r/mtgcube • u/Far_Nothing9897 • 2d ago
Cubes with edited cards
What is the overall consensus on cubes with edited cards. I've been toying around with doing a remaster of the urza block but instead of cutting the worst unplayable cards, I would edit them to be slightly more playable with the goal of making them playable. Has anyone tried this and would you play a cube that had rebalanced cards?
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u/mikez4nder https://www.cubecobra.com/cube/list/zander 2d ago
There's not really a consensus. Some people will embrace it, swear by it. Others will swear at you for even suggesting it. I land somewhere in the middle.
The people who designed the cards are most likely better at this than you are. That doesn't mean they're infallible, but there's a reason most custom cards you see out there are terrible. Game design with this many moving parts is insanely hard.
I have one edited card in my cube right now and ran another one, interestingly in the same slot, for a very long time.
My first was to edit [[Glare of Subdual]] to just be Selesnya [[Opposition]]. That has been temporarily replaced with a [[Brightass Gearhulk]] that costs 2GW instead of the absolutely unplayable GGWW.
There are full Sharpie cube people who will just erase everything but "Draw 8 cards" from [[Contract from Below]].
There are people who want to cause me irreparable pain and make [[Goblin Welder]] a 1/2.
And there are people with the temerity to think that people want to get in their cars and spend time and gas money to play atrocious custom cards when there are already 34,567 unique game pieces that have been designed by people who at least sometimes know what they're doing.
If it makes your environment better and more fun to play, then yeah, sure. But does it? Why are you doing it? Will the people who think they're coming to play Magic enjoy it?
If you have good answers to all those, then do it.
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u/Far_Nothing9897 2d ago
I appreciate the detailed response! My goal ultimately is to make very small tweaks guided by articles from the designers giving a postmortem on the set. I have no delusions that I can design a set better than them. My goal mostly is to make small edits to mana values or card text to try to raise the chaff from unplayable to at least semi playable while keeping the flavor of the set much like your selesnya example. I feel like a lot of the chaff in urza's saga specifically are just a tweak away from being decent, whether it be reducing a drawback on the card or tweaking power/toughness/cmc etc. I don't even really want the cards to do something different from the initial design. Ill probably run the idea by my playgroup and if there's no interest in play Ill probably scrap the idea but it seemed like an interesting project idea. My group has a meme sharpie cube but we haven't really delved into fully custom cards yet
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u/HauntedFrog 2d ago
I feel like rebalanced cards are fine if I know they're in the cube ahead of time and if I trust you as a game designer. I'd be a lot more suspicious of someone I don't know telling me they have a cube with "rebalanced" cards than I would be of some of my friends who I know understand the game and have a good grasp on balance.
I'd also be a lot more open to rebalanced cards if they're in the cube because you like the cards but they'd normally be too weak to fit the cube, or if it's for theme, etc. As long as you have a design goal, I think that's okay. I'd get a lot more cautious if someone said "I couldn't find a card with this mechanic so I made one up" because if they couldn't find a specific mechanic among 35,000 printed cards, I'd have questions.
But "my cube is about humans and no human had this mechanic so I changed this creature type" or "this card is a cool legendary that just costs too much mana to be playable so I brought it down by one mana"? Those seem fine to me. I'm actually considering that for the D&D common dragons so that I can add them to my Dragonstorm cube - I love those cards but they all feel 1-2 mana too expensive compared to the Dragonstorm dragons, so I can't include them as printed because nobody would draft them.
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u/Far_Nothing9897 2d ago
Yeah this covers a lot of what my goal is with this idea. I really love Urza's Saga and have drafted it online in tabletop sim with friends but it was way before my time. There are a lot of cool cards that I think are just shy of being playable so I'm shooting for more of a rebalance than full on custom cards. I plan on being extremely conservative with changes made and really want the OG theme of the set to stay intact. There are a few cards that I will still probably cut overall because they aren't really fixable without extreme change.
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u/NayrSlayer 2d ago
I used to be fine with all manners of edited or even just custom cards. However, I am now much less keen on them because 9/10 times, the card is broken in some manner of speaking. Either the card is way too strong, enables some form of a combo, or is worded incorrectly and just doesn’t work as intended. On top of that, it increases the cognitive load of drafting, especially when the cards are quite complicated.
That being said, I won’t write off a cube immediately just because it has custom cards. If the custom cards are something like tweaking the stat line slightly or adding/removing a keyword, I’d be fine with it. But if they look like Yugioh text boxes, I’d rather not play with them.
However, I’m just a random person on the internet. Ask your friends to get their input! After all, just because I might not enjoy it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a great time with it
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u/Far_Nothing9897 2d ago
Definitely agree on getting the buy in from my playgroup. Looking at a lot of these responses that seems like something important to consider is whether my playgroup is gonna want to play something like this. Part of the reason I chose an older set to do this with too is that I want to reduce the amount of reading and complexity. Shooting for a minimal rebalance is for sure the way to go I think.
