Good MtG Cube w/ links to other similar articles

Here is another good Cube post, specifically a pauper cube, if you are looking to build on of your own: www.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/sf/255

If you are new to the whole concept I highly recommend "The Danger Room" format. The duel tap lands are easy to obtain with the Ravnica black (they are about 0.25/card) and since you don't draft from the Danger Room format (but you could), it doesn't have to be gardened so much.

Again, this is a great, cheap way to experience Magic without having to build your own deck or feel like you have to read 5 years worth of articles. The Danger Room can also be packed up tight which is perfect for travel.

It's kind of surprising that WotC hasn't started releasing Cube sets.

To be technical, it's a "Peasant Cube", actually, not Pauper. Pauper means all-commons, Peasant means commons & uncommons.

At the bottom of the article, there are two links to my currently preferred Peasant Cube list and my currently preferred Pauper Cube list.

Also: I don't remember whether I've posted about it here yet, but there are a couple of very neat draft formats for less than 6 players:
Grid drafting, for 2 players
Tenchester, for 4 players

I think they solve the big problem a lot of folks have with Cube, which is getting enough people together to draft. Also, both of those formats essentially don't work without a Cube (i.e. just using normal booster packs doesn't work), which is why they've just been "discovered/invented" recently.

Of course WotC hasn't started releasing Cube sets. A couple reasons for this: first of all, they need to be very careful about encouraging a format that lets you keep playing Magic without spending more than $20 a year. Second of all, any "rares allowed" Cube would have to be extraordinarily expensive: personally, I'd estimate that $300+ would be what they'd charge *if the cards weren't tournament-legal*.

dragonstout wrote: Of course WotC hasn't started releasing Cube sets. A couple reasons for this: first of all, they need to be very careful about encouraging a format that lets you keep playing Magic without spending more than $20 a year. Second of all, any "rares allowed" Cube would have to be extraordinarily expensive: personally, I'd estimate that $300+ would be what they'd charge *if the cards weren't tournament-legal*.

This is true, but it's also precisely the market that FFG is tapping into with its LCGs. It's already the same kind of mindset that sells the Duels of the Planeswalkers video games. How much does a peasant or pauper cube cost to put together? Would WotC be able to make a profit selling a set for $60? Or WotC could even make a card set specifically for cube that couldn't be used in other formats. If I were in the marketing department at WotC it's something I'd investigate.

metalface13 wrote:

dragonstout wrote: Of course WotC hasn't started releasing Cube sets. A couple reasons for this: first of all, they need to be very careful about encouraging a format that lets you keep playing Magic without spending more than $20 a year. Second of all, any "rares allowed" Cube would have to be extraordinarily expensive: personally, I'd estimate that $300+ would be what they'd charge *if the cards weren't tournament-legal*.

This is true, but it's also precisely the market that FFG is tapping into with its LCGs. It's already the same kind of mindset that sells the Duels of the Planeswalkers video games. How much does a peasant or pauper cube cost to put together? Would WotC be able to make a profit selling a set for $60? Or WotC could even make a card set specifically for cube that couldn't be used in other formats. If I were in the marketing department at WotC it's something I'd investigate.

FFG is absolutely *not* shooting for something like this with their LCGs; they absolutely want you to keep purchasing new sets every month, they're not going to release a complete box that's everything you'd ever need.

With Duels of the Planeswalkers, they're doing two things: first of all, getting money from a market of "people who play apps" that doesn't play games in person and that they therefore wouldn't get any money from anyway; and second of all, the game is clearly intended as a gateway to get you to play paper Magic. It's not a coincidence that the game involves acquiring more cards and now involves spending money to get sealed decks; they want to get you into that mindset. They don't want you in the mindset of "I can play with the cards I already have forever!"

As for whether they could "make a profit" selling for $60: first of all, it's not like Wizards would be buying the cards off the secondary market and repackaging them, so as far as their costs, it theoretically costs them the same to print a Pauper Cube as a Power 9 Cube. This is not actually true, but I'll get to that in a second. Second of all, $60 is low for a boxed set of 360 cards. Let's compare to the lowest price-per-card boxed sets they do these days: Duel Decks. That's $25 for 120 cards. So let's say at least $75.

