Cube Removal: How Much a Cube Needs, and Which Kinds

Cube removal is the control dial for every other decision in the list. Too little, and the first bomb creature to resolve wins; too much, and creatures become irrelevant and every game turns into a card-advantage grind. The right amount depends on your power level and on how good your creatures are, but there are counts that work for most unpowered cubes, and there is a mix of kinds that matters more than the raw number.

This article gives those counts, breaks removal into five kinds, and explains how to tell which kind your cube is missing.

How much removal should a cube have?

As a house guideline for a 360-card unpowered cube, aim for 55 to 70 cards whose main job is removing or neutralizing a permanent, which is roughly 15 to 20 percent of the cube. That is cards like Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares, Doom Blade, and Counterspell-style answers, not creatures with an enters-the-battlefield ping. The range is a house guideline, not a published standard.

By color, it is uneven on purpose:

Black and red carry removal; green barely does, and that is correct. Green’s answer to a creature is a bigger creature or a trample attack, and loading green with fight spells makes it feel like bad black. The discussion of removal density on Riptide Lab’s cube forum covers how owners arrive at numbers like these for their own lists.

Pauper and peasant cubes want the high end of the range. Commons produce fewer must-answer threats, but they also produce boards that stall, and removal keeps games moving.

What are the five kinds of removal, and why does the mix matter?

A cube with 60 removal spells can still be badly built if they are all the same kind. Each kind answers a different problem.

1. Cheap unconditional removal. One or two mana, kills almost anything: Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Lightning Bolt (conditional by damage but close enough at cheap costs), Fatal Push, Go for the Throat. These are the premium picks and the reason aggro can beat a turn-three bomb. Run six to ten per cube. Too many, and creatures stop being worth casting.

2. Conditional removal. Cheap but limited: Disfigure, Shock, Journey to Nowhere, Mana Leak. These are the bulk of the suite and the most interesting draft picks, because their value depends on the deck. A drafter has to ask whether Shock kills enough of this cube’s creatures. Twenty-five to thirty-five per cube.

3. Sweepers. Wrath of God, Anger of the Gods, Pyroclasm, Toxic Deluge. Sweepers are the check on go-wide strategies and the reason an aggro deck has to decide how much to commit. Four to seven per cube in a 360. More than that and token decks cannot exist; fewer and they run over the table.

4. Edicts and non-targeted answers. Diabolic Edict, Liliana of the Veil’s minus, Chainer’s Edict. These answer hexproof, protection, and the single huge threat. Two to four. They matter more in cubes with big reanimation targets.

5. Flexible answers. Cards that hit noncreature permanents too: Council’s Judgment, Oblivion Ring, Abrade, Assassin’s Trophy, Beast Within. These are what keep planeswalkers, equipment, and enchantments honest. Six to ten, with at least a few in each color that has them.

If your cube is losing to planeswalkers, the fix is more of kind five, not more of kind one. If it is losing to the first bomb creature, it is kind one. If token decks win every week, kind three. Diagnose the kind before you add cards.

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Does counterspell count as removal?

For balance purposes, yes, with a discount. A counter answers anything but only on the stack, and a drafter has to hold mana up. Count blue’s counters at about two-thirds weight when you tally the cube’s removal. Counterspell, Mana Leak, Remand, Memory Lapse, and Force of Will-style free counters each play differently, and a blue section wants a spread, not eight copies of the same effect.

Bounce is removal against tokens and auras and tempo against everything else. Count it at half weight. A blue section with Vapor Snag and Repeal has interaction; it does not have answers.

How does removal interact with your creature quality?

This is the question most owners skip. Removal’s correct count depends on what it is removing.

In a cube where the average creature is a 2/2 for two with upside, cheap conditional removal like Shock and Disfigure does real work, and you need fewer unconditional spells. In a cube full of four-toughness value creatures and five-mana bombs, Shock is dead and you need Doom Blade, Swords, and exile effects. Match the removal to the creatures. A good check is to lay out your cube’s twenty best creatures and ask, for each removal spell, how many of the twenty it kills. Conditional removal that kills fewer than half of them is probably not pulling its weight.

The creature side of this balance has its own piece: creatures vs spells in a cube.

Which removal should a first cube avoid?

• Expensive removal. Four- and five-mana sorcery-speed removal with no upside is filler. Murder at three is the ceiling for a plain destroy effect in most cubes.
• Removal that only hits small creatures in a big-creature cube, or the reverse. See the twenty-creature test above.
• Too many exile-and-gain effects. Swords to Plowshares is one card. Running every white one-mana exile spell makes white removal strictly better than every other color’s.
• Removal with a drawback that punishes the same deck that wants it. Dismember is excellent, but in a cube built for aggro it mostly gets played by the deck trying to stop aggro.
• Mass land destruction. It is removal on a technicality and a social problem in practice. The argument for and against Armageddon belongs to the aggro piece; for a first cube, leave it out.

How do you know your removal count is wrong?

Watch three things across several drafts. If the player who resolves the first four-drop creature wins most games, you are light. If creature decks never win and every deck is a pile of answers plus two finishers, you are heavy. And if drafters take removal at picks one through five and creatures at six and later, your removal is too good relative to your creatures, which is the same as being heavy.

Adjust by five cards at a time, not twenty. A change of five removal spells in a 360 cube is noticeable at the table; twenty swings the format.

FAQ

How much removal should a 360 cube have?

As a house guideline, 55 to 70 cards whose main job is answering a permanent, around 15 to 20 percent of the cube, weighted toward black and red and light in green.

What is the best cheap removal for a cube?

Swords to Plowshares, Lightning Bolt, Fatal Push, and Go for the Throat are the standard premium picks in unpowered cubes. A cube wants a handful of these and many more conditional answers around them.

How many board wipes should a cube have?

Four to seven in a 360-card cube. Enough that go-wide decks must respect them, few enough that go-wide decks can still exist.

Do counterspells count as removal in cube?

For balance math, count them at about two-thirds weight and bounce at about half. They interact, but they do not clear a board the way a destroy effect does.

Answer the right question

Count the kinds before you count the cards. A cube with the right mix at the right density lets every archetype play, and that is what a removal suite is for. The game is the reason. The people are the point.

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