Design
The Best 0-3 0-6 Draft of my Life
Let me set the stage for you: January 3 at the legendary West Philly LGS, Redcap’s Corner, just before the Vertex Philadelphia cube tournament. Eighty Magic players greet a life-size Chewbacca statue as they trek upstairs to a cathedral-like room overlooking trolley rails and salty sidewalks. The first groggy-eyed aspirants to arrive soak in the numinous energy, as if they were sitting down in meditative pews rather than at foldable, red-spandex-covered tables.
Besides organizer Greg and judge Bones, a lone Redcap’s employee dashes between check-in tables and tournament software and a million other tasks, orchestrating this pre-tournament chaos pro bono. See, Redcap’s Corner is officially under new ownership, closed to the public. The Vertex Philly cube tournament shouldn’t be happening today. But instead, eighty gamers fill this liminal space like church-mice making their home in a basilica’s walls, an elegy for a game store.
It is a space between past and future, possibility and reality, victory and defeat. The portent of the hour whizzes over my head unnoticed, because at this moment I am busy volunteering as gofer for the lone Redcap’s employee, my friend Anna Scheirer. Unbeknownst to me, I am on the cusp of losing six straight games of Magic in Annie’s very own cube.
It’s funny. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have changed a thing.
The Space Between
I love desert cubes, formats where players are forced to draft some or all of their basic lands. At Vertex, therefore, my preferred cube was a local Desert cube that I’d only drafted once before: Anna Scheirer’s (@annie.online) The Space Between.
My prior experience of this cube was quite simply the worst paper deck I’ve ever drafted. I knew it was going to be a bruiser as soon as I opened the very first bewildering pack:
See, my typical cube draft strategy is ”be ruthless about rate, ignoring the Cube owner’s purported archetypes,” and though I’m not the most skillful Philly mage, it’s enough to make an 0-3 unusual for me. And yet, I have managed that exact record twice in The Space Between, largely because this cube has made my usual strategy impossible. There are no “strong rates.” Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the closest thing to a “strong rate” is basic Plains.
Annie focuses The Space Between on the total oddballs from Magic’s middle history, sets like Coldsnap, Champions of Kamigawa, and Future Sight. Drawbacks abound. Once-a-year rules interactions fizz in every pack like welding arcs (powerful; can maim a careless onlooker). From these starting points, the deckbuilding paths are long overgrown and bramble-choked, inducing a dream-like trance of unfamiliarity. Even the straightforward cards invite self-doubt: am I missing something? Really, what aren’t I missing? Will my brain explode before I can find a draft lane and a working strategy?
My brain did, in fact, explode during my first draft. I gravely misappraised the availability of mana-fixing, and got so lost in my Reality Acid sauce that the deck had no real way of closing out games, crutching on a Cloudpost and Plains as effectively colorless lands. Annie and I agreed that this deck was simply not capable of winning a game of Magic. And yet, regardless of the end result, The Space Between’s eerie feeling of broken-compassed possibility hooked me.
I spoke to Annie about this afterwards. Why desert? Why such stinkers? The answer is rooted in their early days of encountering Magic, long before any systematic rules knowledge or competitive skill:
I played anime-rules Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid, fascinated by the hazy, techno-occult qualities of cards like Witch of the Black Forest, Jam Breeding Machine, and Relinquished. Before being shooed away, I also watched my older brother Will and his friend Patrick play an even more strange and mysterious game: Magic. When they grew tired of them, my brother gave me their decks — Guildpact’s Gruul Wilding and Fifth Dawn’s Sunburst — and I was immediately gripped by their text and images. There must have been other cards from boosters floating around because I also encountered cards like Oyobi, Storm Herd, and Castigate at this time. When I was that age I didn’t understand that some cards are designed to be draft chaff. If a card had a powerful aura, of course it was powerful!
Annie’s card choices transported me to that same lost sense of wonder. I built such a bad deck because, for the span of one draft, I was discovering Magic again for the first time.
As for the extremely harsh Desert restriction, this is also a way of recapturing the scarcity of just-started-learning Magic, according to Annie:
I literally didn’t have enough of each Basic as I fell in love with the game. I think many people in their kitchen-table development stage didn’t have enough lands to build good decks, and their manabases were apt to be atrocious… I will forever die on the hill that Magic’s mana system is great and never needed to be fixed. The amount of texture and character provided by having over 1,100 mechanically-unique lands in the game is incredible.
Taken together, these two design choices create uncharted territory. There’s a sense in which every cube does this, because every cube creates its own context. But there’s a special kind of unsolved possibility that comes from forcing players to utilize weird, demanding, sharp-edged cards. In an Internet of strategy podcasts and 17Lands data aggregation, I had forgotten how to brew until I came face-to-face with the unknown and the long-forgotten.
So, when I sat down for my second draft of The Space Between that January weekend at Vertex Philly, I mentally cracked my knuckles. I was eager to try again with my new insights, and that began with strong synergy plans: first-pick Laboratory Maniac, followed by Birds of Paradise and Life From the Loam. A few lands followed (I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice!) and then I snagged an early Punishing Fire. With three diverse synergy paths open to me, I settled in to support my synergies as much as I could:
Careful readers will observe that this is roughly the same deck as my August trainwreck, with better lands and a more focused suite of win conditions. And, spoiler, my match results were the same big goose-egg. The overall low power level of The Space Between tempted me, yet again, to dream big and brew hard. My drafts were haunted by mystery, enabled by the open-ended buildarounds that suggested problems without predetermined solutions.
