Hello everyone, I love cube and at the moment I have an unpowered vintage cube at 360, but it's not well built since it has a lot of parasitic mechanics and bad stuff, and I don't have the money to make it better from that point of view. So my way of thinking was to build a different cube, to run in parallel to the other, while I'm waiting for building in a better way my "main" cube. Since I started playing in the timeframe of Time Spiral and Lorwyn, and I'm a bit obsessive-compulsive, my idea was to build a cube (360 since I don't have many friends and many sleeves) only with cards from around that timeframe, so my time period of choice was from eighth edition and mirrodin to eventide (coldsnap included obviously). I don't want, though, to make too many errors, since one thing I noticed from my first tries was that I was putting too many niche cards and bad cards.
So my idea to build this is: start with cards that HAVE to be there, like all the cube staples from that era (Bitterblossom, Ancestral Vision, Figure of Destiny and so on) and then decide some archetypes, also based on some of the famous standard decks from that timeframe (even though I am worried that affinity and faeries would be too much parasitic as archetypes, I'd really love to have them). So my first question is: what cards would you think "oh, this card has absolutely to be in this cube! I wouldn't think of a mirrodin-eventide cube without this card".
Thank you all for the answers I will get, I love this site and it really helped me with understanding how to build a cube. I'm not English so sorry for my bad language writing
I'm new to the forum but I've read it for a long time. Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Italy
I've finally decided to build my own cube. It was difficult for me to choose which kind of cube I wanted, pauper or not, with powerful cards or not, synergy driven and archetype based or good stuff, and so on. I've written a long list of cube lists, with cards I own or I don't, from the little 180 cubes to big 720s.
About one month ago, I began looking at cubes that are not made by people but just by jamming 4x each common, 2x each uncommon and 1x each rare of a given set. I thought that making this with some powerful set like Modern Masters would be fun, for recreating the draft environment that I liked a lot of time ago. But it didn't seem what I looked for. The set was stale, the cards were all the same and the non-singleton nature of the cube was really bad for me.
Then I had an intuition: to create a 360-card cube that can remember Modern Masters draft, but has a lot of different cards and some interesting things taken by the original draft environments that were merged into MMA. For example, Kamigawa draft had cards like Teller of Tales and Long-Forgotten Gohei that were really good in the Dampen Thought deck, and Lorwyn had some powerful faeries in Mistbind Clique and Sower of Temptation.
But, I have to make some restrictions. It's too easy to say "yeah recreate the environment" and make some cube that seems similar to Modern Masters but has nothing to do with it. So, the restrictions I thought are really severe, but I love the "restriction breeds creativity" motto so... what I decided is: the cards in the cube can be only from the temporal window from which Modern Masters took the cards, so [8ED, ARB]. Every common and uncommon card from Modern Masters has to be in the cube. Rares and mythics are removed from the cube only if they are bad in cube (Extirpate, Demigod of Revenge) or they were originally in it just for sake of constructed (Blood Moon). I don't like planeswalkers either, so they went out. I don't know whether to keep Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant, but I like those cards so they could probably be kept.
So this leaves us with about 220 cards in the cube, and about 140 free slots for which we can make every decision we want. I already did a version of this cube, but I'm not entirely satisfacted with it. I think that starting again could be the best idea.
Some things are set to stone and I don't want to change them, but everything else is free. For example, in Modern Masters there is a WB rebel archetype. But in Time block, the rebel archetype was mainly mono-white: in fact there were a lot of mono-white matters cards (for example, also Ivory Giant, that is still in Modern Masters). So the WB rebels archetype could become something in between of a mono-W and a WB, so that people could draft it either way. In one case, they should pick Gaze of Justice over Blightspeaker, and vice versa.
Other things, the artifact archetype can easily dip into three or four colors: there is already Shrapnel Blast, we could add Atog and Disciple of the Vault and some other black stuff from Alara block. Since I love Dampen Thought, I want it to be a good archetype, so people could draft both a "standard" UR arcane deck and a dampen thought deck. The dampen thought deck should be more towards UW than UR, with Ethereal Haze and Candles' Glow.
