Player Agency and Cube Design

Ryan Overturf talks through the myriad decisions that players make while drafting and playing Cube and how to abstractly approach the agency of players in Cube design. 

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What's up gamers? Welcome back to 180MTG. My name is Ryan Overturf, and this week I'm gonna be talking about player agency when it comes to cube draft and how that can and should impact our cube designs. When it comes to playing cube draft, there are tons of decisions that players are making all throughout the process drafting, building their deck, playing games. And when it comes to magic, magic is a really difficult game, and it is not worth it to try to be good at the game. Magic is really hard. Most people are never going to be great at it, and they don't have to. What matters with magic is it's a fun game. You want to try to optimize the fun. I'm not here to try to make anybody get better at magic. When you run your cubes, you shouldn't be frustrated at anybody for making suboptimal decisions. That's just something that's going to happen. Nobody's trying to optimize cube in terms of technical play, but we can optimize cubeite in terms of fun and enjoying each other's company. And an aspect of that as a cube designer, I think, is informing your cube design based on the way that people engage with your cube. So today I'm just going to be talking about the various phases of drafting a cube and playing a cube, what decisions players are making, and how as a cube designer you can analyze how those decisions are being made or which decisions are being made, and use that to inform how you want to change the cube to build the most fun environment or something the most approachable that your players can make the most sense of in your design. So just diving right in, at the start of Cube Night, you as the cube designer, you have presented a card, every card in the cube list is there. It could be informed by whatever your process is, but there is a list of cards that is not changing. The players aren't going to impact what cards are in the cube at this point. It is time to draft. And that is where player decision making, where player agency kicks in the cards that an individual player drafts, they make those decisions. You can choose what's in the pack, but you cannot choose how a player is going to evaluate that pack. So players are doing their drafting and they are picking cards based off whatever their own heuristics or desires are. Some players are there trying to win as much as possible. Some are trying to build the most fun deck. For me as a player, those two things are really related. If my deck isn't functional, it can't be fun. But for a lot of other players, they can point to an individual card that maybe doesn't do anything on its own necessarily, but they identify it as a fun card as something they might pick more highly. And also a big thing you see when it comes to player agency, there's cards that just aren't fun that players are going to fully avoid for that reason. And this is going to relate back to how you balance your cube as a cube designer. And some designers have more or less of an appetite for something to be meticulously balanced. But if you have some power outliers, the way that your play group engages with those outliers, if they just aren't the fun cards, then they're going to go later in the draft. And it's also going to be more likely that the people trying to shark the draft just get more of those power outliers if they are less fun cards. So this does relate to making the fun thing the good thing, which is a topic that does deserve a ton more individual attention. But just making sure that there are cards that players find fun to latch onto in your draft is a huge part of presenting a cube that people are happy to engage with. For some players, it's just going to be strong cards. They're going to be looking for those to pick highly, and having just that kind of baseline to start your draft if you are trying to win. Starting with a strong card is a good, fun baseline. You can be a little bit more confident in your deck when you open on a strong card. Some players may be looking for something sillier to start their draft. And a lot of players do just like starting on mana fixing. So having enough mana fixing for your desire, for your audience's desires is really important for maintaining your queue. So be mindful of your playgroup's preferences as they draft and what kind of decisions they are excited to make as they launch into a draft. We played a few different cubes, did a number of drafts, and one of the cubes we drafted was the original recipe tubert. And something about my brother, his background in magic's a lot different than mine. You know, I've played a handful of Pro Tours, been really invested competitively in magic. He is more of a commander player, a lot more gaming on the kitchen table. I think the pre-release is probably the most competitive environment that he's ever played in. And when we were drafting, I noticed that something that he he likes to hate draft, and a lot of players like to hate draft. And I'm not gonna go on a big diatribe about it. I will say my general stance on hate drafting, I think if you literally never hate draft, and the other option is you hate draft excessively, the player who never hate drafts at all will have a better win percentage than the player that hate drafts a little bit too much. I think you're better off never hate drafting than hate drafting too much, just because you won't have to trouble getting enough playables for your deck. And also it's kind of dubious. In an eight-player draft, it's like you might not even play against the person who wanted the card you hate drafted. Even in a two-player draft, you have to know they would put it in their deck, and even with their deck, they won't draw it every game. But anyway, without going too deep into that, my