At the end of my last post, I presented the following deck list without much discussion.
Jund on a Budget
Lands
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Savage Lands
4 Mountain
5 Forest
5 Swamp
Creatures
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
3 Borderland Ranger
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Broodmate Dragon
Other Spells
2 Veinfire Borderpost
2 Firewild Borderpost
3 Bituminous Blast
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
2 Resounding Thunder
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
At first glance, the deck list may appear not to show much restraint - to be fair, the deck is trying very hard to exploit a number of the gold cards that were available at the time (the deck was built when Shards of Alara block was Standard legal). In particular, the deck is interested in playing Bloodbraid Elf, Blightning, Putrid Leech and Sprouting Thrinax. The first three cards combined put us firmly in all three colours and the fourth does that all by itself.
On closer inspection there are a couple of things to notice. The first is that there are no one-drops. While Lightning Bolt has a casting cost of one, it is not often that you'll need or even want to actually cast it on turn one. A card like that has a lot more value a little later in the game and can usually trade for something better than whatever the opponent can produce on the first turn. Instead, the deck assumes that it will be fixing its mana on the first turn. Savage Lands provides all three colours which is a great boost for the deck. Terramorphic Expanse can find the basic land that you need to supplement and support your opening hand. And the borderposts can provide fixing on turn one as well.
On turn two there are a couple of options. With the right mana and a Putrid Leech the deck can attempt to get agressive on the second turn. If the opponent has played something strong then Lightning Bolt or Terminate may be required to stem the bleeding. Alternatively, the deck can simply continue to setup with more mana fixing. Against some decks, this may be a bit slow, which is why there are some safety valves, but the deck hopes to catch up with a powerful mid-game.
The goal is to get into a position to cast all of your spells from turn three. Sprouting Thrinax requires all three colours but can stall the opponent's attacks for a bit or gain you a bit of card advantage. Borderland Ranger is a body that helps you fix your mana once again and should be able to block or even get in for some damage. After that, you're hoping to start to take over the game with cards like Bloodbraid Elf, Blightning or Garruk Wildspeaker. There is removal to help mop up and even the infamous Double Dragon to bring it home to victory.
While the deck starts out slow it hopes to dominate in the mid and late game, making up for being behind on the board early with powerful cards and a stream of card advantage.
So what can go wrong? Well, an openning hand that contains Terramorphic Expanse, Savage Lands and Veinfire Borderpost as the only mana source is going to be terribly slow. In this case, hands like that are the cost reaching for power in three colours. More restraint - perhaps choosing a different three-drop creature and leaving Sprouting Thrinax on the sideline - would help to reduce the burden on the mana. Either way, understanding how the deck will play out and how the mana needs to be designed to support that is the key.
Thursday 20 September 2012
Wednesday 19 September 2012
Mixing the Fixing
This week's challenge at work is to build a three colour deck. The obstacles that you face when building such a deck are similar whether building for competitive play or on a budget, but the solutions available to you are different. In both cases, building a mana base that can support your spells is the fundamental issue to be resolved. When building on a budget, however, the tools are more restricted.
When building a three colour deck on a budget, there are three primary things to consider:
1. Why do you need three colours?
2. What tools are available to build your mana base?
3. What can you do to reduce the stress on your mana base?
There are many reasons why you might want to be in three particular colours, but the key is to understand what they are. If your deck can achieve its goal using only two colours, then you should probably consider cutting the third colour to make your mana base more consistent. Everybody is different, but for me, happiness is good mana. Nevertheless, every Constructed deck sprouts from some germinating idea and that idea may demand three colours. Here are just a few possibilities.
Building around a three colour card: While there are only so many three colour cards available, it certainly happens from time to time that you might want to build around one. If you want to build a deck around Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker then you're going to need to be in Black, Blue and Red.
Building around a particular theme: Let's say you want to play Spirits in Standard. You identify the key cards to be Drogskol Captain and Lingering Souls. Whatever other cards you include in your deck, you're going to need to figure out a way to produce White, Blue and Black mana.
Playing the best cards for a particular strategy: If you want to build an aggressive deck that includes Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape and Loam Lion, then you're going to need to be in Green, Red and White.
Once again, the key here is identifying why you want to be in these colours. This will help you later when you have to start making some hard decisions.
If you have a lot of resources available to you, then you shouldn't have trouble finding a set of Rare lands and maybe some artifacts that meet your needs. When you're on a budget, you need to be a little more careful. Understanding the tools available to you at Common and Uncommon will be important. For example, in the current Standard format (just before the release of Return to Ravnica) the only real mana fixing lands available are Evolving Wilds and Shimmering Grotto. While you can certainly give it a go with these lands, I personally wouldn't try it unless I was using Green as my primary colour. With Green, you have additional access to cards like Farseek that can help to fix your mana. Artifacts include Manalith, Mycosynth Wellspring, Traveler's Amulet, Horizon Spellbomb, Gem of Becoming, Sphere of the Suns and Vessel of Endless Rest. Most of these options are pretty slow, so unless your strategy allows you time to setup your mana fixing, they may or may not get the job done. Of these, Sphere of the Suns is generally the best option as a reasonable fixer. Regardless of your format, you should know what's available to help fix your mana.
From this, you can capture what will become a recurring pattern: the key categories of mana fixing tools are lands, artifacts and Green fixers.
If you're not restricted to Standard, there are number of popular options for budget deck builders:
Lands
Fetchlands: Terramorphic Expanse, Evolving Wilds
Shardlands: Arcane Sanctum, Crumbling Necropolis, Jungle Shrine, Savage Lands, Seaside Citadel
Vivid Lands: Vivid Crag, Vivid Creek, Vivid Grove, Vivid Marsh, Vivid Meadow
Ravnica "Karoo" Lands: Azorius Chancery, Dimir Aqueduct, Rakdos Carnarium, Gruul Turf, Selesnya Sanctuary, Orzhov Basilica, Golgari Rot Farm, Simic Growth Chamber, Izzet Boilerworks, Boros Garrison
Of course, there are more options, but these represent some good examples. The upcoming Guildgate cycle in Return to Ravnica block will add a new set of staples to this list.
