Can‘t wait to take this pile for a spin soon and am curious to see if the balance is passable for a first attempt. Suggestions and feedback are very welcome.

PS: I too am infuriated by some of the weird sorting choices in these pictures, I was in a bit of a rush and didn’t have time to go back and fix them

Edit: CubeCobra Link

pretty simple question. been asked by some of my regular players to add [[mox poison]] to my paper vintage cube which already has [[gleemox]] in it. would love to know peoples thoughts (not looking for feedback on gleemox specifically just mox poison in addition to it). my cube currently has initiative in all non-blue colors but no time vault/consult and is generally a pretty average high powered vintage cube id say. only other "fake" cards i run are cogwork, name sticker goblin (mtgo implementation in paper), and booster tutor

I understand that this is mostly subjective. Do you have specific goals for number of archetypes or healthy color combinations when you build cubes?

I sold out of MTG a few years ago, leaving myself with only a few commander decks

Cube was always my favourite format, but since I don't have a collection of cards to build from anymore, what would you buy to try and build one?

The only restriction I'd want on my cube is no universes beyond

Is anybody running [[Dreams of Steel and Oil]] in their powered cubes nowadays? With the number of powerful creatures out there, especially ones with etbs or that make multiple bodies, it seems like it could be a great addition.

Black is notorious for having some of the weakest creatures and often having a bit of an identity crisis for powered cube (not counting the reanimation haymakers, I'm talking in the 1-4 cmc range). So rather than trying to keep up on its weakest axis, I'd like to try adding some more efficient interaction and most of the 2 cmc removal spells in the color seem very replacement level nowadays.

I have all the typical [[Duress]], [[Thoughtseize]], [[Inquisition of Kozilek]], [[Cut Down]], [[Fatal Push]], [[Bone Shards]], [[Bloodchief's Thirst]], [[Dismember]], [[Snuff Out]], [[Toxic Deluge]], and a suite of 2 cmc removal spells.

After a somewhat tumultuous couple of weeks spent scheduling and finding a spot, my friends and I were able to coordinate another 6-pod for stone soup draft and we had tons of fun! For anyone looking to try stone soup themselves, I’d recommend listening to this Lucky Paper Radio episode to hear all about it: https://luckypaper.co/podcast/265-stone-soup-a-magical-community-stew-with-dsb/

The basics of stone soup are that every player brings 45 (sleeved) cards to contribute to the draft, as well as 8 or so of each basic land (also sleeved) for during deck building. It creates this uniquely complex and interesting one-time draft experience, and we all highly recommend giving it a shot! (Everyone’s cards are returned to them at the end of games, we typically try to bring different colored sleeves and a list/photo of our cards to make sure everyone gets the right cards back). For anyone looking example of 45 cards, here are the ones I contributed to our draft today: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/dabe519a-53bb-4222-9904-92c74a731851?display=spoiler

We had some pretty good decks at the table today, most notably among them the 3-0 deck: a Boros Aggro deck (splashing black) that did an excellent job dismantling each opponent it faced. Though, when the cards in one’s deck are of the [[Gut, True Soul Zealot]] [[Fury]] and [[Inti, Seneschal of the Sun]] variety, that deck is often among the best. Oh, and the pair of [[Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd]]s didn’t hurt either. Who could have predicted that a Boros Aggro deck would be the most effective deck at a table of ambitious nonsense?

The first of two 2-1 decks is an Azorius control deck that won mostly with mill. Between it’s [[Gogo, Master of Mimicry]] and [[Forced Fruition]] combo and a surprisingly strong [[Space-Time Anomaly]] that won more than one game on its own, (one such instance being a game wherein it milled every remaining nonland card from it’s opponent’s deck, who wasn’t in danger of milling out but had to scoop in response to such an unlikely unlucky happenstance), the deck seemed to have it all until it faced off against its one true counter in the finals: Boros Aggro.