Okay, but here come the real costs. The real costs to them are all opportunity costs. Wizards charges $15 for an Intro pack, which is a fixed 60-card deck (as well as a bonus booster pack in addition). They also sell Event Decks, which are 60+15 as well, but for $25.

Why the discrepancy in price? It costs them the same to print either one, even though the Event Deck has a lot more rares.

The intro pack sucks, and makes you want to buy more boosters to make it better. The Event Deck is pretty good, and gives you less incentive to buy more cards. THAT is why the Event Deck is more expensive. If you can get 8 rares from an event deck, and an event deck cost $15: that would make booster packs look pretty unappealing, at $4 per rare!

You can see this also with Modern Masters: Modern Masters booster packs have an MSRP of $7 vs. the normal booster pack MSRP of $4. Same number of cards and everything. I'm sure it also cost much less to design & develop Modern Masters, since it's all pre-existing cards. But the after-market value of those cards is so much higher, so they can easily make more profit off charging more for Modern Masters packs; and if they didn't, you'd feel like a chump for the rest of year buying normal packs until they do a Modern Masters 2.

They could theoretically profit from fixed releases, but they would actually *lose money*, at least if they went too far, from lost booster pack sales. This is also why, for example, on Magic Online, Cube is only available to draft for a few weeks out of the year: specifically, the weeks with the least Magic activity otherwise. If they had Cube available concurrent with the new hot draft format, they'd be competing with each other. Wizards wants to avoid its products competing with each other as much as possible.

There is also the "MSRP" problem. The S in there stands for "suggested". If you put a lot of high-dollar singles in a box set, then no retailer is going to sell it for the MSRP. In a month, "From The Vault: 20" comes out, a boxed set of 20 foil cards, one from each year of Magic's existence. The MSRP for the set is $40. It's currently pre-selling for $350. This happens *all the time*. Wizards isn't getting a dime of that markup.

This can also have the effect of keeping the product out of the hands of the target audience. For example, when they released the Commander preconstructed decks a couple years back, the hope was to get a bunch of players hooked on playing Commander and give them decks to start with. However, one of the decks ended up having an exclusive, hot Legacy card in it; so that deck ended up being bought largely by Legacy players, who didn't even give a shit about the other 99 cards in the deck.

Considering how crazy fucking hard it is to make an entire new card set, there is absolutely no way, ever, bet you $1000s, that they will ever make an entire new card set for Cube, a niche product with a fixed ceiling on how much a customer will pay for it. They might make a dozen or two new cards, sure. Personally, I'd actually greatly dislike cards being made specifically for Cube; it would mean less space for cards from throughout Magic history, and less of that wonderful "whoops, we didn't think this would be THAT powerful!" feel.

FFG is absolutely *not* shooting for something like this with their LCGs; they absolutely want you to keep purchasing new sets every month, they're not going to release a complete box that's everything you'd ever need.

That's where I think you're looking at this the wrong way. WotC would be crazy to release a Cube set, dust their hands off and say "All done!" The LCG model is built around the idea of playing a CCG but without having to buy blind boosters all the time. And then encouraging those who play in the tournament scene or simply wanting to expand their game to buy the expansions. I did a run down before in another LCG thread about the numbers of BGG users who list owning the various FFG LCGs. There's a strong trend of the base set having the highest number of ownership, followed by the first expansion releases and after that it tails off by quite a lot. Granted this is just an informal glance at the BGG database and not a scientifically designed survey, but it shows the bulk of the LCG business is in the core sets.

Of course creating a Cube pack that runs alongside the normal Magic CCG creates problems of cannibalization, but I don't think as much as you foresee. As the link in the OP states, the guy interviewed plays with his Cube set maybe once or twice a month. Right now the people playing Cube are already hardcore Magic players. They already own a substantial collection of cards with which to build a Cube. But it doesn't sound like they aren't playing other formats of Magic either. They're still doing Sealed, Draft, Constructed, etc.

