The Beginning of a Cube and the Squirrelpocalypse!

Hi, and welcome to Cuber DJ’s article!

My name is David, and I live in Orlando, Florida. I have been playing MAGIC since 1998 and have logged hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours playing what I consider to be the greatest game ever made. My love of MAGIC eventually motivated me to check out cube drafting. I’ve been an avid cube fan and cube owner for over 3 years now.

As an Average Joe’s MTG columnist, I am a casual player at heart. I have only played in a few tournaments in my MAGIC career, and I don’t find them nearly as exhilarating as sitting at home with my friends, ordering pizza, and shuffling the night away. I will not lie that I am greater than 95% Spike. I hardly ever play wacky combos or go for the coolest play. It’s not in my nature. Winning is the thing!

Cube is the king of Spike formats. It’s the most powerful cards of all time put together. You pick from the best of the best, and you grind it out against your opponents who are doing the same.

Only the best make it into the cube!

I hope to share my years of expertise with cube construction, cube play, and the cube community with you in the pages of this article.

I thought I would begin this series by giving you a little history of what it took to create my cube. I hope it gives new cube owners an idea of the great thing they are working on, but shows, realistically, what they are getting into.

I began making my cube in September of 2008.

I started by printing out the cube lists of Tom Lapille, Evan Erwin, and the MAGIC Invitational Cube of 2007. Then, I marked lines through all the cards I didn’t think were worthy. This gave me a basic checklist of cards to test. I didn’t think much for synergy or account for the needs of repeated drafting. I just put in what I thought were the most powerful 60 cards of each color, artifacts, multicolored, and lands. This was the standard cube construction of the day. Blue was immensely overpowered and green and white were almost unplayable.

One important consideration is figuring out what size of cube you are going to make.  360 cards is the accepted minimum. That number allows a traditional, 8-person draft with every single card being drafted. The current MAGIC Online cube is 720 cards.  This allows for a lot more variance for each individual draft.  My cube is in the middle of that.  It’s up to each individual cube owner to decide which size is best for them.  The sky is the limit.  I’ve seen cubes with over 1,000 cards!

My original list included all the power. Black Lotus and family were expected from the other players that drafted my cube. I have since scaled back the power level of my cube, leaving only a handful of ultra-powerful cards up for grabs.

Not broken at all...

I recommend playing unpowered for a couple reasons. At the beginning, the swingy plays they allow are exciting! Eventually, however, they lose their luster as what would otherwise be exciting back and forth matches become blowouts time and time again. They also make picks in the cube more obvious. The perplexity of making a first pick in the cube is a large part of the charm of the format.

The first few drafts were rough. One of my friends and I Winston drafted the cube for weeks before I showed it to anyone else. I had a lot of proxies. I just kept thinking, this is how the MAGIC designers do it! Those first few drafts taught me a lot about what the cube needed to be great. Power wasn’t everything. I won my cube’s first ever match with Genesis and Deranged Hermit. The Squirrelpocalypse!

Bushy-tailed rats with BLOODLUST !!

Acquiring cards took a lot of resources and patience. I had about 30% of the cards I needed already in my collection at the onset. I bought the cheapest cards first, so I could remove more proxies at a time. I usually picked up a bundle after each pay period. I got really lucky. I was ahead of the trends on a lot of key cards for my cube. I bought my cube Wasteland for $10 and my Maze of Ith for $8. I would recommend picking up the pricier ones first nowadays. Revised dual lands have skyrocketed since I began creating my cube as have many other cards. The Reserved List has created many problems with card availability, and the cube is no exception.

Some of my friends did donate cards to the cube to help me. I would encourage this for new cubers. Many commons and uncommons needed for a cube, people have sitting around. It smarts to take donations instead of nickel and diming for each of these cards as singles from a dealer. It adds up quickly when you require 360 cards or more for the average cube. It will pay off for everyone. Having a cube in your playgroup is absolutely worth it!

Sleeves were an enormous expense. I needed almost 900 of the same sleeves to get started, to cover the entire cube and the basic lands needed to draft it. Sleeves broke pretty regularly as well with 8 people a night shuffling my cards in lot of different ways. Replacing sleeves is a constant.

At the beginning, cards constantly rotated in and out as their usefulness was examined. I recommend extensive proxy testing for this because I purchased a lot of cards I didn’t need.

Another of my good friends decided to build a cube a few months after I did. His MAGIC experience was quite different from mine. We had many dissimilarities in our approach to cube construction. We learned a lot from each other and spent many hours talking and comparing notes on new card inclusions and drops.

Sharing ideas with other players is a crucial facet of cube construction. You don’t have to go it alone. Talk with your playgroup and other cube owners. Find out what your friends would want to draft with. Also, there are many great cube forums online that you can choose from.

The MAGIC community loves cube and will help you!

After many hours of fine tuning the trifling details, I felt my list was ready to be drafted properly for the first time. Proxied or not, the other players could’ve cared less. For many, it was the most fun they had ever had playing MAGIC. It also allowed many of my friends who no longer played, or no longer owned any cards of their own to get in on the fun. The first cube draft was amazing. So many types of decks were created. So many laughs, crazy topdecks, epic plays, and wonderful, new memories were made!

We commemorated the event by writing the names of the top finishers on a basic land in the cube and drawing congratulatory messages and pictures all over it in Sharpie. I have dozens of these lands to this day. They are a wonderful reminder of the great times I’ve had with the cube. Albeit, many of them are adorned with quite distasteful “art.”

These are some of the tamer ones!

You should give it a try! It’s never been a better time to get it the know about cube drafting. MAGIC Online has an official list you can start with created by some of the greatest design minds in the game. Feel free to ask me questions or throw ideas at me about your own cube. I will be glad to help you! My email is available at the bottom of this article. I wish you luck on your cube adventures!

Signing off,

DJ

cuberdj@gmail.com

All images owned by Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and its affiliates.