For those who usually cube with only 2-4 players, in what ways has having a small group lead you to modify your cube design? I.e. what design decisions have you made specifically because you're usually drafting with only a few people.
How do you usually draft? (e.g. Winston, Winchester, Rochester, Sealed, Booster, etc.)
If your cube has been designed for use with small groups, please post your link so others can look at what you've done.
My cube is currently not designed specifically for small groups but it looks like I could be cubing heaps more than I am now but potentially most often with 2-4 players. I was about to add the "Black Pox Package" but am having second thoughts because of this. I am also thinking about whether I should reduce my overall cube size, the size of my multi-colour sections, remove some 2-colour fixing, etc. Before I do any of it, I thought I'd start this thread to gather some wisdom from others in a similar situation.
The "build-around-me" cards are harder to get value from. Stand alone powerlevel is a more important factor than synergy. Flexibility is key; cards that can remove multiple permanent types are more useful (Bramblecrush, etc).
We played mostly Winston and Sealed when we had 2-3 players.
We often have to cube with 2-4, so I would recommend the following:
- Archetypes are still good, as long as they are supported via synergy, and not combos. For example, you mention the Pox archetype. We have had great success with it, because we added a bunch of sac and mass removal cards, and a good amount of cards to take advantage of them. Archetypes that need more specific cards, like Wildfire or Sneak Attack, will suffer.
- Hybrids, split cards, phyrexian mana, and off color kicker cards are your friend. These cards are flexible, and can go into many different decks. Fire/Ice may not be as powerful as a red card or a blue card, but being able to run it in either will come in handy when you are struggling to get to 23 playables in a Winston draft.
- Gold cards are your enemy. The exact opposite principle as above. I run a a 540 card cube, and run at most 4 gold cards per pair (some of those slots are land).
- Flexible fixing is also your friend. Cards that are a bit slower but fix all five colors might be worth running over signets or the like.
- (Warning: controversial) I see you are running a 450 with fetches, duals, shocks, and a fourth set of fixers that is mixed (painlands, bouncelands, M10 lands, etc). We have had great success with cutting that last set of subpar, unfetchable fixers and adding a second set of fetches. We then moved any additional fixers we wanted to play, like the WWK manlands, into the gold section.
I Winston with two and just draft with 4+. Sealed is best with three but cubing with odd numbers sucks.
Changing your cube can be beneficial if you Winston a lot. Skew more toward aggro and cut risky build around cards for valuable redundant effects. It sounds boring but it makes the drafts a lot more enjoyable.
I agree with the above about gold, I'd shoot for around 7%, not counting hybrid.
When I see Healing Salve, I'm often like "Oh girl, I wish I could turn every card into this." Thanks they removed the gain life part, otherwise this would have been broken.
I have yet to cube with more than 4 people. I have a 450 powered cube. I could probably change it to make is SLIGHTLY better for smaller numbers of players, but I built it as if I would be playing with a full 8. Honestly, we have a blast playing it even though we didn't tune it for a smaller number of players and when the niche strategies do work out, it's all the more memorable. We usually play grid draft (9 packs of 9 for 2 players, 7 packs of 9 for 3), but we try all sorts of draft styles (weave, infinity, tenchester). We found with Winchester the decks were underpowered. With the draft styles we play, you get more cards or more selection so the decks end up being more powerful and synergistic, and you can take chances picking a niche card early because you'll have enough playables even if that strategy didn't pan out.
I almost always draft with 2 players, we started off using the grid drafting then moved on to tenchester. Grid was mainly used when I was still at 360, but we decided we liked tenchester more as if it's just 2 players then there's less fighting over cards and the deck you end up with can be super powerful and archetype support seems fine since you see 360 cards. Having said that, I recently tenchestered my multicolour cube and it was odd when I realised that we would see every card since it's only 360 atm. Having the random "missing" 90 cards when using my powered cube give a bit of risk as you may not see the last card or 2 you're hoping for.
