To each their own and other niceties aside, let me be straight with you. Cube is the best Magic format. Okay, you may not agree with it, and Commander, Modern, or Throne of Eldraine Limited may just be the thing for you. But if that is the case, after building a cube, you will surely discover that cube is the second-best format — until you realize that it really is the best after all.
So why doesn't every Magic player have their own cube, you may wonder. As do I, and I suppose the reasons could be varied. Let's examine some of them, so you can discover why you should no longer miss out on cube curating, or why you should help your friends discover the joy of cubing too, if you already have one yourself. Because, since most cubes represent their own unique experience, there can never be too many cubes around.
EXCUSE: I Don't Even Know What a Cube Is
Let's get this excuse out of the way first. A cube is a self-contained Limited environment. It is simply a large collection of cards that you and your friends can draft time and again. All you really need in order to build a cube is enough cards to make three packs of fifteen cards for each player you want to cube with, plus enough basic lands for each player to construct their deck after drafting. I am not saying that any random pile of cards will make for the best Limited environment, but it will be enough to get you started, if you really don't want to put more work into it.
Technically 90 cards will do if you want to do a two-player Winston draft, and 180 cards are enough for playing two-player Sealed or doing a four-player draft. A pile of 360 cards will accommodate eight players. If you don't want to see every card in the cube in every draft, you just make sure to build your cube with a number of cards that exceeds three times fifteen times number of players. Many cube builders put other restrictions on their cube such as only having one copy of each card and balancing the colors with the same number of cards in each color.
When going deeper into cube building, you will most likely want to create archetypes for players to try to draft, or work on synergies between the cards in the cube. For the most dedicated cube curators, constructing and maintaining a cube is a work of art involving many of the same mental exercises and hours of testing akin to what Wizards do when they construct the Limited environments of Standard sets and certain supplementary products. But that is not necessary as we shall see now.
EXCUSE: Building a Cube Is Too Much Work
Your cube doesn't have to be a hobby consuming all your free time — at least not until you get truly hooked. You can netdeck your cube by visiting CubeTutor or CubeCobra and copy one of the popular cubes from one of those two sites to a couple of wants lists on Cardmarket. You can even use popular cubes to keep up to date with changes curators of those cubes make whenever new sets are released.
Another option is to copy one of the Magic Online cubes. Later you can go crazy building your own monogreen-Pauper-tribal-cube, a Commander cube, an environment where all spells have converted mana cost 7+, or whatever you and your friends enjoy most about Magic.
At its most basic level, Wizards have already done the job for you. All you need to begin a cube is a number of boosters equal to the size of cube you want. Take your favorite Limited environment and buy 24 boosters for an eight-player cube. Draft, play, reshuffle the cards and make new random boosters. Rinse and repeat. This is truly all you need to begin your first cube. This also begins to address another excuse.
EXCUSE: I Cannot Afford to Build a Cube
Since any stack of draft chaff will do as a starting point for your first cube, you may not even have to pay anything at all to get started. If you go join up with friends to build a cube by reusing cards from a single Draft, the cube will cost each of you exactly what you paid to draft it — that is the price of three boosters per person. To avoid cards ending up marked and recognizable, you will also each have to invest in about 100 sleeves — which should be enough for you not to have to unsleeve and resleeve basic lands each time you draft.
Buying boosters from a cheap set such as Amonkhet and choosing some really cheap UltraPro sleeves, the investment could be less than €10 per person, which also means, that you could have your own four-player cube for less than €40. Not all cubes include Power Nine and original dual lands or
You can even acquire gold-bordered versions of some powerful old stuff, since cube cards don't have to be tournament legal. And if you have no qualms about aesthetics, you can use a marker and some basic lands to create any card you want to test in your environment before shelling out for the real deal.
EXCUSE: Cube Doesn't Prepare for Tournaments
Some people miss out on Cube because they feel that a personalized Limited environment is too far from the specific format they want to master. Cube is of course not Modern, Standard, or even whatever the current Limited format played at tournaments. Even if a cube is made only of Modern legal cards, you will never be playing exactly the decks dominating the Modern metagame at any given time.
What Cube does is to sharpen your general skills as a Magic player, since you are often forced to think creatively and come up with completely new lines of play. And sharpening those skills will make you better at evaluating game states, ingeniously opening new way to excel in your chosen format. Cubing also helps you to become better at brewing up entirely new decks and at tweaking the decks you play in other formats.
Every time you cube you get to build a new deck and test it trying out new cards and plays you perhaps would never have thought of, if you had not been forced to make artistic use of the limited pool of cards available to you after a Draft. In time, you may even turn it around and look at the other formats you play as ways to discover cards to include in your cube.
In a recent episode of the podcast Limited Resources, one of the most famous Limited players, Luis Scott-Vargas, expressed something to the effect that all other Limited environments are really just ways to prepare for playing Cube. In other words, Cube is the ultimate goal of Magic and it is here you will truly see your skills tested.
EXCUSE: I Only Play Magic with a Few Friends
While gathering a full Draft pod of eight players or even drafting an entire 720-card cube with 15 of your closest friends every Saturday would be cool, life, family, and other factors may sometimes be distractions standing in the way of the cuber's ideal world. This is still no excuse for not building your cube. As mentioned earlier, you can have just as much fun playing a couple of rounds of two-player Sealed using six boosters per player or doing a Winston Draft, which has been a much-used method for drafting between two people since the early days of Magic.
Also, don't underestimate the added layer of decision making you give to players by curating a cube considerably larger than what is needed for the number of participants. It does make combo decks and certain archetypes riskier to draft, but the reward when everything comes together is also much higher.
EXCUSE: I Fear I Will Get Hooked
Well, you're probably already hooked on cardboard crack, and having a cube is a way to limit your Magic spending, though admittedly the ceiling is very high. Being a casual Commander player does not protect your wallet, as play groups can easily get into an arms race that's hard to control. Even players of Modern and Legacy who used to be able to keep a deck almost unchanged for years may have to dig deep into their pockets to keep up with the powercreep we have experienced lately.
If your cube is singleton, you only have to get one copy of each chase mythic you want from each new set instead of playsets or a copy for each Commander deck in the relevant colors. And since your cube is its own self-contained world, you can even ignore new cards you find too pushed or which you don't feel add anything to your environment.
You don't like Oko or you think a card is too expensive? Just pass on it. Your cube will do fine without it. You can always revisit the decision later on when the card rotates out of Standard, gets banned in Pioneer, and perhaps drops in price. Or you can save up for it over however a long time frame suits your budget. As with all Limited play, no one has an advantage just because they already own the latest powerhouse cards. In this respect, Cube is an inherently fair form of Magic.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily Cardmarket.