Cube Draft
| Cube Draft | |
|---|---|
| DCI Sanctioned | |
| Paper |
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| Magic Online |
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| Magic Arena |
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| Rules | |
| Type | Limited (Draft) |
| Multiplayer |
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Cube Draft is a casual Magic: The Gathering format where players create a cube, a large pool of cards selected to play a Limited game.[1]
Overview
A cube is a curated selection of cards intended for Limited play. Rather than using sealed booster packs, players create and draft "packs" made of randomly selected cards from the pool. Cubes typically contain at least 360 cards, the minimum number needed to support a traditional eight-player draft, although they can contain any number of cards and support any draft format. One of the appeals of Cube Draft is customization: players can design their own Limited environments to match their own preferences.[1][2][3]
Magic Online
Cube Draft is a popular format on Magic Online which is held occasionally during selected periods. The Magic Online Championship Series occasionally adopted Cube Draft as one of the formats they played throughout the whole season. Various Cubes are on offer, usually based on the format; Vintage and Legacy Cubes are popular, while Modern cubes and other personally curated cubes rotate in and out.
Magic Arena
MTG Arena released its first Cube experience in April 2020 with Cube Sealed, primarily to showcase the card list and potential gameplay. The pool was drawn from the Historic format. With pod drafting released during the Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths update, the Arena Cube premiered on June 12th and ran for two weeks, until the release of Core Set 2021.
A second iteration of the cube, the lower-powered Tinkerer's Cube, was released on September 4th in advance of Zendikar Rising. A third iteration was announced for June 25th, ahead of Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, called the Chromatic Cube, with a greater emphasis on multicolor.
Cubes are usually available in the last week or weeks before the release of a new draftable set, as drafting interest is usually lower at that point. The payouts are in gold rather than gems, and events are all phantom.
In April 2024, a new form of curated drafting was released, known as "Remix Draft". Structurally, it differs by allowing collectability, normal prize structure, and uses the classic booster collation of ten commons, three uncommons, and a rare. The first Remix was shortly after the change to Play Boosters, which were more collectable-focused with a potential for multiple rares. The first rendition of the Draft was themed around artifacts, but since then, no new curations have been released.
Tournament play
Cube Draft was one of the formats played at the 2007 Magic Invitational. The 2012 Players Championship also adopted Cube Draft as one of its formats.[4] The Magic Online Premier Play Program regularly uses it in their playoff tournaments,[citation needed] and Arena events sometimes use Cube as their format. Star City Games hosted two Cube events in 2018 and 2019, each with a $10,000 prize pool.[4]
History
Inception and early adoption
Custom Limited environments started in 1999 with the parallel development of Big Box Drafts—all-inclusive collections of every card in Magic's history[a]—and Wagic, which was lightly curated and used Winchester-like drafts. Big Box Drafts and Wagic were both singleton formats. Cube itself emerged in 2000 in Toronto, Canada, likely within the playgroup of Gabriel Tsang and Elijah Pollock. The exact details are unknown; Usman Jamil credits the creation of the cube to Bart Allen, but Allen disputes this; David Rood credits Tsang. Allen's 2000 write-up of his own cube is the first Cube primer ever published online.
The format increased in popularity during the early 2000s due to online writers like Anthony Avitollo, Tom LaPille, and Evan Erwin. According to Usman Jamil, the name "Cube" stuck because the card pool consisted of six equally sized "faces" of sixty cards each: one per color, plus one for colorless, multicolor, and land cards. In these early years, people tended to write about "the cube" as a singular phenomenon, rather than "cubes" in general; it was still a small, collaborative project between an extended friend group of competitive players.[4]
Official recognition and growth
The 2007 Magic Invitational included two Cube drafts. The first DailyMTG article about Cube, written by Tom LaPille, was published in 2010; LaPille later wrote an intro to his personal cube for the site. Cube Draft was also featured at the 2012 Players Championship. With this recognition from Wizards of the Coast came visibility and legitimacy for the format. A growing online community sprang up around Cube; MTG Salvation, for example, opened a forum for Cube discussion circa 2009.[4]
The format first came to Magic Online in 2012 with a cube designed by Tom LaPille and developed by Max McCall.[5] Later that year, the Power Nine was added.[6] The format became more widely available than ever before, and it got another surge in visibility thanks to streamers like Luis Scott-Vargas and Caleb Durwad. Cube first appeared on MTG Arena in 2020 with the advent of real-time drafting.[4]
The scope of Cube had by this point broadened beyond its initial "best 360 cards in the game" premise due in part to writers including Jason Waddell, Usman Jamil, Justin Parnell, and Thea Steele. This was codified in a 2016 DailyMTG article by Melissa DeTora, which insisted that cubes did not need to be maximally powerful and that the ability to customize cubes was a selling point. The cube-management website Cube Tutor launched in 2013 (and was effectively replaced by Cube Cobra in 2019), lowering the barrier to entry for cube designers and leading to a new trend of highly experimental cubes.
CubeCon, a Cube-focused convention, was hosted in 2022 and again in 2023. Since then, Cube events have been smaller and more local in scope. Cube Draft has seen occasional high-level tournaments from Wizards of the Coast and Star City Games.[4]
Gallery
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Original cube booster for Magic Online -
Legacy cube booster for Magic Online -
Legendary cube booster for Magic Online -
Holiday cube boosters for Magic Online -
Vintage cube booster for Magic Online -
Ultra•PRO deck box for a Cube
Notes
References
- ↑ a b Wizards of the Coast (August 11, 2008). "Casual Formats". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- ↑ Tom LaPille (September 30, 2007). "The Cube FAQ". Play Magic With Tom LaPille. Archived from the original on November 24, 2007.
- ↑ Melissa DeTora (May 19, 2016). "Building Your First Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2017-12-22.
- ↑ a b c d e f Parker LaMascus (February 16, 2023). "The History of The Cube Format". Luckypaper.co.
- ↑ Monty Ashley (March 13, 2012). "Magic Online Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11.
- ↑ Max McCall (November 27, 2012). "Power, Cubed". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-09-26.
External links
- Meghan Wolff (April 29, 2016). "Fantastic Cubes and How We Build Them". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-09-26.
- Bruce Richard (August 23, 2016). "Conspiracy...Cube!". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-11-08.
Magic Online
- Monty Ashley (September 26, 2012). "The Cube Is Back". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2017-10-11.
- Trick Jarrett (April 30, 2013). "MTGO Cube Returns". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-05-31.
- Randy Buehler (November 3, 2014). "The New Magic Online Legacy Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- David Whitfield (August 5, 2015). "Announcing the Legendary Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-04-29.
- Jules Robins (March 23, 2016). "Legendary Cube Returns!". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-11-08.
- Wizards of the Coast (March 2, 2017). "Modern Cube Cardlist". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2017-09-15.
- Paul Cheon (March 19, 2019). "March 2019 Legacy Cube Overhaul". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2019-03-20.
- Wizards of the Coast (July 17, 2019). "Magic Online Legacy Cube Returns In Time for Gen Con". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2019-07-25.
- Emma Handy (October 13, 2020). "Cube Spotlight Series - Emma Handy's Proliferate Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2020-10-26.
- Natalie Weizenbaum (March 30, 2021). "Cube Spotlight Series - Nega Cube". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-03-30.
- Emma Handy (June 22, 2021). "Modern Cube on Magic Online". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-06-22.
Magic Arena
- Wizards of the Coast (September 2, 2021). "Tinkerer's Cube Comes to MTG Arena". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-09-03.