Every Cube Night has 12 Losers

I recently had to read Preacher for the first time, across the battlefield in The Oldest School. I look at my hand and see Erhnam Djinn, who I was planning on ramping out a turn early. Now, though, Ernham would have a forced conversion, and I have no blockers or removal to survive that betrayal. I pass the turn with an empty board, hoping to draw one of my three outs.

Land, go. Land, go. Land, go. I hit six mana and try a Goblin Marshal, since my life total is too low to keep passing. Opponent prosletyzes the Marshal, declines to pay Echo, keeps attacking.

I go on to lose that game — obviously — and the match. At least I wasn’t alone in defeat. In a Swiss pod of eight players, there will be four losing players per round, times three rounds, for a total of 12 match losses every time our cubes hit the table.¹

Let that sink in. Seven-eighths of the table will feel the sting of defeat at least once, and half will lose more than they win. It’s a wonder anyone ever comes back to their second Cube night!²

Because losing happens so often in Cube, easing the pain of losing is a hugely efficient use of cube design energy. Winning is always fun — the real challenge of Cube design is to make losing fun, too.

In Cube, every player gets to feel like a winner during the collective show-off that is the draft. When we draft creative, clever, self-expressive decks, it’s not just to win, it’s also to get personal satisfaction and social affirmation. That’s a huge psychological reward that isn’t tied to game outcomes! Feelgoods are not zero-sum, and Draft is the proof.

Magic is already built from the ground up around fun Drafts. As a Cube designer, our job is mostly to restrain ourselves from meddling with an already-great formula.

For instance, a vibe check: you know your local Mono-Green Gal or Rakdos Dude or Tempo Theydy who always drafts a twist on the same deck? Everyone I know has a favorite deck or two, myself included — I love

So I remind myself: let players draft outside the lines. Even though my cube may be built to maximize novelty, I try to allow drafters the freedom to disagree with my definition of fun. If players feel like they can’t draft “their kind of deck”, losses will tend to feel personal, but if the variety is their own idea, then the novelty will be more exciting. Creature-focused decks also help here — though creature combat may seem “boring” to a seasoned Cube designer, the familiar gameplans will help more reluctant drafters build a deck that makes them excited for the matches.

This goes doubly for cubes with strong mechanical gimmicks, restrictions, or themes, because it’s so easy for a drafter to feel lost or hemmed in. When I built a cube biased towards one color, I was tempted to cut my least favorite color (

That’s not to say you can’t bribe players to try something different, though! Just prioritize carrots over sticks: aspirational cards that read cleanly, are obviously powerful, and/or require deckbuilding investments. Use small pockets of synergy to make drafters feel like they’re discovering a secret gameplan.

Drafting is really fun. It absolves a lot of sins in Magic’s gameplay. Let Draft fulfill that role by allowing your drafters to play their way.

Speaking of those gameplay sins… Magic has a lot of cards whose primary function seems to be the same as Dune’s Gom Jabbar Pain Box: to test how much suffering the victim can endure. Kill your lands. Nice creatures, but I’ll mill you instead. Spin Top. Discard your lands. Spin Top. Put your bomb back on your deck to draw it again next turn, once it’s too late. Spin Top.

“Cube owners have a self-destructive love of unfun cards;” old news, I know. I have some inklings why: 1) we’re all sick in the head, 2) we compulsively test-draft our cubes until we’re desensitized to pain, and 3) we inherited the design preferences of the 90s-era tournament grinders who popularized Cube. And many of us, myself included, fell in love with Cube partly due to those rough edges! Are we just unrepentant sadists posing as game designers?

The answer depends on our restraint. When we indulge our most painful cards, I’m reminded of Onslaught’s infamous Craghorn/Commando Dilemma. In a single draft set, those lunatics printed a pair of Red commons with near-identical unmorph costs, but polar opposite incentives for blocking. Welcome to Blowout City, USA. Contrast to the restraint shown for Khans of Tarkir’s Morph creatures, where no creature that unmorphed for less than

In other words, it’s fine to play painful cards if the rules of engagement are clear, and/or if emergent counterplay exists.

To evaluate potential Pain Box cards, assume that half your drafters won’t know to pick it, will always step on the rake, and won’t ever concede early. If that prospect makes you wince, then you’ve found a Pain Box.

A possible next step is to expose Pain Boxes to counterplay. Some counterplay is just a matter of tactics: if you lose to it in the first game, can you sequence differently or reallocate resources in the second game? If you lost to Mana Tithe, you can keep an extra mana up if your opponent has an untapped Plains. But sideboard answers will also work… if the answers themselves are simple and inherently appealing. Players must want to draft the answer before they’ve experienced what it’s answering.³

If counterplay fixes don’t feel right, try (re)setting expectations. Tell your players by the cube name or overview what the core experience will be: is it one of thematically-appropriate mana screw, brutally fast combos, control mirrors, or old-school shenanigans? Then, if that’s still not enough to chew on, head Magic designer Mark Rosewater recently offered a whole podcast on “Making Losing Fun”, and I recommend it in its entirety.

Fun losses are those that preserve hope. Allow players to chalk their mistakes up to bad luck. Allow them to believe a comeback is possible. Don’t test their pain thresholds.

Magic is a complex game. For example, games might revolve around an uneven understanding of Magic’s rules arcana, and there are fewer losses that feel worse in a casual Cube environment. On the other hand, a gracious opponent can turn a loss into an uplifting opportunity for human connection. I’ve written about “dueling honorably” elsewhere, but your social clout as Cube designer gives you the chance to set positive social norms.

We’re not just designing a cool Magic format; we’re building communities of players. When expectations are clear, both socially and within the texture of the game, it keeps us coming back — even if we lose!