We recently tried winston and pancake drafts for a laugh (google the latter and you'll find it, although someone did mentioned it here once). Winston decks were the usual trainwrecks I hear people talking about when the cube isn't designed for it but they were a laugh for a change. Pancake was interesting, it uses 198 cards (18 pack of 11) so you see a similar amount to grid drafts, it was also super fast to actually draft compared to tenchester taking nearly forever. The decks were reasonable but a bit generic, will be trying it again since I first picked recurring nightmare and tried for a rec sur deck (got all the green pieces) but turned out my wife was cutting me on black the whole draft and I didn't notice. :-( Just figured the best cards were in the undrafted half of the cube.
When I've had 4 or 5 ppl we've done tenchester as most of my friends are inexperienced with magic and that format lets you have some discussion over picks when most people have never seen the cards before.
85% of the time I draft with 4 players.
I have found that with only four players drafting works better if you have smaller sized packs but with more packs.
instead of a normal 3 packs with 15. when we are four players we draft with 5 packs of 9 cards. you still end up with the same amount of cards but you end up with a much more coherent set of cards for making a deck. You also eliminate having the pack wheeling the table so much. With a 15 card pack the third and four wheel are generally junk. Where as with 9 card packs you get a few extra first picks and you get one real wheel and stuck with the last card in the pack.
If we have three players, we do a 90 card sealed pool. My cube is designed specifically for multiplayer fun. I have never tried it with just two players.
While my cube is certainly built for 6-8, I often grid and quilt draft it with my roommate. We still end up with quite good decks, though certainly not as consistent as with more. With three we usually just play Stack until we find a 4th, or we do a multiplayer commander draft. (My commanders are not optimized at all, just legends I had sitting around that were not in the cube.) With 4-5 we do 5 packs of 9. With 6+ 3 packs of 15.
While I am very fond of gird drafting (and will not try Pancake), the biggest thing for me was to also build a cube group. I am making progress, with ~6 regulars now though still not quite hitting the elusive 8.
I normally just do two player drafts and we have found quilt drafting (look it up) to be amazing. You see enough cards where you get to build viable archetype decks and you get to have a discussion with your opponent during the draft about what you are doing.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
That's the remarkable thing about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse
Calvin and Hobbes Cube Tutor
I normally just do two player drafts and we have found quilt drafting (look it up) to be amazing. You see enough cards where you get to build viable archetype decks and you get to have a discussion with your opponent during the draft about what you are doing.
Yay, glad to see that some people are still quilting! We do it as a change of pace, but tend to prefer a certain amount of hidden information. Our default 2-person draft may appear a bit unwieldy, but it's been about perfect in allowing a good deal of control, the ability to see a lot of cards (important for narrower archetypes), and enough mystery that you're never 100% sure what colors your opponent is in.
We do the following:
1. Winston 35 cards
2. Six 3x3 grids. After each grid, each player draws three cards and keeps one of them. This last addition only adds 6 cards to the player's pool, but has really helped in building the narrower decks.
With four people, we draft 5 packs of 9 cards.
With three (a horrible number for MTG, of course), I've heard that quilting works quite well, although I don't remember the numbers.
First of all, I agree completely that 3 is a terrible number. Unfortunately, it's a number that comes up often for us. We have a regular group at work of 5 people, and we mostly play league or just casual at lunch. But we have a couple of guys (plus myself) that are keen to put in a little more time, so after work cubing is a possibility. We did it once with 3 people - yuck. And multi-player cube is a different beast entirely from what I'm after.
Ok, so as for the responses:
1. Looking at the different draft variants seems pretty important here. I am now seeing the value in some of these alternate approaches - in particular the issue is how many cards you get to see. I'm interested in at least supporting basic archetypes (aggro, midrange, control) even in a 2-player draft. That's where something like Winston/Winchester can be a problem - you only see 90-100 cards and both decks end-up as mid-range monstrosities. You can draft a larger pile, but it's kind of the same thing. Seeing more cards would be good.
2. Wildfire and Sneak Attack were mentioned as examples of narrow things you can't do. With Sneak Attack for example, my hope was that with a lot of similar cards scattered throughout the cube that care about fatties (various reanimator, straight ramp, Natural Order, Show and Tell, etc.) that there would be enough critical mass to be able to build some kind of combined "cheat fatties into play" archetype, even with few players. Any thoughts on this?
