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This is the landing page for my cube project. It used to have a list of my cubes here, but it was hard to keep things in sync between here and CubeCobra, so that’s just the source of truth now. I still find CubeCobra’s organizational features for serial cube designers like me wanting, and I have some thoughts about the future of this site, but for now it’s mostly a placeholder while I figure things out.
General Philosophy
I have a tendency toward building 180-card cubes, half the size of traditional cube. They’re designed with 4 drafters in mind (as opposed to 8), so they tend to have smaller pack sizes (5x9 instead of 3x15). Mostly this is based on my local friend group—it’s a lot easier for me to get 4 people together regularly than 8.
While this was originally driven by practicality, I quickly found that I enjoyed the side effects of the 180-card form factor.
- It’s easy to design heavily-themed cubes around concepts that lack the depth required to make a 360-card cube work.
- A small cube is easier to store and transport. I can fit four of them in my favorite card case.
- A small cube is easier to shuffle and collate. I can relatively quickly sort any of my cubes into categories, shuffle the piles, and make packs from those piles. This has allowed me to create collation schemes that ensure (e.g.) there’s at least one card of each color per pack, or at least one land per pack, all without making the shuffling process into a chore.
- Since it’s so much easier to store and manage each individual cube, it’s reasonable to have more of them, and to create a wide variety of experiences with them. Some of them I think of as “evergreen”—I’d draft them any day! Some are more of an occasional treat: they’re shallower and probably wouldn’t stand up to many many drafts, but still fun if everyone’s in the mood for them.
Terminology
As I first started building these cubes, the common name for cubes of this form were “twoberts” (a reference to the design goal of creating an experience for 2 drafters, plus a more general term in the creator’s playgroup for cubes). I am… not a fan of this name. So both because of my dislike for the term and because my design goal was different (I’m aiming for 4 drafters, though 2 should still be fun), I wanted to coin a new term for what I’m doing. I settled on “slice” since I felt it evoked the idea of cutting out half a cube.
So all of my cubes are slices, but I’m the only one who uses that name, so I may chnage that if someone else comes along with something better that gains wider adoption.