Draft & Limited
A cube is a hand-built pool of cards that one person owns and everybody drafts, using the same rules as a booster draft. 360 cards is the standard size because that is exactly what eight players opening three 15-card packs will use. It costs nothing to run after it is built, and it never rotates.
A cube is a pile of cards that somebody chose. That is the whole idea, and it is why cube is the most varied format in Magic: the person who built it decided every card in it, so it can be a greatest-hits collection of the most powerful cards ever printed, or a deliberately gentle pool where nothing costs more than four mana, or every card from one plane, or a format where the only creatures are goblins.
Once it exists, drafting it costs nothing. No packs are opened, no product is bought and nothing rotates, which is why a cube is the most economical way for a group to keep drafting week after week. It is also the reason so many cubes get built and so few get finished: the cards come out of a collection that already exists, and the fun is in the tuning.
The procedure is a booster draft with the packs made at home. Shuffle the cube, deal three 15-card packs per player, and pass left, right, left, taking one card at a time. The deck you build is a 40-card Limited deck with 17 lands, exactly as it would be from a set.
What changes is how the picks feel. Every card in a cube was chosen for being good, so there are no filler commons to fall back on and no obviously correct pick in a weak pack. Removal is scarcer relative to the number of threats, the games are faster, and mana fixing is drafted much higher than it would be in a set, because a cube's best cards are spread across all five colors and the fixing is what lets you reach them.
This is where cube genuinely beats set draft. A four-player booster draft wastes packs and produces thin pools; a four-player cube draft just deals more cards. And there are formats built specifically for two players, which is something sealed product cannot offer at all.
Lay nine cards in a three by three grid. Players alternate taking an entire row or column, three cards at a time, then the remaining cards are discarded and a new grid is laid out. Fast, entirely open information, and the best two-player cube format for a first try.
Three face-down piles and a deck. On your turn you look at the first pile: take it, or add a card from the deck to it and move to the next. Take a pile or, if you decline all three, take the top card of the deck blind. Creates genuinely tense decisions and needs no setup beyond shuffling.
Packs are laid out face up and drafted one card at a time in a snake order, so everybody sees every pick. It removes the hidden information that makes normal drafting work and replaces it with something closer to a negotiation. Slow, and excellent with a group that knows the cube.
The least clever option and often the right one. Deal 15-card packs as usual and give each player four or five packs instead of three, so a small pod still ends up with a 45-card pool. The only thing you lose is the number of neighbors passing to you.
A first cube is a design exercise, not a shopping list, and the constraint that makes it work is deciding what the cube is for before deciding what is in it. Seven steps, in order.
Pick a size and stick to it. 360 for a first cube, because every card is opened in an eight-player draft and you learn immediately which of your choices are dead weight.
Decide the power ceiling before you pick a single card. An unpowered cube of strong constructed staples and a powered cube with the Power Nine in it are different games, and mixing the intent produces a cube where two decks are unbeatable.
Build it singleton. One copy of each card is the convention, and it is the convention because four-ofs collapse the variety that makes a cube worth redrafting.
Balance the colors by count, not by feel. Equal numbers of playables in each color, plus a gold section and a colorless section, or one color quietly becomes the correct choice every draft.
Fix the mana generously. A cube is more multicolor than any set, so dual lands and mana rocks are not a luxury section, they are what makes three-color decks castable.
Curve it low. The single most common first-cube mistake is filling it with exciting expensive cards and producing a format where nothing happens before turn five.
Cut after every draft. Note the cards nobody took and the cards that ended every game they appeared in, and change ten of them before the next night.
On power: a powered cube includes the Power Nine, the handful of cards from Magic's first year that are banned or restricted nearly everywhere, among them Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall . They are thrilling and they are also the reason a lot of first cubes are not fun, because a game decided on turn one by who opened what is not a draft format. Unpowered is the better first build, and a cube can always be powered later.
Nothing here needs to be right the first time. A cube is meant to be edited after every draft, which is the part people enjoy most and the reason a cube tends to outlive the collection it came from.
A cube gets drafted by the same group over and over, which makes it the one Limited format where results accumulate into something meaningful. Whether the aggressive decks are beating the slow ones, whether one color keeps winning, and whether the card you added last month is actually pulling its weight are all questions a single night cannot answer and a season answers easily.
TurnZero HQ tracks Draft alongside Commander and Standard, so a cube night logs like any other night and the record is still there when you are deciding what to cut. That is the feedback loop a cube owner otherwise has to run on memory.
A cube is a hand-picked pool of cards, owned by one person, that gets drafted like a set. Instead of opening sealed boosters you shuffle the cube and deal packs from it, and because the owner chose every card the format can be anything: all-powerful constructed staples, a single mechanic, one color pair, or a recreation of an old set.
360 is the standard starting size, because it is exactly what an eight-player draft consumes: eight players, three packs each, fifteen cards a pack. Every card gets opened, so nothing hides in the box and you find out quickly which of your picks are not pulling weight. 450 and 540 add variance for people who redraft the same cube often, and 720 is difficult to balance.
Exactly like a booster draft. Shuffle the cube, deal three 15-card packs to each player, and take one card at a time passing left, then right, then left. Build a deck of at least 40 cards with 17 basic lands, which are free and unlimited as in any Limited format. The only difference from a set draft is where the packs came from.
A cube that includes the Power Nine, the nine cards from Magic's earliest sets that are banned or restricted almost everywhere, among them Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall. Powered cubes play fast and swingy and are the classic high-power cube experience. An unpowered cube leaves them out and is usually the better first build, because the power cards warp every draft around whoever opens them.
Yes, and cube is better than set draft at it because you are not buying packs. Two players can use Grid draft or Winston draft, both of which are designed for exactly two. Four to six players can simply draft more packs each, so the pool still reaches the usual size. Rochester draft works at any size and shows every pick to everybody.
It is, and it is one of the more popular kinds. A Commander cube is built so that a drafted pool produces a Commander deck rather than a 40-card Limited deck, which means a heavy legendary creature section and a much higher land and ramp count. It is a house format rather than an official one, so the deck size and whether singleton applies are things the table agrees in advance.
Log every cube night and let the record decide what to cut.
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