All games have some sort of original sin: the cards nobody has to think about. Sometimes it’s a pack one pick one that you windmill slam. Sometimes it’s the battlefield every deck registers on autopilot. Once a card picks itself, you’ve lost the decision, and the decision is what make’s these games fun. This week, two writers found that card in two very different places, and their fixes pull in opposite directions. The disagreement is the point, though.

As an aside: the best answer to the Riftbound battlefield problem this month came from a tournament rule, not a ban list. Merlion Games is running Team Trios at Breach Bay 2 with a rule that all nine battlefields across a match must be unique. The auto-pick can still show up, just only once, and after that everyone has to actually choose. Details below.

Let’s get into it.

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Drake Sasser was a featured guest at CubeCon, but dropped after three drafts. What most cube designers get wrong, and the principles that fix it.

By Drake Sasser

Welcome back readers! Today we are going to discuss why most cubes, especially yours, suck, how to go about fixing it, and how I applied some of these fixes to my own cube. For the uninitiated, cube is a large pool of Magic: the Gathering cards designed specifically to be drafted. Most are either 360 cards or 540 cards but I spend a lot of time these days working on 180 card cubes designed for fewer  players. You can find more information on the format on the fandom page here. Now let’s talk about why most of them suck.

Before we dive in though, I want to address how I discovered most cubes suck. In the harsh winter of 2023, I was invited to be a featured guest at CubeCon in the scenic town of Madison, WI. I jumped at the opportunity. I was only a couple years into the cube curation process myself and was very interested in the opportunity not just to draft more cubes, but to learn from others who were working on very different cubes and had more experience. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I waded through the first drafts and immediately realized a sobering truth: I had vastly overestimated how much these cubes were playtested by real players before being entered into CubeCon. After the third cube draft I literally couldn’t take it anymore and dropped from the event and sought people to playtest the stuff I was working on, which also sucked at the time for the record, and accepted that if I wanted to hone my skillset I was going to have to look elsewhere. So what went wrong? It turns out the cubes I played suffered from either or both of two main issues:

1. The Draft Was Hard To Parse
2. The Cube Archetypes Were Dissonant and Unbalanced

In general either one of these things can ruin the experience, but the cubes where both issues were present were so extreme, that it made me actively regret sitting down at the table to begin with. So let’s break down the issues and how to fix them.

This issue itself was a compound issue. The three primary questions a first time drafter is asking when drafting a new cube are

And each cube generally failed to yield answers on all these fronts. From fancy textless versions of cards that obfuscate what cards do and what colors they are, to picking obscure cards in large quantities unlikely to be recognized by any players at any level, the extra time it took to get your bearings about what cards were even in the pack slowed down the draft immensely and was a sobering reminder of the cost of bling in a cube. Once you had a hold on what the cards were, all too often there was no clear or evident architecture at play. Cards at wildly different power levels across the full 15 card packs led to instances where not only did you not know what to take, but you can’t even figure out what cards you want to wheel. This made it difficult to figure out what you were supposed to be drafting, much less finding your lane. Turns out it's extremely hard to find your lane when you can’t even see the road.

I don’t want to seem like I am advocating for making boring cubes, but it's important to give your cube a formal architecture that isn’t stretched so thin as to be basically nonexistent. Modern era draft formats are great things to cue off of when building a more generic cube. Generally there are 5-10 archetypes with clear signposts and then a pool of cards that are generically good across multiple archetypes. Make sure you aren’t accidentally tricking drafters into taking cards thinking there is support coming just to try and jam more variety into your cube. It's okay to just make multiple different cubes if you want a very large variety of gameplay. As for card readability, just make sure your cards do what they say and say what they do. Don’t play textless versions or mix languages when your cube has verbose cards in it. If there are complicated mechanics present, especially as a one off, try and get the version with reminder text. It makes your cube much more approachable and much less of a mental strain just to understand what's in the pack.