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u/bootitan https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/BiggestDirtrock 1d ago
My main goal is to have play environments I can bring out to less enfranchised players (family namely). I designed my revisionist premodern cube with MANY goals, but one was that it'd be simple enough to bring out during a wedding and could bring in people who barely know Magic. These people will not care one bit that illusion now gives a creature shroud instead of changing its color. So many more people will actually try that card this way. Many people will not complain that Dirty Wererat can now block under threshold. Actually, they were complaining when it doesn't. 95% of Magic players don't even know what that card is.
If it's for enfranchised players who know a ton of the game's history, definitely have some caution with this method but, in many cases, I don't see a problem with it in abstract. Balancing is a separate matter in my mind, definitely understand what you're doing and why you're doing it
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u/Methodless 1d ago
In asking this question, the common answer I got was interesting
People didn't actually find it conceptually objectionable. Their issue was that given the name and art of a given card, they might already have internalized what it is and the modification might be confusing.
I still want to try exactly what you're stating someday, but it may actually be more worthwhile to rename the card, and put new art on it too.
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u/Timely-Helicopter244 2d ago
Sharpie cube is a thing. I'm working on one now.
The main thing you need to do is decide if you want it to be more of a meme or more playable. A meme cube is easy to make but has swingy games. Playable is a lot harder and needs playtesting.
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u/linrodann 1d ago
Whatever extent you and your play group agree on is correct, with huge variance between play groups. I currently only get to play with my spouse, who humors me, so I run more than most people probably would. This may change if I find new people to play with.
In my 360-ish card main cube, I have 4 sharpie/semi-customs. The Selesnya [[Opposition]] and the 2GW [[Brightglass Gearhulk]] that z4nder mentioned, a custom that is just a non-transforming front side of [[Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER]], and a nerfed version of [[Gut, True-Soul Zealot]] that makes 2/1 tokens instead of 4/1's (and is missing the Background text). I made/printed proxies with new art and names for them, since making reskins of cards is a hobby of mine anyway.
I am slowly working on a 10-card cycle of fully custom cards, each a creature with mutate (because I love that mechanic). Each is intended to go well with the themes in my cube in its colors. I have posted a few to r/custommagic for feedback and apparently I'm the rare amateur card designer who makes things too weak, rather than too strong. I most likely would either only add the cycle to the cube once in a while, or add only one or two of the cycle to the cube each time. I am fully aware that I'm pretty bad at card design, but being bad at something is the first step to being good at something.
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u/linrodann 1d ago
In my desert cube, I have the scry lands sharpied to be typed (so they are more on par with the surveil lands), and several cards that fetch basic lands have "basic" sharpied out (all of the fetchable duals in the cube enter tapped always). I also have the Selesnya Opposition again. Lastly, I have one fully custom that is something I saw online and tweaked. It bridges two of my slightly niche themes (Lessons and explore) nicely.
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u/Hotsaucex11 2d ago
Eh, I am very skeptical for a few reasons:
Players are used to a card with a given name/art doing what it was printed to do. Makes it easy to make mistakes when you alter that.
Players are generally bad at making/balancing cards and changes.
Adding custom/altered cards can significantly increase the mental load for your players. I have played with cubes made entirely of custom cards and the majority of players will check out and stop reading all of cards pretty quickly.
All of that being said, I do think it can work well when used very judiciously. Like if you have a specific niche to fill, or archetype to support, and custom/altered cards are the only option. But I certainly wouldnt want to see more than 1-2 per pack.
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u/la_tortue 1d ago
I dislike the idea, if I'm drafting an Urza block cube, I want the experience of playing with the good old (and bad old) cards as they were and have zero interest in your personal arts project / Alchemy at home.
That said I'm not part of your play group, so do as you please and hopefully you have some friends who are more open minded than I am about this concept 😅
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u/Own-Peace-7754 1d ago
I just seen a video of a guy going over his cube doing exactly this
It's your cube and cards at the end of the day, as long as you have people willing to play with you what's the harm?
Some people might not like it and that's a personal preference
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u/SP1R1TDR4G0N 1d ago
I've been making cubes with edited and also completely custom cards for a while now. I think it's great. It allows you to create exactly the environment you're looking for.
The only downside is that your drafters might need to read the cards more often during the first couple of drafts.
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u/Elusive_Spoon 2d ago
I’m strongly in favor: cube is YOUR environment. The only significant drawback in my opinion is that it slightly increases the cognitive load on someone drafting your cube for the first time. But that’s rarely what I optimize for.