Pink Sleeves

From most to least recent

Cube Design

Recross the Paths podcast appearance.

What am I Asking Players to Pay Attention to? Treating attention as a finite resource that can be directed to or distracted from the experience you're trying to create.

Are We Designing For Cubecon? The misaligned incentives of designing for online, versus your local community. Also available as a mini-podcast.

When Flavour and Agency Collide. Looking at how the flavour of cards and what you do with them can interact in uncomfortable ways.

Introducing Your Cube. A pithy infographic.

Cube Design & the Zeitgeist [CubeCobra link]. How the online cube community influenced my Forbidden Trash cube. As mentioned by Rhystic Studies.

Tactics for Stretching your Complexity Budget. Differentiating between absolute and experienced complexity.

Approachable Hand Disruption. Including hand hate in beginner-friendly cubes. Published simultaneously on CubeCobra.

Why is the Robot Sad? [CubeCobra link] Determining the objectives of your colourless section.

Non-Magic Game Design

Getting my reps in as an absolute amateur.

Downtown Loop: A TTRPG zine for my pre-schooler, about helping ghosts in the Toronto subway. itch.io

Transit Puzzle Game: A puzzle game about constrained planning for ≥1 player. Original Post | Tagged Posts

Scare School: An "Imagination Dice Game" [TTRPG] for my pre-schooler. Original Post | Tagged Posts

Also,

Giving PWHL teams power over their road schedule could reduce travel, control costs, build rivalries, and add another spike of off-season excitement.

Ages ago I put together a thread on a divisionless NHL. Cutting the league into divisions has always created losers. For years, Detroit and Chicago were unjustly kept apart. Nowadays, Nashville shares a division with Salt Lake City (3.5 hour flight, 4 games per season) and a conference with Vancouver (5 hour flight, 3 games per season). This is a team that can get to Carolina, Columbus, or Tampa in a couple hours, yet only takes a single trip to each of them over the course of the new 84 game season.

An old draft of connections for a division-less NHL. Numbers on lines are the number of games opted into by the connected teams (not counting the default home and away). Matchups with less than three games are omitted.

One solution? Abolish divisions. The PWHL is already a step ahead of the NHL on this, but the influx of new far-flung teams, now is a great time to put a structure in place.

I am not going to touch playoff format, I'm going to keep a home and away game for every team so that every market has a chance to see every player, and I'm not going to pretend to understand the work that goes into barnstorming games. With those caveats, here's the pitch:

Each team drafts their road games. Well, the ones remaining after the home and home, which is probably only four, but that's okay!

You're in control of your travel. You're in control of your matchups, and there are a bunch of things a team can do with these decisions:

Minimize travel time

Cut down cross-border travel

Try to prey on weaker teams

Cultivate rivalries

Keep your televised games within your time zone

Travel to cities that are nice to visit

Let your players decide

Let your fans vote!

I'm sure you could come up with more angles and considerations. It's also a marketing opportunity in at least a couple directions.

First, it's another off-season event to generate a little bit of engagement in the dog days. Some of us are sickos and want that kind of thing.

Second, the game can be hyped up by both teams. A road team with fans that travel well can try to take over the arena. The home team can hype it up: When someone challenges you to a game in your own barn, that's extra stakes, and in this system it's all but guaranteed to be against someone you have some kind of rivalry with.

Okay but how does it work?

Pick a draft order, I don't care how. Reverse standings and then snake? Sure, great. Better than great: good enough! (Okay, but important to note that being at the very end of the draft is the one spot where you might end up stuck with a bad flight... but maybe you make a trade to avoid it? So much drama.)

Each team has to host four of these games. In the first two or three rounds of the draft you can't pick the same team to play against twice. Final round is a free for all.

When I did this for the NHL I found completing half the rounds before allow re-picks created a good-feeling balance, but there each team had ten opponents to pick, thanks to the (at the time) 82 game season: 41 road games, minus the one guaranteed game in each city. With a 12 team, 30 game season, there aren't many games to divy up.

So what does the draft look like?

I did a test run, mainly considering travel distance and border crossings (please don't yell at me!). I got this:

Red circles are the last game available in that city. The first three rounds I did not allow repeat picks. Fourth round was a free-for-all.

When you look at teams that elect to play each other at least twice, you get very division-like clusters: Pacific, Canadian East, and American East clusters, but Vancouver, Vegas, Minnesota, and Boston particularly improve their schedule versus explicitly using those groups.

You also get super rivalries:

New York and Boston

Montreal and Ottawa

Hamilton and Toronto

Vancouver and Seattle

These teams each drafted each other's games the maximum two times, leading to 6 matchups in a season. These are markets that twin easily, why not lean into it? Is six games against the same team in a 30 game season a lot? Yes, absolutely... But you don't have to do that! Teams who don't like it have agency.

In the Mothership module Gradient Descent, players are likely to come across The Labyrinth, described as follows:

“THE LABYRINTH: bird’s nest tangle of wet pseudoflesh-lined tunnels and corridors of pipes and scaffolding. Constantly shuddering and shifting in peristalsis.”

This is accompanied by a d10 table with the instruction, “Roll below every time the crew travels in the Labyrinth until they find an exit, The Minotaur, or The Core”

I’d run the Labyrinth as written once for a one-shot. The feeling of repeatedly being kicked back to an exit (20% chance each roll) gave the impression of it being surreal and unknowable, like navigating an Escher painting. It didn’t give it any sense of scale or complexity. I think it can be enriched.