This issue was a little harder to discover as an issue to begin with. I think it is because even the most iconic cubes, like the MTGO Vintage Cube, suffer this problem in varying degrees, but it was much more exacerbated in unpowered cubes: there was no competition for cards because the deck archetypes were so dissonant. To make matters worse, when there is no shared interest in the card pool among lane-locked drafters, it actually makes the entire cube environment hard to balance. MTGO Vintage Cube again feels this strain as well, just ask all the green drafters for the last few years while blue decks continue to stomp everything. In the midst of CubeCon, I felt this frustration in extremes but couldn’t place the actual issue. It wasn't until later on where I had experimented extensively with cubes that had unbalanced colors or lacked colors that I realized a very fundamental truth for cube design.

This sounds like an obvious truth, but it certainly wasn’t for me or any of the other cube designers in the room. MTGO Vintage Cube has it in small doses through extremely powerful cards that any deck can play. For instance the Power 9 is in high demand, and all 8 drafters would likely pick a piece of the power 9 they opened enthusiastically, and some of the other bangers like Ancient Tomb and Library of Alexandria have a broader appeal in subsets of decks. From there it falls off dramatically, and while you do want it to fall off some that way you have a chance of wheeling the cards you need for your lane, I do think the more shared appeal there is, the more fun the draft is and the more stimulating and rewarding the drafting process is. As it stands, most cubes I play feel like 8-10 completely different decks shuffled together and presented to a table of 8 players to sort into their original forms. This feels like as much of a chore as it sounds, and the process of selecting the single cards in any given pack your deck actually wants no matter what your lane is extremely miserable.

The revelation about the emphasis of shared appeal actually helped answer a really difficult question I set out to answer at CubeCon about cube design too: why was designing a fun kindred cube so hard? After all, creature type specific decks are among the most popular and appealing in Magic’s most popular format, Commander, and are among my favorite decks to play as well. Why then was distilling the kindred experience into a cube so challenging to make fun and stimulating? As it turns out there isn’t exactly any shared appeal for Goblin King, Lord of Atlantis, or Supreme Phantom when I am drafting an Elves deck. Again, seems obvious, but took years of iteration for me to realize that there was an alternative at all. Doing the lords in small doses is still pretty good, having a card you can confidently wheel as any given tribe is important to the experience too, but you want to fill your cube with more cards like Gut, True Soul Zealot, Floodpits Drowner, and Spectral Adversary to give them more broad appeal cross-archetype, and allow your players to discover cool ways to play off-tribe cards to great effect they wouldn’t normally in any other environment.

I have found the more of these you include the better, and in general as low as 10-20% of your cube can be archetype specific cards and it will still feel like there are separately supported decks and archetypes, and your players will draft very different iterations of those decks each time based on their own preferences, evaluations, and experiences making for a much better time for them as players and a much more satisfying post-mortem discussion as a cube curator.

So if you are anything like 2023 me, where your cube is pretty fun but feels like it could be more fun, or feels like it is missing something, or your cube night suddenly stopped having enough to draft after a few weeks, it may be time to re-examine your cube through a different lens and make sure your draft is parseable and your supported archetypes have a healthy pool of cards. First make sure your cards do what the text on them says they do. Then if you can separate your cube into standalone decks with each card clearly fitting into a specific archetype, it is time to make some changes and give a large part of your cube a broader appeal. If you wanted to play a bunch of full fledged archetypes against each other go build duel decks instead, but if you pulled your group together to draft, make sure there are multiple cards in each pack for your drafters to think about taking for their deck. Thanks for reading and go fix your cube!

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Team Trios at Breach Bay 2: you, two teammates, three decks, $15,000 guaranteed. All three matches play at once — coach loud, win together.

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Arena's Greatest speeds the game up. Aspirant's Climb exists only to undo it. Why guaranteed access means the strongest battlefields crowd out everything else.