And yes, I lost. But for the first time in years, I remembered what it was like to have so much fun drafting that the gameplay felt secondary. This was Draft as possibility space: a space between mechanics and aesthetics, between Annie’s design and my abilities, between Redcap’s Corner and whatever comes next.
Thanks for reading. Below, I present my interview with Annie in its entirety, but before that I suppose it’s only fair to showcase a couple of successful decks in The Space Between, in case you ever have the fortune to draft it. In the meantime, you can follow Annie on Discord (@annie.online) or CubeCobra.
And here’s the winner from Vertex’s second day:
Okay, now enjoy that interview!
Lucky Paper: What was it about those Coldsnap and Kamigawa stinkers that “pulled you into the game,” as you allude to in your overview?
Annie Scheirer: I played anime-rules Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid, fascinated by the hazy, techno-occult qualities of cards like Witch of the Black Forest, Jam Breeding Machine, and Relinquished. Before being shoo’d away, I also watched my older brother Will and his friend Patrick play an even more strange and mysterious game: Magic. When they grew tired of them, my brother gave me their decks — Guildpact’s Gruul Wilding and Fifth Dawn’s Sunburst — and I was immediately gripped by their text and images. There must have been other cards from boosters floating around because I also encountered cards like Oyobi, Who Split the Heavens, Storm Herd, and Castigate at this time. When I was that age I didn’t understand that some cards are designed to be draft chaff. If a card had a powerful aura, of course it was powerful!
LP: In August you said this cube was trying to capture the sensation of “not knowing how the game worked or why things were good… a sense of mystery and wonder in a box.” I find it telling that your cards mostly hail from 2008 and earlier – the social internet was nascent, and MTGO was brand-new too. Coincidence, or intent?
AS: During the three years between touching those first cards and attending my first FNM, I struggled to understand what this game was and how I could play it with others. I learned about the Protean Hulk “TURN ZERO KILL” from a 240p YouTube video before I understood that Llanowar Elves didn’t tap to put a Forest into play. I think this chasm between the apparent power with which other people were slinging spells and the meager dorks I was wielding is what I’m trying to bridge with The Space Between.
LP: How central are the emotions of “mystery and wonder” to your goals, relative to a Cube designer’s usual goals of balance/novelty/mechanics? Or, maybe, what do you do if those goals conflict?
AS: Evoking emotion is the primary goal of this cube. Initially, I was worried it would be an unplayable mess because I did not put a ton of conscious effort into those usual points about design and gameplay. Perhaps that is still a valid concern. I’ve learned where to put some guardrails from nearly two decades playing and 8 years designing cubes, but the primary animating force in curating The Space Between is not decidedly not well-balanced Magic gameplay. That said, over five or six drafts in the environment it seems aggro, combo, control, and midrange are all viable.
LP: How do you see the Desert restriction (and a harsh one, at that!) as serving your design goals?
AS: There’s a pretty clean thematic reason for making this a desert cube: I literally didn’t have enough of each Basic as I fell in love with the game. I think many people in their kitchen-table development stage didn’t have enough lands to build good decks, and their manabases were apt to be atrocious. I also have a fascination with the Land type in Magic. I will forever die on the hill that Magic’s mana system is great and never needed to be fixed. The amount of texture and character provided by having over 1,100 mechanically-unique lands in the game is incredible. Building this as a desert allows cards like Ancient Ziggurat and Moonring Island to have a home. Zach Barash told me in Pack 3 he was intently weighing his decision between Island and Snow-Covered Island.
LP: Same question for your cube’s two-card combos — eg Punishing Grove, Solitary Squee, Dark Depths. In a sense, these well-known Constructed combos are almost anti-mystery in other formats, so I’m curious about this possible tension.
AS: If you want the truth, they are my pet degenerate combos that have been added and cut from my cubes since the very start. Prior to this I have added and cut Punishing Grove in particular from multiple cubes. The first iteration of Gamers’ Almanac had it and it was extremely oppressive. Thopter-Sword, another cracked combo from aughts Extended, has already come and gone in The Space Between. I think some of the tournament staples present are also a nod to what I saw on Evan Erwin’s The Magic Show circa ‘07-11, like the saga of the community’s underrating and subsequent re-evaluation of Tarmogoyf.
LP: You have your own personal futureshift sheet in this cube, with just a handful of very recent cards (MH1’s Snow, for instance). What does it take for a card from the 2020s to earn a slot in The Space Between?
AS: I think the M15-frame cards in this cube broadly fall into two categories. The first are necessary roleplayer cards like Highland Lake and company, Murk Strider, Sanctum of Stone Fangs. The truth is there’s just not that many reasonable enemy-color duals to work with and these best fit the aesthetics, and some of the other mechanical themes just needed a little boost. The sprinkling of newer Snow-oriented cards mostly fall into the category. The second type are cards that would have fascinated me during those halcyon days: Marina Vendrell’s Grimoire, Throes of Chaos, As Foretold, and the like. I think of these as more Immortal Coils, more Stuffy Dolls, more Hive Minds. If one of these cards fascinates someone, makes them want to build a shambolic deck that ferries them out into the fog of war, then I’m happy.
P.S.: Someone clutched out a game on Friday night before Vertex by Thermal Fluxing their land to give them enough Snow sources to pump their Chilling Shade and swing for lethal. Moments like that make me think the gameplay can be as inspiring as the card curation, draft, and deck-building.