brother likes to hate draft. And we're playing the original SAP Tube. He is a commander player, and we're like in pack three or four of a Minneapolis draft. And also Minneapolis draft, part of the design. You only draft 40 cards, which is fewer than you would get in an eight-person draft. You you know, 42, 45 cards is kind of the baseline historically for retail limited, and a lot of two-player draft formats do involve players getting more than that many cards just to kind of finesse the fact that there's only two players and kind of less of the cube involved in the draft. But Minneapolis draft gives you 40 picks, which is kind of tight. You're gonna get some off-color cards. There's not a lot of wiggle room for hate drafting there, and that's by design having kind of a structure that disincentivizes hate drafting when it's not something that I really enjoy doing. I would rather be focusing on building my deck. But anyway, we are doing this draft, we're only pack three or four. He takes a card and he says, I'm not letting you have that one. And we talk about it. The card that he hate drafts from me is Primeval Titan. And I'm playing green, but Primeval Titan would not have made my deck. It's actually a card, the green six drop in the original SP Tube is something I've been waffling a lot about. I've had the six mana Vorinclex that doubles the counters on your stuff and halves the counters on your opponent's stuff, which has been really unfun playing against planeswalkers, like the way it really inhibits your opponent's planeswalkers has been an unfun play pattern, so I moved off of that. I tried Carnage Titant, Carnage Tyrant's just a little bit too weak, a little bit too low impact in the games. So I tried Primeval Titan just because it's something I had never tried before. I thought maybe with some of the creature duels, it could be something that's kind of appealing. Mostly Primeval Titan, this cube is just colossal dreadmaw with a little bit of trinket text. It is not great. And the experience of somebody using a first pick to hate draft primeval Titan, that tells me at the cube designer that I have made an error. I have this slot that I'm not convinced is strong enough in the cube, and somebody is hate drafting it. That is really bad. And this is not just one person made one decision. Why did this person make this decision? So my brother is hate drafting primeval titan because the card's banned in commander. He's a commander player. This card has quite the reputation in commander, it would totally take over the games there. Also, in a lot of cubes, you can get into stuff like Field of the Dead. That's not in the cube here. Modern players are going to have an awareness of the powerful things that Premeval Titan can do, because of decks like Amulet Titan, there's a course to history with Valicut. And in the original SOB Tube, Primeval Titan just doesn't live up to any of this hype. It really is a glorified colossal dreadmaw, and people love the card, so I thought I'll try it out there. Maybe somebody will be happy to cast it, but I really didn't consider, oh, somebody might think that's really strong and hate drafted. And that experience was so negative that I had to pretty quickly cut the card from the cube. So I'm trying out gruff triplets there, but anyway, be it have an awareness of how players are going to engage with your cards, whether it's just kind of general sentiments and beliefs about cards, or more specifically, the people you know, the people you play with, and how they engage with those cards, that should inform how you design your cube. It's not just what is strong, perception is reality. What you believe is strong and how you act on that ultimately shapes the environment, how it's played, and how the drafts and the game shake out. If I have a primeval titan in the cube that's not very strong, but part of the range is that somebody's going to think it's strong and hate drafts it, that's my fault. I can't make a player draft correctly, but I can make decisions in my curation that gives players the best information to make meaningful decisions. It's probably better to have a card that somebody has never heard of and they're not sure how it plays than to have a card that a player has heard of, they think it's strong, and it's just not as strong as they think it is. That's kind of a rug pull that can lead to all kinds of issues that are just not very fun in actual practice. I ran into a different issue regarding curation and player expectations when I was working on my spooky cube some years ago, where in that cube initially a lot of my design was to have a very narrow power band and to have a lot of graveyard-centric archetypes that were very balanced so that you can kind of explore whatever you really wanted to draft at that time, between madness, spider spawning, uh, human stiples, a big part of that environment. And I just really wanted everything to be pretty equal playing field, no real individual power outliers, and so you could just draft whichever of those things spoke to you at the time. And so when I was drafting that cube, if I would draft Watery Grave, I would have an idea of what I wanted a Watery Grave deck to be. And some of that is, of course, because I was the cube designer, I knew that blue-black was largely going to be madness, was going to go into some kind of discard matters archetype, and that's what I was signaling to myself and the other drafters, at least in my head, when I drafted Watery Grave, hey, Psychotog should come this way. I'm kind of planting my flag. And that's just my approach to drafting. When I make my first picks, I always have a deck that I'm trying to build in mind that should really solidify after a few picks into the draft. So when I pack one, pick one, Watery Grave, or Psychotog, in my mind, I'm kind of doing the same thing. I have a vision for what the deck of those colors in an environment is that I'm trying to draft, and