Level Up Your Cube Drafting With Scarcity

“What’s your Pack One, Pick One?” Ah, the Cube drafter’s oldest question, and for a good reason: Cube drafting is really freaking difficult! Retail Limited is hard, too, but at least every set from LEA to MH3 sticks to some basic standards of rarity and pack composition, not to mention the vanilla 20-life rules of Magic. But Cube? Cube can be anything.

In the face of complexity, we Magic players tend to find heuristics, approximations, and rules-of-thumb. ”BREAD”: Bombs, Removal, Evasion, whatchamacallit, and somthinorother. Letter grades on the newer Draft-focused podcasts, or 17 Lands Game-in-Hand Winrate. CubeCobra bot-draft stats like Elo. Incantations of strategy, like “draft the hard way” or “don’t pick any bad cards.”

Unfortunately, when we put any of these heuristics up against the staggering diversity of Cube, they all fall woefully short. There’s a cube where the only creature spell is 100 copies of Ornithopter. A cube whose decks exclusively consist of Time Spiral’s weirdest stepchildren. Cubes where you have to draft your basic lands alongside your spells. Or you play as 40-life Commander pods. Or every spell and ability costs

less. Or every spell can be cast as a Chromatic Sphere and you don’t get to make cuts to your draft pool. What’s your Pack One, Pick One now? Yeah, I don’t know either.

If a single draft heuristic can’t rigidly translate to every cube, then we must instead learn how to adapt our heuristics on-the-fly, recreating them in the context of each individual cube and deck. For me, the idea that unites all other draft heuristics is simple: scarcity.

The Most Irreplaceable Cards

Which of these cards should be our first and second picks? BREAD draft heuristics might suggest Avacyn for her raw output, then Shock as flexible removal. Drafting the Hard Way aficionados might prefer Savannah, to keep our future paths maximally open, followed by the Opt or Shock which will always make maindecks.

But what if this is a graveyard-focused cube, full of high-value Reanimator combos? I’d argue that Cling to Dust ought to be in our top contention, because it puts us into a grave-focused color and interacts with our opponent’s synergies. On the other hand, if this is a Desert cube, Savannah and Terrarium do the most to fix our mana. Faced with a Theros-flavored enchantment cube, Force of Vigor rockets up our standings.

All of this to say that the “correct” Cube Draft pick is always dependent on the needs of our deck and the demands of the format. To cut through this thicket of conditionals, ask: which resource is the scarcest?

Scarcity is how I talk about an effect’s importance for our deck relative to its availability. Irreplaceability, if you will. Let’s see it in action.

Example 1: Two-MV Cube

In a cube where every card costs

or less, it’s hard to know which effects become the highest Draft picks. Should we pick the best removal spell ever printed, a top-ten cantrip, or a middling creature?

The answer might be surprising, but it starts with scarcity. A two-below cube is bursting at the seams with cheap removal and card-draw. Not scarce at all. Meanwhile, humble Stonecoil Serpent might be the top mana sink in the cube, because the cube’s restriction allows so few options! We can pick that irreplaceable effect with our early pick, knowing that even though Swords and Ponder won’t wheel, Journey to Nowhere and Opt probably will. They are replaceable, and Stonecoil Serpent is not.

Example 2: 100 Ornithopters

In 100 Ornithopters, there are no creatures except what’s in the title. How highly should we pick our creatures? Which noncreature effects are the most irreplaceable?¹

Obviously, by the end of the draft we should have some Ornithopters and some ways to convert them into a win condition. Ornithopters might be the most important cards here, but they are also the most replaceable. Win-cons, too. We can kill with everything from Impact Tremors to Tempered Steel — no need to waste an early pick on something we’ll see over and over again.

How about Echoing Decay? It’s clearly extra-powerful in this context,² but we don’t need it to win. If our opponent controls a bunch of 0-power creatures, we can live. We only really need to worry when they control a huge artifact or enchantment to create a real army. For this reason, I’m on Disenchant, then Decay, then Curse, then Ornithopter. Spend the high picks on the important, irreplaceable effects.³

Example 3: Old-Border Cube

You know the drill by now. In a retro-frame cube, Scrubland and Bolt are best-in-class, but they’re eminently replaceable! Old-border burn gives us everything from Shock to Fireball, and one dual land doesn’t make a big difference when your other 19 lands are all basics (only half-joking). What is scarce in 1997-2008 is self-contained card advantage at low mana values. Urza.

In passing, note that it’s not purely a matter of rate. If Urza was already picked here, then I don’t think our next choice necessarily becomes the other 2019 timeshift, because White protection was commonplace in old Magic. Suddenly, that Scrubland or Bolt both start to look pretty good. We can allow color or style preference to break the tie from here.

Example 4: Desert Cube

A Desert Cube forces players to draft all their basic lands alongside their spells. First-time Desert drafters often have no clue how highly to prioritize their lands, but scarcity helps clear things up.

First, the issue of land priorities. Picking 17 lands out of 45 total picks is about one land in every three picks, so if we have zero lands for our first few picks, that’s fine! On the other hand, if we’ve gotten to pick eight with no lands, suddenly that’s our scarcest resource by far. Scarcity changes from pack to pack.

Now, consider the Pack 2 Pick 1 above for a Mardu seat. I could see us picking any of these five depending on our deck’s needs. Let’s say we missed on any good rares in Pack 1, but we did get eight lands: Irencrag Pyromancer packs the most juice. If our manabase skews White but our spells lean Rakdos, then Weathered Wayfarer or a Guildgate helps smooth things out. Drannith Healer and Plains are the weakest picks in a vacuum, but Draft isn’t a vacuum. If our deck desperately needs card-draw triggers or untapped White sources, I would consider spending a high pick on them.

So it goes for all cubes. In a sticker cube, the scarcest effects are the cards that are already stickered the most. In a mono-Red cube, the scarcest effects are the card-draw and universal removal that Red usually relies on other colors for. And in a Magic 2010 cube, of course, the scarcest effects are still Bombs, Removal, Evasion, whatchamacallit, and somethinorother.

Old heuristics weren’t inherently wrong. BREAD, for example, describes the scarcest resources of early 2010s draft formats — in an era of Hill Giants with upside, that was usually game-winning bombs, and the removal spells to defend against opposing bombs. Drafting the Hard Way responded to the same incentives, prioritizing late Commons from the open lane. Nowadays, the strongest commons on 17 Lands are often the cards which best address a format’s scarcest resources.⁴ These are all attempts to allocate our early, high-value picks towards the era’s scarcest resource.

In Cube, I’ve found the most success when I bypass the mnemonic middleman and go straight to the source. Pick the cube’s scarcest cards for your deck’s plan and your preferred playstyle. Thanks for reading.