Dinner Party Cube Design

You might think it was hard enough to curate 30,000+ Magic cards into a cube draft format ­– and Cube is, indeed, a black hole for your boredom and creativity – but that’s nothing in comparison to the messily human enterprise of finding enough friends to play the dang thing together.

Early cube owners used the allure of “all of Magic’s most powerful, iconic cards in one box” to rustle up pods among the washed-out onlookers in PTQ and Grand Prix event halls. As Cube spread through the late aughts, curators used fine-tuned elevator pitches to tempt players away from EDH and Standard tables at the LGS. Then Cube met the World Wide Web, with Cube Tutor and Cube Cobra allowing offline, asynchronous bot-drafts. Suddenly, those two-second summaries gained a new use, as a Tinder-like hook that snagged test-drafts and online follows.

The ancient art of filling seats with butts evolved once again in 2022 with the first CubeCon, an event with dozens of cubes selected by Twitter polls and online clout. Within two years, local cube events sprung up all over the world, and so too did a staggering variety of cubes designed with these convention-going audiences in mind.

Draft designers in search of a pod have more examples than ever of how to tweak our cubes’ contents, rules, overview, and pre-draft spiel to excite people, but remember, the butt-and-seat-meet-cute is an ancient art. Cube design might be part precedent and part science, but organizing a Cube draft is neither. Cube organizing is simply the no-shortcuts art of the dinner party.¹

A Bad Dinner Party

I ring Mark’s bell Thursday at 7:47 PM, hoping that I’m not the first to arrive. I don’t normally accept social events so late on a weekday, especially not out in the ‘burbs, but when I heard Mark was holding a Ren Faire dinner party, I couldn’t help myself.

Before I’d even taken my first bite, things seemed off. The crew Mark had invited included a few competitive eaters, but not the nice Joey Chestnut types – these were the try-hard guys trying to make it on the pro circuit, with smiles like gargoyles (and even then, only if they were laughing at the amateur diners). Was this competitive scene the reason we’d all had to RSVP individually, including a notarized promise that we wouldn’t get grease on Mark’s limited-edition napkins?

The night only got worse from there. Turns out Mark’s idea of Ren Faire involved a whole boar on a spit in his backyard, theming the entire menu around the roast. Sides of pork-n-beans, salad with bacon bits, sausage-flavored novelty soda. Exactly one apple, but it was reserved for the pig’s mouth. Dessert: vanilla ice cream with brown morsels of bacon. Look, I may call myself “vegan except for hot dogs,”² but this was a little much even for me. For that matter, I’d been jonesing for some medieval-style rye and mustard all day, to pair with a bratwurst like I’d had at the real Faire last summer, but bread didn’t fit Mark’s draconian flavor theme. I resigned myself to a pork-n-beans main course, filling my plate half-heartedly.

Mark clinked his glass, signaling a toast. “Thanks for coming. As you all know, we had a last-minute drop, which puts our table at an odd numbers. In order to determine clear winners, we’ll unfortunately need somebody to sit out.” He looked pointedly at his brother Joe, who sighed and dumped his untouched plate in the trash. After this intro, the bulk of Mark’s speech was about our centerpiece, beginning five years ago with a litter of innocent piglets, and ending with a PowerPoint-backed summary of the tastiest body parts of a full-grown boar. To be honest, I tuned out most of it; my stomach was beginning to growl and I was just listening for bon appetit.

Finally, we dug in. I was seated across from one of the aforementioned pro-eating wannabes, and was shocked when he leaned over to steal a forkful of my beans. “Gotta keep up,” he sprayed through bulging cheeks. As if through a slow-motion camera, I saw flecks of aeresolized pork fly towards my plate, my bacon-soda cup, my limited-edition napkin. That was the last straw. Literally – Mark had only provided one per person, and mine was now irrevocably soiled – but also metaphorically.

“Joe, you can take my spot,” I said, standing. “I’m gonna run to the farmer’s market for some mustard and rye.”

A Good Dinner Party

Mostly About the Gathering…

Look, as fun as it is to tell a little porcine fable, the biggest problems with Mark’s cube night have very little to do with the gameplay. Historical Cube designer wisdom has, understandably, focused on the activities that earn social clout and occupy boredom-filled days: draft design and Magic mechanics. I love that Cube provides us designers endless opportunities to fiddle with and look at and learn from Magic cards.

But just like the food isn’t the true reason anyone attends a dinner party, clever game design is only half the battle for filling seats. Good hosting – community building – is far more important, and that begins with two simple rules: everybody drafts, at the same time and place every week.

