Last november I posted that I was in the process of building one large cube instead of a single medium sized archetype-based cube. We assembled a pile of 1200 of the best peasant legal cards to make sure that everything we found good, fun, cool, nostalgic, <insert value> got into the cube. We wanted a lot of variance, the ability to play a lot of different cards, and low maintenance.
What we didn't anticipate happening was that the low maintenance also made that we were less connected to the cube. Updates were not super exciting, and because of the large size the cube didn't really require tuning (nor do changes have a lot of impact). Less cube in mind equals less cubing.
The higher variance was meant to enable higher replayability. While that's true, a larger cube also makes specific archetypes almost impossible to draft or even include in your cube. There's a reason my original peasant cube became as heavily archetype focused as it did, and I should have paid more attention to that.
But, there was also a reason we decided to make one big cube last year. My old cube tried to do so many things at the same time while also including the classic power cards, that it actually started losing depth. We included so many different archetypes that the total number of different decks may have been quite high, the amount of flexibility while drafting was low. You basically picked a build-around card early and from there on there were basically only 1 or 2 logical options each pack. The decks might look cool if everyone keeps to their lane, but drafting either became solved or a frantic scramble to make something out of a train-wreck when you got cut off.
We needed a solution, so I went back to the drawing board. I started with something that was basically a smaller version of what my cube looked like before expanding to 1200. Powerful cards mixed with a number of supported archetypes. I made sure the archetypes were not too specific or required too many specific cards. Already, we were having a lot more fun again because we were able to consistently draft our favorite cards and actually draft decks again instead of midrange soup.
After a couple of drafts, though, another issue started to become apparent. The power cards showed up more often as well. In the case of archetype specific cards, this was fine (and actually what we wanted). The problem was that there were a lot more powerful removal and bombs relative to the archetype cards. This in turn made some archetypes worse because they weren't really able to combat the amount of 2-for-1's or hard-to-answer threats.
At this point, I wasn't sure where to go with the new cube. I could cut down on power and removal, but this would mean not playing with some super iconic cards (which was the reason I started a cube in the first place). Cutting down on archetypes was also not what I wanted. So, how do you balance different kinds of archetypes and powerful cards? Well, maybe you can't in one cube.
One cube. Does it have to be one cube? What if we made more than a single cube (variation), but kept them small (well supported archetypes)? What if I made sure there would be no overlap between cubes (high number of different cards) and have each cube have their own identity (balance in power level)?
We decided on building three cubes of 400 cards:
- A cube with only old frame cards
- A modern frame cube, archetype focused
- A cube with tribal synergies and less powerful archetypes, and a lower power level to support it
If you want to check out the lists, they're in the menu bar (Old School Peasant Cube, Archetype Peasant Cube and Tribal Peasant Cube). I'll talk more in-depth about them in the future.
Cheers!
