Making Changes

Magic is a game that changes constantly. New sets come out every few months and, in the time that I have been cubing, I haven’t seen a set that didn’t have at least a few cards that went into my cube. There isn’t really a lot of context there for me since I’ve only been cubing since Return to Ravnica came out, but still. So, there comes the question of how to decide if a card gets to go into the cube. Even between sets releasing, my cube tends to change weekly. I’m always looking at the cards and deciding if they need to be changed out.

In the relatively short amount of time I’ve been playing, I’ve come up with a handful of reasons that cards would get put into the cube or taken out of it.

Strictly Better

This sort of thing doesn’t happen too often, but sometimes a card is strictly better than another card so the change is just made and that is the end.  In fact, I don’t think this has happened at all for me up to this point. To be clear, I don’t think there are a ton of cards out there that are “strictly better” than similar cards. Examples of cards that qualify are Black Lotus compared to Lotus Petal. Counterspell compared to Cancel. Diabolic Edict compared to Cruel Edict. I’m sure that there are extremely specific cases where somebody might want to have Cancel rather than Counterspell, but those situations would have to be manufactured so I’m not going to worry too much about that (and I come from an era when Mana Leak was only a decent counter and Cancel was terrible).

I know that people like to use the term “strictly better” often, but I am wary of it. One example of one that I’ve seen get thrown around is Molten Rain compared to Stone Rain. I do agree that Molten Rain is better than Stone Rain. I would not put the “strictly better” label on Molten Rain though. The reason being that the casting cost isn’t identical. It is far easier to splash for Stone Rain (if it was necessary that you do that) than it is Molten Rain. This isn’t really a manufactured or “rare” situation. In cube, you are often playing multiple colors and the mana requirement is important.

Possible Upside

Far more common than cards that are “strictly better,” are cards that have a possible upside. In these situations, the new card would be slightly less than the original card initially. However, with a specific situation, the second card becomes better. As an example, I recently cut Raging Goblin for Foundry Street Denizen. Initially, the Raging Goblin is going to be the better of those two cards. In the long term, however, the Denizen is going to end up being better so long as you stay on curve. I’ll admit, both cards are not particularly impressive in any case, but they do serve a purpose within a deck. The point here, you could argue for either creature and not really be wrong in putting either of them in.

With cards of this category, it often comes down to personal preference. In my case, I simply decided that I wanted to try out the Denizen so I exchanged it. That is the great thing about designing a cube, if you don’t like a card, you don’t have to keep it around. If you absolutely love a card no matter how terrible or underpowered it is, you can put it in.

Something Totally New

This doesn’t happen terribly often, but sometimes they print a card that is just new and has something going on that you just have to have in your cube. The best example of this that I can think of right now is Ral Zarek. While planeswalkers aren’t exactly new, having an Izzet planeswalker is. In a case such as this, you would be looking at the cards you have in your Izzet section (if that is how you handle your multicolored cardes) and decide what can be replaced with the new shiny ‘walker.’

These types of situations are fairly difficult to evaluate ahead of time. As these totally new cards come around, you have to try and imagine what would happen with the card before seeing it. Then, you have to get a feel for the balance of the cube once that card is in there. I am terrible at seeing the true value of a card until I have seen it in play so I have a pretty large issue on this front.

Underperformance

Sometimes a card just doesn’t work out like you had hoped. There are numerous examples of cards that got cut from my cube because they didn’t play out the way I expected (or they just weren’t very good). Just a short sampling of those cards include: Cloudshift, Collective Blessing, Oracle en-Vec, Pit Spawn, and Rathi Dragon (this one was a heartbreaker for me). All of those cards, for one reason or another, didn’t work out the way I thought they would. It is sometimes hard to identify a card like this because you won’t see them in the games. You can easily forget that these cards are even in the cube at all.

In my case, I have a cube that is large enough that I will probably never draft the whole cube all at once. If I don’t see a card for a long time, I don’t think to much of it. Sometimes, however, you might see the card and realize that you never put it into a deck. This is what happened for me with Cloudshift. It was in my cube, but I never found myself using it, even when I had a deck that used lots of ETB abilities. Collective Blessing is a card that ended up getting cut because it was always too slow even though the ability itself is pretty potent and the card was making it into decks.

Cutting cards like this is easy once you realize what is happening. The trick is often finding a card that you want to play in its place. There have been several times where I decided that a card needed to be cut, but I didn’t cut it simply because I couldn’t find a card that I wanted to run instead. Over time, I end up putting a card in that doesn’t have anything like the same ability or find a card that does what I want but better.

