Explain a Cube Draft to me

Alright, I didn't want to derail the NetRunner thread, so I'm starting a new topic.

I know the basic structure of Magic: The Gathering competition (but correct me if I'm wrong). Constructed is when you buy your own boosters and singles and so forth, build your own decks, and then play them against other people. A draft involves buying a couple of boosters, drafting them in a group (a little like 7 Wonders) and then playing the resulting decks in a tournament.

So what exactly is a cube draft? I have found some pages that explain it, but they all kind of presuppose a certain familiarity with the game. My knowledge is pretty much just limited to what I typed above, since I completely bypassed Magic in my hobby history. Could someone explain it in plain English?

You have a shed load of brilliant cards from tons of sets.

You bring this huge stack of cards with you and split them into random packs of 15 (like booster packs) each player gets 3 packs like a normal booster draft.

Then you draft.

At the end of the game everyone gives you back all the cards.

Advantage is they are all brilliant cards (because you chose all the cards in the cube) and there is no issue about selecting a card because it is valuable and you will get to keep it in the end.

From your draft, construct 40 card pack and off you go....

The details may be slightly off but that is the basic idea

Truly thank you both for asking the question and the straightforward response. I get it now.

(At times I feel like a complete friggin' alien for having never given a good goddamn about MTG or the whole CCG scene...)

And in case "drafting" is even unfamiliar...

You open a booster pack (15 cards in it). Secretly choose one of those cards to go in your face-down pile. Pass the rest to the left. Keep doing this until the whole pack is gone. Then open a second pack, and passing to the RIGHT this time; and then a third pack, passing to the left again.

The most fun part of the draft is trying to imagine which cards you have to choose from in a current pack interact best with the cards you've already drafted, taking a gamble on a narrow card hoping to find other cards that will make for crazy synergy, getting the balance right of cool stuff and bread'n'butter to enable that cool stuff.

7 Wonders and Ascension both have resemblance to the mechanics of booster drafts, 7 Wonders particularly so. However, the synergies are incredibly straightjacketed, which is what makes them so much less fun for me (and every MTG player I know). Of course, there's also the fact that you don't play actual Magic games afterwards, but that's not even it: Magic booster drafts are really fun DURING the draft part, before you even get to the "playing games" part, and I think it's really all because the other games hit you over the head with what goes well with what. It's like drafting in a line where Magic is drafting in a web.

Some other interesting things that come up in drafting:

Since there are 15 cards per pack, and 8 players in a booster draft, you'll see half of the pack you opened come back to you, so there's lots of opportunity (especially in Cube drafts, due to the higher overall quality of the cards) to "table" a card, i.e. set it up so that a specific card makes it all the way around the table.

Since you pass left/right/left, if you can figure out what the people to your right are drafting, it's best to avoid those things, as you're only going to draft ahead of them for one pack. Similarly, if you can give your left-hand neighbor a push in the first pack in a certain direction, then you can reap the benefits of that when the second pack rolls around and he's picking that stuff instead of your stuff. This is all called "signalling". Simplfying it down to colors, if I open a pack with three great black cards and one very good red card, I'll take the red card, as the three great black cards will send my three left-hand neighbors fighting over black. Signalling is not nearly as important in Cube, because the disparity between power of different cards is not quite as great, and is at very least much much harder to see (online recently I got a 15th pick Necropotence, which should mean something to the long-time MTGers).

Oh yeah, and the big deal about Cube for board-gamers and other people who wouldn't touch a CCG with a 10-foot-pole:

Collectibility doesn't touch the Cube.

It's a fixed set that only one person needs to own, just like a board game.

Thanks for the answers, everyone.

A couple more questions:

Does a cube draft require a certain number of players? I know most booster drafts go with like 8 people. Does a cube have the same requirement?

Also, how long does a cube draft take to play?

Four is the minimum I would draft with. Generally, even numbers are best, to avoid anyone sitting out while others play. Six is fine too. We just do a team draft with that many. Three people per team, with an opponent between them during drafting. Then, you play each of the three opponents and the team with the best record wins.

Edit: missed your time question. We generally play three rounds after the draft (Round robin with 4, team draft with 6, and brackets style for 8). This usually takes 2 1/2 to 3 hours, although it could be longer with slow players.

