The Call of the Cube

I got pulled into Magic again by drafting shadowmoor with a few friends about a year ago. After a few drafts I caught the Magic bug all over again. I tried to get back into competitive play and even when to a few tournaments. Things went much better than I thought they would. I used a friend of mine's elf deck and ended up pulling 17th out of 50 with a deck I had never played before. I really had missed the game.

Overall my experience rejoining the competitive magic world ended up with me spending money on a few boxes and finding that the competitive environment has devolved into most people playing buying singles for decks that they have found online. The game moved too quickly for me now. It seemed that new sets were constantly being released and I did not want to be constantly sinking money into the game or take the trill away that come from opening packs. At this point I stopped playing again and missed the entire Alara block. Standard was no longer the environment for me.

Looking at my collection again, I was left once again with the thoughts of what to do. I no longer enjoyed standard due to having to shell out big money to stay competitive and felt like my collection was incomplete if I only had one or two copies of a good card instead of a full playset. I did enjoy drafting but what is the point of paying for cards that I am only going to use once if that is the only type of magic that I play? I needed a solution that would allow me to get the most out of my old cards and enable me to play cards that I only had one copy of to the fullest. Fortunately, I found cube drafting.

The basic idea behind cube drafting is to create a pool of cards to use for a draft. As such, the minimum card pool should be set to 360 cards to be able to support an 8 player draft. Typically, the cube also only uses one copy of each card. The cube draft format seemed to solve all of my main issues I had with the game. I could use my `one-of`s, I got the same style of gameplay that I enjoyed from drafting, and I could use my full collection of cards. Cube drafting would also allow me and my friends to play games at a power level above that of a normal draft by being able to choose which cards would be drafted ahead of time.

I have spent the last week going through my collection and assembling some of the best cards and limited bombs and with the help of the donations of a stack of cards from a friend of mine I was able to complete my first draft of the cube. I broke down the cards for my cube in the following way:

52 cards of each color (260 total cards)
50 gold/hybrid cards (5 of each 2 color combination)
50 Artifacts/land (some fixing and some colorless lands)

I will post a full card list for the cube soon. For those who are interested in learning more about cube drafting, I found cubedrafting.com to be a great resource in coming up with good ideas for cards to use. Between the site owner's cube and the threads on their forum I was able to include and remove a few cards from my initial list based off of the other cube owner's experiences. Expect more posts on the subject as the play testing begins.