Posted by Zachary

 

Part I: Origin Story	Part II: The Actual Math	The Gold Cube List

 

 

 

Things with an intrinsically awesome nature have always seemed to me to possess a kind of eternal feel to

them, indeed, so strong is its presence, it becomes difficult to point to a time in one's life

where that thing was absent. Individuals may not understand what they did with themselves before their certain special someone was in their life, or perhaps what they did before they could drive, or before there was internet.

For myself, however, I cannot imagine what must have crowned my leisure time before the Cube Draft came into our lives.

 

To say it seemed like yesterday when Andrew came bursting into the house babbling something about Evin Erwin may be somewhat misleading. It is an event both perennially

present, and

infinitely distant, as if to draw up the memory were to blow the century-heavy dust from the cracked and ancient tome where that very day had been carved into the stone of our lives. But it is not gone, no. How could I forget that first draft? Andrew set the metal box on the table and eyed us with a silent cunning. Nothing was said. We gathered, then, around the table, the six of us, the original six, as it were: Josh, Austin, Andrew, Teddy, Cody, and I, some excited, some confused, most suspended in judgment, until the first pack was cracked open, and then...then it became a

reality.

 

I mean, what do you do when you thumb through your first pack and see Mind Twist, Pernicious Deed, Ancestral Recall, Sol Ring, and Exalted Angel? Then you thumb through the rest of the pack and find that the lands are an original dual and Library of Alexandria, and that Tarmagoyf is sitting side-by-side with Masticore. The mind, conditioned by numerous drafts, does not expect such a thing to happen. It does not plan on it, and ultimately it does not know what to do.

 

 

 

That first pack was five minutes of pure, joyous confusion.

 

 

But nothing lasts, really, and the full intensity of that environment died down somewhat, as after many drafts we learned the archetypes and the rhythm of the environment, and before long, we were drafting through the worlds of the past as though we had always known them. Though the glory remained, it was tamed, especially since we had played it safe and constructed a cube almost exactly to Evin Erwin's specifications. But something in me soon rose to the top, bubbling, churning to reach forth and forge a new and powerful thing in the likeness of the first.

 

Meanwhile, at about the same time, we had finally finished drafting through the three boxes of Ravnica Block I had purchased, and this was cause both for celebration and relief.

 

As I was determined not to open any packs unless they were being drafted, it took a number of consecutive meetings over the course of a few months to draft through an entire box each of Ravnica, Dissension, and Guildpact. But then the game was over, as it were, and I sat with some half a thousand Ravnica block cards wondering what to do with them. The answer came pretty clearly, and after a quick pass to separate out the wheat from the caff, a small, six-man Ravnica-Block cube was assembled, humbly clothed in penny sleeves and kept in a small cardboard box lovingly decorated with cut-up booster packs.

 

It was interesting, but not substantial. Six men is not enough to enjoy a draft, and Josh became increasingly frustrated with how easy it was to draft the best card in every pack and then fix all the colors later, something Andrew did with almost blatant and frustrating consistency. It soon became evident that, though fun, this was only a fledgling of what could be a far greater thing. The idea to make a gold cube was soon the thing on the tip of everyone's tongues, and this proved to be easier to accomplish than we had originally thought. At some point in the past I remember, for some reason, making it my objective to possess one of every Invasion-block card, and the resulting quest added thousands of additional cards to the collection which were, for the most part, stored away. I did not doubt that, among the scattered relics of those forgotten times lay a play-set of the block, with holes here and there at the rare level. But it was there. Then of course there were all the Ravnica cards. The match was obvious. The idea floated around from tongue to tongue for a hazy period, like the swallowing before the first leap off into unknown space, and then somehow it was done.

 

 

THE CUBE

We had originally wanted to create a cube of cards only from the Invasion and Ravnica Blocks and then, when Alara was released in the middle of construction, that block too. We were to have the three "gold" blocks together in one harmonious environment. This idea was almost immediately dismissed when the inclusion of Mirari's Wake was momentarily questioned, because it did not come from the aforementioned sets. There was a second or two that hovered there, and then the rule was broken. We went through all the binders and boxes and grabbed some of the best multi-colored cards ever printed, regardless of set, though Invasion and Ravnica served as the base for the cube.
We also went nuts with mana fixers, including every land from Duals and Shocks to Vivids and Reflecting Pool.

