Episode 77 - CubeCon 2026 Recap

So CubeCon is a yearly event held in Madison, Wisconsin.

Um, it is a blast.

If you have never been to CubeCon specifically in Madison or to any of these local cube events that run for either, like, maybe one or two days, they're so much fun.

Um, cube design over the past, like, five years or so has really been popping off.

Like, I, I'll talk about this a little bit at the end of the episode, but I think that people have...

In general, cube designers have gotten a lot stronger across the board, and there's been so many cool innovations over the past five years in the cube design space.

And getting to experience all of those in person, drafting with physical cards with the actual things that people put together, is so much fun.

It really is...

I, I think it's just my favorite Magic event, period.

The actual event of CubeCon is a little bit brutal, to be honest.

Like, it is...

It's so much fun, I will never stop saying that, but it is pretty grueling.

So here's how it works.

There is a tournament structure to this.

There are cuts to top 128 and top, um, 64, and then they do do a top eight draft to, um, determine the winner.

Um, the thing is, a lot of people are there mostly just to cube.

Um, like, y- there-- you'll have a lot of opponents that show up that, you know, if they do well in the event and they make the top 128 cut, they're gonna try and do that.

But a lot of people are there just to experience the cubes.

So I will say that, like, this is not the most difficult tournament to do well at, because people have a lot of...

There's, like, a lot of different Magic players playing, people have a lot of different expectations.

But I do think that this is one of the most challenging tournaments that you can play, both because it spans three full days, um, kind of three and a half, and because it's just, like, the breadth of Magic that you play.

The different types of Magic that you play is so wide that it really challenges you in a variety of different ways in, uh, more specific format tournaments don't.

Um, so the actual tournament structure, to actually get into it, on Thursday of the Con, there is what they call the Prequel Draft.

So this is using the cubes that are in the main event.

Um, this event has fewer match points per win.