Hello everyone! Let me just dive right into it: I'm looking to make a Warlord Cube.

It all started with my love of Magic: The Gathering. I started in 1994 and have been playing on and off for 16 years. As I get older, however, I found that other obligations demand my time and resources. As a result, I no longer attempt to keep up with Magic's constantly changing formats and card rotations. I thought I would quit altogether, but a buddy of mine turned me on to a variant format dubbed "Cube" (For an explanation of the Cube format, see below). I haven't looked back. I love my Magic Cube so much that it inspired me to create Cubes of other card games that I've played throughout the years. Since then I've created a Vs. System Cube, I'm working on an Illuminati cube, and now I want to dive into my latest project: A Warlord Cube.

I'll give a brief back-story regarding my experiences with Warlord. I started playing in 2001 in the summer before I was shipped off to college. I enjoyed it a lot. (I'm sure most of you expected that =p) Most of the people in the card shop took it up as well, and so did the owner even! Long story short, when I came back from college the next year it had drastically fallen out of favor. A few people still played but I was your typical broke college student so I didn't buy the new set. The following year it was all but gone. So I packed up my two favorite decks (Just in case so I could play with a friend on a rainy day) and threw the rest of the cards away. I haven't looked at it since then. I've only ever played with the core set (Saga of the Storm)...and now I'm lost!

Anyway, I've been reading up about Warlord on Wiki. A lot of cool changes, but I'm a little overwhelmed. First let me explain the Cube. The one I am going to be crafting is 360 cards total. (Excluding Warlords) It's a singleton format (meaning only 1 copy of a card is allowed) and it's a draft format. (If you don't know what drafting is, Google it. =p)
This format appeals to me because once the Cube is created, it needs very little updating. Also, it allows me to play with my friends when they don't own any cards or don't plan on buying cards. After gathering information online, I've decided to breakdown the Cube as follows: 40 Nothrog, 40 Elves, 40 Free Kingdoms, 40 Deverenians, 40 Dwarves, 40 Mercenaries, 40 Equipment, 80 Actions, with a more or less balanced split between classes and a balanced curve for cost.

This is where I need help. What format should I use? I've heard talks of ancient and open and epic and I'm not quite clear on what is what. What promos are legal where? Dragon Lords, Medusa Lords...like how am I supposed to get a character with a cost of twelve into play? I think the biggest cost was five or six when I started and that was fairly difficult.

Once I get the format defined, I'm going to need help determining which themes I want for each faction. Any ideas? I'm not sure what has support or not. When I first started playing, for example, there was a Dwarven Warlord that searched for Gargoyles but there was only 1 gargoyle in the game at the time and it was fairly terrible. What cards are overpowered? What should I stay away from?

Anyway, this post turned out longer than I expected so if you managed to get through it all, thanks for reading! Any help/advice/insight/anything would be appreciated. I'll check back later and hopefully by the end of the week I can post a tentative list of the Cube. =D

I worked on creating the Cube for Star Wars CCG, so I have some experience in what a good Cube should have- I'll try to post my thoughts on how this would work for Warlord later. Regardless, though, this is a pretty sweet idea.

OK here are some quick thoughts of mine:
•For the most part, Cube cards should be readily playable (meaning easy to get into play), so Dragon Lords and Medusan Lords are out, as are a decent number of items.
•One of the inherent difficulties with a Warlord cube is going to be making sure stuff is balanced- there will be very little chance for 'build' decks to be successful, for the most part, because drafting a deck that is mostly strike cards will just be quicker
•Tied to the last point, it is going to be challenging to ensure that each game isn't just a boring game of "who drew more strikes and rolled better"
•Most cleric warlords will have an inherent disadvantage, because they favor a longer game.

I'm not sure that 10 items/20 actions per class will be enough to support a properly drafted deck, especially if multiple people use the same class. Similarly, you may have to create rules editing the loyalty penalty (maybe OPT play a character without penalty? Just an example), to ensure that people can still play their faction (again especially if 2 people play the same faction). Very generally speaking though, I suspect you'll find that 360 is a bit too small.


The 4e (current "Type II") format is a bit too small for a solid cube. I think an Open/Ancients cube would be fine, as it would allow players to revisit some of the cooler (or in Carter's case, more janky) cards of yesteryear. Especially considering everything is 1x, Open would probably be fine. I wouldn't worry too much about promos/Dragon Lords/Medusan Lords, as I mentioned above.

This is a more detailed discussion, I think.

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You may want to start thinking about some potential alternate rules for Cube format. For example (and these are obviously just off the top of my head, so don't feel like you have to use them)
•OPT Play a character without loyalty penalty (this helps with the character selection)
•OPT Your Warlord is +1 (+2?) levels for equipping an item (this lets you put big fun items in the Cube)
•Maybe OPT play an action/item off-class? This might be too strong but would allow for better, safer drafting

Thanks! That's exactly the kind of help I'm looking for. I'll check back tomorrow when I have more time to write a better response.