Artifacts
Ravnica Signets: Azorius Signet, Dimir Signet, Rakdos Signet, Gruul Signet, Selesnya Signet, Orzhov Signet, Golgari Signet, Simic Signet, Izzet Signet, Boros Signet
Mirrodin Talismans: Talisman of Dominance, Talisman of Impulse, Talisman of Indulgence, Talisman of Progress, Talisman of Unity
There are others, such as the obelisk cycle (e.g. Obelisk of Esper) or the borderpost cycle (e.g. Veinfire Borderpost) from Shards of Alara. These tend to be more slow and ponderous but they are options for slower decks.
Green Fixing
Ramp spells: Farseek, Rampant Growth, Cultivate, etc.
Creatures: Borderland Ranger, Dawntreader Elk, Avacyn's Pilgrim, etc.
One thing that you'll notice is that all of these options take a little time to setup. Non-rare mana fixing notoriously enters the battlefield tapped, so in my opinion it will be very difficult to build a three colour aggressive deck with a consistent mana base. Reliably being able to produce Green, Red and White on the first turn to support Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape and Loam Lion is going to lead to some frustrating games. For this reason, in budget decks I think you're looking at midrange and control strategies when you're talking about three colour decks. Aggressive strategies really need to be thinking about restricting themselves to one or two colours.
That being said, this list is not exhaustive and you can see that there are many mana fixing options available if you know where to look.
Once you have identified them, you need to identify how many mana fixing options you have available to your particular deck and how much you can afford the drawback. At the end of the day, your deck will tend to under perform if all of your lands enter the battlefield tapped.
One of the best things that you can do is to ease the burden on your mana. Are you trying to cast several spells for each colour? One approach is to have a primary and secondary colour along with a "splash" colour. In the Spirits deck I mentioned above, you might decide that the entire deck can be built using White and Blue spells and that you only need Black to pay the flashback cost on Lingering Souls. If this is the case, then you probably don't need many Black sources and probably don't need a Black source very early. This means that you can build your deck to have good Blue and White mana and include a couple of Swamps along with four Evolving Wilds to go and find a Swamp later in the game if you haven't drawn one already. Similarly, if you only need Red to cast Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker in an otherwise Blue and Black deck, then you can have a similar setup.
If you do want to cast spells in all three colours, then another way to limit the burden is to restrict yourself to spells that only require a single mana of a particular colour, especially for those spells that you want to cast in the first few turns. So, while Murder is a great spell, it's going to be difficult to cast in the same deck as Volcanic Geyser and Mind Control. Do yourself a favour and stick to cards that you will actually be able to cast with your mana base.
The more demanding your spells are on your mana, the more sources of each colour you're going to need. You may need to get creative by mixing the different types of fixing available to you. Take a look at the deck below. While it is certainly not perfect, it takes advantage of all three types of mana fixing in order to be able to cast many of the powerful spells that made the Jund deck so deadly in its day, while still being a budget version of the strategy. While the deck has taxing mana requirements, it is a midrange deck that is happy to spend the first turn or two setting up its mana before taking over during the middle turns.
Jund on a Budget
Lands
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Savage Lands
4 Mountain
5 Forest
5 Swamp
Creatures
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
3 Borderland Ranger
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Broodmate Dragon
Other Spells
2 Veinfire Borderpost
2 Firewild Borderpost
3 Bituminous Blast
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
2 Resounding Thunder
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
While this is certainly not the final word on mana, these are the first things that I'd take into consideration when building a budget three colour deck.
When building a three colour deck on a budget, there are three primary things to consider:
1. Why do you need three colours?
2. What tools are available to build your mana base?
3. What can you do to reduce the stress on your mana base?
1. Why do you need three colours?
There are many reasons why you might want to be in three particular colours, but the key is to understand what they are. If your deck can achieve its goal using only two colours, then you should probably consider cutting the third colour to make your mana base more consistent. Everybody is different, but for me, happiness is good mana. Nevertheless, every Constructed deck sprouts from some germinating idea and that idea may demand three colours. Here are just a few possibilities.
Building around a three colour card: While there are only so many three colour cards available, it certainly happens from time to time that you might want to build around one. If you want to build a deck around Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker then you're going to need to be in Black, Blue and Red.
Building around a particular theme: Let's say you want to play Spirits in Standard. You identify the key cards to be Drogskol Captain and Lingering Souls. Whatever other cards you include in your deck, you're going to need to figure out a way to produce White, Blue and Black mana.
Playing the best cards for a particular strategy: If you want to build an aggressive deck that includes Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape and Loam Lion, then you're going to need to be in Green, Red and White.
Once again, the key here is identifying why you want to be in these colours. This will help you later when you have to start making some hard decisions.
2. What tools are available to build your mana base?
If you have a lot of resources available to you, then you shouldn't have trouble finding a set of Rare lands and maybe some artifacts that meet your needs. When you're on a budget, you need to be a little more careful. Understanding the tools available to you at Common and Uncommon will be important. For example, in the current Standard format (just before the release of Return to Ravnica) the only real mana fixing lands available are Evolving Wilds and Shimmering Grotto. While you can certainly give it a go with these lands, I personally wouldn't try it unless I was using Green as my primary colour. With Green, you have additional access to cards like Farseek that can help to fix your mana. Artifacts include Manalith, Mycosynth Wellspring, Traveler's Amulet, Horizon Spellbomb, Gem of Becoming, Sphere of the Suns and Vessel of Endless Rest. Most of these options are pretty slow, so unless your strategy allows you time to setup your mana fixing, they may or may not get the job done. Of these, Sphere of the Suns is generally the best option as a reasonable fixer. Regardless of your format, you should know what's available to help fix your mana.