3. Card flexibility is interesting - I'll do a bit of a review of these types of cards (e.g. Bramblecrush) and see what I come up with.
4. "Hybrids, split cards, phyrexian mana, and off color kicker cards are your friend." Yes, I'm seeing this now and as I mentioned in another thread I'm looking into adding more cards like this.
5. "Gold cards are your enemy." Yeah - I currently run 4 per guild at 450 and these don't include land. Last night I was looking at cutting back to 3 true gold per guild. If I separate out an unbalanced hybrid section then I don't actually have to cut very many cards from my gold section - I think it was only 4 or 5 and I wasn't too upset about the cards I thought I'd cut.
6. "Flexible fixing is also your friend." Also yeah. I'd love more cards like City of Brass and Gemstone Mine for turn 1 fixing in aggro decks of any colour combination. I do run Grand Coliseum, Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds. Any other lands you'd suggest here? I currently follow a design aesthetic that doesn't use artifacts for mana fixing, only ramping. The only current exception is Mox Diamond and I've got Chrome Mox on order. I'm not a big fan of cards like Coalition Relic and Chromatic Lantern since I think they take a lot away from what Green does, but perhaps this is the type of thing you're suggesting? Any other suggestions in this area?
7. "Warning: controversial" I'm happy to drop the 4th set of 2-colour fixers - was looking at that last night. I'm also happy for others to run multiple copies of cards (e.g. fetches) but for me, the singleton rule is a sweet design constraint that, to my mind, gives cube real definition and character. (I currently run all basics with the same art but moving at some stage to all singleton basics too because I like the singleton aesthetic so much. :)).
Not sure whether I responded to everything but that's enough for one post, I think. I'll check back later for more.
Just to address one issue you raised: I push reanimator quite a bit, and normally draft with two although I am trying to make my cube also work with 8. I found that the cheat-into-play strategies had trouble when the big fatty target wasn't in the pool, or was snagged by someone else as a finisher. People wouldn't go into the archetype if their top end was Ob Nix or Thornling or something at the end of it. (This is very much unlike what happens in a regular draft, where you can get away with one or two 6 drops in each color).
As a result, while trying to keep my curves lean, I run two more big dudes in each color than I otherwise would, and it's worked great. Sure, if the pool is stacked weird or noone is doing ramp/reanimator/cheat-into-play, then they are undrafted. But you're not actually taking up too many slots, and it doesn't mess with the overall curve as much as the average-cc stats might lead you to believe.
First of all, I agree completely that 3 is a terrible number. Unfortunately, it's a number that comes up often for us. We have a regular group at work of 5 people, and we mostly play league or just casual at lunch. But we have a couple of guys (plus myself) that are keen to put in a little more time, so after work cubing is a possibility. We did it once with 3 people - yuck. And multi-player cube is a different beast entirely from what I'm after.
Ok, so as for the responses:
1. Looking at the different draft variants seems pretty important here. I am now seeing the value in some of these alternate approaches - in particular the issue is how many cards you get to see. I'm interested in at least supporting basic archetypes (aggro, midrange, control) even in a 2-player draft. That's where something like Winston/Winchester can be a problem - you only see 90-100 cards and both decks end-up as mid-range monstrosities. You can draft a larger pile, but it's kind of the same thing. Seeing more cards would be good.
2. Wildfire and Sneak Attack were mentioned as examples of narrow things you can't do. With Sneak Attack for example, my hope was that with a lot of similar cards scattered throughout the cube that care about fatties (various reanimator, straight ramp, Natural Order, Show and Tell, etc.) that there would be enough critical mass to be able to build some kind of combined "cheat fatties into play" archetype, even with few players. Any thoughts on this?
3. Card flexibility is interesting - I'll do a bit of a review of these types of cards (e.g. Bramblecrush) and see what I come up with.
4. "Hybrids, split cards, phyrexian mana, and off color kicker cards are your friend." Yes, I'm seeing this now and as I mentioned in another thread I'm looking into adding more cards like this.