On top of that, as I was prepping for my ongoing campaign, I noticed that the accompanying table is rough. Once I caught that one entry gives random results numbered 1 to 9, other details began looking suspicious. Not game-breaking, but the variety of Androids present raises an eyebrow (why those two specifically?), one entry (2) looks like it may be intended to mirror another (4), but doubles the chance of encountering the Minotaur instead, room references are presented in an unintuitive order… These are nitpicks, but it reinforced my desire to rework the Labyrinth mechanically.

I had a tool in mind: Flux Space, or at least a simplified version.

Spoilers for Gradient Descent after the jump.

Scans for my basics page on Cube Cobra.

Mountain. Duskmourn (2024), illustrated by Nestor Ossandon Leal. Altered by Brent for Untap TO, September 2025.

Forest. Return to Ravnica (2012), illustrated by Yeong-Hao Han. Altered by Brent for Untap Winter 2026, January 2026.

Two weirdos for my basics page on Cube Cobra

Isola [Spanish Island]. Fourth Edition Foreign Black Border (1995), illustrated by Mark Poole.

I ran the Haunting of Ypsilon-14 for my dad and sister last night, neither of whom had played Mothership before.

I read the pamphlet twice and did some prep:

My only substantial change was saying that they had to drop off their delivery but also pick up cargo from Dr. Giovanni, which Sonya is unaware of, but suggests it could be in the Heracles, or down in the mine.

I sketched the workspace just to make sure I had a mental image of the area incorporating all the provided details

I decided on basic timelines for the NPCs to keep introductions manageable: An oncoming shift filters into the workspace (minus a conspicuous missing Mike), an outgoing shift arrives from the mine, they head to different spots in the living area.

Unlike previous Mothership sessions, I put sticky notes in the Player’s Survival Guide for stuff I knew I was going to need to reference, which reduced friction so much.

I wish I had prepped physical descriptions of the miners, to give them a little more presence, although I think the quick descriptions do give them enough personality to run with.

I had both of them roll up two characters each, with the intention of treating one each as contractors, but they just played them as normal, which was fine.

Rules didn't feel like an impediment at all. The combination of the character sheet, the “how to be a good player" section, and the back cover of the PSG gives such good, consistent, scripted onboarding.

There was a bit of staring at character sheets for answers (“none of my skills are useful” and “what is the point of my trinket?" (I took the opening to re-explain spark tables)).

There was a lot of out of character discussion of what they should do, to the point where once or twice I told them they needed to talk to each other in character. I’ve seen the advice of having players only be able to talk to each other in character to build immersion, and I’m liking that more and more. It feels like a must in situations with obvious time pressure and/or NPCs present.

I’ve run the Panic Engine close to a dozen times now, and it felt like the first time I called for saves and panic an appropriate amount: PC’s ended with between 5 and 15 stress, and there were several failed panic checks. I do kind of buy that the Panic Table could be more dramatic, but it works when panic is happening frequently.

I really like how open ended yet constrained the adventure is: because they decided to go down to the mine almost immediately, it was very yellow goo-forward, instead of monster-forward. I’ve seen it progress very differently in actual plays. The story is going to advance naturally, without having any story beats prescribed.

Survive, solve, or save?

I’d give them half marks on all three:

They killed the monster

2 of 4 player characters survived

5 out of 11 NPCs (cat plus 4 miners) escaped with the surviving PCs. I maybe should've been picking them off faster while the players were down in the mine

See the rest of the review and some of my prep here.

Once you leave Heron Station, you’re met with the text, “It takes a half-day’s hard scrabble through the foothills to get to the ship” and no other details. This is a hard contrast with the trip from Greta to Heron, which had light scaffolding to support you.

Flux through the Jungle

I decided I didn't want to skip over the travel. Getting through an alien jungle didn't feel trivial.

The solution I arrived at was a shallow flux space (5 random points of interest, and 6th “deep” location), with the intention of giving more insight into what the carcs are doing while they aren’t assaulting the colony. I enjoyed coming up with these spots, but I know my friends felt like they weren’t sure what they need to do. Of the five I wrote:

Four gave clues about the carcs’ intelligence and/or intentions

Two had avoidable violent encounters

One gave the opportunity to learn how to solve a later puzzle

None presented obstacles for proceeding

I then re-worked the ones they hadn’t visited for the trip back, with the complication of warring carcs.

I didn’t design in enough player agency. These areas were exhausted once you learned what you could and engaged with or avoided the violent encounter, but with no clear indication that you were ready to move on. They needed problems to solve. In contrast, the deep location--a carc path to the ship--did feel pretty good, because it has a clear conclusion. I think I would keep this flux space for a replay, but I would have to do significant work making it more game-able.

Starting from the blank canvas of, “I don’t want to just skip over this travel,” to researching options for handling it, to writing the points, was a ton of prep time for not a lot of play time, and was enjoyable, but took away from other prep I could’ve done. It didn’t feel like it was worth it for the group, but it did feel like an investment in my own skills.

Prepping the Ship

I like the room designs in the ship, but the three linear paths felt designed to invalidate prep. I’m going to try to internalize a bunch of puzzles, and I know that once the party picks an entrance, there’s a minuscule chance that they'll encounter two-thirds of them. My friends figured out how to open the airlock and took the extremely short [B1], [B2], [B5], [D] route. I know there’s always going to be stuff players miss, but this makes the feel-bad explicit.

The strength of the linear design is that it turns gameplay into a series of puzzles to solve, which in some ways was a really nice change of pace. What it failed to do was make the ship feel like a real, labyrinthine, alien location, and my players commented that it felt a little anti-climactic. If I were to run this again, I would seriously consider re-working the layout of the ship, but that did not feel like a realistic option for me as a new Warden running a published adventure, and I wanted to try it as written rather than assume I knew better. There would also need to be some kind of mechanic to guide players in the right direction, in case they lost or didn't find have the tracker for Hinton.

