Day 4 - Walking and (still) rambling

I actually got interaction today! I saved up my walking/standing time to go to casual night MtG and make a few trades/drop off a few cards/look at some Alt 4th edition stuff. It felt good to get my mind off being in bed for a while. Nothing shocking or crazy today, except the fact that I WANT TO MOVE! I hate being restricted. I have so many things I would like to do, but even my computer situation is limited. I am using a laptop that is about 5 years old (ancient in technology standards) because sitting at my regular PC would be painful after a while. I guess it will all be over soon and I will be back to the grind, so I shouldn't complain.

I want to say a big thank you to all the guys at casual MtG for the well wishes and putting up with my disgusting looking midsection. A HUGE thank you to my wife for braving the storm and in general for everything else she has done for me this week and everything she will do for me in the future. In particular, thank you Misty for going along with the diet change as well. I could write 5 pages on how much I have learned in the last week about foods and how they relate to fat content. The best way to sum it up and not bore you? Stop eating out. Best think you can do for your life, trust me.

I was posting some fun stuff on mtgfanatic.com for a while I feel that I want to move them over here occasionally. Adam got me into building a Pauper Cube and I wrote a short take on the issue with putting one together.


Everyone has been there. You are in round 3 of an 8 round grinder and nothing to do after the end of a quick round or you are preparing for a pre-release or a qualifier and are burned out on the tier gauntlet. In that down time, friends and myself always found creative ways of passing that time, while still keeping limber mentally in the Magic world. We played group magic before it was ‘hip.’ We traded crazy decks to see how the other team mates thought about decks. We even took a stack of about 300 extra cards, threw them in the middle of the table and the same stack and graveyard. In that format, any card could be turned upside down and used as a painless City of Brass. Sometimes we would play mental magic where you could cast any spell you could think of that was the same casting cost as the one in your hand OTHER than the actual card you were holding. I miss those days and now with a much larger pool of cards, some of which I am not familiar with. I am slowly getting back into the world of playing both competitively and for fun and stumbled onto the Cube idea through a new work friend. An actual Cube is a little too much thought, so I chose to dig into the pauper variety. I totally underestimated the thought process that would go into such a simple sounding item.

I didn’t dive right in; I played with my work friend over lunch in a Winchester draft of a pauper Cube to get my feet wet. I was hooked instantly, but had a lot of questions. The basics of the Cube is a stack of 360 to ‘whatever number you choose’ individual and unique cards (in this case, all commons), a good mix of each color, non-basic land, artifacts, and multi-color cards, and a lot of patience and time. You can draft it with 8 people, you can two person draft it, you can even play like I used to…both right off the top with unneeded cards as land. There are a myriad of articles that give you more details of the Cube and the theories behind certain cards out there. This musing, however, is more of the angle of a novice and how it has spurred my interest and excitement over Magic the Gathering again.

In sitting down to a Winchester draft of my first ever Cube, I was as attentive as I could be and brought away what I could from the table. I saw some old staple cards, as well as some new ‘soon to be’ classics. Cards like Nightscape Familiar are very powerful when drafted correctly and Repulse becomes almost as good as removal when splashed. I went away from the experience enlightened and confused at the same time. “Why not play this card” or “what is wrong with X card.” Little did I know that it would consume a lot of my human RAM for the next week?

Through this process, I made a challenging discovery. You cannot just dig into your extra commons and take and stack of each color and throw them together. I came up with three major areas to be concerned with when looking through the stacks of commons available.

Creature/Spell Balance

Each color needs to have a heaping helping of creatures and not too many spells/enchantments. With too many spells/enchantments, the color becomes only a splash. Keep in mind that you will use the Cube in a general setting where you will most likely be playing with someone (or multiple someones) with whom you don’t know their playing style. When you are attempting to appeal to a general market of potential players, you don’t want to put off the blue mage by throwing in 10 blue creatures and 30 counterspells. Depending on the usability of the spells/enchantments, about 10% to 25% of the color should be spells/enchantments with a focus on handling creatures or controlling the deck or hand (yours or your opponents.) Land destruction is hard to support unless it is the focus of a color and then it gets narrow for the red or black mage. Discard is a good splash, but not as a main focus. Balancing out the creature to spell ratio is a not a high focus, but will help control the speed of the games.

Power

There is a LOT of powerful commons throughout all the sets available and some tend to stand out as splash cards or a sure bet to be put in. Not so fast, though. Some of them may be too powerful for this environment or too weak in only a single copy. Dark Ritual is notably one of the best commons in the game of Magic, but a wasted card in this environment. Accumulated Knowledge is a great drawing card…in multiples of 4. So consider that the environment will be middle speed and that you want good matches, not an overbearing color or deck, and then choose your spells accordingly. The same can be said of creatures. You don’t want evasive creatures like Trespassing Souleater that are going to ping your opponent in 10 turns without a solution and conversely, you don’t want cards like Shield of Oversoul that slow the game to a crawl.

Fun

The last part is easy. Once you have balanced out all the colors and spells to creature’s ratios, have fun with it. I got partially through the Winchester draft with my work friend and an Unhinged card was flipped over. I actually chuckled out loud and then realized it wasn’t a joke. The format is open to all cards and how you put it together is up to you. You can put conversation pieces in, signed cards, alternate art cards, even the silly Knight of the Hokey Pokey card from unglued if you want. The format is loose in the truest sense of the word and a great way to pass time between the serious playing with friends, acquaintances, or players you just met.

I have been told that even when I finish what I think is my pauper Cube, that it will evolve drastically after the first few trial runs and slightly there-after. I am looking forward to that process and encourage you to explore the idea as well.