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…

I had been doing some digging at Evan Erwin’s cube site, cubedrafting.com (one of the earliest attempts to be a hub of cube discussion and articles not hosted on a major site, since it was essentially a pet project from Evan’s then-passion for Cube) to find some old articles that I did to update the…

I know that it’s… well after New Years, but I’d intended to write a post with some odds and ends on what’s going on and thoughts on 2025. One of our cube regulars, Erik, who I’ve known since 2008 or so, is also a fellow huge Rush fan and lately we’d got to talking about…

One quick thing – although I was part of CubeCon via doing panel, like I did last year, I’m not a staff member, this post doesn’t have any involvement by them and wasn’t requested by them. When I started this Substack, I intended to do a post about how my CubeCon 2024 went, but never…

In my article review of Fate Reforged, I talked about me putting the tri-hybrid cards like Yasova Dragonclaw into my colorless/miscellaneous section.   Here, I’ll talk about why. In the article, I mentioned that due to the hybrid mana, it’s actually easier to cast the tri-color hybrids than traditional tricolors and that they go into…

From Dzyl’s draft, from the first day of cubing. From a different draft. I’m wondering if an algorithm was made where the power cards were put into a separate section so they could be doled accordingly (no more than 2 per pack, when it comes up for example) and if it backfired.  Apparently it’s a…