Drafting a Cube With Two to Seven Players: What Changes

Eight drafters is the classic Cube night. Real life sends you five, or three, or one friend and the box. The draft lesson showed the procedures for smaller groups. This lesson is about drafting well in them, because the same habits that win an eight-person pod can mislead you at a smaller table.

The wheel comes sooner

With three packs of 15 per player, each player still makes 45 picks. What changes is how often each pack returns to you. With any number of drafters, a pack you see comes back after one pick per player.

At four drafters, you see your opening pack four times. When it comes back at pick 5, eleven of its 15 cards are still there.

What that means for picks

Plan your wheels. At a small table, you can often predict what will come back. If a pack holds two cards you want and one of them only fits your deck, take the card others might want and expect the narrow one to return.

Signals arrive faster and clearer. With four drafters, only three others touch each pack before you see it again. A color that keeps coming back is almost certainly open.

Colors are less contested. Eight drafters across five colors means most colors have three or more people in them. Four drafters means many colors have one or none. Two-color decks get deeper, and drafting into a color nobody else wants is easier to spot and more rewarding.

More of the Cube stays in the box. Four drafters use 180 cards. From a 360-card Cube, half the cards never appear. You cannot count on any one card being in the draft, so stay flexible a little longer than usual. Our piece on Cube pack size shows the counts for other sizes.

Decks get stronger

At small tables, every deck tends to be better: more good cards per color, more fixing to go around, fewer missing pieces. That changes deckbuilding:

• Cut harder. You will often have more than 23 playables. Keep the best ones on curve, not the most.
• Splashes get easier. With fixing less contested, a three-color deck with real fixing is more realistic. The mana lesson’s odds still apply.
• Expect strong opponents. If your deck feels great, theirs probably does too.

Five to seven: the awkward counts

Five and seven are odd counts, so someone sits out each round. Two practical options:

• Draft as usual and handle the odd player in pairings with a bye or a three-player round robin. The regular night lesson in Level 4 covers pairings.
• Split into two pods if you have enough cards, such as a three-player Grid draft and a two-player Winston draft.

Two and three: different formats

Pick-and-pass does not work well for two players, so other formats take over. Our guides to two-player Cube formats and Grid draft for three or four have the full procedures. The skills they reward:

Winston draft hides most information. Each pass makes a pile bigger and more tempting. Learn to weigh one strong card now against a growing pile your opponent may take. Remember what you passed: if you passed a pile with a strong blue card, your opponent may now have it.

Grid draft hides nothing. Every pick is a full row or column from a three-by-three grid of face-up cards. Strong Grid players look at what their pick leaves behind. Taking a line that also breaks up the line your opponent wants is often worth a slightly weaker pick.

Hate drafting matters more. In an eight-player pod, you meet only some of the other drafters. In a two-player draft, every card you leave goes to the one opponent you will play. Denying them a bomb can be the right pick.