that could shift as I get deeper into the draft, but I always want to have an idea of what my goal is for a 40 card deck at the end of the process, which is a very different perspective from drafters who just abstractly draft lands very highly. There's a lot of drafters, certainly when it comes to cube draft, that will take some meta fixing land even in the first few picks, just take whatever fixing is available and then figure out what to do from there. And that's really difficult in environments that are very synergy driven with narrow power bands. Something that happened kind of regularly in Spooky Cube when I had that initial vision of the specific archetypes with a very narrow power band and really balanced across archetypes, is players who draft manifesting lands abstractly highly do that and expect at some point in the pack, at some point in the draft, there's going to be something that is undervalued. Some card, be it a monocolor card, a gold card, whatever, is going to slip through the cracks because people don't want that, they can't cast it, there's some reason that something that is just stronger than the other card stays in the pack too long, and if you have good fixing, you can pounce on that when the opportunity arises. Well, in an environment with a very narrow power band, there's not going to be any such opportunity. You actually have to have a plan for what deck you're trying to draft. So I had this environment that really spoke to me the way that I enjoy drafting. I pick a Watery Grave or a Psychiatog. They are one-to-one to me. They signal the exact same things. A lot of other drafters, when they take Watery Grave, they're thinking, I might not even play this. I want to take all the best mana fixing, and then eventually I'm going to leech onto some colors and figure out what deck that I'm trying to play. So for those players, what would happen is they would take a bunch of lands and just have a bunch of lands and then just never end up with a very coherent or strong deck, because such a narrow power land with such a synergistic environment means that you have to really have a vision to end up drafting something strong. If all the synergistic pieces are relying on you getting one plus one equals three, and you are waiting for a card that's an individual two that never comes, and all you have is mana fixing. In practice, those decks sucked a lot. They were really bad in the cube, and that over time I realized okay, I actually need to have some cards that are a little bit more in the individual power space, because even though, for me personally, I like having this vision for a draft, I have to be mindful that there are players that are just going to pick fixing highly, and I don't want to just reward them with the best deck at the table, but I want to have some power outliers. They just increase comfort, and given this very popular proclivity of players who draft lands highly, I want to give them more opportunities for success in this cube. Even if personally I did like the idea of the environment with the flatter power band with the more balanced synergies, some power outliers, you just have to actually try to meet player expectations. So players are gonna do what they like to do. If people like drafting lands, they are going to draft lands highly, even if it is to their own detriment, and you just kind of meet people where they are when it comes to cube design. So you want to be aware of what your own draft style is, and then just kind of some common things you'll see at the draft table, the hate drafters, the land drafters, and then at the end of the draft, I find it's always very useful and informative to just ask people what they were valuing highly in the draft, how they ended up where they are, especially for those train wreck drafts. When someone's deck is just not functional, like those spooky cube decks that had too much mana fixing lands and not enough identity for what the deck was trying to accomplish. It's good to know that players are drafting lands highly, kind of why they're doing it, they're looking for some power outliers, and just giving them a little of what they want. You know, maintain your vision, make your cube about the thing you want it to be about, but also give the people what they want. Cube design is an exercise in self-expression, but it's also an exercise in collaboration and in compromise. And then the next phase of player agency in cube draft is deck construction. There's different cubes that are going to have more or less going on here. Also, draft methodology is going to impact this. I was talking about how Minneapolis draft you only get 40 total cards, so you're gonna have fewer total options here. Some draft methodologies give you more cards, and some cubes and some draft pools are just gonna have more or fewer options, just kind of depending on how things shake out here. But it can be really interesting to dig into what's going on in a player's sideboard after deck construction, or how long they take in deck construction. So those are two very different things can be really informative about cube design and how you want to design your cube going forward. When it comes to the question of cards that end up in the sideboard, this is another place that I like to look and have conversations with drafters when drafts go badly. It's often useful to dig in sort of a sideboard for cards that they might have undervalued and investigate why that is, or maybe talk about cards that you think are stronger than they are. So there's a card in their sideboard that you think is strong, maybe they undervalued it, and you can investigate that, and maybe next time they'll give it more of a shot and they'll learn something about their archetype, or maybe they'll point out to you that the card just isn't as strong as you thought it was and it wouldn't help their deck anyway. And you can use that information to tighten up your design. And it's also