Pokemon Cube Drafting - A New Way to Play

Hello everyone and happy new year to you all! Welcome to another article on a bit of a different topic than normal. Usually I’d be taking a look at recent results or looking ahead at the next set but there’s not been any big tournaments since my last article and Ultra Prism is still about a month away from being released (though if you are looking for a new card fix right about now, keep an eye on the Omnipoke YouTube channel for some new decks very soon).

So whilst we’re a little bit in limbo I’d like to talk about something some of you may not be too familiar with, the concept of cube drafting. I’d like to take a look at what a cube draft is, how you can get involved in cube drafting and maybe even some of the ideas and concepts we can take from cube drafting and apply to our play in the Standard format.

What is a cube draft?

Cube drafting is something that I’d only heard of about a year and a half ago at the last UK Nationals before the big tournament change last season. A cube draft is essentially an amped up pre-release style event in a drafting format. A huge pool of around 500 cards will be distributed into smaller random 10 cards packs for example given to each player who will then pick a single card from their pack and give the rest to their neighbour to take from the remaining cards. This continues until each of the cards in the pack has been taken and then everyone is given another pack and the process repeats. Eventually you end up with a large pool of your own personal cards to then construct a deck out of and then compete with the other players in the cube draft. The concept is simple enough but the real fun begins when starting to consider the cards within the cube draft, and adding special rules for your cube draft format.

Cube drafting is a fantastic way of getting to play with some of the more underpowered cards within a set that may normally be sent to the bulk pile. This also gets to showcase some of the older powerful cards against some of the newer cards creating some super fun interactions and gameplay. This past weekend I was able to play in a cube draft twice with 7 other players and each time everyone had a completely different deck as the cards you get in your packs are random meaning that everyone gets different picks. The cube I played in personally had some fan favourites such as Machamp and Empoleon along with some lesser seen Pokémon like Honchkrow and Pidgeot. The two decks I managed to draft were a Machamp deck that had both the BREAK and the Lv. X to top off a 5-4-4 Machamp line, and a Beedrill Gardevoir deck that could snipe the bench and heal every turn.

Variations between cubes

The fact that a 6 player cube will contain 500+ cards means that pretty much every cube will be different overall. This is brilliant not only for replayability but also for seeing some of these fantastic cards from throughout the years. What makes it even more fun however is then including special rules for designing and playing your specific cube.

One of the best rules of the cube we played this weekend was the singleton copy rule. This meant that every single card in the cube was different other than multiple copies of Double Colourless Energy and Rare Candy. This created some pretty weird evolution lines and some very creative situations that would not normally ever have existed such as Breaking a Lv. X Pokémon. Again this was another reason that more random cards that no one had seen before had made it into the draft and really built on the uniqueness factor.

Another important note is the obvious increased power level of cards through the past years and because of that, there were some slight changes to the ex rules. More recent “EXs” still had their usual penalty of giving up 2 prizes but the older “exs” from the Ruby and Sapphire era were treated as single prize Pokémon. This dealt with the fact that these Pokémon were much better in their prime but now seem much more lacklustre, and meant that people still picked these cards as they didn’t have the usual downsides.

Fan favourite Fossil Pokémon are often included in drafts as these are often some of the most interesting Pokémon printed.  However rather than having to play with various different fossil mechanics, there were rules in place that meant that the lower evolutions were in fact just basic Pokémon. This meant that the usual restoration rules weren’t stopping some of these cards seeing play even in this format. Rules like this make ever more interactions within the game.

Mutant drafts are another really interesting idea that mean you see even more crazier interactions along with many unexpected experiences. A mutant draft allows any Pokémon to evolve from a lower stage evolution of the same type. This for example could lead a Basic Pikachu evolving into a Stage 1 Electivire into a Stage 2 Luxray. This is a really cool way of fitting multiple different interesting stage 2 lines within your draft without making it really large and unlikely for people to draft them as everything evolves from everything.

Erratas of cards are another commonplace rule within cube drafts and these can be of cards themselves or specific rules within the game. The ex and Fossil rulings up above are examples of changing a rule within the game to make it more fun for people playing. A rule I plan on implementing in my own cube is an optional mulligan rule. This will mean people can choose to mulligan away their hand even if it contains a basic in order to try and get a better one at the sacrifice of giving your opponent an extra card each time you choose to do so. This means that hopefully there will be less games of just draw passing and more games where everyone sets up and tries to get their crazy strategies online! There is also the concept of erratas to cards that may normally be too strong to be in the draft overall such as changing attack costs or damage output.

