As Steps and Phases End (part 1)
Foreword
This will be the first of what I hope to be many articles detailing my "beginnings" with TL:R and (mostly) Cube, and will have a lot of my own personal thoughts, impressions, ideas, spin, and, unavoidably, biases. I want to share these thoughts and feelings with you because not only will that help clarify and solidify my own opinions and direction but also hopefully ignite your own spark; a fun and relatable reminder that "bad" art is still art, and the expression and pursuit often matter more than the displayed skill or quality of the result.
I thank you for joining me on this journey, and while you are free and encouraged to depart when it suits you I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts and ramblings as much as I enjoy writing and having them. By relating these stories and lessons and experiences, it is my wish that they are not lost "As Steps and Phases End." As always, let's all have fun and play together!
The Beginning (Phase)
While the technical beginning of this story is debatable (causality is complex and multifaceted, and what are Judges if not pedantic?), I would think the most satisfying event was when I met Sarah (@chiyasi). Due to unrelated issues, I can't don't recall a lot of what happened around this "beginning", though this was around the time I started earning my moniker of "Judge Dad." I met Sarah in person at Eternal Weekend that year, and our conversations piqued my interest in TL:R. From there, my next serious step was taking on a re-write of the rules and policy of the time.
All of that is to say: my first real introduction to the Tiny Committee was slapping what were essentially a pared-down CR and TR and saying "hey, so I know you didn't ask, but here." I am aware of the surface and implied problems with this behavior, and am and have put in a lot of work in therapy (if you aren't going, 10/10 would recommend). Instead of chasing me off with stakes and garlic, my formalized documents were accepted, and my work and involvement with the format began in earnest.
Passing Priorities
Around the this time was when I really started to get into Cube. I had a near-fully "proxied" powered Vintage cube, but mainly because I enjoyed the then-seasonal MtGO (Magic Online) Vintage cube and wanted to play that more. I didn't know how expansive the possibilities of a cube were, or how popular the idea was. Then I found out about CubeCon. Talk about a mind-blower. I started working on a "Tiny Cube" to take with me to the Con.
Sheesh was that first iteration...just....terrible. It was largely based on the premise of TL:R, adhering to the Banned List and format restrictions and all that. At this point it had yet to occur to me to design it as a commander cube; as in, one of the core structures of the format, having a commander, color identity, etc. Plus, this initial iteration was full of mostly value engines, so games had a tendency to get grindy. That was the first remotely clear goal I'd had. Sure, I'd always had the nebulous concept of "powerful cards, powerful cube", but that doesn't provide much (or any, really) direction. Now I had one.
Grindy games mean slow games, which in a format where power outliers are very much outliers, and that meant I had a few "knobs" I could turn: I could "dial down", or cut back on various forms of removal (discard, literal removal, permission); I could "dial up", or increase the support for, more aggressive strategies (cheap creatures with evasion, "combat tricks", attack and damage triggers); and/or make better use of smaller resources (mainly life total as a resource). At this point in time, my understanding of cube was fairly limited, so this iteration was 540 cards (same as the MtGO cube).
Day 2 of CubeCon my eyes were opened: I got to see so many unique takes on not only traditional cube, but also the game itself. Many cubes had a gimmick, a few had strong foci as the appeal, while a handful bucked convention and altered various rules or aspects of gameplay. The "100 Ornithopters", "Mono-Red", and "Circle of Life" cubes nicely highlight these approaches to cube, respectively. 100 Ornithopters asks the somewhat whimsical question "how do you win with only Ornithopters?" Mono-Red explores the surprising depth and complexity of Red as a color. The Circle of Life staples emerge to every creature, fundamentally altering card evaluation and twisting mana cost as a balancing mechanism. The hamsters in my brain slammed a Nos and started running.
Now the passion for cube had fully set in. I was in talks with the organizers of Commander Sealed to run commander cube side events for the namesake event the following year (and bear in mind I hadn't finalized the theoretical list for this cube yet). I also abandoned my plans for Tiny Cube. Not because I was abandoning the cube; there had been a [TL](https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/tinyleaders) cube at CubeCon, and reading the overview had me realizing that I had completely forgotten about commanders while also contemplating how I wanted to tackle the additional questions that having commanders would raise; figuring out how to "make it work" for Tiny would provide great insight for a full commander cube.
Trials of Knowledge and Zeal
Over the next several months, if I wanted to make my Tiny Cube an actual TL:R cube and bring my Commander-In-A-Box to fruition, there were several important and difficult questions to answer: First and foremost, how do I address color identity? Second, with the answer to the first in mind, how do I get the right commanders in player's hands? Next, a continuing corollary to the first two, how do I address fixing (and by extension both accessibility and to a lesser extent speed)? Further, how many players should the cube support (I've come to use the MtGO size of 540 cards, or 1.5 pods, as a "measuring stick")? All this comes before I've thought about what goes in the first slot of the list. The challenge was (and sometimes still is) stressful and is often exciting.
