A First Look: What is Cube? Featuring Entry Enjoyment

Tuition

Femme_Fatale

11 April 2016

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Welcome all, to my first introductory article to cube, featuring Entry Enjoyment! A couple of links to get you started and we will be right on our way.

• Tappedout: Entry Enjoyment
• CubeTutor: Entry Enjoyment

What is this cube? Quite simple really, it follows closely to its name. This is a cube more focused on the beginner or casual player. It does this by being two things: A cube predominately structured of archetypes that beginner/casual players would build, and one that isn't powered at all. Its price is focused to be around the card count it is, as such it is much cheaper to buy a cube than to play Standard or Modern. Well, not counting the lands, case nor sleeves. Those can at times can add prices that double the cubes price.

But before I get any further, I shall answer in simple matters, what is a Cube?

Cube is basically a method for players to have a permanent drafting environment. Instead of having to pay $15 for a draft night at your local game store (LGS), or buying a whole booster box to draft with your friends, you can save up that money for one 360-720 (numbers can vary also depending on how many players you want your cube to allow, and what kind of cube you want) card Cube, which can last you a lifetime.

Remember the reviews on WotC's product: Duel Decks: Anthologies? Where 4 of the oldest duel deck series were reprinted in that one collection? To put it shortly, buying Duel Decks: Anthologies was like buying a board game. Or should I say, a Munchkin game (so fun, google it). Basically, by buying Duel Decks: Anthologies, you are buying a stand-alone product. You have 8 pre-made decks to choose from that can face each other, and new Duel Decks are always made so those can easily be called the "Munchkin expansions". Sure you could crack some packs and see if new cards can go into the Duel Decks, but you never have to. They are yours to enjoy straight as they come, and can be an excellent method to bring someone into magic.

A Cube, is essentially the same thing, but under a much different angle. Instead of purchasing a product that is sold from WotC (which by the way, is A LOT easier, and A LOT cheaper), you buy, trade, or find stashed in your collection, each individual card that you want for your cube. Being a replica draft environment, you end up with a lot of different cards, and I must say that the shipping costs can certainly rack up. Also hard to keep track of every card.

But now you must be asking, "How do I build a cube?" But what you really must ask yourself ... "What do I want to build?" And the reason for this is simple: Building a cube is a time consuming process that for many players can be mentally and monetarily draining. It is a process that requires dedication to fulfill, like any project. The more interest and motivation you have, the more likely you will strive to get through to building the cube. Regardless of what you want to build be it mono-white cube, all aggro cube, no-blue cube or whatever, it needs to be something that you have interest in and enjoy because there is a lot of time and mental energy needed to be spent simply making sure your cube is good to go before you even buy it, and from there, you need to learn some basics.

There is no straight way to build a cube. Pauper Cube (all commons), Innistrad Cube (cards only from Innistrad block), Khans Cube (cards only from Khans of Tarkir block), Commander Cube (a cube to build a drafted commander deck), Powered Cube (an extremely pricey cube containing the power 9) and so much more. However, there are many common guidelines that players follow. Every cube ...

• is constructed of only 1 of every card.

• increases in 45 card increments (45 cards = 3 packs = 1 player).

• adheres to a 15 card pack size.

• has a minimum of 360 cards.

• assumes you are playing with 8 players minimum.

• that the number of players playing cube is even.

• does not follow any rarity system like you might see in regular packs.

Why? Well, there are reasons.

A regular draft for mosts set consists of 8 players sitting around a table. Each player has 3 packs of cards. Each pack of cards contains 15 cards. For each player, they open a total of 45 cards. There are 8 players, so this means in any average draft, there are 360 cards opened. Once the cards are drafted and everyone has built they're decks, they each face each other in 1v1 matches. Every player that drafts knows this system and follows it. Things that would change this system can throw a player off and result in a draft environment that isn't very focused or well known in how to draft it. Most of the cards we see are drafted in this environment, and are created for this environment, so it is easy it see why they are structured this way. It removes complications that can occur if you don't follow this structure.

