It is now over two years on from when I stared the homemade cube project and I am just about to get my fifth print run done. Previous runs have focused on fixing issues with the format and balance on the cards. This print run is aimed differently, it is aimed at fun! Certainly I have always been aiming for this goal but to start with I didn't know what it looked like or where to find it. I assumed if I made a cube that did the things I wanted it to and balanced it well then the fun would just magically be there, and yet seemingly there is not quite enough of it yet. I have done a bunch of experimenting with card design and a bunch of probing the problems in other ways and I now think I have a reasonable grasp of what "fun" is as it relates to magic. This has been the hardest part of the whole project as it was so unexpected and so hard to assess. There is no formula for fun, no way to calculate it and add or tweak accordingly.
Yes, we all find things differently fun and so there is no objective correct way to do it but it was clear that despite being very well balanced and achieving all my goals, that my homemade cube was simply less fun to play than my best legacy and vintage cube offerings. Different people found it differing in degrees of less fun, and I am sure they did so for their own unique reasons, but we all ultimately found it to be less fun and wanted to play it with lower frequency. I had thought I was nearing completion on the project but in reality there was much to do. It is all well and good having a functional balanced cube but if no one wants to play it then it is hard to call that a finished product. I have known it was less fun for some time but without knowing what fun was or how to produce it I had no real plan to resolve it. All I had was probing the concept and designing stuff to see if it promoted more fun.
I have now about 250 new and reworked cards done, designed and balanced pretty specifically with the various notions of what I now think should be conducive to the most fun! So what have I learned about the concept in all my probing I hear you ask? Firstly that there is fun to be had in three distinct ways in magic, or at least cube style magic, and each of those commands a different design approach to accommodate. The first of those is the draft and build element. This is where it is exciting to build towards payoff cards and then hit them. Where it is fun to push synergies and try and maximize them. And where it is really fun to find new ways to combine cards or ideas. There are creative things at play here, as well as gambling elements, all on top of your good old classic game play choices.
Then we have the gameplay side of things. Here we are looking for close interactive games but in some contrast to that we are also seeking pivotal moments, big swings, and story moments. Ideally we also want some degree of pacing going on. These are the aspects my cube failed on hardest. It did have big swings and story moments but they tended to be in epic games that lasted 45+ minutes rather than a 10 minute blast of a game. It lacked the density of good moments per unit of time played. I was also failing pretty hard on pivotal moments. It was all too incremental. You were trying to balance developing board without over extending, using and developing all your mana, lining up threats and answers, and managing your hand size. Turns out this chess style of incremental, methodical, and slow pacing is a bit of a turn off to most players. Games were good in a technical sense but there were not enough of them, and they were too much like hard work
It was easier to spot what wasn't fun than what was. It is also quite easy to solve the problem of things being a bit slow from a design perspective. It did however come with a healthy dose of irony. It meant power creeping my cube and making more polar and game ending top end and threat cards. This is something I have been complaining about wizards doing for years now and now the foot is on the other shoe.... It does mean at least that this side of the fix has had a head start on the others.
The last way in which I think people seem to have fun in magic is the individual cards themselves. This is pretty much a halfway point between the drafting and the gameplay elements and can be best summed up with the phrase "doing the thing". Cards do a thing and when you achieve that thing it is fun. The more novel and wild the thing the more fun it tends to be. The more you manage to push the thing that card does with other cards and synergies the more fun you milk from it too. This is part of why flip cards manage to be quite so fun despite being logistically a right pain in the arse in magic. They are some of the best cards at doing their thing. They have their own task or arc and a built in payoff. Sagas are also quite a fun win as they take you on a journey that gives the feeling of doing the thing.
Synergy is the best way of "doing the thing" as all your cards get to do their thing while also all empowering the other cards in the deck to do their thing better too. Now, synergy is great. In many ways it is the foundational concept of constructed magic. In limited formats it is very hard to get right. High synergy cards can easily be parasitic on a format and reduce consistency and option density and all that good stuff we worked so hard to bake into the homemade cube! You can make your synergy cards stand alone to stop them being parasitic, but then you have the problem of the synergy decks being way too good as their cards are individually fine but combine to be greater than the sum of their parts. It seems as if this isn't a terminal problem and can be somewhat navigated around with careful design and balance but it is certainly a longer harder process tuning the cards.
One of the big lessons I have learned regarding the adding of synergy cards is that it is best to be a little chaotic. It is all very tempting to take each colour pair and neatly assign them a synergy thing they do and then make cards for them. The problem here is that everyone just gets in their lanes and you wind up with a format of mildly varying preconstructed decks. It is a very stale draft format and quite a boring and narrow meta. The best synergies are ones that can have overlap with many of the other supported synergies, both in terms of colours and in terms of mechanics. This lets players combine way more working parts in way more clever ways. The chaos and cross pollination makes the draft and building portion of things a lot more fun and it helps to ensure the meta stays fresher for longer. On top of all this there is way more "doing the thing" happening in games and so many more happy customers. I have a life synergy rooted in white and a food synergy based in Golgari. These two mechanics do a pretty good job of blending colours and mechanics at the margins and allow for a far greater range of builds and combinations that include scalable synergies.
I have found that trying to be too rigid and balanced on the various synergy themes to be detrimental. They can vary in support, power, colours, and so forth. You do not need 8 or any specific number. More colours is better but mostly for overlap. I do tend to ground synergies in a parent colour or guild and then have more loose support and overlap in other colours. I tend to try and keep them within four colours but this is more for identity than anything else. It might get homogenous if everything was in all the colours but depending on the synergies, it might well be fine.
I have always likened cubes, their design and their resultant metagames to ecosystems. The best and most robust ecosystems are complex ones involving lots of lines, ensuring one issue with one species can't bring the whole thing down so easily. As Richard Garfield said, Magic isn't about individual cards, it is about the interaction between them. The more ways you can find for your cards to interact with other cards in interesting and beneficial ways, the healthier of a cube format you will have created. The key to getting the synergy cubes right is to ensure the links between cards are well spread out. Links that stay mostly within clusters, even with lots of them, will result in stale formats.
To conclude, a fun format is one rich in options when picking and building, that leads to close, punchy games, with pivotal and/or story moments. This is done in a number of ways. Ensuring my threats are a bit more capable of ending games in a timely manner, and have the appropriately increasing power as we move up the curve. Then I have tried to involve as much in the way of synergy and interaction between cards, themes and mechanics as possible. Lots of "things to do" and lots of different ways and tools to help do that thing.
It turned out it was pretty easy to make a more balanced format than any Wizards had offered. It is however proving a much taller task trying to make one that is also more fun. I fear the task will be rather longer than the first! I am looking forward to seeing how much I manage to shift the bar with this latest print run and where I manage to hit the mark best while aiming at this new target of "fun".