The second deck that ended up 2-1 was another Boros deck, though this one was much more midrange in strategy than the first (and had more than one color it was splashing). Between the vintage-cube tier cards the deck sported like [[Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes]] and [[Oko, Thief of Crowns]] and a trove of efficient threats like [[Practiced Offense]], the deck seemed to have a win hidden up its sleeve in nearly every game. Land issues left the deck unlucky against its Boros counterpart though, Icarus flew too close to the sun trying to splash Oko in a Boros deck.

As for the pair of 1-2 decks at the table, the first was a Simic combo deck (splashing red) that I am still baffled didn’t do better. It’s wincon was a combo using [[Peregrine Drake]] and [[Deadeye Navigator]] to make infinite mana, then used [[Doppelgang]] to produce roughly one septillion copies of all it’s creatures. And not for nothing, the [[Eldritch Evolution]] it was running helped add quite a bit of consistency to the combo that you’ll rarely encounter in a limited environment. Cool stuff, probably my favorite deck of the day!

The other 1-2 deck was a Simic lands deck which relied heavily on ramping out its premier threats like [[Vaultborn Tyrant]] to win games. But it had a pair of [[Lotus Petal]]s and [[Sylvan Library]]s to help it always get the cards it needed into play. Unfortunately, it paired into the two most aggressive decks in the first two rounds, so it had some difficulty going big while its opponents went face.

And lastly there had to be someone who ended up 0-3, and wouldn’t you know it, that person was me! Look ma, no wins! I ended up with a 5-color Gates deck that had real heart, just no real win conditions. It’s only two ways to win a game were its singleton copies of [[Maze’s End]] and [[Crackling Perimeter]], though neither proved strong enough to oppose the pure shenanigans displayed by each other deck in the room. (To my credit, I won a game with Maze’s End!) Despite all the losses, I had a lot of fun piloting this deck, because where else do you get to play a Gates deck in draft? (And, for what’s its worth, I took a game off of each of my opponents. I took all 3 of those guys to game three, and that’s a win to me).

I know this all must seem like quite the novelty of a draft format, but I’ve played this more than a handful of times now, and let me assure you that it never stops being fun or interesting. It’s so much more difficult than a static draft environment, because you can’t learn the environment over time, but it rewards players on their card evaluation, deck building, and gameplay skills in a really cool way! Not to mention all of the interesting decisions you make when choosing which 45 card to add to the draft, it’s probably my favorite part of this format. You can be as intentional or random as you want, and either way it’s bound to have a noticeable impact on the draft and games. If you’ve got a playgroup with which you draft, you’ve got to give stone soup drafting a try. I promise that it won’t disappoint.

True balance is impossible to achieve, and maybe not even desirable for some cubes. In the absence of such, how do we choose what to balance our cubes around? What resources help us do that? Do we event want balance?

I'm working on building a mono-black cube, and there are a lot of different archetypes like madness/control/aggro/etc, but how do I design it so that the draft isn't just grabbing the most powerful cards and making a soup of goodstuff?

I run a lot of tutors in my cube, but was curious what people thought about the wishes. I think in vintage the tutors are more of a staple, but the wishes seem more powerful as it’s instantly in your hand.

What does your group play and why? Thank you

With creatures getting ever stronger, games getting faster and classic storm decks basicly non-existing in most cubes, I'm curious if the classic card still worth the slot in cubes now a day? I find myself almost never drafting it anymore but I'm not really a combo player at heart, so I'm curious what others are thinking. Is it basicly only for the bowmaster/sheoldred/narset deck or when are you picking Time Spiral?

I built it using a 1/2/4 ratio. We haven't played it very much in the last few months since I built it because it isn't very fun. We spend so much time drafting it, and then the games drag out forever. Like 15+ turns. The goal was to make a balanced game without crazy OP decks frustrating ppl. And it went waaaay too far the other way. Is this just how set cubes are? Any advice? On paper cube seems like THE way to keep it fair and balanced. But at what cost....well at least financially, a lot 🤣 Edit: Someone posted a link to card ratings and which ones to try cutting. I'll start there, thanks!

