During a decade+ hiatus from buying (and mostly playing) Magic, I found myself "drafting" a "cube" in late 2011. I had no real experience with Limited and had never even heard of a cube, yet had a fantastic time with both the draft and playing.
Fast forward several years (about a year and half ago) -- I got back into magic, but only playing Limited. My cube experience stuck with me, and the idea of building my own set seemed very appealing. The whole undertaking seemed massive and it was hard to know where to start. So instead of diving in and making a cube, I did what I normally do when confronted with a huge challenge and want to procrastinate. I started reading.
My searches inevitably led to the power-max schools of thought. I went with it for awhile because of the Maro adage, Restrictions Breed Creativity. At some point I was reviewing a change log to a pauper cube, and noticed the cube owner was trying awfully hard to add functional reprints with different names to get around the singleton restriction. It was suddenly apparent that singleton was not a design choice, but a meaningless restriction. And likewise, a number of cube restrictions supposedly meant to breed creativity were just arbitrary dogma used only for the sake of maintaining traditional rules and not for making better games. Fortunately I ran into a number of Jason's CFB articles that were in much better alignment with how I was beginning to think about cube. Likewise, I read virtually every PureMGTO Ars Arcanum article analyzing the stats behind limited sets, which are a great way to understand the science of building a limited set.
I built a fantastic spreadsheet to organize, design, and analyze my cube. Of course, I didn't actually have a cube yet, which was beginning to present a problem. I finally decided to build one based on the design principles I had laid out with one key restriction to get me started: cards that I own.
It was terrible.
Now, a year after its inaugural draft, my cube is almost to the point where I wouldn't be embarrassed to share it with the fine Riptide folks. And many of the improvements are directly because of the great thoughts and discussions you can find right here.
Fast forward several years (about a year and half ago) -- I got back into magic, but only playing Limited. My cube experience stuck with me, and the idea of building my own set seemed very appealing. The whole undertaking seemed massive and it was hard to know where to start. So instead of diving in and making a cube, I did what I normally do when confronted with a huge challenge and want to procrastinate. I started reading.
My searches inevitably led to the power-max schools of thought. I went with it for awhile because of the Maro adage, Restrictions Breed Creativity. At some point I was reviewing a change log to a pauper cube, and noticed the cube owner was trying awfully hard to add functional reprints with different names to get around the singleton restriction. It was suddenly apparent that singleton was not a design choice, but a meaningless restriction. And likewise, a number of cube restrictions supposedly meant to breed creativity were just arbitrary dogma used only for the sake of maintaining traditional rules and not for making better games. Fortunately I ran into a number of Jason's CFB articles that were in much better alignment with how I was beginning to think about cube. Likewise, I read virtually every PureMGTO Ars Arcanum article analyzing the stats behind limited sets, which are a great way to understand the science of building a limited set.
I built a fantastic spreadsheet to organize, design, and analyze my cube. Of course, I didn't actually have a cube yet, which was beginning to present a problem. I finally decided to build one based on the design principles I had laid out with one key restriction to get me started: cards that I own.
It was terrible.
Now, a year after its inaugural draft, my cube is almost to the point where I wouldn't be embarrassed to share it with the fine Riptide folks. And many of the improvements are directly because of the great thoughts and discussions you can find right here.
