone over the set spoiler before attending. In the average cube, there are few if any duplicates, the cards are on the wordy side, and the “bombs” don’t provide as much guidance, so it’s much, much worse.
3. Difficult to support synergy. For example, in the Elegant Cube, the archetypes don’t really work when a player only has access to ¼ the core pool. A 90 card sealed pool will have a few pieces of many decks.
4. Too random. Players are subjected to higher “variance” in the form of some very bad and some very good pools. Experienced players in particular dislike that.
This trick is inspired by dedicated deckbuilding games (Slay the Spire, Thunderstone, Dominion). In all of these games, adding a single card to the deck impacts the deck’s functioning much more than adding a card to a Magic deck does. Presenting fewer but more impactful decisions maintains a similar level of agency but has the advantage of decreasing cognitive load and smoothing the skill curve. Playing 20-card decks is an option, but a reshuffle rule might change the game too much, and I want to be playing something closer to other Magic formats.
In terms of logistics, the copies are kept in two separate identical piles, kept sorted by color. To set up the draft, only the first pile is randomized and drawn from. After decks are built, duplicates of the cards being run are searched in the second pile. After the draft/sealed is finished, cards are sorted back by color and into the two piles.
Coming back to the idea of “parts of decks being combined”, using each pair of copies of cards as a 2-card “part” has many benefits.
The structure of 2 copies of a card as a part also mitigates or solves the problems of Sealed mentioned above.
1. The choices are overwhelming.
We can break down the act of “recognizing the best build” into:
The choice #1, the choice of colors, can be simplified by, again, looking at Jumpstart. Randomly choose two of the five colors and give a pool with only those colors to the player. That gets rid of the first big chunk of the problem, reduces variance, and doesn’t change agency all that much - sealed pools with actual ambiguity about which colors to play are rare for players who know a format well.
To tackle choice #2, the choice of cards, the reduction in reading and removal of color choice saves time and energy, and using a curated, non-microarchetype oriented cube list allows the pool to be reduced (20 cards of each color is a bit less than you’d expect to see from your two largest colors in a pool of 90). The number of combinations of 12 pairs (24 nonlands) that can be chosen is 20C12 = 125,970 possible decks, a much smaller number of options, but a lot more distinct from each other than the possible decks in a sealed pool.
If we’re careful to include in the cube only cards that are playable in any deck (not fully archetype dependent), we can even tighten the sealed pool to 12 cards (duplicated into 24), transforming Sealed into a random deck generator, a much finer grained Jumpstart.
Generated decks work well for beginners who don’t know enough to build a deck from even a small pool, and the next step is more natural - giving them more choices in a 20-pair sealed pool, or even more choices in a draft format.
2. So much text.
A sealed pool of 20 pairs drastically reduces the amount of useless reading. A pool of 20 different cards cuts the reading by 78% compared to a 90-card pool.
A generated deck (12 pairs) doesn’t even need to be all read before playing.
During gameplay, fewer individual cards need to be read as duplicates show up.
3. Difficult to support synergy.
The Smooth Twin Cube won’t have a micro-archetype focus and will tend towards “aggressive good stuff”.
Beyond that, every card being a 2-of increases the density of any combinations that are picked. Picking one card A that synergizes with another card B means you have access to two copies of each in the deck, increasing the odds of the combination A+B being available in a certain draw. Assuming 40-card decks and half the deck is seen in a game, there is a 24.4% chance to draw A and B if they are 1-ofs, but 56.6% if the A and B are 2-ofs.
4. Too random.
Sources of variance between sealed pools include color distribution (sealed pools with more color imbalance are better) and a wide power band (individual card power levels).
Color distribution is not an issue with pre-chosen colors, although color balance becomes a larger one.
A wide power band can be tamed, and is unlikely to be as bad a problem without the intentional inclusion of bomb rares and limited unplayables as retail sets do.
Power variance will still exist between these small synergy packages, but because we’re combining 12 parts into a deck, they tend to regress towards the mean more strongly than the 2 parts that make Jumpstart decks.
