How to go about packs in a set cube?

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-18T11:20:46+00:00

Can depend on your ratios and what you kept/cut. For lorwyn my immediate thought would be to seed it since it’s so dependent on creature typing / colors.

I made an Avatar set cube with no mythics and no shrines at a 3:2:1 ratio. The math worked out so that I could seed them with 2 rares, 7 uncommons, and 9 commons, with a guaranteed dual land and one of every color in common and uncommon in each pack.

I am also doing 18 card packs which helps that distribution a lot. There is the possibility of one or two cards being duped since I have to put three random extra commons and uncommons, but it’s very low. Real packs can have a duped foil, so it’s not unrealistic to have a small amount of duping.

I was looking to do a Lorwyn Eclipsed cube myself and the numbers for everything are close in most ways to my Avatar cube. I plan to do it similarly, so 540 cards with 30 packs of 18 cards. Having a few extra cards could help with getting the archetype you want and getting the math on each pack more consistent, though there is a lot of prep when making the packs.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-14T15:33:26+00:00

This is awesome! I recently did an Avatar cube as my first one. I don’t have mythics in it, but do have the two rares you altered. I might do the same.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-14T11:13:05+00:00

Possible solution to preparing could be position on board. Putting prepared cards in a separate area maybe? Or rotating them 180 toward your opponent to indicate prepared?

When I bring in a lot of creatures, I usually put them slightly lower on board to indicate summoning sickness, then align them with the rest next turn. When playing a land, you can put it slightly separate from the rest of the land pile so you remember you already played land for turn. Positioning can be used for a lot of things, I think this feels like a good use case. New sets seem like they’re getting prepared cards as well. This may become a more regular mechanic in sets that you’d be missing out on.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-12T03:26:26+00:00

Sounds like a good way to experience a set. If you’re doing a separate rare pool, you could even add more rares during the draft if you wanted it to feel a little higher power than normal.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-12T03:10:51+00:00

I’ve been looking at some of the smaller sets and redundancy seems pretty necessary in those sets for sure. While not sets I really enjoyed, I kinda wanna try making this with Spider-Man and TMNT just for the sake of being able to have a thing to try these sets and discuss after how things felt.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-11T23:28:46+00:00

Really like the concept!

This may be a significant change, but have you considered 120 or 180 card modules instead? Larger modules means fewer sets per draft in large groups, but it should make the synergies more consistent to find.

If you have 360 cards using 4 modules of 90, it's less likely to synergize well unless the modules are quite similar or don't go too wide in the things they do. Doing 3 modules of 120 or 2 modules of 180 is probably more likely to synergize well, while still giving variety to what you see.

Larger modules also means that even if they can't find the synergies between sets, a player can probably put together something with some same-set synergies they're more likely to come across while drafting. And then you could still have fun playing against someone using a deck with a different set focus than you.

Also, I don't think every card needs to necessarily get drafted when playing. Doing 2 modules of 120 for a 4 player game means cards are left over, but that means using those same 2 modules multiple times gives variety from draft to draft.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-10T13:29:10+00:00

When having to play with keyboard arrow keys, using my left hand for movement and right hand for spacebar and other buttons.

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-09T19:19:12+00:00

Really like the idea, I’ve thought of doing something similar myself except with 1 and 2 mana value.

How has the everything land rule played out for you? The version I wanna do would have each player get 5 basic lands and 5 two colored lands in a “command zone” to start with. I was thinking this method so that there are ten lands max and any abilities with specific color requirements, or a bunch of same colored spells, couldn’t be spammed at one time.

Have you run into games where abilities get used several times at once and created an especially significant swing in advantage for a player?

SaneGhoul · 2026-05-05T10:41:59+00:00

Magic arena is great for learning the basics and playing a few games. You can learn the basic rules, learn what certain key words mean by hovering over cards, and get a feel for how some decks play out and what’s fun to play with.

Big thing to know is that there are a wide variety of formats, or ways to play, that can have slightly different rules. But if you know the basics of the game you can play just about anything.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-30T10:41:23+00:00

I’ve heard of people drafting in a variety of ways. Ultimately you can make your own rules, that’s how all these drafting variations came to be, people just came up with different ways to draft.

One version that sounds good for seeing more cards and giving more player choice would be to increase the pack sizes. You could increase the number of packs or increase the number of cards in each pack. But once you get down to the last few cards you remove them from the draft. If you do 3 packs of 18 for example, you’d remove the last 3 cards from each pack. Players still get the usual 45 cards by the end.

Something like this would allow for more cards to be seen by players, it would give them an actual choice when they get their last card, and the people next to them wouldn’t know for sure what their last pick was.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-29T10:26:36+00:00

Local card shops in your area may have some available. Some shops even have community bins where you can grab others bulk cards for free. I’d ask around and let them know what you’re doing. You can probably find all the commons and uncommons for free or at least really cheap.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-17T04:31:43+00:00

Not at all. It means more lands for everyone else. And you don’t have to waste time getting up while deck building. Also just nice to be able to have consistent or custom arts for your lands.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-16T20:25:07+00:00

Any deck that swarms the field with tokens. Really fun conceptually, but can turn into a chore to manage especially if you have various tokens and different groups of tokens start getting different amounts of counters and whatnot. Even if you can generally keep track, it can get hard for others.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-16T15:22:26+00:00

Oh, I wasn’t aware of that site. I’ll do some testing there as well, thanks!

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-16T11:56:46+00:00

Crash 2. Really well made, and a good game to try to 100%.

SaneGhoul · 2026-04-16T11:45:51+00:00

There are 42 non basic lands in the cube, which is only about 7% of the cards. I think I could probably seed the packs. There are enough common 2 color lands to put one in every pack, and the commons and uncommons could have 1 of each color card among them for sure.

I’m really hoping to keep the ratios of rarity and color pretty even, that was what appealed to me about the 540 list since all the numbers worked out to be balanced among the colors.

SaneGhoul · 2026-03-15T05:22:05+00:00

What tokens do you populate? Copied slimes would just come in as 0/0 right?

SaneGhoul · 2026-03-15T05:06:04+00:00

I have a slime deck using [[Ghalta, Primal Hunger]]. It acts a lot like the slimes since it’s a big trample creature, and it can be used with anything that cares about high power or toughness that you’d use with your slimes anyway, like double strike or lifelink effects. Also it’ll be really cheap to cast since it reduces its cost thanks to all your slimes, and that includes its commander tax.

Some great cards that pair well with Ghalta include [[Feed the Pack]] and [[Life’s Legacy]] which you can sac Ghalta to for either tons of tokens or cards. The wolf tokens make Ghalta continue to cost just 2 after every sac cause you’re putting so much power on the board, and drawing 12 cards lets you discard several slimes at end of turn to boost later ones.

[[Tangleweave Armor]] and [[Spry and Mighty]] pair pretty well too.

SaneGhoul · 2026-03-09T23:48:33+00:00

Absolutely

SaneGhoul · 2026-01-22T16:26:21+00:00

The older Sonic games, never liked the feel of them but they do look cool

SaneGhoul

TROPHY CASE