Inaugural Draft: The Pauper Constructed Cube

A few weeks ago, I and four other friends took my Pauper Constructed Cube for its first spin. But wait, what’s a “constructed cube”?

The Cube

• Pauper: well, kinda. I’m stretching that definition a little. All of the cards in this cube have at some point or other been printed at common in paper or on MTGO. Some of them are banned in pauper, and a few have never been legal at all.

  The card pool is also focused around the decks I enjoyed playing back in 2017-2019, especially before Blue Monday. There’s some newer cards and support for newer decks (You can build Golgari Gardens or Basking Broodscale combo), and for some older decks (primarily Storm and Faeries), but this is really a love letter to pauper as it was when I played it most.

• Constructed: here’s the weird part. Instead of drafting cards and building a 40-card deck, players draft playsets and build a 60-card deck and 15-card sideboard.

The cube consists of 360 four-card packets, for a total of 1,440 individual cards.

The cards are sleeved in Dragon Shield mattes¹, and the packets are contained in Ultra-Pro thick sleeves². I wanted to be able to draft the packets directly, rather than draft single copies of cards and ask my players to fish through a big box to get the rest. That does mean that a “booster pack” is 60 cards, so they needed some kind of cube shell to make it easier to pass them around the table. Fortunately, Ultra-Pro makes just the thing: inexpensive deck boxes!

Almost every packet is a playset of a single card, but 40 of them are mixed packets that contain a variety of cards.

Each mixed packet has a little helper card in front that shows its contents, along with a descriptive name so that hopefully you don’t have to flip through the packet mid-draft. Sometimes the mixed packets are a toolbox of cards for the same deck that you wouldn’t want a full playset of, sometimes they’re a group of sideboard cards or utility lands, and sometimes they’re a way to make it not impossible to draft Tron.

The Draft

With everything set up, it was time to draft! I made a Google form for folks to submit decklists and photos (and to collect some feedback about the cube and the logistics). Every seat got a card with QR codes pointing to the cube list and the submission form.

We ended up with 5 drafters. In an ideal world, the players will see as much of the cube as possible, so we drafted 4 packs each, stopping at 11 picks out of each pack. That gave us each 44 picks, but it left 4 undrafted packs. We made a late decision to divide them up among us and draft a fifth pack of 12, again stopping after 11 picks. Not ideal, but I’ll have ot give some thought to other possible pack structures with 5 players.

In any case, we ended up with 55 picks each, more than enough to build some decks from.

The Decks

• Seat 1
• Seat 2
• Seat 3
• Seat 4
• Seat 5

Seat 1: Waffleosophy’s Izzet High Tide

Decklist: Moxfield

This is one of the decks I was most worried about, power level-wise, when building the cube. I was happy that it came together but didn’t feel unbeatable. In its authors words:

Was able to collect enough strong options to do a variety of decks, had the full shell for a burn-based storm list with Firebrand Archer and Thermo-Alchemist as a gameplan, but ultimately was happier going a creature-light route (which ended up being better again the removal-heavy decklists). Good baseline with a nice amount of variety to how the deck could be assembled and needed multiple rounds of iteration to get it to an end state I was mostly happy with, although still has room to improve. Was satisfied with the deck’s ability to get to a big goblin end board that was able to end games and was happy to hate draft a decent amount of the red mass burn to have in my own sideboard with Tolarian Terror pressure as a great backup plan. Somewhat linear in its goals but the key points of interaction in Fire//Ice and Daze were excellent. Also was surprised by how strong Wrenn's Resolve ended up being, was enough of an over performer that I moved it to a 4-of by the final decklist.

Seat 2: Ambassador Laquatus’s Sneaky Delver

Decklist: Moxfield

Delver is alive and well! This particular build struggled against the MBC removal pile, but otherwise mostly did the thing.

Seat 3: 1337pete’s Elves!

Decklist: Moxfield

A pretty classic monogreen elves list! The biggest tragedy here is that I stole Pete’s Birchlore Rangers —I’d seen the start of a string Elves deck go by me in pack 1, so I grabbed it in case they wheeled. But here’s Pete on his deck:

I saw a few elves payoffs early in pack one, and felt confident going all in when some roleplayers tabled. I did have a fair amount of black removal/grindy cards in the pool, but decided to just maximizing the mono green elves plan for my 60. The tap abilities of Timberwatch, Titania, and Wellwisher (with the option to double activate through Quirion Ranger ) generate cray numbers the other decks can’t achieve. I played the Snakeskin Veils to protect my lynchpin creatures, but it didn’t make a difference against MBC’s onslaught of removal. In the other match-ups, victory came from either a higher caliber of early aggression thanks to Timberwatch, or from overwhelming forces in the late game with Sprout Swarm , Stampede, and Huntmaster.

