Curating a Cube: Draft Data, What to Cut, and a Changelog

A Cube is never finished. The building lesson said so, and our piece on Cube maintenance makes the full case. This lesson turns that idea into a routine: what to watch for, how to decide on changes, and how to share them.

Draft night is data

After each draft, you have eight decks, eight sideboards, and the memory of which games felt good. That is a lot of information. Capture a little of it before it fades.

A short note after each night:

• Which decks went well, and in which colors and lanes.
• Cards that went last or near last in their packs.
• Cards drafted but not played. If a card keeps ending up in sideboards, it may not be good enough, or its deck may not exist.
• Cards that decided games. Some of these are fine. Some may be too strong.
• Complaints and delights. “That card is no fun to play against” is real data.

Our piece on treating the first draft as a test has a full list of what to record.

Online tools help too. CubeCobra lets you run playtest drafts against computer drafters and look at your Cube’s analysis pages. Use them as a second opinion, not the main source: bots do not have fun, and your group does.

Read the signals carefully

One night is noise. Look for patterns across three or more drafts.

• A card that goes late once may have been in a crowded pack. A card that goes late every time is weak, or its role is not clear to drafters.
• A lane nobody drafts might be underpowered, or it might lack signposts. The design lesson covers both.
• A deck that wins every time might be too strong, or might belong to your best drafter. Ask whether it wins in other hands too.

Deciding what to cut

Adding cards is exciting. Cutting is harder, and it matters more. A few useful questions:

• Does it have a job? Every card should fill a role: a cheap threat, an answer, a piece of an archetype.
• Is there a better card for the same job? Compare cards within a role, not across the whole Cube.
• Does anyone miss it? Ask your drafters. If nobody notices a card is gone, it was not doing much.

Our guide to Cube cuts has a full method for trimming a list.

Change a few cards at a time

If you change 40 cards at once, you cannot tell what caused what. Most owners swap a small batch between drafts. That keeps the Cube familiar enough for regulars to build on what they know, and fresh enough to stay interesting.

When new sets come out, resist adding every exciting card. Judge each one by the role it would fill and the card it would replace. Our method for reviewing a new set and our guide to evaluating new cards for Cube walk through it.

Keep a changelog

A changelog is a short record of each change: what came in, what went out, and why. It does three things:

• It helps you. Six months later, you will not remember why you cut a card. The log will.
• It helps your drafters. Regulars like knowing what changed before they draft. It gives them something to talk about.
• It builds trust. A Cube owner who explains changes, and listens to responses, keeps the group invested.

Our piece on the Cube changelog has an entry format, and tools to track Cube changes covers the options for keeping one.

Listening without losing the Cube

Your drafters will have opinions. Some suggestions will be great; others will pull the Cube in five directions at once. The owner still decides. Our guide to owner and community design has a process that takes requests seriously while keeping one clear vision.