Cube Pick Orders: Power, Removal, Fixing, and Flexibility

Pick one is rarely the hard pick. The hard picks come around pick six, when you have a direction, the pack holds three good cards, and none of them is clearly best. Lists of the best Cube cards help less than you would hope here, because the right answer depends on your pile.

This lesson gives you a way to break those ties. It assumes you know your colors and speed from Level 1 and how to read the table from the signals lesson.

The four questions

For any close pick, ask:

1. How strong is it? Raw power still matters most. A card that wins games on its own beats a solid card.
2. How many decks can play it? Colorless and single-color cards fit more decks than gold cards. Early in the draft, flexibility has real value.
3. How replaceable is it? If the Cube has 30 cheap red creatures and four red removal spells, the removal is the scarcer card.
4. What does my deck need? Late in the draft, the missing piece beats the twentieth good card.

Early picks lean on questions 1 and 2. Late picks lean on questions 3 and 4.

Removal versus threats

New drafters are told to take removal, and for good reason. But it is not automatic.

• Take removal when it is cheap, flexible, and in your colors, and when your deck has fewer than about four good answers.
• Take the threat when it is much stronger than the removal, when your deck is short on creatures, or when you are aggro and the threat is a cheap attacker you cannot replace.

Our piece on the Cube removal suite shows how many answers most Cubes hold per color. If your Cube is deep in removal, you can wait on it a little. If it is thin, take it early.

Fixing: when a land is a pick

Lands that make two colors, and artifacts that make mana, are called fixing. They are easy to undervalue because they do nothing on their own.

Fixing is worth an early pick when:

• It matches your colors, or a likely pair.
• You are planning a splash for a strong card.
• The Cube has lots of gold cards or three-color decks.

Fixing is a late pick when you are firmly in two colors with a light, single-symbol mana base. A dual land in two colors you will not play is a hate pick at best. The mana lesson puts numbers on how much a land helps.

Gold cards: power with a price

A gold card is often stronger than single-color cards at the same cost, because it asks more of you. Early, that commitment is risky: you are betting on two colors, not one. Later, once you are in those colors, gold cards in your pair are some of the best picks you get, and other drafters are less likely to take them.

A good habit: before pick five, take a gold card only when it is clearly the best card in the pack. After you settle, take gold cards in your pair freely.

Synergy versus raw power

Some Cube decks run on synergy: cards that are average alone and strong together. A card that gives you value when artifacts enter, for example, is a high pick in an artifact deck and a weak one everywhere else.

Two rules of thumb:

• Take synergy cards when the payoff is already in your pile, or when the signals say the archetype is open.
• Do not take three enablers and no payoff. A pile of pieces with nothing that wins is the classic synergy trap.

Our Cube archetypes guide lists which cards each lane needs.

Hate drafting

Taking a card only to keep it from an opponent is called hate drafting. In an eight-player Cube, it is rarely right, because you will play against only two or three of the seven others. Take the card for your deck. The exception is late in a pack, when nothing helps you and a bomb would go to a neighbor in your colors.

Building your own pick order

Some Cube owners publish a rough pick order. Use it to start. Then adjust it as you learn the Cube:

• Note which cards win games when you play them, and which are flashy but slow.
• Note which roles run out early: two-drops, removal, fixing.
• Note which archetypes go late at your table.

After three or four drafts with the same Cube, you will have a pick order that beats any generic list, because it fits this box and this group.