Limited is deeper when more options are offered to players than in Sealed, making more cards available for deckbuilding. Draft formats allow cards to be picked from a larger pool of cards than Sealed. That widens the realm of possible decks in theory, though it may actually decrease the diversity of viable decks if these choices aren’t limited somehow. Not limiting the choices is effectively constructed, and the reason why constructed metas present a smaller variety of optimal decks than limited.
Rotisserie draft, for example, allows players to use any card that hasn’t been picked yet. This results in:
Let’s look at Sealed:
Booster draft is a format I like a lot.
My ideal playing format for a twin cube when players are skillful enough to deckbuild is something akin to a booster draft in terms of focus, card variety and decisions, but for two players and resulting in a smaller pool (20 pairs).
Starting with the Decisions variable, I want this format to offer a choice between only a few directions at the beginning of the draft, and starting with very small packs is a way to implement this. I am adapting the Pyramid Draft I described in my blog, with the same rationale of keeping the decision tree at a constant width during the draft.
The goals of this draft structure is to provide variety for replayability in the three criteria we’ve been talking about:
Hate drafting is somewhat curbed by the small pool, as there isn’t much room to pick unplayables. Meta drafting is a supported dynamic, and situational cards should be limited in power - I won’t include Engineered Plague or Hurricane, for example.
Other dynamics that will appeal to many players are:
For 3 players, stick to Pyramid Draft, and adjust the packs slightly:
For 4 or more players, Pyramid Draft with open boosters (Rochester-style) will get slow and it’s best to shift to regular booster draft, drafting secret packs in parallel.
Booster draft is basically an afterthought, but it might even be the best way to play the cube. There’s nothing like players making picks to divide up a cube into decks.
In booster drafts, manabases are weaved into the draft experience, which poses an interesting question: how highly to pick nonbasics? Well, the question is “interesting” in an academic sense. Whether it’s correct to pick a nonbasic versus a spell is sensitive to many variables: land density, nonbasic choices, gold card density, draft pool size, power level discrepancy, format speed. This makes the decision more of a test of knowledge about a specific cube environment, and not a particularly transferable skill to other formats. In the spirit of streamlining decisions that are less impactful, 4 rainbow lands will be given to each player.
These 4 rainbow lands, added to 6 of each basic land (6/6 split), make a 16-land manabase with 10 sources of each color (10/10). For drafts, some players may choose to splash a color or play three colors. A splash can be done with a 6/5/1 split, yielding 10/9/5 sources, and a 3-color deck can run a shaky 4/4/4 split, yielding 8/8/8 sources.
I will aim to build the Smooth Twin cube with 180 pairs, which gives plenty of variety and totals a nice round, classic 360. This is also enough to play two pyramid drafts without reshuffling.
In addition, 4 perfect lands need to be available for each player, which is another 8 cards for 2 players, or 32 for 8 players.
The contents of the box are:
Total: 552 cards
A version for only 2-players can be smaller to fit in a wine box (single sleeved (you aren’t going to double-sleeve 10-cent cards, right?
):
Total: 438 cards
And finally, here’s the list I’m tinkering with:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/smooth
Although the ultrasound technician was like:
The Smooth Twin Cube is the second paper cube I’ve built. The Elegant Cube was assembled in 2010. Building a new paper cube is a big event in my hobby life.
It is a response to an even bigger event. My wife and I are expecting a baby (very very soon)! I anticipate having less free time and smaller chunks of it from now on, but I still want to play Magic. The Elegant Cube is designed to be played in larger groups, and drafts take at least 5 hours. I need a quicker format, a quicker cube.
