Discuss our latest article on drafting here:
http://stimhack.com/cube-drafting-revisited/
Agree or disagree with some of our cuts? What would you do instead? Let us know!
Given the weakness of your economy in Cube decks, and how a deck that draws one critical economy card early like a Magnum Opus, Melange, or Kati Jones tends to do massively better than one that ends up clicking for credits all the time, I ahve been considering the following:
- All runner and corp identities are:
40 card deck. (No influence restriction).
Gain $1 at the start of each of your turns.
I feel that this would help the feel of the games and make it less swingy depending on whether you could first pick Opuses and then manage to draw them, or not. The games would feel a bit more normal.
Also, for the corp side, I worry about an abundance of 3/2 agendas, in an otherwise ‘weak’ deck format caused by the draft, and in decks that only require 18 agenda points.
Even if everyone first picks all the 3/2 agendas, there are a lot to go around.
Essentially, there are 17 agendas that are 3/2 in the cube, if all are included. Thats Just over 4 per person. If you include the five 2/1 agendas as additional very easy things to score, you get a scenario where the average player’s deck contains about 9-10 points of very easily scored agendas. Given that they probably wond distribute exactly evenly, you tend to end up with someone who has like 12-14 points of 3 or less difficulty agendas, who can do incredibly well simply by playing the ‘never advance’ guessing game.
As I have played some cube, I have felt that it might be improved by cutting more chaff cards, but also maybe some of the most broken agendas and stuff, and then providing players with ‘sets’ of core staple cards that they automatically have access to. For exmaple, things like Sure Gambles, Easy Marks, Hedge Funds and Priority Requisitions. Ideally these would be staple core set cards that a purchaser of several sets could have extras of.
Good points about the 3/2 point agendas. For me the fun of limited comes from playing with things you wouldn’t normally use… For our first cube I want to have some 1 of terrible cards like data hound and burke bugs. I’m just missing an ASIS pack, but I went and cut braintrust and 1 of each project agenda to go from 17 to 14 3/2s. After reading your analysis, this seemed like a good compromise. Will test next week.
That seems pretty reasonable. The best thing about the cube is that its 100% customizable. Low powered cubes can also be lots of fun.
Wow, cube was a huge success! During the last tournament I had a bunch of players drop after round 3. I set up a side event with the cube I had built for them to play for store credit $5 buy in 100% payout.
It was pretty crazy, they had a blast. I didn’t get to pay much attention, but I did see someone advancing a project beal using simone diego for a hilarious win.
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Very cool! Glad it worked out well.