Cube Draft

[oggey]

Has anyone ever crafted, or come across, a cube draft list for this game? I have seen that the game is draftable-- had anyone home so far as to make a cube?

For reference, drafting is where a group of players pass packs around a table, each person taking one card at a time from each booster until everyone has a semi-curated, semi-random stack of cards to make a deck out of.

Cube draft is where you curate the cardpool. In a normal draft, you would grab four booster packs from the same booster series or season. Instead for cube, you make 10-card packs from a custom list. Maybe in your cube, you want to see a particular set of games represented and not others, or bloodlines, or maybe your cube just has all the most powerful combos and characters, or maybe it's a blue-haired cube where every card art has someone with blue hair in it.

[oggey]

Here's an idea-- for limited play, like sealed, one could...

Instead of making packs, each player draft picks a game, and they receive 60 random cards from that game/color, as well as 3 random 1-costers from that color. The cards will come from a curated pool, though. You don't just get 60 green cards, you'll get 60 green from the 90 in the pool. Those 90 will come from all across the 20 sets, and will include relevant neutrals. Using that, you make a 30card Singleton deck, and everyone dukes it out.

Or, is multicolor a major part of the draft experience? Maybe you'd instead get 30c from two different games, and you'd snake draft, like Catan, where first person gets first pick and last pick, and the "last" person picks twice in a row.

 

Another thing comes to mind-- what if the resource requirement were different in limited formats? Instead of having to match your bond color for playing cards, you can match any affinity. You'd still need to match for any bond-flip abilities that call out a color, but otherwise, maybe you draft your deck from a huge pool of mixed up colors and the colors don't matter as much as the cool combos you make along the way.

Just brainstorming. I really love playing card games in limited environments!

[whase]

I've used box 20 to draft recently, that was a lot of fun and I will be doing the same for the last two remaining sets.

As for Cube drafts, I just happen to have sorted my cards by color yesterday and planned on looking through my cube options tonight. It will be a green-only pool, since I have 3 full boxes of green, and I simply love Tellius the most.

I will be sorting my cards on rarity and count them out to be the right amount to represent real boxes (except they'll all be green).

[Captain Karnage]

I thought this was about MTG Cube, I love working on those.

Anyways as someone whose been really active in TCG communities, some games are a lot easier to do cube drafts than others. Now I've mostly watched Cipher gameplay and have played a few proxy games of it. Personally I think it would be incredibly difficult to do since this game feels like it was meant more for constructed play seeing as you need quite a few copies of your characters to make a deck work well, and yo help keep you up in card advantage, as the player who does end up getting more copies of a certain character the more card advantage they'll end up getting, which at that point they could just stomp out the competition way to easily.

Curated pools also really take away the randomness of the draft.

Honestly for games like Cipher I think Battle Boxes would be better. If you don't know what one is, its essentially a box that contains several precon decks that you may randomly assign or let your players pick what deck they want. 

[oggey]

@whase I would be very interested to learn of your experiences with the all-green cube! Do you think you'll draft, or do sealed?

 

@Captain Karnage You make a good point there. I suppose I'll just keep expanding my BattleBox using the cipherfaire lists!

Edited June 24, 2020 by oggey

[whase]

15 minutes ago, oggey said:

@whase I would be very interested to learn of your experiences with the all-green cube! Do you think you'll draft, or do sealed?

I will be using it to draft. Obviously a drafted deck will never be very efficient, but that's what makes it fun to me. Green is probably the worst color to draft with though, since stack effects will never be very easy to get. I'll let you know when I actually get to be able to try it! =3