informative if you look at their sideboard and it's just a bunch of off-color cards or on-color cards that don't play together. Sometimes your cube is just too parasitic. Maybe the strongest decks come out really strong and they are synergistic, but then the weakest decks just don't function at all. And you kind of want to get to a point where everybody at the table has a deck that they're happy playing. Not every draft has to be perfect, you can't make it so that everybody's draft is good, there's enough moving parts where at least some of the time somebody's going to have a bad deck. But if you're looking at cyborgs and there's just a lot of cards that nobody would play anyway, then you are kind of reducing player agency by your design maybe being too parasitic, having too wide of a power band. So there's usually something to investigate in the sideboard there for that reason. And then when it comes to that deck construction aspect, when deck construction takes a long time, there is the other side of it where sometimes there's just too many playables, and different designs are going to leave this for different reasons. Sometimes you have a draft methodology, maybe you're trying something out, and you just have a lot more cards in your pool at the end of it, and you want to reduce the total number of cards, but even things like a color-restricted cube or cubes that make it so more of your total pool is just naturally playable. An example, I talked to the podcast on one point about my friend Andy's mono black cube. And in a mono black cube with a landbox where you can add any number of swamps, if you draft 45 cards, then odds are you're looking at over 30 spells that you can cast all of them because everything just costs black mana and it's just pretty easy to play anything, and then you have 10, 15, 20 cards you need to cut from your deck. That's a lot of decisions to make. And then you end up in a space where maybe people are happy playing just more total cards, 50, 60 card decks, that's something we saw initially. But there's things you can do in the design to kind of finesse that to the direction that uh Andy and I talked about that has been really cool and fun in that environment, just really increasing the utility lands in the cube so that you play more of the cards in your pool, and with the lands, it's not the same as having a ton of spells, so you get to the 40 card deck a lot quicker when there's more lands kind of available there. And that's another thing happening in some of my other cubes, like 30 to 50 Feral Hogs has more mana fixing lands than my other designs, because you always have to pay red for the Razor Swines. So, with every deck being red, there's just more red mana fixing lands to make sure that that works. And as a result, that's a funny cube where when we do the Minneapolis drafts and you have 40 cards, oftentimes players have like a two or three cards sideboard because you have so many lands and MDFCs, so you just end up playing most of the cards that you draft. Which to be clear doesn't work for every environment, and there is some appeal to having some useful cards in your sideboard, but when you have this environment that is color restrictive or just for whatever reason you have so many cards in your pools and it takes a long time because the players have to make so many cuts, there's things to investigate there as a cube designer. So there's usually something going on where you don't just look at the decks people are playing, but there are things to investigate and to glean information from when you look at players' sideboards. Either for cards that are not playing because of evaluations of card strength, cards that are not playing because you just have to cut something, and cards that they can't play. There's a lot that you can look into there. Either the decisions that players are making because they are constructing the deck the way that they want to construct it, the way that they understand it, or decisions that are forced in that example of parasitic cards. If the cards just aren't castable or don't make any sense in their deck, that's something that you are heavily influencing in cube design. So there's always knobs that you can turn, and looking at players' sideboards and seeing how they construct their deck is a treasure trove of information for a cube designer. And then the next area where you're going to see a ton of player agency is in the broad category of in-game decisions. And there's a ton of different skills tested, you know, even in drafting and then in the games themselves. How well do you mulligan, how well do you sequence, how well do you assess threats, and how do you value your removal versus threats, how do you line up your threats against potential interaction from your opponent? So much happens in a game of magic, and I'm not going to try to really break this down into how well players play, one player misses something, both players miss something. So rare that a perfect game of magic is played, and it's even less likely on a casual cube night. I'm mostly just highlighting this as an area where players are doing the things that they want to do and making the decisions that they are happy making. And so you want to be mindful there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of variance in games and outcomes of games based off of player decisions. The better player doesn't always win, the player who makes better decisions doesn't always win, and even when it does shake out where the better player wins, that can also muddy the water a little bit when it comes to your cube design. Decisions, because when the better deck loses, that can make something get lost in the shuffle about power level. I know a lot of the conversation about what the strongest cards and archetypes are in a cube often just has to do with records, and you know, you do have to account at least a little bit to the extent that it's possible for how well a game