Try Exhibition Matches. Thank me later.

I’ve played weekly cube draft for nearly five years, with player counts from 2 to 36. I wouldn’t trade my local Cube scene for the world… but I must confess that my love is fading for Magic’s usual round structure.

At a Pro Tour or a Prerelease alike, 1-on-1 players use a best-of-three Swiss structure to determine round timers and pairings. Best-two-out-of-three ensures matches aren’t determined by extraordinary randomness. Swiss, or pairing opponents of equal records, allows an LGS or tournament to clearly determine a sole winner from among 2^N players. Naturally, our cube group adopted this structure when we began our weekly meetups.

There are only a few problems, though. First: walk-ins and last-minute drops are extremely common (and more than welcome, because we wanted to grow our group!), so multiples of 2^N players is rarer than you might expect. Heck, even numbers are rarer than you’d expect. Second: three 50-minute Bo3 rounds after a draft usually takes four hours minimum, which bumps up against the sleep schedules of our players and the generosity of even the friendliest LGS employees. And those four hours are suprisingly light on Magic, too. Usually, two or three pairs finish their match 15-30 minutes earlier than the grindiest pairs, and Swiss gives them nothing to do but twiddle their thumbs.

And there’s one subtler drawback, too. Just as Swiss clearly determines a sole 3-0 winner at the top of the bracket, it also creates one unambiguous 0-3 loser at the bottom. If you’ve built up a decade of loss immunity through FNM drafts or ranked Arena, this may not seem like a big deal to you, but an open-invite Cube night has put me in contact with a whole different kind of player. Players who are good, but not grognards. Whose smiles and laughter fade when they quietly confess their game record. Whose disappointment at 0-3ing turns into frustration or apathy the second or third or tenth time they are the night’s biggest loser. The certain knowledge that you had the 8th-best deck is not a recipe for a repeat visitor.

And look, I don’t want to sell my friends short. They’re all tough and perseverant, and I’ve never once felt like they couldn’t handle the occasional trainwreck. But losing is tough on anybody, and not only does Swiss exacerbate the worst outcomes there, it also makes me miss my beauty sleep because I had to run tiebreaker math for a weird pod of seven where all the rounds went to turns. Enough is enough.

The Exhibition Match

Enter the Exhibition Match: untimed two-game matches with ad hoc pairings. Cube event legend Judge Bones was the first to mention this to me using the name “best-of-two.” Apparently, tournaments for the Lorcana and Star Wars Unlimited TCGs use a similar structure, and Bones mentioned it to me as a potential time-saver for Magic.¹

And so, one day, short on time before a dinner reservation, I tried exhibition matches with a semi-reluctant pod. We had an absolute blast. Exhibition matches neatly solve my biggest problem with best-of-three Swiss rounds, chopping off all those wasted minutes while three pairs of players are waiting for the slowpokes to finish their grindfest. A daft and three exhibition matches might take as little as 2.5 hours!² Suddenly a whole Cube night can fit in the same timeslot as a crunchy board game.

Exhibition matches also work perfectly with the Swiss tournament’s most cursed player counts: five, seven, and nine. The odd person out gets a snack for fifteen minutes until the blazing-fast aggro mirror finishes up, and then they pair off with the winner. The leftover person out has their turn for a snack break, until the midrange mirror finishes up… and so on. Just keep re-pairing with whoever’s free, and in this way, you can easily ensure that every player gets a full three rounds in.

On nights where I don’t need games to be quite that zippy, then I’ll just play a fourth (or fifth!) exhibition round. As a cube designer, I get first-hand gameplay observations from a larger share of my drafters, and as a human, I get one-on-one social time with more of my friends. A win-win!

Another huge bonus, I’ve learned, is the exhibition match’s possibility of ties. Ties are obviously less than ideal for the Pro Tour, but for a cube community whose only goal is having fun together, they allow newcomers and/or weaker players the dignity of uncertainty. A match record of 0-0-3 might be 99% likely to become 0-3-0 if you’d played out the deciders, but the plausible deniability is an emotional lifesaver. It also signals to any visitors or newcomers that your cube community cares more about socializing than you do about pubstomping cy00b n00bs.

Now, I confess that I can struggle to have fun if I’m not playing to win. Indeed, when I suggest exhibition matches, the most frequent pushback I hear concerns a perceived lack of stakes. Personally, these fears never came to pass for a simple reason — do you know how freaking cool it is to post a 3-0 record when you don’t even get the benefit of tiebreakers!? Or, even better, going 5-0 with the extra time you saved! (My best so far is 4-0-1, but I’ll get there one day.) Even when a match ends in a tie, I was surprised to observe that I rarely feel disappointment, only a mutual respect for my well-matched opponents.

Exhibition matches rule. You should try them. Of course, if you don’t like them, they needn’t become your group’s only way to game! My back-pocket formats still include Housman for counts of two to four, and Team Draft for six. But when time is short or the players are odd in number, exhibition matches are my new go-to tool.