Shining a Spotlight on the Future of Cubes

If there's one thing Magic Online players generally love, it's Cube. And while Vintage Cube, Legacy Cube, and Modern Cube are popular, there's always room for more. That "more" is starting next month, when we introduce a new way to Cube on Magic Online: the Cube Spotlight Series.

The Cube Spotlight Series is our way of providing novel and interesting play experiences. A few times this year, we'll put a new cube up for a single week. These cubes will be a little more unusual than the standard fare. They'll be offbeat and experimental. We're trying new things and taking a few more risks than usual. We're not putting up anything we don't think is fun, but we recognize that when trying new things, they won’t all be hits. And that's okay. Our current plan is to run one Cube Spotlight Series event between each major release, and we'll evaluate from there.

If one of these cubes hits big, we'll certainly be open to bringing it back, but we're not trying to find the next major cube to stand alongside the established host.

For those who remember the Legendary Cube from 2015, it would have fit right in with what we're hoping the Spotlight Series to be. In retrospect, the problem we had with the Legendary Cube was not that it wasn't a good first experience, but that it wasn't a good tenth or 20th experience. Not every experience has the depth of our major booster releases, and by expecting it to perform at that level, we failed to recognize how it could have been great: as a fun, limited-time offering.

An Uncommonly Good Time

The first instance of the Cube Spotlight Series is one that's near and dear to my heart: the Uncommon Cube. This is a variant of my personal cube, using the same rules that have evolved over the past three years, but adapted for a broader audience.

In the Uncommon Cube, the rule is simple: every card in the cube is uncommon. It's not enough that an uncommon version exists; the version in the cube proper must be the uncommon one. This causes some problems in translation, as rarities aren't always preserved between paper Magic and Magic Online. Two of the most iconic cards from my paper version—Sylvan Library and Force of Will—exist in their original sets as uncommons, but on Magic Online, they're only available in rare or mythic rare. Explorer's Scope is an uncommon in the first Conspiracy set, but Magic Online only has that card in common. All in all, there were nineteen cards from my paper version that had to be removed for one reason or another, but there were plenty of great cards to replace them with. This isn't digital limitations hamstringing good gameplay; some of those substitutions will make their way back into my paper version, so the experience is different but ultimately one that I'm excited for you all to try out.

Designing in Silver

My primary goal with the Uncommon Cube (and the reason I created it in the first place) was that I wanted a cube both experienced and lapsed players could enjoy without needing to do much homework.

Most of my non-work friends are lightly enfranchised Magic players, interested in Commander and Conspiracy Draft but uninterested in following competitive formats or even serious competition. Building an experience for their level of expertise meant imposing a cap on the comprehension complexity of any individual card; I'm always happy to have strategic complexity, but I've watched some of my closest friends decide halfway through a card that they didn't want to keep reading, so no card in the cube can be that long. And my work friends . . . well, it shouldn't be a surprise when another Wizards employee is deeply invested in Magic.

Making an experience that would interest both groups was a challenge, but after playing an uncommon-only cube made by Seattle-area Magic player Steven Stadnicki (@shaterri on Twitter), I knew I'd found a solution. Uncommons are designed to be reasonable cards that show up frequently in Limited but not in multiples, often with more powerful and/or narrow effects. My favorite cards tend to be uncommons, and I know that's true for a lot of other long-time drafters. Uncommons are the cards that tend to be remembered: Spider Spawning, Dampen Thought, Flametongue Kavu.

With that in mind, I started by making a set skeleton to ensure I could balance the colors. Then I did some research on recent large sets to get a proportion of mana costs, and I spread out my card slots across the mana curve in roughly the same proportions. Once I knew how many cards of each color at each converted mana cost I needed, I sat down with Gatherer and started picking cards. 540 cards later, I had a first draft. Then I playtested with colleagues, revised, and playtested again. The cycle repeated a few times, and every iteration taught me more, both about what I was trying to create and how to do it.

I rapidly realized that this cube isn't about the best uncommons of all time—there's no Path to Exile, for example, in the current iteration—and couldn't have been even if I wanted it to be. The cube would end up as a huge jumble of undercosted creatures, grade A removal, and card-draw spells. Some of my favorite uncommons aren't included, either. And that's correct, because as sad as I am about not including Mundungu, nobody else is sad about that. Instead, it's a Limited environment crafted using the tools available at uncommon with some rules I've developed over the years specifically for this cube.

To stay accessible, the Uncommon Cube is necessarily a low-synergy format. The archetypes are deliberately low volume, and almost every card can stand or fall on its own merit. Synergy cards are certainly present—Riddleform, Lone Rider, Breeding Pit, etc.—but most of them have a function outside "their" deck. Riddleform can help filter your draws, Lone Rider can pick up an Aura or Equipment and transform itself without other life-gain cards, and Breeding Pit's worst-case scenario is to create an endless stream of chump blockers. Where you'll see storm decks or affinity decks in some cubes, those aren't the kind of decks that a casual player will likely see in their first draft. In a low-synergy format, players can pick the cards they like, sticking to the fundamentals (mana curve, etc.), and they'll end up with a pretty decent deck.

I needed to make sure that people didn't need to know ahead of time what they'd find in the cube. This meant being careful to avoid traps. For example, in an early playtest, I had a single Sliver in the form of Manaweft Sliver because I wanted a cheap five-color mana creature in green. However, what I heard several times was that someone would see it in pack one, then look for the five-color Sliver deck that the card appeared to be promising. I discovered that even a secondary tribal benefit was enough for a card to give people a false impression of what they might find, so as much as I'd like to include Manaweft Sliver or Drover of the Mighty, their tribal benefits became a disqualifier. I'm still a little worried that Servant of the Conduit will suggest that there's an energy deck if someone sees it early, but that hasn't happened yet.

When I first took the cube to my lightly enfranchised friends, we ended up playing it a lot. It was everything my friends wanted. (She said, perhaps exaggerating a little.) It continued evolving from there. It grew from 540 to 600 cards as I started running events with more and more players. More people were running four- and five-color decks than I thought was healthy, so I toned down the volume of color fixing and removed the Ravnica bounce lands, shrinking the multicolor section to match. I enforced a slot in each pack for nonbasic lands, which holds true in the Magic Online version as well.

Very early on, I heard an overwhelming consensus that people weren't enjoying color hosers on either the giving or receiving end. After digging into that, it tied back into the homework issue: they just wanted to play. Sideboarding was a level of the game that was pretty alien to their play pattern, and for a group that mostly plays Commander and Conspiracy, that's not hard to understand. I didn't want to eliminate sideboarding entirely, of course, but I rapidly took away cards that made players feel like they had to use them in sideboards. This led me to another Uncommon Cube rule: "The power level of a card shouldn't be based on the colors of the opponent's permanents or the land types they have." This meant a huge swath of the game didn't fit: anything with landwalk or protection was right out, but it also meant that a lot of black removal spells were gone. (Pour one out for my boy Shriekmaw.) Fortunately, Magic is large and ever-evolving, and after I started to look for replacements, this rule that I worried might not work turned out to be minimal in effect; Doom Blade's absence just makes room for Go for the Throat, Murder, and Cast Down.

Ultimately, the Uncommon Cube is quite a departure from what we typically do with the big three (Vintage Cube, Legacy Cube, and Modern Cube). And as much as I love this cube, I'm under no illusions that the design rigor that went into creating this can match what we put the others through. That said, I'm very confident that for the first handful of times drafting it, it's a lot of fun. And that's exactly in line with our goals for the Cube Spotlight Series: unusual, interesting fun for a single week.