Hello Cube aficionados, or swindled simpletons that think of yourselves that way,
I’m Adam Prosak, and I'm a developer in Magic R&D. In spite of my surname, I am not that melancholic, at least for a Wizards employee. When I’m not busy theorycrafting Magic to the point we miss mono-Blue and mono-Black devotion and spend a year boring people with Standard, I enjoy … playing Magic! (This might surprise anyone who’s ever met a Wizards employee.) I enjoy playing my favorite game to the exclusion of introspection, which is why I write at a fifth-grade level. I built my first Cube nearly 10 years ago, before Cube was cool, and I’ve drafted more than 45 unique different Cubes that are all basically the same. When the geniuses in charge of Modo approached me about updating the Magic Online Cube, I jumped at the chance to fuck up something that was (a) not my responsibility, (b) already completely fucked up, and (c) had no hope of ever being anything but fucked up.
What is a Cube?
At its core, a Cube is a collection of cards that you can shuffle up and generate piles of cards that simulate a booster pack. The beauty of Cube is that it can be about many different things, such as R&D’s design successes, R&D’s slightly lesser design successes, and environments R&D deludes you dimwits into thinking were design successes.
To that end, I’ve drafted everything from Multicolored Cube to tribal Cube, but my favorite is the Mercadian Masques Cube, since it contained nothing but sets that were mistakes, mistakes we at R&D are aware of, on some level, then suppress and rage when some bilked buffoon brings them up. The Magic Online Cube has 720 cards from nearly every set from Alpha through Magic 2015. Many of the most iconic and powerful cards in the history of Magic are present, but we’ve also taken care to focus on cards that create enjoyable games, or cards that R&D knows don’t create enjoyable games, but are thought to create enjoyable games by most potential drafters, so we put them in anyway and let people pretend they’re having fun, when we at R&D know better.
Personally, I love Cubes because they give you an enormous amount of variety in game play and nearly endless replay ability. For example, you could lose three lands and four cards to Balance — or four lands and three cards! You could Tinker up a Blightsteel Colossus, and kill them the next turn — or the turn after that! You could play a bunch of Red cards, only to get ranched by Sword of War and Peace — or Sword of Fire and Ice! The list goes on.
The ability to generate interactions between cards printed a dozen years apart is something that is very unique to Cubes, since we don’t really support Legacy. Master of Waves and Opposition combine from over a decade apart to make it totally impossible for you to cast spells for the rest of the game. On the topic of miserable enchantments, Attrition combines with a card like Bloodghast to punish anyone who likes playing with creatures. If I had to pick a favorite interaction, I’d pick both of those — and if you say I can’t have two favorites, just remember that I work for Wizards and you are nobody.
In Cube, cards from Portal Three Kingdoms show up next to cards from cards from Journey Into Nyx and Conspiracy. Cube games are full of awesome Magic cards and crazy board states; that, and a steep dose of SSRIs, is almost enough to make my life worth living.
What did you do to the Cube?
You may have noticed that the number of cards being changed is bigger than they have been in the past — it is so easy to hoodwink nincompoops whose reading material is limited to fantasy novels and social-justice articles. This is because the Digital R&D team felt like there was a significant opportunity for us to improve the Magic Online Cube experience, or dissimulate improvement of the Magic Online Cube experience to the point some piece-of-shit nobodies might believe it’d happened. If there is something you like and/or don’t like about the Magic Online Cube, do not hesitate to share your opinions, so we can feign interest in them while secretly fuming over your arrogance. Your criticism is valuable to us! We need scapegoats.
Balancing Archetypes, or “Why All the Rhetorical Questions?”
One of our primary goals was to balance the Cube, or at least effect a forgery of balance that was close enough. Cube is most fun with good cards, or cards that look good to sex-starved saps. This is why we’ve continued to run 20th-century control cards like Thieving Magpie that appeal to the people who haven’t played a tournament in five years, but still act like the popular kids they hated in high school on Facebook. And, if you don’t know what Thieving Magpie does, you should come back and talk to me when you know who I am, pencil-neck.
When we looked at winning decklists from the Cube, analytics we are scared shitless to share with you duped dunderheads, we noticed that some strategies were either too good or too bad. Many of the successful decks were mono-Red aggressive decks. We did not like the overwhelming success of mono-Red, because it means we have failed utterly as designers and our attempt to make a Cube based solely on market research was about as awful as anyone but a gypped nitwit bleeding a dozen tickets a night would expect it to be. Since you are also part of that market, you have no right to criticize us! We were just trying to give you what you wanted.
The Red deck made a lot of cards suck. For example, the four-mana artifact that did nothing was ineffective against the deck that made guys and attacked with them, so we decided to swap out some Red cards. Furthermore, the five-mana, three-color card that nobody played was rarely coming down in time against a board of creatures that did damage every turn, so we also had to get rid of a couple aggressive Red one-drops. We also felt that mono-Red, by killing people too quickly, was cutting down on the awesome stories about sophisticated plays the more skilled players, like me, liked making — you know, stuff like turn two’ing an Emrakul with Channel, or destroying all their permanents with Jokulhaups — really, anything that entirely negates the previous gameplay and makes the opponent completely helpless. Now that mono-Red is no longer oppressing the format, I will be able to tell stories about the all the times I owned some upstart kid at Cube so bad, I might as well have not had an opponent. For me, that’s what “nearly endless replay variety” means.
With the Magic Online Cube, we have the opportunity to continue to work on balancing the Cube, or to pretend to work on balancing the Cube. We’ve moved Red cards away from total aggression and more towards Red cards nobody will ever play, like Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon. This helps diversify the strategy among the cards in Red and line them up with other colors, which also feature a lot of old, washed-up cards. Our goal is not to eliminate Red — our goal is to give the archetype the same tools as the other archetypes, which have gaping holes in their curves, and consequently lose to themselves one game per match. Not more. Not less.