By Daniel Zidenberg

Battlefields in Riftbound are one of the best and most unique aspects of the game. Being able to change the rules of the match before the first card is even played gives every deck some interesting tools to differentiate itself. Few card games have access to such a unique mechanic, and in a perfect world battlefield selection is a great way to get a competitive edge.

It’s also one of the hardest aspects of the game to balance, as was made abundantly clear when nearly half of the Spiritforged bans were battlefields.

The challenge with battlefields is that they need to be impactful enough to justify being played, but weak enough that they aren’t immediately slotted into every deck. If they barely affect the game, they become blank deck slots that nobody considers. But because every player is guaranteed access to their battlefield every game, even a slightly overtuned effect quickly becomes format defining. There isn't any variance keeping these cards in check - by the rules of the game you’ll always have access to them. This kind of design has a very small margin of error every time a new battlefield enters the pool.

On one end of the spectrum are battlefields so conservatively designed that they're essentially unplayable. No one is going to complain about the presence of a battlefield like Trapping Grounds in the metagame. On the other hand you’ve got The Dreaming Tree, which didn't just influence games when it was legal - it warped the entire format around it and encouraged players to build decks just to exploit it.

Even after the bans, the format still has some clear outliers that are gradually pushing out most competing options. One in particular has been gaining even more traction lately, warping every game where it's involved.

The Arena's Greatest has become the default battlefield for almost every aggressive strategy when going first. You’re effectively skipping a full turn of the game, allowing decks to threaten a lethal push as early as turn five. Cutting off a full turn shrinks the number of games where the player going second can mount a comeback, reducing Arena’s Greatest games to a very limited set of viable play patterns.

As a result, games featuring Arena's Greatest tend to become heavily polarized. The successful decks are either the ones abusing the battlefield themselves or the ones specifically built to compensate for it. Some lists accomplish this through powerful stabilizing cards like Rengar - Trophy Hunter or Moonfall, but the most obvious answer to an oppressive battlefield is simply another battlefield.

That's where Aspirant's Climb enters the picture.

If Arena's Greatest is the premier battlefield for going first because it effectively speeds the game up by a turn, Aspirant's Climb does the opposite. Rather than creating a different style of game as it was originally intended to, it exists largely to undo the advantage created by Arena's Greatest.

This dynamic first appeared in the post-ban Spiritforged metagame. Decks like Draven and Irelia frequently adopted Aspirant's Climb when going second simply to neutralize the opponent's battlefield advantage. Instead of encouraging diverse gameplay, this locked pair reduces a very interesting aspect of the game to two “do-nothing” battlefields.

The main reason this pair of battlefields hasn't become the default is the continued presence of dedicated late-game strategies. Decks like LeBlanc, Lux Loop, and Dazzling Aurora are perfectly happy to see games slowed down, giving them more time to leverage their inevitability. Giving one of those strategies one extra turn is often the difference between winning and losing, so we aren’t yet in a metagame where Aspirant’s has become a staple like its aggressive counterpart. If those decks ever fall out of favor and the metagame becomes dominated by exclusively aggressive and midrange strategies, it's easy to imagine a format where decks are registering Arena's Greatest going first and Aspirant's Climb going second.

And that's the real issue.

The problem isn't necessarily that Arena's Greatest or Aspirant's Climb are individually overpowered. It's that the battlefield system rewards finding the single best option for each side of the coin. Because battlefields are guaranteed resources, the strongest ones naturally crowd out every alternative until the mechanic that was meant to create diversity instead reduces it.

Battlefields should encourage different ways to play Riftbound, not homogenize gameplay. If every competitive deck eventually converges on the same handful of battlefields, then one of Riftbound's most innovative mechanics risks becoming one of its least interesting.

The battlefield mechanic should remain a defining feature of Riftbound. But for that to happen, future battlefields need to be tailored to specific strategies with less raw power. Otherwise, every new release risks repeating the same cycle: either the battlefield is too weak to matter, or it's strong enough to become the only battlefield worth playing.

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