Important info
Restrictions: Cards cannot have full text boxes. Most cards should be from the newest frame available. Cards should be under a dollar, and in many cases cheaper.
Size: 586 and growing
Duplicates: This follows a style of 1/2/3 set cube, but with cards assigned to rarities as I see fit.
Goals
The sticker cube has existed in my ownership in some form since around 2015, it was originally a chaotic, completely unordered affair that often left people with feedback like "this is nonsense" at the best of times.
The actual goals for the current iteration of the cube are to create a fluctuating, creative environment that allows for a unique form of skill expression.
Cards that wind up with stickers on them should amplify the experience and cultivate a feeling of "oh these cards are cool" rather than "oh these cards are broken".
Philosophy
The cube should be large enough that even someone showing up to every session should not have a full idea of everything that they might encounter. My hope is to recapture some of the joy that existed in most of our early interactions with the game where a little bit of wonder exists every time.
Emergent gameplay and archetypes should be the norm, as players can craft cards to better fit an idea. While there were general ideas of 2 color archetypes to start, as time's gone on there's been small pockets of new ideas starting to worm their way in.
Every few sessions I go through and try to make cuts of stuff that folks have identified as irritating, as well as printing up some new stickers. I also rotate the font for stickers just to keep the "seasons" visually separate.
All stickers are distributed with restrictions placed on them as to the cards types they go on and the minimum and maximum mana values. This helps a lot to make sure there's less chances for the stickers to wind up somewhere busted.
Process for keeping the Cube cobra list up to date
This is kinda a nightmare, but I want to document it for folks who are interested in doing similar. My core idea to keep work down is to make sure that my images of cards have static URLs so that I never have to fidget with that stuff on the cube cobra side.
All the images are handled through an Obsidian Vault published online using Quartz. This allows for some fun additional tracking stuff, like using the properties to allow for showing pages on the published site for each person who has drafted the cube with info about the cards they've put stickers on.
After every session of drafting the cube, which basically has to happen in my own home, I'll gather cards from each player's pool (I leave these out overnight), and begin the process of scanning them in. I keep them nicely separated with lil dividers for player names, then plop the 8 cards onto the scanner, carefully line them up and scan. These then go into GNU Image Manipulation Program and I use their "slice on guides" feature to chop them up. These images are then exported and updated in the vault, vault gets updated and pushed to github, site is updated, cube looks good. Final step is to make sure that anything that was touched gets their tags updated to reflect their sticker count.
Things I've been contemplating
Currently it does feel like the reactive decks here are missing a bit of juice outside of exactly Dimir+ decks. One of the future updates of cards might add some more options for ungated removal spells.
There will likely be some need to rotate out the last few examples of keywords I've cut for being super repetitive, but I'm still letting those simmer for a bit.
You can reach me by email! Omniczech@tuta.com