The title is mostly to call attention, but it's an important question that I feel doesn't get talked about enough. Over the years with this hobby, I've seen a plethora of theory-crafting, vocabulary-forming, trends coming and going, but rarely has this question truly taken the center stage.
My reason for bringing this is mostly because I've been having this in the back burner since reading @landofMordor 's history of cube and thinking about parallels with how I've seen game design grow and develop in the last decade or so, and I think the trajectory is already laid out in front of us, and it comes down to this that one of my teachers in game design kept bringing up:
The context in which we play a game is just as important as the game itself.
This is so important that games are usually designed and produced aiming at a very particular context. Cubes not so much. Sometimes a cube is just designed around the context of playing cube. Here's a few questions that might be helpful to think about the context of your Cube:
- When do you get to play it?
- How often do you play it?
- Do other players in my group also have a Cube?
- Do you often have new players coming in?
- How many players can you actually get to play with?
- Do you play at home or do you have to transport it?
- What is the experience that you are trying to emulate?
These are all essential questions to be answering to think of how to deal with a Cube, and should change card selection choices, update policies and etc. I feel that a lot of people here already does this intuitively, and there's a great deal of attention taken towards readability and accessibility of a cube, so I don't think this will be game-changing to anyone. In the Sink or Swim thread alone we see multiple ways where these questions show up. Being honest about the context of play can also be important for us to critically think about the hobby, and our relationship to it and our players.
I'll share a few anecdotes about how the context of play informed my designs in the past, and I'm sure everyone will have a bunch more to share.
14 or so years ago, my playgroup back in my home town in Brazil was mostly composed of try-hards, former PTQ try-hards and many with lots more years of experience than I had. We usually played at the local store after a couple of rounds of FNM and after the closing hours, when some of us would hang out with the cube and some beers. That was the Grinder era, and power-maxing fit the playgroup extremely well. Accessibility was not there and I feel it would've even been detrimental to the playgroup, as everyone was an tournament junkie (if only not very successful). Language of cards didn't matter at all, as everyone would just recognize the art (remember when there were just a couple arts per card at most?) The frequency of drafts combined with the high power level made me have to adapt my update strategy, have the cube size at 720, and keep mending the list so the Esper Good stuff control wasn't always the winner. My solution at the time was to play with booster sizes and placement of cards, keeping a "test pool" always in the drafted boosters to keep an eye on cards that were coming in or out of the list.
6 to 8 years later I started cubing again, now in another country and with different people, and all of these rules I learned to manage my cube had to be unlearned to my new context. My pool of players now was always changing, with a lot less years of game experience, with no ability to understand non-english cards, and rarely having 8 players at a table. In retrospect, I learned a lot from this era by not learning anything and trying to keep managing a cube like I did in the past. The drafts weren't horrible, but I was not designing the cube to the context I was inserted.
Jump again a few years to just before the pandemic. My playgroup does retail drafts and commander, but there's always gaps in the releases that we could be drafting cube instead. My now-wife-then-girlfriend plays Magic as well, though basically just commander with precons. She soon learns that she likes playing with me, but hates playing against me. The solution that I came up with to fit cube into the mix was to have a powered 2-headed giant cube. It's probably the worst balanced of all my cubes so far, but it was just meant to bring people together for a few chaotic sessions, and it did just that. I think I update the list every semester or so, but play it less than once a year at this point.
Enough of my incoherent sleepless rambling! I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but now it's not just in my head. If you have cool stories about how your context of play changed how you design and deal with your Cube, share it here!
PS: It's late and I'm writing from my phone. I'll spell check this tomorrow. Sorry!
My reason for bringing this is mostly because I've been having this in the back burner since reading @landofMordor 's history of cube and thinking about parallels with how I've seen game design grow and develop in the last decade or so, and I think the trajectory is already laid out in front of us, and it comes down to this that one of my teachers in game design kept bringing up:
The context in which we play a game is just as important as the game itself.
This is so important that games are usually designed and produced aiming at a very particular context. Cubes not so much. Sometimes a cube is just designed around the context of playing cube. Here's a few questions that might be helpful to think about the context of your Cube:
- When do you get to play it?
- How often do you play it?
- Do other players in my group also have a Cube?
- Do you often have new players coming in?
- How many players can you actually get to play with?
- Do you play at home or do you have to transport it?
- What is the experience that you are trying to emulate?
These are all essential questions to be answering to think of how to deal with a Cube, and should change card selection choices, update policies and etc. I feel that a lot of people here already does this intuitively, and there's a great deal of attention taken towards readability and accessibility of a cube, so I don't think this will be game-changing to anyone. In the Sink or Swim thread alone we see multiple ways where these questions show up. Being honest about the context of play can also be important for us to critically think about the hobby, and our relationship to it and our players.
I'll share a few anecdotes about how the context of play informed my designs in the past, and I'm sure everyone will have a bunch more to share.
14 or so years ago, my playgroup back in my home town in Brazil was mostly composed of try-hards, former PTQ try-hards and many with lots more years of experience than I had. We usually played at the local store after a couple of rounds of FNM and after the closing hours, when some of us would hang out with the cube and some beers. That was the Grinder era, and power-maxing fit the playgroup extremely well. Accessibility was not there and I feel it would've even been detrimental to the playgroup, as everyone was an tournament junkie (if only not very successful). Language of cards didn't matter at all, as everyone would just recognize the art (remember when there were just a couple arts per card at most?) The frequency of drafts combined with the high power level made me have to adapt my update strategy, have the cube size at 720, and keep mending the list so the Esper Good stuff control wasn't always the winner. My solution at the time was to play with booster sizes and placement of cards, keeping a "test pool" always in the drafted boosters to keep an eye on cards that were coming in or out of the list.
6 to 8 years later I started cubing again, now in another country and with different people, and all of these rules I learned to manage my cube had to be unlearned to my new context. My pool of players now was always changing, with a lot less years of game experience, with no ability to understand non-english cards, and rarely having 8 players at a table. In retrospect, I learned a lot from this era by not learning anything and trying to keep managing a cube like I did in the past. The drafts weren't horrible, but I was not designing the cube to the context I was inserted.
Jump again a few years to just before the pandemic. My playgroup does retail drafts and commander, but there's always gaps in the releases that we could be drafting cube instead. My now-wife-then-girlfriend plays Magic as well, though basically just commander with precons. She soon learns that she likes playing with me, but hates playing against me. The solution that I came up with to fit cube into the mix was to have a powered 2-headed giant cube. It's probably the worst balanced of all my cubes so far, but it was just meant to bring people together for a few chaotic sessions, and it did just that. I think I update the list every semester or so, but play it less than once a year at this point.
Enough of my incoherent sleepless rambling! I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but now it's not just in my head. If you have cool stories about how your context of play changed how you design and deal with your Cube, share it here!
PS: It's late and I'm writing from my phone. I'll spell check this tomorrow. Sorry!
