Welcome to another edition of The Opener! Theros, Beyond Death is back as the Ranked format on Arena so hopefully my insight can help you with your drafts.
The first pick of the draft is not extremely important but it’s fun to think about. It doesn’t always get played and it’s the pick with the least amount of context. At this point in the draft, you don’t have any idea what any other player is doing yet. Your goal when you’re first picking should be, in general, to take the most powerful card.
If you have never read a ‘what’s the pick?” article before, I will be showing you a few pack one pick one (P1P1) scenarios and I will tell you what I would take and my reasoning behind it. I will also give an honorable mention. So let’s get started!
The Picks
My Pick
Heliod’s Intervention. The best cards here are definitely Voracious Typhon, Dreaful Apathy, and Heliod’s Intervention. Most of the time, I believe that it is correct to take the rare in this format. In fact, it took me a long time to find picks for this article that weren’t super obvious. This pick is close but it is not an exception. Heliod’s Intervention is very often a blowout. I find that a reasonable amount of the time it is a two-for-one, three-for-one or even better! Even the life-gain mode is not a terrible fail-case and will catch opponents by surprise. I also believe that it is an underrated card that I believe players should take higher.
Honorable Mention: Dreadful Apathy is premium, common removal and it is what I would take here if the Intervention was not in the pack.Voracious Typhon is a great card too but I am giving a slight edge to Apathy for being removal.
It feels weird writing a tournament report about a limited GP given that: (a) I didn’t make top 8, and (b) all Magic Fests are cancelled for the next two months because of the corona virus. For whatever it’s worth (likely very little), I’ll be discussing my overall experience with Magic Fest Reno, including my main event sealed deck and my Day 2 draft decks. I hope you enjoy it!
Reno is only about two hours from my house in Folsom, which is awesome. Waking up late is never a good start on tournament day, and this was no exception. Luckily, it was Friday, and the tournament I was about to play in was just the PTQ, not the main event. My best friend and original manatutor, Tony Benedetti, (he taught me how to play magic when we were about 10 years old) was meeting at my house and we planned to leave for Reno around 7:30/7:45. I usually get up by 6:30 but I accidentally slept in until 7. Oops. I was just getting out of bed and making a pot of coffee when he knocked on the door. Both my 2 and 5 year old daughters were fast asleep, and my wife looked at me with those big “WTF” eyes as she’d just woken up about two minutes earlier. “Better early than late” was not the response she was looking for, but it was the response she got.
What if one card per pack is not the best way to draft? What would the world be like?
So, a normal Magic draft has 8 players opening packs of 15 cards, picking one, and passing the rest along. Rinse and repeat for 3 packs.
45 cards per player.
24 packs at the table.
Each player sees 18 packs 2 times with choices to make and 6 packs only once or with no second choice.
This is the way it has always been… but is it the way it should be?
Question norms, probe what is widely accepted.
One day when trying to figure out if we could draft commander decks from our cube with only 4 players, we set up a draft with packs of 15 cards and had each player pick two. This “pick two” had three very interesting effects. First, as expected, it allowed us to draft 90 cards per player twice as fast as some variant that would have players select one card at a time (a huge boon when the goal is to get to playing Magic quickly before people have to leave for the night).
A Cube-Builder’s Work is Never Done: A history of one cube and considerations for making your own.
Let me tell you a story…
Welcome friends, young and old! Please gather round. I wanted to tell you about the first cube.
“The first Cube ever?”
Well, no. Not exactly. But a very early cube. One that grew on it’s own, before MTGO was making and sharing such a variety of fantastic cubes with all of us. It’s interesting to me to look back and see how a cube grows organically – like watching microbes evolve over generations into a complex organism.
Put on your lab coat, get your sample jars, and let’s examine this organism’s history.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the expression, a “cube” is a general term for a curated card pool used for playing Magic drafts or other limited formats. You see, people have been playing Magic in creative ways since, well, since there were Magic players. Back in the late 90’s and early 00’s magic players began collecting their favorite cards together to create a fun or interesting pool of cards to use in booster drafts. That way they could draft over and over without opening (and purchasing) new packs each time.
