Emergent Cube Design by Example

Andy and Anthony talk through emergent cube design by example. Starting with a listener submitted card — Trade Routes — they explore ways to create a context where the card is a role player. Moving beyond direct synergies, they demonstrate how they’d use on card as a seed crystal to generate ideas for a mechanically coherent Cube.

⁠View all cards mentioned in the episode →⁠

Discussed in this episode:

• Scryfall search "fo:/whenever.*you.*discard/"
• Our article about using Scryfall
• Our article about regular expressions
• BoshNRoll YouTube Channel Sharkstill Decks
• Tolarian Community College Cube Video
• Ship of Theseus

Timestamps

0:00 - Introduction

1:18 - Episode Overview

6:29 - Step 0: Look for redundancy

8:35 - Step 1: Identify Cards with First Order Synergy

24:47 - Step 2: Identify Cards with Second Order Synergy and Emergent Themes

36:01 - Step 3: Look for natural answers to your emergent themes

40:33 - Step 4: Look at the bigger picture: What does aggro look like? What does interaction look like? What does fixing look like?

47:15 - Conclusion

Cubes Mentioned

• The Turbo Cube

Check us out on Twitch and YouTube for paper Cube gameplay.

You can find the hosts’ Cubes on Cube Cobra:

• Andy’s “Bun Magic” Cube
• Anthony’s “Regular” Cube

If want us to do a pack 1, pick 1 from your cube submit it on our website. Send in questions to the show at [email protected]. You can also find both your hosts in the MTG Cube Talk Discord.

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Musical production by DJ James Nasty.