Building a MtG Cube

>>54191245
I'm really tempted to proxy the vintage cube from MtG:O. Anyone ever play it? Any fun?

>>54191512

I've played it on MTGO, it's a lot of fun. There's really nothing like playing with the super high powered cards, drafting p9, jace, natural order, etc., all in the same cube. I usually do a few every year. There are obvious archetypes that get drafted, though, so it's not like it's a competely different ride every time. Storm is often there, white weenie is usually pretty good, mono red can be good, green ramp decks, and blue/white good stuff decks. I always make sure to play a few every time they have it up - especially comfy in the winter. It's probably even better in person when you all see what each other ended up with rather than the playing in the league format.

>>54191245
Build a Wizard's Tower instead

Nice to see a cube thread. Probably my favorite way to play magic. Anyways, as far as balance goes, obviously address things that seem outright broken, but play through it a couple of times with other people before you make massive changes to what you think is a balanced list. You'd be surprised by what cards end up powerful in limited formats. That being said, I'd only let one or maybe two colors keep tokens as an archetype if it's a small (360 card) cube. Also, don't try to support mill or infect. It's a waste of time and will either be broken or horrible depending on how many people draft into it.

>>54191512
Yes. It is a very fun Cube. It is possibly Magic the way Garfield (pbuh) intended it. Proxy it, play it, throw in your own jank even, I'd advise. It's a pure joy to play.

>>54194826
This. If mill or infect has enough viable cards to be an archetype either 1 player gets it all and has a guaranteed 3-0, or two players fight over it and both meet at 0-2

Also make sure you keep an eye on mono-red burn. It's easy to just load up with bolt and fireblast and incinerate and char and eventually the deck just wins turn 4, sometimes turn 3.

How to start a Cube:
- 360 cards
- Do not build a multicolor Cube; they are objectively garbage; long story short - Wizards hasn't printed enough multicolor cards
- Limit multicolor cards to maybe 1-3 per Guild
- Fuck rarity restrictions, they're stupid and arbitrary; YOU set the power of the Cube not some stupid symbol color
- Decide on whether you want to support 5 guilds (easier) or 10 guilds; once you've decided that write down what archetypes/decks you want those color pairs to build and consider how each card choice contributes and interacts with each archetype/deck
- Avoid parasitic archetypes like Storm, Mill; the goal is to avoid making players feel like the packs are full of nothing; a Grizzly Bear is 100% of the time a better Cube card than Lion's Eye Diamond or Tendrils of Agony; Nephalia Drownyard is a win condition foremost and is a fine card, but it's not a pure mill card
- Break singleton to support decks that you would want players to build
- Non-basic fixing lands should encompass 60-80 cards out of your 360, this is a great opportunity to break singleton
- No foreign language cards
- Provide tokens and dice

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If WotC printed a full cube filled with old-school power houses, but gave each card a colored frame and unique backing like the old World Champion decks, wouldn't they sell a million copies? I seems like by including a couple of premade deck lists for quick duels and enough cards for a 4-man sealed/8-man draft environment, they would be able to profit off all the people who switched to board games because they hate the TCG model. At least would sell more than the Archenemy box. Is this a terrible idea? Don't know much about MtG finance.

I would have to say playing with friends and getting actual data of what's being played/what's annoying to deal with/what's underperforming really helps. I have a cube myself and it's never finished, to be honest, because I can always find a new card to put in that's better or I can get new cards.

Another thing is try to make every card be on the same power level. A great way to do this is to get all of the power cards and put them in a cube (this is also super fun and a big reason why a lot of people do it), but no matter what that's going to be a challenge. However just using every resource at hand and evaluating every card by asking a butt-ton of questions about it (with the biggest being "how does this fit?") then you should be able to widdle down your card selection.

Now I'll go to bed now. Sorry for the incoherent advice

>>54195630
People would still go "REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! MUH RESERVED LISSSSSSSST" and they'd get approximately 13 billion lawsuits and have to shut the company down
Or at least that's what they probably think would happen

>>54196152
Why are MtG finance fags the worst?

>>54196252
Because they have deluded themselves into thinking they deserve to make stock-market-like returns on """investment""" with none of the risk. Sometimes you invest in Enron and it fucks you over. Too bad. Learn to diversify a little.

