If you don’t know what a Draft Cube is check out this article.

My virgin draft cube experience was so long ago, I didn't even know it was a cube. It was spring of '97 (give or take a year) and I was at GAMA in Reno, Nevada checking out new products for my gaming shop. It was an awesome time, I picked up the very last copy of the first American print run of Settlers of the Catan that Mayfair was willing to part with (ask me about that story sometime, it's a heartwarming one). I got to hang out after the hall closed with George Baxter (of classic pro-tour fame) and Peter Adkinson. George had a dirty white card box with him and asked if those of us sitting around talking about Magic wanted to draft. We asked if he had packs and he just opened the box and said, "we can just draft with these."

It was awesome. We shuffled the cards and made 15 card packs. I looked at my first pack only to find a Black Lotus. None of these cards were sleeved, so I panicked. "George, aren't you worried about scratching this?" I said as I showed him the card.

He snickered and looked at me with a calm that only a Pro-Tour-Thousandaire could have and said, "Nah, these are just extras, there's some Moxes in here too. Draft it, it's probably good."

We (the Vegas guys) built a Magic the Gathering Draft Cube about 7 or 8 years ago and we drafted it at least 3 times a month for a good 5-6 years straight. The last couple of years we have only drafted it sparingly as we’ve spent more time drafting WoW packs or testing constructed decks. To be honest our draft to constructed play ratio is about 4:1; 60 cards is just so many, 30 cards is our forte.

We draft a lot, for cakes and for fun.

Lately I’ve been missing drafting the cube; it always fills me with nostalgia and you get to play with all your favorite cards from the past and see how they interact with the new ones. Our Magic Cube had the potential to revisit  many of the classic constructed decks and archtypes. You could draft 30 card versions of Necropotence from the Black Summer, Survival of the Fittest/Recuring Nightmare toolbox with Squee, Rob’s favorite Mono-red, Tinker artifacts with Tolarian Academy, White Weenie, Prison lock down, etc. - all with the sweet power nine available as frosting on top. I was always surprised at how closely the draft decks played to their constructed counterparts. It was like re-living all the old tournaments we played together.

I want to actually yell, “Leeroooooooooy Jenkins!” in a game again.

(I know he’s reprinted, but I’ll be surprised if he makes the cut in any competitive decks)

Can we do this with WoW? I don’t know if we’ll be able to draft old decks and archtypes like we did with the Magic Cube. I don’t think it will be as easy to draft a classic solo deck with a WoW cube as it is to draft a creature-less deck in Magic, but I think it would be cool to play with all those cards that still get my blood pumping when I look through binders of old cards. It has been done before, I’ve always watched out for other people’s WoW cubes to figure out how they went about doing it. On the old UDE site there was a feature article about someones Cube but I can’t remember his name; if someone does, please let me know in the forums. They had a whole system where they strictly sorted the cards by class, faction and quests and then built packs ensuring that every packs had the desired distribution.

Deck Dr. Dan (the artist formerly known as Bus Driver Dan) has a cube that we got to draft at the last NACC Draft Camp. His cube was a blast to draft and it whetted my desire to build our own. The Dr. also does a sorted out distribution for the packs, but the time it took to set up the packs followed by the re-sorting of cards afterwards seemed like a bit of a deterrent to being able to do it often, or even want to do it.

If I wanted to sort cards, I’d live in Tim’s card closet.

With our Magic Cube we just put all the cards from the cube into face down piles and spent a few minutes shuffling them all together. Then we’d make three 15 card packs for ourselves from the randomized piles. I want to try the same thing with WoW. I do not want to worry about the type distribution at a pack level and just allow for the distribution to be covered at the card pool level.

Shuffle ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.

There is a precedence for this, as I know others have done it. Nek0angel has featured his cube on the IpswichWoW youtube channel. Completely random packs also solves one of our worries about a strict pack distribution system in that it makes it too easy to read what the guys feeding you are taking. It’s very easy to pick up signals when you know how many of each type are in the packs. We may get some packs with oddball clumps, but that happens in our Magic Cube as well. I’ve set myself to drafting mono-white weenies only to be passed a pack with 10 very desirable white cards in it, but it always seems to work out. There are going to be 24 packs total in an 8 man draft and they’ll all have something you want even if a couple seem to suck.

Don’t over-think it, just think of it as a feature of the format.

It looks like from the video that Nek0 has built a cube with just enough cards to do one 8 man draft. This seems like it could get a bit stale as it’s the same card pool every draft. Our Magic Cube has enough cards to do two 8 man drafts back to back without repeating any cards. We often drafted twice in one night because we knew the second card pool wouldn’t have any cards from the first draft. This also meant that every draft we did would have a different card pool than any we’d drafted before.