So, I want to keep that "mix-and-match archetypes" feeling from Modern Masters, but if they have more colors or are more flexible... that should be a good thing, shouldn't it?
The problem is that I don't know where to start. By looking at each individual archetype, search a lot of cards that could help it, and add them? Or something more holistic? I hope that you can help me, and I hope I didn't put this topic in the wrong section
This was my attempt: https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/his3. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them!
So my idea to build this is: start with cards that HAVE to be there, like all the cube staples from that era (Bitterblossom, Ancestral Vision, Figure of Destiny and so on) and then decide some archetypes, also based on some of the famous standard decks from that timeframe (even though I am worried that affinity and faeries would be too much parasitic as archetypes, I'd really love to have them). So my first question is: what cards would you think "oh, this card has absolutely to be in this cube! I wouldn't think of a mirrodin-eventide cube without this card".
Thank you all for the answers I will get, I love this site and it really helped me with understanding how to build a cube. I'm not English so sorry for my bad language writing
I hope that you can help me, thanks in advance
I'm new to the forum but I've read it for a long time. Sorry for my bad English, I'm from Italy
I've finally decided to build my own cube. It was difficult for me to choose which kind of cube I wanted, pauper or not, with powerful cards or not, synergy driven and archetype based or good stuff, and so on. I've written a long list of cube lists, with cards I own or I don't, from the little 180 cubes to big 720s.
About one month ago, I began looking at cubes that are not made by people but just by jamming 4x each common, 2x each uncommon and 1x each rare of a given set. I thought that making this with some powerful set like Modern Masters would be fun, for recreating the draft environment that I liked a lot of time ago. But it didn't seem what I looked for. The set was stale, the cards were all the same and the non-singleton nature of the cube was really bad for me.
Then I had an intuition: to create a 360-card cube that can remember Modern Masters draft, but has a lot of different cards and some interesting things taken by the original draft environments that were merged into MMA. For example, Kamigawa draft had cards like Teller of Tales and Long-Forgotten Gohei that were really good in the Dampen Thought deck, and Lorwyn had some powerful faeries in Mistbind Clique and Sower of Temptation.
But, I have to make some restrictions. It's too easy to say "yeah recreate the environment" and make some cube that seems similar to Modern Masters but has nothing to do with it. So, the restrictions I thought are really severe, but I love the "restriction breeds creativity" motto so... what I decided is: the cards in the cube can be only from the temporal window from which Modern Masters took the cards, so [8ED, ARB]. Every common and uncommon card from Modern Masters has to be in the cube. Rares and mythics are removed from the cube only if they are bad in cube (Extirpate, Demigod of Revenge) or they were originally in it just for sake of constructed (Blood Moon). I don't like planeswalkers either, so they went out. I don't know whether to keep Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant, but I like those cards so they could probably be kept.
So this leaves us with about 220 cards in the cube, and about 140 free slots for which we can make every decision we want. I already did a version of this cube, but I'm not entirely satisfacted with it. I think that starting again could be the best idea.
Some things are set to stone and I don't want to change them, but everything else is free. For example, in Modern Masters there is a WB rebel archetype. But in Time block, the rebel archetype was mainly mono-white: in fact there were a lot of mono-white matters cards (for example, also Ivory Giant, that is still in Modern Masters). So the WB rebels archetype could become something in between of a mono-W and a WB, so that people could draft it either way. In one case, they should pick Gaze of Justice over Blightspeaker, and vice versa.
Other things, the artifact archetype can easily dip into three or four colors: there is already Shrapnel Blast, we could add Atog and Disciple of the Vault and some other black stuff from Alara block. Since I love Dampen Thought, I want it to be a good archetype, so people could draft both a "standard" UR arcane deck and a dampen thought deck. The dampen thought deck should be more towards UW than UR, with Ethereal Haze and Candles' Glow.
So, I want to keep that "mix-and-match archetypes" feeling from Modern Masters, but if they have more colors or are more flexible... that should be a good thing, shouldn't it?
The problem is that I don't know where to start. By looking at each individual archetype, search a lot of cards that could help it, and add them? Or something more holistic? I hope that you can help me, and I hope I didn't put this topic in the wrong section