Draftcube
Design principles
- The cube contains 680 cards, because that many fit in the box where I keep it. There are 98 cards in each color, 70 multicolor cards, 60 colorless cards (including rainbow lands), and 60 dual/triple lands.
- Power level should be such that classics like Serra Angel and Mahamoti Djinn are playable, but not automatic first picks.
- Aggro, midgame, control, and aggro-control decks should all be about equally good. Combo kills can exist, but they should involve more than two cards and be relatively easy to disrupt. Splinter Twin + Seeker of Skybreak + Vitalize is a good example.
- Brokenness is good in small amounts, but gets boring if there is too much of it. Also, it should come from interactions between cards rather than a single bomb that wins the game on its own.
- Include
- Classic cards from the 90s.
- Rares that are constructed quality in theory, but never saw play either because there was no deck for them, or because they were overshadowed by a better card. Nantuko Cultivator is my pet example of these.
- Limited MVP commons and uncommons from more recent sets.
- Try to follow the color pie better than WotC does in recent sets. Particularly, green is not supposed to have a lot of removal of its own. It should have good color fixing instead, so it can borrow removal from other colors.
- No planeswalkers. They tend to violate the no broken bombs rule, and also interact incorrectly with some of the older cards (for example, Nevinyrral's Disk doesn't kill them).
- No double-sided cards, because of the practical problems they cause during drafting and gameplay.
- Avoid the following, but allow exceptions when there is a good reason:
- Extra things to track; mechanics like poison counters, dungeons, monarch, and the ring tempts you. Tokens and normal counters that are put on a card are allowed.
- Immunity mechanics like hexproof, indestructible, uncounterable spells, and repeatable graveyard recursion. These are simply not fun to play against.
- Cards and mechanics that are known to cause rules problems.
- Cards that require repeated reshuffles during a game. Lack of broken bombs in the cube tends to make the games longer than in other forms of Magic, and reshuffles add to that.
White
Blue
Black
Red
Green
Multicolor
Colorless
Dual Lands
| Shocklands Core Set / Innistrad Duals | Filterlands Painlands | Snarls Triple Lands |