Quick Start to playing a Magic: The Gathering™
With an emphasis on playing a Khans of Tarkir Cube
With an emphasis on playing a Khans of Tarkir Cube
What the goal here?
If you’re here, you probably have told someone you are going to learn enough about MTG to play in a cube. MTG can be a very large game to learn, I’ve been playing since 1995 and I can boil down the steps to learn it today to as few as possible for you to have fun sooner.
I assume people reading this will be at different levels, you might need to skip ahead if you understand the concept of that section.
At the end of this, you should be ready to kick some ass against your friends in a gaming session with physical cards.
What’s MTG?
Magic: The Gathering™ is a collectible card game from 1994 that’s played all over the world and even in 2020 it is probably nearly at it’s peak in popularity. It’s got a paper and digital version (actually multiple digital versions)
What’s it cost?
It costs nothing to play the formats described here. You only pay if you want to do something else and go deeper. The upper limits there are very high, but don’t worry, this free version is more fun in my opinion.
What’s a “cube”? What’s it mean “to cube”?
A cube is a pre-compiled set of cards. To cube you construct packs to draft with.
But what’s “drafting”?
Drafting is a format of making playable MTG decks from packs of cards. I’ll go into more detail later about the process, but simply put there are 3 phases to playing in a draft.
Picking cards
Building your deck from those cards
Playing multiple rounds against different opponents
Sounds fun, how do I start?
I don’t know anything about playing Magic (2–3 hours?)
We’re going to start with the basic rules of Magic. In Magic, there are 10,000s of cards, but you don’t need to know them all. Magic is composed of sets of cards that come out a few times a year. There are core rules that are common to all sets and there are some rules that only are added by the cards of a set. So you only need to learn the core rules and the rules of the set you’re playing.
To learn the core rules, I recommend playing on https://magic.wizards.com/en/mtgarena which is a PC or MacOS app. (There is no phone app that is good yet.)
Play it until you get through the tutorials. They will give you a bunch of pre-constructed decks which you can adjust as well.
Note: There are other official digital versions of the game. They are either horribly out of date or super complicated and not new player friendly.
How do I build a draft deck?
Here’s the official instructions on how to draft your pool of cards to build your deck: https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/formats/booster-draft (2 minutes)
To do that, you’ll want to have some things in mind about the deck you are going to created. You will need at least 40 cards in your deck and usually exactly 40. You don’t have to draft basic lands, you get those after for free. For starters, you might want to try to create a deck with this proportion of cards.
Summary Basic Draft Deck Formula (40 cards total, usually 2 colors):
16 Creatures
7 Spells/Enchantment
17 Lands
It’s definitely ok to modify from this starting point to surprise and punish your opponent, but you need to be able to attack and block at all points in the game to survive typically. You will also want to make sure you have a good mana-curve, meaning that you can play cards each turn and not waste your turns.
You will want to try to keep these things in mind when drafting your pool of cards. Don’t worry if you make mistakes, it’s a whole skill to learn and master. Your second time will probably make more sense than the first.
Advanced reading on mana-curves: http://epicstream.com/features/Guide-How-to-Curve-And-Make-The-Perfect-Magic-the-Gathering-Draft-Deck
If you want an in-depth video about drafting, check out this summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUqPxSYPfrA (12 mins)
Learn about the cube you’ll be playing
Not strictly necessary, but it will give you a huge upper edge and make things go faster. You’ll get more wins this way.
This is a description of what’s in Myyk’s cube, in short, it’s the cards from Kahns of Tarkir: https://medium.com/@myyk/making-a-khans-of-tarkir-cube-d4452555b8df
Since it’s mostly just emulating retail packs, you can mostly just use strategies that were common when the set was played. Here’s some resources that should be pretty helpful. (There’s probably some jargon in there you may need to pick up. Feel free to ping me if you need some help understanding it.)
Kahns Of Tarkir (KTK) is a very weird set but also very fun! It focuses on 5 tribes (Kahns )which are 3 colors. So it’s very normal to see 3 colored draft decks unlike the usual 2. Also, it’s not unusual to see greedy ass 4 or 5 color decks full of unexpected bombs.
Also, after everyone gets more experience, we can modify things such as 2 rares per pack or stuff like that to make it different. Those would all modify some of the drafting strategies and keep it fresh.
Resources:
Special Rules for Set — https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/mechanics-khans-tarkir
Drafting Strategy — https://www.channelfireball.com/all-strategy/articles/frank-analysis-a-pick-order-list-for-khans-of-tarkir-draft/
All cards as list — http://www.mythicspoiler.com/ktk/
How to cube? (~3–4 hours)
Get 6+ people together and one person who owns a cube.
The person organizing will need some help from you to possibly shuffle the entire pool of cards.
The organizer will make packs from the pool of cards. In Myyk’s cube, each pack will probably contain 1 rare, 3 uncommons, and 11 commons.
You’ll sit in a circle and draft from 1 pack at a time. (30–45 mins)
After the last pack, you will have about 45 cards in front of you to choose about 23 to make a deck which you add 17 lands to from the land box. (30–45 mins)
Play some games and have fun, meet people! (30 mins to hours, up to you)
Before leaving, please separate the cards and return them to the pools. Turn all face up in same direction as their pool. Basic lands in their separate piles. Separate cards by rarities, try to shuffle into their piles. Ask if cube owner if unsure.
That’s all
I hope that was useful. If you have more tips or I missed something, please drop some suggestions in the comments.