Aug 12, 2026 · 52 min · 11 segments
Welcome to the 60th episode of Cuberviews, a podcast where I sit down with friends to explore the world of Magic: The Gathering cube design! Today, I’m happy to be joined by my good friend Sam Cote…
Ian BravermanHost
Yes, that's a great segue because today we are talking about something that I've been thinking about for a while, which is designing cubes to fill gaps in your cube meta or designing cubes for your play group.
There's two things that kind of go through your mind of being the most important, I would say.
One, what is this cube? What am I going to build this cube to do? Like, what is the cube? Do I want to build some crazy idea? I just build like a normal cube.
And then the second thing is, what are players going to want to play? How am I going to get eight players? Am I going to be able to get enough people to cube? Exactly.
When you have an established cube group like ours, we always cube in Connecticut.
We have vintage cubes, popper, peasant, legacy, rules change cubes, different power levels, all different types of cubes.
What kind of cube do you build that will get people interested in doing your cube?
when there's so many different cubes in your play group, how do you build something that will get people to say, oh, yeah, that sounds great.
Let's do that one, especially in our group where we kind of just have like a voting process where people will bring their cubes every week and oh, which cube are we doing today? Let's do like a vote or oh, that one sounds fun.
Like Kyle brought in his latest cube in a, what was it, a Staples bag or something like that?
So is this something that you've experienced, like trying to figure out, okay, what kind of cube do I build that like our playgroup would be interested in or something that maybe is unique that our playgroup doesn't already have? I've definitely had thoughts like that.
Like I said, that was kind of the case of the TLDR cube where I looked at our local...
Meta isn't really the right word because it's cube, but the allotment of cubes that we had available to us, there was this kind of gap where a lot of them were either...
They had weird rules or they had a lot of modern cards or interactions that were maybe a little too complex for people who were new to the game or new to cube to sort of pick up on.
You want them to feel at ease when they're going through a pack or learning what's up.
So I thought maybe I'll just play to that and come up with some rule that makes for a snappy elevator pitch, which in this case was limiting it to exactly five lines of rules text for the environment.
Yes, that's a great segue because today we are talking about something that I've been thinking about for a while, which is designing cubes to fill gaps in your cube meta or designing cubes for your play group.
There's two things that kind of go through your mind of being the most important, I would say.
One, what is this cube? What am I going to build this cube to do? Like, what is the cube? Do I want to build some crazy idea? I just build like a normal cube.
And then the second thing is, what are players going to want to play? How am I going to get eight players? Am I going to be able to get enough people to cube? Exactly.
When you have an established cube group like ours, we always cube in Connecticut.
We have vintage cubes, popper, peasant, legacy, rules change cubes, different power levels, all different types of cubes.
What kind of cube do you build that will get people interested in doing your cube?
when there's so many different cubes in your play group, how do you build something that will get people to say, oh, yeah, that sounds great.
Let's do that one, especially in our group where we kind of just have like a voting process where people will bring their cubes every week and oh, which cube are we doing today? Let's do like a vote or oh, that one sounds fun.
Like Kyle brought in his latest cube in a, what was it, a Staples bag or something like that?
So is this something that you've experienced, like trying to figure out, okay, what kind of cube do I build that like our playgroup would be interested in or something that maybe is unique that our playgroup doesn't already have? I've definitely had thoughts like that.
Like I said, that was kind of the case of the TLDR cube where I looked at our local...
Meta isn't really the right word because it's cube, but the allotment of cubes that we had available to us, there was this kind of gap where a lot of them were either...
They had weird rules or they had a lot of modern cards or interactions that were maybe a little too complex for people who were new to the game or new to cube to sort of pick up on.
You want them to feel at ease when they're going through a pack or learning what's up.
So I thought maybe I'll just play to that and come up with some rule that makes for a snappy elevator pitch, which in this case was limiting it to exactly five lines of rules text for the environment.
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