Having fewer players, smaller cubes and smaller pack size can definitely all be done together as one. In fact, for many beginner players, I do indeed recommend doing this. A draft for perhaps 6 players instead of 8 can go a long way in making sure you have enough players to draft your cube, a problem that can frequently occur. Going to 4 can make things difficult, as for each 2 players (needs to be even) you take away, the end product of your cube can change drastically. Specifically, knowing what each other player is drafting far too easily. If you wish to change any of the dynamics of regular cube building, I suggest starting first with how many cards does each player open total. From their, you can determine how many packs and how many cards per pack in order to end up with that total. There is no direct evidence in what occurs from changing the basic dynamics of cube, but here are some potential results that I can gather from what experience I have.

• Larger cubes can result in some archetypes never appearing in a draft.

• Smaller cubes means the most powerful cards are more likely to appear every time.

• Fewer players means it is easier to know what each player is drafting.

• Fewer cards per pack means it is harder to know what each player is drafting.

• More packs per player means it costs more to buy your sleeves.

• Not following sets of 45 or even sets of 15 when changing your cube card count means you can have loose cards not in packs.

• It is easier to balance archetypes and colours when in sets of 45.

Of course, none of these apply if you don't do a booster draft cube, which is what this is. Probably should have mentioned that ahead of time. Anyways, there are many, many different ways to play a cube, as a cube is essentially just a collection of numerous cards that can be played as a multiplayer game. Beast cube is where the entire stack of cards is put at the center of the table and everyone draws from that stack. Each player can only play one spell per players turn, but they do so for free. No basic lands are used (I think?), so the cmc of something doesn't matter. Abilities can be done whenever and as many times as one wants, provided they obtained cards that generate the mana for it. A certain WotC employee has a Beast cube that is one of every single card in existence. Every single printing. Probably not language. Imagine playing that thing.

Roto draft is where all the cards are face up and everyone can see everyone's picks. This is very easy to change the number of players and number of cards as packs are no longer an issue. Nor is shuffling. Or sleeving cards in packs. Grid drafting is similar, but for 2-4 people. You lay out 9 cards in a 3x3 grid. Each player picks out 1 row or column of cards that are present until no cards are left. The person who picked second goes first in the next pack. 18 packs recommended. Winston drafting ... I'mma copy that from cube tutor, slightly edited.

"... You start with a stack of approximately 100 cards (50 per player). ... Firstly the top three cards are removed from the stack and placed next to it to create three "piles" of 1 card each. The first player starts the game by looking at the card in Pile 1 and decides whether to Take it or Pass it. If they Take it then it goes to their card pool. If they Pass it, then a new card is added to Pile 1 from the stack and they look at Pile 2. The same process is repeated, and again for Pile 3 if Pile 2 was passed. If the player passes Pile 3 then they take a card from the top of the stack. Whenever a pile is taken the player must replace it with the top card of the stack. As the draft progresses the number of cards in each pile will vary, meaning that the decision to Take or Pass a pack becomes dependent not only on the quality and colour of the cards in the Pile, but also the implied value of the remaining piles. Signalling is also a very important part of Winston Drafting."

That was complicated, but excellent for fewer players. It is meant to be played with 2 players, but can be done with more.

Cubes being primarily made of singletons focuses on the fact that drafts are usually like that. But regular drafts are random, featuring sets with card numbers always being below 360. Smaller sets you are more likely to see the same card, but there is still going to be a high chance of seeing only one of anything in your deck.

However, probably the main reason for being singleton stems from the cube's eternal life span. A cube lasts for as long as you keep it alive, so making sure it is always unique in every play through can be very important. Having multiples of one card can streamline drafts into certain events. Also, players do easily note which archetypes are more consistent because they have cards that are present in more numbers than others.

