When Trivia Beats Strategy

A few months ago, I was at my weekly Cube meetup when I heard another drafter half-shout, “You’re doing what with Fiend Hunter?”

Uh-oh, I thought. If you target Fiend Hunter with Cloudshift while its first ability is on the stack, then… yeah, y’know what, I don’t even want to explain it. Go watch a video. The point is, Villain abused Magic’s stack and a quirk in wording to exile two creatures with their Fiend Hunter — one of them permanently. Unfortunately, as you may have guessed, it took ten minutes, three explanations, and four disrupted Cube matches to convince our story’s Hero that they weren’t the victim of a newfangled type of cheat. (By the way, Hero is an experienced Constructed player, but because they’ve “only” been playing a decade, they never learned about Fiend Hunter.) Somewhere around the third minute I found myself thinking, Is one extra trigger really worth all this brouhaha?

Don’t get me wrong — complexity can be good! Complexity allows strategic depth, creates partial information, and shields players from overthinking their strategy.¹

But too much complexity can cross a sudden threshold, creating overwhelm. In Cube, I’ve noticed my more complex environments can struggle to attract interest from newcomers to the group. Of course, a few reluctant drafters add up to a big problem when you’re trying to build up a weekly Cube community! Managing complexity to create the right blend of approachability and depth is one of the primal challenges of Cube design.

But what about when complexity doesn’t add strategic depth? When memorization is the entire decision, that’s a trivia check.

Trivia checks are decisions that hinge on memorized rules rather than strategic or probabilistic thinking. If a nearby judge or rules reference would reveal a clearly (in)correct play, then the decision isn’t strategic; it’s a trivia check. To explain why these aren’t ideal in a cube setting, let’s examine what might be the most trivia-heavy mechanic in Magic: Protection.

Protection has caused Magic rules headaches since 1993. Back then, Protection from a color meant that the creature could not be “affected by any magic of that color” (not the clearest official ruling I’ve read). Even when Protection was given clear rules definition (complete with a mnemonic acronym!), WotC remained lukewarm on it, cutting it almost entirely from 6th-9th Editions and from Origins to M20. When Protection returned to deciduous status with M20, Mark Rosewater explained by saying Protection is “a very efficient tool to help balance the [Constructed] metagame”. That’s not the same as “fun”. At the Pro Tour, extensive rules memorization is the table stakes, but in a casual setting, every trivial memory check is a risk that cube players will publicly punt the ball directly into their own net.

Say you’re at cube night, and you try to have your Dark Confidant fight the opponent’s Auriok Champion. Congrats, you just scored an own goal! Put that Confidant right in the graveyard. Protection prevents damage — not that you’d know from reading this reminder-text-less Champ. You shoulda cast your Stomp this turn, and then your Fight plan would work. Just don’t target the Champion with the Stomp, because Protection won’t let you. And don’t try to block with your Bonecrusher Giant, either. Now, our

In Constructed, Protection might be a cool reward for deep study of a format, but in a Draft format as diverse as Cube, Protection can become a trivia check that fails to provide strategic depth. If it was just one mechanic, then we’d all cut it and move on, but trivia checks extend to other patterns in cube design:

• Card versions with outdated text or confusing rules (“any target” burn spells and Dead Ringers are two examples)
• Obscure or rules-heavy mechanics that lack reminder text
• Combos that are older than your drafters’ experience with the game
• Card interactions that were only relevant in a past Constructed format
• Card interactions that revolve around mana value determination, the stack, and/or layers — all sections of the rules that are deeply unintuitive, abstract, and rarely relevant to normal games
• Textless, altered, and/or signed cards
• Mechanically unique instants with a large variety of effects, making it difficult to counterplay into open mana
• Un-cards, playtest cards, and other effects that skirt Magic’s usual rules

Again, it’s usually a good thing that Magic doesn’t firehose us with rules minutae or edge cases. But this list is chock full of patterns that require the rules minutae without providing it themselves. Even experienced Cube players don’t have strategic “decisions” to make about trivia checks, just memorization and recall.² As a result, trivia checks are “own goal generators,” creating opportunities for publicly embarrassing misplays that are 100% preventable with knowledge of the right rules.

Frank Lantz writes in The Beauty of Games that all games contain a skill component and a knowledge component. If you sit down for a game of Poker, you can’t apply the skills of bluffing and calling until you memorize the knowledge that Aces are high and a Straight beats a Pair.³

Magic’s most essential gameplay skills require the player to extrapolate from the game state’s limited information, predict the opponent’s plan, form a counter-strategy, and execute. To map that vast decision space, players create abstract heuristics like ”Bolt the Bird” and “Who’s the Beatdown?” — applying (or ignoring) the memorized heuristics in deckbuilding and gameplay is a skill all its own. Together, these skills give Magic its incredible depth. Here’s an example:

One night at Cube, my opponent passed the turn with

So instead I swing for two with my lowly Vampire Hexmage. If I’m right about the Emperor, Villain won’t be able to react here, because that would put their shields down against Hexmage’s instant-speed sacrifice ability. Villain looks momentarily gobsmacked, picks up pen, passes through another turn with

Imagine the same scenario if there’s a Blood Moon in play and a Naturalize in my hand. If I play Dark Depths into the Moon, does it “enter with ten ice counters on it”? The answer is no, but it might have required a judge call to reach a consensus, and maybe Villain would have sideboarded differently if they’d known. This interaction doesn’t require strategy or skill; it’s just a trivia check. Did both players treat their Aces as high?

Since trivia checks are not strategic by definition, reducing their impact is a great way to stretch a cube’s complexity budget and focus on the skills that make Magic fun.⁴ I see roughly three approaches. The first is my least favorite: give every player a complete rules reference. Yuck.

The second approach is to set your drafters’ expectations. As with so many other aspects of Cube design, expectations go a long way:

• Allow rules-based table talk during your cube draft. Set an example for your group by asking rules clarifications yourself, even if you think it’s bad for your win equity.
• Carefully examine the memorization component of each of your cube’s combos and decks. Do you market towards ex-Commander players, but play some 15-year-old Standard combos? Conversely, do you market to lapsed OGs while including brand-new mechanics without reminder text?
• Allow takebacks at cube night within reason, especially when they involve new cards, obscure cards, and cards without reminder text. Double-especially when one player is at a knowledge disadvantage.⁵

If well-managed expectations aren’t enough to minimize the impact of rules trivia, then it might be time for a hard look at your format:

• Your art choices matter for gameplay, too. Do you have complex foreign cards, rules-obscuring alterations, or a version without reminder text?
• Do your cube’s synergies involve obscure rules baggage like layers, stack shenanigans, or mana value of double faced cards?
• How many instants does a player have to memorize before they are able to counterplay into open mana? Duplicating important instants is one way to alleviate this trivia check.
• Remember that draft requires memorization, too. Repeated keywords and mechanics will lower the amount of memorization required to draft with confidence.
• How many combos are more obvious on Wikipedia than they are mid-draft? Those are candidates to cut or nerf.

Maybe some of these are tougher pills to swallow than others, but that’s OK! Even the easy changes will go a long way to reduce the relevance of trivia checks in your format.

A cube designer is responsible for 12 match losers, not just the winners. If we can eliminate the match losses caused by trivial memorization checks, we can make Cube more appealing and welcoming to all players, regardless of their background.