The Unwell Kingdom is a set designed for limited play, and cube draft is the best way to get the intended experience! Drafting works best with 8 players, but playtests for this set comfortably accommodated as few as 4. Setting up a cube can be daunting for folks who are newer to Magic, or who have only played other formats, so here are some guidelines for the recommended UWK cube:

The Cube

A cube is a self-contained box of “packs” of cards, basic lands, and tokens—everything needed to play sealed or draft with friends. Think of it as a curated, reusable box of real booster packs. Players open packs and build decks on the spot before facing off against each other (more on that later). But before all that, the cube requires a fair amount of setup.

Building the Cube

The UWK set cube contains every card in the set, with multiple copies of some to simulate rarities. The full cube contains 40 packs of these cards, plus enough basic lands for players to complete their decks. Here’s the breakdown:

• 1x cube case – Something to carry all those dang cards!
• 40x reusable packs – I’ve had success with Cubeamajigs, but there are lots of options out there, including 3d printing your own or using zip bags.
• 660x UWK cards
  • 1x each Rare and Mythic card in the set
  • 2x each Uncommon card in the set
  • 4x each Common card in the set
  • 4x each Illusory Palace per color pair
• 200x basic lands – I keep 40 of each basic land sleeved up for 8-player drafts, but you may not need as many for smaller playgroups.
• 860x card sleeves – Good for protecting cards (or holding printer proxies). Avoid see-through sleeves, as there are several double-faced cards in this set.
• Tokens, to taste – The this set includes custom copies of all tokens the other cards can create. Not strictly necessary if you have other ways to track them.

Prepping the Packs

This cube is designed to follow a similar structure to real MtG packs, with a guaranteed quantity of each rarity per pack. For the official draft experience, sort all cards into their rarities before shuffling them into packs.

Due to the math of rarity distributions, a prepped cube will have 20 leftover Common cards. I recommend setting these aside up front. I like to avoid having duplicate cards or an overwhelming amount of any one color in these 20, but feel free to ignore this in the spirit of true randomness. No matter what, this adds a slight amount of variance to each draft.

Once that’s done, it’s time to shuffle the remaining cards according to their rarities, with all Rares and Mythics shuffled together. It’s best to do this in advance of a draft, as it’s a lot of cards to shuffle. Once that’s done, it’s finally time to fill each pack!

Packs in the Unwell Kingdom are on the generous side, with 16 cards per pack instead of the usual 15. Add 2 random Rares and/or Mythics, 4 Uncommons, 9 Commons, and an Illusory Palace. The guaranteed Illusory Palaces helps a lot with mana-fixing, as they come in all color pairs.

Draft vs Sealed

Once packs have been filled, it’s time to play! As mentioned before, drafting is in my opinion the best way to enjoy The Unwell Kingdom. In a draft, players each start with three packs, but only pick one card at a time to add to their decks before passing the packs around the table. There are tons of drafting guides and rulesets out there, but Magic’s official explainer is a good starting point. This lets everyone see a lot of cards but can lead to tough decisions if multiple players gravitate toward the same colors! Drafting can be intimidating for this reason, but it allows for a ton of depth and replayability in the deckbuilding phase.

Sealed is an alternative format that forgoes the interactive dynamics of drafting for a more straightforward deckbuilding challenge. Here, each player starts with six packs instead of three, and everyone opens their own packs all at once and gets straight to building. Even though each player gets a larger pool of their own cards than draft, they technically see fewer cards overall and will have way more cards that don’t make the cut. Sealed tends to feel a bit more guided, depending on the Rares or amount of certain colors opened. But it can still lead to fun games!

In both formats, the goal is to create a minimum-40-card deck and face off in 1-v-1 matches against other players, usually in a small tournament bracket. These games follow standard MtG rules—20 life, no free mulligans, and the player who goes first skips their draw on the first turn. A good target to aim for is having 23 playable cards and 17 lands. Players have unlimited access to as many basic lands as they like. Unlike commander, there are no color restrictions on cards that can be included, and with the right lands, it’s possible to splash into a third or fourth color.

Drafting with Smaller Groups

While drafts work best with 8 players, it’s not always possible to hit that perfect number. Magic recently put out a “Pick 2” variation for 4-player drafts, but it doesn’t work well for the Unwell Kingdom. Instead, what we found to be most effective was to give each player 6 packs each instead of 3 and only draft the first half of each pack. In other words, draft like normal until each player has 8 cards from a pack, then remove the remaining cards from the draft pool and continue to the next pack. This gives players a chance to see as many cards as they would in a full 8-player draft, but there’s a caveat. With fewer people competing for the same colors, it’s easier to find open lanes, so the average power level of the resulting decks will be higher. Your mileage may vary, but in our playtests, this variation resulted in some very fun games!

Other Ways to Play

The fun doesn’t have to stop with just limited play! Experiment with these cards in any way you like, but first, a word of warning. The UWK was only balanced around itself, with a heavy focus on 1-v-1 play. While I tried to avoid straight power creep, I’m certain there are tons of broken combos out there if combined with Magic’s 30+ years of other cards. Always talk to your other players beforehand to agree on the type of play experience you collectively want. See what you can come up with!

UWK Constructed

With enough copies of each card on-hand, The Unwell Kingdom can support classic constructed play. Brew 60-card decks with up to 4 copies of any card, shuffle up, and play! This is a great way to build around cards that don’t always show up in limited and push your favorite synergies. For added depth, you can also also build sideboards for best-of-3 matches. There are some pretty niche tech cards available in this set, like the Un-Candle to prevent Inspiration-fueled combat tricks or To Distant Shores to pull a card back out of the Hoard.

Commander

Frankly, the Unwell Kingdom struggles to scale up to Commander free-for-alls. The card pool stretches thin when trying to fill 100-card singleton decks, leaving some mechanics in the lurch, and higher life totals trivialize a lot of burn spells. Games tend to play long and grindy as a result. There’s also the trouble of available commanders, with a handful of 2-color legends and only three options 3+ color decks (Adelaide, Blue-Haired Bard, Wilhelm, the Fell Prince, and Frara, the Chromatic). If you’re dead-set on trying to play UWK-only commander, I recommend the following rule change: In addition to picking your commander, choose any of the tri-lands in the set to use as your “Command Tower.” You can include cards from any of those three colors in your deck.

Alternatively, you could try splashing UWK cards alongside real Magic cards, and make commander decks that way. This will give you a much, much larger card pool to work with, but you might still run into some power spikes and troublesome play patterns. Again, just clear it with your pod before springing anything on them! Our pod has already house-ruled the tri-lands into any of our decks, for example.

Ultimately, these are just suggestions. The Unwell Kingdom is vast and versatile, and there are lots of angles to explore that I never even considered during development. Experimenting is half the fun of Magic, after all!