Cube Draft @ TooSarcastic's or "How Losing Builds Character"

We had an abortive Cube Draft and simultaneous EDH multiplayer and LLM drafts going Good Friday. All this during a storm that dropped a foot of snow while we played- and nine people showed up! Man, Magic players will brave anything for some cardboard crack.

Today I want to talk about Scoop_Phase and our Cube Draft. Poor Scoops thought it would be LLM draft before he showed, so he was a little blindsided. Still, he ended up drafting a fine G/W deck that could drop weenies and then Armageddon or play the slow attrition game with lots of white spot removal and finishers like Eternal Dragon. Unfortunately he played against Swizz Dizzle, who promptly “comboed” out a Mirror Entity for a turn five, twenty damage smashfest that left Scoops with a match loss and a bad taste in his mouth. Scoop_Phase dropped from the draft and went home. And why shouldn’t he? He was in a unexpected situation, managed to draft what everyone agreed was a solid deck (The Captain changed two cards and then promptly beat me with Scoop’s deck while we waited for the last match to finish), and still went 0-2 first round in games that involved minimal interactivity. Hardly a grand introduction to a new format. I continued my own Cube streak by losing to The Captain, receiving the bye round two (I am NOT counting it as a win for the Cube Draft format!) and then finding that because we were playing for fun (i.e. we didn’t ante packs) everyone but the undefeateds wanted to drop and play EDH. So yeah. 0-1 on the night then, if you don’t count losing to the Captain again when he beat me with Scoop’s deck.

I am trying to figure out why Cube Draft is such a different format than regular draft. I am no amazing drafter, but 1-2 in a “normal” draft would be a disappointing finish for me anywhere. In Cube I would be tying my personal record for wins on a night! Why is this? Before last Friday I was totally mystified, but working through the contents of the Cube and playing a few more games has given me a few possible reasons that Cube draft behaves differently than regular drafts.

1. The cards are different than a regular limited draft.
Let’s get the obvious out of the way, right? What I mean is, playing LLM or TPF or RGD draft you have the same chance to see all the cards you could possibly see in that environment, every time. And smart people who make the game meant the cards to be in the environment we see them in. In the Cube, even if you have a “finished” set of 360 or 720 cards that changes only minimally, all those cards were never meant to be drafted together. You can “learn” a Cube set’s feel by drafting it many times (YOU can, I apparently can’t, as we’ve covered above) but even then those cards weren’t designed to play together in that environment. Many of them are rares. All of them are overpowered. These differences affect play and drafting. There are also actually fewer “solid” cards than there are bombs, which has obvious implications for deck building as well.

2. Many of the cards in the Cube are old.
So what? Well, I don’t know when Scoops started playing, but I know that I haven’t played with quite a few Cube cards- ever! And I started playing around Ice Age. You know who has played with those cards? Competitive constructed players from days of yore! They’re the great Cubers, because they know the power of the cards. Another related point is card evaluation. Mtenda Lion finally got booted from the Cube- against my vociferous dissent. Once I heard people repeatedly saying that the card was rubbish I had to ask myself why I thought it was so great in the first place. Well, I had played with it, um… ten years ago, when I was… sixteen… and nobody I knew played with blue (negating the drawback) because blue was for chumps. Okay, so MAYBE a card that seemed awesome to me over a decade ago isn’t really all that great- and never was! Maybe I didn’t know anything about Magic back then other than it was fun. Or maybe I should started buying packs of the re-released expansions on MODO. Heh.

3. Increased power levels make for swingy games that mess with conventional Limited risk assessments.
So I am racing with The Captain game one of our match. We are both on ten life. He has two cards in hand. I make a devastating swing with all my guys, forcing a chump block from his freshly cast Juggernaut- one of only two creatures on his board. He blocks, Giant Growths to save his Juggs and goes to one. This is fine because he still only has nine power on the board. His turn he swings in and then Shocks FTW. Now imagine an LLM draft game where both you and your opponent are on ten life and you swing in like that. The chances of your opponent having such potent reactive spells are much less. Yes, Giant Growths are in the format, and so are Shocks, but I find out in the next game that the Captain is packing not only Shock, but Sudden Shock, Tribal Flames AND Fiery Temper! He had plenty of burninating outs, way more than you could consistently draft in a normal limited format. And I thought I was stacked with Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Seal of Fire and Stormbind! Guess not!
In an example from game two, I have Channel and Fireball in hand the whole game. I keep an aggressive hand and then proceed to race- again. I was always just a few points shy of being able to Fireball him out. I sent in what I thought would be enough damage to put him away next turn, leaving back my Wood Elves to chump a Moldervine Cloaked morph, but during his combat he sent it at me and flipped it to reveal Hystrodon- trampling me down to three life. I had put him on Gathan Raiders. Swingy! If I get him even three life below me, even at the expense of my whole team, I would take the chance and try to burn him out with Channel/Fireball, risking the instant speed response. Bet he wouldn’t see that coming. Instead it’s his swingy play that makes the difference. In LLM there are only a few cards in both sets that could combo with the same power of a Cloaked Hystrodon (or Channel/Fireball). But for the Cube, they’re actually pretty mild “combos.” The moral of these anecdotes is that playing the Cube like a normal limited format is going to get you blown out- and you’ll be cursing how lucky your opponents seem to be getting because your risk assessment will be way off.


I’d like to think that my play will improve after doing all this analysis, but my real hope is that this post will entice players like Scoop_Phase to give Cube Draft a chance, arming them with some knowledge that I had to go through a lot of match losses in order to learn.

Props to The Captain for finding a Cream of the Crop for ze Cube. An extra heaping helping of props to Swizz Dizzle for winning the LLM draft, claiming his first pick foily Countryside Crusher- and then donating it to the Cube! It looks sexy in there, lemme tell you! Was there another card added that I forgot? Let me know. Anybody have an extra Taurean Mauler to throw in there? That card has got to better than the worst Red spells we have in the Cube currently.

T