Pokémon Trading Card Game - Cube Format

Hi all. Today I'm going to be having a look at what has become my preferred way of playing the Pokémon  Trading Card Game.

I've been a Pokémon TCG player since the very beginning (In the UK at least). The game was first released in the UK whilst I was in year 6 of primary school, so it was great to go down the corner shop after school to buy a pack of cards in search of that elusive Charizard or Chansey (that remained elusive).

Fast forward 20 years or so and I can now walk into the local game store and buy a whole box of boosters at once, or even buy single cards online. However it's sometimes very difficult to keep up to date with the latest release, meta and top decks and I can be very difficult trying to think of a deck idea when you may only play once or twice a month.

The solution? A cube of course!

Cubes are mostly known from the Magic The Gathering card game, however more and more Pokémon cubes seem to be popping up on the internet.

A cube is basically a custom built booster box that players each take a pack from and then draft cards from. Each player selects a single card from their pack before passing it to the next player. Once the last cars of the pack has been locked each player selects another booster and does the same thing again, until all of the cards in the cube have been drafted by the players.

Each player then builds a 40 card deck, with basic energy allowed to be added to the deck from outside the cube. A mini tournament is then generally held with 4 prize games. This is usually a round robin tournament and is very casual.

The advantage of a cube as opposed to the sealed or constructed formats is that you get to choose every card included, allowing a massive amount of options. When building my cube I decided to limit the set to the first 151 Pokémon only, as they are the ones I remember from playing Pokémon Red on my Gameboy and opening packs of base set back in the day. I also decided to include none of the modern EX or GX cards that are massively powerful compared to a lot of the older stuff.

Another advantage is that you don't need to worry about building decks to bring down to a game evening; as long as someone brings the cube you all build your decks together with the cards that have been drafted. This is great for many of us that work full time and don't have a lot of spare time to spend building Pokémon decks.

The process of drafting a cube is fun in itself, however we have recently tried to draft a cube online using a tool we found and were beset by technical issues such as how we were going to play the games with the resulting decks, that made the whole experience less than enjoyable. 

We have since discovered tcgone.net that allows you to play Pokémon TCG in your browser. This has proved very useful for playing games over the internet, but there is currently no option for 40 card/ 4 prize games, so we are having to draft from larger cubes to have enough cards to pick from for a 60 card deck.

There are numerous special rules that people include in their cubes. For example some may say to ignore and Pokémon name prefixes for evolution purposes. I could evolve my Blaine's Charmander into a standard Charmeleon and then into a Dark Charizard. This helps with something else that is popular in a cube, which is to run it as a singleton format, where each card in the cube is unique. 

Another special rule that is sometimes used is to run a cube as a mutant draft. This means that for evolution purposes you can use any Pokémon of the same energy type. for example, I could evolve my Oddish into a Metapod and then into a Venusaur. This rule helps to avoid having to include poor basic or stage 1 Pokémon just because you want to include a certain stage 2 Pokémon in your cube.

I just want to shout out to u/vandergus over on Reddit for their awesome drafting interface for Pokémon cubes. You can check out the post on reddit here, where they explain how it all works and how you can set up your own drafting interface for your own cube.

Example of u/vandergus' drafting interface.

Once my own cube is in a better state i'll get the link posted up here, along with some guidance on creating your own cube!

The first draft of my Retro Cube can be viewed here. I welcome your comments on how to improve this. The card pool has been kept intentionally small to allow for faster drafting with a small group of players (4 players).