Pokémon Build & Battle Cube - Part 1
So if any of you have been following me for a while, either here or on Twitter, you know I love to draft Magic the Gathering. You probably also know my fondness of other card games, like Force of Will. But today, I want to talk about the game not built to draft, Pokémon. Pokémon is built for sealed or constructed, and I should just accept that, right?
WRONG.
Pokémon can be drafted. Mark my words. It can even be cubed.
So, if you're not familiar with MtG or FoW, what is a draft? What is a cube? Allow me to explain.
A draft is a limited format, similar to sealed. You are given a number of packs (typically three or four) and sit with anywhere from four to twelve other players.
First, open your first pack. Look at all the cards. Feel them. Smell them. If this game has a guaranteed slot, take that out (like a land in MtG or an Energy in Pokemon). Then pick the card you want to keep from the pack. Pass the pack to your left. Then take the pack from the player to your right when they have made a selection. You now pick a card from their remainder. These packs will circle the table until the packs run out. Then open the next pack and go the other direction. Continue until all the packs are used up, and you have a nice stack of cards, most of which will be in one or two attributes.
Now we run into our first problem. Magic has five main colors to pick from. That means if you're aiming at being in two colors, you have ten combos to pick from. If Colorless or Snow are here, typically one pair will be meant to hang out with them, like the extra kid in a group project.
FoW is the same way - it has five attributes to pick from. These being Fire, Water, Wind, Darkness and Light. Time and Moon are like Colorless and Snow above, they just show up and hang out with another pair.
Of course, Colorless energy in Pokémon is like Generic is Magic or Void in FoW, in that it plays with all of them, and Dragon is always a combo. So we have 9.
9 energies means you don't have 10 combos. You have 36. That's a lot to keep track of in a draft. How can you pick between 36 things? Even if you're like "Oh, I'm totally playing Psychic" that's still only dropping you to 8 options. Meanwhile, if I was in Magic and said "I'm totally playing Blue" I'm down to 4. It's literally twice as hard to draft Pokemon without help.
Enter the Build and Battle format.
This was a format introduced in 2019, if I recall, but from what I could find, they only made four premade packs.
The idea is simple - you have three types of packs.
Theme Packs are all one Energy, and you get two of these. This tells you what to take in a draft. Each theme is 9 cards, 7 Pokemon and 2 Trainers or Items.
Trainer Packs have four cards from a pool of four, but you might have duplicates. So either 2-2 or 2-1-1 or 1-1-1-1 of four generally useful trainer cards.
Draft Packs are your standard 10 card Pokemon booster. You get four of these.
So let's duplicate that for a cube!
But what's a cube?
A cube is a curated set of cards so you and your friends can draft repeatedly. Think of it as turning a TCG into a Deck-Building Game with friends!
So what if we made our own themes packs and card pool and trainer pool, and made a way for us to play Build & Battle with our friends repeatedly?
That's a project I already started. And here's what we're looking at.
This is a theme pack I call "Legitimate Business"
Start with two Hidden Fates Eevee
Add a Majestic Dawn Umbreon
And finally an Acrobike and a Billowing Smoke
And each pack will have an A and a B. The B pack is only these 9 cards. The A pack has an extra card in it. In this case
This would be one of your two packs for theme - so you know you want to pick up more Dark cards.
I'm excited for this project, and I hope you all can join me on the designs I make for it!
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
germansingergirl
dededos
romaincrisis