Oh, and changes to your cube are A LOT easier with singletons. Simply finding multiple variations of a card takes more time when altering your cube, and perhaps the quickest way to alter your cube is right after your draft. Whenever you draft your cube, it is very important to get player feedback on how they felt the cube performed. If they think something should be removed, or added, you can easily get that card out or in when you have 7 other people, who all still have their deck built. If one has the said card that should be removed, you can easily get it out, and if they don't then you know it is in the stash that is drafted. Multiples can make this process take longer.

Finally, a single card's effect on a cube isn't as drastic as many. While this does go in the similar vein of consistency, it's a little bit different. An over-powered card that can warp the entire game (Library of Alexandria) has double the effect on the cube if there are 2 of them. Triple if there are 3, and so on. You see this card warping the game more and more often. In this it also applies into uniqueness of each cube in that if more people keep drafting a card that makes them win, the cube becomes really "draft this card, win". It works the other way around too. Weak cards can bog down a pack or even an entire archetype into unplayability.

So to break it down, Cubes mainly consist of singletons because:

• Most cards in regular large set drafts will only appear as singletons.

• Archetypes are equal in consistency and power level.

• Easier to make changes.

• Drafts are unique more often.

Well, you try organizing 360 cards in your cube into separate common, uncommon, rare and mythic piles and rebuilding your packs off of those piles. It takes A LOT longer to do. Additionally, higher card number cubes and other alterations throws off the normal pack structure in terms of numbers. Finally, it is god damn bloody difficult to adhere to these numbers when you have a cube full of only singletons. None of the cube is centered around Standard or regular deck building like normal packs are, so the reasons for rarity structures are not necessary. That being said, you can do it. And I have done so myself.

I recommend following the very same thing that I have done, that is only the rares and/or mythics get specific numbers for each pack whereas the commons and uncommons don't. You'll find through cube building that your commons and uncommons will be quite difficult to balance in terms of numbers as they will fluctuate wildly. It just becomes a much more difficult task to balance them when the power level between the two rarities isn't that much of a difference. It is much simpler to balance the rares and mythics and let the commons and uncommons be random. It also makes more sense as the power level change of rare and mythic is much higher.

Balancing them in this method is also a very good reason to have your cube card count stick to a solid multiple of your pack size or multiple of number of packs opened per person times the number of cards per pack. Either one works, depending on which one you are focusing on. When determining how many rares/mythics you should be having in your cube, you need to figure out how many packs there are in your cube. You do this by simple math. Cube card count divided by pack size equals your pack total. From there you multiply your pack total with how many rares/mythics you want in your cube, and that becomes your total rare/mythic count. From there, you need to balance that number out between all your archetypes.

The balancing thing is the difficult part, as not all archetypes are going to have their rares/mythics treated equally, or even made in the same numbers. Good control win cons are usually in rares or mythics, and there are a tonne of mill mythics and rares made in numerous sets. Conversely, RDW and Equipment archetypes don't have that many mythics among them that are at a reasonable power level and price for this cube.

For my cube, I chose 450 as my cube card count because that makes the balancing a lot easier. Specifically, I chose 450 because I wanted a lower cube count as it is cheaper and easier to manage, and yet still have one that is higher than 360, a multiple of 45 and 15, and can support 10 solid archetypes. Let's break down the math here. 450/pack size which is 15. This gives me 30. Multiply this by a number that results in a number divisible by the number of archetypes I have. Which is 10. The pack number makes my job a lot easier, as it itself is divisible by 10, so any number I choose will work. In this case, I chose 4, which gives me 120 rares/mythics.

But I didn't just chose 4. Having a solid 10 all around allows me to have 3 rare slots and 1 mythic slot for each pack. Leaving me with 90 rares (9 rares per archetype) and 30 mythics (3 mythics per archetype). Going even further, I have 1/3 of those mythics being planeswalkers (1 planeswalker per archetype). This becomes a lot more difficult when your rare/mythic count is not divisible (resulting in a non-decimal number) by your number of archetypes. There is a solution to that remainder amount, but that will be touched on later.