There is a bit of a wrinkle in this type of situation however. Some cards in my cube require you to build specific decks around them. These cards will often not end up in decks even if they are in the draft pool. A common example that I see in many cubes is Wildfire. I love this card and when you get a Wildfire deck together, it is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, it will often just wheel around because the rest of the pieces aren’t there, or it doesn’t show up until late in the draft and it isn’t possible to change gears to use it. I like these types of cards and try to put them in each color, so I have to pay attention to make sure I know why these types of cards aren’t getting played.

Overperformance

Maintaining a balance between all the various colors, archtypes, and cards is the most important thing that a cube designer needs to do. Watching out for cards that are just stupidly powerful is something I do each time my cube gets drafted. There are some cards out there that are known offenders in this regard (Sol Ring, Jitte, etc…).  There is also a chance that the specific structure of your cube makes particular cards over powered in relation to the other cards. These types of situations can be difficult to identify though. It would be really hard to monitor every game that gets played and even harder to decide if the card is too powerful since so much of that depends on the board state.

To help me sort this type of thing out, I have a ‘Watchlist’ of cards that have shown a tendency to be too powerful. I have Sol Ring, Jitte, and Elspeth, Knight-Errant on this list (among other things). I then keep track of the outcome of any game in which that particular card is resolved. This isn’t hard when most of the ‘drafts’ are between only two people. Larger groups require cooperation from the general group.

A card really only ends up here when there is some sort of pattern that emerges around these cards.  In the case of Sol Ring, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that the Ring was the issue since that card doesn’t do the actual killing. After tracking the card for a while, I found that the player that resolves Sol Ring wins about 80% of the time. That indicates that the card is really powerful and is likely to be coming out of my cube in a future update. Umezawa’s Jitte is a little different. That card is obviously powerful and downright oppressive at times. So, I tracked it and found that the player resolving Jitte only won about 50% of the time.

A harder example of this involves Bribery. This card is obviously busted in the first place, but people like to play it so I have it in my cube. In one game I played, my opponent had me defeated on my next turn. There was easily enough damage on the other side that I had to do something to win the game right then. So, I use the -1 on Jace Beleren (lets me draw a card) and turn up Bribery. Casting it, I rifle through my friend’s deck and take his Inferno Titan. That single card stops my friend dead in his tracks and wins me the game in the next turn. In the next game, a similar situation happens and ends the same way. In both cases, the Titan takes down two of his creatures on the spot and gives me a blocker to take down his other creature.

In the example above, Bribery was not the only card on my radar at the end of the match. Was the Bribery the problem? Perhaps Inferno Titan is too powerful? Or, maybe Jace is the issue since he let me go get the card in the first place. Ultimately I decided that this was a situational problem. First, Jace was actually sent to the graveyard by my use of his -1 so I don’t feel like that is too out of control. Bribery is powerful, but if that Titan hadn’t been there, this problem wouldn’t have happened. The titan was a bit harder to settle on. Inferno Titan is clearly a bomb, but would normally not be so devastating in a different board state. My opponent was playing a mon0-red deck with lots of low toughness creatures. Killing a six toughness creature with a mono-red deck is pretty damned hard to manage.

A final example here is the various Swords of X and Y. Sometimes your opponent plays a sword and it has protection from your deck. that is just bad luck. I tracked my swords for a while and found that the win/loss record wasn’t as out of control as it would initially seem. I like the swords personally, they are powerful, but they do require some amount of interaction to get them to work. Some of them are better than others, but all of them are good enough to be in my cube.

The Biggest Reason

The last and most important reason that I make a change to my cube is input from the people playing my cube. I don’t really play my cube alone. I’ve been playing magic for years with essentially the same group of players. I respect the opinions of all of them and they will often force me to look at a card in a new light that I hadn’t thought of before. If it turns out that the people playing my cube don’t like a card for any or all of the reasons above, I cut the card. Even if I don’t necessarily agree with their assessment of the card, I’ll switch things out to test the new suggestion.

With that said, I will normally ask for a suggestion to fill the slot on a card that is being put on the chopping block. Feedback like “I hate Stasis, you should cut it,” is not normally going to cut it. Nobody likes playing against Stasis, but nobody likes to play against Counterspell either so…

Conclusion

In the end, you have to pay attention to your cube. Each card has a possibility of being something else. Changing a single card will often have a sort of ‘butterfly effect’ on the rest of your cube so care has to be taken when making changes. In my case, I pay very careful attention to what sorts of decks are being built and how they are working out. I imagine that any cube designer would need to do the same thing. If you watch, you’ll see where the problems are in your cube. How to fix them isn’t always easy, but that is another part of the whole thing that ends up being fun.