$100 Cube

I’d seen some content around using Foundations as a way to make a cube on the cheap, and a common talking point for rarity-restricted cubes was to use them as a way of making a cube on a budget. I gave myself the challenge to make a cube for $100 which seemed like a fine budgetary constraint, coming from someone who doesn’t play paper M:TG and doesn’t personally consider a $350 burn deck to be a “budget” deck, since that’s the price of a Switch OLED.

Part of what inspired me to do this was from doing a draft of the TCC Foundations cube and it felt like a way to infinitely draft Foundations rather than as a starter cube - which the cube was marketed as, during the tail end of the video, as something that could be upgraded over time. It didn’t help that I didn’t find Foundations draft to be very fun, but the TCC cube had a lot of the same issues that Foundations had - there wasn’t a lot of removal (even with including 2x of some commons) and there were some big power band deltas. I might be singing a different tune if it was based on Duskmourn, a generally more fun draft.

So I set out to make a $100 cube and, at least as of now, it’s still $100. It was more as a proof of concept than a “Hey, copy this and make this a cube” but I’m pretty happy with this as a first draft.

It's not the first time there have been cubes with a budget constraint as the Solely Singleton "board game cube" did it years ago - but I wanted to approach this with a "balanced" (I know, perfect balance is an ideal that's not really something to aspire for) approach and to not have the power outliers like Dig through Time, etc. (some things like Satya might be pushing it, but it's something easily fixable if so, like I did with Palace Jailer) and give it a term that’s more intuitive, since “Board Game Cube” requires explaining that the cube is approximately the cost of a board game. I’ll eventually use it as something to make some content for, whether it’s an article talking about the best ways of doing so (since I can’t recall an article talking about this), a podcast about it or some Substack posts or something like that (or some other combination of contents about it.)

I’ll probably end up updating it as time goes on, and as something to refine since I want to polish it more, but I did a draft of it and found it enjoyable.

Edit - Also, I honestly have no idea how these kinds of things work, but Ubercube is a TCG player affiliate, so if you end up doing a cube copied from/inspired by this, use that link. :)