I Am Altering the Meta, Pray I do not Alter it Further.





So we started our own Cube for Starwars Destiny. To clarify for those not in the know, Starwars Destiny is a collectible card game based around the concept of having Heroes/Villains that lead your deck of cards, and many of the cards relying on Dice to employ their mechanics. Sounds random at first, but after playing a lot of games, a lot of the current strategy or meta of the game is about mitigating the chance of the dice and trying to make a one underlying strategy across your entire deck, much the same as any good collectible card game.









There are a couple of formats to play Destiny in, an unofficial one being Cube. Taken from the format of the same name in Magic: The Gathering, Cubes are large sets of player chosen cards, that you pull 'packs' of 15 cards from to make randomized decks. It's essentially like creating your own expansion.





The appeal in Cube format is the ability to remove un-fun or broken cards, while also being able to emphasize the aspects of the game that you enjoy the most.









The thing with Destiny is that it involves Hero cards. You can't play without them, and in the official Draft format where you open boosters to make your decks, you can't rely on getting Heroes in any of your packs, so they give you a set of basic Heroes to choose from.





We didn't like the idea of being able to fall back on the same heroes every time, so to fix that we made a separate drafting phase where you draft from a pool of Heroes.









We also emphasized choosing heroes that would synergize well together, as well as going for many mid-range points cost heroes, since in Destiny you're only able to take 30 points worth of heroes.

We've drafted the cube 7-10 times now, and have tried multiplayer modes, as well as the standard 1v1s. I was actually surprised at how well the Cube worked out, since at the beginning it was mainly a mishmash of a bunch of different higher tier decklists and whatever cards we had.

For anyone interested in making their own cube, we focused on a couple different archetypes or main ideas behind each color.

For blue, the main focus right now is around Shielding and pulling Sabers from the deck. Qui-Gon is a strong pick (maybe too strong compared to the others).







It was difficult to figure out what to theme Red around, so we mainly filled it with strong Vehicle characters. Hera is unbelievably scary when she can pull a free AT-ST onto the field Round 1. In the future, I want to try to cull one of the less popular vehicle characters and potentially work on a Disposable Character meta, such as going for a 5 Storm Trooper build.



With Yellow, the current theme is lots of resource generation and costly but powerful upgrades. I really want to work on culling lesser used characters or figuring out ways to make them more used in Draft, ones like Finn and Ketsu.

But overall, the cube's worked out pretty well so far, and I encourage you to try to make one yourself. Ours is built for 4 players.

The stats we use are 12 heroes, 4 of each color (although right now yellow has a Jawa in it just to fill in some gaps, as we don't have a better Yellow replacement right now.)

We each draw 4 heroes, take one, pass the rest to the person on the right, and so on until we each have a selection of 4 heroes.

Then we each pick 4 lands out of the pool, and draft until we have 2 lands each to pick from.

Then, the main chunk of the cube are the cards themselves. Since it's a 4 player cube, we've found a good number that works is 30 of each color. So 30 blue, 30 red, 30 yellow, and 30 gray.

We draw 6 'packs' of 5 cards each, then draft them one at a time by picking up a pack, picking a single card to keep, and passing the rest to the right, until all the cards are drafted, alternating which way the cards are passed with each pack.



If you're worried about it being unbalanced, don't fret too much. It'll quickly become apparent in play which heroes are taken over others, and which cards have too much effect on the field compared to others.









Labels: Basics, Cube, Star Wars Destiny