From this, you can capture what will become a recurring pattern: the key categories of mana fixing tools are lands, artifacts and Green fixers.
If you're not restricted to Standard, there are number of popular options for budget deck builders:
Lands
Fetchlands: Terramorphic Expanse, Evolving Wilds
Shardlands: Arcane Sanctum, Crumbling Necropolis, Jungle Shrine, Savage Lands, Seaside Citadel
Vivid Lands: Vivid Crag, Vivid Creek, Vivid Grove, Vivid Marsh, Vivid Meadow
Ravnica "Karoo" Lands: Azorius Chancery, Dimir Aqueduct, Rakdos Carnarium, Gruul Turf, Selesnya Sanctuary, Orzhov Basilica, Golgari Rot Farm, Simic Growth Chamber, Izzet Boilerworks, Boros Garrison
Of course, there are more options, but these represent some good examples. The upcoming Guildgate cycle in Return to Ravnica block will add a new set of staples to this list.
Artifacts
Ravnica Signets: Azorius Signet, Dimir Signet, Rakdos Signet, Gruul Signet, Selesnya Signet, Orzhov Signet, Golgari Signet, Simic Signet, Izzet Signet, Boros Signet
Mirrodin Talismans: Talisman of Dominance, Talisman of Impulse, Talisman of Indulgence, Talisman of Progress, Talisman of Unity
There are others, such as the obelisk cycle (e.g. Obelisk of Esper) or the borderpost cycle (e.g. Veinfire Borderpost) from Shards of Alara. These tend to be more slow and ponderous but they are options for slower decks.
Green Fixing
Ramp spells: Farseek, Rampant Growth, Cultivate, etc.
Creatures: Borderland Ranger, Dawntreader Elk, Avacyn's Pilgrim, etc.
One thing that you'll notice is that all of these options take a little time to setup. Non-rare mana fixing notoriously enters the battlefield tapped, so in my opinion it will be very difficult to build a three colour aggressive deck with a consistent mana base. Reliably being able to produce Green, Red and White on the first turn to support Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape and Loam Lion is going to lead to some frustrating games. For this reason, in budget decks I think you're looking at midrange and control strategies when you're talking about three colour decks. Aggressive strategies really need to be thinking about restricting themselves to one or two colours.
That being said, this list is not exhaustive and you can see that there are many mana fixing options available if you know where to look.
Once you have identified them, you need to identify how many mana fixing options you have available to your particular deck and how much you can afford the drawback. At the end of the day, your deck will tend to under perform if all of your lands enter the battlefield tapped.
3. What can you do to reduce the stress on your mana base?
One of the best things that you can do is to ease the burden on your mana. Are you trying to cast several spells for each colour? One approach is to have a primary and secondary colour along with a "splash" colour. In the Spirits deck I mentioned above, you might decide that the entire deck can be built using White and Blue spells and that you only need Black to pay the flashback cost on Lingering Souls. If this is the case, then you probably don't need many Black sources and probably don't need a Black source very early. This means that you can build your deck to have good Blue and White mana and include a couple of Swamps along with four Evolving Wilds to go and find a Swamp later in the game if you haven't drawn one already. Similarly, if you only need Red to cast Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker in an otherwise Blue and Black deck, then you can have a similar setup.
If you do want to cast spells in all three colours, then another way to limit the burden is to restrict yourself to spells that only require a single mana of a particular colour, especially for those spells that you want to cast in the first few turns. So, while Murder is a great spell, it's going to be difficult to cast in the same deck as Volcanic Geyser and Mind Control. Do yourself a favour and stick to cards that you will actually be able to cast with your mana base.
The more demanding your spells are on your mana, the more sources of each colour you're going to need. You may need to get creative by mixing the different types of fixing available to you. Take a look at the deck below. While it is certainly not perfect, it takes advantage of all three types of mana fixing in order to be able to cast many of the powerful spells that made the Jund deck so deadly in its day, while still being a budget version of the strategy. While the deck has taxing mana requirements, it is a midrange deck that is happy to spend the first turn or two setting up its mana before taking over during the middle turns.
Jund on a Budget
Lands
4 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Savage Lands
4 Mountain
5 Forest
5 Swamp
Creatures
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
3 Borderland Ranger
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Broodmate Dragon
Other Spells
2 Veinfire Borderpost
2 Firewild Borderpost
3 Bituminous Blast
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
2 Resounding Thunder
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
While this is certainly not the final word on mana, these are the first things that I'd take into consideration when building a budget three colour deck.
Saturday 8 September 2012
Size matters
You are sitting on your living room floor on a rainy Saturday afternoon,
surrounded by your entire collection of Magic cards. You have been sifting through your once relatively organised collection like a mad scientist, selecting cards that you think you'd like to include in the cube that you've decided to build. A significant pile of potential inclusions is starting to take shape. With every new box of cards that you rummage through, you find another of your favourite cards that you'd love to play with again. Put it in the cube pile! Hours later, you take a look at the results of your feverish work. The pile is huge! How many cards are in there? You do an initial count...927. Ugh. That's a lot of cards. You start to get the feeling that perhaps you should cut a few. But how many?
Some questions to ponder
One of the first decisions you'll need to make when you first build your cube is how many cards to actually include. There is, of course, no single correct answer. However, the answer that is right for you will depend on your answers to a few key questions:
1. How will the cube be played?
2. How many players do you want to be able to support at one time?
3. How much variation do you want each time the cube is played?
4. How strong do you want decks to be overall?
5. Is there a limiting factor that caps the size of your cube?
Formats
There are a variety of methods that people commonly use to build cube decks. These include multi-person booster drafts, two-person Winston or Winchester drafts, Sealed deck, and more. Each and every method has merit, but each also brings certain constraints to the card pool. In general, booster drafts usually involve creating three 15-card piles of random cards per player. Winston drafts often involve a single pile of about 90-100 cards; Winchester drafts usually involve two piles of about 45-50 cards. Sealed deck usually involves 75-90 random cards per person. This leads us naturally on to the second question: how many players do you want to support at one time?
