Turn Your Spare Cards Into Fun: Build & Draft Your Own Pokémon TCG Cube

Building a Cube is a great way of experiencing your favourite card games in a whole new light, and it provides a brand new home for bulk cards that you absolutely love, but just can’t slot into a current deck. Cubes let you breathe new life into your old cards. Whether it’s a classic that’s no longer playable in the extended format, or a niche new card that doesn’t quite work in the current meta, but would go great with the right support from older sets.

Today, we’ll be talking Cube, and showing how it’s possible to build your very own custom Pokémon TCG set.

What is a Cube?

Like most card game traditions, Cube was invented by Magic: the Gathering players. A Cube is a collection of cards that function as their very own self-contained set.

Those cards can be drawn from any point in the game’s history. You can evolve your Charmander from Pokémon 151 into the Charmeleon from XY Evolutions, and then into Mega Charizard X from Phantasmal Flames.

As the designer of the Cube, it’s your call about which Pokémon and trainers you include. Whether you pick all of your favourite Pokémon and Gym Leaders, or you go for cards that support strategies that you love.

The number of cards that you’ll want to include in your Cube can vary. It largely depends on the size of your play group. 270 cards is the minimum Cube size, and can support up to 6 players. A 720 card Cube can support up to 16.

How do you play with a Cube?

Sit all of the players that you’ll be playing with around a table, and then give them all three “packs” using the cards from your Cube. The size of these packs can vary, but 15 cards is a comfortable number. There is no need to include any basic energy cards in these packs.

Every player then looks at their first pack, takes a card out, and passes it along to the player sitting clockwise next to them. This continues until every card in the pack has been taken.

Players then open their second pack and repeat this process, and then do it again using their third pack.

This is known as “drafting”. Once everyone has finished drafting all of the packs at the table, if they’ve been picking their cards carefully, they should be able to assemble a playable 40 card deck using the Trainers and Pokémon that they have collected. Players can also add in any number of basic energy cards to this deck that they want.

Then players pair up and play a series of 4 prize card matches to determine who built the best deck.

Theme Ideas

So now that you know how to play with a Cube, here are some ideas about themes you can use to make it your own.

If you’ve got a favourite region, you can build a Cube featuring only Pokémon and trainers that appeared there. You can go old school and fill your Cube with generation one icons like Pikachu and Eevee, or think about who might win in a battle between Cynthia and Cyrus.

Maybe you’ve got a favourite era of the TCG’s history? Whether you like classic cards, brand new Pokémon from the Mega Evolution series , or anything in between, you can build a Cube that reflects your favorite part of the game’s history, or mix and match across time.

You can get really creative with your themes. You can build a Cube using only fire types, or include only Pokémon whose names begins with the letter “S”, or fill the whole Cube with legendries. The choice is yours, and there’s no shortage of options out there.

Changing the Rules

The fun of building a custom format like a Cube is being able to adapt the rules to suit the sort of play style that you want to encourage.

You can customise anything from the size of packs, to the number of prize cards that are used, or you can allow players to start the draft with a full evolution line available to them.

You can even shift some of the fundamental rules of the game. To make drafting smoother, lots of Cubes allow Pokémon that share a type to evolve into each other. So any grass type basic Pokémon can evolve into any grass type stage one and then into any grass type stage 2.

If you want to push for faster, more aggressive games, you can allow multiple supporters to be played in a single turn or permit players to play multiple energy cards.

Build the version of the Pokémon Trading Card game that you’re most excited about.

Cube Conclusions

So this has been a primer on how to build your own very Pokémon TCG Cube. If you start digging through your collection, you’re sure to find some inspiration for a Cube of your very own, and if you need any extra cards to put it together, you’re sure to find something in our wide selection of Pokémon TCG singles.

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