What is Cube?

What is an MTG Cube?

TL:DR; Cube is a self contained, curated collection of cards with which a group of people can play Magic the Gathering together.

A Magic cube can take many different forms and be played in many different ways but oftentimes a cube will consist of 360 unique cards (also known as singleton) plus additional basic lands (40 of each color is a good starting point for a 360 card cube). This allows 8 players to draft 3 “packs” of 15 cards giving each player 45 cards at the end of the draft to build a limited deck of at least 40 cards. A typical draft deck will often consist of 23 nonland drafted cards and an additional 17 lands (Some of those will be acquired during the draft, the rest will be filled from the extra basic lands). This configuration will use all 360 cards from the cube in an 8 player draft. (8 * 45 = 360)

Players can then take their deck and face off against one another in best of 3 game matches or whatever format as decided by the group. This is not the only way to utilize and play Magic with a Cube but it’s a very common and safe assumption that can be made if someone asks if you “want to cube?”

Why Cube Over Other Formats?

At the heart of the Cube format is draft. This is the most common way to utilize an MTG cube and there is good reason for that. There are many players of all skill levels can attest that draft is the purest form of playing Magic the Gathering “Just like Richard Garfield intended”, but why is that?

Problems with Constructed

When going to an event to play constructed Magic, an edge has already been established between players simply by the decks each decided to bring to the event. Some decks just have really bad matchups against other decks and sideboard and deck building decisions are predicated heavily on the current “meta” or popularity of certain cards and strategies. If you make decisions based on some incorrect assumptions, you can end up having a less than ideal day that was largely decided before you even sat down for your first match.

With so many different constructed formats available, knowing and understanding the formats meta and different decks becomes very taxing not only from a time perspective trying to learn all the different cards and decks, but also a monetary perspective if you want to be competitive in many of these formats. You just might not be able to reasonably compete with cards under a certain budget because you’ve quite reasonably decided that $50 is too much to spend on 1 piece of gilded cardboard.

Constructed formats also go through month-long ebbs and flows of fun or miserable gameplay based on the formats meta. There are some periods of time where the format requires playing cards and decks that you might not enjoy if you have any desire to be competitive. You might try looking at other formats that don’t have those issues, or hope that Wizards will recognize the issue and make some bans/unbans to fix the format. Instead of waiting for a day that might never come, you could instead play a format that is far more fun and individualized for the group you play with, and will be much faster to react and fix any issues that come up making for a healthy, exciting format.

How Draft Addresses Problems

Draft fixes many of these issues by eliminating needing to lock in any pre-event meta analysis as no deck registration is required before the event. It also levels the playing field from a monetary perspective as each player is putting up the same amount of money for the event and has the same chance of opening any given card. While there is certainly still value in knowing the cards and decks that can be built from the set being drafted, much of that information about what cards are being passed around and what cards are being taken happen while you’re drafting during the event live. Decisions and pivots can be made in real time and that contest of skill is a much more fair contest than one that happens prior to the event which is heavily contextualized for each individual.

Why Cube Over Draft?

If you draft Magic a lot, it can still become expensive having to buy so many packs all the time to draft with. You also might want to draft across multiple sets of Magic rather than just what’s available at your local game store. Enter the cube format. For admittedly a larger cost upfront of time and money, you can get endless draft replayability that is specifically tailored to be fun and exciting for those that will be drafting the cube. It’s a customized format to have all the fun you want from playing Magic, while not allowing things that make the game unfun for your specific play group from ever entering into the format.

Cubes don’t have to take thousands of dollars or countless hours to put together and still be incredible either. There are many great cube lists online that have had hundreds of drafts under their belt to attest to their construction that can be copied. There are many low cost cubes of cards costing pennies or ways to get great looking proxy cards for only slightly more. For those that do want to design a cube from scratch, there will be lots of guides, tips, and templates in the following posts on exactly how to go about that process.