Hinton and the Nobles

When I initially read the module, the Court sounded very under-explained, but at least for me, this ended up one of the spots where I had the most fun thinking through how it ought to play, and how to tie all the threads together, without feeling like it was a burden. No notes.

Make up your own Scenario IV mechanics

The ask for the final act is weird. It’s true that it would be difficult to pre-write, depending on the specifics of how your adventure has played out, but with the zooming out, simplifying big actions, the way the timeline works, you’re being asked to make something up that you haven’t done before. There’s not really any way to take what you’ve been taught so far and apply it. This involves changing the mechanics of the game to portray kinds of conflict that aren’t well-covered in the Player’s Survival Guide.

My work-around was to create a set-piece at Heron Station, with the survivors holed up in the hangar, fighting off a wave of carcs, and the drop ship incoming. I did about half an hour of work creating and balancing a slightly simplified combat system for the carcs attacking and the colonists defending, and that paid off. The party burnt some time on tactics that put them in good position, but likely cost them the lives of most of the colonist inside.

Ship combat for some reason

Once you’re on the ship, I followed rules as written for damage from the attack (it caused a fire, which led to a few rounds of damage before the sprinkler system took care of it), they dealt with Maas, and all the infected got into hypersleep.

I didn’t bother with teaching ship mechanics, because there’s really no payoff. The ship attacks once, then evades. It moves at a speed like they’ve never seen. So, what is the battle supposed to be? I don’t think there’s anything meaningful the players can do, except maybe get a lucky hit in… except that as described in the Shipbreakers’ Toolkit the executive transport has no weapons.

It’s not a problem -- I think a terrifying ship that outclasses you hitting you once provides lots of drama -- there’s just no benefit to participating in player-facing combat, except to check the box of the adventure including it.

What is Mothership trying to do as it teaches you how to run the game?

I really admire Sean McCoy’s work in trying to create an onboarding point for running TTRPGs that doesn’t rely on Wizards of the Coast, and I think he’s doing a great job. The Warden's Operations Manual offers incredible, practical advice that demystifies and tears down barriers to entry, but with both the manual and Another Bug Hunt, Tuesday Knight Games is pulling off some sleight of hand.

Arguably, Mothership’s killer app is the huge library of high-quality zines and pamphlets, both first- and third-party. I love the mechanics, and I initially picked it up because I want to use it as the system for my own zine, but I’ve seen a lot of people talk about the adventures as the real selling point.

The fact is, the Warden’s Operation Manual doesn’t give much advice to help you run published modules, and the later portions of Another Bug Hunt don’t do a very good job of prepping you for running published modules. They are both much more focused on getting you comfortable with the idea of making your own adventure.

I would call it insidious, except look at the outcomes: I suspect that trick is a big reason why there is such a virtuous cycle of people enthusiastic and confident enough to make stuff for people to play. Is Mothership built on a lie? Maybe, kind of! Am I going to hold it against them? No, I will not.

The early sections of Another Bug Hunt gave me exactly what I was expecting. The later sections provide something else, something that makes Wardens stronger, makes the community stronger, but doesn’t necessarily lead to the best experience for players, and doesn’t always feel like you’re getting what you signed up for. I’m really glad I ran it all the way through, but this is an adventure that is purposely incomplete, and as the introductory adventure, I don’t think that’s what everyone comes in expecting. As you get farther in, it stops being a fun, pre-written adventure to share with your friends, and starts being creative exercise.

That sounds like a dour note to end on, but there was so much in Another Bug Hunt that I loved, memories with my friends that I will cherish, and I think it made me better at running games, and especially writing my own stuff. I think it’s unlikely I’ll ever run a longer play-through again, but this provides great fodder for one-shots, and I’d easily recommend this, with the caveat that it’s going to make you do work.

Break a leg saving, solving, and surviving!

Spoiler-heavy player handouts for Another Bug Hunt!

See the rest of the review and some of my prep here

Scenario 2 has some high highs and some throw-you-in-the-deep-end stuff.

Shipbreaker’s Toolkit and the APC

It feels a little weird that in the absence of a description of the APC, the module doesn’t call out something like, “details on the APC are available in the Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, or feel free to make it up yourself.” Because the toolkit is inessential for running most adventures, and an APC isn't a ship, it’s easy to miss that the APC is in there, even if you have it. I realized it was there during our one-shot, which is bad timing, but I was appreciative of not needing to improvise it.

Ride of the Valkyries

Scenario 2 opens with the suggestion of an encounter while your friends travel from Greta Base to the Heron Terraforming Station, with the explicit instruction to flesh it out as much or as little as you want.

This leans into play report territory, but I am getting to a point, I swear…

The situation I came up with is that there’s a bend in the path along the river, and just beyond the bend, bugs have downed trees, and dug hidden pits in the jungle. I had already decided that the jungle was majority bamboo, but I did some research on invasive trees that might be used for terraforming in thin soil. Taking elements from Black Locust and Honey Locust felt appropriate: black bark, long thorns, sparse leaves, and big pods. Alien-sounding, but purely terrestrial.

On the ride, the player in the turret spotted a glimpse of a carc in a tree. I used trait 73 from the random table, but that wasn’t rolled randomly. I decided to progressively ramp up the weirdness of traits. That paid off as players developed competing theories about them, and gradually had elements of those theories confirmed or (more often) contradicted.

The players decided that rather than ramming the trees, firing the APC’s mortar, or going off-road, two of them would get out and investigate, which is terrific horror movie logic. They got ambushed, one of their backup marines was dismembered and left comatose, before the carcs were drawn away by Valdez.