Design Goals
The Smooth Twin Cube has the following goals:- Be optimized for two players
- Quickly get into a game
- Plenty of agency in gameplay
- Fast games - skew aggressive
- Easy-to-jump-in format to teach brand new players with a deck that isn’t boring
- Replayable even for advanced players, offering variety between decks
- Budget so that it can replicated by other people as a board game-like experience
- Stable so that players can apply lessons learned in previous drafts, and to keep replicas easy and cheap to maintain
Jump-started by Jumpstart
Jumpstart shows how important it is to be able to jump into a random game right away, and my first idea was to simply build a Jumpstart cube. Jumpstart packs are pre-assembled half decks. Shuffling two packs together results in something resembling a real deck with close to zero setup cost. I appreciate this quick setup more and more as my free time dwindles, and it is great to skip the drafting part altogether for beginners as well.Jumpstart isn’t exciting to me, however, and there are two main reasons why:
Jumpstart feels like playing someone else’s deck
Jumpstart has “half decks” that are already built, and though that provides some variety of gameplay and a surprising amount of cross interactions, it bypasses an integral part of Magic: deckbuilding. Deckbuilding is the greatest appeal of the game for me, and the favorite of so many players too. Video games like Slay the Spire and board games like Thunderstone and Dominion capture the feeling well, and I would like this feeling to be part of the game, and not all left to the designer.
A core strength of Magic (and of card games in general) is modularity. The concept of building decks made of cards clearly delineates the design space where players can exercise creativity, mastery in tirelessly fine tuning lists, out-of-the box thinking in breaking a meta, and knowledge of cards, interactions, and evaluations. Cards composing decks are such an elegant and resonant concept, and Magic is an incredible implementation of it, in which tens of thousands of cards decades apart can be played together, and in different rulesets (booster draft, EDH, standard) and interactions work perfectly fine.
Of course, introducing the gameplay rules to new players is best done without asking them to go through deckbuilding - deckbuilding requires knowing the gameplay rules. Jumpstart is great for this, skipping the step completely! The Smooth Cube will take a page from Jumpstart and support a form of deck generation. However, that will be a secondary format; the primary format will include deckbuilding.
Jumpstart feels like playing someone else’s bad deck
Many Jumpstart games I played had low agency and I think that’s both a byproduct of card choice, and of many half-decks being built around micro-archetypes. Balancing micro-archetypes is already hard with a self-correcting drafting section, or a self-correcting constructed meta. Doing so just by changing the decklists is effectively impossible. Jumpstart has half-decks that combine better and worse with others, and that kind of high variance in power leads to more low-agency matchups.
The Smooth Cube will not be focused on micro-archetypes; it will have elements of synergy, but the archetypes are expected to be macro-archetypes, that is, classified by general gameplan - aggro, midrange, control, aggro-control.
The card choice should also tend to be higher agency, which will need to be weighed against word count. I rely on tempo/card advantage dynamics and a focus on creature combat to try to achieve this goal.
Jumpstart is basically Sealed (no, it isn’t)
But enough hating on Jumpstart, it’s fine, honestly. Just not exactly what I’m looking for. What I want is to design a cube with similar goals to Jumpstart, but with “parts” with smaller granularity than half-decks. Ideally, players can pick which “parts” to combine to make a deck (fine print: yes, they can in Jumpstart but there’s only 3 possible combinations and it’s not great).“Parts” composed of 1 card would work perfectly well and not require any sort of marking to pull them apart. But that’s Sealed… and I don’t like Sealed. What was the problem with Sealed, again? Maybe I shouldn’t be drafting my cube and just playing sealed instead? Nah, it’s coming back to me.
1. The choices are overwhelming. Finding a 23-card deck in an 84-card sealed pool is looking at a universe of 84C23 = 2.5*10^20 possibilities. For comparison, drafting has fewer total possibilities, (15!)^3 = 1.3*10^12, and the decisions are broken down into steps in which you have much less information. Rares help a ton to narrow down the pool into a deck in either format, because a bomb rare will weigh the scales a lot in terms of color selection, though bombs reduce gameplay and deckbuilding agency. Tightening the power band (as most cubes do) results in even more difficult sealed pools to build than in retail sealed.
2. So much text. Reading through 84-90 cards is such a chore.
I barely have time to read through my pool in prereleases I go blind into, and have a much worse experience in these prereleases compared to when I have gone over the set spoiler before attending. In the average cube, there are few if any duplicates, the cards are on the wordy side, and the “bombs” don’t provide as much guidance, so it’s much, much worse.