5. "Gold cards are your enemy." Yeah - I currently run 4 per guild at 450 and these don't include land. Last night I was looking at cutting back to 3 true gold per guild. If I separate out an unbalanced hybrid section then I don't actually have to cut very many cards from my gold section - I think it was only 4 or 5 and I wasn't too upset about the cards I thought I'd cut.
6. "Flexible fixing is also your friend." Also yeah. I'd love more cards like City of Brass and Gemstone Mine for turn 1 fixing in aggro decks of any colour combination. I do run Grand Coliseum, Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds. Any other lands you'd suggest here? I currently follow a design aesthetic that doesn't use artifacts for mana fixing, only ramping. The only current exception is Mox Diamond and I've got Chrome Mox on order. I'm not a big fan of cards like Coalition Relic and Chromatic Lantern since I think they take a lot away from what Green does, but perhaps this is the type of thing you're suggesting? Any other suggestions in this area?
7. "Warning: controversial" I'm happy to drop the 4th set of 2-colour fixers - was looking at that last night. I'm also happy for others to run multiple copies of cards (e.g. fetches) but for me, the singleton rule is a sweet design constraint that, to my mind, gives cube real definition and character. (I currently run all basics with the same art but moving at some stage to all singleton basics too because I like the singleton aesthetic so much. :)).
Not sure whether I responded to everything but that's enough for one post, I think. I'll check back later for more.
Just to address one issue you raised: I push reanimator quite a bit, and normally draft with two although I am trying to make my cube also work with 8. I found that the cheat-into-play strategies had trouble when the big fatty target wasn't in the pool, or was snagged by someone else as a finisher. People wouldn't go into the archetype if their top end was Ob Nix or Thornling or something at the end of it. (This is very much unlike what happens in a regular draft, where you can get away with one or two 6 drops in each color).
As a result, while trying to keep my curves lean, I run two more big dudes in each color than I otherwise would, and it's worked great. Sure, if the pool is stacked weird or noone is doing ramp/reanimator/cheat-into-play, then they are undrafted. But you're not actually taking up too many slots, and it doesn't mess with the overall curve as much as the average-cc stats might lead you to believe.
That's a good idea, thanks for that. It's obviously pretty easy to find additional fatties - most cubes are cutting high quality - high CMC creatures - shouldn't be too hard to add a handful back in. I'll take a look at that.
I'm not a big fan of cards like Coalition Relic and Chromatic Lantern since I think they take a lot away from what Green does, but perhaps this is the type of thing you're suggesting? Any other suggestions in this area?
Personally, I feel like the 3cmc mana stones don't take away from green as they come down way after pretty much all green ramp does. Unless you are running green yourself, these typically won't be tapped for mana until turn 4. I personally don't run any signets, but do run the 3 mana fixers you mentioned and will probably add Darksteel Ingot at some point.
2. Wildfire and Sneak Attack were mentioned as examples of narrow things you can't do. With Sneak Attack for example, my hope was that with a lot of similar cards scattered throughout the cube that care about fatties (various reanimator, straight ramp, Natural Order, Show and Tell, etc.) that there would be enough critical mass to be able to build some kind of combined "cheat fatties into play" archetype, even with few players. Any thoughts on this?
I put Natural Order in a different category than Sneak Attack. It plays more like Tinker, where you only need to draft one fatty to be great. Sneak Attack and Show and Tell require you draw one fatty, and possibly more, to be worth it. Reanimation is similar, but there are a lot more reanimation effects, and they are concentrated in one color, so drafting a reanimation theme (or sub theme) is a bit easier.
I think the size of your playgroup should have a big influence on the size of your cube. I usually cube with 3-6 people and for the supported archetypes to be draftable I have to keep the cube small.
How do you usually draft? (e.g. Winston, Winchester, Rochester, Sealed, Booster, etc.)
If your cube has been designed for use with small groups, please post your link so others can look at what you've done.
My cube is currently not designed specifically for small groups but it looks like I could be cubing heaps more than I am now but potentially most often with 2-4 players. I was about to add the "Black Pox Package" but am having second thoughts because of this. I am also thinking about whether I should reduce my overall cube size, the size of my multi-colour sections, remove some 2-colour fixing, etc. Before I do any of it, I thought I'd start this thread to gather some wisdom from others in a similar situation.
