Awesome primer on things to think about when approaching cube design! Minor point (and I don't think you actually meant this exactly), but one might understand your land discussion to mean that to promote better mana fixing serves the goal of enabling 5c goodstuff. I've been an advocate for years for breaking singleton for fetches, and for me, the salient point is that this allows more people to play more magic more often. 5c soup wants good mana, but it also wants a meta where linear archetypes are slow &/or underpowered, it wants a density of spells that fix, and it wants value-oriented individual cards (often in gold, which can be picked up late on the wheel) to define the meta. All this is to say that good mana doesn't perforce enable goodstuff. It may well be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Again, I am not suggesting that you said the above; I just wanted to clarify my position on why I love breaking singleton for lands.
Great points Cultic. And I think you are correct. I think leaning into cosisntency argument for a reason to break singleton for lands is probably the strongest argument. Instead of 5C as an example, I should have thought more about other archetypes such as "lands matter" as exemplified in your Cartographia cube!
I currently own a Peasant cube in paper and I'm currently thinking my next cube might be horror themed. I built my peasant cube after drafting a friend's more higher power levelled cube and had a moment where I went "This is my favourite way to play the game." Since then I've been into cube design so much and it has led me down some interesting rabbit holes in terms of design. Right now one of my working theories is that cubes don't run enough support in their land selections, both in terms of fixing and tech lands which leads to a lot of unused cards post-draft.
Unused cards post draft always break my heart as a cube designer! As curators, we would love for every card in the cube to have a home, right? Cultic Cube, he commented below, breaks singleton for multiple fetches and shocks in his cube "Eleusis". I'd link the cube list but Cube Cobra is being a bit buggy right now :(
@@ChillMTGtv I've looked into Cultic's solutions while I was thinking about the issue, but I genuinely like sticking to the singleton rule. There's something about it that appeals to my desire for elegant design. I know some people also break the rarity rule for fixing when it comes to lower rarity restricted cubes, but I've found a lot of appeal in trying to solve the problem without breaking any of my restrictions. While the vast majority of my fixing lands come into play tapped I haven't actually found that to be a problem, so far at least. This could actually be applied to the theory on context. Because of the pace of the environment, even among aggro decks (Which I'm attempting to push the envelope on in order to make up for the opportunity cost of tapped duals) the aggro decks do not lose too much tempo on the tapped duals. Of all the things my playgroup have mentioned to me, the issue of the tapped duals has actually never come up as an issue even for the player who drafts aggro. Speaking of context, my favourite card regarding that has been Tinker. Very few of the tinker targets in my cube are ridiculous enough to end the game on the spot. In fact the only one that really pushes it is God-Pharaoh's Statue. This one element is what has prevented me from putting Sol Ring in the cube, since Statue on turn 1 or 2 could just make the game completely unplayable for the opponent. Finally, the one "good" thing about unused cards, especially since the majority of players hand them back to you (at least for me) is you can get an idea of what cards might not be synergising well with the cube goals, that they have been left out. (Obviously mostly relevant when the cards match the colours they're playing in.) Sorry for the essay.
@@Jakar_Umbra Heck yea! Love the "essay" and I love the restrictions you are putting on your design. Sounds like you are exactly in the creative space for sweet cube curation.
@@ChillMTGtv Yeah. I don't really have anyone to theorise with in my playgroup when it comes to the actual curation and it's my favourite form of expression in the game. Keep up the good work. I really look forward to your cube drafts.
Awesome primer on things to think about when approaching cube design! Minor point (and I don't think you actually meant this exactly), but one might understand your land discussion to mean that to promote better mana fixing serves the goal of enabling 5c goodstuff. I've been an advocate for years for breaking singleton for fetches, and for me, the salient point is that this allows more people to play more magic more often. 5c soup wants good mana, but it also wants a meta where linear archetypes are slow &/or underpowered, it wants a density of spells that fix, and it wants value-oriented individual cards (often in gold, which can be picked up late on the wheel) to define the meta. All this is to say that good mana doesn't perforce enable goodstuff. It may well be a necessary but not sufficient condition. Again, I am not suggesting that you said the above; I just wanted to clarify my position on why I love breaking singleton for lands.
Great points Cultic. And I think you are correct. I think leaning into cosisntency argument for a reason to break singleton for lands is probably the strongest argument. Instead of 5C as an example, I should have thought more about other archetypes such as "lands matter" as exemplified in your Cartographia cube!
Ooh digging the new segment! Great vid and info.
I currently own a Peasant cube in paper and I'm currently thinking my next cube might be horror themed. I built my peasant cube after drafting a friend's more higher power levelled cube and had a moment where I went "This is my favourite way to play the game." Since then I've been into cube design so much and it has led me down some interesting rabbit holes in terms of design. Right now one of my working theories is that cubes don't run enough support in their land selections, both in terms of fixing and tech lands which leads to a lot of unused cards post-draft.
Unused cards post draft always break my heart as a cube designer! As curators, we would love for every card in the cube to have a home, right? Cultic Cube, he commented below, breaks singleton for multiple fetches and shocks in his cube "Eleusis". I'd link the cube list but Cube Cobra is being a bit buggy right now :(
@@ChillMTGtv I've looked into Cultic's solutions while I was thinking about the issue, but I genuinely like sticking to the singleton rule. There's something about it that appeals to my desire for elegant design. I know some people also break the rarity rule for fixing when it comes to lower rarity restricted cubes, but I've found a lot of appeal in trying to solve the problem without breaking any of my restrictions. While the vast majority of my fixing lands come into play tapped I haven't actually found that to be a problem, so far at least.
This could actually be applied to the theory on context. Because of the pace of the environment, even among aggro decks (Which I'm attempting to push the envelope on in order to make up for the opportunity cost of tapped duals) the aggro decks do not lose too much tempo on the tapped duals. Of all the things my playgroup have mentioned to me, the issue of the tapped duals has actually never come up as an issue even for the player who drafts aggro.
Speaking of context, my favourite card regarding that has been Tinker. Very few of the tinker targets in my cube are ridiculous enough to end the game on the spot. In fact the only one that really pushes it is God-Pharaoh's Statue. This one element is what has prevented me from putting Sol Ring in the cube, since Statue on turn 1 or 2 could just make the game completely unplayable for the opponent.
Finally, the one "good" thing about unused cards, especially since the majority of players hand them back to you (at least for me) is you can get an idea of what cards might not be synergising well with the cube goals, that they have been left out. (Obviously mostly relevant when the cards match the colours they're playing in.)
Sorry for the essay.
@@Jakar_Umbra Heck yea! Love the "essay" and I love the restrictions you are putting on your design. Sounds like you are exactly in the creative space for sweet cube curation.
@@ChillMTGtv Yeah. I don't really have anyone to theorise with in my playgroup when it comes to the actual curation and it's my favourite form of expression in the game.
Keep up the good work. I really look forward to your cube drafts.
please do not put that awful chalk scraping sound in any more videos
Noted, shipmate!
@@ChillMTGtv ty :)
Outta the car, finally able to watch AND listen. As suspected the production/editing is fine 👌 Looking forward the next one
Thanks Stephen. I'm working on sourcing a real DSLR camera for recording the video so I don't look so blurry :)