I mean, part of the point of a Cube is that it's HIGHLY customizable. Now that there's an official "Magic Online Cube", it might become a little more standardized, but before that you could barely find two people with the same Cube (other than people who copied the really high-profile Cube lists), or even the same number of cards in their Cube. Some people deliberately built Cubes for drafting one-on-one, some people deliberately built them for playing "sealed" instead of drafting. A lot of people don't even have enough cards in their Cube for an 8-man draft.

But since standard booster drafts are 8 people (again, people DO play more or fewer players than that sometimes even in sanctioned booster drafts), that's pretty much the standard for Cube as well. That number was chosen for one main reason: as a power of 2, it allows for an easy 3-round single elimination tournament. Despite that being the main reason for the number, I've grown so used to 8-man drafts that the quirks of different player numbers drive me crazy, but I'm a bit of a purist in general about everything. A wonderful thing about 8 is that when the pack you open comes back around to you, there's half left. It's just a nice sweet spot: more players means you get higher-powered decks, fewer players is IMHO miserable because you get lower powered decks.

An 8-man swiss booster draft on Magic Online takes around 3 hours to play; the draft itself takes about 40 minutes including deck construction post-draft, and then there are 3 matches that take a maximum of 50 minutes each. With experienced Magic players it takes the same amount of time; sanctioned matches have the same 50-minute time limit. With inexperienced Magic players, especially with the standard CUBE (due to the much higher complexity level), drafting takes a good hour (in my experience). But it's also really fun playing with a bunch of casual players, everyone's eyes bugging out at every pack, lots of smack-talk during the actual draft itself even. Add maybe a half-hour for deck construction, because it takes forever for inexperienced Magic players to build decks.

Now, if you're thinking "this Cube idea sounds great, no collectibility is perfect, but the complexity doesn't sound great for a noob": another two popular styles of Cubes that are both simpler and also cheaper are Pauper cubes and Block cubes.

A Pauper cube is one made with only commons and uncommons, no rares. A Block cube is made of only cards from one block, i.e. three connected sets (typically, every card in the block is used). Block cube is simpler to play than a Pauper cube as there are fewer mechanics, but can still probably keep you happy forever. I like Block cubes. I'm less a fan of Pauper cubes, just because so many essential types of effects have *never* shown up outside of rare: you've generally got a bunch of small creatures, almost NO "sweepers" (cards that kill a ton of cards at once), and just: rare cards are FUN. Both common cards and rare cards can be powerful in Magic, but when a common card is powerful it's typically because it's very efficient, and when a rare card is powerful it's typically because it has a big effect on the board. All efficiency and no splashiness is a bummer, to me.

Full-on standard "best stuff ever" Cubes are incredibly expensive. I'm happy to even spend extra money "pimping" out my Cube to make it look as beautiful as possible, but for people who just want to try it out: *cough cough* Artscow *cough cough* or magiccards.info print proxies *cough cough*.

dragonstout wrote: Now, if you're thinking "this Cube idea sounds great, no collectibility is perfect, but the complexity doesn't sound great for a noob": another two popular styles of Cubes that are both simpler and also cheaper are Pauper cubes and Block cubes.

I just wanted to throw out there that I recently bought a huge load of cards (2000+) for about $50 from www.mtgmintcard.com/ and proceeded to construct a Pauper cube. Its was a lot of fun and a great way to get back into MtG after a long absence. It was also cool to see how the theme and advantages of the colors really plays out. I'm hoping to get it into pretty decent shape so I can bring it to my local store for some drafting fun.

Dragonstout makes a good point about the difference between good Common/Uncommon cards and Rares/Mythics, however when you start adding them the balance and hitting a good price point can be difficult if you are new. A block cube, which I hope to try next, might be the better way to go particularly if your local store has some past blocks on sale. I really would like to do a Scars of Mirrodin cube. For some reason I really liked that story. Any block recommendations Dragonstout?

[Edit: If you and your friends used to play MtG, the best way to make a cube would be for someone to just gather everyone's cards together and construct one. You could use a spreadsheet to keep track of ownership, and you only invest time and it might be a fun group activity.]

Invasion Block and Ravnica block would both be excellent for Cube. Lots of color interaction and fixing in both of those, with juicy stuff at common/uncommon.

I've been out of the loop--Cubes weren't even a thing really when I was playing in tourneys, either time.