is played. The deck that should have won is worth at least as much in that consideration on power level as the deck that did literally win. So player agency is certainly an aspect when you are trying to break things down based off of records and power level. But as a cube designer, I think more than how well players play, or paying any mind to that, I think it's useful when it comes to in-game decisions to isolate times when a player just does something that they didn't necessarily mean to do or wouldn't do if they had better information. And I don't mean hidden information of the game. I am largely talking about game complexity here, and there's some boneheaded stuff like, oh, I didn't know that that was an instant, or I didn't know that that could target artifacts. But those even specific, like small boneheaded things, they do happen more often in environments that are more complicated. Just kind of the more that you have to keep track of, the more that you have on your mind. There's just it's just more likely that you miss more things, even simple things you would otherwise know. So a more complicated environment, even if it's not the specific, very complicated thing that's being handled incorrectly, having to track all of that can cause you to lose track of things you would normally be on top of. So when you introduce very complicated mechanics, the loudest examples are things like day night, that you have to track every turn of every game, and the ring tempts you is one that I don't know anything about. A lot of people talk about the initiative. That's one that I'm more sympathetic to than those first two because it kind of just wins the game and I can track that much. But just generally, like emblem mechanics are really tedious, and if you have a lot of cards, a lot of words, a lot of keywords, definitely if you have keywords without reminder text. I have been more sensitive to including a lot of double-faced cards in my cube. When I did my Loreworn Eclipsed cube review, I called out the cycle of double-faced cards that can transform every turn, like the new Ashling, the new Oko, and those are even more complicated than many double-faced cards, given the fact that players get the choice to transform them every turn. So both sides of the card are relevant on every turn of the game, and that's just a huge tracking burden, especially if you have to flip them over and read them every turn until you really can remember what those cards do. That's a huge kind of complexity crunch, and there's just so much to keep track of in magic. Very complicated game just as a baseline. There's over 30,000 cards, there's so many mechanics, and when there's a lot of errors happening in games, yeah, sometimes, like again, nobody has to be good at magic, it's just that that important of a thing, but I do think it's good to be mindful of the complexity of your cube environment, just because less complexity tends to make things more approachable, and the game of magic is already just so complex no matter what you do. So, like in the original recipe Tube, I don't end up adding a lot of new cards to that environment. Sometimes a set will come out and I won't make any updates to the cube at all. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that so many cards are so wordy now, and I'm not saying that's inherently bad. If you're exploring specific synergies, it can be really good for cards to touch on multiple things, especially if you want to have overlapping synergies across archetypes. Though the original Recipe Tube Birch is just kind of a little bit more of a mid-range environment, there are synergies in that cube. It is a synergistic environment, and some decks are absolutely better than other decks because of the ways that the cards can come together. But when it comes to a newer card that's gonna have some text that just doesn't gonna matter in that many games, a lot of my cubes, I don't feature a ton of enchantments because I find the play patterns on chant enchantments can be very negative, where oftentimes you need a very specific card to answer an enchantment, otherwise it's just in play the whole time. And if that's the case, it's either really strong and game warping or it's not strong enough to be worth a card. Both of those I find to be undesirable outcomes of putting a card in your deck. And so if I don't have a lot of enchantments, few or no enchantments, then having cards that destroy enchantments, that is kind of communicates something to players. This extra information, this word on a card, destroy X or Y or an enchantment. And if there's no enchantments in the cube, they might pick that up because they think it's a good cyborg card, and it's just something that a card theoretically could do that doesn't play in the environment, and that can just add complexity, even though it doesn't actually matter in the games. Just any extra information is something that I'm always mindful of in curation, and it's just reducing those pain points on complexity and things you have to pay attention to. Fewer words on cards is often a good thing. More words can be good if there are more synergies to explore, but words that don't matter, double-faced cards you have to read both sides every turn, emblems where there's words that matter to the card, there's card text that's not on the card itself. You can understand how these things can lead to increased complexity. If your games are taking a long time, if players are making more bone-headed decisions than you think that they normally would, these are all things to pay attention to to address those concerns. So can complexity is something that you want to be mindful of when it comes to how players are approaching in-game decisions, and just so everybody is happy with the environment and nobody feels exhausted at the end of the games. And individual card complexity isn't the only way that games get complex. Some environments have a way of having