In the last post I covered the general concept of the Doomtown Cube, explaining how to make drafting Doomtown possible using a combination of preset outfit starter packs and drafting from a pool of 300 cards – the cube itself. As well as the size of the cube, I also established how many cards will be in the outfit starter packs, and in aeach draft “pack”, as well as how many draft packs each player will open.
Note, if you don’t care to read all the waffle about how I designed the cube, you can head straight to the latest ruleset for the Doomtown Cube.
Having established that the cube needs to contain 300 cards and players will draft from a pool of 208 of these in any given draft, in this post I’m going to go into more detail about the actual composition of the cube itself.
Suit Distribution
Aesthetically I think you want to make the cube so that all suits are equally represented. On average, actions (clubs) and especially dudes (spades) tend to represent more than a quarter of your deck, while hearts (goods, spells and events) are typically quite far below 25%, so having an even split of suits in the Cube is not ideal in this respect
But, when you consider that each players outfit starter pack is going to mainly consist of dudes and could also contain one or two key actions, and there are spell slinging factions that significantly over-index on hearts compared to the norm, and therefore make up for the typical deck being low on them, I think it could balance out nicely.
So we will begin with a Cube of 75 dudes, 75 deeds, 75 actions and 75 “enhancement” cards made of a mixture of goods, contraptions, hexes, miracles and spirits.
Face Value Distribution
A Cube by its nature needs to contain a high power level and exciting cards. This should be the priority over a completely even distribution of face values (A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q and K). That being said, I want to try and get a reasonably even distribution. With 75 cards, the average count of each value in a suit would be 5.7. I’m going to abstract this to a general guideline of a minimum of 3 and maximum of 8 of each face value per suit.
♠︎ Dudes
My plan is that players will have a core collection of outfit specific dudes in their outfit starter packs, so the initial temptation is to make the 75 dudes in the cube all be “drifters” (non-aligned characters). However, on second thought I realised that including some outfit specific dudes in the cube too will add more interest and excitement to the draft and to deck building.
Firstly, it’s entirely possible for players to employ dudes from other outfits – paying a tax to do so based on the dudes influence. There could be a player drafting a deck that produces lots of ghost rock and would be more than happy to pick up some powerful off-faction dudes. Equally, there are probably some that are pretty cool and don’t have a huge influence making them cheaper off-faction inclusions.
Secondly, it seems a good chance to add a game within a game at the draft stage. Is the powerful Law Dog dude going around the table because nobody has ended up with the Law Dogs, or is the Law Dog drafter playing a clever bluff or simply gambling that he can pick it up last pick?
My instinct is to keep this light touch, perhaps around 20 of the 75 dudes being outfit specific. Divide that evenly between all the factions you have starter packs for. I’m provisionally aiming for 8 starter packs to ensure diversity, so I’m thinking each outfit has 3 of their dudes in the cube and that leaves 51 drifters (of course, we shall see if I actually have 8 outfits).
♣︎ Actions
This needs some thought with the types of actions available. My first thought is they could probably be classified into 6 groups:
- Movement & Positioning – Move your dudes, force enemy movement, or control shootout locations.
- Shootout Boosters – Improve your odds in shootouts. Higher hand ranks, targeted effects, or defensive tricks.
- Cheatin’ Resolutions – Punish opponents who cheat in shootouts. Often powerful and disruptive.
- Control & Disruption – Boot, unboot, send home, reduce influence or income, or cancel enemy plays.
- Economy & Draw – Gain ghost rock, draw cards, or improve card quality and flow.
- Utility & Tutoring – Search your deck, recycle cards, or enable specific combos and effects.
Most are useful to everyone but different decks will want to major in one or two of the types of effects and some are clearly more useful than others. My instinct is to go with something like 15 each of movement & positioning, shootout boosters, economy & draw and control & disruption, 10 for utility and 5 for cheatin’. As it will be harder to significantly stack your deck in draft than in constructed, I don’t anticipate a high demand for cheatin cards. We can make sure the 5 that are included are particularly powerful to make them worth considering.
♦︎ Deeds
Our starter packs cover us for the low income non-unique strikes and generic in town locations, our equivalent of Magic’s basic lands. That means the 75 deeds in the cube itself can largely or entirely be made up of all the cool and unique in town locations and whopping great mines.
Like actions, it is possible to classify the Deeds into groups. I imagine (and I’m trying to call on well over 20 year old memories now) they may broadly fall into “ghost rock generation”, “control points” and “utility” (doubtless with a load of cross over of course). Utility might well break down into more distinct categories – I’ll see when I dig out my Doomtown cards. to start with, I’ll aim for a roughly even split of whatever types I dig out anyway.
As with dudes, there is the chance to include a small number of deeds that particular factions really crave in the cube itself – bringing some tension and bluffing into the draft portion.
Of all suits, I think deeds will be the hardest for me personally to get 75 cards for. We’ll see if I actually have 75 unique ones at all. As such, I anticipate the classification of deeds by type to be largely irrelvant in my case – but you may have a larger Doomtown collection than me, in which case thinking about the types of deeds is probably a sensible step.
♥︎ Hearts (”Enhancements”)
Each of the spell types in Doomtown (Hexes, Miracles and Spirits) is used principally by one faction and a small number of off-faction and drifter dudes as well.
Goods are pretty universal but could obviously be subdivided further, in the same way as I did with actions. Potentially similar categories apply here. Horses for movement & control. Weapons for shootouts. Utility goods. And so on.
Going by memory again, I remember events being largely underwhelming and not very popular, outside of certain broken events that powered degenerate decks. That might be wrong, but my initial instinct is to make events similar in quantity to cheatin’ cards.
If your play group has a Collegium deck, then you’ll want to include their contraptions and devices in the mix as well. I don’t. So my Cube will probably be something like 25 Goods divided evenly between whatever categories I discover, 15 of each spell type, and 5 events.
Summary of Provisional Cube Structure
- ♠︎ 75 Dudes
- 24 x outfit specific (8 x 3)
- 51 x drifters
- ♦︎ 75 Deeds
- 25 x utility
- 25 x ghost rock generation
- 25 x control points
- ♣︎ 75 Actions
- 15 x movement & positioning actions
- 15 x shootout actions
- 15 x control & disruption actions
- 15 x economy and draw
- 10 x utility and tutoring
- 5 x cheatin’ actions
- ♥︎ 75 Enhancements
- 15 x hex spells
- 15 x miracles
- 15 x spirit spells
- 25 x goods
- 10 x shootout
- 5 x mobility
- 5 x control & disruption
- 5 x economy and draw
- 10 x utility
- 5 x events
Each suit has between 3 and 8 of each face value (A-K)
In the next post I will talk through my thought process on the construction of outfit starter packs.