This is a cube I've been working on. It's nearing completion, at which point I'm going to proxy the cards for play. I'm still open to suggestions about what should be added and/or cut. Like I wanted to include a number of alternate win cons but the more I think about the Gates, the more I think I should cut those and Maze's End.
I also think there should be more creatures in there, so I'm especially open to suggestions on those, and especially in the colors that are lacking. I want to support cascade as well but the cube doesn't do that currently.
Um... what else... I figure any "balance" this cube might have comes from the card pool being so big that you have a relatively small chance of seeing any given card in a draft and therefore often won't get all the pieces you need to build an ideal deck. Like the Power Nine only make up 2% of the cube and at 18 cards (two copies of everything) it's quite possible you won't see any of them in an eight man draft (and most of the time I'd be drafting with fewer people anyway).
But yeah, hit me up with comments and suggestions please! Playing this is going to be quite the experience and I want to tweak it before I go to print.
I made my first cube over the course of a month, laying out all the cards I had on a table, sometimes on the chair or for a short while even in the floor. I had rows and piles of various rarities and card types and mana costs. Things got easier as I narrowed my selection and get rid of stuff I knew wouldn't have a spot. But it's still quite a hassle to try to look at over three of four or even five hundred cards or more all at once. It's a huge mess! Somehow, I trudged through that and ended up with my first pauper singleton cube, which has a dear place in my heart. I'll always remember the process of creating it.
Sure, you might still need to search through your cube every so often (since finding Cube Tutor it's mostly been to remove something I've already decided didn't deserve a spot after removing it on Cube Tutor). And you might still end up with piles of cards on your kitchen table for weeks on end (I mean, who doesn't?). But if you do either of those things after using Cube Tutor, it's likely to be out of choice and not because it's absolutely the only way you can possibly get a decent look at your cube.
Cube Tutor's interface seemed fairly self explanatory to me, but I want to use this article to give you a crash course in its use so you can jump right into things. After creating an account, you'll start off with an empty cube. The first thing you'll want to do is fill that cube with a list of cards. You can do this by going to the Edit List tab and filling them in one at a time, or go all the way to the right, the Bulk Upload tab. From there it will ask you to choose a text file that contains your card list to upload. No matter which method you choose, after adding (removing cards via the Edit List tab) be sure to click save once so that list will actually update. Now use the View List tab to see how Cube Tutor has conveniently sorted all your cards by color and CMC! Hover over a specific card to get a pop-up image of the card.
The Blog tab is pretty simple. It tracks edits you make to the cube (I usually delete most of those) and allows you to make posts to tell the public abut your cube. Those posts can also function as reminders to you. The Draft tab lets you simulate a draft (using bots which learn to draft a little better as more drafts are done and they see which cards human drafters value) while Sealed gives you a bunch of booster packs to make a deck out of. Any decks you make can be saved (with unique names and notes) and you can look at all those decks through the Decks tab.
Visual Spoiler loads pics of all the cards (and can take awhile) while Sample Pack loads pics of only 15 random cards. I've never used the Forum tab; presumably it creates a post on the Cube Tutor forums relating specifically to that cube. I'm not totally sure but that's my assumption. This brings us to feature I use most on Cube Tutor aside from View List and Draft: Analysis.
Analysis is broken into six categories with handy visual charts: Color, Pimp, Rarity, Super Type, Curve, and Draft. Color, Rarity, and Super Type all show you what percentage of your cube is made of various different categories of cards. You can see how many creatures you have, how many cards are green, and what the ratio of common to uncommon to rare to mythic is. You can use the Edit List to determine which of your cards are “pimped;” that is, foil or from a specific release or language. The Curve charts show the mana curve of your cube by color. Finally, the Draft charts will show you how often a card has been chosen or passed in draft. This can be really useful in giving you an idea of which cards are bad for draft, but is only really useful if you can get a lot of drafts to give you decent numbers to look at.
Last of all, at the very top of the page is the My Account tab. You'll want to go here to create new cubes, rename your cubes, delete cubes, or reset cubes. I often find it easier to reset a cube as I'm constructing it and bulk upload my new list, than to go through and remove or add a bunch of cards one at a time.
Aside from Cube Tutor, there are a few other websites I find very helpful when creating a cube (or any deck). First and foremost is Gatherer, the official Magic card library. After that, MTGVault is my preferred webhost for magic decks (and you can export them as text files for uploading to Cube Tutor). Admittedly, other sites offer more, this is just a very simple site to use and since all I really want is easy card search and the exported text file, this does it for me. Finally, the program Cockatrice from Woogerworks allows you to create decks and play Magic online against others. It is not a Wizards of the Coast product and is not supported by Wizards. It also allows you to export decks as text files, which is useful for uploading the Cube Tutor. It is difficult to look at a cube with this program, but really easy to add or remove cards if you know their names. I typically make additions and subtractions in this program then export the list to upload to Cube Tutor, at least when I'm still in the process of making large changes to my cubes.
I hope this has been useful to you and that Cube Tutor will be a valuable resource to you. Are there any programs or websites that you find useful when working on a cube?