games really get bogged down. This can definitely happen when you have an environment where you really try to have a really narrow power band, when you have just a lot of creatures on the ground that can make it difficult to make good attacks and blocks. And I think it's important to make sure as you have a cube, or maybe the games get kind of wide, games can go long, that you have some means to players for p to punch through and actually end games. Some kind of overrun effect, you know, having a crater of behemoth that can always end the game. This may be an extreme example, but just something that can punch through. Even just flyers are useful here. I like to make use of more explicit unblockability, so even as the battlefield gets gummed up, players can still make good attacks and the game can move towards a conclusion, big damage spells reach fireballs or something that's really useful to actually make sure the game closes, consistent damage sources just two players, stuff that makes it so the game actually eventually ends. The longer the games go, the crunchier things get on the battlefield, the harder it becomes to identify a good attack, the more you're gonna see players check out. When players are checked out, they're not having the most fun, you wanna keep them coming back. And certainly for my sensibilities, I want to play games that actually end. That's why I'm playing Cube and not Commander. And then just something to consider when it comes to player agency in-game and how complicated magic it is and how difficult it is to play the game very well. I know that everybody kind of looks at the 3-0 deck, and every draft, if you play an 8-person single elimination draft, there's going to be a 3-0 deck. There's no way around that. And the player that wins every match, of course, they're going to get some attention. You'll look at what are the strongest cards in that deck, how strong that archetype is. I think everybody knows to look at the winningest decks. If you're talking about format balance, if you're looking for maybe power level outliers, it could be problematic, as well as looking at the decks that perform the worst to see if there's some archetypes that aren't fully supported, some cards that can't really hang in the environment. It's really easy and it makes sense. It's very natural to look at the decks that win all of their matches and the decks that lose all of their matches. But something that I think is very compelling is to look at the decks where players win one or two matches in spite of the decisions that they make. I think is maybe the best way to put it. I remember there was this time, I'm gonna pull an anecdote from Competitive Constructed, a friend of mine was trying to select a deck for a tournament, and they pointed out that a very established, uh very strong technical player had won some like magic online challenge. Some tournament one-off was won by a strong player with a decklist that had no other results. And I said, well, you don't really want to choose the deck you want to play for constructed based off of a strong player winning one tournament that can often be just as much of just an example of how strong we are as a player. It is often much more worthwhile to explore the decks that a lot of weaker players have seen success with. When it comes to a good player winning a tournament, oftentimes they're just making good decisions. Sometimes they're catching players by surprise with their brew. One of my favorite players, one of the best to ever do it, is Hall of Famer Shota Yasuoka. I have never in my life copied 75 for 75 cards of a Shota Yasuoka deck, because even though I can copy his technology, I cannot borrow Shota's brains. I can just not play like Shota. And his decks tend to not be things that really catch on. He wins because he's such a talented player, and I'm not saying he's a bad deck builder, but I am saying that I can't play his decks to results the way I could other decks. I need to play a deck that somebody who is a mere mortal can see success with. It is more useful if you know somebody who likes two and twos every week at FM, and then they randomly spike back-to-back RCQs, it's a really good bet that the deck that they spiked those RCQs with is very strong. So to bring that back to Cube, when somebody 30s the Cube draft, one, of course somebody is going to, that's just the natural way of things, and there's a lot of ways that they can navigate the draft and the games better so that they can win, even if they don't necessarily have the best deck at the table. There's ways that they can play better, there's ways that variants can break their way. And I really want to look at somebody who is maybe fumbled on some of these other things we've talked about. I want to look at somebody who hate drafted to excess, that didn't have enough playables in deck construction, that drafted a bad mana base and is fumbling through their games, but still won a match or two, because sometimes that means that they had a card in their deck that is so strong that you can do everything wrong and still win if you draw and cast that card. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it is a good and important aspect of magic that the less skilled player does win some of the time, and indeed a significant amount of the time when both players have access to good deck lists, or you have an environment where the complexity isn't so high that you're priced out if you're just not as invested in the game as the other player. It is good that anybody could win a given cube draft, even if you are maybe less likely than some of the other players, you want some egalitarianism involved. In fact, this is a lot of the core premise of powered cube drafts. Anybody can end up with a black lotus, and pretty much anybody can win if you cast a black lotus. So it's good to have some of that. You can have some power outliers. But when you're getting away from those power maxed environments and you want to get into players meaningfully drafting synergies and playing coherent decks, I think you can find power outliers in decks that go 1-2 or 2-1 that kind of win in spite of everything else happening in the draft, about as effectively as you can find them in the 3-0 decks. And the reason why it's useful to look at those 1-2s and 2-1s, because those games are probably not very satisfying, where to use an extreme example, somebody just has a bad deck, but they draw and cast Oko on turn 3 some of the games, and then they just win very easily because you have this one card, there's a decent chance that neither player had very much fun in that game. It just kind of feels like the decisions that everybody made were kind of invalidated, which again, you know, Oko's an extreme example that blanks the text on other cards. But just all to say that you can identify power levels even when they're not in the winningest decks, just by kind of taking into account all of the complexity and player agency in games and just pointing to individual games that are decided on the back of an individual card when you account for all the other things that can go better or worse in the draft. And having an isolated bad game is not always indicative of some kind of problem that needs to be addressed. I'm just saying that everybody knows to look at the 3-0 and the 0-3, but the 1-2 and the 2-1 decks, they can offer insights to things regarding the power band of your cubes, they're worth looking at, especially considering that if you just have a physical cube and you're playing maybe once a week with your local group, you'll never have statistically significant data on winning and losing decks anyway. So it's good to know how to look for things that stand out, kind of regardless of record being able to isolate what's happening in games, how players are approaching them, things that might not be fun, and for me, power outliers that decide games, even in bad decks, are something that I am very sensitive to and I pay attention to when it comes to curating my cubes. And then in the course of play, players have agency regarding sideboarding decisions, decisions between games. And this really relates to that aspect of deck building where you make cuts, what are the extra cards in your sideboard, how tight is the list, how many picks can you use speculatively on sideboard cards. And this does really relate to those environments where more of the cards are more playable. When you end up with like 13 cuts in deck construction, I find it's actually kind of harder to sideboard in those environments because you're usually oscillating maybe between archetypes, maybe between an aggressive or a controlling focus, and you're trying to make your deck do a specific thing. And often when you have those 13 sideboard cards, just as much as in deck construction, that can kind of lead to decision paralysis in sideboarding when you're you're maybe looking at, okay, well, I want to destroy this strong artifact and enchantment. The level one is, yeah, I'll bring in my naturalize, but what do you cut? And what are the cascading effects for that? If you have to cut a cheap aggressive creature, it seems like the weakest thing in the matchup, then suddenly do you want to reconfigure your deck by changing 10 cards because you have 10 playable cards in your sideboarding? That's something that can maybe be fun for some players, but it can really slow the games down. And oftentimes, when it comes to a casual game night, if you're not playing for stakes, it's like I really don't want to think about moving around 10 sideboard cards. So I do find that the tighter cubes where you have maybe three or four cuts and one or two very specific cards in your cyborg, where it's like, yeah, I'm gonna main deck this fatal push, and then sometimes I'm gonna board into this naturalize effect, depending on the matchup. That's just way more approachable. I think that those kind of decisions the average player is just more capable of making on the fly without too much stress to it, and it's certainly something that's more comfortable and more fun for me. So when it comes to these sideboarding decisions, it's of course another spot where you can talk to players about what's in their cyborg, kind of look over their deck in their cyborg. If they lose to a specific card and they say that card seems too strong, you can say, alright, well, maybe you have access to this plan, but that's not really the most fun thing necessarily to engage with, and especially if players have so many playables where it becomes really crunchy a sideboard, it's really easy and approachable to make one or two card swaps, especially when they're really loud in how they play in the texture of a matchup. But a lot of players aren't really excited and signing up for the casual game night so that they can make crunchy sideboard decisions. So I find that the more that I find myself having to look at, well, you know, you drafted well and you played well, but you could have sideboarded better, like that can be a fun pursuit. You know, certainly if you're somebody who is interested in playing competitive events and trying to get better and succeed at high levels of competition, yeah, this stuff is all really fun to unpack. But if you're trying to have a couple beers and play a game at a pub, then the crunchy sideboarding stuff is something to pay attention to as something that is not always the most welcome part of every environment. I do enjoy having a couple cuts from my deck, I do enjoy having a couple sideboard options, I don't enjoy cubes. I mean, I was talking about how there's just often not very many enchantments in my cube. I don't like playing against a strong enchantment, where game one, the environment, I am not excited about main decking a very narrow answer to an enchantment, and I am also not excited about playing the sideboard game where my game plan kind of