MTG Salvation

I like the idea of cube. I've played with a cube and loved it.

I don't have the resources (financial or "spare cards lying around") to actually build a cube that's not, well, assembled garbage. How do people do it? What's the... Path to becoming a cube enthusiast?

I suggest starting with garbage. That is what I did and I feel like I learned more slowly transitioning to gold than just having fake gold dumped in my lap.

I smashed about 800 cards together before even reading a list. I don't have the list any more, but it was discussed in the first pages of my cube thread on this very forum, which was my first foray into sharing it. It really wasn't that terrible as a draft environment, in all honesty, just rather unbalanced due to the power discrepancy. Bear in mind that was years ago and 800 card cubes nowadays don't have to include any weak cards at all, as there's so much to choose from.

I would start with whatever you got, make a 180 cube, and go from there - just add the effects you need to make the drafting environment work!

Just dive into it. Sleeve up a box of cards and slowly sculpt it into a masterpiece.

Put a rough "skeleton" in place of what you want the basic construction to look like, and start throwing in random stuff until you have a workable Frankenstein's Monster of a cube to play with your pals.

I love my fake gold cards. It allows me to draft with any cards & test cards as they're spoiled.

That being said as long as you have a short-term & long-term plan with your Cube it will be a total blast.

Good luck!

Build what you can out of your collection, then make some goals of "Stuff I need to improve" and commit to finding those pieces in between.

I'm admittedly not the best person to ask though, because I built my cube by taking apart my 9 EDH decks and mashing them together into a cube. I had the resources to do that, a lot of people probably don't have 540 relevant cards laying around in decks waiting to be mashed together.

Here's another vote for just throwing some cards together and drafting them. Once you do, you should also log them into a page at Cubetutor.com to help you manage your cube. It makes life a lot easier. Plus, that way you can participate in the "Draft the above person's cube" thread here which gives you a lot of helpful data about what kinds of decks people can put together from your cube as well as the most and least popular cards.