Challenging Cube Dogma in my own cube.
I'm increasing my cube by 2 cards and why it doesn't matter.
I’ve been running 555 cards in my cube since I did my cube updates after getting my local group back together after Covid quarantine, going from 465 (450 + 15 for Lore Seeker) to 555 (540 + 15.) To be the change I want to see in the world, I'm increasing my cube by a numerically and metgamically (is that a word? It is now) insignificant number of <5 cards.
When cube started, it was initially loosely defined. No one still definitively knows why cube is called cube - the closest info that was attributed to me in Parker’s article above (which is a great read) was as close as I could find after hours of research.
In the early 2010s as cube gained popularity, rules coalesced around what a cube “should” be and how it should be defined.
Every section’s the same size, with multicolor being slightly larger to account for one of each tri-color card, but those have to be the same size too.
Non-Creature and Non-Creatures should be evenly split in white, red and black.
Include full cycles of fixing lands.
Play cycles in general, because they’re all usually the same power level.
When I started my cube, I realized that a lot of this didn't make sense, since some card types straddled that line. Bone Shredder was much more, functionally, of a spell than a creature, so playing it as a creature is going to lower the creature count for my aggro decks (if I follow this rule.) I realized that a lot of mental calories were spent on something that was ultimately arbitrary and making cube decks, especially aggro ones, worse.
Having 50-card sections (with multicolor having 60 for 1 of each tricolor) was a common cube foundation and when I went to increase my cube’s WUBRG section to 51 cards, someone said it wasn’t right. I asked why and I didn’t really get an answer, aside from it looking weird from an aesthetics perspective. It was one of those Kairos moments of change that shaped my cube journey, because a lot of these commonly accepted pieces of cube dogma and orthodoxy were ultimately arbitrary.
From the DIY industrial punk and early metal ethos that inspired to make my own cube (since I wasn’t able to draft one locally in 2009) to seeing a lot of existing dogma and orthodoxy and challenging it, it’s what ultimately inspired me to write about cube - to challenge the existing rules of what a cube was, since they were often ultimately arbitrary and made things worse.
Ironically, because I was writing for SCG, I became seen as the status quo and had some people griping about my writing because of that.
I was young once. I get it.
It’s so cliche to say “the rules are there are no rules” but… it ain’t wrong either. From 2015 until late 2024, when I wasn't writing about cube design and mainly focused on set reviews, many more arbitrary walls got broken down by others in the cube space.
Lands in the land box, they don’t have to just be basics.
Further exploration of what can be done with non-singleton inclusions.
And I’m sure that I’m just scratching the surface here (which is why I’ve been making an effort to be in more cube spaces, especially after CubeCon 2024.)
But some bits of old cube orthodoxy remain, like sizes of cubes being multiples of 15.
It ultimately stems from packs of cards being 15 cards and having cube sizes adhere to that as a way to measure cube sizes: 180, 360, 540, 720 are common cube sizes because of that.
In the development of my CubeCon 2024 panel about designing a cube, I created the slide below to articulate that adhering to those strict sizes doesn’t make sense, since ultimately, what your expect your cube’s expected audience to be should determine the floor of a cube’s size (if you expect 8 drafters to draft with 3 sets of 15, then your cube should be around 360… at minimum, not as the final size.)
Not a lot of cubes hit their maximum supported size, but even in those cases, max size is generally seen as the optimum, not the floor - which is what it should be.
(Even if that floor is what you want it to be. I'll talk about cube sizes and their pros and cons in more detail in another article. Eventually.)
In my CubeCon 2024 panel, I talked a lot about Micro and Macro design points-of-view (I’ll talk about it more in a future article, but essentially it's the big and small picture things in cube design) and don't get me wrong, the micros absolutely matter in cube design. But having 557 cards in a cube instead of 555 doesn't and is ultimately arbitrary.
Since I have a voice in the cube world, I might as well be the change I want to see the world and this is a way of doing so, even if it’s ultimately symbolic. Practice what you preach, ya know?
Another way that I’m doing so is that I’m going to be adding some cards that aren’t Legacy-legal, as I’ve been using the Legacy cardpool as a guiderail for the format’s power level (with some cards excluded, so the term “Legacy-Lite” is a good fit.) I’m not overly concerned cards that are (currently) Legacy-illegal being in the format, since they’re cards that could, conceivably, fit in the meta, via Tenacious Pup and GO TO JAIL, with the latter having been in my cube before.
Because ultimately, it doesn't matter.
A lot of things that you think may matter in cube might just be orthodoxy that isn’t actually doing anything. Small things are ultimately insignificant. One extra card in white and colorless? GASP
The thing is, a lot of these small imbalances aren’t going to break anything. It’s hard to nail down the last time we had a fully-balanced retail draft environment, and that’s a world where designers have the ability to edit cards during development. I haven’t personally dug formats like Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Modern Horizons 3 and Bloomburrow, but Duskmourn? A really good one, and one where the color pairs weren’t even in harmonic balance!
Your color pairs won’t all be in perfect alignment in terms of metagame representation and win rate. They never will. You’ll never achieve perfect balance in your cube.
And that’s ok!
As long as the metagame, broadly speaking, balanced (archetypically speaking), then you’re good.
If a rule is preventing you from doing something in your cube, don't be afraid to break it. It likely doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Even this article’s under the “normal” cube article length at being well under 2000 words. Did it matter? Nope!
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