Long ago a younger wizard who looked a lot like me but with less grey hair, began lamenting that out of the thousands of spells he knew, he was only casting a small number of them. And he lamented that if friends came over to play Magic, not everyone had decks and, even if they did, there was such a wide disparity of power in everyone’s personal card pools that it led to some very lopsided and un-fun games.
Hmmm… what to do? What to do?
Sorting cards. Peaceful therapy for Magic players.
One peaceful afternoon I began sorting my collection which spanned Legends, The Dark, and Ice Age through Apocalypse (‘94-’01). As I sorted I collected one single copy of each card that I owned. This included top notch cards like Birds of Paradise, Tundra, Sol Ring, and Pernicious Deed along with everything else.. And I mean EVERYTHING else…
These all went into a shoe box. A Mephisto shoe box. And we would draft and make sealed decks from this card pool.
Whenever we drafted from this random interesting pile of cards we called it a Mephisto draft and the name stuck. As the years went by I’d do the annual Mephisto Box update where I’d look at all the cards from the last year’s sets and take one of each to add to Mephisto’s open arms. As you might expect, the Mephisto box soon became a +5,000 card monstrosity but we still played it often and with joy because it offered a unique challenge each time we drafted and we discovered it was fun to remember old cards that we had not seen in years.
We had plenty of matches where an Obsianus Golem with Dragon Wings was really a solid game plan because of how low power the pool of commons and uncommons was back in the day. There were often drafts where you’d see only 3 creatures in a pack of 15 cards!
Lo and behold, the smarter minds of better magic players had also been doing things like this and had made the obvious and sensible leap to include only a certain select group of cards in this ‘draft box’ and they called their format Cube. (I still think Mephisto Draft has a nice ring to it.) Many great insights into various Cube formats have been written by folks and I recommend you go read some of them. (Two I recommend are here and here.)
As fans of this format have said before, building a cube is a labor of love. You, the creator, are trying to collate a collection of cards that will deliver on a goal for your players – maybe you love long drawn out games that go 15+ turns, maybe you love surprising and random dice rolling cards, maybe you love only playing green spells – whatever your desired experience happens to be, you can craft a cube to meet that end result.
I currently have 3 cubes , and you can see from these three what kinds of games I’m trying to create for my players:
THE Cube– This is what I think of as our default cube. It has one of each of my favorite cards from Beta to the newest set. It is a singleton 600-700 card monstrosity. This cube gets the most play and is updated about 3 times per year. It is the default way to play Magic at our house.
The Multiplayer Cube – this cube is focused on multiplayer interaction. It has a ton of cards from the Conspiracy sets (and includes conspiracy cards too) as well as many cards that I think make for fun and interesting multiplayer games. It has singleton rares & mythics, but has multiples of select commons and uncommons that I felt made for interesting draft choices.
Zelnoc’s Unhinged Cube – This cube is basically a pared-down pile of Unstable commons and uncommons based on how awesome I think it is to graft a Shark-Zombie or a Ninja-Kitten! Because the themes of this set tend to play well together the only non-silverboardered things I’ve added are 1x of each bounceland for some color fixing. Though I think there is room to take the augment mechanic and pair it with other themes so this cube may be ripe for modification.
Considerations when Cube Crafting
Firstly, as mentioned above, consider your goals. The gameplay you are hoping to achieve, the feeling the players will get when drafting and playing these cards should be your guiding light. Once you’ve gotten a feel for the mood or tone you want to create, it will help you with all the upcoming card choices. (Because maybe you forgot – but Magic has more than 18,000 cards and counting!)
Second, do some math. You’ll want to decide on the size of your cube – if you want to support a full 8 player draft you’ll need 45 cards x 8 players = a 360 card minimum. The consensus is that 540 cards allows a consistent draft environment with enough variation to keep it fresh. Those who prefer an experience with more variety may want to push that number higher. I keep my main cube around 700 cards and use the following starting ratios: 80 cards of each of the 5 colors, 80 multicolored cards, 80 artifacts, and 80 lands lets you come in at 640.