My Cube
My Blog
We played mostly Winston and Sealed when we had 2-3 players.
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
- Archetypes are still good, as long as they are supported via synergy, and not combos. For example, you mention the Pox archetype. We have had great success with it, because we added a bunch of sac and mass removal cards, and a good amount of cards to take advantage of them. Archetypes that need more specific cards, like Wildfire or Sneak Attack, will suffer.
- Hybrids, split cards, phyrexian mana, and off color kicker cards are your friend. These cards are flexible, and can go into many different decks. Fire/Ice may not be as powerful as a red card or a blue card, but being able to run it in either will come in handy when you are struggling to get to 23 playables in a Winston draft.
- Gold cards are your enemy. The exact opposite principle as above. I run a a 540 card cube, and run at most 4 gold cards per pair (some of those slots are land).
- Flexible fixing is also your friend. Cards that are a bit slower but fix all five colors might be worth running over signets or the like.
- (Warning: controversial) I see you are running a 450 with fetches, duals, shocks, and a fourth set of fixers that is mixed (painlands, bouncelands, M10 lands, etc). We have had great success with cutting that last set of subpar, unfetchable fixers and adding a second set of fetches. We then moved any additional fixers we wanted to play, like the WWK manlands, into the gold section.
Changing your cube can be beneficial if you Winston a lot. Skew more toward aggro and cut risky build around cards for valuable redundant effects. It sounds boring but it makes the drafts a lot more enjoyable.
I agree with the above about gold, I'd shoot for around 7%, not counting hybrid.
We recently tried winston and pancake drafts for a laugh (google the latter and you'll find it, although someone did mentioned it here once). Winston decks were the usual trainwrecks I hear people talking about when the cube isn't designed for it but they were a laugh for a change. Pancake was interesting, it uses 198 cards (18 pack of 11) so you see a similar amount to grid drafts, it was also super fast to actually draft compared to tenchester taking nearly forever. The decks were reasonable but a bit generic, will be trying it again since I first picked recurring nightmare and tried for a rec sur deck (got all the green pieces) but turned out my wife was cutting me on black the whole draft and I didn't notice. :-( Just figured the best cards were in the undrafted half of the cube.
When I've had 4 or 5 ppl we've done tenchester as most of my friends are inexperienced with magic and that format lets you have some discussion over picks when most people have never seen the cards before.
Thread Cubetutor
My Other Cubes
Pauper Cube
One-Drop Cube
I have found that with only four players drafting works better if you have smaller sized packs but with more packs.
instead of a normal 3 packs with 15. when we are four players we draft with 5 packs of 9 cards. you still end up with the same amount of cards but you end up with a much more coherent set of cards for making a deck. You also eliminate having the pack wheeling the table so much. With a 15 card pack the third and four wheel are generally junk. Where as with 9 card packs you get a few extra first picks and you get one real wheel and stuck with the last card in the pack.
If we have three players, we do a 90 card sealed pool. My cube is designed specifically for multiplayer fun. I have never tried it with just two players.
While I am very fond of gird drafting (and will not try Pancake), the biggest thing for me was to also build a cube group. I am making progress, with ~6 regulars now though still not quite hitting the elusive 8.
Calvin and Hobbes
Cube Tutor
Yay, glad to see that some people are still quilting! We do it as a change of pace, but tend to prefer a certain amount of hidden information. Our default 2-person draft may appear a bit unwieldy, but it's been about perfect in allowing a good deal of control, the ability to see a lot of cards (important for narrower archetypes), and enough mystery that you're never 100% sure what colors your opponent is in.
We do the following:
1. Winston 35 cards
2. Six 3x3 grids. After each grid, each player draws three cards and keeps one of them. This last addition only adds 6 cards to the player's pool, but has really helped in building the narrower decks.
With four people, we draft 5 packs of 9 cards.
With three (a horrible number for MTG, of course), I've heard that quilting works quite well, although I don't remember the numbers.
My $40 MTGO cube
Draft my cube at Cubetutor!