 

THE PACK PROBLEM

That's right about when we ran into difficulty. With Evin Erwin's cube, the tradition was to mix all the cards in the draft equally and evenly, though randomly, and make random "packs" of fifteen to draft out of. To maintain balance in the original cube, we had stuck in two of each color, two lands, two artifacts, and two gold cards for packs of sixteen and drafted out of that. Obviously this wouldn't work in an environment like this one, so obviously unbalanced, and so we came up with a this process of pack construction:

 

First, we divided all the cards into categories.

White Cards
Blue Cards
Black Cards
Red Cards
Green Cards
Gold Cards
Mana-fixing cards (a combined category of nonbasic lands and mana-fixing artifacts).

 

We took two cards from each of the first five categories at random (10 cards), mixed them together, and cut two cards at random, leaving a total of eight cards, at random, from the mono-color groups.
Then we took five gold cards at random.
Then we took two mana-fixers at random.

This is what would constitute a single pack of fifteen. 8 mono-colored, 5 gold, and 2 fixers.

 

This didn't quite work, however, because not all the cards were bomb cards; most fulfilled many other roles. So when the bomb cards came along, they might come along in clumps, sometimes sparingly, often sporadically, and never in the right colors. It was then that we separated out from the gold cards a small group of powerful cards we deemed worthy of "bomb" status (The Guild Leaders, almost any dragon, Legacy Weapon, Cromat, Progenitus, Violent Ultimatum, etc.) and placed them in an eighth category, known as the "rare" pile.
Thus, in addition to creating a 15-card pack in the way mentioned above, one also took 1 random "rare" card from the "rare" category and stuck it in, to create a 16-card pack.

Make three packs per person, and go.

While this system may seem over-complicated and a difficult way to construct packs, it assures that, in this delicate environment, power is adequately distributed. Any less precise method would lead to far too many luck-based situations, as some packs would be better than others, or some would have far more of one color combination than others.

 

 

 

ALPHA PLAYTESTING

 

So we felt good and wise, until we realized that the best thing to do was draft all the Vivids and mana fixers, and then ramp up into unstoppable bombs and absurd wins. Everyone tried playing five-color, some people got lucky, others didn't, and we were back to the problem of the original Ravnica cube.
 

 

Such an environment made Gruul the most obvious choice, or Jund as Gruul splashing for black things. With fast aggro and artifact destruction, midrange and five-color control could be stopped before they got to their win conditions. Grixis also proved to be initially powerful, but required more luck to pull off correctly, and its win conditions were almost always snapped up by greedy five-color decks.

 

So we cut the Vivids and the Reflecting Pool, though it hurt my heart to do it. We reigned in the mana-fixing a bit, and began throwing in mana-intensive cards for mono color. Josh changed everyone's paradigm on this when he added Jugan, the Rising Star, a huge threat but also, more importantly, one with a triple-green cost. We also talked about looking out for repeatable, activated abilities in one color, to push players into two- or three-color avenues, to give players some reason not to draft every single color. We went with the Planeswalker's Scorn cycle from Planeshift. Some worked, some didn't. The goal was, as always, to make three-color decks the norm, with five-color and two-color decks being on either edge of the bell curve. Mono-color, as far as we could tell, was and still is impossible to draft, though Austin has (predictibly) tried to prove that wrong. He has yet to succeed.
 

 

The Hole in the Format
 

This brings me to another important problem which we solved. Initially, I had included the Vivids as the sort of glue to hold together weird color combinations, since we wanted to value all color interactions equally. The big problem was that we had Alara tri-color lands and artifacts, so the ally-color triples were pushed, but not the enemy triples. When the Vivids were cut, they left a hole, and draft swung towards the Alara shard colors.