Third, pay attention to themes. This is like applying rule number one to each color or color pair. Think about linear strategies that require a critical mass of cards and make sure you support them properly or consider removing linear strategies all together (affinity, energy, allies, slivers, etc). And it applies to single cards too. There are so many red 5 drops you are going to have to choose from among many fantastic cards and the choice should be driven by what themes and subthemes your cube is supporting. If your cube has a lot of +1/+1 counter and token interactions then perhaps you consider Falkenrath Marauders or Skarrgan Hellkite over some of the other options.
Rough mana curve example
Fourth, watch the mana curve. Usually you’ll want your mana curve to match a draft deck in that there are more 1, 2 and 3 casting cost cards then 5 and 6. And that applies to each color on its own as well as the cube as a whole. My penchant for splashy powerful effects means I struggle to keep the +6CC cards down to a reasonable number.
Pondering the converted mana cost layout of the multicolor cards… what to cut?
Finally, consider function. Think of what you want to do to make the physical experience interesting and enjoyable as well as considerations for cube transport and management.
An example of a sleek, ready-to-travel cube
Sleeve up lands and keep them with the cube. (find a style of sleeve you like and stock up!)
Have most of the relevant tokens available.
Make sure you have a safe and easy way to transport your cube.
Keep a list of your cube cards so you can quickly reference what’s in or out and plan new trades/purchases.
One of the most memorable physical experiences with a cube I can recall was 5 players around a folding table in the woods. The sun had set long ago, fingers were chilled, lanterns and flashlights were illuminating players hunched over Platinum Angels and very large Forgotten Ancients. It ended the way many multiplayer games tend to where the player with the last haymaker in their hand wins it. I think a large Overrun effect eventually ended the epic battle and people moved back around the campfire.
This game was not memorable for the cards themselves, but it was because 5 players of varied skill level, in the middle of the woods, were able to draft some sweet multiplayer decks and have a great time playing magic! It was possible because I can carry playmats, dice, counters, and a 600 card double sleeved multiplayer cube all in a nice little camping package.
The cube before shuffling.
My old Mephisto cube of ancient commons and uncommons now sits gathering dust under a dresser as, long ago, I harvested my favorite cube cards from it and forgot about it. It has evolved into new and more satisfying ways to play and that’s ok.
… but I may shake off the dust some day – just to remember what it feels like to cast Psychic Venom on a land and use a Floodbringer to venom my opponent to death! … ah… those were the days…
I encourage you to look at your collection of Magic cards with new eyes. Think about maximizing the fun you can have with your cards and, for me, Cube drafting is my favorite way to do that!
Thanks for reading, please share any amazing cube moments you will never forget, and until next time, may your cube keep evolving!
This being my first
article on the site let me introduce myself for those of you who haven’t met
me. My name is Isaac Sears I’m a 2 time grand prix Top8er, 2014 World Magic Cup
United States Member and World Magic Cup Semi Finalist, and am a huge fan of
modern, legacy, cube, and especially battlebox.
What is battlebox? You may ask. Don’t worry
Battlebox was originally named Danger Room named that after the X-men’s training room. The format, as far as I can tell at a cursory glance, was made by Brian De Mars around June 2014 and popularized by Ben Stark. Each player starts the game with 1 of each basic and 5 comes into play tapped dual lands. After you count all the mana sources each color should be represented exactly 3 times (easiest to use all the ally or enemy guildgates). These lands start in a command zone of sorts from which you may play 1 land each turn. My group likes to have a shared library but separate graveyards, this makes scry decisions more interesting but may not be for everyone. Each player starts with 20 life and 4 cards in hand. 4 cards sounds like too few until you realize there are no lands in the box and a good amount of cards have the text “draw 2” on them. Guess what? your hand size is still 7 mothersmurfer.
