Cube Creature Count: Getting Creatures vs Spells Right

The cube creature count decides whether your games are played on the board or on the stack. A cube that is 65 percent creatures plays like a retail draft: boards get wide, combat matters, removal is premium. A cube that is 40 percent creatures plays like Legacy: the creatures that exist are threats, and the spells around them do the work. Neither is wrong. What goes wrong is building one by accident.

This article gives the ratio most unpowered cubes settle on, how it should vary by color, and the signs that your own number is off.

What creature ratio do most cubes run?

For a 360-card unpowered cube, a house guideline that works: about 55 percent creatures among the colored cards, which is roughly 27 or 28 creatures in each 50-card color section, with the gold section a little lower and the colorless section split between rocks and artifact creatures. Taken across the whole cube, including lands, creatures land somewhere under half of all cards. These are our numbers, not a published standard; they are where our own list settled after enough drafts.

Here is how that looks per section in a 360:

White and green are the creature colors. Blue is the spell color. Red and black sit in between. If every color runs the same split, white has too few creatures to be aggressive and blue has too few spells to be blue.

Why 55 percent and not 60 or 50?

Because of what a draft deck needs. A typical 40-card cube deck runs 16 or 17 lands and 23 or 24 spells. Most archetypes want 13 to 17 creatures in those slots. Eight drafters times 15 creatures is 120 creatures demanded, from a 360 cube that holds about 165 colored creatures at a 55 percent ratio. That leaves enough slack that the eighth drafter can still find playable bodies, but not so much that creatures wheel in bulk.

Push to 65 percent and the creatures stop mattering individually; drafters can always find another 2/2. Drop to 45 percent and the two aggro decks at the table cannot both fill out a curve, so one of them ends up as a midrange pile. The piece on why aggro dies in most cubes is partly a story about owners drifting below 50 percent without noticing.

How does the ratio change by power level?

Higher power usually means fewer creatures and better ones.

• Pauper cube: 58 to 62 percent creatures. Common spells are weak enough that the game happens on the board, and common creatures are the format’s identity.
• Peasant and budget cubes: 55 to 58 percent. Uncommons add real spells, but creatures still carry most decks.
• Unpowered legacy cubes: 50 to 55 percent. Planeswalkers, card draw, and premium removal take slots from creatures.
• Powered Vintage-style cubes: often under 50 percent. Fast mana, combo pieces, and the best spells in the game crowd the list, and the creatures that remain are mostly either one-drops or game-ending.

Those bands are from lists we follow rather than a standard. If you copy a Vintage-style ratio into a peasant cube, the spells will not be good enough to justify the slots, and games will stall.

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Which noncreature spells deserve the slots?

The noncreature 45 percent divides roughly into removal, card advantage, mana, and everything else. In a 360 cube’s colored sections, a useful breakdown:

1. Removal and interaction: about half of the noncreature slots. The kinds and counts are in how much removal a cube needs.
2. Card advantage and selection: a quarter. Draw spells, cantrips, tutors where your power level allows.
3. Ramp and mana: mostly green and colorless; a tenth of the colored noncreature slots.
4. Build-arounds and payoffs: the rest. Reanimation spells, token makers, enchantments that define an archetype.

Planeswalkers count as noncreature for the ratio but behave like creatures in a game, since they must be attacked. If you run many walkers, you can lower the creature count a little. How many is too many is its own argument.

What goes wrong when the ratio is off?

Too many creatures: removal becomes the premium pick by a wide margin, and drafters who miss it feel helpless. Boards stall at six creatures a side. Games end on an evasive threat or a topdecked sweeper. Combat tricks look good, which is a tell; in a well-built cube, tricks are weak because spells are better.

Too few creatures: drafters fight over the same twenty bodies. Aggro cannot exist. Decks are piles of removal with two finishers, and games are decided by who draws their finisher after both players have traded answers. Equipment has nothing to carry it.

Right ratio, wrong quality: the subtler failure. A cube can be 55 percent creatures where the creatures are vanilla and the spells are premium, and it will play like a spell cube because nobody wants the creatures. The ratio only works if the creatures are worth picking. A 2/2 for two needs a reason: a keyword, an enters effect, a death trigger, or a type that matters.

How do you test your own cube’s ratio?

Three checks after a few drafts.

• Count creatures in the finished decks. Average under 12 across the table means your cube is spell-heavy or your creatures are weak. Average over 17 means spell-light.
• Look at wheels. If creatures are wheeling in bulk at pick 10 and later while spells are gone by pick 6, drafters are telling you the creatures are filler.
• Watch combat. If a typical game has fewer than three meaningful attacks before someone wins, creatures are not where the game lives. Decide whether you want that.

Then adjust by three to five cards per color, swapping like for like in mana value, and draft again. This is the slow, written-down update process that keeps you from overcorrecting.

Does the ratio apply to the gold section?

Loosely. Gold cards are mostly signposts, and signposts can be creatures or spells. A go-wide green-white signpost is probably a creature; a blue-red spells signpost is probably a spell. Let each pair’s archetype decide, and keep the whole gold section somewhere between 45 and 55 percent creatures so the section does not quietly tilt the cube.

FAQ

What percentage of a cube should be creatures?

About 55 percent of the colored cards in a typical unpowered cube, higher for pauper and peasant, lower for powered lists. Within that, white and green run creature-heavy and blue runs spell-heavy.

How many creatures should a cube deck have?

Thirteen to seventeen in a 40-card deck for most archetypes, fewer for control, more for aggro. The cube’s ratio exists to make those decks possible for eight drafters at once.

Do planeswalkers count as creatures in a cube?

For counting the ratio, no. For how games play, they act like threats that must be answered on the board, so a walker-heavy cube can run slightly fewer creatures.

Why do creatures wheel in my cube?

Either you have too many or they are not good enough. Check whether the wheeling creatures have a reason to exist beyond stats; if not, replace them with fewer, better bodies rather than more spells.

Build the board you want

Decide whether your games should be won in combat or on the stack, then count to it. The game is the reason. The people are the point.

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