Most important question to answer was that of color identity. The cube I saw kinda-sorta did away with that. It was an appealing option. The other problems would be made easier or even obsolete via this method. After sitting with it for a few days, I decided that's not where I want to take my cubes at present. I tell myself (and you, friend), "at present" quite deliberately. We can (and should) change our minds with new information. That's what being informed is all about. But I digress, and still have a problem to solve. So the only remaining option was to work with color identity. If I wasn't willing to directly expand access to colors, is there a way to do so indirectly? To make things harder for myself, I also wanted the solution to be fairly simple, both to implement and explain; after all, if players don't understand what I'm asking of them, how can I reasonably expect them to have fun?
The solution I arrived at seemed to answer the first two questions somewhat neatly: my "expanded partner rule." The first iteration of this rule was unintentionally clunky, and after some workshopping with locals ended up on the version currently in use: "a player can have two commanders if each is less than two colors." This rule is intended to fairly easily allow players access to 3+ colors, though has come at the expense of some underestimated and unforeseen baggage. The primary issue is that players are often incentivized to either play 4 colors or 2, and while the offerings to put in the 'zone are ostensibly varied, the strategic and synergistic depth isn't where I'd like it to be. The second chief concern is how quickly and easily some cards get broken in half; Lurrus is the poster child for this concept, as having Lurrus at the helm of a 4-color deck is often so value-driven that competitors are hard-pressed to keep up.
Getting commanders into players' hands took some thinking. Up to this point I had only ever experienced randomized draft environments, so my first draft with a rotating "bonus sheet" got the hamsters in my brain all worked up. I could have a "bonus sheet" of only commanders, and dedicate a slot in each pack to this bonus sheet! This concept has, at its core, been key to the planning and execution of my commander-style cubes and I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future; it's such a simple concept, but affords so much freedom and control it's nearly perfect! With this sheet, I can fine-tune the archetypes, colors, and even specific legends I want to guide players to utilize; the number of cards on the sheet dictates probability of appearance, and the variety of options allows a high degree of control over so many other areas (for example, the most recent update adjusted the sheet to 32 cards of only 3+ colors and they are only in the first two packs).
Fixing is largely a non-question for me: I like being able to cast my spells and I assume that most players do, too. To this end, I generally provide ample means of fixing in my cubes. Another consideration I ask when contemplating fixing is "how costly should colors be?" Playing multiple colors always has an opportunity cost, the degree of that cost is the question. Mostly, the cost of "speed" and "consistency". The initial slew of fixing lands did include the "tri-cycle" lands (IKO triomes and SNC HQs) and the common typed land cycles from KDH and DMU, combined with incentives to play them in the form of the "check lands" (such as Glacial Fortress) and, of course, the fetch lands. ABU duals and shock lands were excluded, with the idea that slow but consistent mana would allow for multicolor decks while still leaving room for two- or even mono-color decks. With the apparently innately grindy nature of this cube, I have since re-evaluated and have made (and will likely continue to make) adjustments to the mana base. Finally, to help reduce the impact that not drafting lands would have, each player would start with a Command Tower and Arcane Signet in their pool.
The "final" (lol) question was how many to support. Since TL:R is a 1v1 format, and I want this cube to be draftable with friends and at events, it needs to support at least 8 people. I also like the idea of information gaps, speculation, "living the dream", and variety of play. To be more specific: information gaps are the gaps between [what a player knows] and [knows they know], and [what they know they don't know] and [don't know they don't know], ie knowing what's in their pool and the cards they've seen vs what each other player has and what hasn't been opened; speculation is drafting around specific cards or strategies with imperfect information, fewer exclusions means less speculation; "living the dream" refers to putting together unlikely setups to do exceptional things, the more exclusions and pieces to create a more powerful effect equates to a more desirable achievement; and "variety of play" refers to the ability to recreate a given play experience, less abstractly the ability to assemble the same or similar cards/effects. Using my "measuring stick" of 1.5 pods, the math works out to (at present): each player gets 4 packs with 11 random and 1 "bonus sheet" (commander) cards , so (4x11)x12=528, and since each player should get 2 commanders in a draft, that's 32 commanders. Since I wanted to have only 3+ color commanders available, and to that to an even distribution across colors, it had to be a multiple of 10, and so 30; the extra 2 are for 5-color legends for that "live the dream" factor.