3. Difficult to support synergy. For example, in the Elegant Cube, the archetypes don’t really work when a player only has access to ¼ the core pool. A 90 card sealed pool will have a few pieces of many decks.
4. Too random. Players are subjected to higher “variance” in the form of some very bad and some very good pools. Experienced players in particular dislike that.
Fixing sealed (I get the “Smooth” but why the “Twin”?)
In the Smooth Twin Cube, every card in your pool comes with a duplicate. In Riptidelab-speak, everything is squadroned.This trick is inspired by dedicated deckbuilding games (Slay the Spire, Thunderstone, Dominion). In all of these games, adding a single card to the deck impacts the deck’s functioning much more than adding a card to a Magic deck does. Presenting fewer but more impactful decisions maintains a similar level of agency but has the advantage of decreasing cognitive load and smoothing the skill curve. Playing 20-card decks is an option, but a reshuffle rule might change the game too much, and I want to be playing something closer to other Magic formats.
In terms of logistics, the copies are kept in two separate identical piles, kept sorted by color. To set up the draft, only the first pile is randomized and drawn from. After decks are built, duplicates of the cards being run are searched in the second pile. After the draft/sealed is finished, cards are sorted back by color and into the two piles.
Coming back to the idea of “parts of decks being combined”, using each pair of copies of cards as a 2-card “part” has many benefits.
- Parts are easy to sort.
- There is plenty of deck building modularity when the parts are this small.
- The parts have internal synergy within themselves (like Jumpstart 20-card parts do), since cards that have any sort of gameplay synergy with other cards have deckbuilding synergy with themselves (at least at lower numbers, before saturation). For example, Reanimate and Animate Dead have gameplay synergy with discard outlets and large creatures. Because both synergize with the same type of cards, the deck tends to be better if you run them both (as opposed to only one of them) because that makes all the discard outlets and large creatures much better.
The structure of 2 copies of a card as a part also mitigates or solves the problems of Sealed mentioned above.
1. The choices are overwhelming.
We can break down the act of “recognizing the best build” into:
- Recognizing the colors to play
- Recognizing the exact card list to run
The choice #1, the choice of colors, can be simplified by, again, looking at Jumpstart. Randomly choose two of the five colors and give a pool with only those colors to the player. That gets rid of the first big chunk of the problem, reduces variance, and doesn’t change agency all that much - sealed pools with actual ambiguity about which colors to play are rare for players who know a format well.
To tackle choice #2, the choice of cards, the reduction in reading and removal of color choice saves time and energy, and using a curated, non-microarchetype oriented cube list allows the pool to be reduced (20 cards of each color is a bit less than you’d expect to see from your two largest colors in a pool of 90). The number of combinations of 12 pairs (24 nonlands) that can be chosen is 20C12 = 125,970 possible decks, a much smaller number of options, but a lot more distinct from each other than the possible decks in a sealed pool.
| Smooth Twin Cube format: Two-Color Sealed This format is targeted at beginner players who already know enough to perform some card selection. Each player gets:
Pick 12 pairs (24 nonlands), add 16 lands and shuffle well. |
If we’re careful to include in the cube only cards that are playable in any deck (not fully archetype dependent), we can even tighten the sealed pool to 12 cards (duplicated into 24), transforming Sealed into a random deck generator, a much finer grained Jumpstart.
Generated decks work well for beginners who don’t know enough to build a deck from even a small pool, and the next step is more natural - giving them more choices in a 20-pair sealed pool, or even more choices in a draft format.
| Smooth Twin Cube format: Generated Deck Targeted at first-time players, in this variation each player gets:
Again, add 16 lands. |
2. So much text.
A sealed pool of 20 pairs drastically reduces the amount of useless reading. A pool of 20 different cards cuts the reading by 78% compared to a 90-card pool.
A generated deck (12 pairs) doesn’t even need to be all read before playing.
During gameplay, fewer individual cards need to be read as duplicates show up.
3. Difficult to support synergy.
The Smooth Twin Cube won’t have a micro-archetype focus and will tend towards “aggressive good stuff”.
