I’m Usman Jamil and I’ve been writing and podcasting about Magic: The Gathering’s format since 2010, talking about cube design and cube theory. I’ve written for sites like Star City Games, Lucky Paper and Hipsters of the Coast and work on the Magic Online Vintage Cube and The Pauper Cube, and here’s my current home of my set reviews and cube theory.
On this About Me page, you’ll find a short summary of my cube content creation history.
- I started playing M:TG in 1994 until around 2000 and got back into the game in 2005. I started my cube journey from hearing about it in the Magic Show episode “Gleaming the Cube” and made my own, in late 2008-2009.
- Initially a “powered cube” but one that has since become a “Legacy-Lite” cube. I also maintain a pauper cube and various cubes in various states of creation.
- I started writing about cube in 2010 with a one-off article for MTGSalvation. I’ve written for Quiet Speculation, Star City Games, Coolstuffinc, Hipsters of the Coast and Lucky Paper. I’ve written many set reviews and theory-based articles on cube design over the years, with the latter shaping much of modern cube design when it was mostly in an undefined state in the late 2000s.
- I created the first cube podcast, The Third Power, in 2010. (Since the host, MTGCast.com, is down, most of the episodes are lost to the sands of time, but I was able to salvage some and I’ll be posting some on here) and created the Pack One Slick Ones podcast, where I’m one of the hosts. I’ve also been a guest on various cube podcasts over the years.
- For several years, I’ve served on the committee for The Pauper Cube for curating the list and participating in the discord. I similarly work on a committee for updating the MTGO Cube.
- I created a cube for Magic Online, The Ravnica Cube, which was on Magic Online in 2022 for a week. The cube’s theme was based on the plane of Ravnica, using planar neutral cards to flesh out the cube and to make it a better format.
- I hosted a panel at CubeCon 2024: “Cube Building for Dummies: Everything you wanted to know but were too afraid to ask” and presented the panel again at CubeCon 2025 and in the Table Top Talks discord, where I recorded a video of the panel.
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