Ok I've thought about it some more, and here are my additional thoughts:
Still trying to keep 360 cards. (If I absolutely need more I will add it after testing)

30 cards of each race (Nothrog, Deverenians, Free Kingdoms, Dwarves, Elves, Mercenaries)
Of the 30 cards, there will be
14 One cost characters
10 Two cost characters
7 Three cost characters
3 Four cost character
1 Five cost character
30 x 6 = 180 cards

30 actions for each class (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard)
30 x 4 = 120 cards

15 items for each class (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard)
15 x 4 = 60 cards
180 + 120 + 60 = 360 cards total

Warlords will be a separate thing. I'm thinking I'll get approximately 40 Warlords, equally distributed in the races and classes, and draft them up quickly but separately before the actual draft. That way you know what your Warlord is and have a few options before you draft. Since people are going to be taking Mercenaries regardless of the Warlord, I'm hesitant to add Mercenary Warlords but we'll see. I'll also try my best to diversify the classes within each race so if you're playing Nothrogs for example, you don't just grab every fighter action you see. Going to take a lot of testing but I'm hopeful. Thanks for all the input so far. I'll post a list of Warlords possibly later today.

Interesting idea for sure.

TBH with that spread, you might be better off ignoring lvl 5 characters and add another 3 or 4 cost character. It can easily become difficult to impossible to get a lvl 5 character into play unless you have enough lvl 3-4 characters to ensure getting that 4th rank.

If you put off-class characters into the faction mix, make sure they are useful in and of themselves. Cardinal Scelus is a good example of what I mean. Even if you have no cleric action or item cards, he is still useful in a Dev deck. If you put a Throg rogue into the mix who does nothing different from the fighters, he'll end up being a classless character with no real trick.

I'd be tempted to suggest cutting it down to 4 factions + mercs. That way you can have 1 faction per class + mercs filling in as easy gaps. It also means you can have more variety of characters for each faction. If you go for normal sized decks, you have 25 characters, one of which is the warlord. With 30 characters per faction you will be aiming for 24/30 characters, which does not give much variety imo. 36 characters could help this.

Warlord isn't normally a drafted CCG, right? In Magic, normal decks are 60 cards and draft decks are 40 cards to compensate for the lower card amounts and lower quality card pool.

Since Warlord decks are normally 50 cards, applying the same restriction would leave us with somewhere between 30 and 35 cards..so really 15-20 cards would be characters. You also have a choice of Warlords before you even start drafting so if you find you're getting hard cut off from once race, you can switch. I'm thinking about cutting each race down a little further and overloading mercenaries, or maybe just disabling the recruit penalty, I'll see with testing.

Yeah, I would say a Warlord draft deck should be 30-40 cards. I don't think removing the loyalty penalty completely is the right answer, but maybe twice per game or something would be good.

A blanket number for character level distribution isn't going to work. What are the Devs going to do with a bunch of weenies and 5 cavalry characters in the entire pool? The low level character distribution will always favor factions and warlords that are more adept at blitz strategies.

Also your math is bad. You indicate 30 characters for each faction but in your breakdown it comes out to 36. 14+10+7=31, you were over before you got to 4th level.

My friends cube all the time (mtg) and they have an ingenious system I'm sure will work for warlord that has nothing to do with limiting the overall cardpool...lemme have a chat with them and I'll get back to you after we discuss how to best adapt it for warlord.

Another thing is having the Action/Item ratio Destributed evenly between classes does not work.

Action Distribution

Wizard Most
Cleric
Rogue
Fghter Least

Item Distibution

Fighter Most
Rogue
Cleric
Wizard Least

Excellent points all.

Damn I failboated on the math. Anyway I'm going to try to maintain 360 and a tentative breakdown of 30 characters per race, 100 actions and 80 items. If I find it's too many characters then I can swap some out for more items or actions.

Within each category I guess I'm just going to do my research and feel it out. Hedge's post has been really helpful as a basic guideline.

Having not played Warlord in 8 or 9 years, here's the Warlord list I came up with...be gentle...
Nothrog: Fo'ttr'ak'ka, Krenthor Gouge, Grilt Fenstalker, Taoth, Krun, Uthanak, Mekk'iah

Dwarf: Garn Hearthstone, King Xod, Nitesh Imaran, Loki, Grace Hearthpride, Durin Kortouched, Gnorrow Yaw

Deverenian: Inquisitor Dmitir, Duchess Brymin, Sakar, Kalten the Bleak, Dallen Stormlost, Edric D'Ilchant, Slayer the Unkind

Free Kingdoms: Niobe, Sir Robert of Andover, Raylor Magicbane, Anton Cyldragen, Keziah Firehair, Albrecht, Captain Alera

Elves: Behlial, Ophinuchus, Zevil Adinerach, Tepheroth, Coreos Bodach, Feyd Rowan, Rustiq Umbala

Mercenary: Andlewick, Black Tom of Corinth, Marcus Shaw

Thoughts? Again I made most of the picks without really knowing what support certain cards/themes have, so any help would be appreciated.

For me, the omission of a Free Kingdoms ranged striker is a big omission. Use one of:

Captain Dukat
Trevor Magson
Logan Ebonwoulfe

I'm liking Logan, but which of these is the weakest would you say?

Keziah Firehair, Albrecht, Captain Alera or some other card on my list? (I'd like to keep at least 1 of each class per race)

I am eagerly awaiting the outcome here. I'm not familiar enough with drafting to have valuable input but I'd love to try this out if we get something worked out.