Entry Enjoyment costs around $490 or so. This number decreases each day as many cards in BFZ block are still dropping, KTK and FRF are rotating out, and different archetypes will come into Standard. Gideon, Ally of Zendikar is a really good example in a card that has been slowly losing its value over time. In 6 months he lost about $23 in value, and will plummet when he rotates out. He is also pretty easily replaceable in that he is just 1 card. Removing him drops down the price of the cube by $19. Same thing will happen with the new SOI Jace, Unraveler of Secrets. And when rotation is a really long ways away, it is fairly good to say that a card is best picked up right after its set is no longer opened for draft. Sure, it is better to wait for rotation, but that can be a long wait sometimes.

For beginner players, they can do something really quite simple for their cube that also allows for the cube to be really balanced: No cards above $X. For me, I really tried to restrict anything that was above $5. Unless I already have it, or is absolutely required. Out of this cube, for anything about $1 or more, I own about $100 of it. Here is a quick price examination of the cube. Tappedout is quite faster at generating prices than cube tutor that's for sure. I've included things like, Chain Lightning, Lotus Cobra, Archive Trap, Awakening Zone and Parallel Lives because I already own the cards. They aren't necessary to the cube and any player can save themselves $50 by not including them.

Sometimes, they are. And that is when things get tricky and annoying. Infect, an archetype I'm going to be talking about a lot in this article, has two cards that if weren't included, the archetype would not work as well as it does now. Phyrexian Crusader and Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon. These two cards are definitely expensive, but are definitely necessary to the infect archetype. Yeah they are powerful, sometimes too much so, but the archetype won't work without me jamming in as much infect cards as I can in a 450 card cube.

But sometimes, the price of a Black Lotus doesn't matter when you only have $100. You can still use it anyways even if you don't have it, through a magical little thing called proxies.

Proxies are a pretty divided topic through the mtg community, but sometimes they are simply justified. A cube is not using its cards for anything but a cube, and nothing about the cube is required for tournament use. It's a casual setting where players are there to have fun. A new player can use proxies in order to use more powerful, more expensive cards that just work with their archetypes without having to shell out the cash. Buying the real cards is still a good idea, but you don't need them to be able to play the cube. You can slowly buy them over time, seeing your cube solidify.

But proxies have another benefit: changes. A proxy allows you to make a change to your cube without having to spend the time buying, trading, waiting for them to ship, or waiting till you have enough cash saved up to make the change. A change, I might add, that without proxying, you cannot know for certain will be worth the time and money you spent on getting that card. Proxies allow for a quick and easy way to test changes in your cube, and can save your wallet in the future.

So lets say you spent $50 on ink and paper for your cube (yeah, that costs money too), now what do you do? Well, you need card backs for those pieces of paper, and sleeves to hold them in place. Like it or not, 360+ basic lands does cost you some money. Stores can sell them for different prices, I think 5 cents is a common price. that's $20+. Now sleeves. I recommend to get KMC's Perfect Fit for your basic sleeves. These fit snugly, take up the least amount of space, allow you to do double sleeve if you so do desire, and put the cards into a makeshift pack. Many players use elastics to structure the packs. KMC's perfect fits are about a set of 10, 100 sleeve packs for $30 on ebay. $120+ there. Don't like those? Well your next two best options are Dragonshields or KMC's Hyper Matte. And that will dig a really big chunk out of your wallet. Oh wait. Guess what, you need around 50 or so of each basic land for deck building your draft decks, and they need to be sleeved too. 250 basics means another $15 total. Then there's the box. Honestly, the best boxes are bought at your local game store. Just ask for a cardboard storage box that can hold a collection of cards, and they'll have some that they use to store their bulk stuff. They generally sell them for a $1 or $2. Aaron Cain however, makes the best custom wooden cube boxes, though they are expensive.

