A Practice Plan for Cube Drafting: Six Weeks to Sharper Picks

You know how to draft, build, and play. You can read signals, plan mana, and draft aggro or control on purpose. The last step at the drafting end of the ladder is practice that actually makes you better, not just more drafts.

This plan takes about three or four hours a week for six weeks. Scale it up or down, but keep all four parts.

Choose a home Cube

Practice works best on one Cube you know well, ideally the one your group drafts. If you own a Cube, use it. If you draft someone else’s, ask the owner for the list. Most Cubes are on CubeCobra, which also lets you draft them against computer drafters.

Learning one Cube deeply teaches skills that carry everywhere: which roles run out, how lanes behave, how signals work in a list you know. Then try others.

The four parts of every week

1. Volume. Draft often. Options:

• CubeCobra lets you draft any posted Cube against computer drafters and review the result. It is the fastest way to practice, and it is available any hour. Its bots are not people, so treat their picks as rough signals at best.
• Draftmancer, a browser-based multiplayer draft site, runs Cube drafts with friends and bots at a distance. It can load a Cube list from CubeCobra.
• Magic Online runs the Vintage Cube in limited-time leagues, as our MTGO Vintage Cube explainer covers. MTG Arena, Wizards’ digital game, has run Cube events at times. Both are on the publishers’ sites: Magic Online and MTG Arena.

Aim for three to five drafts a week, mixing bots and people.

2. Focus. Each week, choose one skill from the ladder and draft with it in mind. The six weeks below give an order.

3. Review. After every draft, spend ten minutes:

1. Lay out your picks in order, or open the draft log.
2. Find the pick where your deck’s direction was set. Was it the right call?
3. Find one pick you would change, and say why.
4. Count your final deck against the checklists in the deckbuilding and mana lessons.

4. Play. Drafts teach picking. Games teach whether the picks worked. Play your decks, against people when you can, best of three.

The six weeks

Week 1: colors and speed. Name your deck’s speed by the end of pack one every draft, using the three speeds lesson. Check at the end whether the deck matched it.

Week 2: signals. In each draft, write down the color you think is open after pick 9. Compare it with what you ended up in. Use the signals lesson.

Week 3: pick order. Note every pick that felt close, and which of the four questions in the pick order lesson decided it.

Week 4: an unfamiliar lane. Force yourself into a deck you rarely draft. If you always play aggro, draft control, using the control lesson. You learn what your usual lane is worth by being across from it.

Week 5: the games. Focus on play. After every game, name the turn where you spent the wrong resource, as in the playing lesson.

Week 6: put it together. Draft normally, with full reviews, and compare with week one.

What to track

Keep a few numbers from week to week:

• Match record in drafts against people.
• Playables at the end of the draft. Fewer than 23 good cards in your colors means your picks drifted.
• Games lost to mana, too few lands or the wrong colors. If it is high, revisit the mana lesson.
• The pick you would change, in one line. Over six weeks, these lines show your habits.

The people across the table

The point of getting better is not to win every draft. It is to make every draft better, for you and for the people around the table. Strong drafters who explain their picks, share their decks, and welcome newcomers are the reason Cube groups last.