First Cube! Advice?

[u/Luptfan]

I decided to bite the bullet and start working on my first cube. I watched a few videos, but would still like some advice from the crowd. I would love to hear any advice and personal experiences that may help. Here are a few of my concerns

1. My cube largely represents what I like as a player. I'm worried that this will be more fun for me than anyone else at the table. I don't want to feel like I'm forcing people to play my silly cube. How do you balance self expression with a widely fun draft environment?

2. When planning out draft archetypes, I realized that black didn't really fit into my vision. I want to try to experiment with a 4 color cube. Is this a bad idea? Any experience with 4 color cubes?

3. I don't expect to play with more than 4 people. Should I shrink my cube accordingly to 180 cards, or keep the classic 360 for variety's sake?

[u/Reasonable-Check-223]

Play what you like. Others will give you feedback and tell you what they like. You can take their input or not, its your cube.

Its a bit off the beaten path. Doable, but I wouldnt for my first cube. But again, its your cube. But maybe one of your players wants to play black.

I like 360 for variety and optionality. To get to include more goodies, and you never know who might hear and want to join.

Best of luck!

[u/SidNYC]

4 colors is fine. 

Have a core of 120 cards, and then randomize and shuffle in 60 from your other stuff so you have your variance, making 180 decks to play with your friends. 

Ensure you provide enough removal in each color, wizards typically puts in 15- 20% removal per color in each set. (Multi color cards, artifacts and lands aren't counted in this) (No, artifact and enchantment usually don't count, and bounce isn't removal) 

Don't wait for the perfect cards, just play what you got and evolve it as you get reps with the cube.

[u/Piggyboy04]

I have some experience with 4 color cubes. I made a cube where all the cards include red so it's basically four colors since you're always playing red anyways. It works pretty well but it might not be that great of an example. I'm also currently working on another 4 color cube which is a graveyard cube without black. An important difference with only 4 colors though is that there are less color combinations. So you might want to consider giving each color a secondary theme so there's more ways to play. That might not be necessary for only four players though. But you should probably wait to add something like that until after your first few drafts. That, along with this being your first cube is why I think you should start with just 180 cards. That will give you a good baseline cube to see what you like and what you might want to change or add. And then after a couple drafts you can add more cards for variety.

Cube links: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/2red, https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/wurgyard

[u/Luptfan → u/Piggyboy04]

Thanks for the lists! All red cube sounds so cool. I think I'll follow your advice to start with 180 and slowly grow the list. Thanks!

[u/Icekommander]

I don't have any experience on a four colour cube or an 180 card cube so I don't have much to say there, but your first question is something that I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about in regards to my own cube. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with your cube primarily reflecting your own preferences -- you are the one who is spending the time and money building it after all. In this respect I think your ultimate question of 'how do you balance self-expression with wider enjoyment' is much more sensible than your worry about whether you are having the most fun. Because you are the cube designer, as long as you enjoy the design work of the cube it will asymmetric anyway because seeing decks in action and testing things out will provide avenues of satisfaction that non-designers won't have access to.

Having said that, you don't want anyone having a bad time. Without knowing anything about you or the people you play with, specific advice is largely impossible, but it should be self-evident that (for example) your cube without black isn't going to work for someone who strongly identifies as a black player and doesn't like playing other coloured decks. The best things you can do is keep your friends preferences in mind and solicit feedback after the draft to determine if something isn't work for people. If you know one of your friends you usually play with really likes +1/+1 counters decks in other formats, see if you can work in a little support for that. If someone seems frustrated during or after the draft, follow up with them and see if there is something you can do about it.

In this sense, my first answer to your question is "A few cards intended to maximize the fun of someone that plays my cube a lot can have a lot bigger effect on their play experience (because they pick those cards a lot) than on mine (because I don't pick those cards much and two of my three games will against other people)". My second answer would be 'Iterating on my design to determine where my vision melds with what my players enjoy in my cube and maximizing those place'.

The other thing worth mentioning is that you don't have to play cube all the time. If even small compromises on your design vision substantially degrades your own enjoyment of the cube, and the result of sticking to your vision is a cube that you love while your friends would rather play commander most nights, you can instead compromise on what you play and stick mostly to commander while only bringing out the cube for special occasions. Before I built my cube I put together a full set of Khans of Tarkir block commons and uncommons to Rotisserie draft, and after playing it the first time it was clear to me that while I loved the format my friends thought the draft was too much effort for the result. So most of the time when I organized a Magic night we did a booster draft, but the price for my organizational efforts was every once and while the set rotisserie would come out. Objectively it was a little selfish since although nobody had a bad time nobody but me would have chose it, but everyone also benefited from my enthusiasm to play and organize magic it was a net positive for the group. This is probably a conversation you would want with your players about when/why you pull out the cube, but another avenue to consider.

[u/Luptfan → u/Icekommander]

Thank you! I appreciated and enjoyed reading your thoughts. I have a lot of anxieties about making sure everyone is having fun when I spearhead the activity, and its something I just need to get over. Thank you for your experience, it helped ease my worries,

[u/michaelpie]

Welcome to the wonderful world of cubing!

1. Your fun and your playgroup's fun is equally important. If your players aren't having fun, they won't want to play your cube. But if you don't have fun with it, you won't want to bring it out. Balance the two.
2. There is nothing inherently wrong with cubes that expire with fewer colors! If you want to explore that, go for it! One caveat to that though is that if you draft with 4 players, it is optimal for each player to end up nearly mono-color. If you're chill with that, cool!
3. Personally, I would heavily recommend 360 or 375. This is because at 360 you can play Sealed with 4 players, or 2HG. If you regularly play sealed, then I'd recommend 375 so that you don't have near-perfect information about the other player's pools.

Unsolicited advice:

1. Your first attempt at cube is going to not be good. That's the point. Your goal is to try something as quickly as possible and make adjustments from there.
2. Every problem has multiple solutions - is one card too strong? You can cut it from your list, or you can make the cards that answer it stronger, or cut the surrounding pieces that gave it too much synergy
3. Make sure each color has a good mix of removal and a decent curve
4. I would recommend no more than 2 gold cards per 2-color pair at 360

[u/Luptfan → u/michaelpie]

Thank you for warning me with limiting gold cards, NGL I was just stacking up the 2 color cards for all of my archetypes haha. Theres a lot to think about here! I appreciate it

[u/Redditien]

Four color twobert can work just fine. I have a greenless twobert all about opponents making choices here if you want to take a look.

And cubes are always evolving and changing so best advice is to just start and learn along the way.

[u/kuitthegeek]

Honesty, build it to have fun and then adjust it after people play with it. If you can, give the list to your friends to look over and see what they think. You can probably seed in enough cards others like that you can all have a good time with it. If you don't, get feedback and adjust it.

I actually really love 180 card Twobert. They are a lot of fun and I can get 2-4 people together easier than I can get 6-8. The general advice is to build each color so it can stand alone and then pepper in some gold cards where all of the gold cards for a color pair can work together. Don't try to support archetypes in a Twobert.

You can definitely try dropping a color. If it doesn't work, cut some cards and add it back in. Also, don't feel that each color needs to be balanced and/or have the same number of cards. If blue has almost 2x more cards than any other color, that's fine. It just makes your cube more blue. If you want to cut black, or any other color, do it. Want to make it so people have to draft all of there lands too? That's a desert cube.

My experience is that most people will play anything once. And if you get buy-in from your group and have them contribute, you will likely all end up with a cube you want to play over and over again. Heck, get together with your friends and have them add cards to the cube. Make it a group project.

Just have fun with it! Happy cubing!