On June 23, I will begin a six month internship at Wizards of the Coast in Magic: The Gathering Research and Development.  When this begins, I will have to stop writing and I may or may not need to stop updating this site with my cube list.  I hope that I will not have to do this.

EDIT: I am now on the inside.  This will be the last update to the front page of my site.  Thank you to everyone for your support over the past year.  If you want to know how I did this, this premium article is my explanation.

The Morningtide updates to cube have been added to the cube page.  The master lists have been updated, and the changes are in the change log.

I just acquired Camtasia and am working on finding a headset microphone.  When that happens, I’ll start doing videos here.  I am excited about this.

That is all for now.  Have fun and keep battling.

I learned a lot while doing this, but the most important thing I learned is that I never want to not play ever again. I enjoy battling too much, and everybody had too much fun for me to not have that next time.

Thanks to Professional Events Services for helping us with this. They run the best events I play in. Also congratulations to Mike Patnik for winning the last available trip to Malaysia in the midwest.

The Hollywood qualifier schedule is up. Who wants to win a ticket?

My schedule:

• 1/5: Garden City, Michigan
• 1/12: Cleveland, Ohio
• 1/26: Louisville, Kentucky
• 2/9: Columbus, Ohio
• 2/16: Indianapolis, Indiana
• 2/23: Vancouver, Canada
• 3/1: Nashville, Tennessee
• 3/15: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• 3/22: Indianapolis, Indiana
• 3/29: Columbus, Ohio

How bad do you want it? This season is probably the best opportunity any American player will have to go to their first pro tour that will happen for a while because of how many qualifiers there are. If you are willing to drive, you may even be able to hit one almost every weekend like this. Go make it happen. I’ll see you in Hollywood.

Travel safe and good luck to everyone who is attending.

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.

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.

Seasoned players tend to talk about “sideboarding plans,” which is not a surprise since sideboarding well is really all about planning. Tom looks at some decks and asks you to think about how their sideboards do or do not fit with the decks’ game plans. He wants to convince you that you need to be aware of and take into account your deck’s plans to build the most effective sideboard you can.

Enjoy!

1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Godless Shrine
1 Mountain
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Sacred Foundry
1 Steam Vents
1 Stomping Ground
1 Temple Garden
4 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills

4 Dark Confidant
4 Grim Lavamancer
3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda
4 Kird Ape
3 Mogg Fanatic
4 Tarmogoyf

4 Firebolt
4 Lightning Helix
4 Tribal Flames
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Vindicate

Sideboard:
2 Cabal Therapy
3 Duress
3 Engineered Plague
3 Kataki, War’s Wage
4 Leyline of the Void

I think that the maindeck is absolutely beautiful and may be card-for-card perfect. However, I think that the sideboard is absolutely terrible. I propose this instead:

4 Molten Rain
3 Armadillo Cloak
4 Ancient Grudge
4 Leyline of the Void

These cards address the same matchups that the previous sideboard did. Why might this sideboard be better?

Also, from now on I’ll be giving my card bonus pictures alternate text captions.  I will do my best to make these amusing.

Have a good one.