Beyond that, every card being a 2-of increases the density of any combinations that are picked. Picking one card A that synergizes with another card B means you have access to two copies of each in the deck, increasing the odds of the combination A+B being available in a certain draw. Assuming 40-card decks and half the deck is seen in a game, there is a 24.4% chance to draw A and B if they are 1-ofs, but 56.6% if the A and B are 2-ofs.
4. Too random.
Sources of variance between sealed pools include color distribution (sealed pools with more color imbalance are better) and a wide power band (individual card power levels).
Color distribution is not an issue with pre-chosen colors, although color balance becomes a larger one.
A wide power band can be tamed, and is unlikely to be as bad a problem without the intentional inclusion of bomb rares and limited unplayables as retail sets do.
Power variance will still exist between these small synergy packages, but because we’re combining 12 parts into a deck, they tend to regress towards the mean more strongly than the 2 parts that make Jumpstart decks.
Tangent: Why stop at twins? What’s wrong with triplets? Or quadruplets?
If we use “parts” made of 3 copies of a card, the copy density in a 40-card deck is equivalent to a 4.5-of inclusion in a 60-card deck. For many types of cards it is not desirable to run that much density (many cards aren’t run as 4-ofs in constructed). Adding the decision of how many copies to run would solve this, but detract from the simplicity of all formats.Tangent: Parallels with constructed
Limiting the number of different cards in a deck to 12 retains most of the freedom to build different decks. Take Standard constructed, for reference. Standard deckbuilding is not far from picking ~12 nonland cards from the recent standard-legal sets. Yes, building a constructed deck does involve more steps - adjusting numbers, designing a manabase and a sideboard, but the essence of the deck are those ~12 cards.Limited is deeper when more options are offered to players than in Sealed, making more cards available for deckbuilding. Draft formats allow cards to be picked from a larger pool of cards than Sealed. That widens the realm of possible decks in theory, though it may actually decrease the diversity of viable decks if these choices aren’t limited somehow. Not limiting the choices is effectively constructed, and the reason why constructed metas present a smaller variety of optimal decks than limited.
It is physically impossible not to draft a cube
By introducing constraints instead of simply letting players pick the same cards like constructed does, limited formats are able to increase deck diversity. Designing and tweaking a drafting mechanism allows us to influence certain variables:- Focus: How focused decks can be, i.e. how different their game plans are from each other.
- Card variety: How evenly distributed play time is between cards.
- Decisions:
- How many decisions players need to make.
- How overwhelming the decisions are.
- How much impact the decisions have.
Rotisserie draft, for example, allows players to use any card that hasn’t been picked yet. This results in:
- Focus: High, decks resemble constructed.
- Card variety: Low variety, a good slice of the weaker cards are no-plays, while the best are must-plays. Still higher than constructed, since picked cards won’t be available to other players.
- Decisions: The decisions are many and pretty overwhelming (it’s like drafting from an extremely large booster), and they are very meaningful at first but their impact decreases over time as players just go through the motions filling up the rest of their deck and building mana bases.
Let’s look at Sealed:
- Focus: Low, decks are almost always good-stuff. Players only have access to a fraction of the complete card pool.
- Card variety: High, below-average cards get played, assuming a pool that’s not much larger than the deck size.
- Decisions: The decision of what to play is only one, pretty large, impactful decision.
Booster draft is a format I like a lot.
- Focus: Medium, decks can be pretty focused, since a large part of the cube is seen, but archetypes must be well-crafted to make synergistic strategies viable.
- Card variety: Medium, at usual pack counts, it requires plenty of the card pool to be played such that there is room for being scrappy and for using creativity to make the worst cards work. In fact, the format rewards finding “secret decks” with cards no one else wants.
- Decisions: The decisions are many, but they are given with partial information, and as such there is plenty of room for risk/reward dynamics, usage of heuristics, or just slamming the best card, so players effectively can choose how much energy to spend reasoning about the choice. The first decisions are very meaningful, and late in packs some decisions are not, however at that point they take only seconds.