I then proposed a crafty idea. We make some cards. From scratch. Initially Josh thought this was a terrible idea, that we'd be crossing a line, but I vehemently argued for it, and in the end we produced five unique cards, which were exact mirrors of the five Alara lands, except they represented the enemy-colored triples. I named them lovingly after the Planar Chaos dragons, wrote rhyming flavor text, and stole art off of DeviantArt. Josh printed them. Done and done. We never told anyone about them, though, and the next few drafts had Andrew yelling across the table, "What is THIS?"
"Just draft it," I said. "Don't ask questions." And that was that.

 

More drafts showed that this was a good direction to go in, and so we went back and included many of the cycling-with-activation cards from Onslaught (Essence Fracture was a good example of a card that pushed a player into a color). Speaking of blue, an early rule was that permission should be kept hugely in check, as a heavy permission deck would be unfun for a format that included such offbeat experimentation. Or, to put it another way, mono-blue or mostly-blue was out as a possible format. A permission deck had to be gold, so our rule was to include no hard-counters that were not gold. I made a point to put in the whole cycle of UU and [color] counterspells: Absorb, Undermine, and Voidslime. Then Double Negative was printed and fulfilled the cycle (Punish Ignorance having long ago been pointed at as something to get). Blue, however, was still fairly weak, as the primary draft win condition (fliers) were not present in any sort of attainable abundance. I put Fighting Drake and Air Elemental on the To Add list, and Josh considered doubling up on Snapping Drakes and/or Wind Drakes. The lack of Esper-themed bombs was also a problem, but Enigma Sphinx went a long way to solving that problem, and when I purchased a Zendikar Intro Deck for its Sphink of Jwahr Isle, things really came together (we had been trying to find a cheap Sphinx of the Steel Wind to finalize Esper's power, but that didn't happen for a long time).

 

 

 

 

 

Then there was Lotus guardian. My problem is that I like certain cards for nostalgia reasons, and not necessarily because they're good. Josh had accepted that this might come up. Andrew was less thrilled.

 

 

It started when I opened up one of the random boxes and found eight to twelve Lotus Guardians. Josh's face said "No" as soon as I looked at him. The result of the argument that followed was taking a pen and writing "vigilence" in the text box. The exact tweaking of Lotus Guardian has been the subject of some debate, and it has gone through several versions, including such natural ideas as untapping to add the mana, or such blatant tomfoolery as First Strike or lifelink.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Final Amendments

 

Alara Reborn and Conflux brought a good deal of strange and wondrous powers into play. Nicol Bolas graced the cube as the one and only planeswalker, though Ajani Vengeant will be the second addition. The Boarderposts showed up almost instantly in the mana-fixing pile, and a small number of cascade cards were handpicked to add a little punch here and there. The final draft of the cube includes no shock lands and no fetch lands, something which may surprise some, though it may come as more of a shock that they are simply not needed to fix colors: bounce lands and signets do an amazing job.

 

The last thing we did was to cut down the monocolored piles into the same number, and to bring the two-colored cards into even numbers. The problem was that there just weren't as many enemy-colored cards printed as there were allied-color cards, so we were forced to cut things down slightly. Allied-color pairs were to have 20 cards for each two-color combination, while enemy-color pairs had 15. We also cut back on specific strategies (like Esper artifacts and Rakdos hellbent) which were unsupportable in this larger  environment.

 

The cube, like most things, is always being tweaked, but as it is, it's balanced (mostly), playable, and fun. But it's also the most challenging draft environment I've ever played in. You'd think that something like a Power Cube would be difficult, and it does have its challenges, but once you've picked your two colors, it really isn't that hard to just keep picking the best cards. The trick of the Gold Cube is that we've created an environment in which everything pushes you to want to play every color, and then restricted the mana base so you CAN'T do that. That tension, that constant temptation to splash for another color, analyzing how much you can get away with it, when you should take mana fixing over power, and struggling to draft a deck where consistency and power meet each other perfectly...that's a challenge, and because all those choices depend on what order you open up cards in, it's always different and always interesting.