Many years ago I had the lovely chance to play a game called Risk: Legacy. Playing it gave me many, many ideas and left my mind brimming with so many ‘what if’s; it was an amazing feeling. Around that same time I had begun my journey into Magic: The Gathering. Magic was a great hobby for me because when I get into a hobby I want to dive right in, and boy did Magic allow me to do just that.

If you are reading this, I assume you are interested in game design, Magic: the Gathering, or both. If you don’t have much of an idea of how drafting or what a “cube” is, read the paragraph below for an explanation. If you already know all about drafting and cubes feel free to skip it.

As I was to learn, in Magic a common form of playing is drafting – where 8 players sit around a table, open 3 booster packs each, and play what they decide to take from their own packs and the remains of the packs passed to them. After playing for some time I came to the conclusion this was my favorite way to play Magic. Then I learned about cube drafting – a form of drafting but instead the cards provided are chosen by whoever brought the cube, meaning they could tailor and tinker with it and edit it as they saw fit.

Since learning how to draft and what cubes were in the wide world of Magic, Legacy games were also becoming more of a trend. Here’s the part where I define what a Legacy game is for the Magic crowd in the following paragraph.

Risk: Legacy and games of its ilk have a certain permanence to them. They usually involve defacing the game board or adding stickers to game components to permanently alter them throughout the game’s lifespan. These games are commonly played with a set group for consistency, and although there are not too many out as of this writing it seems everyone wants in on the concept.

With all that out of the way, I had concepted what Cube: Legacy would look like for some time but it took many ideas before I felt there was something worth pursuing. I had seen similar projects undertaken and posted about on social media, but the write-ups were never in-depth or descriptive enough for anyone to really follow-up on them.

On a a Magic related note, of the images that had been circulated all the starting cards were quite strong on their own. In the Magic community, there seems to be this notion that all cubes need to have ludicrously high power levels, a notion I firmly disagree with. I have always found the joys of limited (Magic slang for ways to play that involve limited access to cards) to be in crafting a makeshift deck, and then playing actual Magic with said deck – Not by winning super early with a degenerate combo or being hosed by a single card your opponent drafted. My first cube is a (mostly) peasant cube, meaning it consists of primarily commons and uncommons (link is here for those interested), giving it a lower power level than most other ones I’ve played.

I found it so odd that people would want to start with already strong cards, and then make them better. Why not instead start with mediocre, or even straight up bad cards, and add permanence from there to make things more interesting? If you’re going to give cards more text, why not have a ton of blank canvases to work on?

Found throughout the various Cube: Legacies I stumbled across another commonality besides power-level: They all used very similar formats to give out and place stickers. The method done in the first Legacy game, Risk : Legacy, had various conditions for opening packages that gave the players new goodies to work with and use. This was really cool in a game of Risk that allowed for some serious shenanigans, however I wasn’t 100% sold on the idea for a Magic formatted Legacy-style game.

I’ve been fortunate in that I have been able to play through several Legacy games at this point, and seen more ways to distribute permanence between plays. I settled on a simpler system with almost no hidden information (that players can make choices based off of anyways) that all of us should be able to grok – Boons and Scars each have a Tier List, Boons have 1-5 Tiers and Scars have 1-3 Tiers. Each match win in the draft gives the winner 2 Boons points to spend at the end on cards they drafted. Each match loss in the draft gives the loser 2 Scar points to spend at the end on any cards they wish to scar that players drafted. These points are a now-or-never affair so players need to spend them at the end of each draft, starting with any Scar points, and then proceeding with any Boon points. Each Boon or Scar costs the number of points equal to its Tier.

One thing I had considered early on was the color pie. In Magic, there are 5 colors players can cast spells from. Each color has different strengths and weaknesses. I consider this a very good thing, and have aimed to keep the color pie intact, within reason, as much as possible for this Cube. However I realized I had a problem, ‘When cards are consistently last picked, how will they ever get better? Why would players waste Boons on cards that are just worse than their other choices?’ This led to two major decisions that will be momentous as the Cube progresses (in a good or bad way, it is far too early to tell.)

The last picks of each pack are not drafted. They are instead set aside until the end of the draft. Of those set aside cards, one of each color (and one colorless card if there are any) will randomly be chosen and randomly given a Boon, which can come from any color’s abilities and Tiers. The other set aside non-creature cards are given Cycling, and the creature cards are given Morph.

What this means is although the players can add Boons to cards normally, they have to be restricted by the color pie. If a card is given an off-color ability via this randomly selection process, it’ll be more valuable because it’ll be an oddball card within its color(s). Players can give cards colors by adding to their casting cost, but it is far more tedious to use up their precious Boon points than to let a bad card get a new and strange ability.

All of this has been the framework by which I am constructing the cube. I am attempting to seed for cards and abilities that don’t exist yet. I am trying to make it as fun, fair, and balanced as I possibly can. Legacy games are notoriously hard to get right, even with plenty of prior experience. Will all of it work as intended? Probably not.

The only thing I am sure of is we will break the cube in half, and attempt to tape it back together. With 8 people drafting and editing it, we are sure to accidentally make some silly combos, or ridiculous ways to win that will probably not be balanced until we self-balance them with Scars. I cannot say if this will happen on the first draft, or the sixth, but I fully believe it’ll happen.

I will also be trying to keep all of you at home up to date with the important happenings of the cube with updates after every draft if possible, maybe every other draft though as things could go slower than intended.

If this was all super boring to read though, or really interesting, let me know! I want to know if people are interested in this sort of stuff, or if they’d prefer I stay away from non-strictly board game topics. Thanks a ton for checking it out!

-Taylor Shuss (@Drawnonward)