One of the things you will realize after playing the format for a while or looking at my list below is that there are no planeswalkers. In fact, oddly enough, in this great format there aren’t too many “great cards” (at least not ones that you’d classically refer to as such). Sure, there’s lightning bolt and fatal push but there’s no Snapcaster, no Tarmogoyf, no Jace, not even a Kolaghans’ Command. “But how can this be Isaac? you said this was a great format.” Well, you know how sometimes you’re playing a game of magic and you’ve out-thought your opponent and jedi mind-tricked them into 3 for 1-ing themselves, or its just a favorable matchup when somehow you draw 16 lands in a row and they rip all 5 of their fireblasts? Well this can’t happen in battlebox.
For one, in battlebox you can never get land screwed or flooded as both players start with the same lands in a zone that doesn’t conflict with either of their draws. And two, the cards (in my battlebox at least) are balanced so that you don’t have these busted unbeatable cards or card advantage machines that then you smush your opponent because:
This is very different design philosophy from other common battlebox choices, as the goal is to reward tight play and remove excessively high variance in top-decks. In short, my box is closer to the more evenly powered Ben Stark interpretation as opposed to the more powerful and swingy Brian DeMars version.
This is also why battlebox was initially called The Danger Room. Like the X-men’s training area, the battlebox is a place for people to sharpen their skills and improve. My cards are more like 5 or 6s on the overall play-ability level in magic, more like a decent 2nd pick in a draft rather than what you’d put in your PTQ deck.
With GP Vegas in two weeks, I hope that this will help you prepare and/or provide a context to this fantastic format before it is gone from Competitive Play.
The first pick of the draft is not extremely important but it’s fun to think about. It doesn’t always get played and it’s the pick with the least amount of context. At this point in the draft, you don’t have any idea what any other player is doing yet. Your goal when you’re first picking should be, in general, to take the most powerful card.
If you have never read a ‘what’s the pick?” article before, I will be showing you a few pack one pick one (P1P1) scenarios and I will tell you what I would take and my reasoning behind it. I will also give an honorable mention. So let’s get started!
In my experience so far, Hogaak doesn’t just feel broken in Modern. It also doesn’t take much work to make him very good in limited. Sometimes all you need are some Winding Ways and/or Ransack the Labs. It’s not going to be an early play in limited but it is always a powerful one. An 8/8 trample in this format is huge! It will always be the biggest creature and it demands an answer yet there aren’t many removal spells in the format that can actually deal with it forever or even temporarily. I probably wouldn’t take it this early but this is definitely a weak pack. The next best card is probably Changeling Outcast not on raw power level but it is a wonderful enabler for the Ninjas archetype which in my opinion is one of the best decks.
There are definitely two cards that really stick out to me here. The gold card and the rare. Generally it’s not good to take gold cards super early because your chance of it making your deck is so low or you can end up pigeon-holing yourself early. It’s relatively close but this time I am making an exception for the Infiltrator because it is a bomb in it’s archetype and also the the rare is in the worst color, white. After picking this up I am looking to play about as many Changeling Outcast as I can. I hope that this one comes back to me. However, I doubt that it will because the commons here are pretty weak otherwise.
Conversely to the last pick, we are taking the white rare this time. It’s generally accepted that white is the worst color in the format by a decent margin. However, Serra the Benevolent is a low-key bomb and this pack is quite weak. The reason that I would take her here is because there really isn’t any other card here besides the Snow-Covered Island that my deck is likely to miss. Everything else here is either filler or merely good in a single archetype.
Drafting with players is self-correcting. Because of that, I am happy to be white in this format if I can identify that I am the only one playing it. Serra is the most powerful when she is coming down in the early stages of the game, usually as a 4/4 Flying, Vigilance with upside. A common play pattern with her is to play her on turn four, make a token, tick up turn 5 if she survives and then make another token if she isn’t extremely likely to survive after that. That’s really powerful and enough for me to take a chance on white this early coupled with the low power level of the rest of the pack.
I hope that you all enjoyed or at least learned something from this first installment of The Opener. There are more to come and other formats to explore. If you have any feedback, please feel free to leave a comment below.
