So I have built a cube, but before delving into that, first some background.

After collecting all the asylum packs and expansions (plus an extra arkham and two more core sets) I had a complete set of cards and started to build more and more competitive decks. There was just one problem with this, I haven't heard of any events for the game less than a 3 hour flight away, my friends only play the game sporadically (though a lot of them like it) and it is really not an easy game to play at high levels. So I found myself mostly playing four-way multiplayer with the centacle rules and monofaction highlander decks. This is not a big problem to me, since I find it almost more interesting than the extremely fast matches with competitive decks which are often decided by one bad play, one good card and which none of my friends really enjoy since they just like to play the game for kicks once in a while.

So, enter the cube. After reading about how fun magic players had with cube drafting I wanted to construct something similar for Cthulhu. There are of course some differences between the games, mainly manabase (in that Cthulhu doesn't use lands) and the number of factions (magic only has five). This means that magic drafts will be able to use a smaller card pool to construct decks (since decks will be at least 1/3 land and probably more). It also means that Cthulhu drafts will be more challenging when it comes to constructing decks that doesn't suffer to much from multifaction resourcing.

This is my cubes construction and the solution to the problem. I haven't tested it out yet but will hopefully get the chance next week:

50 cards of each faction (singles only)

80 neutral cards (singles only, no descendant since I don't like it)

20 conspiracies (singles only, I just like them, especially in multiplayer centacle)

Draft exactly like a normal booster draft (15 random cards per booster), but with 4 boosters per player instead of three. Then build a deck with 40 cards minimum. This will give you 60 cards to choose from so even with the amount of factions in cthulhu you should be able to build a deck that is mostly two-faction (with an option for a third colour as splash) and some neutrals as fillers (since there is double the amount of neutrals counting the conspiracies).

So that is that. If I manage to test it out I will make a short report here and if you want to know anything more about the cube just ask here and I will answer as best I can.

Ah, cube-draft! That's a game variant I'd be very interested in for the Call of Cthulhu LCG!

How do you decide which cards go into the cube - is it going to be random?

How are you going to test it?

My idea was to set up a cube as a deck in Nyarlazobec's deck-builder then use its card drawing simulation to test if the resulting decks are playable.

While I enjoy playing highlander games, I think it would be nice if it was possible to also get multiple copies of cards for a cube-draft, but as mentioned above it will be difficult to decide on which to include.

In this first variant I have gone for variety, power and the possibility to at least theoretically play most strategies that are available. I have not included all the deck-thinning cards of yoggie, but the three most powerful ones are in there as a possible second strategy. The only power-card I did not include was the Descendant since it's so flawed and requires snow graves to combat effectively. Other than that I included all the power cards of each faction, some fun ones I wanted to see play and especially those that could be used for splash with other colours and be fun in multiplayer.

I will see how many people I get together. I don't aim for a full draft of 8 and then playing a 1v1 tourney but rather a 4 player draft followed by a centacle multiplayer.

Having multipels of certain cards can be a good way too balance a cube. From what I've read a lot of magic cubes include four copies of a allcolour manaland just to help with resourcing. This can't be done in cthulhu though. If I find something is missing I will probably mix in more copies of certain neutral cards to fix it, I was thinking of including multiple copies of ice-chute just to get more removal going and speeding up games. Since it is a support and not an event it just leads to analysis paralysis in multiplayer though so I opted not to. I might go with three each of feint, forgiveness and any other cheap, neutral combat tricks I can find if I think it is needed though.

interesting.. I have experimented with various draft rule ideas, but I find that the drafting process is not as dynamic as it is in other games due to the extremely tight faction balance in CoC. What I mean is there are what? 8 factions now, and neutrals. What this means is that you need a pretty large group of players to be able run a draft, as in over 8. Or your cube will simply split into factions. We tried a rule that the decks had to be tri-colour and that helped a bit. Like if you use cube'n rules like even card ratios amounts, as soon as the draft is running people notice that say Shub is open, and then all they need to do is grab every shub card... "drafting" doesn't even come into it, the entire draft turned into hate drafting rather than deck building.

Not to say that a draft is not a good idea for CoC, I would love to see a good draft system.. I am just unsure exactly how this could work.