Number of players
If you plan to use your cube for two-person Winston or Winchester drafts exclusively, then you could get away with a cube with as few as 100 cards. If you generally have about four people and like to do 75-card Sealed pools each time you play, then you'll obviously need at least 300 cards to play with. If you want to support an eight-person booster draft, then you'll need at least 360 cards. The math is pretty straight forward.
Variance
However, the math only really tells you the minimum number of cards that you'll need. If you always booster draft with eight players and have a 360-card cube, then all cards will be drafted every time. This will create a fairly consistent environment but will also create a situation where players will tend to know that certain cards will turn up in an opponent's deck at some point. This could cause them to make certain decisions, such as always putting artifact removal in their main deck just in case they play the opponent with Sol Ring. On the other hand, the larger your cube, the greater the variation from draft-to-draft since some cards won't appear some percentage of the time. Generally, the more cards you have relative to the number of players, the greater the variation.
Power level
Counteracting the push to larger cubes - at least for "best of" cubes - is the simple fact that the more cards you have, the further down the list of top cards you have to go. There will likely be a significant difference in the overall power level between the top 10 and the 70th to 80th-best White cards, for example. The further down the list you go, the more cards you have to include of a lower power level. That's fine, of course, if you want a bit of a range of power levels of the cards in the average cube deck. But some cube designers prefer to keep the power level very high and therefore tend to prefer slightly smaller cubes. If you're playing cube to play with the best cards in Magic, then you you probably want those cards to actually turn up in a draft. If you're playing a powered cube, you might like to actually see moxen from time to time!
Limiting factor
On the other hand, if you're building a themed cube of some sort, then you might find that there are only so many cards that fit your theme. This is likely to grow over time, but you might need to do a little research before finalising the overall size. Let's imagine that you want to build a tribal-themed cube and one of the tribes that you'd like to include is Kithkin. A quick Gatherer search shows that there are only 58 different Kithkin creatures in print, while there are 134 Merfolk and 264 Goblins. Further, an analysis of the Kithkin cards could reveal that you don't actually want to include all of them for whatever reason. Assuming you want some balance between the various tribes, at first glance it appears that Kithkin could be your limiting factor. It might make sense to work out how many of these cards you'd like to include and go build up from there.
For cube designers working with a traditional cube, one limiting factor turns out to be the number of aggressive (e.g. 2-power) one drops available. Agressive decks in a "best of" environment need to get off to a fast start, and therefore require a critical mass of these one-drops - cards like Isamaru, Hound of Konda, Goblin Guide and Gravecrawler. Unfortunately, there are only so many of these cards available. If you want to ensure that there are enough cards available in the cube to support aggressive strategies, then you can only grow your cube so big before there just aren't enough of these cards to appear with sufficient frequency to push someone into this strategy.
Common approaches
In practice, since booster drafts are one of the most popular ways to play cube, it is very common to select a cube size that is some multiple of 90. Common cube sizes include 360, 450, 540, 630 and 720 (with 630 being less common). Cubes tend to start at 360 in order to support an eight-person draft while 720 supports two eight-person drafts without the need to reshuffle (draft half the cube, then draft the other half). This is certainly not necessary, since any cards leftover just add to variance and can be shuffled back in for the next draft - the leftovers don't strictly need to be a multiple of 90. But it's a decent rule of thumb to consider.
What about the other formats, like Winston? Well, even a 360-card cube has enough cards to support multiple Winston drafts without reshuffling, so most cube builders tend to focus on the larger sizes. However, I have seen at least one 200-card cube designed for just this reason. You really are only limited by your own goals and preferences.
My own traditional "best of" cube currently contains 450 cards, in order to support an eight-person draft with some variance (20% of the cards will sit on the bench) and still keep the overall power level fairly high. 450 also supports exactly six 75-card Sealed pools which is one of the ways that I like to play when there are only 3-4 people. In practice, I have had more than one 10-person draft and have had to exclude people in the past as well due to the limitation of the cube size; as more cube-quality cards get printed I find myself considering a shift up to 540. However, I also experience the limiting factor listed above: I don't believe that there are quite enough aggressive one-drops of cube-quality for me to make the shift up to 540 cards. This could change over time as more of this type of card get printed.
The number 450 has another useful property. In a traditional eight-player booster draft using sealed booster packs, there are 24 packs, each pack containing 10 common cards (not counting basic lands) for a total of 240 common cards. The average set contains about 100 unique commons (for example, M13 has 101). Assuming that all of the packs are from the same set, then there are approximately 2.4 copies of each common in the draft on average. This number can be scaled to any cube size as a simple ratio, but if you scale it onto a 450-card cube then you find that the number is exactly 3. This means that for a 450-card cube, three cards that do approximately the same thing are the equivalent to a common in a traditional booster draft. This provides a meaningful metric that I can use to help determine how many cards that provide a particular effect I want to include. As your cube scales this number gets larger. For example, in a 720 card cube this number is 4.8.
For this reason, the themed cube that I am designing - which assigns actual meaning to card rarity - will also be designed as a 450-card cube as a starting point.
Summary
While size matters for getting started, ultimately you can always make changes at a later date if you need to. It will involve some work to change, but it can be done. So don't stress - just pick something reasonable and get started.
Some questions to ponder
One of the first decisions you'll need to make when you first build your cube is how many cards to actually include. There is, of course, no single correct answer. However, the answer that is right for you will depend on your answers to a few key questions:
1. How will the cube be played?
2. How many players do you want to be able to support at one time?
3. How much variation do you want each time the cube is played?
4. How strong do you want decks to be overall?
5. Is there a limiting factor that caps the size of your cube?
Formats
There are a variety of methods that people commonly use to build cube decks. These include multi-person booster drafts, two-person Winston or Winchester drafts, Sealed deck, and more. Each and every method has merit, but each also brings certain constraints to the card pool. In general, booster drafts usually involve creating three 15-card piles of random cards per player. Winston drafts often involve a single pile of about 90-100 cards; Winchester drafts usually involve two piles of about 45-50 cards. Sealed deck usually involves 75-90 random cards per person. This leads us naturally on to the second question: how many players do you want to support at one time?
Number of players
If you plan to use your cube for two-person Winston or Winchester drafts exclusively, then you could get away with a cube with as few as 100 cards. If you generally have about four people and like to do 75-card Sealed pools each time you play, then you'll obviously need at least 300 cards to play with. If you want to support an eight-person booster draft, then you'll need at least 360 cards. The math is pretty straight forward.
Variance
However, the math only really tells you the minimum number of cards that you'll need. If you always booster draft with eight players and have a 360-card cube, then all cards will be drafted every time. This will create a fairly consistent environment but will also create a situation where players will tend to know that certain cards will turn up in an opponent's deck at some point. This could cause them to make certain decisions, such as always putting artifact removal in their main deck just in case they play the opponent with Sol Ring. On the other hand, the larger your cube, the greater the variation from draft-to-draft since some cards won't appear some percentage of the time. Generally, the more cards you have relative to the number of players, the greater the variation.
Power level
Counteracting the push to larger cubes - at least for "best of" cubes - is the simple fact that the more cards you have, the further down the list of top cards you have to go. There will likely be a significant difference in the overall power level between the top 10 and the 70th to 80th-best White cards, for example. The further down the list you go, the more cards you have to include of a lower power level. That's fine, of course, if you want a bit of a range of power levels of the cards in the average cube deck. But some cube designers prefer to keep the power level very high and therefore tend to prefer slightly smaller cubes. If you're playing cube to play with the best cards in Magic, then you you probably want those cards to actually turn up in a draft. If you're playing a powered cube, you might like to actually see moxen from time to time!
Limiting factor
On the other hand, if you're building a themed cube of some sort, then you might find that there are only so many cards that fit your theme. This is likely to grow over time, but you might need to do a little research before finalising the overall size. Let's imagine that you want to build a tribal-themed cube and one of the tribes that you'd like to include is Kithkin. A quick Gatherer search shows that there are only 58 different Kithkin creatures in print, while there are 134 Merfolk and 264 Goblins. Further, an analysis of the Kithkin cards could reveal that you don't actually want to include all of them for whatever reason. Assuming you want some balance between the various tribes, at first glance it appears that Kithkin could be your limiting factor. It might make sense to work out how many of these cards you'd like to include and go build up from there.
For cube designers working with a traditional cube, one limiting factor turns out to be the number of aggressive (e.g. 2-power) one drops available. Agressive decks in a "best of" environment need to get off to a fast start, and therefore require a critical mass of these one-drops - cards like Isamaru, Hound of Konda, Goblin Guide and Gravecrawler. Unfortunately, there are only so many of these cards available. If you want to ensure that there are enough cards available in the cube to support aggressive strategies, then you can only grow your cube so big before there just aren't enough of these cards to appear with sufficient frequency to push someone into this strategy.
Common approaches
In practice, since booster drafts are one of the most popular ways to play cube, it is very common to select a cube size that is some multiple of 90. Common cube sizes include 360, 450, 540, 630 and 720 (with 630 being less common). Cubes tend to start at 360 in order to support an eight-person draft while 720 supports two eight-person drafts without the need to reshuffle (draft half the cube, then draft the other half). This is certainly not necessary, since any cards leftover just add to variance and can be shuffled back in for the next draft - the leftovers don't strictly need to be a multiple of 90. But it's a decent rule of thumb to consider.
My own traditional "best of" cube currently contains 450 cards, in order to support an eight-person draft with some variance (20% of the cards will sit on the bench) and still keep the overall power level fairly high. 450 also supports exactly six 75-card Sealed pools which is one of the ways that I like to play when there are only 3-4 people. In practice, I have had more than one 10-person draft and have had to exclude people in the past as well due to the limitation of the cube size; as more cube-quality cards get printed I find myself considering a shift up to 540. However, I also experience the limiting factor listed above: I don't believe that there are quite enough aggressive one-drops of cube-quality for me to make the shift up to 540 cards. This could change over time as more of this type of card get printed.
The number 450 has another useful property. In a traditional eight-player booster draft using sealed booster packs, there are 24 packs, each pack containing 10 common cards (not counting basic lands) for a total of 240 common cards. The average set contains about 100 unique commons (for example, M13 has 101). Assuming that all of the packs are from the same set, then there are approximately 2.4 copies of each common in the draft on average. This number can be scaled to any cube size as a simple ratio, but if you scale it onto a 450-card cube then you find that the number is exactly 3. This means that for a 450-card cube, three cards that do approximately the same thing are the equivalent to a common in a traditional booster draft. This provides a meaningful metric that I can use to help determine how many cards that provide a particular effect I want to include. As your cube scales this number gets larger. For example, in a 720 card cube this number is 4.8.
For this reason, the themed cube that I am designing - which assigns actual meaning to card rarity - will also be designed as a 450-card cube as a starting point.
Summary
While size matters for getting started, ultimately you can always make changes at a later date if you need to. It will involve some work to change, but it can be done. So don't stress - just pick something reasonable and get started.
Wednesday 5 September 2012
Pattern Recognition
As a software architect, one tool that has been very useful over the years is the identification and use of patterns. The concept of design patterns originated in traditional building architecture where similar problems were frequently encountered. Over time, standard solutions to these problems were documented and reused by other architects, thus allowing a buildup of professional knowledge and a common language for discussing the various solutions. An example of such a pattern in traditional building architecture is the arch. Patterns also creep up in software design, and they can apply to cube design as well.
A pattern is a recurring solution to a common problem. For example, in software engineering, the Singleton Pattern is a solution to the requirement that there be only a single copy of a particular object at run-time. Cubes also traditionally follow a singleton pattern. But why?
In cube design, the singleton pattern refers to something slightly different: the cube contains only a single copy of each card. This is not strictly required; if you've ever played in a booster draft then you've probably seen more than one copy of a single card, especially among the commons. In fact, contemporary booster packs sometimes contain premium foils that can mean a single pack could contain two copies of the same card (one foil, one non-foil). On the other hand, booster packs otherwise do have a kind of contract with players: with the exception of premium foil cards, booster packs will not contain any duplicate cards. This helps to smooth out the drafting and avoids clumping of cards. It is made possible by the fact that booster packs are assembled in a controlled printing and packaging process that ensures the contract is met.
When you're building booster packs yourself everything is done manually. It is already tedious enough shuffling up several hundred cards; I don't also want to sort cards to ensure that multiple copies of the same card don't end up in the same pack. If there is only one copy of each card, then it is not necessary to do any additional sorting, as there will never be duplicates.
A happy by-product is that the singleton pattern provides a great deal of variety during a draft. The result is much more akin to the feel of a draft environment that includes all three sets of a block, rather than the early triple-large set drafts.
When multiple cards that provide a similar effect do appear in the same pack, this can actually create some interesting decision points for drafters. While you may always choose Lightning Bolt over pretty much any other burn spell, you might find the choice between Firebolt and Searing Spear more interesting.
Including only one copy of each card also creates some interesting decisions for the design of the cube. If you were selecting only a single burn spell in Red, for example, you might choose something like Lightning Bolt for your set. When a new card comes along like Searing Spear, you can instantly see that it's not quite as good as Lightning Bolt so you might decide to just leave it be. However, in a singleton cube, you often want to accumulate a critcal mass of a similar type of effect. This redundancy basically acts as a bit of a counter-measure to the singleton pattern and may result in you including both Lightning Bolt and Searing Spear in your cube.
I follow the singleton pattern strictly for my traditional "best of" cube. For the most part, the themed cube that I am currently designing will also follow this pattern - with one exception. For a number of reasons, I have some issues in my White section which can be helped greatly if I include multiple copies of Squadron Hawk. Squadron Hawk, of course, is a very average card if there is only one copy available, and as a result it is almost universally shunned in cubes. However, if I were to include, say, four copies of Squadron Hawk, then the card becomes significantly stronger. In fact, it can create some interesting draft decisions in and of itself. It is very much a gamble to take the first copy of Squadron Hawk since it is not very good on its own. Collecting additional copies, though, can be very advantageous and even very powerful depending upon the draft environment that you're creating. In M11 draft, it was a very strong card indeed.
But what about that issue of having multiple copies in the same pack? Actually, I think that in this case it could once again make for some interesting draft decisions. If it's early in a pack and you're looking at two copies of Squadron Hawk, do you take one? If you do, what are the chances that someone else will take the other one, thus reducing the value of the first? What if you pass both? You can then no longer get both, meaning that you're passing on them entirely. Since these decisions will only come up periodically and since I'm planning to restrict it to the one card, I think that this sort of thing is fine. I just wouldn't want it to happen with a lot of cards; it makes a better exception than a rule.
So, the singleton pattern solves the problem of duplicates and simultaneously adds to the overall experience. As a result, most cube designers choose to follow this pattern by default. As I continue to explore cube design in more detail, I'll be on the lookout for more patterns used by other cube designers to solve common problems and apply them to my own cube designs wherever they seem appropriate.
A pattern is a recurring solution to a common problem. For example, in software engineering, the Singleton Pattern is a solution to the requirement that there be only a single copy of a particular object at run-time. Cubes also traditionally follow a singleton pattern. But why?
In cube design, the singleton pattern refers to something slightly different: the cube contains only a single copy of each card. This is not strictly required; if you've ever played in a booster draft then you've probably seen more than one copy of a single card, especially among the commons. In fact, contemporary booster packs sometimes contain premium foils that can mean a single pack could contain two copies of the same card (one foil, one non-foil). On the other hand, booster packs otherwise do have a kind of contract with players: with the exception of premium foil cards, booster packs will not contain any duplicate cards. This helps to smooth out the drafting and avoids clumping of cards. It is made possible by the fact that booster packs are assembled in a controlled printing and packaging process that ensures the contract is met.
When you're building booster packs yourself everything is done manually. It is already tedious enough shuffling up several hundred cards; I don't also want to sort cards to ensure that multiple copies of the same card don't end up in the same pack. If there is only one copy of each card, then it is not necessary to do any additional sorting, as there will never be duplicates.
A happy by-product is that the singleton pattern provides a great deal of variety during a draft. The result is much more akin to the feel of a draft environment that includes all three sets of a block, rather than the early triple-large set drafts.
When multiple cards that provide a similar effect do appear in the same pack, this can actually create some interesting decision points for drafters. While you may always choose Lightning Bolt over pretty much any other burn spell, you might find the choice between Firebolt and Searing Spear more interesting.
Including only one copy of each card also creates some interesting decisions for the design of the cube. If you were selecting only a single burn spell in Red, for example, you might choose something like Lightning Bolt for your set. When a new card comes along like Searing Spear, you can instantly see that it's not quite as good as Lightning Bolt so you might decide to just leave it be. However, in a singleton cube, you often want to accumulate a critcal mass of a similar type of effect. This redundancy basically acts as a bit of a counter-measure to the singleton pattern and may result in you including both Lightning Bolt and Searing Spear in your cube.
I follow the singleton pattern strictly for my traditional "best of" cube. For the most part, the themed cube that I am currently designing will also follow this pattern - with one exception. For a number of reasons, I have some issues in my White section which can be helped greatly if I include multiple copies of Squadron Hawk. Squadron Hawk, of course, is a very average card if there is only one copy available, and as a result it is almost universally shunned in cubes. However, if I were to include, say, four copies of Squadron Hawk, then the card becomes significantly stronger. In fact, it can create some interesting draft decisions in and of itself. It is very much a gamble to take the first copy of Squadron Hawk since it is not very good on its own. Collecting additional copies, though, can be very advantageous and even very powerful depending upon the draft environment that you're creating. In M11 draft, it was a very strong card indeed.