My sideboard was kind of a miss against what I expected the other decks to be (ie: Thermokarst for Tron), and if I were to reimagine it, I would try to find more tools for the MBC matchup (ie: removal for Witches, more Spidersilk Armors).

Seat 4: Andrew R’s Mono Black Control

Decklist: Moxfield

I’ll hand this one over to Andrew:

This was very similar to MBC lists back in the day, minus Gary and with some removal switched out. Gary is a big loss, but a removal pile full of 2-for-1s and a Monarch card is very good. It’s also easy to draft with lots of replaceable stuff. It was also nostalgic — I used to play MBC in Pauper Leagues on MTGO a lot, so I had a blast. My pool was a bit of a mess overall besides this, because I was trying to have outs to be Ratlock or Ephemerate if I missed out on getting enough black cards to be MBC, and I had some of those pieces but not enough fixing or power to justify those decks. Overall, seems like a menace in the cube, no notes.

Seat 5: SconeforgeMystic’s Caw-Gates on Acid

Decklist: Moxfield

This one went a little off the rails. I tried to draft turbofog, speculated a bit on Ephemerate or maybe Esper Familiars, but never got the pieces for any of those with two other blue players and an MBC player. But in the second half of the draft I found a Basilisk Gate and Squadron Hawk and pivoted in this direction. I won no matches, but I took a few games here and there—giving a random flier +6/+6ish can certainly end a game. I think if I’d managed to pick up any of Journey to Nowhere , Kor Skyfisher , The Modern Age , or any cantrips, the deck might’ve been more successful.

But the real success story here is that even though my deck was bad, it still felt like a “real” constructed deck. Like when you try out a new brew, bring it to pauper night at your LGS, and get end with a losing record because it didn’t match up well against your local meta. The games were mostly close games, with real decision points.

The Lessons

Building a sideboard felt like guesswork. Having a limited sideboard is necessary with a pool of ~180 cards, but building one poses some unique challenges here. There’s so many more picks in the draft than will end up in your opponents' decks, and so much more speculative picks in general, that there’s less of an ability to predict what your opponents will be doing than in a classic draft. And if you don’t know what you’ll be facing, how do you pare down your sideboard? In this draft, almost everyone spent some sideboard slots on artifact hate, but there were no artifact decks.

I don’t have a perfect solution to this at the moment, but after the draft we did talk a little about possibly expanding the sideboards to 20, or even 25, cards. We also thought about building decks in two phases: lock in main decks, then go around the table introducing our decks and what they’re looking to do (in a more competitive environment, having open maindeck lists), then building sideboards afterward.

When drafting a linear deck, there’s a lot of meaningless picks. Assuming your deck is mostly 4-ofs, you’ll use maybe 9-12 of your nonland picks, out of a total of ~44. It’s even more pronounced if you’re drafting a monocolor deck, where you won’t be picking as many lands either. I think it’s important that there be linear options (like elves or mono-red aggro) in the cube—those decks exist in “real” pauper, and they provide a foothold for drafters who are new to this cube.

One idea we discussed that could address both is changing the deck-building rules: perhaps, instead of building a sideboard at all, each player should build two 60-card decks. In order to win a match, they’d have to win with both decks. Or, to put it another way, once you win with a deck, you set it aside for the rest of the match. My guess is this approach will work better at lower player counts, so maybe it’s the answer for 4-5 seats, and we go with large sideboards for 6-8. Certainly something to experiment with.

The logistics weren’t as challenging as I’d feared. Drafting this cube does require some prep work³, but packing the cube away afterward was surprisingly easy if everyone sorts their own pools. I was worried that it’d be hard to manage this many cards with the weird collation I’ve got going on and that we’d only draft this cube maybe once or twice a year, or only as a rotisserie draft, but I could see this being a more frequent thing if we can get some more people involved.

All that said, I don’t think this is a weeknight draft. It really wants to be a weekend afternoon thing. And even though it won’t be relegated to only rotisserie drafting, I do still want to do a roto of it soon.

The Conclusion

Okay, I’ve spilled a lot of ink over this, but I think it’s a cool and unique way to engage with the game, and there’s a ton of space to explore in terms of ways to play with this set of cards: roto drafts, alternate deck building rules. I’m excited to see how it evolves!