I think there's a large segment of former Magic players out there who were turned off by the price of keeping up with Magic. They're unlikely to just start buying back into Magic again, even if they are playing Duels of the Planeswalkers. So why not sell them a Peasant/Pauper Cube box, it can still get them hooked and move them to mainline Magic.

When I told my brother a former Magic and Magic Online player and avid board gamer and yes, he owns the Duels 2014 game for his iPad, about the Cube format the first question he asked was "Can I just buy a set? Does Wizards make one?" When I told him no, you have to make it yourself he lost interest.

If anybody wants to make a Cube set they have to go through the secondary market. That's hundreds of cards bought and sold that WotC doesn't see a dime of. Why not take a dip into that market by producing it's own set? I'd put this down as an Opportunity, not a Threat.

If WotC made a peasant/pauper cube set would Magic players really go gonzo for a set of uncommons and commons? I don't know, I'm not involved in the Magic community to know.

Ah, when I was talking about the Cube competing with their other product: yes, part of it is that Cube discourages buying new cards in mass. But the other main part of it I meant is that an avenue of buying several hundred really good cards at once makes it so you don't need to buy more boosters, whether you Cube or *not*. So the price would have to be very high, probably too high to really be produced in large numbers.

I think dragonstout makes some good points and its hard to argue with the logic that Wizards does not want anything to compete with the buying of more and more MtG cards (at least currently). I still think there would be increasing demand for it. Maybe it will show up in the closed environment of Duels at some point.

"Can I just buy a set? Does Wizards make one?" When I told him no, you have to make it yourself he lost interest.

However, to split the difference, I wonder if a Cube market could be created. You'd have to figure out how to get large piles of cards cheaply. Then you could sort them into Cubes of different types and start a company based on moving them. It might not be too crazy to try to do.

bioball wrote: However, to split the difference, I wonder if a Cube market could be created. You'd have to figure out how to get large piles of cards cheaply. Then you could sort them into Cubes of different types and start a company based on moving them. It might not be too crazy to try to do.

Crazy, crazy not like unto a fox!

Actually not a bad idea. So we're agreed? We're forming Cube Partners, LLC?

Average prices for one of those pauper cubes is around $500

There is nothing wrong with going for a block cube. It's more cohesive, both thematically and mechanically. You get some assurance that it has been WotC playtested for fun and balance. And it's a heck of a lot easier to get that building a cube out of singles.

For example:
2@commons Return to Ravnica
1@uncommons Return to Ravnica
2@commons Gatecrash
1@uncommons Gatecrash
2@commons Dragon's Maze
1@uncommons Dragon's Maze

That's 750 cards and it should cost you only about $50-$100 online.

quozl wrote: Average prices for one of those pauper cubes is around $500

Okay: WTF? I built one for Black Barney for $80 (plus some more for sleeves and shipping), and I believe I've got it down now so that I can buy, say, that Pauper Cube linked in the article, for $60, no more.

NO idea where you're getting $500 from...

Maybe you mean Peasant? That's believable. You can make that Peasant Cube linked in the article for $200, though, IF you're willing to proxy about 5-6 cards, like Force of Will, Wasteland, Maze of Ith, and probably a couple more.

I'm genuinely curious where that number is coming from, because if this is a common perception, I want to blast that shit out of the water and teach y'all how to buy singles.

Edit: I just realized that $500 is *more* than $1 per card. You should be paying a few pennies for each card in a Pauper Cube, outside of some you might have to pay 25 cents or a couple dollars for.

dragonstout wrote: I'm genuinely curious where that number is coming from, because if this is a common perception, I want to blast that shit out of the water and teach y'all how to buy singles.

Magic school!

Pauper cube for $60, you say...

This is how crack addicts relapse, isnt it?

Also of note, if you don't mind some sketchy legality and arts and crafts time, you can proxy up a cube full of all sorts of insane stuff. I sure as shit ain't playing with any of the actual P9, but it's still real fun to get to play with them sometimes.