It is amazing that with around a hundred words the authors set up such a fertile but well-bounded prompt to get new Wardens to stretch their legs. Masterful, economical pedagogy.

Running NPCs

Heron Station's NPCs are… daunting. You’re given more than enough information to do a good job with Valdez, Brookman, and especially Edem, but damn, running a situation where three NPCs are in the same spot and all trying to get you to go along with their competing plans is intense.

This was intimidating, and in my pursuit of guidance I came across a couple reviews of the module that called this out as a difficult spot to put a novice GM in, which was reassuring. The warden's manual focuses on the roles of NPCs in an adventure, more than the front-line work of playing an NPC, so wasn't much help. I will come back to the interaction between the warden’s guide and published modules in a later post, because I think that dynamic is interesting.

I mitigated the issue by having Valdez give her spiel to the players outside the base before you’ve met anyone else, but it still felt like a juggling act.

I liked having Sobol as the voice of god to answer questions about the base and technology. They're enriched past being an info-dump by their suspicions about Hinton, which Valdez can dismiss as prejudice.

Edem’s secret is a great opportunity to stress-test the lack of social abilities, and frankly, it just works. It works for players to ask, “can I get a read on this?” and be told that she seems like she’s hiding something, and let them pick at it. I didn’t feel like it lost anything at all by not being hidden behind a roll.

I think I under-developed Brookman, but my friends decided they would go to the lab and then the tower, which feels like the default path a lot of groups will take, although I'm sure that my bias leaked in. 

Hinton’s Whereabouts and the Logic Core

One bit of timeline-breaking is that if the players find the long-range scanner in Greta Base and then speak to Valdez in Heron Station, you get two tough-to-reconcile reports on Hinton’s location: he’s already up in the mountains, but he just went down to the reactor. Not impossible, but I thought it was more interesting to lean into the weirdness.

Meanwhile, what is there to stop you from calling down a dropship and just waiting for it to arrive without ever engaging with the later material?

My solution was:

Hinton managed to either clone or surgically remove his logic core (yes, hand-wavey sci-fi), and it is in the mothership, which is what is being picked up by the scanner. He really did go down to the reactor. Sobol can speak to android technology, and that he doesn’t have an answer for how he could be in two places.

When you restore comms, Maas is enthusiastic and then asks for the identification number off the logic core, which would require either physically having it or getting that information from Hinton. He does not respond in any way after requesting it.

When you get to Hinton at the end of part 3, he has already deduced everything, and is more than happy to hand over his logic core, for his own nefarious reasons.

I was happy with how all of this played out. The downside was that spending time on this siphoned time away from other prep that I should have done, like writing evocative descriptions that I’m not good at improvising.

The Laboratory

The laboratory was pleasantly self-contained, but I made a mistake. The party was extremely cautious going in and engaging with Ziegler, and I let them get the jump on him and had him less far along in his infection, because I just didn’t think another fight with a carc would be fun in the moment. The issue was that it made the whole laboratory feel very minor. That was the wrong call, and the module doesn't bear any blame for that.

The Dam and the Tower

Without getting into play-by-play, the dam and the tower went better than I could have expected. I’ve heard of prepping situations instead of props, and loading them up with potential energy, and this was an incredible demonstration of that power. The players’ actions, the complications, and the consequences flowed naturally, and ended up cinematic and exciting. I think it hinges on the attack ending with the death of the carc as a release valve, because otherwise the situation would be doomed. There’s lots I bet I can learn by studying this section, and this was the highlight of the whole adventure. The only snag was that the players who got into the control room didn’t understand that they could kill the carc, and I’m not sure how I could’ve communicated it better. One of the others was on the roof (the fourth was hiding in the storage room at the base of the tower with a broken collarbone after being knocked down when Brookman slipped on the ladder), and he did get it and eventually asked, “why aren’t you killing it?”

The Reactor

Spoiler-free player-facing mission organization chart for Another Bug Hunt, plus a somewhat inaccurate map for players to fumble with (it worked well with my group, imo!)

See the rest of the review and some of my prep here.

I've seen lots of reviews of Another Bug Hunt, some of them by people who've played it. Fewer by people who've played the whole thing, and none by the target audience: people who haven't run RPGs before.

Well, I had never run RPGs before, but now I've run Another Bug Hunt, both as a one-shot and a full adventure.

My history with RPGs

I’m a nerd in my thirties, so I’m in the weird spot of having played way more RPGs than gen-pop, but way way less than someone who is “into” RPGs. In the past fifteen years, I’ve played Pathfinder 1E, D&D 5E, Invisible Sun, Candela Obscura, and a handful of rules-light systems. All together, I had probably played around 30 sessions of RPGs, and never run any except the game I made for my (at the time) three-year-old last year.

I came across Mothership because I’d been kicking around an adventure idea for a few years and was trying to find a system that would fit. I watched the Quinns Quest review and bought the Core Set from a local store. Thank you Sword & Board for stocking cool games so that I will give you money!

Greta Base

I ran the first scenario once as a one-shot, before playing through the whole adventure with another group.

The first act is completely self-contained. There's stuff you can pull in from elsewhere, but it was a joy to prep: eat the book and then fill in any details you want to add. I didn't feel like there was extra work I had to do just to make it run, so I could focus on tweaking and adding stuff to make it my own.

Some considerations:

If your party has been lucky with their load-outs (especially getting a laser cutter) they have a good chance to kill the bug, and there's no backup threat. This caught me off-guard in the one-shot. That said, the game didn't need more violence to stay tense.