Variation is the lubricant for re-playability.

So I’m going to go with that; I want enough cards to at least do two 8 man drafts with. The next question is how many cards in a pack? Until Throne of the Tides, packs always had 18 cards. Now they have 15. I think going less than 18 is a good idea as often you’re just drafting none-playable cards for the last few picks. Because I want to test out the completely random pack distribution I do want a bit of a cushion, so I’m going to go with 16 cards in a pack. We’ll test this out and if it doesn’t work, I’ll make some changes and let you know.

We’re gonna kick the tires and run ‘er around the block a few times. See what parts fall off.

16 card packs comes to 384 cards for an 8 man draft, making it at least a 768 card cube. I like round numbers so I’m just going to make it 800. Now about type distribution; I’d asked Tim awhile ago what his favorite draft set was and I was going to use that for my percentages. He liked Drums of War and he still had a box with open but still intact packs so I went through it and tallied the card types for some percentages. I adjusted those numbers to include Neutral Allies, Death Knight cards and Master Heroes. I even cleaned up a few of the other numbers for smoother distribution. Here’s what I came up with:

Overall Percentages:

Alliance Allies: 16.75%

Horde Allies: 16.75%

Neutral Allies: 9%

Abilities: 32.5%

Equipment: 8.75%

Quests/Locations: 15.63%

Master Heroes: .63%

Card count Breakdowns:

Alliance/Horde 1 drops: 20 (each: 20 Alliance, 20 Horde)

Alliance/Horde 2 drops: 24

Alliance/Horde 3 drops: 23

Alliance/Horde 4 drops: 22

Alliance/Horde 5 drops: 20

Alliance/Horde 6 drops: 15

Alliance/Horde 7 drops: 5

Alliance/Horde 8+ drops: 5

Neutral 1 drops: 6

Neutral 2 drops: 13

Neutral 3 drops: 12

Neutral 4 drops: 12

Neutral 5 drops: 11

Neutral 6 drops: 8

Neutral 7 drops: 5

Neutral 8+ drops: 5

Class Abilities: 24/each class

Neutral Abilities: 10

Dual Class Abilities: 10

Weapons: 35

Armor: 20

Items: 15

Quests: 95

Locations: 30

All these numbers are subject to change depending on how my searching through each of them goes. I’ll probably keep the percentages really close, but for example: if there aren’t 30 really good Locations, I’ll shift into some other Quests or Stash cards I didn’t include in my initial Ally search. If some classes get more equipment love than others, I may take some ability spots away from one to give to the other.

Little Timmy got nervous as the team leaders starting picking their teams. Would he be last again?

I have a spreadsheet that I’ll clean up and share with the world in the next few weeks that you will be able to type in your own figures and adjust the percentages to your own taste. You’ll be able to then draft cards for your own cube using those numbers as a guide. You can even cut it from 800 cards to 384 if you want to just have a regular old cube. I may even adjust the numbers myself as we play it and see how it works. Maybe we’ll want more neutral allies, or we’ll find that solo decks could be viable if we had more equipment.

This will be an ongoing series. I’ve broken down the numbers this time and I’ll cover other choices that I find myself making as I draft the cards, like, “how am I going to deal with Forms in Druid, Combos in Rogue and Reputations on allies now that the game is evolving?”

Seriously, CZE R&D, are you going to change anything else? You’re not making this any easier. lmk kthnxbye. ;)

I’ll list the whole cube soon, probably in a Forum post with rollover card lists, and I’ll write regular articles featuring breakdowns of the whole. For example one article will cover my Horde ally choices, while others will cover all the specific class card choices. As new sets are released I’ll write about what gets cut and what gets added and why. I’ll talk about decks we’ve drafted that really stood out and maybe even some strategy or musings on possible Cubes built around specific themes are arch-types.

I’ll want to hear what you think, did I miss some really great interactions? Is your favorite card missing? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what should and shouldn’t be in a Cube. For now, what do you think about my initial approach? Will the randomly built packs not work? What are some themes or ideas for Cubes that you have?

Gleaming the Cube: 6.1.01: Introduction

“What’re the goofy numbers on the Article title?”

That’s how I’m going to track this process:

The “6” is the latest block the DMG Cube is built up to (Aftermath is block 6).

The “1” is the latest set the DMG Cube is built to (Throne of the Tides is the 1st set in block 6).

The “01” will be the Article number.


Yes. I’m a geek.

~Kirk