One game that I play a lot of and have not discussed yet is Magic: The Gathering. I enjoy competitive play, generally Modern if in person or Timeless if on Arena, as well as casual play. However, I do not enjoy the format known as EDH or Commander, which is the primary form of casual play in the MTG community. Generally, for casual play my group turns to our cube, which we have been developing over the past decade or so. For those unitiated, a cube is effectively a custom and curated drafting set. We all enjoy the cube, we've catered it to have a power level and playstyles and strategies that we enjoy, however only a handful of us have any real input on its design. Over the past years, the playgroup has expanded and shifted, so I have been thinking about ways to include the newer players into the curation and design experience of cubing, and ways to allow their ideas and preferances more room in our play.
With this in mind, I came up with the format I call "Bring Your Own Cube" or BYOC - which probably exists in places already, I doubt that it is completely novel. The idea is to combine the cube drafting experience with the aspects of casual play leaning on personal preferances and pet cards and strategies. To play BYOC, each participant brings any 45 cards they want, with the exception of basic lands. All cards from all players are then shuffled together and fully randomized, and are then distributed into packs of 15 as per normal drafting and cubing. MY hope was that this would result in a fun and unique draft format which included the personal expression and taste aspects of commander, with the more balanced and enjoyable gameplay experience of cubing. This past weekend, I was finally able to get people together and host the first trial run.
My intent was to give some ideas, demonstrate to complete openness of the format, and hopefully not restrict peoples thoughts and ideas in any way. I think it went pretty decently, we had five players (including myself) and nobody used the same method for selecting their cards or had similar additions (although there was some overlap in individual cards). I will discuss my additions in a little more detail below, but of the other players we had one who added 45 of the cutest (art-wise) cards they possessed, one who went through some piles and chose essentially at random the cards they thought would be funniest (an unusable card which affected only commander creatures, for instance), one player who added only weird 1 mana artifacts and some cards that interacted with them, and one player who had brewed up a merfolk mill/lantern control deck so added all the necessary components for that as well as a handful of other cards to throw people off course.
For my addition, I gave myself the theme of creatureless MTG. I often like to say "The game is called Magic the Gathering, not Creatures the Gathering" as a method of complaining about modern heavily creature value focussed design of the game, so I decided to put my money where my mouth was and go for it. I decided to go balanced to demonstrate the full range of possibilities (as it exists), and ended on 6 cards in each colour, 1 card for each colour pair, and 5 colourless artifacts for my total of 45 cards. The entire set can be seen above. I included a few packages of cards to open up possibilities for people. I added my pet card Claws of Gix as well as ways to effectively use it, many of the cards being elements of a modern brew I made back in 2015 or so (which I may look at again for the 2015 Modern format) such as Demonic Pact, which is the only card that I added that has the word creature anywhere on it. I also added the card Spine of Ish Sah as a throwback to when it was the best removal spell in a dollar store repack draft some of us did about a decade ago, and noted that it combos with Claws to be 8 mana destroy a permanent and gain 1 life. Another package I included was Isochron Sceptre, I tried to make sure there were options for all colours to use it. I added Counterbalance as well as a couple support cards for it. And I also decided to make white a primary counterspell colour, and added two monowhite counterspells. There were also a light land destruction theme in Jund colours. Overall, my goal was to add interesting cards that enabled a variety of strategies that were not creature focussed, and I think I accomplished that fairly well.
I started the draft with some black removal spells, then picked up an Angels Grace planning to combo it with Isochron Sceptre and end up in Black White based control. However, by the end of pack one I noticed that there were very few white cards available, and ended up taking an assortment of Blue, Red, and Green options as well. In pack two I continued on with black control, but noted that the entire Claws of Gix sacrifice package was available, which I then decided to take after seeing the entirety of it wheel throughout multiple packs. This put me solidly in Blue Black, but I was also taking some Green and Black/Green cards (someone added a bunch of legendary BG saproling cards). I ended up in Blue Black control with most of the Claws of Gix sacrifice related cards, some good blue card selection, a number of black creatures that doubled as removal spells, and a single Hydroid Krasis that I could only cast using a couple mana fixing artifacts that I picked up. I also had a Fey of Wishes with Isochron Sceptre with Angels Grace and a few other options into my sideboard as targets.
My first opponent was playing Red Green beatdown with a significant top end. I lost a close first game, absolutely demolished in the second game using the Claws and Spine loop, and lost the third game to a Hazorets Undying Fury revealing a big haste creature and an extra turn spell in the last possible moment. My second match was against White Green aggro, where I won in two very long games, as the opponents deck managed to be very grindy for an aggro deck. My third match was against White Red equipment aggro - the deck I was most worried about - but I managed to win the first game by barely keeping myself alive by sacrificing thing with Claws, and won the second game by having a bunch of removal spells to get rid of the few creatures that could be equipped. My last match was against merfolk mill/lantern - the player who brought it just drafted the deck - and it was a completely onesided situation; I think it could be winnable, but the redundancy of adding multiples of key cards to the draft put too much strain on my limited control options.
I think everybody had a lot of fun, it was overall a good time and good drafting. We were all relatively happy with the selection and balance of cards, everybody had a functional deck and there were multiple strategies involved. The main concern I have going forwards is likelihood of drafting the cards one brought themselves. 10 of my 23 non-lands were cards I added to the pool, which seemed about where everyone was except for the merfolk mill player who only played 4 or 5 cards that they didn't bring themselves. There are a few ways to alleviate this, the simplest of which is increasing the player count, but this is easier said than done. Another option is to have a pre-draft discussion about what people brought. For the first one, I wanted people to keep their additions a secret and let it be a surprise while drafting, but I think the information imbalance of being able to plan your drafting around cards you know are in the pool might be a little problematic. Some sort of discussion of themes, packages, and and the like might be beneficial - however, this has the downside of reducing drafting excitement and memeing potential. We'll probably try it next time, to compare which method is more enjoyable.