My ideal playing format for a twin cube when players are skillful enough to deckbuild is something akin to a booster draft in terms of focus, card variety and decisions, but for two players and resulting in a smaller pool (20 pairs).
Starting with the Decisions variable, I want this format to offer a choice between only a few directions at the beginning of the draft, and starting with very small packs is a way to implement this. I am adapting the Pyramid Draft I described in my blog, with the same rationale of keeping the decision tree at a constant width during the draft.
| Primary format for the Smooth Twin Cube: Pyramid Draft with open boosters like Rochester; all cards of a booster are laid out on the table, then players alternate making a certain number of picks before discarding the rest of the pack.
|
The goals of this draft structure is to provide variety for replayability in the three criteria we’ve been talking about:
- Focus: 78 pairs of cards are seen, which combined with the internal synergy of 2-card parts should allow for a reasonable amount of focus - less than 8-person booster draft, but enough to set decks apart. The 9-card packs allow going deeper into a strategy that was formed in the early picks.
- Card variety: The Twin structure helps synergy shift card evaluations quickly. The early picks from the 3-card and 5-card packs make it difficult to be too picky about card quality as 12 out of 17 pairs picked get played, and the later packs aren’t large and don’t offer all that many on-color options.
- Decisions: The first 4 packs offer only 3 card options and these choices set a direction. When we get to the 6-card packs, players will either stick to the “plan” and pick accordingly, narrow down the plan if the first picks left an open pool, or pivot away if things aren’t going well - and they have only a tight 13 picks to do so. The decisions are more impactful than usual, as one pick has double the impact on the deck, however they are rarely between too many options.
Open Drafting and 1 vs 1
Being a 1 vs 1 format with all cards open on the table and public picks intensifies two dynamics that are rare in 8-seat booster drafts: Hate drafting (picking cards so that the opponent can’t play them) and Meta drafting (picking cards that work well against the cards the opponent has picked).Hate drafting is somewhat curbed by the small pool, as there isn’t much room to pick unplayables. Meta drafting is a supported dynamic, and situational cards should be limited in power - I won’t include Engineered Plague or Hurricane, for example.
Other dynamics that will appeal to many players are:
- Being able to talk about picks makes the drafting more social and better for discussing, teaching and learning.
- Players can avoid drafting similar decks if they collaborate. You can finally play a fun version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
This game you two are playing looks cool, can more people join in?
The Smooth Twin Cube is, first and foremost, a two-player cube. But supporting more players is easy.For 3 players, stick to Pyramid Draft, and adjust the packs slightly:
| # Packs | # Cards / Pack | Picks | Trash |
| 4 packs | 4 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 1 card |
| 5 packs | 7 cards per pack | Each player picks 1 card | Trash last 4 cards |
| 4 packs | 11 cards per pack | Each player picks 2 cards | Trash last 5 cards |
For 4 or more players, Pyramid Draft with open boosters (Rochester-style) will get slow and it’s best to shift to regular booster draft, drafting secret packs in parallel.
| Tertiary format for the Smooth Twin Cube: Booster Draft
|
Booster draft is basically an afterthought, but it might even be the best way to play the cube. There’s nothing like players making picks to divide up a cube into decks.
Mana bases
In a cube aimed at two-players, a lot of dual lands would be left unused, so we simply use perfect rainbow lands, created by defacing Rupture Spire / Transguild Promenade / Gateway Plaza / Archway Commons with a sharpie.In booster drafts, manabases are weaved into the draft experience, which poses an interesting question: how highly to pick nonbasics? Well, the question is “interesting” in an academic sense. Whether it’s correct to pick a nonbasic versus a spell is sensitive to many variables: land density, nonbasic choices, gold card density, draft pool size, power level discrepancy, format speed. This makes the decision more of a test of knowledge about a specific cube environment, and not a particularly transferable skill to other formats. In the spirit of streamlining decisions that are less impactful, 4 rainbow lands will be given to each player.