Hehe, shipping. That's right, shipping on everything. This varies. Can I just say like ... $30? Oh, not living in USA? Depending on where you are, everything just went up ranging from 33% to 10%. I'm in Canada, so up it by 25%. Sleeves can set you back from $200-$500, and that will be the bulk of the cube's price. Much of the other stuff is a lot cheaper and easier to get at times, but the sleeves always will set you back.

In short, the price of making your cube functional beyond just being cards will cost anywhere from $300-$1000. The larger the cube, and the fancier you want it, the more expensive maintaining that cube will cost. This is why it is always recommended to start with a smaller cube first, and work your way up from there. A good 405 cards I think is an excellent start, and here's why.

One of the main features of any regular draft is that you cannot be guaranteed to open every single common and uncommon due to this randomness. 360 cards will always show every single card in a draft (unless you draft with fewer people) and can change up how people think about the draft in that they know if they don't see a card, someone else will have it. Having it at 405 means they can't entirely rely on this style of thinking, and that regular draft randomness is present to a certain extent. It is also easier to make archetypes appear more often with smaller cubes than with larger ones, allowing you a wider range of versatility with your cube.

However, you may start to notice that some archetypes just aren't strong enough with a small card size. These are the "general" archetypes. Ones where no synergy and no interaction appear with the cards beyond following one direct goal of either control, tempo, midrange or aggro. This is because these generally require a fair amount of support in the removal/counterspells/early game creatures they want, so unless you are building specifically for them, they are unlikely to appear. However, the reverse is true in large cubes. These are much easier to build in large cubes because they have a much higher card count supporting them even if they aren't specifically structured into the cube. Whereas archetypes that rely on synergy or interaction between cards are less likely to be drafted due to the lower chance of one finding those cards.

Here I have a list of all the types of archetypes and how they stack up in terms of cube size. At the top of the list are the most effective archetypes in terms of large cubes and at the bottom are the most effective archetypes for a small cube. In the middle are ones that work everywhere. I've slotted in "spaces" to help display the locations of each on an effective line graph without having to open up photoshop or paint. Laziness.

= Control

= Midrange

=

= Tempo

=

= Aggro

=

= Modular Mechanics

=

= Synergistic

=

= Non-Linear

= Pants

=

= Linear

=

= Parasitic

= Combo

The general rule of thumb is that the more cards there are to support an archetype, the better that archetype works at higher card counts. Thusly, all the general archetypes that are present at every format are better in larger cube counts, whereas all the archetypes that require specific cards are better at smaller cube counts. However, the general archetypes can work in smaller cubes if you focus on them, but you can sometimes miss out on cool interactions if you do that.

But let's say that there's this one archetype that you REALLY want to play in your cube at 540 cards but there just isn't enough support for it. What is the only thing you can do? Up the card count of those supports. While I know I said that this does degenerate the cube a little, sometimes there's nothing you can do but to up the number of support cards. Infect is probably the best example of this. For my cube, mono-black infect does not really have enough support at 450 cards. Adding additional copies of common/uncommon infect cards, replacing the ones that don't work as well or removing some other cards to balance it out, can definitely bring the archetype up to a more draftable standard. It is important to note that when doing this, you really don't want to up a card count to more than 3, and that the cards shouldn't be anything extraordinary. Remember that you still need to strike a balance between the archetypes, and if a player sees multiples of a certain card, that gives them more belief that that archetype is more consistent and should be drafted the most. The more you can diminish this effect, the better.

This one is probably the hardest to do out of everything, and is the number one reason why I say that users should build and test their cubes extensively online before buying and building them. Entry Enjoyment churned through about 7+ different archetypes and many many revisions. It probably would have cost me an additional $1,000 just to do all these edits if I decided to buy it right away. But the real question is, how does one balance them effectively?

There are two main methods. Number one is through playtesting. And playtesting can be done in two different methods itself if you are using the normal booster draft cube. Through Sealed and Draft. Sealed is probably the best method in terms of testing on your own as it doesn't need another player in order to build a deck. You basically just record what archetype you built for each sealed pool, and then count up all the archetypes. If one archetype appears more than another, then it is time for that archetype to be debuffed.

Draft is a little harder to derive data from. The main reason was stated in a WotC article (which I don't think I could find again) in that draft is a self-balancing format. The stronger one archetype is, the more players want to draft it. The more players who draft that archetype, the fewer cards available for each player to pick. The fewer cards available, the weaker the decks become. In this, the end result of the decks built around an archetype could very well be balanced, but one should look to what is being drafted, instead of which decks won the tournament at the end. If too many players are choosing an archetype in draft, that means that there is either too many cards for that archetype, or too powerful of cards for that archetype. And the reverse is true for archetypes that never get drafted.

In order to balance the archetypes, the first thing you should do is make sure that all the colours are equal. Many cubes these days may have 1 or 2 card differences between colours and sometimes that is okay. Sometimes it isn't. If you are making a lot of edits to your cube as you go along, players won't be able to tell which colours are more powerful than others through sheer colour density, but there is still that difference between each colour. However, some cubes just have inherent colour density variations, just like some draft environments. Innistrad in particular was low on white thanks to its horror theme and the weakness of common white tropes in the story and lore of Innistrad.

Similarly, each archetype itself should have the same number of cards. And even, each archetype should have the same balance of colours for their cards. While each level of balancing becomes more difficult and less necessary, the more you balance, the better the cube can turn out in the end. However, colour and archetype density are really the only two things you can balance without battling drafted decks against each other. It is only one level of balancing and in fact should be the first thing you do. As once you've gotten universal density throughout your cube, balancing power levels becomes simply a matter of removing the more powerful cards with weaker ones and vice versa.

However doing this is difficult without an online source. Without one, you would be forced with doing it on a paper or spreadsheet program on your computer. But since online resources are available, I suggest using both tappedout.net and cubetutor.com because of their different selections in data portrayal. My first suggestion is to build your cube under a regular deck-list for tappedout.net, because at the time of this article, the same data analysis graphs that are present in deck-lists are not present in cube-lists. You'll still need a cube list if you desire to do multiplayer drafts through its draft sim, but for the most part, cubetutors solo draft sim is much better. Tappedout also has a category section, where you can view your cube list in terms of various categories like type, cmc, price and best of all, custom categories made to your choice. This is the primary reason to use tappedout, because you can easily tag your cards into sections and view them. This makes for balancing archetypes soooooo much easier as you readily know what numbers each archetype has. Cubetutor is still necessary, as it is much easier to view things like curve and colour density, as tappedout's colour graph analyzes symbols due to the site's focus on constructed.

If you look at my deck-list for Entry Enjoyment, you'll notice that I have put everything into custom categories. However, it isn't done properly. You see, in order to make all the archetypes fully balanced I need to move some cards into other archetypes. All the removal cards should be in their own archetype. All the discard cards should be in their own archetype. All the cards that can be used for multiple archetypes should be marked as such. However, while there should also be ones for burn spells, counterspells and draw spells, those are part of specific archetypes in my cube and thus won't get their own category. It should be noted that you can put a card into multiple different categories. Oh wait. I didn't tell you how. # of cardsx Card Name (optional Set TLA) #Custom_Category #Custom_Category_Two. It'll look like this: 2x Monastery Mentor (FRF) #Tokens #Tempo

These additional categories are awesome ways to be able to keep track of just what additional items you want in your cube. One of my eternal dilemmas was that I always enjoyed seeing combat tricks in a draft environment, but I hated putting them into my own cube. Having additional categories allows me to more easily balance them into my cube without worrying too much of lowering archetype quality since I'll be lowering each archetype down equally instead of just one archetype of the colours of those combat tricks. It'll still be a pain to have to remove cards from the main archetypes in order to balance them in, but it is always like that.

One of the things I suggest for every cube builder is to put in cards that can be used for multiple archetypes, especially for the weaker cards. This is because those weaker cards would normally be last picked, but can be more desirable across the table if they can appear in multiple archetypes. This leads to less of those final picks that just don't fit your archetype. For example, UW fliers and GW tokens are two archetypes in my cube that frequently compliment each other. Many token producers produce flying spirit tokens. In this, the numbers for each of these archetypes is larger than what the cube list says. However, this does lead to degenerate drafts as currently, UW fliers is arguably one of the strongest archetypes, with BR chroma/devotion close behind. In order to fix this, you need to make sure that you have additional categories of cards that can appear in multiple archetypes.

However, sometimes this doesn't work. The mono-U control archetype is probably the best example. While yes, UB mill definitely would love them some control cards, it doesn't make sense to put any of the control cards into the mill/control category. Even further, archetypes that you don't intend to exist can exist. UR counterburn is one that sort of surprised me in a "duh" sort of way. I didn't intend for it, but with the amount of RDW and Control support, there's no reason for it to not be drafted.

Let's get back to the rarity issue. Those extra custom categories of removal, mana vixing, discard etc, can be used for those extra remainder rares that can't be balanced effectively throughout your main archetypes. One just has to be careful about how important those other categories are, as the more rares you put in the more powerful they become, but the less likely players are going to get them in draft.

But another thing to note is that the more parasitic an archetype is, the fewer rares or mythics there are going to be for that archetype. Infect is again, a prime example. If you look at my infect archetype you'll notice that most of its rares are actually filled up with removal spells. Because of this, the infect archetype has a significantly lower number of cards than each other archetype. If you are to utilize the rarity aspect of your cube, you must be certain that each archetype has the amount of cards to support such rarities, otherwise you'll be forced to put in multiples of certain cards, and that can frequently reduce the entertainment players have drafting your cube. In this, it is important to always diversify your categories in order to get the best data in terms of balancing the numbers. You can even have a separate category to be #Awesome_Shizzles because everyone has those really awesome cards they want in. Murder Investigation is frequently one of mine.

One thing you might notice is that Equipments has a higher count than all the other categories in Entry Enjoyment. This is because of the nature of "pants" archetypes. A "pants" or "voltron" archetype is one that requires two sets of cards to work. Blink, Heroic, Aura, Equipments, Prowess, 8-Rack and many others are all "pants" style archetypes. Pants archetypes require more cards than most other archetypes due requiring two sets of cards. The first set are your enablers. Things like hexproof creatures or ETB creatures. The next set are your support cards, which turn on your enablers. These are more ubiquitous and can be picked by other players, thus they need to be in a higher amount in your cube than your enablers unless they aren't heavily picked by other players. It all depends on what archetype you chose. Equipments wouldn't need as much of a difference between the two sets, whereas blink, heroic and 8-rack do due to their needing multiple supports to proc one or two enablers.

A lot of pants archetypes are also non-linear, which supports the difference between the two sets of cards. Non-linear mechanics are ones where you only want a few of those mechanics in your deck, the complete opposite of linear. Heroic and blink are excellent examples as you need to target your support cards on your heroic/etb creatures to generate a one spell, one turn value. Multiple heroic or etb creatures are not effective to your game-plan as you can't split your spells up unless they specifically state that they can. Like the Heaven's Gate's cycle. Such interesting cards for a heroic deck.

There are many aspects of Cube building that most online articles don't touch on that would be really useful to many players. While I certainly only detailed the building aspects, there are many other aspects of creating and maintaining a cube that I can touch on in the future. I mainly focused on the many things that I think a beginner cube builder should know, as they were all the things that I really wish I could have accessed during my beginning days. If there are any other aspects of cube building that you would like me to cover, do let me know in the comments below.

I hope this article was of use to you, and do be on the look out for for more articles from me in the future!