This Sunday, all 8 of us managed to get together and draft the inaugural draft of Cube: Legacy. The link to the cube can be found here (linky) in case you’re wondering where the power-level stands, which I plan on updating with new card images soon. For the very first draft no cards had stickers, but I make an example card (below) to display the full extent a card can be edited over the course of the cube.

During the drafting and deck-construction portions of the cube, everything went swimmingly. People were very excited to see cards like Time Warp and Lightning Bolt in their packs, as well as one player who wanted to live to dream by wheeling Graf Rats after getting Midnight Scavengers (spoilers: the dream never happened). The last picks of each pack were set aside the be given Cycling, Morph, or a random, potentially off-color ability; making even the very last pick of each draft impactful.

Generally speaking, the decks we built were pretty even power level-wise, though I did get quite lucky to opening two planeswalkers, as well as getting passed a Planar Cleansing.

The finals of the draft were Green/White Enchantments (splashing Blue for Clone) versus Red/Green Stompy. In the end, the Enchantments player won the match. We decided to slightly edit to prize structure for the finals, as a draw gives each player 1 Boon point and 1 Scar point, which would give both players access to Tier 5 Boons making it basically the best play once you’re 2-0. It ended up with us deciding 6 Boon points total for the winner, and 5 Boon points for the loser, just to make sure IDs weren’t a constant issue.

For those of you interested in the details of the Boons & Scars system, here (linky) is the Excel sheet I am using for them. The Boons are at the top, with Scars being below and Planeswalker Tier on the right side of the sheet (and below that is the Key for adding abilities to walkers.) Recall that each Boon costs its Tier value, so a Tier 2 Boon would cost 2 Boon points. This list in definitely not perfect, or 100% balanced, and we are all aware of that. If you have ideas for more fun abilities (that are short/easy to write!) please comment with them. I have decided not to edit the list further, as each of us has a printed version in a folder for post-cubing, and updating it would be time-consuming and annoying to go over every week, but suggestions for possible updates post-this Cube are appreciated.

With the draft proper over, it was finally time for the parts that made this different than a normal cube outing. We starting by letting all players with Scar points (2 per match loss, not including the finals) Scar any cards drafted by players. There were some clever and funny scars, and even one that will not be a detriment at all, see if you can spot it below.

There is a pretty good mix of cards that got tame scars, like Shivan Dragon and Clone, and cards that got legitimately bad, like Air Elemental and Pacifism. Fiend Hunter is going to be nuts next draft, as if you stack his triggers properly you get to just exile a creature and return him to your hand for the low price of 1WW a turn!

Now the Boons players made were fairly interesting. Recall we could only Boon cards we drafted, and below are the results of that.

So technically there was another Scarred card, Rakdos Ickspitter (Morbid was put on the activated ability), but it got Booned so I wanted to put it in this section. In the first image we made some really strong value permanents, with a quad-land, investigate, as well as a game-ending sphinx. In the second one we have some very strong cards, like 4-mana Insurrection (that makes everything bigger!) and a 4-mana Upheaval that can be cast at your opponent’s end-step.

You might have noticed some not-so-perfect templating with a few our stickers, and that’s just an issue that will be hard to get right with so many people editing cards at once. Don’t worry too much about it, we know the octopus is an ETB trigger, it’s all good.

After our Boons, we got to randomly select cards out of the last picks and upgrade them with potentially off-color abilities. The remaining cards were given Morph or Cycling, depending on if the card was a permanent or not. Here are the cards that gained Morph!

I love how the Morph enablers now have Morph! I think that’ll be super fun to see how that archetype evolves as we get more and more Morph creatures. Next up, Cyclers!

I was really surprised that Backlash got last-picked, and not at all surprised to see Archangel’s Light in the same boat. Hopefully these will get more playable? Maybe?

And finally we have the cards that were last picked that got random Boons from the Tier List. There were no Black cards last-picked (at least mono-Black) so every color (plus Colorless and Multi) besides Black got a new toy to play with.

Wow, we got a Green Lightning Bolt! A Thalia-esque 4/4 in Red! A sneaky boat! These are definitely different, to say the least. We all thought the strongest newly-minted card was Tormod’s Crypt, as it enables Storm kills easily, despite there being no Storm cards in the cube (yet!), as well as killing with our two Prowess creatures and with Molten Nursery. A worrisome card indeed!

One thing I did without telling my other 7 players was to make a trophy for the overall winner of the cube. I knew it wasn’t going to be the most competitive atmosphere (which I prefer) but figured adding something small as a prize would be a good incentive for the players involved, and maybe even a fun momento once it’s all over and done.

Thanks a ton for reading, let me know what you thought! Did I focus too little on the actual matches/gameplay? Did I yammer on and on about the Legacy aspects for too long? Do any of you have questions about the Cube list, now that it’s visible, or the Tier List? Let me know, and hope you enjoyed it!

If you’re curious about the foundations of the cube itself, perhaps my first post about it might answer some of your burning questions?

-Taylor Shuss (@Drawnonward)