TL;DR: New way to play cube allows you to both get new players into the game and help them learn the advanced concepts more quickly and easily, all in a short amount of time.

UPDATE: The entire cube is now finally uploaded! Link in the comments!

 

Hey all, I'm CapnWracker. This next year, I'll be establishing an MTG club at the high school I teach at. After many iterations of design and testing, I've arrived at a solution I'm comfortable with for the many problems I expect to face. Before we move on to the solution, we have to define the problems we're trying to solve:

1. I cannot allow expense to be a concern for my students. If we let money be a determining factor in who succeeds, we've turned Magic into a rich kids clique.

2. New players left to their own devices massively overvalue trivial mechanics, and only very slowly gain experience with mechanics that don't seem as immediately valuable.

3. Static deck choices exacerbate the previous problem, creating stale games and painfully inbred metagames.

4. The full experience needs to be fast enough to fit reasonably within a shorter time frame. Two hours is a huge time commitment in high school, and it's likely we won't even have that much.

5. The experience needs to be as friendly to new players as possible.

So what's the solution?

 

The Newb Cube

 

Having some form of Cube solves many of these at once. No student has to pay to play a cube. By choosing the card pool, we allow for varied strategies while still dodging inbred metagames. On top of that, we give the opportunity to see a wide variety of mechanics. So far, so good. Unfortunately, diving straight into draft fails to solve our need for fast games and good introductory difficulty.

Draft itself is a great format, but it poses some difficulty to new players. Learning signalling takes time. Players who don't have well developed knowledge of what cards are good in that particular draft may unknowingly make poor choices, like trying to play mono-red burn in Shadows Over Innistrad (it's color-pie supported but not supported with actual cards in the actual packs).

We solved that through changing the nature of the draft itself, then changing the Cube's contents to match our goals.

 

The Cube Design

 

For budget reasons, we started with a peasant cube. Choose only monocolored cards, and don't include any land. As an introductory experience, we chose not to include colorless cards, and due to how the format is played, we did not include any multicolored cards (we'll get to why that is in a moment). We chose some hybrid cards, but categorized them as whichever color had the theme they supported best. Since we wanted to provide the best aesthetics, we chose only cards with modern frames.

Currently, the Cube sits at around 450 cards, with 90 of each color. The main monocolored themes are:

White: White Weenie

Blue: Counterspells and Flyers

Black: Removal and Aristocrats

Red: Burn and Goblins

Green: Ramp and Trample

There are subthemes for each color by itself, and intentional themes for each allied pair (for instance, we have auras in both green and white, and tokens in red to fuel the aristocrats in black), but what exactly the themes are is less important than having themes that are synergistic and fun to play. I'm expecting to keep the monocolored themes consistent, but I may change up the multi-colored themes from time to time to keep deckbuilding fresh.

 

How To Play

 

Separate the cube into 5 piles, one for each color. Have all players roll dice, and then order themselves around the table from highest to lowest. Starting with the highest roller, each player declares 1, 2, or 3 colors, and draws cards.†

If a player chooses 1 color, they draw 24 cards of the chosen color.

If a player chooses 2 colors, they draw 12 cards of each color.

If a player chooses 3 colors, they draw 8 cards of each color.

Then, all players take about 5 minutes to decide what 12 cards to keep of their initial pool of 24. The rest are separated out by color, and put on the bottom of their respective piles in any order. That ends the pseudo-sealed phase of deckbuilding.

From there, each player takes 3 cards of each color to make a functional pack. For the first four picks, packs are passed downstream‡ (high roll towards low roll). Then, the cards left in those packs are put into a discard pile, and new packs are drawn, which are passed upstream for the last four picks. This leaves players with 18 non-land cards.

Players then choose the number of lands they want to run, given their curve. The minimum is 12 (or 40% of a 30 card deck), and the maximum is 16 (47% of a 34 card deck). Note that these lands are strict additions, and the total number of cards in the deck goes up as more lands are added.

Players are then paired up and play!

IMPORTANT: Because we set a minimum on the number of lands in each deck, we allow for a special mulligan rule! If your opening hand doesn't have at least 2 lands in it, you may reveal your hand to your opponent, shuffle it into your deck, and draw a full 7. Because of the small maximum number of lands in the deck, it's impossible to be flooded TOO hard already, but we don't want anyone to lose to mana screw.

 

Results

 

Currently, a full sequence of deckbuilding and one game has averaged about 45 minutes. I'm hoping this means that a 90 minute time-frame will allow for deckbuilding and three games using pairing methods similar to Wizards' pairing system (to keep games as even as possible). I'm not particularly interested in knockout brackets at the moment—we want to maximize the number of games that can be played in the time we have.

The games have played out more similarly to Modern than what I expected from a limited environment. Board presence stalemates sometimes occur, but the amount of removal available makes less prevalent overall. This was a major concern in the design phase, but hasn't been an issue at all.

The metagame isn't anywhere close to a clear solution. I'm currently keeping an eye on if there's too much removal overall, but "do-nothing control" decks currently don't have any reliable finishers in their colors. I know that I'll need to police strategies more actively than most cubes due to the ability to choose a strategy directly, but there haven't been enough iterations to really define what the strongest decks are. I suspect black, red, and white are vying for top slot, with blue and green making up more of a second tier, but that analysis comes out of card choice more than win percentages. I'm actually quite excited to see if someone can find a strategy that's good against everything, because it will give me a chance to hone my set design skills.

The total cost of the cube has actually turned out to be less than almost any competitive Standard deck, and the limitless options in building and rebuilding the cube have already provided me dozens of hours of entertainment.

We may change the rules over time to keep the experience suited to a maturing audience, but the complexity seems to be in a good place for right now.

Most importantly, this whole experience has been extremely fun.

 

##Possible Changes

 

There are lots of variants to consider:

1. Is the experience better if we extend the draft phase?

2. Are there better choices for the passing rules for the draft?

3. Do we hide color choice until everyone has chosen? (Write them down; flip them all at once).

4. Instead of only basic land, what about providing a certain number of taplands to players with multicolor decks?

5. Does the game player better or worse if we increase or decrease the total number of cards kept from the original pool of 24?

 

##Footnotes

 

† Of course, this means you have to limit the number of people that can call the same color. Game theory dictates that they won't all want to call the same colors anyway, but having 4 people call monored won't work out unless your version of the cube has more than 90 of each color.

‡When the number of players is small, we have a special rule that if packs get back to the original player who draws them, they get put in a discard pile and new packs are drawn. The passing of the packs is definitely more guideline than actual rule. Choose whatever is fun for the level of group you're playing with.

 

Parting Thoughts

 

Eventually, I'll write down the whole set list and post it on an appropriate forum for review, but for right now I just wanted to share what I've found as a solution to the problem of introducing new players to the game in a fun way that doesn't get stale. I hope others try out their own Newb Cubes, and if you do, let me know how it goes!