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I had an oppertunity to get out and sling the cardboard this weekend and boy was it a good time.  I have been skeptical of the EDH Cube format since it's inception.  EDH being a format with rigerous deckbuilding requirements seemed like a bad fit to be paired with a limited format.  Happily I was wrong about that.  When built well a Cube can likely handle most building restrictions (depending on how many packs you have time to draft.  5-Color and 250-Magic seem like bad candidates).  Here is a link to the Cube List our playgroup used.

I started out expecting to draft heavy in green, since I believe, it is the best color in EDH.  I ended up with an early [card]Coiling Oracle[/card] and shortly thereafter was able to pick [card]Riku[/card] and [card]Momir Vig[/card].  I originally planned to play with Riku and drafted A LOT of creatures with enters-the-battlefield or death triggers/sac abilities, as well as some powerful spells.  After the drafting section we chose teams and were allowed to pass a few cards (3 I think) to each other for the deckbuilding process.   My group played with 45 life, 60 card decks (highlander OBV) and I ended up having far too many good cards!  This forced me away from Riku and ended up with a pretty sweet Vig deck that looked like this:

We got a 5th turn [card]Soul Foundry[/card] with a [card]Spore Frog[/card] imprinted on it, which kept my team alive far longer than it should have.  A [card]Painful Quandary[/card] and [card]Lightning Reaver[/card] (cloned in various ways a couple times) by another team cleaned up us first and the other team second rather quickly.  I sat on my first turn [card]Sol Ring[/card] and 2 lands for most of the game, and my teammate, Chris, didn't fare much better.  The random discard from his first turn [card]Gamble[/card] made him discard the planeswalker that was most of his early game plan and we quickly folded to attrition.

All-in-all, EDH cube is rather fun and it something I may try to put together myself.  The UN-Cube and my currently active EDH decks are taking up most of the cards I would need for now, but the format is certainly fun.  It gave me a good reason to play some of the fun cards I tend to avoid due to overuse in the EDH community and was an interesting building experience.  Removal seemed to be a little sparse for most of the colors that weren't black.  My deck seemed light on it, and the entire table couldn't get rid of ONE [card]Lightning Reaver[/card] which seemed like a balance problem.  

In the end, a great time was had by all, and my opinion of EDH Cube has changed.  So, until next time, if you are invited to give EDH cube a try I think you'll enjoy it.

We tried out Live Rotisserie Draft this last weekend and found out that while the format was EXTREMELY fun, it needed a little tweaking.  I will highlight the changes here, but they are all reflected on the Live Rotisserie Draft format page as well.  Also, there are some tips and tricks to making a good cardpool for this format that I will also purvey as well.

First, we found that choosing basic lands for the starting deck was far more fun than three copies of each color.  Forcing multi-color was no fun and it was interesting to change colors after play started, or to try and estimate what colors the others were choosing.  Also, with the new freebie rules for drafting basic land, we decided to speed up the pace at which you get business spells and put only 10 cards in the starting deck size.

Second, Paying 4 life for an additional buy did two things we did not like.  One, it sped up games, not letting us play any of the bombs we drafted.  And secondly, it made drafting multiple cards in the first few turns too easy.  We modified the rules to take a hint from EDH.  Players may draft one card per turn by paying its mana cost.   Players may draft additional cards for +2 colorless mana per additional card drafted.  (The first card you draft each turn, you pay the mana cost, the second mana cost +2, then mana cost +4...etc). 

Third, In order to make basic lands worth drafting if non-basics are in the draft pool, Players may draft one additional basic land each turn for no cost.  After that basic lands are drafted the same as other cards.  This not only helps make basics a useful draft choice, but makes switching to undrafted or under-drafted colors and strategies a viable choice.