A final twist on the cube drafting experience is having a reward system for your players, so the ‘winner’ of your cube draft gets to perhaps add in a specific card of their choosing or gets to errata an existing card within the draft, or even gets to invent a card exclusively just for the draft. This is another great way of making your draft unique whilst remembering each of the past winners of your draft at the same time!

Strategies

Since this was the first cube draft I had ever competed in, I wasn’t sure the best way to approach the drafting aspect of it. I have played in plenty of pre-releases in the past which of course help somewhat but the fact you must give your remains cards to the next person can mean you may have to pass up on certain very good cards in order to help your evolution line, despite them being very powerful.

An interesting strategy is the idea of denying people the good cards by taking lower evolutions of some of the stage 2 cards you see. This may dilute your own pool of useable cards but may also ruin other player’s strategies around the table at the same time. This is of course a risk as you never know what your opponents may already have in their own card pool but can be a really useful strategy if the other cards within your pack don’t benefit you too much either!

How to get involved

So what can you do to begin playing this fun format? I’m in the process or beginning to make my own cube at the moment to share with me and my friends when we are getting bored of standard so I want to share some of the things I’m doing to get started.

The first step was to decide which evolution lines that I wanted to play. I tried to pick some of the more obscure lines that had interesting effects but never quite saw the limelight in their own format. I’ve decided to take the singleton approach so the next step was to look for the individual cards within the lines. This has been the hardest part trying to keep everything at a similar power level. However, it’s also been great looking at all of the old cards and seeing what they did. Finally, it’s onto the trainers which again hasn’t been the easiest of jobs. However, the power level of the cube is feeling okay so far and I’m looking forward to trialling some of these cards in gameplay scenarios.

I’d love to have a full cube of the original cards as it would be great to have the original copies. However, the best approach for building a cube is printing out proxies of the older cards to save a lot of money, effort and time when building. The only other cards you’ll need at that point is energy cards and a bunch of sleeves to store them in!

The final step is to get playtesting. The best part about cube drafts is you don’t have to stick to the rules, and you can take out and put in different cards whenever you see fit. This is the best way to test the power level of your cube, seeing whether there are any cards that need erratas or maybe even removing completely. Keep playing your cube and changing it up to see how to make it as fun as possible.

What can we learn

By now you’re probably wondering what on Earth this has to do with your next League Cup and why you’ve read up to this far and honestly there aren’t too many ideas that translate over on the whole as you’re never really going to be exposed to a singleton type event where running a 5-4-3 Swampert line that does 4 for 100 damage is the best you can do. However, there are two key concepts that are really important in cube drafting that I think are often overlooked in competitive play.

The first is resource management which is key in a cube draft style format as there’s only 1 of every card in the draft. This means you’ve got to be super careful wasting resources early that you may need later on in the game such as Pokémon search or gust effects. This also makes Once per turn search effects premium as they up your consistency hugely. Translating this to standard isn’t completely the same as you will often play multiple of the important cards in your deck so this takes some of the pressure off of managing your resources overall but it’s still a super important thing to keep in mind whilst Sycamore is the best draw supporter we have. Knowing exactly whether to N your last Guzma back into your deck or to dig a little bit further with a Sycamore can be game changing. Of course there is never a guaranteed right answer as you never know exactly what your will draw with either option but being able to weigh up things like that is very useful for working out how you’re going to close out a game and is amplified even further in a singleton cube format. It is also useful for working out the amount of options your opponent has left in order to try and prevent them winning the game overall.

Something that goes hand in hand with this is prize checking out in order to keep an eye on what resources you don’t have immediate access to and the odds of certain cards being drawn when you take a knockout. Again in a singleton format prizes can be literally game changing and this again is important for working out whether you need to take some prizes before having access to Guzma again for example.

Finally, being adaptable to your opponent’s game plan is of course again amplified in terms of a format where you have no idea what any of the cards do but can help when your opponent springs a surprise tech on you that you’re unsure how to react to. This weekend I think I read upwards of 100 new cards that I had never seen before and had to think about how best to deal with said card and I think this is a really important skill to have in any format, whether new cards are being played for the first time or if the format is property figured out like today’s and people begin to get creative with tech cards. Being able to see what your opponent is building towards game plan wise and reacting appropriately is super useful as it can deny opponents the potentially only outs they may have to winning the game.

Thanks for reading this week’s article, hopefully it has given a bit of an insight into another fun way to play Pokémon and is something you’ll try out for yourselves. And if not hopefully some of the ideas I talked about at the end of the article will be things you can help improve on in your own gameplay. Make sure to stay tuned into the Omnipoke YouTube channel for plenty of new decks and updates ready for the new set coming soon!