How are lands handled? I always hated that part of drafting. I remember being in some booster drafts and you could bring like five lands or something, which was stupid and didn't help anything. You still ended up spending precious drafts on land cards. Always hated that.

In the actual cube itself there's ususally a selection of rare and/or interesting lands that could compliment various color combinations or tribal themes. (No basic lands are in the cube) For example in the last MtG:O cube they included all the original dual lands, the fetch lands from Zendikar and Onslaught and some of the rare lands from Urza's Saga. Once the three packs of the draft are all done being picked you can add as many basic lands as you want in any combination to your deck and they are provided for you.

-Will

Ken B. wrote: I've been out of the loop--Cubes weren't even a thing really when I was playing in tourneys, either time.

A lot of people first learned about Cubing in 2006, so that's not surprising.

Ken B. wrote: How are lands handled? I always hated that part of drafting. I remember being in some booster drafts and you could bring like five lands or something, which was stupid and didn't help anything. You still ended up spending precious drafts on land cards. Always hated that.

I have never heard of this in 18 years of playing Magic. Sounds like you were drafting with some asshat rules. You always always always always have access to as many basic land as you want. The only draft format that ever existed where that vaguely wasn't true was Coldsnap: you still had as many basic land as you wanted, but you could only have the snow-covered lands you drafted. I actually kind of liked that aspect.

Bioball wrote: A block cube, which I hope to try next, might be the better way to go particularly if your local store has some past blocks on sale. I really would like to do a Scars of Mirrodin cube. For some reason I really liked that story. Any block recommendations Dragonstout?

Hey, if you really liked the Scars of Mirrodin story, go with that! I'd say pretty much any block would work fine as a Cube, if you like the block in the first place. Jeb recommended Invasion block, which I am *not* really a big fan of (despite it being a big leap forward at the time), simply because it's so excruciatingly card-advantage based. I felt like every card gains you +2 card advantage and costs 5 mana. My personal recommendation would just be my favorite block ever, Time Spiral block. This has the added bonus of, outside of Future Sight, being a very cheap block. I know many people have advocated the much-maligned Kamigawa block, and I can actually see that being both 1) really fun, probably the only way those cards'll really shine and 2) probably the cheapest choice. I also loved the heck out of Rise of Eldrazi, a single-set block, so that might be even cheaper (though you'd need to supplement it with an extra set of commons or something to get enough cards). Last piece of advice on this front: even if you really love Scars of Mirrodin, if money is an issue to you you should wait until the fall before buying complete sets from that block, when prices will drop precipitously due to leaving Standard.

Very very very brief block summary:

Invasion block - multicolor madness, pushing towards five-color
Odyssey block - all about the graveyard
Onslaught block - creature type matters & face-down bluffing creatures ("morphs")
Mirrodin - artifacts, lots of artifacts
Kamigawa - Japanese folklore legends, spirit vs. human war
Ravnica - each of the 10 2-color pairs has its own mini-set
Time Spiral - batshit craziness based on the batshit crazy early years of Magic
Lorwyn - creature type matters again, this time with overlap via race/class system, Celtic folklore
Shadowmoor - color matters, TONS of hybrid cards (playable with EITHER of two colors)
(the previous two blocks actually form a "super-block", Shadowmoor is the "dark" version of Lorwyn; in this and the following superblocks, there are thematic connections but little mechanical connection)
Shards of Alara - like Ravnica, but this time, the five allied 3-color groups instead of 2-color pairs
Zendikar - treasure-hunting adventure world, lands have more effect than just making mana
Rise of Eldrazi - BIG-ASS creatures and creature that can level themselves up
(the previous two blocks form a "super-block")
Scars of Mirrodin - artifacts again (of course), but in a war against the evil, poison-causing Phyrexians
Innistrad - gothic horror, werewolves, vampires, ghosts & zombies vs. the humans
Avacyn Restored - humans fight back and kick ass, with a little help from a ton of angels
(the previous two blocks form a "super-block")

How much should a block of cards set you back?

Also, what is a "block?"

ebay offering Avacyn Restored complete set with mythics for $140

Urzas Legacy complete set $110

Scars of Mirrodin complete set $79

Just as examples of prices

A block is usually 3 sets with a common theme like Urza's Block which is Urza's Legacy, Urza's Destiny and Urza's Saga. I guess, maybe $350 for a complete block.