But what about that issue of having multiple copies in the same pack? Actually, I think that in this case it could once again make for some interesting draft decisions. If it's early in a pack and you're looking at two copies of Squadron Hawk, do you take one? If you do, what are the chances that someone else will take the other one, thus reducing the value of the first? What if you pass both? You can then no longer get both, meaning that you're passing on them entirely. Since these decisions will only come up periodically and since I'm planning to restrict it to the one card, I think that this sort of thing is fine. I just wouldn't want it to happen with a lot of cards; it makes a better exception than a rule.
So, the singleton pattern solves the problem of duplicates and simultaneously adds to the overall experience. As a result, most cube designers choose to follow this pattern by default. As I continue to explore cube design in more detail, I'll be on the lookout for more patterns used by other cube designers to solve common problems and apply them to my own cube designs wherever they seem appropriate.
Sunday 2 September 2012
Cube: More Than a Box of Cards
Each person views the world through a unique lens. This, in turn, affects the manner in which each of us interacts with our environment. Ever since I can remember, I have always enjoyed activities that allowed for a great degree of variation while still imposing a distinct set of restrictions. I was never really into jigsaw puzzles, on the one hand, because there is only one correct solution. Painting, on the other hand, allows for too many possibilities since it imposes no restrictions beyond the two-dimensional canvas and the imagination of the artist. My favourite childhood toy was Lego: a large box of Lego pieces allowed for a huge set of possible outcomes while still very much restricting the builder to a set of basic shapes and mechanisms for interconnection. This same Lego-block style of thinking is what ultimately lead me to a career in engineering and is also a key reason that I enjoy Magic: the Gathering.
Building a Magic deck of any variation - whether it be Constructed, Sealed, Draft, Commander or whatever - requires the builder to select from a set number of pieces - the cards - and build a deck within some basic restrictions - deck size, number of copies of each card, etc. The card pool from which one may choose is effectively their box of Lego pieces. This may be defined by the format - Standard, Modern, Legacy, etc. - or simply by the cards physically on hand, as in the case of Limited formats. The resulting deck represents the builder's unique perspective exerted upon the Magic environment.
The concept of a box of Lego pieces has slowly developed within the Magic community not only into Limited formats, but over the past few years also into the concept of a cube. At its most basic level, a cube is simply a box of Magic cards that you use to build decks. The box could contain anything, such as the cumulative collection of cards obtained from past five years of pre-release events, for example. But it is human nature to exert one's will on the environment. Cube owners do this by selecting the cards that are contained in the box. Thus, cube design was born.
If you have followed some of the history of cube, from Sam Gomersall and Tom Lapille to Evan Erwin and Thea Steele and many others, then you're probably very familiar with the standard definition of cube as a collection of the most powerful cards in Magic's history stuffed together into a set to be drafted. To my engineering mind, this is simply a group of people agreeing on a basic design criteria: the cards in the box are selected because they're the best cards in the history of Magic. It is, indeed, a fine criteria for selection. In fact, whole cube communities have developed (such as this one at mtgsalvation.com) in which like-minded individuals gather to discuss exactly which cards should be included in a cube. Further, Wizards of the Coast has chosen to surf the wave of cube enthusiasm both by creating a cube that can be drafted on Magic Online, as well as recently featuring cube draft as an official format at the Magic Players Championship. This official support further cements the common understanding of what a cube represents. I have built such a cube myself, and have learned a great deal about cube design from the various cube communities and authors on the subject.
In the process of cube construction, I have come to realise that restricting the criteria for cube design only to the "best" cards has its own caveats and limitations. For one thing, it's difficult to get agreement on which cards, exactly, are the most powerful. Cube lists differ even among those who subscribe to this basic definition. There are those who for various reasons have decided to exclude the "power 9" cards - the most powerful and, generally speaking, most expensive cards ever printed. Some cube designers restrict the sets from which cards are considered acceptable for inclusion, excluding, for example, cards from the un-sets (Unglued, Unhinged) and sometimes from sets such as Portal which were never part of any official format. Most cube designers also make some attempt to give structure to their cube by balancing the five colours, artifacts, multi-coloured cards and lands. This is like choosing how many blocks of each colour will be in the box of Lego. Furthermore, experience with playing the cube has lead many cube builders to include selections that support various deck archetypes in order to create a more varied and balanced play environment. This also helps to create linkages between the pieces, much like selecting styles of Lego, such as Lego Castle or Lego City. However, every time a card is included for one of these reasons it is potentially replacing a card that is "better". As a result, there is already far more to a cube than simply being the best cards, even if this remains the primary design principle.
Upon further inspection, however, it becomes apparent that this is not the only possible design criteria. "Pauper" cubes refer to those built using only common cards; "Peasant" cubes are built using only common and uncommon cards. Generally these cubes are still applying the "best of" criteria, but only within their overarching restriction on card rarity. There is also the concept of Block cubes. These cubes are different in the sense that there really isn't any design involved; rather, they contain one copy of every card in a Block of sets as released by Wizards of the Coast. I have put together a couple of these myself: I have a complete set of Innistrad and a complete set of Dark Ascension in a box ready to be drafted. It is also possible to cross the concepts: I have a Block cube which is simply every common and uncommon in Scars of Mirrodin Block and another which is every common and uncommon in Innistrad Block (including Avacyn Restored). While there is no design involved in these cubes, they do provide a very good approximation of what it feels like to draft the entire set and get a feel for the various mechanics and interactions.
