Designing Your Cube: Archetypes, Color Balance, and Signposts

The building lesson got you a first list, probably copied from a proven Cube. This lesson is about making that list yours: understanding why it works, and changing it without breaking it.

The key shift is this. As a drafter, you ask what is good. As a designer, you ask what the draft will feel like for eight people. That is game design, and the tools are simple.

Start from the decks

Before you count cards, decide which decks your Cube supports. Most Cubes are built around the ten two-color pairs, each with a plan: aggro in one, a graveyard theme in another, control in a third. Our guide to Cube archetypes explained lists the common ones.

You do not need all ten to be equally deep. You do need every color to have at least one good home. A color whose two-color decks are all weak becomes the color nobody drafts, and then its cards go unused every night.

Write the plan down. A short line per pair is enough to start, and it grows into a primer later. Our guide on how to write a Cube primer shows the format.

Balance by section

Most owners organize a Cube into sections: one per color, a gold section for multicolor cards, colorless cards, and lands. Balance starts here.

• Equal colors, roughly. Many 360-card Cubes give each color about the same number of cards. A color with ten fewer cards shows up less in packs and gets drafted less.
• Equal roles within each color. The count is not enough. Each color needs its share of cheap creatures, removal, and strong late plays. Our piece on Cube color balance explains why green and white tend to drift weak even with equal counts.
• A gold section sized to your fixing. More gold cards ask for more dual lands. Our guide to the Cube gold section has working sizes.

Our piece on Cube sections and slots shows how to give each card a named job, so a swap replaces a role rather than a random card.

Answers in every color

The most common balance problem is removal. If one color has most of the ways to kill a creature, drafters in other colors cannot handle a big threat, and games feel decided by who opened the bomb.

Check each color for:

• Cheap removal for small creatures.
• At least some answers to big creatures.
• Ways to handle artifacts and enchantments, somewhere in the Cube.

Not every color answers threats the same way, and it should not. But every color should have a way to interact. The Cube removal suite piece gives counts by color.

Signposts: tell drafters what to build

A signpost is a card that announces a deck. When a drafter sees it, they know that the plan exists in this Cube. Gold cards make natural signposts, because they belong to one color pair, but single-color cards can do it too.

Good signposts are clearly for one deck, appear often enough to be seen early, and are worth taking. Our guide to signpost cards works through examples, and its house guideline is three to five gold cards per two-color pair in a 360-card Cube.

The worst signpost is one that lies: it promises a deck the Cube cannot support. If you include a card that rewards sacrificing creatures, make sure the Cube has enough sacrifice outlets and creatures worth sacrificing for a drafter to build the deck.

Count the lanes

A deck needs about 23 playables. In an eight-player draft, each drafter takes 45 picks from 360 cards. If an archetype needs 15 specific cards to work, and the Cube holds 20, one drafter can build it, but two cannot.

So for each lane:

• Count the cards that only that lane wants.
• Count the general cards in its colors that any deck there would play.
• Ask whether one drafter can end up with a full deck in a normal draft.

Lanes that fail this test are the ones drafters abandon halfway.

Power band

Keep cards in a similar range of strength. One card much stronger than everything else decides games when drawn. A section full of weak cards becomes filler. Our guide to Cube power levels explains the bands most owners choose.