In your draft who did you define the packs? As there are not common,uncommon,rares like in the original game anymore and power is subjective apart form some stupid powerful cards. I'm looking at you Decendant of Ebion... but still is there enough to make deep thinking in drafting packs?

So I have gotten two chances to try out my cube, one time with 4 players drafting 4 boosters of 15 cards and then playing a round of centacle-multiplayer. That worked brilliantly. Everyone had 2-faction-deckes except me (that could´'t decide and so played four factions) + neutrals. Actually one player just had something like 22 cthulhu cards and 18 neutrals, but it worked out. We got decent decks with a balanced number of power cards and some crazy combos going off (especially my hastur/agency/syndicate/miskatonic deck that you never really knew where you had). No-one got stuck for resources and everyone managed to play their factions as intended (cthulhu went for 5-2-1 and early ancient ones + kopesh, shub+syndicate just spawned and miskatonic got an investigate team of doom out after stalling with an early campaign chief).

I also tried drafting winchester with two players, whick did not work at all with 60 cards each, we had to play four colour and it was pretty bad decks. We trided with 100 cards each and got really good two-faction decks. Lots of fun making your deck and finding new strategies here.

After these two tries I have started to gravitate towards throwing in descendant again, there really is nothing like to overpowered in a cube. Part of the fun is trying to get as many power cards as you can. Magah birds cannot be thrown into a highlander concept but I think endless interrogation can have a place in the cube as well. I have also started thinking outside the box of finding a perfect number of boosters to draft for the cube, since it does not work in any way like magic due to the lack of lands and the number of fractions I think that instead one must set a number of boosters based on the number of players, since with few players the number of cards in total being drafted for a single faction is to small to make anything but four-faction decks.

So this is what I will try to be drafting when I try it out again:

2 players = 90 cards

3 players = 75 cards

4+ players = 60 cards

with 4+ players and four boosters of 15 you will not get single faction decks (unless you go with neutral as a faction, which can be silly fun and therefore must be encouraged). You will be able to build reasonable 2 faction + neutral decks but if you want to be able to cut the less than optimal cards that you drafted you will be forced to go with 3 factions.

Sounds great! I'd be really interested in your cube setup (as mentioned)...

What's Winchester, though?

I still do not understand how you force people to make drafting choices. Like unless you have 8 people playing the draft, wouldn't they just split into factions and simply take every card in their own facts, and leave the others that are not in their faction. If I am in a draft and I see yog cards getting passed, then I just grab all the yogs, if i see them getting picked, then I simple garb a diffrent faction.

I love drafting but I am just unsure how you in fact are planning to run this.. like what card mix do you put into each pack, how do you define common and rare? etc etc etc

jhaelen:

Thankes, I will try to get it up after updating it with the last pack of the current cycle. Since I will let it be and just play with it to try it out until the next cycle is done I should be able to get the cards written down here in the forums. WInchester is a 2-player draft-variant where you each split your cards in two stacks, reveal one card from each stack and then alternate taking one pile out of four and adding a card to each pile after each choice. It makes 2-player drafting quite fun actually.

booored:

The setup is 500 cards, 50 of each faction and 100 neutrals. No rares or commons since it is a cube (just the most powerful cards with no internatl order whatsoever (which is not nearly as broken in CoC as in Magic). WIth 60 cards per player and 4+ players you will have to go 2-faction (one player went with cthulhu and neutrals which was not nearly as good as cthulhu + another faction would have been) if you use all the cards you drafted from those factions and most of your neutrals. That will not make for an optimal deck, if you only want to use cards that are tournament worthy you will have to go with three factions. It worked really well with four players and 60 cards each.

Hatedrafting is easy, and you will not really know what your factions will be during the first pack since 8 factions makes it very hard to know what got picked out (there is a good chance that there never was a certain faction in a pack for example). Anyone who sees the Khopesh will get it, even if you have no cthulhu at all in your deck, so even if you get sent a lot of cthulhu you can't count on getting all those cards. So it is quite a challenge to draft a good deck, even though I think we weren't the best drafters when we tried it out. It produced fun choices and decks though, and that's the point of the cube.

Elochim said: