Play Magic With Tom LaPille

When it was first announced that this year’s Magic Invitational was going to use cube draft as one of the formats, I was very excited. It’s my favorite format, and the designer and developer parts of me that working on the cube awakened were very interested to see what R&D’s take on building a cube would be. It turns out that Wizards R&D and I disagree a lot about what a cube should look like. I was initially very unhappy with the R&D cube; I thought it was built hastily and with bizarre sensibilities. However, after having spent some time thinking about the choices they made I think I understand what they were doing and why their choices were different. By discussing these differences, I hope to show you the thought processes that lead to interesting cube construction and the ways that your design decisions will affect the games people play using your cube.

The most important difference between my cube and the R&D cube is the amount of lands and mana fixers we have. My cube has 100 lands in 640 cards, while Wizards’ has about 50 lands in 720 cards. My lands include full cycles of original dual lands, Ravnica dual lands, Ravnica bouncelands, painlands, and Onslaught and Mirage fetchlands; Wizards included only the original duals and the Ravnica bouncelands. I have a full set of signets, talismans, and diamonds, while Wizards’ has none of these. This difference may be subtle, but it leads to very different play experiences. Every decklist from the invitational cube draft had eleven or more basic lands; plenty of decks I have seen drafted in my cube have had as few as three basic lands in them. The invitational cube decklists were also almost all two colors with maybe a splash of a third color; most control decks drafted in my cube are solidly in three colors, and it’s not too hard to draft all five if you want. When you draft the invitational cube, a color commitment actually means something because basic lands are going to provide most of your mana.

This may be a little bit hard to understand for someone who had never cubed before, but recent blocks have shown us some extreme variation in the availability of mana fixing that demonstrate exactly this phenomenon. Ravnica block had the best mana fixing at common that Magic has ever seen, with one signet and bounceland per two-color combination across the full block. Any given Ravnica block draft cardpool included an average of one and a half signets and one and a half bouncelands per player, and a sealed deck included an average of two and a half of each. Because of this, players were free to splash around with little penalty; most full block draft decks were at least three colors, and many sealed decks could branch out to four or five colors and still have reasonable manabases. Time Spiral block constrasted starkly with Ravnica; the only common colorless mana fixers in the block are Terramorphic Expanse, Prismatic Lens, and Chromatic Star, and these along with the storage lands at uncommon gave players a small amount of flexibility for splashes. Players who had incentive to splash off-color flashback costs or simply strong off-color cards tended to take the available fixers higher than those who did not, but people who went out of their way to splash were able to.

My cube’s mana works very similarly to Ravnica’s by deliberate design.  In a booster draft in my cube, one sixteenth of the total cards will be in play per person.  I have 24 mana fixing artifacts that cost two mana in total, which is exactly one and a half “signets” per player.  I have 63 multicolor lands, which comes out to about four per player in a draft.  The invitational cube has only about one and a half multilands per player and zero color-aligned mana fixers, making it feel more like a “normal” limited block like Time Spiral.

Given that Ravnica block is one of two multicolor blocks that Magic has ever seen, it’s obvious that that level of mana fixing is not something that we are going to see in limited too often. However, cube isn’t exactly a normal limited format.  Most modern constructed formats have been able to support decks being a lot of colors, and I like my cube exactly becuase it produces games that feel like constructed.  I also find that players have more fun when they can cast their spells.  For example, filling up white with beatdown creatures that cost WW and then not giving people plenty of multilands that let them play other colors along with them would be cruel.  Decks in my cube look like imitations of constructed decks; the invitational cube decks looked like limited decks that happened to have crazy cards in them.  My cube is not a reflection of Magic as it is supposed to be, but a reflection of what Magic looks like when its boundaries are pushed by good players.  Their cube reflects what Magic is “supposed” to feel like, with color commitments that are actually commitments and a lot of basic lands.

Although I understand why they had so few colorfixing lands, I still find it incredibly odd how few other nonbasic lands they included.  Basic lands are just absolutely terrible cards in a lot of ways since they don’t do anything other than make mana.  Drawing too many basic lands is a recipe for disaster, but appropriate nonbasics can give you some game even if you mana flood.  I think it would have helped to cut some of the marginal cards of each color- think Flying Men or Opalescence- for some color-aligned nonbasic lands.  I mentioned above that there are 63 color-fixing lands in my cube; the other 37 make colorless mana and do interesting things or are aligned with a single color.  The Urza’s Saga and Onslaught cycling lands are great for smoothing out mana draws, and cards like Flagstones of Trokair or Tolaria West give you interesting ways to get value out of your land slots.  I believe that the more interesting cards you put in a deck, the more likely you are to have complex and challening games, so I’m completely happy to overload on nonbasic lands to get more effective spell slots into my players’ decks.  This is also the philosophy behind having so many colorless lands.  I love cards like Urza’s Factory, Quicksand, and Temple of the False God.  They aren’t sexy or exciting, but they do interesting things and I’m thrilled to have as few basic lands around as possible.

It’s not just me that likes to have a lot of mana fixing in cube.  Most cube lists that I have seen on the internet and played with in person have felt more like multicolor blocks than normal blocks, with between one tenth and one eighth of the cards being gold and a healthy amount of lands and other mana fixing.  When I built my cube, I assumed that four out of five metaphorical cube owners probably weren’t wrong, and it turns out that I don’t think they were.  Should you decide anyway that you want games in your cube to feel more like “normal” Magic than a multicolor block, I would still encourage you to find as many interesting nonbasic lands that don’t fix colors as you can.  Nonbasic lands that affect the game in ways other than making mana make for more interesting games and make manaflooding a less painful experience.  The cube is all about having fun, and nonbasic lands give players something to do when they might otherwise be forced to sit there miserably with a hand full of Swamps.  That just isn’t fun.