A Cube That Fits in a Deck Box | Segovian Pai Gow

Link to the Cube: https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/SegovianPaiGow

Pai Gow (pronounced Pie Go) is a Magic: the Gathering format you probably haven’t heard of. The first time I learned about Pai Gow was in a Denny’s after a midnight prerelease. My friend pulled out his prize packs and told us we were going to be playing Pai Gow.

Pai Gow has the following rules.

• 3 Card Deck
• 5 Life
• Infinite Mana

You start the game with all three cards in your hand. You do not lose to decking. First player to get the other one to 0 life wins the game. If the board has stalemated the player with the most life wins the game.

It’s very simple, quick, and a great way to play with leftover booster packs that requires very little setup. With 15 cards in a pack it’s possible to build 5 decks each with 3 cards. Play vs someone else pairing one deck against each other at a time and the first to win 3 games out of 5 wins the match. If you’d like to learn more about Pai Gow you can read this helpful article by Gaby Spartz explaining the format here: https://ultimateguard.com/en/blog/gaby-spartz-playing-pai-gow-magic

However, as much fun as Pai Gow was there were some major flaws through playing it with booster packs. Pai Gow is incredibly unbalanced ranging from cards that win the game by themselves with infinite mana or cards that do literally nothing such as lands.

What would happen if you actually designed a format around Pai Gow?

Cube, for those of you who don’t know, is a casual way to play Magic: the Gathering. Simply put Cube is a collection of cards that is meant to be drafted with and put back together after you are done. People do this all the time to emulate old draft sets that aren’t in print anymore such as original Innistrad or you can choose to design your own custom draft environment.

I decided I wanted to make a cube for Pai Gow. This was my first time designing a Cube for Magic: the Gathering that didn’t play by all the same rules a normal Cube usually follows. I have always loved cubes that break the mold and was excited that I might be onto something of my own. When there’s infinite mana and only 5 life to work with the way you evaluate cards radically changes. I needed to set some design goals to figure out exactly what I wanted from my cube.

The goals were as follows:

• I want all 3 cards in a hand to matter in a game
• A single card should not win by itself in one attack step*
• Everything is about the combat step

These design goals helped me realize something important. When players only have 5 life a creature with 3 power kills the opponent in only two turns! If I were to design the cube in such a way that a vanilla 3/3 was one of the best cards in the format, this would dramatically help me when finding cards that would be good for the cube. But out of all the 3/3’s in Magic: the Gathering which one should make the cut?

Much in the same way one would create a cube for the plane of Ravnica or Innistrad, I decided that my cube would feature the plane of Segovia.

However, Segovia is another aspect of Magic that many of you may not be familiar with.

To explain Segovia we need to go back to when Magic: the Gathering released Legends in 1994. The art for the card Segovian Leviathan shows a colossal creature dwarfing whales. However, the power and toughness of this massive beast is only a 3/3. Players were confused about why this gargantuan creature was a 3/3 the size of a Dominarian Elephant. Wizards of the Coast responded to this conundrum by creating the plane of Segovia, a world in which creatures are scaled down to 1:100th of their size. They then swept Segovia under the rug until 2019 when Modern Horizons 1 released and gave us the 2nd card featured in Segovia, Segovian Angel.

Since then one more card has been printed for Segovia in Invasion of Segovia. Segovia is a plane we may never visit in an official Magic: the Gathering set but it is the perfect setting for my Pai Gow cube. So I decided to take my own approach to Segovia and Cube.

Designing a Tiny Cube

Once I had the epiphany to have a Pai Gow cube set in Segovia everything else about designing the cube fell into place. I wanted to create an environment that made small battles feel important. I wanted there to be a deeper story to Segovia that was communicated through the cards of the cube. And most importantly, I wanted a cube that could fit the entire cube experience inside of a Commander Deck Box.

With a (basically) vanilla 3/3 in Segovian Leviathan defining what a powerful card is in this cube I knew I was going to be digging deep for cards for this cube. I started by searching for creature types that I felt like would be at home in Segovia.

In the flavor text of Segovian Angel it makes a reference to gnats implying the existence of insects in Segovia’s world. Insects imply an ecosystem that could be populated by Squirrels and Birds. Faeries can offer a little bit of magic into the world and Dwarves was my stroke of genius when it came to adding a humanoid creature type to the cube/plane.

Occasionally I also did searches that related to specific design criteria that I wanted to meet. One such question was if there was a card with 5 power that could still fit the design of the cube. This led me to stumble upon this old Dissension rare that has a huge downside in Pai Gow.

I also wanted to see if Planeswalkers could fit in the cube. Fortunately, War of the Spark’s uncommon Planeswalkers were the perfect power level for this kind of cube.

Eventually I realized I had a story on my hands! The Avatar of Discord is here on Segovia causing havoc! Saheeli calls in a favor from the Wanderer and together they investigate why this would happen to an otherwise peaceful plane. At the root of the scheming they find Tibalt who has summoned the Avatar to the plane to cause chaos. The two planeswalkers are able to work together to stop the Avatar of Discord, aprehend Tibalt, and save the plane of Segovia! It’s nothing complex but this narrative adds richness to the cube that gives cards meaning beyond the text box.

While there are many different directions you can take a Pai Gow cube I really enjoyed the way this cube turned out. Adding an element of a plane and story to the cube really helps it come to life in a way that many of my more setting-agnostic cubes haven’t ever had before. The power-band limitation of having to primarily work with creatures that had power 3 or less was also challenging but ultimately rewarding. There’s a couple of things you should know about my cube if you’re interested in trying it, or a variant of it, out for yourself.

Drafting the Cube

I knew when I created this cube that I wanted it to be fit the theme of being a tiny cube. Without the need for basic lands, and with each player only ending up with 15 cards at the end of the draft I realized that I could make a fully-functional cube that could fit in a Commander Deckbox. 8 players multiplied by 15 cards leaves you with a cube that has 120 cards in it. With these 120 cards there are multiple different ways you can draft the cube.

When drafting with one other player you can do a variation of winston draft. Choose a starting player and reveal the top 3 cards of the library. Have the starting player choose one card from the 3 and then the second player will choose one from the remaining 2 cards. Discard the final card and reveal the next 3 cards from the top of the deck now starting with the other player. Repeat this process 15 times until each player has 15 cards in their draft pile.

With four players you can draft in a more traditional way. Give each player 3 packs containing 5 cards each. Draft one card from each pack and pass to your left. When drafting the second pack pass to your right and when drafting the third pass to your left again. With eight players split off into two pods of four and draft following the same rules.

Conclusion

I had a vision to create a tiny cube for a tiny plane and I’m incredibly happy with the final result. It’s an amazing bite-sized game of Magic that can serve as an appetizer to the main event. Toss it in your bag and take it with you whenever you go out for Magic night. I hope my Segovian Pai Gow cube inspires you to create a cube of your own. Thanks for reading and have an amazing Tuesday!

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