Play Magic With Tom LaPille

Evan Erwin and I will be hosting open cube drafts beginning at six o’clock PM on Saturday evening at the Magic: The Gathering World Championships this weekend. We love cube drafting, and we also know that making a cube isn’t the easiest thing in the world so not everyone has had the opportunity to try it. I’ve played everywhere from kitchen tables to Pro Tours, and nothing else I have ever done in Magic has been nearly as much fun as the cube. If you’ve never cubed before, you owe it to yourself to cone find us and get in a draft.

Evan’s cube can support eight players at a time, and mine can support sixteen. Of course, the two of us can only support twenty-four total players and that’s not all that many. This is where all you other cube owners out there come in! We want to share the joy of cubing with as many people as possible, so we need your help. If you have a cube and you’ll be at worlds, we invite you to find us and host drafts with your own cube. We know of at least one cube other than ours that will be present, and we are hoping for even more.

If you don’t know what a cube is, you should check out…

My website’s cube FAQ

Evan’s cube site, cubedrafting.com

My cube list

Wizards is setting aside table space for this event, but we don’t know where that will be at this moment. There will be a public announcement at Worlds around six o’clock about where we are located, so listen for that and come find us. Feel free to contact Evan or me on the forums with any questions; my username is TomLaPille and Evan’s is misterorange. Listen for the announcement onsite, and together we’ll all show the world how awesome cube drafting is.

It’s been about a month since I grew my cube from 640 to 720, and its contents are starting to settle down. I feel like I’m starting to shift from “designing” to “developing” at this size. Given that, I decided to write a design handoff document about the cube as it is now in the style of this article to clarify my thoughts as I go forward with evolving it.

Tom’s Cube Design Handoff Document

Overview

• This cube is a greatest hits album for constructed Magic.
• Most constructed decks from Magic’s history that have been played extensively in tournaments can be drafted.
• Cards that are wildly overpowered and/or often lead to stupid games are deliberately excluded. Examples: Black Lotus, Library of Alexandria, Wheel of Fortune, Moat.

Size: 720 cards

• Increased size gives more variety and allows more people to draft simultaneously.
• It also allows more subthemes to be fleshed out fully in each color.

Distribution

• 100 cards of each color, 100 land, 60 gold, 60 artifact.
• White, red, and black have half creatures and half spells. Blue has 33 creatures and 67 spells, while green has 66 creatures and 34 spells. This is because blue has more good spells and green has more good creatures.
• Lots of lands help make things feel more like constructed than limited.
• The cube includes a lower creature count than normal sets because constructed games are less focused on creature fights than limited games are.

White

• White is split between small efficient creatures and their supporting cards and slow board control.
• About two thirds of white’s creatures cost three or less mana, and these are backed up by creature enchantments, mass pump effects, and mass land destruction.
• There are numerous Wrath of God effects and spot removal cards.
• Subthemes include gaining life and hiding behind enchantments.

Blue

• Blue is about being in control, specifically by countering spells and drawing cards.
• Since blue has historically been the best color in constructed, it’s the best color in this cube.
• Subthemes include taking control of things and bounce.

Black

• Black does not have any particularly cohesive theme, but it rewards you for having lots of black cards.
• Black’s reanimation theme is supported in subtle ways by other colors
• Subthemes include reanimation and paying life to draw cards.

Red

• Red is about efficient aggressive creatures and burn.
• Many red creatures have echo, die immediately, or have other drawbacks that trade future potential for power now. Small numbers of these cards seem harmless, but enough of them together can be very powerful. Because of this, red decks get better the more players are in a draft.
• Subthemes include blowing individual things up, blowing everything up, and taking things for a turn.

Green

• Green is about having the best creatures and supporting them with spells.
• Green’s creatures emulate other colors’ spells. Green can draw cards, kill enchantments and artifacts, and gain life with its creatures.
• Green facilitates multicolor play with mana accelerators like Birds of Paradise,
• Subthemes include making creatures bigger, mana acceleration, and regrowing things.

Gold

• There are fewer gold cards than cards of each color so that a player does not lose too many playables in the draft by not being many colors. More gold cards would excessively punish single-color and two-color drafters.
• Five cards for each two-color combination; one card for each three-color combination.
• Three-color gold cards were chosen to avoid excessively rewarding players for having lots of colors in their decks so as not to punish people who don’t. This means plenty of goofy cards like Fiery Justice and Elemental Augury but no three-color dragons.

Artifacts

• Once again, there are fewer artifacts than cards of each color to help push players to commit to colors.
• Twenty mana fixing artifacts enable players of any color to accelerate and fix mana, but also allow decks that do not need to do this to compete with them.

Lands

• Cycles of color fixing lands take up 55 slots. Depending on how you count, there are around nine more color fixing lands that are not color-aligned, making 64 total and giving an average of four fixing lands in a draft per player.
• There are 30 color-aligned nonbasic lands, ten of which are cycling lands. These mollify the effect of mana flooding.

Other Features

• There is a morph subtheme of approximately twenty cards. In all colors, any reasonable morph creature is included to increase morph uncertainty even if its power level may be low.

Things for Development to Consider

• Reducing the amount of mana fixing, both in artifacts and lands. It is possible that the number of lands should be cut. The painlands and some of the color-aligned lands are most expendable.
• Overall card quality is lower in this cube than in others because of the size. Reducing the size would mollify this, but would also take away from the support of subthemes in some colors.

I have been offered a weekly column at StarCityGames.com. Due to my first deadline’s imminence, it’s unlikely that I’ll get another piece up on here for a couple of days. In the meantime, check Star City on Tuesday!

In other news, my cube list has been updated. The cube grew to 720 cards this time, and each color has its own list page now because the huge list was getting unwieldy. I’ll eventually get around to talking about the changes, but I’m not sure when that will be. In the meantime, happy cubing.