#cubelet

I’ve been doing a lot of two player games lately with people who don’t have decks. I love drafting in any form and while I’ve been providing casual constructed decks to my friends when we play, it occurs to me that Solomon Draft would be a lot of fun.

But I don’t want to buy packs every time we want to do it.

Any thoughts as to a 90 card cubelet that would be fun for repeated Solomon Drafts? I can of course change it up if things get stale, but I think the baseline should provide a lot of depth right from the start. It would be really easy to travel with and provide an easy way to draft and play when I travel.

Here’s a link to the list for those of you who just want to see that. I’ll also put it below a read more on this post.

But first, how about we answer the question, “What the hell is a Cubelet?”

The short of it is, a 100 card singleton deck meant to be used as a shared library for two or more players to play against each other. The deck contains no lands and any card can be played face-down as a non-basic land that taps for any color of mana. You can’t take mulligans and player’s have their own graveyards. This format is quick and fun and can lead to a lot of interesting stuff. Consider the following.

What’s the color pie?

When every land you play can tap for any color mana without drawback, the color pie stops meaning much at all. What that means for your Cubelet is you can shove in any card that sounds like fun and you don’t have to worry about mana fixing. What that also means is that the innate balance that comes from making a card cost multiple colors disappears. You can be assured you will hit every two-drop and three-drop and so on. So be careful about how powerful the (multi-colored especially) cards you include are.

Curve’s gone too

Well, kind of. Again, every card you draw can also be played face down as a land. You will never be land screwed or mana flooded in Cubelet. That said, this is how I looked at the mana curve. I knew I wanted there to be early game plays. If you look at my Cubelet, you’ll see that just under half the cards are 3 CMC or lower. There are going to be early game plays and it won’t simply be “Land, go.” for the first three turns.

Then why is over half the Cubelet 4 CMC or higher? That seems like a pretty high curve. And it would be for any other deck. But I also imagine the high CMC spells will be the ones that typically get used as lands. So that upper half is what I see as my land base (and in a shared library deck you want about half of it to be lands) that can be spells later in the game. Instead of debating about which 1 or 2 CMC spell I should use as a land, chances are I have some big spell that I can easily decide to play as a land instead. Deciding which land to play likely isn’t where you want the skill testing to be. There isn’t much fun in realizing you should have kept the Lightning Bolt to play and used your Path to Exile as your land drop.

Play the fun stuff!

You know how in Commander you get to play a lot of high CMC spells you normally wouldn’t get to see? Well similarly here you can throw in all sorts of stuff that would normally make for bad constructed decks. Mana cost means very little and you can put effects from all the colors together and know you’ll be able to get them to go off. And since it’s singleton that two players are splitting, don’t worry too much about including combo pieces. Chances are one player won’t draw all of them.

Flickering and Gating take on new meaning

Flickerwisp is a card I’ll be watching closely. I think it is likely too powerful for the format. Pick any permanent and play it as land. Flickerwisp it on turn three and see it return as Nicol Bolas, for example. But in a huge deck where it’s only a one-off, I think these will mostly be pretty rare and exciting plays, which is something I want to see. Venser allows for similar plays.

Gating is when a permanent bounces another permanent back to your hand when it enters the battlefield. Normally this is a drawback, but in Cubelet it might mean you can bounce a land back in the late game and then cast it as a spell. It also puts a new twist on cards like Deprive. I love it and included effects like this wherever I could.

Scry to your Mama

Who is going to draw next? That might mean more when you consider when to play Memory Lapse. It might also mean a spell like Chronostutter allows you to essentially steal your opponent’s best creature. I’ve included quite a bit of scry and effects like this because I want there to be battles to control what’s on top of the library and who gets what from it. I may consider Courser of Kruphix for the chance to push this contest into high gear if necessary.

Grave Matters

This is a theme I quickly decided to build on since graveyards belong to each player individually. With effects that allow you to retrieve cards from the grave and some milling, graves become a great source of card advantage and begin to function as private libraries. I think I’ll have to tweak the exact balance of cards that mill and cards that retrieve things from the grave or care about the grave more generally. This also means effects that destroy lands allow you to fill your grave with spells you might be able to recur. I also originally included some graveyard hosers but felt more often than not those would just be feel bad and removed them. Whatever it ends up looking like, I know this is a theme I want to cultivate in my Cubelet.

Table for Two?

So Cubelet is intended as a way for two people to easily play Magic, especially when one of them might not have a deck available. This sounded great to me as later this month I’ll be visiting friends who don’t have Magic decks but who play with me whenever we get together. This provides a compact Magic experience for us. But there are three of us. I’ve compensated here by making the Cubelet larger than 100 cards. I think it can still be cut down, but with three players and a milling theme built in to fuel graveyards, I’ve opted for a Cubelet that’s nearly 50% larger than normal to start out. As we play and I get a better feel for it, I’ll make some changes to what’s in there and also look to pare down a bit.

In Con-Cube-sion

There you have some of my general thoughts about Cubelet as a format and more specific notes on why my Cubelet looks the way it does. Has anyone else played before? Does anyone else have one? Please share your experiences and thoughts!

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