In my fable, Mark’s most important dinner-party mistakes had nothing to do with a bad menu. It’s much simpler. The event’s time (late on a weeknight) and location (a suburban house) were not accessible to most guests. Mark also sent out personal, private invitations, vetting every guest for trustworthiness without determining whether or not they were polite. (Cube’s history is a disadvantage here, with invite-only drafts optimized for the owners of a car-priced status object, rather than the health of the community.) It’s far easier to build a local Cube community by hosting a public, no-RSVP event at the same spot every week/fortnight/month. Then, no matter how many people show up, from two to 17 or more, everybody drafts.³

As Hall of Famer Patrick Chapin has noted, one of the best ways to attract new drafters to a cube night is to have a fun crew of regulars. Emphasis on fun! An LGS full of laughter and smiles is much more appealing to newcomers than a grim-faced pod of the ultra-serious. “Join me and my two best friends” from a friendly face, somebody you’ve gotten to know at Prerelease or EDH night, is a better sales pitch than “these are the 360 strongest Magic cards ever assembled” from a stranger.

And, to be clear: it’s okay to have a spikey playgroup who’s motivated by playing well and mastering the Magic game engine. I have a playgroup exactly like that, but never to the exclusion of being friendly and playing honorably. If a local scene wants to grow, those have to come first.

Everybody drafts, and the time is consistent and easy to schedule around. Consistency, inclusion, accessibility, fairness, and fun. Everything else is secondary, including the cube’s gameplay.

… Also a Little Magic

You could stop reading here and it’d be a great start to building a local Cube scene. Honestly, you probably should stop reading here, because I’m about to start grinding an axe about Cube design and, as previously noted, design is a drop in the bucket compared to good hosting. Without further ado…

The elevator pitch, a Cube designer’s best friend from the “best 360 cards in Magic” days onwards. From the long-term view of community-building, there’s really no need for the hard-sell tactic – a group of joyful gamers is its own billboard. However, I’ll sometimes ask a curious onlooker, “Are you interested in Cube draft? It’s a custom draft format designed by one of our locals, different every week.” If they’re busy tonight but generally interested, then I just tell them to come by next week, same time same place. The consistency totally relieves any pressure on the interaction.

But in Cube’s early days, elevator pitches were a tactic to fill the ad-hoc drafts of the GP hall. “All the most powerful Commons ever printed” is a hook to convince a Constructed grinder to try Pauper cube. “You’ve got to draft your basics too” sells the Limited junkie on the Desert restriction. And so on. Elevator pitches (and their close cousin, the CubeCobra overview) are also an efficient way to increase one’s status online as a Cube designer: higher follower counts, more test-drafts, and especially, more clout to be featured in local cube tournaments.

The first CubeCon in 2022 offered an odd set of incentives for Cube designers. Most drafters would vote on and rank featured cubes with zero prior experience, quite possibly without ever reading the overview. They might play their top-ranked cubes once, at most, over the course of the weekend, and some unlucky cubes might go entirely undrafted. As a result, a cube name has become a one-to-three-word elevator pitch. Any design restriction that can’t be instantly summarized suffers – after all, nobody’s ever voted for “The ‘Cards I Like From My Childhood’ Cube.” Better to call it The Nostalgia Cube, as if the designer has copyright on an abstract noun. Even better, find a one-word custom rule that really grabs the eye, from Cascade to Turbo to 100 Ornithopters, because if the gameplay sucks, then it doesn’t matter because the drafters will never see that cube again after this weekend.

Now, these particular “clown shoes [affectionate]” cubes are extremely elegant and fun, and small cube tourneys are the perfect place for them. But topping the rankings at a two-day event is a very different goal than building a consistent local community. The vast majority of my Cube gameplay happens in my city, among friends and newcomers who might not even know Magic’s regular rules fully, let alone custom variations therein. Gameplay gimmicks can bring somebody in for their first draft, but what about their second, third, and hopefully fiftieth draft? For such a cube, I instead emphasize accessibility, aesthetics, and variety.

Prioritizing variety makes me especially wary of the monolithic elevator pitches that cube events incentivize. Mark’s all-pork menu may be a striking theme for a dinner, but local cube communities are more like a mixed-company dinner party (another metaphor courtesy of Chapin). Many diners won’t enjoy the same foods, so Mark would be better off with a menu like a breakfast buffet. The genre of food offers more flexibility, so we can choose how we’d like our eggs cooked and our personal favorite pancake toppings.

For example, it doesn’t matter if my local Pauper cube has shocklands and the occasional old-school rare, because I don’t need to be pitched on my friend’s format that I played last month. It doesn’t matter if my friend R. hates the color Black and wants to build The Ink-Treader Cube, I am happiest when drafting Black, and R. wants me to be a satisfied regular, so she softens up on the pitch-perfect theme. Gimmicks are fine for larger events, but for my local scene, I paraphrase the immortal words of Ian Malcolm: “don’t think about whether you could gimmick before you decide if you should gimmick.”

Even then, go easy on the gimmick, just in case somebody disagrees with you. And remember: to fill seats with butts, focus first on good hosting.