First of all, I agree completely that 3 is a terrible number. Unfortunately, it's a number that comes up often for us. We have a regular group at work of 5 people, and we mostly play league or just casual at lunch. But we have a couple of guys (plus myself) that are keen to put in a little more time, so after work cubing is a possibility. We did it once with 3 people - yuck. And multi-player cube is a different beast entirely from what I'm after.
Ok, so as for the responses:
1. Looking at the different draft variants seems pretty important here. I am now seeing the value in some of these alternate approaches - in particular the issue is how many cards you get to see. I'm interested in at least supporting basic archetypes (aggro, midrange, control) even in a 2-player draft. That's where something like Winston/Winchester can be a problem - you only see 90-100 cards and both decks end-up as mid-range monstrosities. You can draft a larger pile, but it's kind of the same thing. Seeing more cards would be good.
2. Wildfire and Sneak Attack were mentioned as examples of narrow things you can't do. With Sneak Attack for example, my hope was that with a lot of similar cards scattered throughout the cube that care about fatties (various reanimator, straight ramp, Natural Order, Show and Tell, etc.) that there would be enough critical mass to be able to build some kind of combined "cheat fatties into play" archetype, even with few players. Any thoughts on this?
3. Card flexibility is interesting - I'll do a bit of a review of these types of cards (e.g. Bramblecrush) and see what I come up with.
4. "Hybrids, split cards, phyrexian mana, and off color kicker cards are your friend." Yes, I'm seeing this now and as I mentioned in another thread I'm looking into adding more cards like this.
5. "Gold cards are your enemy." Yeah - I currently run 4 per guild at 450 and these don't include land. Last night I was looking at cutting back to 3 true gold per guild. If I separate out an unbalanced hybrid section then I don't actually have to cut very many cards from my gold section - I think it was only 4 or 5 and I wasn't too upset about the cards I thought I'd cut.
6. "Flexible fixing is also your friend." Also yeah. I'd love more cards like City of Brass and Gemstone Mine for turn 1 fixing in aggro decks of any colour combination. I do run Grand Coliseum, Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds. Any other lands you'd suggest here? I currently follow a design aesthetic that doesn't use artifacts for mana fixing, only ramping. The only current exception is Mox Diamond and I've got Chrome Mox on order. I'm not a big fan of cards like Coalition Relic and Chromatic Lantern since I think they take a lot away from what Green does, but perhaps this is the type of thing you're suggesting? Any other suggestions in this area?
7. "Warning: controversial" I'm happy to drop the 4th set of 2-colour fixers - was looking at that last night. I'm also happy for others to run multiple copies of cards (e.g. fetches) but for me, the singleton rule is a sweet design constraint that, to my mind, gives cube real definition and character. (I currently run all basics with the same art but moving at some stage to all singleton basics too because I like the singleton aesthetic so much. :)).
Not sure whether I responded to everything but that's enough for one post, I think. I'll check back later for more.
My Cube
My Blog
As a result, while trying to keep my curves lean, I run two more big dudes in each color than I otherwise would, and it's worked great. Sure, if the pool is stacked weird or noone is doing ramp/reanimator/cheat-into-play, then they are undrafted. But you're not actually taking up too many slots, and it doesn't mess with the overall curve as much as the average-cc stats might lead you to believe.
My $40 MTGO cube
Draft my cube at Cubetutor!
That's a good idea, thanks for that. It's obviously pretty easy to find additional fatties - most cubes are cutting high quality - high CMC creatures - shouldn't be too hard to add a handful back in. I'll take a look at that.
My Cube
My Blog
Personally, I feel like the 3cmc mana stones don't take away from green as they come down way after pretty much all green ramp does. Unless you are running green yourself, these typically won't be tapped for mana until turn 4. I personally don't run any signets, but do run the 3 mana fixers you mentioned and will probably add Darksteel Ingot at some point.
I put Natural Order in a different category than Sneak Attack. It plays more like Tinker, where you only need to draft one fatty to be great. Sneak Attack and Show and Tell require you draw one fatty, and possibly more, to be worth it. Reanimation is similar, but there are a lot more reanimation effects, and they are concentrated in one color, so drafting a reanimation theme (or sub theme) is a bit easier.