These 4 rainbow lands, added to 6 of each basic land (6/6 split), make a 16-land manabase with 10 sources of each color (10/10). For drafts, some players may choose to splash a color or play three colors. A splash can be done with a 6/5/1 split, yielding 10/9/5 sources, and a 3-color deck can run a shaky 4/4/4 split, yielding 8/8/8 sources.
Gold cards
We don’t really need gold cards, and they add some complexity to be usable for Sealed. A gold section can be an interesting “expansion” for draft, but I won’t include gold cards in the Smooth Twin Cube, at least in the first iterations.Artifacts
We don’t really need artifacts either, but they are pretty good color glue and I like equipment a lot as a high-agency, combat focused, resonant and elegant mechanic. Therefore, I will run some artifacts in the Smooth Twin Cube.Contents of the box
For two players, Pyramid Draft uses 78 pairs of cards, Pre-Built Sealed uses 24 pairs of cards, Sealed uses 40 pairs of cards. This cube can be as small as 78 pairs = 156 cards, but for replayability this number can be significantly higher, and because of the twin structure, synergies are more resilient against dilution than usual.I will aim to build the Smooth Twin cube with 180 pairs, which gives plenty of variety and totals a nice round, classic 360. This is also enough to play two pyramid drafts without reshuffling.
In addition, 4 perfect lands need to be available for each player, which is another 8 cards for 2 players, or 32 for 8 players.
The contents of the box are:
- 180 nonland cards
- 180 identical twin nonland cards
- 32 perfect lands
- 150 basic lands (30 of each color)
- 10 cards to randomize colors for sealed
Total: 552 cards
A version for only 2-players can be smaller to fit in a wine box (single sleeved (you aren’t going to double-sleeve 10-cent cards, right?
):- 180 nonland cards
- 180 identical twin nonland cards
- 8 perfect lands
- 60 basic lands (12 of each color)
- 10 cards to randomize colors for sealed
Total: 438 cards
Card List
The Smooth Twin Cube card list will be generally:- Relatively aggressive and creature-combat oriented
- Games shouldn’t take long and should be about trading blows continuously, while gaining tactical advantages in each combat.
- Building around combat makes it easier to get a good Pre-Built Sealed experience, so the play patterns are consistent.
- Card advantage will be incremental rather than explosive.
- Favor small to medium creatures
- The most common outcome of blocking should be a trade. For that to work, we favor higher power than toughness, building the format around 2/1s, 2/2s, and 3/2s (which all trade with each other), and make creatures with 4 toughness or higher more expensive and less plentiful.
- Budget
- No rarity restriction, but the vast majority of cards will be non-rares, and the rares will be cheap. My aim is to stay under 100 USD (as per CubeCobra prices) for the 360 cards (which appears like 50 USD in CubeCobra, but we need two copies of each card). Current price displayed is 39 USD.
- Version 0.0.0 in reality cost me 95 CAD (74 USD), plus taxes and shipping, for the 360 nonland cards and the 32 sharpied lands.
- Market fluctuations may make some cards expensive in the future, but the low rarity (103 commons, 73 commons, 4 rares as of v0.0.0) makes this less likely. The less synergistic structure also makes it easy to replace more expensive cards.
- Reasonably elegant, few wordy cards
- Relatively to the average cube this will be a less wordy cube, especially since it is almost a Peasant cube.
- Compared to beginner cubes, the Smooth Twin Cube will be more wordy, as it won’t focus on vanilla or french vanilla creatures, or on running the simplest version of effects.
- Complexity is already reduced by having fewer different cards to read, and by the list being stable.
- Use few types of tokens
- Finding tokens takes some time, and it’s not a smooth experience when playing on paper. Some cards may be worth including tokens for, and we may simplify some tokens, especially by caring only about some specific creature types.
- Minor synergy themes
- Party
- Heroic
- Runes
- ETB
- Tribal (Warriors, Wizards, Rogues, Clerics)
And finally, here’s the list I’m tinkering with:
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/smooth
So, is it twins?
No no no, just one.Although the ultrasound technician was like:
- “And here you can see the first…”
- !?!
- “aaaand…….. that’s it.”
- '¬_¬
Last edited:
Artifacts