Both my parties considered either blowing up the bandolier of grenades, or the fuel in the garage. Because those are so predictable, I would've loved a WES (Warden Education System) blurb on making those rulings.

The illustration of the base and the mini-map gently contradict each other (where exactly are the ducts supposed to be in the picture?), so I made a few changes.

More extensive ducts connecting the barracks, control room, and commissary, with an egg inside if I wanted to spring a newborn on the group.

A retrofit after-market duct attaching the showers to the garage. This made my group super paranoid, which was great.

Having the medbay and the freezer back onto each other, connected by a duct with roof access. I put a ladder on the east side of the base, with an AC box you could smash to get in. My players didn't do that, but a carc did.

Backup Characters

Once you get to the Heron Terraforming Station in Scenario 2 there are excess NPCs to use as backup characters. I had a player take over Dr. Kawaguchi, because you're probably going to be heavy on marines.

Back in Greta Base, you don’t have that option. The module does suggest having extra marines, but the module and the Warden’s Operations Manual didn't make me feel confident running them.

Unless you're okay with your friends sitting around dead, any Mothership session needs a strategy for backup characters. If I run Greta base again, I'll have everyone roll a backup and run them as contractors. That's an extra rules ask, but I think it's a worthwhile upfront investment.

The Option of Running

I've had one out of nine players flee from the garage. With how small the base is and how aggressive the bug is, I think its hard for players to see running as anything other than the shortest-term solution.

The ideal outcome of the encounter is that the bug is injured, flees, and begins stalking the players. Unfortunately, my two groups just killed it.

I would try (in the most OSR-way) to weigh the situation and rulings towards a wound being the most likely outcome. It might be heavy handed, but treating both the fuel and the bandolier of grenades as the explosives in the equipment list (Body Save or take a wound) is probably the cleanest solution.

Let me run this again and again

The first act of the game is incredible. It feels like a repertoire piece: it's living in my head and I would happily run this as a one-shot again and again.

Play Experience

This is not advice for drafters. This is about what I'm trying to cultivate. I know better than to assume it has worked.

My favourite Magic is when you're able to devote your attention to how your cards interact, understanding what your opponent is trying to do, and the choices that come from that. I want players to tap into that quicker than Magic often allows.

That means:

Cards that are easy to understand quickly...

Iconic cards

Succinct rules text

Cards that say what they do without players flipping them, relying on an external reference, or parsing unusual layouts

...But not necessarily clear in their role.

Open-ended effects

"Combo-adjacent": there are (essentially no outright combos, but there are cards that look like combo pieces.

Cards that don't necessarily do what they're known for elsewhere

A need to improvise, rather than find scripted lines

Drawing attention to what your opponent is doing

Leaning on symmetrical effects

Fact or Fiction-style mini-games

A decent amount of hand disruption and "peaking" (e.g. Gitaxian Probe)

Keeping interaction powerful, but requiring mana - if your opponent is tapped out you aren't going to be blown out by a free spell

Clones. Too many clones.

Biasing toward "small games" to keep board states coherent

Embracing cards that reduce the number of game pieces you need to track

Limiting comprehension complexity & other distractions

Using named mechanics sparingly

Limiting distinct and/or confusable tokens (Okay, but I'm way too high on Copies)

Avoiding shuffling more than necessary

Sidestepping trivia checks where I can

More than anything, I want you to have a good time with your friends, and I'll break away from any of these tactics if I think it improves the experience, or if I just think it would be interesting.

With all due respect to barbarians and apologies to Orwell, "break any of these rules sooner than [cube] anything barbarous."

"And what's just taste?"

Creatures are relatively small and lean aggressive: Lots of 2/2s, and [more 3/2s than 2/3s]

Non-creatures are peaks of power

Lots of moving cards between zones: bouncing, blinking, milling, discarding, sacrificing, casting from graveyard, and looting

Computer simulation of infection timelines in the module Another Bug Hunt (Chapman, Crader, Gearing, Gerding, Kimball, Vaupen, 2023) for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG.

I got asked on Discord, so confirming that yes this real, but it's very noisy. It's a simulation of 64 random characters (roll Sanity, apply the bonuses for a random Class), and then roll the infection procedure (2d10 hours until next check, then Sanity check to see if infection progresses) until infection gets to Stage 5.

Bars to the left of centre are less wordy, less obscure, fewer keywords. Bars to the right are wordier, more obscure, more keywords.

User haganbmj created a cube comparison tool to help select cubes at CubeCon. I shared it with the local Discord and they brought up the possibility of a single "complexity index." I don't think that's really possible, because of how, uh, complexly the different contributors interact with each other, but I did want to try to visualize some key elements.

I took the cubes at Untap TO (using lists as of November 1, 2025, not the date of the event) and plotted the z-scores for their wordiness (average of word count with and without reminder text), obscurity (negative average card popularity), and unique keywords.

Some dynamics you do and don't see above:

Desert cubes like Volcano Manor are going to have much lower word counts! However, the keyword count shows that Tom is keeping that kind of complexity down

The nature of reminder text is going to vary hugely: basically no one needs a reminder of what Reach does, but creating a Map token really does need that text... but there should also be a discount for repeating keywords. Klaykl also pointed out that reminder text might only be present in Scryfall's data depending on rarity (that is, commons and uncommon a get reminder text that rates and mythical don't)

Similarly, the tool's keyword count includes evergreen stuff that is just table stakes for getting through any game of Magic.

Card popularity should give a discount on word count. This is individual specific. I think you could have people calibrate by reviewing a sample of a couple dozen cards of different popularity bands and noting which ones they would have to read. That'd give you an empirical curve to use to apply that discount.

The "unusual layouts" data is interesting, but a very broad bucket. DFCs are the real criminals here. Split cards are intuitive, I have no way to know what a Strixhaven dean does.

Some factors might need to be adjusted for cube size. For example, 10oz has a lot of keywords, but it's also the biggest cube.

This only captures card-level summary stats, and doesn't capture the gameplay. See more thoughts here: Absolute vs Experienced Complexity

Obscurity is based on the percentage of Cubes include the cards. There are cards that will be better known from other contexts, like multiplayer staples or current Standard cards. How much a difference that makes depends on the individual (I don't know Standard or EDH)

I have no plans to continue working on this; just something I wanted to explore and think about a little.

I've been working on my own cube for quite a while now, but what that means is I put some good and beloved cards together, play it once, have a meh experience, and take it apart... then I get the cube itch and repeat the cycle.

Do you have any advice/resources on coming up with a vision for your cube? My "vision" if you could call it that has been basically not Vintage cube (I play enough of that) and wanting something fun to play with my friends, most of whom like Limited the most. That's fine, but it leaves me adrift when it comes to card choices, power band, etc.

Thanks for reading and happy cubing~

Oh this is such a a good question, and I don't have a clean answer because vision is so personal and elusive! I have a few thoughts and recommendations.

First, I think it's way easier to work on improving a set of cards in front of you than it is to come up with a digital list you're happy with. I think it gets your brain firing differently, just seeing and touching the cards. Sounds like you're already up and running with "just at least make something."

For what it's worth, my initial vision for Pink Sleeves was to build something we could draft for free. Once I did that, it became pruning confusing stuff and feel bads. Once I was happy with that, I moved to making it more elegant and atomic. Now that I'm mostly happy with that and I'm pushing more explicitly for pursuing my own taste. So it's iterative and I went years without more vision than just making something that worked for me and my friends.

My other cube, Forbidden Trash came about because I was inspired by Inscryption's Bones mechanic (imagine Delve, except you have no way to ever recur your graveyard), and the discard deck in Slay the Spire. I had a lot harder time executing that, and I wrote about it here. I don't think that essay really answers your question, but might give you a sense of the process I went through.

I've also had several ideas that I was just never satisfactorily able to follow through on. I think there's a degree of serendipity with finding an idea that you're passionate enough about to stick with, and where the pool of existing cards feels like it's providing further inspiration, rather than limiting you

On an elementary level, playtest and notice what feels good and interesting and what feels bad and tedious. Then add and cut cards to get more of what you like and less of what you don't. That core loop is way more important for developing something you're excited about than balance or whatever. That also doesn't have to mean actually getting a draft together, it can be looking at packs or doing mock drafts or gold fishing or anything else that has you looking at the cards you've picked and how they interact with each other.

In the absence of a bigger, motivating vision, a good approach is to pick a handful of cards that you want to be important in the cube and build out from there. For Pink Sleeves, Goblin Bombardment, Parallax Wave, and Living Death are a few of the cards I've retroactively identified as core pillars that I want to stick out. Lucky Paper Radio has done a few episodes where they talk through this process, and I'd highly recommend those. Episode 182 was the first, and 197 was another.

September 14, 2025 | cubecobra.com/c/pink | cards mentioned

Pink Sleeves was featured at Untap TO and fired two eight-seat pods. My immediate takeaway on the day was, “jeez, I have no idea how games played out.” As deck pics and comments came in on Discord I was able to piece together a better idea, and I want to collate some of that experiential data. I was fortunate to get several thousand words of feedback over the next week, and I’m incredibly grateful that almost everyone who drafted the cube talked to me in person or afterward. Quotes are… pretty direct but not exact.

My goal is to capture some of the experiences and conversations to inform future changes, but also as a time capsule of this era of the cube, as I have some interest in making some larger scale changes over the next phase of Pink Sleeve’s life.

The Prompt

I took a heavy hand and wrote the below prompt, and tagged everyone (as far as I knew) that drafted the cube.

For folks who drafted Pink Sleeves at Untap, some prompts:

What moments, lines, or interactions stand out in your memory?

What did games feel like they made you focus on?

Were there any cards that felt like they didn't belong here? Especially if it wasn't because of power level

Was there anything that felt out of line with your expectations? For good or bad?

Why did you rank this cube?

You're welcome to talk about power balance, but I'm much more interested in hearing about how it felt to play. You also don't owe me anything! I hope you had fun!

Trophy Decks

🏆 Devin’s 3-0 Busy Izzet Mage

This comes with an asterisk, because this table didn’t realize that How to Keep an Izzet Mage Busy is a sorcery. Reading the card… uh, says what the card is, but this is still a sweet deck and if no one realized then I guess that’s what happens.

Devin: “I was effectively a combo deck, so I was staying alive and slowly growing my creatures and answering important threats until I dug to HTKAIMB and enough lands. I loved the vibes of the packs I’d seen and wanted to play cubes I hadn’t gotten to.”

It’s hard to imagine ever cutting HTKAIMB, but it has the unpleasant dynamic where your opponent only sees it when it’s providing value. They don’t see it if it’s rotting in your hand. Koby gave the solid suggestion of Flame Jab as a more fair alternative, but I agree with Gray that the novelty is a lot of the appeal.

Nat: “I think it’s the type of card that’s good in good decks more than anything else. It’s basically Tendrils of Agony, but in this environment if you take it reasonably early you’re bound to stumble into ways to make it good. Guttersnipe is not a particularly great card that becomes good with this one, but also if your opponent kills all your things it literally does nothing.

Devin: “Yeah, I usually hate Guttersnipe but was excited to have it in this deck. Lack of evasion made Kiln Fiend extremely mediocre even in this deck that was very good at triggering it.”

Koby: “[Kiln Fiend] is very narrow and risky. There are better or more flexible cards. I would sooner play Thermo-Alchemist because even in non-spellslinger aggro it represents 1 damage per turn, and in the current meta of creating tokens Kiln Fiend is getting chumped for days. Thermo-Alchemist also procs Harmonic Prodigy.”

Bill: “I got slapped by HTKAIMB.”

🏆 Dom Harvey’s 3-0 Bant Blink

Dom commented that Soulherder was an enjoyable part of a fun deck, but asked about the perception of it being a disliked card, as it’s “too blunt a push for a repetitive archetype.” I hadn’t given that much thought. The card has been a staple in the cube since its early days [I checked; June 2020, about eight months after it was first drafted], but I can definitely see that.

The positives I see are that it’s a simple, clear signpost that depends on the cards around it. The repetition and being a much better blocker than attacker are negatives, and it’s certainly contributing to big games, with Eternal Witness, Mulldrifter, Whirler Rogue, Bramble Sovereign, Thragtusk, Sun Titan, and Esika’s Chariot all being targets that can inflate hands and board states. I’m very open to cutting it in the next phase of Pink Sleeves.

Parallax Wave and Esika’s Chariot continue to be pillars of power.

Themes

The Cool Thing Not Working

Brent: “I went 0-3 with truly brainless monogreen. I tried to build into lands matter and then mostly ate shit into the average removal card. Had a great time though. I did get Managorger Hydra on board with Evolution Sage at one point and cast Crop Rotation into Prismatic Vista. That was cool. George get big… but my threats were almost always answered with efficient removal.”

Pav ran into problems with WB Reanimator. “I had zero guidance from my early picks, so I figured I could grab some reanimation spells and worry about picking up bombs later. It never happened. I found very few necessary pieces to make it flow.” I think the reanimator deck is awkwardly supported. I’ve deliberately put it together to rely on lucky draws in order to really go off - creatures aren’t binning themselves, there’s no Entomb, etc, and I think I need to re-think that. Living Death and Exhume is a deck I absolutely want to support, but I don’t want to trap players with visions of reliable turn 2 cheat that take multiple pieces aligning.

As Koby put it, “holding up countermagic and pecking away with birds and spirits is boring to a lot of people, they’d rather do a cool Jegantha pile or something.”

Flying Tokens, Reach, Big Games, and Removal

Emphasizing the power of 1/1 flying tokens, Enzo praised Noose Constrictor: “I mostly picked it up as a discard outlet, but it saved my ass against Jeskai flyers.”

Kirin said, “ultimately it was spirit token spam that won me games. My opponents had very few fliers or reachers.”

I don’t want to revamp my removal, but it deserves to be thought about. While Brent’s deck got picked apart by efficient removal, Kirin’s board states ballooned with a lack of removal and his own token spam. Nat attributed one match win to an opponent not having removal.

Piloting a WB Aristocrats Control hybrid, Ryan said, “at no point did I feel games were completely unwinnable, and I felt like I had outs to most board states.” I love to hear that, but we’re seeing that it wasn't a universal experience.

Chris had trouble interacting with opponents, but “I think the interaction is just weird packs breaking, Swords to Plowshares is in the cube, and there’s plenty of good black removal, I just got Disfigure, Liliana of the Veil, Primal Might (banger by the way), and Voracious Hydra. Beast Within seems like a cruel trick and seeing that when I needed removal felt sad. A 3/3 is so much to give to someone and casting it on your own stuff is a big ask. Maybe Song of Dryads as similar broad targeting removal?” I’m interested in making that swap, and am thinking about Ulvenwald Tracker, which is more repetitive than I like, but would put downward pressure on board states, including flyers.

It would be easy to group all of this feedback together and say that I need more, less efficient removal. That might be true, but I don’t think so. It would also be easy to say that this is just an artifact of how packs broke and how different players prioritized interaction. That’s probably a little true.

The idea I want to explore is adding more removal that hits multiple targets, or otherwise shrinks the board beyond 1-for-1’s. Arc Lightning has been amazing, and I think that some less efficient but more powerful removal would do the list some good.

Are Typal and Threshold Things?

Devin asked about creature types and Threshold, based on seeing Heirloom Blade and Mindwhisker. Heirloom Blade (as any Usman Jamil will tell you) is just really good, but does specifically support Humans here, but can also hit plenty of Soldiers, Wizards, Elementals, and Constructs. It’s almost always a card, and I’m not worried about this as a mis-interpretable signpost, but I am leaning towards cutting it just for having so many words..

Threshold is less specific, but it plays nicely with Sultai self-mill strategies, whether that’s blue spell recursion, black reanimation, green lands, or Laboratory Maniac. I’m torn on whether this is a trap. I have been very happy with the Threshold cards (Shoreline Looter is the other), both in my own decks and seeing them played by others, and I think I would lean further into it rather than cutting it. There are also a couple Delirium cards that are adjacent.

Dom commented that Hedron Crab felt like a cool, legit threat, but, “Ashiok, Dream Render was the main headscratcher for me. When Rob played it against me it felt like the game was immediately about that and nothing else. It’s a very polarized and polarizing card. At the other extreme it would do nothing versus the Boros decks except randomly screw someone who drew their one Prismatic Vista.”

What I’ve seen previously is Ashiok enabling Lab Man and Living Death. In that role, and because the static comes up less in a fetchless environment, I’ve liked it, but that’s obviously too narrow a view to take, and I think it should go.

Field of the Dead and Parsing Lands

Brent: “Mono-Green lands was fun to draft, but despite consistently finding cards that I thought were shoe-ins for a lands-based deck, the top-end of trying to get Field of the Dead online really didn’t come together until much too late in the games.

