Building Better Set Cubes: Baldur’s Gate

“Magictating” is defined as getting into the zone with your Magic the Gathering collection--thinking, planning, organizing, reminiscing about past games, and imagining future games. It is a combination of hard thinking about the game and calm meditation, reveling in the joy it brings you.

I love to draft. I don’t draft competitively, but I do draft for fun all the time. It’s fun to win, but it’s also fun to try out new things with no real stakes to worry about. I find that not having ownership, points, rares, value, or other monetary incentives in your draft can release you to having even more fun. Sure, sure, there’s some fun in conquering the competition and taking the spoils, but that’s not what I’m here to discuss today. I’m far more interesting in sharing and proliferating the idea behind building a cube. I’ve written several times about building both a Commander/EDH Cube, and even building a Budget Commander Cube. Well, I’ve been assembling a new cube, and it isn’t original, but the organization behind it is. I’m here to discuss how you can build a Baldur’s Gate Set Cube and make it incredibly easy to access all of the joy and alleviate a ton of the headache behind preparing it for play each time. If building a reusable cube based on your favorite draft set is appealing to you, then you’ll want to hang around for the rest of what I have to say.

What is a Set Cube?

Vexing Puzzlebox - Volkan Baga

The idea behind a building a set cube is not mine, and there are tons of resources out there on how to go about building one. The basic concept is that, similar to a normal cube, you build a set of cards that you can shuffle up and draft over and over. A set cube is just like a normal cube in that way, but rather than having only a single copy of each card, it has multiple copies of uncommons and commons. This allows you to mimic a typical drafting experience. Typically, you include 2 of each uncommon and 4 of each common, and just single copies of those rares and mythics. This allows you to construct an adequate number of packs for a typical set, and thus you can seed each pack with one rare, three uncommons, and eleven commons. You end up with packs that represent the set at large, and also give you access to a typical drafting experience from your favorite set every single time you sit down with your friends. This is a pretty cool concept, and definitely one that is cost effective for those of you that think drafting is costly, or perhaps those that don’t have the money for building many different decks. Either way, this is cost efficient way to play lots and lots of magic with your friends. You’ll want to sleeve up about 250 basic lands along with the rest of your cube, but that’s dependent on your group. You’ll need fewer if it’s only four of you drafting together.

Why Build a Set Cube?

Inspired Tinkering - Craig J. Spearing

The simple answer is that you should build a set cube when you find a set you love to draft. Usually you find this out from drafting it multiple times. This usually gives you a great head start on building that set cube. My buddies and I drafted an awful lot of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate. We had a blast drafting it, and we even experimented with drafting Collector boosters (they dropped to a very low price point, and I figured it might be the only time we could even justify doing something like that—yes, it was ridiculous and fun). After we had drafted quite a few boxes we found we had more than enough commons and uncommons from the set just lying around. Additionally, I had a seriously large collection of rares and mythics from the set. Toss in trading with my buddies and I had a set cube collected in short order. This meant that we would always be able to draft this set, even when it was out of print and the prices were out of range for drafting it. Currently, you can probably still pick up boxes of Baldur’s Gate for cheaper than $100, which is cool, so you should probably buy one to see how much fun it really is. Anyway, eventually all sets become cost prohibitive for drafting, but a set cube lets you side-step that indefinitely. That’s a major reason to build one. Additionally, if you and your friends struggle to build decks that match up against each other, then cubing and drafting fixes all of those issues right away. The other thing that I love, love, love about cubing in general is that you get to play with cards that you might not otherwise play with. You might not want to build a monarch deck, or a dragon deck, or a control deck, but you can build one while drafting and try it all out with your buddies in real time. That’s just awesome sauce.

