Thursday, July 10, 2014

Cube

After a loooooong gestation period, I have continued to build a cube. I think I started picking cards for this in September of last year and then just let them sit for awhile. It's time to get this set going though.

Don't worry, don't worry: I haven't left One Shot At Glory in the dust, I just haven't had a moment to play that deck since the Legacy event, with the Conspiracy drafting and the Commander play. I'll get on that deck again this weekend, if all goes well and will have the final post about it on Tuesday.

But the cube: I decided I would pull the worst (but still potentially playable) card I could find from every color, from every set I owned. The card had to be bad (or boring) but it couldn't be bad and unplayable; think Flowering Lumberknot as an example for something that is bad and unplayable in the cube I'm building. About halfway through (Mercadian Masques, I think) I realized that I probably wanted to pull two bad cards from each color from the larger sets, just to ensure that I would have enough cards and creatures to make it work!

Shortly after that, I recognized that I was putting in a ton of really expensive, difficult to cast cards, so I started to ramp up the artifact mana fixing, just to make it playable. I want people to play shitty cards; if they can't then I'm going against my purpose.

In the meantime, I've started to make a spreadsheet for the cube, so I can see what's in there and what is needed. It's not finished yet but I should have all the entries done in a few days. I can see which large blocks I only have one card from (Ice Age through Urza's Saga being the most likely) and that might allow me to add in some cards that will give the cube some balance.

White, for example, has a ton of instants; probably too much and I can easily see that's an issue, so it can be tweaked to add more card types. In a set like Innistrad (one which many drafters consider to be one of the best draft sets ever) the number of creatures in a 249 card set is approximately 133, and this is without counting spells that make tokens. So it seems like I want to have a little over half my cards to be creatures in this cube. The spreadsheet will hopefully make managing all the information a task I can actually accomplish.


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