With all that covered, I present the new and improved rules for:

Some notes on creating a card pool/Cube for this format.  Cards being exiled from the graveyard seems a bit too powerful.  A well times [card]Relic of Progenitus[/card] can reset the whole game for all players, potentially removing entire decks from the game with little ill effect to the controller.  Even [card]Path to Exile[/card] and [card]Swords to Plowshares[/card] removing cards from play slow decks down an amazing amount.  I left [card]Path to Exile[/card] in my cube due to there ALWAYS being a basic land you can fetch, and because [card]Darksteel Colossus[/card] was in our cube as well, but alot of the graveyard removal had to go. 

Which Brings me to our second tip for building; Combos - Good or Bad?  Personal preference aside, I find combos to actual not be as broken as they would appear to be in a format with such small decks.  Players often see the combo coming and can draft answers.  In the first game we played I drafted [card]Phyrexian Dreadnought[/card] and [card]Illusionary Mask[/card] in the first turn and had a dreadnaught out on turn 4-5 ish (the earliest you can play "Business" cards in turn 4 because drafted cards are put into your graveyard and you do not reshuffle for the first three turns under the old rules.)  Even if one of the other players had not drafted a [card]Path to Exile[/card] or some other removal spell in the first few turns, they could have drafted draw spells and removal to get rid of the Dreadnaught quickly.  Most combos can be seen coming from miles away and are thus easier to be prepared for.  I had multiple two-card combos in my cube and most of them never saw play. 
Other cards that are not combos that are a bit different in this format include graveyard recursion (which lets you play what you draft immediately) and a few other single cards.  We found [card]Sun Titan[/card] to be extremely powerful, as every turn you are guaranteed to get something for nothing.  Even if you draft a non-permanent, you can still also draft a land and get it into play during your combat step.  [card]Genesis Wave[/card] is overpowered in this format and should likely be banned.  Our Genesis Wave player had his entire deck on the board the first turn after a board wipe every turn for 5+ turns in a row.  With a constant resupply of permanents in the library, Genesis Wave always hits a ton of stuff, and what it does hit (more land) allows playing it in only 1-2 more turns for everything else in the library.  This also makes the small number of instants/sorceries that player has come up nearly every turn.

In order to give a try to the new Live Rotisserie Draft format that I threw together I needed a card pool.  I have always wanted to create a cube and have just never had the need for one.  We mostly play constructed formats (EDH and Casual Free-for-All if you must know) around here and I have to work a bit to get most of my gaming group to try anything new.  (We even lost a couple of players when we started playing EDH because they didnt want to build new decks.) 
I have yet to see a Cube with the intent of being awesome multiplayer cards.  They are generally meant for drafting and then being played in a duels-based tournament-like setting.  As some of you may know, I generally do not enjoy duels as much as multiplyer and I find that there is already plenty of infor for every duel format available on the web so I only occationally bother posting anything that involves less than 3 players.  Here, you will find the list of cards I have put into my Cube.  There is a much smaller number of gold and hybrid cards than normal because I am a bit nostalgic by nature and multicolored cards used to be a rarity before Invasion/Ravnica/Shadowmoor/Shards of Alara...you get my drift. 

I know it's hard to notice, but the title of this article is supposed to be to the tune of the theme song from "Smokey and the Bandit".  It sounds funny in my head, but in execution it turned out pretty stupid...ANYWAY.

Today, and for the next few days I want to talk about some Magic variants I have thrown together that were inspired by my new favorite game: Dominion.  If you have been reading the last couple of articles I have written, you know that time is a major factor in my gaming life.  Simply put, I barely have any.  With little time to play and even less time to deck build I have settled on playing Dominion more often than Magic because you build a deck as you play.  My goals was to transpose the greatest mechanic in the world from Dominion, into the greatest game in the world; Magic.

My first concotion that will be featured today I call:

It is a little farther removed from Dominion than some of my other ideas, but it seems like a lot of fun.  It gives you the oppertunity to build a deck while you play and uses elements of several awesome formats.  This weekend I plan on testing the format with my newly built Cube (the list therof I will be posting within the next few days as well.)
With this format I tried as hard as I could to distance Live Rotisserie Draft from Dominion, while keeping the elements of live deckbuilding that makes Dominion so much fun for those with little time to play and less time to build.