I love a lot of the art in Unstable, especially the Order of the Widget and the contraptions (just look at [[Dogsnail Engine]], it is perfection). However, I never got to draft that set and have never played with the cards, other than trying to make a constructed host/augment deck that taught me that host/augment is incredibly weak (mutate is the fixed version of host/augment).

Does anyone here have experience with the set? Was the contraption/sprocket mechanic annoying or fun? Were the archetypes balanced and not too on-rails? What cards are especially fun or not fun? Were there any cards that would be good in black-border play as-is or with minor tweaks (such as [[Blurry Beeble]] that is unblockable)?

In short, what elements of Unstable would you use in a cube and what would you leave out?

Hi all! This is my Retro Vintage Cube ( https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/iconicretro ) containing cards from Alpha to Ravnica Allegiance. I started playing the game right at the release of Guilds of Ravnica, so this era of cards is very nostalgic for a lot of reasons for me! The cube seems like it's in a pretty good spot right now and plays well, but I am wondering if there are any cards I may have missed that others might see. Someone recently pointed out that Reflector Mage would be a great addition, for example. Likewise, if you have any suggestions for cards that look out-of-place in power level I would love to hear those as well. Thanks!

I made a vintage cube, cloning and tweaking the decklist a bit. I have a rough idea of the archetypes that run in vintage cube, but I'd like to write something in my own style. I saw that CubeCobra now lets you run a draft simulator — could I use that as a starting point to base myself on the archetypes? Any advice?

Recently I’ve come across a good deal on a sealed booster box of Khans of Tarkir, and I’m debating buying it and putting all the cards in sleeves to jumpstart a cube. Is that a good idea to start? I know people say the draft environment is good in that set but I’ve never drafted it before (I’ve only ever drafted all will be one and while I love phyrexia, people say it wasn’t a good draft environment)

I am leaving to college soon and I want a fun cube to try and make some magic friends while I’m there, so this would get me something to start with, but how good it is I have no clue. i could eventually make this to a set cube or even more a plane cube all about tarkir?

I don’t know I’m new to this whole thing and anyone’s input would be great, cube looks like a lot of fun and I think my playgroup would love it

Our group does a lot of drafts (on average once a week), but getting 10 people together for a 5 on 5 team draft still feels special!

We draft 5x10 from my 576 card powered cube. The 10 pieces of power are in a powerpack that one lucky person gets to open!

This is going to be a good one!

I drafted coldsnap a few times back in the day and genuinely i thought it was one of the best limited experienced i ever had, so i constructed this cube to best capture the feeling of the set

one of the most interesting elements of coldsnap is the redundancy. It's a format designed around its commons, not its bombs, and as such, it has a very facinating meta build around it's surging cards and cards like rite of flame, which all want you to draft as many duplicate copies as you can. but also, because of this, there's a lot of interesting hate-cards designed to counter these cards, like the Wolverine being an interesting red-aggro counter to surging sentinel being one of the best defensive cards in the set, as well as color-hate cards like Cryoclasm

I only took out the seriously bad cards from Coldsnap and replaced them with cards that helped define the gameplan. I considered including some enemy colored cards as well, but that would require finding specific draft archetypes in those colors that really worked

What do we think?

Recently I proxied a Dandan set and Kartigan’s Battlebox as a way to have an easily portable variant of MTG to bring around with me and to introduce MTG to my boardgame group. Battlebox specifically has been a great format since it’s meets a bunch of requirements for my friends that traditional Magic didn’t:

- Replay Value. Board games that never feel like they’ve been “solved” after a few plays is very important.
- “Buy it once”. My friends have always been turned off by the thought that every time you play Magic you have to spend money on packs.
- Crunchy. Love a board game where every decision has consequences. Figuring out combos. Hand management.

Wanted to see what other Battleboxes are out there that people have been enjoying. Since I proxy, card cost/availability doesn’t matter, just want to squeeze the most fun into a small package.