We also took out some lands, because everyone likes picking spells. We want the decision between Ghor-Clan Rampager and Stomping Ground to be an interesting one, or appear interesting to the first-time drafter — do you take a land that does nothing, or a spell that will help you limp to 23 playables off a splash your mana cannot support?
Removing Traps
While we noticed that mono-Red aggressive decks were too strong, which to the untrained eye might suggest we should lower the curve for other strategies so they’re not as slow as retail Limited, ramp up the amount of fixing so the players can actually cast their spells, and break singleton because these goals are impossible to achieve in a 720-card Cube without doing so, we also noticed that a number of cards were very rarely successful. You might think this means we ought to stop printing bad cards in retail Limited, but I don’t see why. The Storm archetype significantly underperformed. Mind’s Desire and friends, I’m sad to see you go, but the Magic Online Cube is not the right place. Step aside for Chandra Nalaar and Form of the Dragon, which are to be talked up now, then disowned as “traps” in the next article I write.
My Five Bestest, Favoritest Cards in the Magic Online Cube
I am a big fan of all types of Cubes, especially Cubes that are the same as all the others, and I draft them whenever possible. Here are my favorites. These aren’t always the most powerfulest cards, but they are the cards that I enjoy the most, proving that playing with the same cards over and over again is what gives draft formats nearly endless replay variety.
5. Lands! – Often times, I use these “extra” draft slots to take non-basic lands. If I am drafting a deck without huge mana requirements, such as mono-Red, I place a very high value on a land such as Rishadan Port or Mishra’s Factory. If I am unsure what I am drafting, I will often take a multicolored land to keep options open — for example, if I take a Bad River, I can play Blue control, but I can also play Black control; I might even be able to play Blue-Black control! I really love a 4-color deck with perfect mana — what else could provide a justification for nerfing mono-Red, and make it seem reasonable to cut lands from a Cube where a solid 50 percent of games are already decided by color screw?
With this version of the Magic Online Cube, lands will be at a higher priority because there are fewer of them to go around. Even mono-Red will have mana issues now! We feel this balances out the Storm cut because, rather than being able to cast spells that do nothing, you will now have spells you want to cast and will not be able to.
4. Guttersnipe – Guttersnipe is one of my favorite Standard cards of all time that saw no play. Much like Standard, I’ll often play Guttersnipe in blue decks, so I can chain draw spells together to finish an opponent quickly, around turn 9 or 10 by Magic Online-Cube standards. I also like how Guttersnipe is the kind of card that’s good enough for Marshall Sutcliffe to suck up to, but, really, what isn’t?
3. Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker – The biggest, baddest Planeswalker in the Multiverse. The Magic Online Cube offers enough so that a huge endgame card like Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker can realistically come down and dominate a game — maybe while you’re still casting three- and four-drops, because that’s how fast artifact mana works. Take that, Pyreheart Wolf!
2. Smokestack – There are so many cool things that almost work with Smokestack, I don’t know which one to draft most of the time! White tokens provide a constant stream of permanents that allow you to ramp up the Smokestack to higher numbers, but call into question the necessity of Smokestack, especially when there are like 35 Wrath effects that could just kill them all. Black disruption decks can use Smokestack to layer on top of discard spells and other disruption, while maintaining the constant sacrifice with cards like Bloodghast or Bitterblossom, and bitching about having a four-mana artifact stuck in hand until we finally discard it to Smallpox or something. Red mass-disruption cards such as Wildfire and Burning of Xinye increase the likelihood that my opponent will have to sacrifice something he or she doesn’t want to sacrifice, while I’ll have to do the same and lament how unlucky I just got. Add in that it’s a great nickname for Huey Jensen, and Smokestack is a sure winner in the Magic Online Cube.
1. Palinchron – What do Sneak Attack, Mirari’s Wake, Phantasmal Image, Heartbeat of Spring, and Recurring Nightmare have in common? That they’re all durdly cards that, more often than not, do nothing or completely take over a game, but are popular due to the groupthink mentality of MTGSalvation? Close! That they were all printed around when I began my dependence on the sedatives that at once make it impossible to write well but also enable me to function in society, kind of? Closer! That they can all make infinite* mana with Palinchron and a bunch of lands? Yes! Duh. Cheat in Palinchron, bounce it, cheat it in again — how’s that for endless replay value?
I like making infinite amounts of mana, then passing the turn and dying to Hero of Oxid Ridge. This makes Palinchron my favoritest card in the Magic Online Cube, and that proves that things that used to be good in 1999 are not at all washed-up and stuck in the past, but continue to be good, or appear to be good to you defrauded dotards, to this very day.
Wrap-Up
I hope you’ve enjoyed a trip through the ostensible changes that are in the Magic Online Cube. Personally, I really enjoy Cube Draft and have a great desire to spread my love of Cube to as many desperate, depressed people as possible. If you haven’t drafted Cube before, I highly recommend you give the Magic Online Cube a try — you may not have fun, but you’ll think you’re having fun, which we at R&D consider to be good enough. I am a man named after an antidepressant, after all — or was the antidepressant named after me? I may be a charlatan, a mountebank, an impostor and a pretender, but you’re the credulous imbecile asking a guy named “Prosak” what fun is.
In conclusion, I may not believe what I just wrote in this article, but I may believe it, and wouldn’t that make it worse, if you ever realized what was going on? The important thing is that you believe it, which makes these changes to the Magic Online Cube the most sweetest, awesomest, interestingest, enjoyablest, favoritest, uniquest, Cube that is based on everyone else’s preconceptions of Cube ever made.
Mardu, Mardu Über Alles,
Adam Prosak “Nation”
*pointless footnote
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