A Deep Dive on Disruption Density in Cube

After teasing it on their Centennial Retrospective, Andy and Anthony are revisiting the topic of one of their notable past episodes, number 31: Bread and Butter Breakdown. With some small revisions to his categorization system, Andy tallies up the density of disruptive cards in the current iteration of his Bun Magic Cube and compares them to the numbers from January of last year, with some surprising results. What starts as a nuts-and-bolts discussion of how the density and quality of disruption affects an environment turns into a reflection on how much Andy’s cube has changed in just 17 months and how much our biases about cards influences our assessment of their power level.

View cards mentioned in the episode, organized by how they are categorized in the Bun Magic Cube.

Check out the tables of the numbers discussed on this episode on our website.

Timestamps:

• 6:28 — Pack 1, pick 1 from the Bun Magic Cube
• 15:07 — Definitions of categories of disruptive cards: hard removal, conditional removal, soft removal, stack interaction, hand interaction, and grave hate
• 24:16 — How has the Bun Magic Cube’s disruptive suite changed since January of last year?
• 32:12 — What disruption has been cut from the Bun Magic Cube?
• 37:48 — What is the makeup of the targets for removal spells in the cube? What does the toughness and mana value distribution look like?
• 50:43 — Concluding thoughts

Discussed in this episode:

• The Members of the Band Of Montreal

Check us out on Twitch and YouTube for paper Cube gameplay.

You can find the hosts’ Cubes on Cube Cobra:

• Andy’s “Bun Magic” Cube
• Anthony’s “Regular” Cube

If you have a question for the show, or want us to do a pack 1, pick 1 from your cube, email us at [email protected]. Please include how you’d like to be credited, your pronouns, a link to your cube if relevant. You can also find both your hosts in the MTG Cube Talk Discord.

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Musical production by DJ James Nasty.