Actually Using Your Set Cube

Now, once you’ve built your set cube you might wonder about how to play it, and that’s where I’ve got the bad news. It takes work. You must separate your rares and mythics from the uncommons, and pile all your commons together separately as well. Then, you have to shuffle, shuffle, and shuffle again. Once you’ve got those piles all shuffled, then you can start seeding packs with the appropriate numbers of rares/mythics, uncommons, and commons. Now, normal sets are relatively easy to do this for. There’s not tons of cards within the sets themselves, so separating them isn’t a ton of work. However, Commander Sets are huge, and their packs are 20 cards rather than 15. Oh, and the packs themselves are seeded much differently from a normal 15 card pack. Each draft pack contains the following: 1 rare/mythic, 1 legendary creature (u/r/m), 1 legendary background (c,u,r), 1 traditional foil (c,u,r,m), 3 uncommons, 13 commons, 1 token/ad card. Now, this complicates things tremendously. Some people just shuffle it all together and embrace the variance. If you do that, then some packs might have 5 rares and no legends, others may have seven legends, and still other packs may have no rares and no legends. I can’t advocate doing that, but what I can advocate is a system that takes advantage of project booster fun.

What’s Project Booster fun? Well, in short, Project booster fun started way back in Eldraine. Did you know we’ll be going back to Eldraine in September? That’s going to be pretty cool, but I digress. Anyway, Eldraine kicked off the fancy card treatments and border treatments that have had a profoundly positive effect on the game for the average player. I’ve written about this before, but all the fancy foil treatments, showcases, and other editions have driven the prices of normal cards to lows that make Magic more affordable than ever. However, I’m here today to suggest you buy into a few of these fancy treatments.

Here’s why. My Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate set cube is actually really easy to tear down and separate at the end of each play session. The reason behind that is foil-etched, borderless, and showcase treatments. If you pick up all legendary creatures and backgrounds in foil-etched and none of the other cards in your cube are foil-etched, then separating those cards at the end of a draft is quick and easy.

Now, if you go ahead and purchase rares and mythics in borderless or showcase treatments then you can easily find those as well. Now, you can either separate out uncommons and commons from one another or simply embrace a little extra variance and shuffle them all together. Additionally, you could purchase uncommons in regular foil, and that will add yet another layer of organization to your set cube. I found this to be a fast and easy way to build my set cube. You can actually buy most of the cards from the entire set for not very much money. Additionally, you can pick up these treatments for cheaper than some of the regular treatments. I think this has something to do with how the Collector Boosters seeded packs, but basically, this gives you cheaper access to an easier to use set cube.

In short, I made it so that my foil etched or showcase cards were all my legendary creatures and backgrounds. This means that I can easily separate, shuffle, and seed packs with these. I’ll end up with leftovers, but that’s OK, because those leftovers will help to simulate that foil slot. Likewise, my borderless rares and mythics stand out and they’re super easy to separate and seed as well. Additionally, those extras find their way into the “foil slot” as well. I won’t get into the specifics of the math, but it does wind up being incredibly close to the actual rate when you shuffle up the extra rares, mythics, and legendary cards to help flesh out the 17 other cards the booster pack requires beyond those seeded rares and legends. As I said before, you could easily make you uncommons regular foils or a different treatment, depending on the set you’re building, and then you could easily seed those as well. I hope this approach has helped inspire some of you to build your own set cubes for Commander. While Baldur’s Gate is still pretty cheap to buy boxes, I’d recommend trying it out with your friends. If you find you enjoy it as much as we did, then why not build yourself a specialized Commander Set Cube to help add even more variety into your game nights? Heck, it’s not really so complicated to set up, tear down, or collect, so have fun.

Some people gave up on the idea of building a Commander set cube, but with all of these art treatments, the solution is just staring us in the face. I’ve been eyeing these spoilers from Commander Masters rather hungrily, because this seems like a set that could make a masterfully fun set cube. The variety of special treatments available also suggests that if this set is even half as good to draft as Wizards is touting, then building a set cube for it will be the holy grail of Commander Set Cubes. Sure, sure, it’s going to be expensive to build, but not nearly as expensive as you might think. Once the set releases, people will be buying, selling, and trading it like crazy. You snap up some cool editions and versions, and you can use the blueprint for my Baldur’s Gate set cube as a roadmap to building your own fully functional Commander Masters Set Cube. I’ll let you know what mine turns out like once I decide what editions I’ll be assigning each seeded section, but I assure you that the etched foil treatment will once again be doing some serious organization magic for me and my friends. Until your next set cube adventure, may the card treatments, your pack seeding, and the cards themselves be ever in your favor.