Living Lore
To me, one of the simultaneously most enjoyable and stressful aspects of cube isn't the gameplay: it's the curation. While gameplay is an important part, to be sure, it's only one piece of the puzzle. Every cube asks the same and different questions in the same and different ways, but they all start with the hardest: "what are you trying to do?" Sometimes the answer changes as I work on a cube, and sometimes I forget and have to re-learn or figure it out anew. And sometimes that answer just does not work and I have to start over. I want to use my own cubes to exemplify and illustrate my meaning:
Pauper Power aims to demonstrate the most powerful pauper play (with a little "creative freedom" relating to the format ban list). Pauper as a format can be surprisingly fun, deep, and powerful. It's easy to forget that rarity does not always equate to power, and some of the most powerful and iconic cards in the game are (or were) commons. Counterspell, Llanowar Elves, Lightning Bolt, and Fireblast are among Paupers more famous inclusions, though certainly not the only powerful members.
Museum of Modern tries to evoke nostalgia, memories and feelings of days gone and offer a look at what Magic used to be. So many cards that used to drive top-tier decks are now barely playable, if at all. In my lifetime, I watched Jund Midrange go from Tier 0 to mid to tier 1 to unplayable; the final nail being the printing of an innocuous uncommon named Fatal Push. I'd be surprised to meet a player younger than me who knew, let alone understood, the menaces that used to be Birthing Pod and Siege Rhino. Call me old-fashioned, I miss the days pre-FIRE.
Opposite Day asks players to set aside their expectations and heuristics for traditional Magic and change one small but fundamental aspect: the built-in "losecons". How does creature evaluation change when power is a liability rather than an asset? How does one incentivize players to draft and play creatures in such an environment? Are there things that instantly break/get broken by these changes? These were all questions I had to have solid answers for before I could ask them of players.
Iterating on Expression
For me, the number one question I like to keep in mind is "what does this feedback mean?" I try to listen to as much discourse surrounding cube as I can, mine in particular; seeing how others are tackling similar challenges, what new and interesting methods and alterations are introduced, and what is said about cards and strategies. Not everything is implemented or indeed even useful for me; knowing the standard format metagame isn't information I can make use of, but seeing why a certain card is good/bad can be quite helpful.
Most of my changes, both to lists and structures, come from iteration. Each draft and game I look for the things that go well and the things that don't, and either can be desirable or undesirable. If players are consistently drafting certain archetypes, how "desirable" that is depends on how intended it is. My Back to Basics cube has 5 distinct archetypes with minor overlap, with clear signposts as to which archetype a card is intended for.
Structural changes are made to achieve more specific goals. My commander cubes draft 4 packs of 12 rather than 3x15 both to slightly bump the number of cards drafted and to increase the number of higher-priority picks (ie more "pick 1's"). Many desert cubes have additional packs dedicated solely to drafting lands. Increasing number of packs increases card quality, while increasing number of cards per pack increases card quantity. Depending on use-case, it's also possible to pre-determine packs, with some combination of pre-set contents (either by category and/or specificity) and/or order (such as with block drafts). Using both gets you "duplicate sealed", where each player opens the same cards in the same order (identical packs), which sounds rather interesting.
As a child, it was impressed on me that learning and growing are inextricably linked. Closing yourself off from new ways of thinking stagnates the mind, and eventually the soul. By practicing accepting constructive feedback, and learning how to productively give that feedback ourselves, improvement becomes almost inevitable. By iterating on my designs, and applying constructive feedback, I hope to improve the experience for the next time. It doesn't have to be perfect, and I doubt it ever will be. I just want it to be fun.
I Would Like to Demonstrate a Loop
All of this has been challenging, frustrating, fun, and fulfilling. I have spent months working on each of my cubes, and would not call any of them "finished." Even after each iteration of play my cubes undergo some change, be it to the list or the structure. And that's how I want it to be, because for me it's as much about the process as it is the result.
That isn't to say no cube is ever finished, or even that none of mine will be finished. I have several that are "nonrotating", in that I don't plan to update them with new releases with any sort of regularity. Museum of Modern will only ever see changes if the list itself needs an adjustment, and even then the selection is limited (pre-FIRE modern is limited to 8ED-M20, I also exclude WAR). The rapid pace of releases and the increasing number of UB properties I'm not enthused about further diminishes my desire to constantly keep up. I have to prioritize my time and energy, and it doesn't make sense to expend it on something that doesn't bring me joy. Which also means I can focus on the things that do, ie the cubes and sets that I do care about.
Humans are creatures of habit, and it's easy to get into habits that end up draining us of joy and enthusiasm. Where possible, is it not better to break these cycles and try to add more brightness to our lives? That's why I play Magic, it's why I'm a Judge, and it's why I engage with the community the ways that I do; I've always been told "be the change you want to see in the world." Well, I want to see a world where people are better to each other, where we can "all have fun and play together." So I stand for human rights, I believe everyone deserves a living wage, and I'm going to draft cube any chance I get.
Love yourself, love each other, and let's all have fun and play together! -Gray | Judge Dad