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All of these questions tend to occur in my favorite non-constructed format: Cube Drafting.

So what’s cube drafting you ask? A cube is a collection of cards broken into an even dispersion by color. These cards can be from any set, at any legality. Chaos Orb is legal. Even though anything is legal, some cards tend to not be in cubes (Contract from Below and Sharazad for example.) All of Magic’s most broken, silly, and famous cards can be played.

What if you don’t have a Black Lotus? The cube’s not going to be very good if you don’t have all of the cube staples! (Power 9, drain, tutors, duals, signets, broken artifacts) The great thing about cube drafting is that it is a completely casual format and many cubes are around 70% proxied!

While there are cube purists who believe in proxies only for expensive cards, not all of us can afford 100’s of $20 dollar cards to be handled over and over again.

So, how do I make a cube so it works well? The first step is to make a list of cards that you want to play. Pick cards that aren’t completely linear and that will allow you to play them in different decks. Your goal is to choose cards that can be justified as a 5^th pick or better.

The cube can be as large as you want, but just make sure that the cards are in an even ratio. You don’t want 30% black, 30% blue and random amounts of the rest. Otherwise your drafts will seem repetitive later on. So, after you have a large list, you will want to separate your cards into these categories:

Land/artifact mana

Artifacts (and by converted mana cost so you can control curves. You don’t want 30x 5cc spells in one color!) +Creatures and non)

5x two color

5x Shards

5x Mono

Here’s an example if your confused: http://www.stlmtg.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=928&start=0

So after you have spent hours making this, it’s finally time to play! Find 4-10 people and shuffle the cube thoroughly. Next, make 15 card packs randomly and make sure everyone gets 3 of them. Now you can draft! As you will notice, this draft is very skill intensive and extremely fun. Plenty of combo decks can arise and soon you will find yourself in the most anachronistic situations magic has to offer. I encourage all of you to make a cube, either with a friend, or maybe get your store to make one. I’m personally going to start working on my cube when I get back to Columbia. I think I might start having cube drafts at my house or at casual night. I hope to see you guys soon!