>>54196252
>>54198523
I don't get the people who act like this, in MTG or any other obviously bad investment in pop culture artifacts like comics or lego sets. They get so butthurt and defensive about the legitimacy of their investments because they know it's total bullshit.

>>54199374
I don't get it either. But someone somewhere realizes that they could make money off this, who told their friends, who told THEIR friends, and now we have a game controlled widely by speculah cash that hamstrings the ability of WotC to support any non-Standard format.

>>54199374
This. Buy the cards to have fun, and TAKE THE RISK that you can resell them at a fair/good price.

Are you really going to sell that card one day, or is your heart going to give out first so your family can trash it or give it away?

>>54195518
Is 2-4 copies of a card about right? Or is singleton appropriate for some cards?

>>54195518
When you say a "multicolor cube," do you mean a cube of all multicolored cards?
>Guild
They're color pairs, not "guilds." Not every plane is Ravnica.
>non-basic fixing lands should encompass 60-80 cards out of your 360
That sounds like a lot, the guide Wizards has up only says to put in 10 or so.

>>54199707
Not every card needs to break singleton. It's just you should adopt the mindset that you don't need to wait for Wizards to print functional equivalents for Cube. For example, it's not worth celebrating when they printed Day of Judgment as a second Wrath of God; most Cube players should have just been running two copies of Wrath of God already. You shouldn't be debating over which combination of Chain Lightning, Lightning Bolt, Incinerate, or Searing Spear to run; you should just be running 2-4 copies of one of those cards. Same goes for the Ponder/Preordain debate, just run multiples of one if you want both. A card like Gravecrawler is desirable by suicide/aggro/dredge archetypes so it would be reasonable to include 2-3 copies of them whereas a card like Delver/Young Pyromancer is only desirable to one deck and therefore probably only needs one copy or is so parasitic you might not want it at all. Run multiple copies of Noble Hierarch or Birds of Paradise or Llanowar Elves depending on what you want Green to do. Finishers like Planeswalkers are so powerful that there's no need to double up on them. Cards like Bonesplitter are desirable to multiple aggro decks so it's reasonable to double up on them to enable multiple aggro drafters in the Cube.

I dislike blindly including signets, they skew the typical Cube curve unless you specifically balance the cube around their existence.

>>54201969
Wizards couldn't build a good Cube to save their lives. If your players want random bullshit then by all means listen to how Wizards builds Cube; but if you want to create a landscape where players are rewarded for doing some thinking about how you've crafted the environment beyond reading color signals you can make sure they can play their spells with 60-80 fixing duals.

>>54191245
i've made a cube out of the mediocre semi-casual stack of 10 year old cards i had, just to bring to bring it out one night to play with 8 friends.i've never played a cube before and i haven't played mtg in 8 years at the time.

i've been endlessy laughing the whole time while drafting and playing UB reanimator.
we all had a blast, except for the poor guy who ended up drafting red. Having always hated red i just didn't have any card for the color and at the same time i didn't want a fast deck enviroment so i ended up limiting the amount of good red spells while also having no good support for mixing it with other colors.
it was SO bad.Designing the cube color by color ended up failing to make some color mix well.Looking back at it i should have proxied some Chandras to solve that.

Definitely start thinking about a theme for each couple of colors or even just allied colors.I'd say it's not bad to have 2 color combination overlap and leading to overpowered interactions as long as you have something good and completely different for the other 2 colors(hint: if you don't have cards for those colors, you will have to get them somehow).Draft is afterall a self-balancing game mode and you can always modify the cube for the next play session.perhaps one player out of 8 will end up with a shitty deck, but that's always bound to happen.

if you still don't want 2 archetypes to meld too easily you can try to search for alternate key cards that don't work with the other theme ( example: a sacrifice deck that has cards that trigger only on the death on NOT TOKEN creatures) or eliminate color fixing for that color pair and tell it to everyone before the drafts begin.

>>54195518
>mana fixing
>60-80 cards out of your 360

60 mana fixers are 7.5 per player.You usually end up playing almost all of them, so 5-6 mana fixers in each deck at the table are a bit high when 4 is all you need to run bicolor and even attempt a splash for a high end third color card.
i'd be more comfortable with 40, making sure some are more-than-2-colors for people who want to to go 3-4 color and splash everything.