Cube

[adventus]

Hey nobody on these forums ever talks about building or playing cube drafts. 

Sound off if you do!

I've got a 360 card Scars of Mirrodin block cube that's awesome.  My play group loves it. 

I'm in the midst of building a Weatherlight themed one right now. 

[Rass]

Hey nobody on these forums ever talks about building or playing cube drafts. 

Sound off if you do!

I've got a 360 card Scars of Mirrodin block cube that's awesome.  My play group loves it. 

I'm in the midst of building a Weatherlight themed one right now.

Do you mind explaining a little more of how/what you do for this.

[Silent1236]

What is cube?  I've heard of it, but never really seen anything about it. 

[adventus]

From google:

What is a cube?

A cube is a large pool of cards selected for the purposes of limited. It should should contain at least 360 cards so that you can support a standard eight-player booster draft. The actual selection of the cards will depend on the feel that you want games of your cube to have. Ben Bleiweiss owns a box containing one copy of each unique card that has been printed that he uses to draft, and although he does not call it a cube, it could be called one. On the other hand, my cube contains 410 cards, and almost every card is strong enough to have seen constructed play at one point or another. However, I have tried to avoid cards that make games unfun by being too powerful, such as Black Lotus, Wheel of Fortune, and Ancestral Recall; Gabe Walls does not worry about this, and includes pretty much anything and everything in his cube.

What you put in your own cube will reflect what you want out of it. If you want to have really powerful games, you can build something similar to mine. If you just want a change of pace but prefer limited to constructed, why not make a cube with all strong limited commons? Even a cube consisting of cards from only one block could be interesting. Your imagination is the limit.

Practically speaking, the cube should be sleeved so that expensive cards don't get destroyed. You will also need to have enough sleeved basic lands to go around.

[adventus]

What do you do with a cube?

In general, the cube is drafted. Eight-player team booster draft is my preferred format, because having eight players makes it feel most like a normal draft and using teams means that no one has to lose and not play anymore. However, any limited format can be played with the cube. I have killed many between-round breaks by playing cube sealed, and I have also done an eight-player Rotisserie draft- that is, we put the entire cube face up on the table and rochester drafted the entire cube all at once. This was riotous fun and attracted many confused spectators. To do a normal booster draft, have everyone shuffle the cube together and then make random fifteen card packs out of the randomized cards. Then, draft, add basic lands, and play.