How cube draft works

Paste a list of cards and Spellpod builds the packs from it. Your cube, your card pool, drafted in the browser by up to eight players.

A cube is a card pool somebody curated by hand. Instead of opening real boosters from a set, the packs are built out of the cards you chose, so the draft environment is whatever you decided it should be. It is the most control you can have over what a draft feels like, and the only format where the pool is the design.

Getting your cube in

In a draft setup, switch the card source from Set to Cube and paste your list, one card name per line. That is the whole setup. There is no file format, no account linking and no import step.

Names are resolved against the real card database, so a name that does not match anything is simply dropped rather than breaking the draft. Repeats of the same name are collapsed to one entry: a cube is a set of distinct cards, and listing something twice does not make it twice as likely to appear.

How packs are built

Cube packs ignore rarity entirely. A set draft rolls a pack against that set's real booster recipe, with commons and uncommons and a rare slot. A cube has no such structure, so Spellpod takes cards at random from the whole pool, and every card in a pack is distinct.

Pack size is the total of the four booster-content numbers in the draft settings, which comes to fifteen by default. Change those and the cube packs change with them, so a fifteen card pack becomes a ten card pack if that is what you want.

How big does a cube need to be?

Enough to fill a round without repeating: pack size multiplied by the number of players. A four player draft at fifteen card packs needs at least sixty cards before the first round can be dealt.

That is the floor, not the target. A cube that only just clears it will show you nearly all of itself in the first round. The classic cube sizes exist for a reason: three packs each for eight players is three hundred and sixty cards, and that is the scale at which a cube starts to feel like an environment rather than a shuffled pile.

What you draft it into

The format setting is independent of the card source, so a cube can produce whatever kind of deck you want. Leave it on Limited for a forty card deck, or set it to Commander Limited if your cube is built for Commander and you want the pool to become a sixty card deck with a commander at forty life.

That second combination is worth knowing about. A Commander cube drafted into Commander Limited is the setup a lot of groups actually want, and it is two dropdowns here.

Draft your cube

Playing with fewer people than seats

Bots fill any empty seat, so a cube does not need a full pod to be drafted. They pick on rarity and color, which in a cube is close to picking at random, so treat a bot pod as a way to test how a cube drafts rather than as a real game.

Common questions