To hell with resale value, Magic: The Gathering is better when you bust out a permanent marker and draw on the cards

Back in 2011, Risk Legacy shook the staid little world of board games with its anarchic approach to the sanctity of playing pieces. It was a game designed to be customized in play—after a few sessions you’d have written new names on the board, ripped up cards and thrown them away, added new rules, and permanently altered it in ways that made each copy unique to your gaming group. 

While the immediate reaction included a lot of forum threads about how to play Risk Legacy without permanently changing things so you could reset it to zero at the end, in the long run the joy of vandalism won out. It inspired an entire subgenre of board games like Pandemic Legacy and Betrayal Legacy that demand you treat them like an underpass begging for graffiti.

In Magic: The Gathering, where the collector market considers cards to be investments it’s frankly barbaric to play an actual game with, the equivalent is an unofficial format called Sharpie Cube, or Redacted Cube. It takes the normal Cube Draft format—in which you pre-select a pool of 360 cards, which stack in a rough square, to build your decks from—and attacks it with a permanent marker.

Cards in Sharpie Cube end up looking like NSA documents, only instead of damning surveillance records they’re giving a Colossal Dreadmaw the Storm keyword by blacking out the rest of its flavor text. Or, in one of my favorite examples, changing the Spellgorger Weird into the Spell Weird. Where the original gave you a +1/+1 counter when someone cast a noncreature spell, the redacted version forces you to respond to the same situation by spelling the word “weird”.

Spell Weird was invented by the Skill Check channel, who play a great game of Sharpie Commander full of inventive redacted cards. Some are mechanically twisted, like the one that instructs another player to tap someone’s father, or the one Charlie ‘MoistCr1TiKaL’ White plays that lets him make a copy of any card he can think of, but many are just funny, juvenile gags. It turns out that, if you delete enough letters, there are a lot of Magic cards you can vandalize until they contain the word “cum”.

The Sharpie Cube trend originally spread on Reddit, where it has its own dedicated subforum, though it was popularized via a YouTube short by Magic streamer Ashley Bits. It has, of course, spread to TikTok as well. Showing off your best Sharpie Cube cards is now so popular that the main Cube Draft subreddit is sick of seeing them, because down with fun I guess.

I’m still enjoying the fad, though. While some players cautiously redact cards by writing on their inner sleeves, or are experimenting with removable tape, or printing out substitutes, I get a kick out of seeing a Magic card treated like a disposable piece of cardboard rather than an investment in your children’s college fund. Here’s a gallery of some of my favorite doctored cards.

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