Gameplay
Win More Magic By Reading Less
“I ain’t readin’ all that.”
This is, to my embarrassment, my most common audible reaction to cards in a Cube Draft.1 And I have the audacity to call myself a “cube Spike,” motivated by playing my best and seeking a deeper understanding of Magic’s game engine. My devil-may-care attitude would never fly at the Pro Tour. Yet, at my city’s weekly Cube draft, as shark-infested as they come, I do pretty well for myself, usually ending up with a positive record and a puncher’s chance at the trophy.
I’ll let you in on my secret. Read the cards less.
Still A Numbers Game
Obviously I am exaggerating for effect. I do read the cards, but I am ruthless about rate.
Let’s say we’re drafting a Kamigawa-themed cube, heading into the late picks of Pack One with a few
Three of these cards synergize explicitly with Samurai, which was the supported Boros deck in NEO. However, I’m picking Kyodai because its rate is much stronger than the alternatives, despite the fact that I never expect to activate its
Synergies lie to their readers all the time. Just by reading all the cards in that pack, we’d never know that NEO’s Samurai deck was famous for being a trap archetype, weaker than a vanilla midrange deck in its own colors, to say nothing of the Ninjas and Enchantments of other color pairs.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given (or been given) deckbuilding advice that boils down to “cut the cute synergy; play the stronger card that’s in your sideboard.” To avoid trap archetypes, we have to stop reading the cards, and look at their numbers instead. Look at the rate.
“Rate” simply refers to how much output you get for the mana you spent. Grizzly Bear gets you a 2/2 for
It gets complicated once we start evaluating things like “enters” abilities, triggers, Kickers, or other synergies. Making our job even harder is the proliferation of rules text, which has more than doubled since the ’90s. If the words themselves double, the opportunity for synergistic combinations goes combinatorically upward, creating a dense maze of nested triggers.
Allow rate to be the razor that clears the thicket. Ignore the words. How big are the numbers for the price?
How Rate Impacts Gameplay
Magic has always been a game of threats and removal. Early control like The Deck dominated in the ’90s because the removal came at stronger rates than the threats. Nowadays, threats are more juiced, but a format’s strongest removal will always dictate which threats are playable. It’s a numbers game: how much stuff (mana, tokens, ETB value) gets left behind when Serra Angel meets Doom Blade.
A lot of Cube designers don’t know this – I know, because I’m one of them. Or, maybe we do, but we don’t put it into practice. We get stuck on our pet cards and our aspirational tests and our cool unique archetypes and their one-in-a-million combos. In other words, we Cube designers read the cards too much. We indulge our synergistic daydreams, and bot-draft sick-looking combos without ever testing them in the field.
No shade to the Cube designers, of course! It’s fun to bot-draft and daydream, and no cube will ever get played enough to truly reveal which cards don’t belong.2 This is only to say that Cube designers can’t guarantee that their cube’s synergies will actually play out as strong as they might read. Be ruthless about rate.
Diagnosing Rate
The simplest rates are fairly straightforward. Of these
For other simple effects, you can math out rate. Generally, a card is worth
We could be really meticulous about Brutal Deceiver’s abilities, but I ain’t readin’ all that. It’s not card-draw, so it probably rounds down to “bonus.” Manic Vandal, on the other hand, casts Shatter for free upon entering play. We could make the precise conversion, or we could just approximate with “mostly gives us +1 card.”
Things get trickier with Cleon, Merry Champion, and here’s where it becomes really useful to stop reading the cards. Yes, double strike is typically worth at least
When those heuristics fail, we can always approximate rate using notoriety. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker is one of the hardest cards to math out. How much mana is the Reflection of Kiki-Jiki worth on its face, let alone on a two-turn delay? I don’t know, but I do know that Fable got banned a couple times, not because of some niche combo, but for its all-around value.
In short: if the rate isn’t easy to guess, prioritize recent cards, notorious cards, and Standard-skipping cards.4 If abilities are hard to quantify, just round up or down to the nearest card’s worth of advantage. Once we’re ruthless about rate, the synergies will take care of themselves, especially as we’re selecting our 20th- through 24th-best spells at the end of the draft packs.
Don’t read the cards; don’t trust a synergy unless it’s backed up by rate. I don’t have time for all that, and neither do your drafters.
- Our group has tacitly clamped down on table-talk by allowing only one ”this is still in the pack?!” per player, per draft. You also get one use of “oh, baby!” Spend them wisely.↩
- That said, I sometimes like to evaluate my Cube synergies with this same ruthlessness. Helps to identify those pet cards, unintentional bombs, or stinky synergies.↩
- Complexity creep also leads Cube designers to include more recent cards as “archetype glue” or “slot compressors.” Wordiness correlates to recency, which correlates to rate.↩
- Magic cards have a convenient copyright date in the bottom border! Look for the ugly shield set symbols for the Commander-legal releases.↩