The AFR showcase printings of Evolving Wilds and Hive of the Eye Tyrant also mixed up a drafter, and I think the easiest patch is to replace or cut that Evolving Wilds, which I’ve been planning to do anyway.

The creature lands in general were a challenge. Chris had multiple landfolk and Aidan said, “the variety of different options of blocks he could make, ways he could spend his mana, etc. was a bit overwhelming and difficult to keep track of, and led me to make some unforced errors.” Aidan attributed some of this to his own abilities, which is probably accurate, but doesn’t discount the sentiment at all. That just makes him my target audience. On top of that Chris and Nat pointed out the potential (but not observed) feel-bads of surprise Mishra’s Factory and Blinkmoth Nexus blocks.

Worse than any of the above, my “playtest” proxies of shocklands slipped in their sleeves. This caused frustration to multiple players as they miscounted lands, especially but not only with Field of the Dead in play. This is a basic and embarrassing error that I will 100% be fixing as soon as possible. Sorry Ryan!

Speaking of Field of the Dead, Chris asks how reasonable it is since I switched to triple shocks? I never truly saw it go off even before the change, so it’s probably time to swap it out. It’s passed into trap territory.

Contested Colours and Signals

I made the executive decision to include a Cogwork Librarian in every Pack 1 after I saw that none of the other cubes at Untap had any rules modifications except the lone desert cube. I knew that was probably bad for the tables, but I wanted to inject some novelty into the event and people have fun with them. They can be like candy for breakfast. I heard positive things about them, people were excited to talk about how many copies drafters were able to hoard, and they give the feeling that you can force a synergistic deck, but they also really mess up signals.

In the first draft, Aidan and Ryan both ended up in WB, while Enzo and Chris were both in different densities of Abzan colors. Devin, Bill, and Cameron were in subsets of Jeskai colours, and only Tim found an open lane with Dimir. The second draft had Rob and Dom (the 3-0) in Bant plus Logan in Sultai, and Nat and Kirin both got 2-1’s with WR. People struggled to divide into lanes, and this was a strong group of drafters: four of the names I’ve mentioned in this paragraph finished in the top 8, and two more were just outside.

As Enzo put it, “some key things wheeled for me, others didn’t. Mind you, we had Cogworks, so I didn’t really expect anything, and was pleased and reassured I found my seat because things wheeled and I was getting the pieces I had hoped for.” Then what happened? “Both times,” (let me come back to that), “I was surprised there was another Golgari player at the table.” Both times, because this wasn’t even Enzo’s first time finding himself drafting Abzan at a table with another Abzan drafter. “Perhaps there’s too much support for this archetype if it supported two players. Are there any noticeable underdrafted archetypes over the last few runs of Pink Sleeves?”

Well that’s a great question.

Since August 2024 (when I made a large set of changes), Pink Sleeves has been drafted 14 times. Important to note that this data includes a variety of pod sizes, only sometimes had Cogwork Librarians, and once had an extra 90 cards added to the cube for a 10-player draft, which was Enzo’s previous experience. Depending on how you want to count (or not count) three-colour decks, WU and RW are the most commonly paired, and RG and GU the least. Before I counted, I was entirely open to the theory that Golgari and Abzan were overly attractive colour combinations. I’m still sympathetic to it, but it’s not obviously backed up by the data. I’m not trying to capture which decks are good, I want to know which colour combos draw in drafters, and it seems more likely this is a signalling problem than a BG problem.

You can also look at the percentage of drafts with at least one deck for each colour combination. That approach sees RW and BR show up the most often, and RG show up the least. That doesn’t tell me a lot, but it at least doesn't identify BG as exceptional.

Miscellaneous Comments

Koby pointed out Fallaji Archaeologist as an upgrade on Augur of Bolas, which I’m pretty happy swapping. Similarly, the misleadingly-flavoured Self-Destruct over Fling.

Embercleave and Balance were both mentioned as draws to the cube.

General positivity from people about Parallax Wave. Aidan praised it as a generically good card “that makes for very interesting games,” but also appreciated that the proxy draws attention to the fact that it’s not that complicated.

I was glad to hear Kirin mention that he “was happy to maindeck Dryad Militant and Containment Priest. I would have loved another hatebear type effect.” That’s a texture I’d like to lean into more, but it’s tough to balance the vibes. Thalia, Heretic Cathar is a perfect speed bump, but Thalia, Guardian of Thraben leads to people needing to roll back, or realizing they forgot about the effect two turns ago, which I hate to see happen. It’s just such an unfortunate feeling. Doorkeeper Thrull might be in the sweet spot.

The potential for interesting downticks with Saheeli, Sublime Artificer was highlighted by Rob (who duplicated Hedron Crab), as well as Chris and Dom.

Containment Construct is cool, but Nat cast it as a Goblin Piker. Goldhound raised some eyebrows, and pretty much any 2/1 for R would’ve been preferred.

Maybe too much green top end, says Chris.

From the sidelines, Koby says, “Goblin Bombardment is a crazy outlier that’s difficult to interact with.” I agree, but it’s an outlier that I want to be an outlier. I am interested in more answers for enchantments (and to a lesser extent artifacts). The game is just more engaging when you have to decide whether you want to die to Goblin Bombardment or Sulfuric Vortex.

And finally, here’s the blurb for the back cover, courtesy of Chris:

“A lot of my games focused on the board, attacking and blocking, but they were interesting to navigate without being overwhelming, which is honestly refreshing. This cube feels great every time I draft it, super sweet stuff going on, and a ton of cards I love.”

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