Making the kind of cube that you want to make is kind of a daunting task but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Many rares and cheap legendaries can be used to make a cube. Just throwing a bunch of cards together and seeing what fits will make for an awful experience. A little planning will go a long way. In order to make a great cube you have to consider the following:

Archetype Support

Do you want characters and cards that can support mill, vehicle and mono colored strategies? Currently my cube supports mill, vehicles, range and melee aggro.

Character Support

How do you want to deal with the character problem? Do you want to allow players to use the draft kits in order to fill out potential holes or do you want to have your cube have a way to be self sustained? You could just buy a few Rivals and have the characters be put in a set aside zone just in case someone bricks on a certain cost. Ideally you want to stay away from using the rivals characters at all since its kind of boring having everyone use the same characters.

Dice to non-dice ratio. Character to non-character dice cards and balancing events, battlefields, plots while making sure you have a good color mix.

This is probably the most annoying part and I’ll go over how I map it out. I personally feel that 1 out of 5 dice cards ratio is too low for a pack. I do a 2ish out of 5 and make sure that one of them is a character/battlefield/plot and one is non-character dice card.

How many players does your cube want to support?

If you have a big group of players that you regularly play with then you want to build one that can support 6 to 8 players. The bigger the cube the more time consuming the labor will be to construct. I opted to make a 4 player cube since I usually only play a 2 player format I call Dank Draft and the effort to support a 4 player draft was the same.

“Dank Draft” Format

The idea is derived from the EPIC card game’s Dark Draft with some modifications to make sure there are enough dice cards. The way it works is that you have to make three face down stacks: one with character dice/plots and battlefield cards, one with non character dice cards and one with events and supports. I have the characters, plots and battlefield stack in different sleeves from the other two stacks so its easy to find them. The non character die cards, events and supports are in the same sleeves since those are the cards that go in the deck. Pre-sleeving the whole cube is great since it will make starting the game very quick.

Each player makes a five card pack taking one card from each of the two piles containing die cards and then three from the other pile. You look at the pack you made and take one card and pass the remaining four cards to your opponent. You then take the pack that was just passed to you and take two cards from it and set the other two cards in the “Dank” pile, those cards will no longer be used. We end up doing this 12 times ending up with 36 cards to construct with plus the Rivals set. Doing this 12 times each amounts to seeing 120 cards from the Cube, my whole cube is about 140. I personally like that some cards aren’t seen.

From there your deck build as usual. We’ve been allowing the use of the Rivals set but I intentionally filled my cube with cheap characters that are usable or characters that support a specific strategy. Those will generally be better than whatever you would be using from Rivals but sometimes the cards don’t come and you need emergency characters – this makes it so you have to value characters highly although Anakin gets used very often because he’s a melee character and blue is the melee aggro color. I kind of dislike the Rivals cards because some are auto include like Hidden Motive and to a lesser extent Fang Fighter but I feel you might need the cards to fill it in. This makes it so you’d have to have two rivals sets available but hopefully your opponent has one or you have two. You could honestly scrap the use of it and probably be fine, using Rivals is just an insurance policy. I might alter this in the future and feel free to play around with it since we haven’t tested it highly – we are mostly playing it safe with using rivals. We play that your deck can have between 20 and 30 cards.

Four Person Draft

With 140 cards in your cube you can support a 4 person draft. You’d play normal draft rules with passing packs of 15 cards two times – you make three five card packs like in dank draft but then combine them into a 15 card pack for the first round of the draft. That’s two 15 card packs per player, with 4 players that adds up to 120 cards used. Having extra cards is also good because if you think a card is OP and want to remove it you can. As an aside cards that are on my watch list are Weapons Factory Alpha, Unkar Plutt, Long Term Plans and General Rieeken.

Breaking it Down by Archetype

Right now I have around 56 dice/plot/battlefields cards and 84 events and support cards – 28 in the characters, plots and battlefields pack and 28 non character dice cards. . Right now the Cube supports Mill, vehicles, range and melee aggro.

Archetype Breakdown Per Color

Red: Range Aggro, Vehicles and Mill

Yellow: Range Aggro, Vehicles, Mill and a little melee

Blue: Melee Aggro and a little melee and mill.

The Grey cards and battlefields support these plans.

Until Next Time

Next time I will specifically detail the cards in my cube and have a video to illustrate how “Dank Draft” goes because it might not be easy to follow in writing. The colors need to be represented equally and so do the archetypes. I hope this will be a nice little shortcut for anyone who doesn’t have the time to crunch the numbers and an inspiration for people who were on the fence about building a cube. Instead of selling your collection just build a cube and that will be a lot of fun. If you are on a budget and don’t own a enough cards to do something like this you can look in the Facebook Marketplace. People are selling there collections very cheap and you can find great deals.

Thanks for reading and as always!

ABC, ALWAYS BE CUBING!

-NJCuenca

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