There are also "themed" cubes which attempt to build a cube based around some criteria other than "the best cards". A common example is a Tribal cube, which promotes drafting decks around a particular creature type. Themed cubes tend to get less attention within the cube communities. The primary reason for this seems to be that when a cube designer is building along some axis other than "the best", other cube designers find it difficult to provide input. This makes sense, but does not reduce the value of such cubes. In fact, this is probably the area of greatest interest to me currently - not so much designing a cube around a specific theme such as Tribal, but simply designing a cube which is a set all on its own, with cards chosen specifically for their fit within that specific environment.
Cube design provides an opportunity to design and build a Magic set of my own, using the pieces provided by Wizards of the Coast. The result of my effort, in turn, is a box of pieces to be used by myself and my friends to form our own creations. Cube design, for me, is the study and application of the various criteria for defining what is to be included in my box of cards, whether this be the structure, archetypes, mana curves, colour pie breakdown, individual card selection or any other criteria.
So, while it is common to refer to a cube as a collection of the best Magic cards of all time, I will also continue to explore the various facets of custom draft set design which represents the greater hobby that is cube design.
Building a Magic deck of any variation - whether it be Constructed, Sealed, Draft, Commander or whatever - requires the builder to select from a set number of pieces - the cards - and build a deck within some basic restrictions - deck size, number of copies of each card, etc. The card pool from which one may choose is effectively their box of Lego pieces. This may be defined by the format - Standard, Modern, Legacy, etc. - or simply by the cards physically on hand, as in the case of Limited formats. The resulting deck represents the builder's unique perspective exerted upon the Magic environment.
The concept of a box of Lego pieces has slowly developed within the Magic community not only into Limited formats, but over the past few years also into the concept of a cube. At its most basic level, a cube is simply a box of Magic cards that you use to build decks. The box could contain anything, such as the cumulative collection of cards obtained from past five years of pre-release events, for example. But it is human nature to exert one's will on the environment. Cube owners do this by selecting the cards that are contained in the box. Thus, cube design was born.
If you have followed some of the history of cube, from Sam Gomersall and Tom Lapille to Evan Erwin and Thea Steele and many others, then you're probably very familiar with the standard definition of cube as a collection of the most powerful cards in Magic's history stuffed together into a set to be drafted. To my engineering mind, this is simply a group of people agreeing on a basic design criteria: the cards in the box are selected because they're the best cards in the history of Magic. It is, indeed, a fine criteria for selection. In fact, whole cube communities have developed (such as this one at mtgsalvation.com) in which like-minded individuals gather to discuss exactly which cards should be included in a cube. Further, Wizards of the Coast has chosen to surf the wave of cube enthusiasm both by creating a cube that can be drafted on Magic Online, as well as recently featuring cube draft as an official format at the Magic Players Championship. This official support further cements the common understanding of what a cube represents. I have built such a cube myself, and have learned a great deal about cube design from the various cube communities and authors on the subject.
In the process of cube construction, I have come to realise that restricting the criteria for cube design only to the "best" cards has its own caveats and limitations. For one thing, it's difficult to get agreement on which cards, exactly, are the most powerful. Cube lists differ even among those who subscribe to this basic definition. There are those who for various reasons have decided to exclude the "power 9" cards - the most powerful and, generally speaking, most expensive cards ever printed. Some cube designers restrict the sets from which cards are considered acceptable for inclusion, excluding, for example, cards from the un-sets (Unglued, Unhinged) and sometimes from sets such as Portal which were never part of any official format. Most cube designers also make some attempt to give structure to their cube by balancing the five colours, artifacts, multi-coloured cards and lands. This is like choosing how many blocks of each colour will be in the box of Lego. Furthermore, experience with playing the cube has lead many cube builders to include selections that support various deck archetypes in order to create a more varied and balanced play environment. This also helps to create linkages between the pieces, much like selecting styles of Lego, such as Lego Castle or Lego City. However, every time a card is included for one of these reasons it is potentially replacing a card that is "better". As a result, there is already far more to a cube than simply being the best cards, even if this remains the primary design principle.
Upon further inspection, however, it becomes apparent that this is not the only possible design criteria. "Pauper" cubes refer to those built using only common cards; "Peasant" cubes are built using only common and uncommon cards. Generally these cubes are still applying the "best of" criteria, but only within their overarching restriction on card rarity. There is also the concept of Block cubes. These cubes are different in the sense that there really isn't any design involved; rather, they contain one copy of every card in a Block of sets as released by Wizards of the Coast. I have put together a couple of these myself: I have a complete set of Innistrad and a complete set of Dark Ascension in a box ready to be drafted. It is also possible to cross the concepts: I have a Block cube which is simply every common and uncommon in Scars of Mirrodin Block and another which is every common and uncommon in Innistrad Block (including Avacyn Restored). While there is no design involved in these cubes, they do provide a very good approximation of what it feels like to draft the entire set and get a feel for the various mechanics and interactions.
There are also "themed" cubes which attempt to build a cube based around some criteria other than "the best cards". A common example is a Tribal cube, which promotes drafting decks around a particular creature type. Themed cubes tend to get less attention within the cube communities. The primary reason for this seems to be that when a cube designer is building along some axis other than "the best", other cube designers find it difficult to provide input. This makes sense, but does not reduce the value of such cubes. In fact, this is probably the area of greatest interest to me currently - not so much designing a cube around a specific theme such as Tribal, but simply designing a cube which is a set all on its own, with cards chosen specifically for their fit within that specific environment.
Cube design provides an opportunity to design and build a Magic set of my own, using the pieces provided by Wizards of the Coast. The result of my effort, in turn, is a box of pieces to be used by myself and my friends to form our own creations. Cube design, for me, is the study and application of the various criteria for defining what is to be included in my box of cards, whether this be the structure, archetypes, mana curves, colour pie breakdown, individual card selection or any other criteria.
So, while it is common to refer to a cube as a collection of the best Magic cards of all time, I will also continue to explore the various facets of custom draft set design which represents the greater hobby that is cube design.
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