As I wrote about in the introduction to the Doomtown Cube project, a combination of reminiscing about the past and a pretty intensive Magic drafting weekend had led me to think about the possibility of drafting Doomtown via a cube-like format (a draft format that uses a curated collection of cards as the pool of cards to draft from, rather than randomised booster packs).
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.
Once the idea struck me, I had a rather fevered afternoon and evening to think about whether it would be possible, research if anyone else had tried and what their results had been, and begin plotting how this could actually work for Doomtown. In the course of which, I think I may have the bones of something that will work, and also wrote several thousand words in the process.
This post covers the first part of the process – adapting the Magic Cube format for Doomtown and structuring the actual Cube itself.
What Are The Challenges?
The first thing I did is see if anyone else had had the same thought, and soon found a bit of discussion. One poster on Board Game Geek floated it in 2011 but appeared to be dissuaded by other users saying it couldn’t work. There were a couple of similar Reddit posts. Nothing that lasted more than a few messages and no reports of a finished and successful effort.
The key problem to overcome is that Doomtown in some ways is a much more structured game than Magic. In particular, players decks are built around distinct factions or “outfits”. For example, the Law Dogs are all about locking up goons and bandits, and gain control of the town (the ultimate aim of the game) by doing so. There are distinct characters or “dudes” that belong to the Law Dogs, two or three options for an outfit home (such as the Sheriffs Office), one of which they must use, and a handful of other cards which, while not being specific Law Dogs cards, are so closely associated with them that they may as well be – the town jail, for example.
In this sense, there is no equivalent to Magic’s sort of default deck archetypes that play on what colours always do – green ramp, red burn, black reanimate etc… and no possibility of combining factions together in different ways at will.
One of the discussions I’d read about landed on the possibility of players choosing a faction after drafting. To me, thats the wrong way around. In Doomtown, you absolutely need to know which faction you’re building around before building a deck.
Furthermore, you need to do more than just pick an outfit – you also need to guarantee access to a decent amount of the outfits dudes and other critical cards that make the outfit tick.
Neither of these is possible with a pure draft format so the solution is obvious and was possibly subconsciously inspired by one of the new Magic sets we were planning to draft – Tarkir Dragonstorm. In this Magic set there are five quite distinct factions. While not as linear as Doomtown’s, they’re so distinct and have such specific deck building needs that Wizards of the Coast changed how they ran sealed deck pre-releases for the set. Instead of players opening a pool of cards from 6 generic booster packs to build their decks, they opened 5 generic boosters and 1 special pre-release booster themed entirely around, and supporting deckbuilding for, a specific faction. This special booster basically gave your deck a faction direction that you’re wise not to ignore and guarantees you minimum support for it.
Adapting this into Doomtown Cube, I imagine a combination of sealed deck with a set of curated, predefined outfit cards you choose first, which I’m going to call the outfit starter packs, and then drafting from the cube itself, done with the benefit of knowing exactly which outfit you’re drafting and building for and what the viable strategies are for them.
I had what I thought was a viable concept, and turned my attention to thinking about how many cards and in what type of distributions a Doomtown Cube and supporting outfit starter packs need.
Thinking About Numbers
How many cards need to be in the cube? How many should be drafted by players? How many cards should those starter packs have?
Magic Cube, and Magic draft in general, is well established and very popular. They’ve probably got something right about all these mechanical aspects of the format, so I started thinking about it’s numbers first.
A magic cube has a variable number of cards, but the flagship Magic Online one has 540. Players draft 45 cards. In an 8 player draft, that means 360 cards, or 67% of the cube, form the draftable card pool that players actually pick cards from. From what I can gather, it’s generally supposed to be most of the cube because then regular players of it can learn how that particular cube works and how best to draft it, rewarding skill and practice. Other cubes are just 360 cards – so all cards are seen and drafted. I like the idea of a bit more replayability though.
So we know players draft 45 cards and in Magic they do this with a view to building a 40 card deck. They’re able to add unlimited basic land though – essentially the basic resource generating cards of the game – which is not part of the cube. A typical 40 card Magic deck has 17 lands and 23 cards, but some of those lands are special lands that are drafted as well. From watching plenty of cubes, I’d estimate about 27 drafted cards are used. So that means 60% of the 45 cards a player drafts actually make the cut. This is important because you want some challenge in deck building, and to allow room for some inevitable duff picks.
What’s the relevance of all these stats? Simply that we can apply the same % figures to Doomtown, working up from the Doomtown deck size, to achieve a draft format that has similar mechanical underpinnings and so more chance of working.
Doomtown Cube Mechanics
A Doomtown deck has 52 cards. Being an alternative wild west setting, the echo of a deck of playing cards is very deliberate and important to the feel of the game.
For the same reason, the number 13 is aesthetically pleasing – it being the number of each suit in a standard deck. As a result, I liked the idea of drafting from 13 card packs. This is quite close to Magic’s 14-15 card packs, but with a subtle Doomtown vibe.
Given 13 card packs, we can either open and draft 3 packs, yielding 49 drafted cards, or 4 packs yielding 52 drafted cards. Not only is 52 once again a nice resonant number, but when we think about the % of drafted cards that should make the cut, 52 also makes more sense. Here’s why.
If we draft 49 cards and expect 60% of them to make the cut, that means we only have 29 playable cards from the draft and need to top this up with 33 from our outfit starter pack to make a 52 card deck. You also don’t want to have to use every card from the starter pack – so that too ought to be subject to a similar % cut off. If 33 cards from a starter pack was 60% of the pack, the pack would need to be 55 cards. That’s a huge amount of cards to read and digest before even drafting, and it’s already bigger than a Doomtown deck on it’s own. In addition, I don’t think there are close to that many decent outfit cards for most outfits (certainly not in my collection) and the replayability of this version is extremely limited since well over half your cards are pre defined and don’t change from game to game.
How does it look like if we draft 52 cards instead? We will end up with 31 playable cards (assuming that 60% cutoff), leaving 21 required from a starter pack. That could make our starter pack a more reasonable ~30 cards.
This is much closer. But in the end, I still think it’s too high. The right sort of size for a starter pack feels like about 20 cards. To start with I am am prepared to push the cutoff point up towards 70-75% – that is, players will need to play about that proportion of what they draft. Thinking this through and playing with a spreadsheet, I’ve eventually settled on these mechanical underpinnings to start with:
- Starter Pack Size: 20
- Draft Packs: 4
- Draft Pack Size: 13
- Total Drafted Cards: 52
- Total Card Pool: 72
- Deck Size: 52
- % of Card Pool Used: 72%
If having to use 72% of your pool to build a deck proves unsatisfactory, then I will consider adding a 5th draft pack (though this extends the length of the draft to a potentially boredom inducing level, considering that the draft is already 1 pack and 7 cards longer than a Magic draft), reducing the deck size (though 52 is such a resonant number, I think would be a big shame) or increasing the size of the outfit starter packs a bit more (though I am very reluctant to do this as it will make the decks and games more similar from draft to draft).
Doomtown Cube Size
Lastly, let’s think about the ramifications of this on the size of the Doomtown Cube. I’m going to design this cube for an assumed four players – I don’t know more than that who would ever consider playing Doomtown, let alone in a weird format like this. Four players opening 52 cards means 208 cards will be in play in any given Doomtown Cube draft.
The total number of cards should be divisible by four (important for reasons I’ll come on to later) so I settled on a cube size of 300. That means a 69% of cards are in play in any given draft, very similar to Magic online’s 67%, and it divides neatly by 4 into 75.
In the next post, I will talk about how to structure those 300 cards among the available types of Doomtown cards.