General Where did you start with cube?

S

Salmo

Hi all!

My name is sam, I'm a writer at TurnOneMagic.com, and I'm undertaking a fairly ambitious cube project that could or could not come to fruition. Part of this project is looking at the history of cube. I can go back about 5-6 years myself, but I know the format is older than that, and unfortunately my introduction was by someone else who was just about as new to cubing as myself.

I've been going around to communities asking them if they could give small nuggets or as much as they can about when/where/with who they started, as any and all information is good in tying the pieces together. If anyone would like to help me with this by posting your experiences here, that'd be much appreciated. It can be anything as little as a year to a book, anything you have at all is absolutely welcome.

If you have any questions, don't be afraid to ask

Best,
Sam
Turnonemagic
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Hey Sam, thanks for tuning in.

I don't know if I have too much to add here, I've been at the cubing thing for a lot less time than some of the others around here.

I started with the usual resources, and quickly gravitated to people who were doing things a bit off-beat. Thea Steele had weird ideas about limiting the number of Planeswalkers via "Planeswalker Slots", and Andy Cooperfauss was tooling around with his Rebel errata.

Probably the most influential resource has been David Sirlin, who doesn't even really have ties to Magic (aside from an M15 card), who was a competitive SF2 player turn game-design. His website was filled with things about how to succeed as a player and as a designer, and while they are related the two are in most ways pretty radically different. If I had to characterize the "Riptide Lab" school of design in one sentence, it's that we try to use our designer hats instead of our player hats. We don't always succeed, but I think the ideas here represent a significant departure from traditional cube design because we don't include cards on the merits of power level alone.

There are certain features that have become characteristic to the school of design (breaking singleton, multiple sets of fetchlands, heavily pushed aggro), but I see those as symptomatic of the "designer hat" approach.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I have even less to offer, as my cube is less than a year old now. After my first ever cube draft I was hooked and knew I wanted my own cube. Pretty soon I found out my ideas about cube assembly didn't align well with the vocal majority and I stumbled upon this site. The departure from power-max and dogma's like singleton on this site have helped me get my cube to a good place a lot faster than I would have gotten it on my own or with the "help" of traditional guidelines.
 
S

Salmo

Your cube could be a day old, anything helps. I'm toying with the idea of putting the dates on a spreadsheet or something if I get that far and get enough answers.
 
MCMcEmcee

MCMcEmcee

I started my cube with some of my college team draft group maybe a month before Dark Ascension came out. We pooled a bunch of random cards from old drafts, mostly commons/uncommons and bulk rares going back to Lorwyn block. Eventually I just started spending store credit on random cards for the cube and it became more or less my project to update the cube. Andy Cooperfaus' s articles on CFB gave me some early ideas, and Jason's articles on CFB and here helped me flesh out things I was trying to implement (breaking singleton, pushing aggro, improving fixing).

Would probably put Cooperfaus, Thea Steele and Jason above, say, Usman and such in terms of influence on the direction my cube has taken.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I started building my cube in late 2010, and debuted it early in 2011. It was kind of a pile, made up mostly of cards I owned from the last couple of Standard seasons, starting with Shards of Alara and going up to Scars of Mirrodin. It wasn't a good cube, by any objective measure, but it still was a blast to play. One thing I did from the start, though, and haven't wavered from since is breaking singleton all over the map. My personal favourite was my two Acidic Slimes.

In that era, Kranny was a force, and he was far and away the #1 influence on my early cube design. I feel like he was one of the first people to look at cube from a designer's perspective moreso than a player's - his banning of Elspeth, Knight-Errant was the spark that got me to thinking that power max isn't the only philosophy to building a cube. He also invented the Pox archetype, which has since been superceded by Jason's Gravecrawler deck, but was still one of the first innovative ideas in the space of aggressive black decks. Sadly, Kranny kind of retreated from having a public cube persona soon thereafter, and I was forced to scrounge around for scraps of cube design tidbits from various sites for the next couple of years, until landing here.
 
Grillo_Parlante

Grillo_Parlante

Contributor
I started only about a year ago, with the usual powermax story. Thankfully, a realization that my black section was terrible lead me to an andy cooperfauss podcast on channel fireball, which in turn lead me here, where there is a lot of freedom to explore crazy ideas.

My current cube is influenced heavily by ars arcanum articles on existing formats: everything is designed to further a strong set goal, and in maintaining a certain game pace.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
My cube has been around for a little over two years now. Much of its history is documented on its thread http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/cmls-cube-405-polychromatic.23/ and its splendid genesis is here:

http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10397
http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=10720

Basically it arose from the great expense of drafting older formats and complete discontentment with newer limited formats compared to those older formats. When I compared contemporary Cube to older formats I saw it was shit, too, and the primary reason is that the curves are too high with respect to the power level of the format -- after battling Team Sealed in Portland, where Runeclaw Bear is way more of a card than Charging Rhino (and this is not the case in the regular limited format), I am even more convinced this is true. From there it is easy to begin cutting Deep Analysis for Foundry Street Denizen, so to speak, doubling up on a few key cards, and ruthlessly trimming from 720 to somewhere south of 540.

I also dislike how the old Cube format is dictated by the Modo Cube, which is dictated by the people who work at Wizards or hang around those people, who are more or less all humorless, tasteless, insular assholes. Think of RiptideLab as both preserving the tradition of skill-intensive and complicated Limited and embodying what happens when you pair MTG with regular humans that make jokes and have social skills and can admit they're wrong.

Anyway, get at me if you have more questions!
 
FlowerSunRain

FlowerSunRain

Contributor
Cube is a logical extension of limited Magic. I first noticed it in December 1998. I have been exploring casually since then. I had met a couple of other groups that had also discovered cube over they years, but my contact was primarily insular. In 2011 I discovered that the format had become popularized and had been given a name. The discourse accompanying the format was quite exotic compared to my own discoveries, which I initially found fascinating. However, it was troubling that a trend of attempting to reduce the potential design space by defining variation out of discourse accompanied this popularization. I found participating in the discourse frustrating and much of the discourse itself disingenuous. Much of it did not match my experiences at all.

More recently, I have shown Cubing to lots of players, practically all of which enjoy it and some of which have become explorers and designers themselves. Bringing more people into the discourse both in the form of new players and here on Riptidelab has helped to broaden my horizons and refine my design skills. The difference between the reactions of players in 2011 and those in 2014 are incredible. Like any discovery, realizing the full potential of Cube relies on open discourse and I lament taking so long to engage in it.
 
James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
I started my cube like 8 or 9 years ago, trying to copy Evin Erwin's list as closely as possible. I read everything on maskedadmirers.wordpress.com and cubedrafting.com, Usman's articles and stuff too. I dunno when I started changing, but I got tired of bomby cards really fast and wanted to encourage my decks to be more about synergies. That was about the same time that the cubedrafting.com forums were being flooded with spam, so I stopped reading all that stuff. Time passed and I got in on this riptidelab lark back when it was a google group. But actually these days I like the people here more than I can care about magic, and my cube is just kinda sitting on my shelf untouched.
 
Jonas

Jonas

Ablut two years ago, I wanted to do something with my cards, but playing standard was no fun, so I found out that if I threw all of my fun cards in a box, it was a cube. And then it kinda spiraled out of control.
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
The ABBA-Halloween episode of Community is one of my favorite episodes of television ever.
EDIT: This is what happens to RipLab threads. Sorry Sam.
 
James Stevenson

James Stevenson

Steamflogger Boss
Staff member
Reminds me of the Abba museum in Stockholm. 10/10 would lark around in the giftshop without actually going in the museum again.
 
Goldenpineapple

Goldenpineapple

Playing the local cube around 2009 got me wanting to play a cube without all the really powerful cards I dislike (recurring nightmare, swords of x & y) so I just built my own list from scratch using what I could remember from his as a baseline, with no real guideline or design philosophies. While writing the list I figured what supporting archetypes meant, and "the poison principal" when supporting certain bad apples. My list was clearly an abomination (since I refused to proxy at the time and didn't own a lot of the lands then) but it still produced some fun games.

Since then other locals have made the typical 'powermax' cube (I think there are 3 now) and one peasant cube.

So basically I'm not helpful at all history-wise.
 
Tom

Tom

I started thinking about a cube-like project before I know a cube was a real thing. I remember I got into Magic around Alara block. I bought a bunch of boosters and enjoyed just building decks with what I had and battling them. I did my own sealed environments, knew about drafting at the local store, and realized if I had enough boosters I could "repack" them, and never have to buy boosters again. I extended this concept to just getting a complete set: maybe 1 of each rare, 2 of uncommon, and 4 of each common. Put these in a box, pack them into boosters when you wanted, and so my first cube idea was born out of the desire to reuse boosters for a limited environment. I never actually went through with it.

Fast forward to about 2012. I've been a mostly-consistent reader of dailymtg. I came across this article:
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/tpc12/intro_to_cube

Which linked to Tom LaPille's FAQ:
http://www.tomlapille.com/cube/cube.html

Now I knew what a cube was, and decided that one day I'd do this.

I finally got around to it last year. I had some time off work, and some extra cash so I pulled the trigger. I thought a lot about what I wanted, and finally ended up with fairly powerful, fairly low-dependency/theme cube. I found this forum not long after I started and these guys have definitely helped me focus on valuing good gameplay.

I really like my cube. I like how 360 cards combine to form endless combinations and stories. I like how it enables me to be a game designer and competitor. I like how it enables me to play Magic with my friends and family. I like trying to capture everything I love about Magic into one box.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
I started cubing around Ravnica: City of Guilds, pretty early on in cube's life. This was right around the point in my magic experience where masticore was this mythical creature I'd only heard of in flavor texts, and the amazing cards in standard at the time like mortify and watchwolf convinced me that a collection of the most powerful cards ever might be a cool thing to pursue.

My first cube was a joint venture: a 240ish card abomination in hot pink dragon shields. We had no concept of how big the cube should be, but at that size even if you only had 4 people drafting you could always construct the same deck, as my friend liked to do with mirari's wake and goblin trenches.
No curve, no color balance, no proxies, and plenty of horribly unfun cards. Isochron Scepter was included purely for the combo with orim's chant, and had few other targets (As lightning bolt was really expensive at about 5$ at the time)

Fast forward to around Zendikar, me and my friends had all quit magic for varying lengths of time, but I'd started playing again and pitched the idea of a cube to my friends. A proper one this time, where the draft wouldn't comprise of the exact same pack layout each time. We hopped on gatherer, loaded up the beta spoiler, and slowly picked out cards, set by set, one at a time.
And if that sounds like a horrible way to design a cube, you'd be right. The finished product was well over a thousand cards, each color had more 5 drops than 1-3 combined, there was more removal than there were creatures in some colors, as well the project was about 30% artifact mana.

It was also fully powered, leading to a funny moment when we decided to remove ancestral recall due to power concerns, only to find out we had been proxying it on the back of a giant growth.

Eventually I grew weary of the inability of aggro decks to come together, the bomb-centric gameplay, the brainless drafting, and having to run updates by 3 other people who barely cared about the thing, and decided to make my own cube, with blackjack and hookers. (I've included custom cards from the beginning, and when I announced the project to my friends with the preceding sentance, we had a beer filled brainstorming session as to what Blackjack // Hookers would do)
Blackjack {1}{B}{R}
Sorcery
Exile the top card of your library. You may choose to repeat this process. Once you choose to stop, put the exiled cards in your hand and lose life equal to the total converted mana cost of the cards revealed.
If you reveal 4 or more land cards, lose half your life rounded up and end the turn. The cards remain exiled.
Hookers {3}{U}{U}
Instant
Gain control of target creature

Cooperfaus' articles really set me going on shaping the environment your cube creates, and eventually after using custom cards to shape my environment once I found WotC's pool to be lacking, I found jason's article about breaking singleton, and thought to myself "Well, I basically tried to make 3 other copies of bloodghast with different names, this seems WAY easier"

And now we're here
 
anotak

anotak

i started playing cube some point a little over a year ago, and finally put my cube together roughly in august. it was mainly to change the pace with my casual-but-competitive friends who normally played EDH. i probably would've tried it a long time before that but i've always had such disliked traditional limited formats. i've always preferred playing with competitv.

i never came into this with a powermax viewpoint or modo cube viewpoint or anything like that. i've been designing or modding games in one form or another since i was very young, i was making doom maps when i was 6 or 7 years old. to me, game design is something i do as an artistic output that makes me happy in a similar way to what painter, musician, or writer experiences. so, extending that to magic was just natural. eventually i started using custom cards in my cubes too. my design influences are too many to list. i've learned/taken from a many places, including my own experiences from other genres.
all art is defined by unique flaws or quirks. you can't have those if you just repeat other people. all art is also inherently unoriginal yet original because it is just the sum of your experiences channeled into an output, so i just steal from as many sources as possible.

the reason i came to this site is that i read several forums for a bit about cube design, and found i disliked the attitudes and atmosphere on the others. i'm not sure if i found this site by a link on another site or through CFB.
 
Lucre

Lucre

Sam! I think I've enjoyed your content before!

I might be the earliest cuber on these boards I think it was something like around scourge or Mirrodin but it could have easily been closer to dark steel when I first opened up a pack with deranged hermit and basalt monolith in it. I understand it's history in Ontario goes back way farther than that but I can put you in contact with the guy who introduced me to the format. He's a you tuber too and can probably elaborate on it's history vs the mtgontario boards more than I ever could.

Later me and my friends (including riptide contributed Chris Taylor) made our own monstrosity but we all seemed to have come back to cubing later in our young adulthood because magic is great when it costs next to nothing and you only play with people you find agreeable.
 
shamizy

shamizy

I'm actually starting up my first Cube right now, played in a handful of them over the last year since I began playing Magic again. Now that I think about it, this is my first post on this site since registering like two weeks ago. Love the discussions guys, I've gotten a ton of ideas I want to implement in my cube.

I started up by finding Jason's Cube articles on CFB and through listening to Maro's Drive to Work podcast. The process of designing your limited environment was very appealing to me and I got right to work. I began by scouring the web for resources and reading over lists for cube staples, common archetypes and whatnot before stumbling upon Jason's Lifegain article on CFB. The idea of breaking singleton was something that I had not experienced in an actual Cube Draft nor considered in the first place but I quickly saw the benefits of doing so. Really opened my eyes to supporting possible archetypes that would not be viable if I were to stick to a strictly singleton format.
 
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