oscillates on whether they draw their powerful enchantment, and if they do, whether I draw my naturalize, where it feels like a mulligan if they don't have their card, or I need to draw on the card if they have it. That stuff all just kind of feels more out of my hands, and it does feel a matter of my agency in the games, so I'm just less interested in that kind of thing in my player environments, and your preferences, your mileage may vary. You know, I'm just saying my preferences as kind of an aspect of these general categories of things to think about. So I'm not trying to tell anybody how to do it, I'm just saying what my experience is, what my preferences are, and why they are this way. And speaking of preferences, probably the most important, the final aspect of player agency relating back to that notion of wanting to keep them coming back. Do players want to play your cube again? That's always the choice, right? It's hard enough to get adults together to get an eight-person draft together, and it's a lot harder if you have presented a cube environment where players don't feel like they want to play it again. And different groups are more amenable to cubes than others. Some groups just would prefer to play other formats, which is totally fine. Some groups are more cube curious, some groups are hardcore into cube, and the more open a group is to playing cube, the more likely they are to want to refine and play the same cube time and again, and some groups also just get nostalgically attached. I know that a number of players that feel displaced from their former favorite format, former legacy players, even former standard players these days, they'll move to cube, and a lot of it is just nostalgically driven. It's even less about the refinement necessarily, it's just kind of playing the games with the people they used to play with in the way, the kind of games that they used to like to play. So playing with a lot of the same cards over time, which is totally cool. Great way to do it. I find for players who more are getting into cube more broadly that like to play a lot of different cubes, an important aspect of trying to keep them coming back, leaving your players wanting more, does relate just to all these conversations. Asking players what they prioritized in the draft, why they did it. Ask them about their deck building process, the decisions they made, why they made them, how they felt about them. Did they enjoy the games? What were the interesting decisions in the games? What were the fun points in the games? What were the not fun points in the games? And just listening to their feedback. I know that for a long time, and even still sometimes it can be difficult to fight the urge to tell them why they're wrong, you know. You you drafted your lands too highly, you played horrible, you know? And like, yeah, everybody makes mistakes, whatever. And sometimes if you want to say you played horrible, there's something that you missed, and your analysis is horrible. It cuts both ways. If you're looking for mistakes, you'll find them. And the discussion about games in cube, fun games and cube curation, this should never be about who's right and who's wrong. They should always be about collaborating, coming together, and finding a pr approach to work together and play joyful games in the future. So when you're having those conversations, approach your players with curiosity, genuine interest, and a desire to work together and to make the cube something that everybody enjoys, is comfortable with, and is excited to play again together. So, to recap, magic is a very complicated game. Cube draft drafting adds layers of complexity. There's a lot of moving parts, your players have agency, your players have different preferences, your players have different skill levels and aptitudes, and magic also checks a lot of different skills. And the important thing about cubing is not to tell anybody what they like is wrong, they need to get better at any of the things involved. It is to meet players where they are at and to cultivate fun play environments, both in terms of how you relate to other human beings, and how you can communicate with the game pieces, and how you can curate something that everybody has a good time playing. Cube is so much more than a list of cards in a spreadsheet. It's so much more than a stack of cards in a box. It is the means by which we choose to spend our time together, and it's really important for Cube to be a collaborative thing, at least on some level. It's important to approach the people you play with with some curiosity and interest in what they like about the game, so you can work together and just kind of play the games that everybody enjoys the most for the collective fun of the group, so that everybody is excited to come back again and play again. Next time that you all are able to get together. So players have a lot of agency when it comes to how they play, but you, as the cube designer, you have the power to allow them to express themselves better or worse, or to make decisions that they are more or less comfortable with based off of their aptitudes and just the complexity of your environment, and any number of things just regarding beating people where they are at. So that's something that I try to be very mindful of. You want to enable players to express their agency in ways that are fun for them. So these are some ruminations, a little bit more on the social aspect of cube, and I hope that I was able to kind of illustrate these with some slightly more concrete examples from cube design and relate this in ways that could be useful to you in curating your cubes in the future. Either way, you know, let me know what you thought of this one, and I appreciate you taking the time to listen for anything else you do to support the podcast, liking, commenting, reviewing, sharing, subscribing, all that jazz. And I will be back next week talking more cube. Later, gamers.