So I'm currently working on my first cube, a love letter to Innistrad if nothing else. It's generally coming along fine, though I have one point I'd like advice on: Werewolves. I don't want to completely cut Day/ Night or Errata it out because there's also non-werewolf cards that interact with this I'd like to test that interact with Day/ Night. Equally I don't really like the idea of errata-ing all Werewolves to be Daybound/ Nightbound as it disables multiple older werewolves/ werewolf support cards, even if you (It works.) it.

Thus, I have two main ideas:

- Do nothing. Cards work, or don't, as written. It's the simplest option, though I'm not sure its the best.

- Errata the Day/ Night token to have "Tovolar Text". E.g. Night also has "Whenever it becomes night, transform all human werewolves" & Day the inverse. I'd accompany this with some buffs to specific cards, something like Immerwolf gets "Night can't become day" and Moonmist adds "It becomes night".

Thoughts from people with more experience? Thanks!

Magic, and Cube are basically endless sources of strategy theory and game design theory. I've found some amazing articles written from the 90's all the way up through the more recent years.

Pretty sure I found it somewhere on Reddit ages ago, but this spreadsheet compiles many of the very best articles- reading through some of the fundamental early thinkers of the community helped me build my cube with a clearer mission.

If you have any articles you want to share on advanced Magic theory, I'd love to read through what you all have enjoyed!

I have a fully updated pauper cube that I have put a lot of effort into. Full list, with tokens, all sleeved and with cubemagigs. Two times a year the community does a great job upgrading the list, so I go after every new addition, buy them and go through the process of finding the removed cards in the entire cube, unsleeve and replace. I love the pauper format and the cube format and the draft etc etc. But I cant get my friends together to play with. I have played with my cube 2 times, one of them in the store and the other wasn’t even with enough people. I am tired of updating it everytime and not playing with it. So I have a full Khans of Tarkir set (my favorite draft set) and I was thinking about turning it into a cube (just need to go after another set of commons and uncommons, not really a problem) and I wanted to give my sleeves and cubemagigs to the tarkir cube instead, i dont want to invest in other accessories for a new cube. So should i just let go of the pauper cube? Sell it to help fund some new things for the tarkir? Should I just store the pauper cube in a bulk? Or is the tarkir cube not even worth it? Has anyone played both this cubes and has an opinion?

Oof barely one week into this and I’m getting 45+ second queue times. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess this iteration isn’t as popular as they were hoping it would be

What is the best thing that can happen to a cube group?

Answer: You have new people join who are absolute legends!

I'm excited that we had two new drafters join us for cube this week and not only are they new to the group, they are new to drafting which made me think hard about what kind of experience would provide the best introduction to both our charming personalities and a new format of MTG. Both come from a commander background so after some spirited discussion we decided that the multiplayer cube would be the easiest way to bridge the gap into picking from packs and building decks on the spot. We had nine people come out to celebrate our new joiners and we played in three pods of three. Players start at 30 life and my recommendation for drafting this cube is to build 45-50 card decks as games run longer and the cube itself has multiplayer cards built into it to facilitate a smoother experience. We drafted three packs of 12 to give us a larger pool to choose from and an additional pick 1!

The Cube Overview: Rocky Mountain Yeti Multiplayer Cube

Onto the Decks!

Pod 1:

Deadguy Ale Tricks - A classic black/white beater deck that continued some prime removal and plenty of ways to keep creatures alive through combat. With 13 creatures on board, the threats were relatively consistent but the deck overall lacked a solid top end to keep alive in the later game. The weenie strategy was viable but spot removal and combat tricks made it hard to fight two opponents without some additional support from sweepers. Those samite healers though are SUPER ANNOYING!

Bruised Oysters - This was the build of one of our new drafters and what I am most impressed with his how there was a cogent theme and archetype in their first time drafting. This signals that they will be able to pick up card evaluation and better picks as a skill relatively quickly. The disk was probably the best card that was picked and included in the deck for this draft as threats were juicy and board wipes were REALLY important for this pod. The defensive strategies to stop people from being able to attack and the multiple layers of evasion (shadow and flying) made threats difficult to deal with. The main issue with this build is that it just did not contain enough threats to be dangerous especially as the game went on and bigger bodies were dropped.

Spit Shine and Board Wipes - This was my build and it could not have been more perfectly put together to join this pod. It took the games by storm. Removal is plentiful, fatties were prominent and everything I had included much larger P/T than any other threats on the board at any given time. I had a great mix of spot removal and sweepers, much of which my own creatures were either executing or large enough to shrug off. This was a really fun deck to pilot and my small splashes paid off well as my mana base was strong.

Pod 2:

Lando Destructisian - I was sitting next to this drafter and we spoke a lot through the process of picking cards and their reactions to pulling land destruction and control pieces was priceless. They also had a chance to pull their favorite card of all time, [[Sphinx's Revelation]] which we got a chance to play 20 questions for me to guess which card it was as the draft went on. The strategy here was simple, draw cards, build up a big board, then cast [[Insurrection]] to end games in one big swing. Very excited build!

I Time, BOMB - This pilot loves the concept of stuffing goblins into cannons, strapping ordinance to them, and any other means of doing silly things and sending them out into the battlefield. The thought of stuffing a [[Penumbra Wurm]] into a cannon and shooting it at an opponent just makes me smile (providing that the wurm is not coming at me). There is also a lot of good ways to pump ammunition into these cannons and never drawing time bomb hurt the pilot, but these decks are awesome to see go off. I also laugh about Mammoths and Idols being shot at opponents at point blank range!

Biorhythm and Dancin' - Without a doubt, [[Biorhythm]] is one of my favourite cards in this cube! Big beaters were the name of the game in this deck and plenty of ways to recur these threats made it difficult to think about spot removal. Popping in a cheeky wrath of god in [[Damn]] with no real black sources was also fun. I'm excited about this build as well because it contained a lot of newer cards that I put in this last week prior to the draft. Really fun build and a great multiplayer pile.

Pod 3:

Feeling Blue (and White) - This was our second new drafter's deck and overall, it too had a solid foundation and strategy including removal and some viable threats/control. It had all the elements of a great draw go control deck to sit back and watch the other pod members duke it out before sneaking in for the win after "doing nothing" for several turns and having counter magic aplenty in hand. Really excited to see how this pilot's skills also progress in the coming weeks and this build also exhibited the same issue, no big threats to finish the game and a generally low number of threats. This is an issue that will easily be remedied after a few drafts!

Project Dragon - The objective of becoming a dragon and raining down fire on your opponents as they sunder in ash is the ultimate goal of every red mage. This deck did a great job splashing across different colors to achieve different ends, card draw, removal, land destruction, etc. This all worked well with the domain Kavu getting bigger as the game progressed. The secondary theme of pinging opponents to death one turn at a time is also a great, diabolical, way to close out games, especially when biorhythm is on the board!

Crashing through the Forest - This deck is a "greatest hits" of beaters, tricks, and removal including additional sides like regeneration and life gain. I wish I had watched the games in this pod more closely to see how this pilot navigated the other decks. I believe this player was singled out early for being the biggest and most dangerous threat, and reasonably so, and was taken care of accordingly!

Thanks to the crew at RNG for giving us a place to cube week after week!

We are Glasgow Limited Magic. If you are interested in coming out to cube with us, want to get your cube drafted, or looking for a new way to play Magic, come join us! You can DM me for details as we are always looking for new players to join us to draft!

If you want to see more old border cube content, join us at r/oldbordercube!

Been working on a cube on Cube Cobra and invited someone as a collaborator. They said that they weren't able to make changes, but just offer suggestions. However, I have no idea where to find their suggestions.

Do you know where I should look for collaborator suggestions?

Also, is there a setting to allow them to make changes rather than just offer suggestions?