In 2011, Risk Legacy shook up the staid little world of board games with its anarchic approach to the sanctity of game pieces. It was a game designed to be customizable as you played—after a few rounds, you’d written new names on the board, torn up and discarded cards, added new rules, and changed it so permanently that each copy was unique to your gaming group.
While the immediate reaction included lots of forum posts about how to play Risk Legacy without permanently changing things so you can 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 collectibles market views cards as investments that are downright barbaric to play a real game with, the equivalent is an unofficial format called Sharpie Cube, or Redacted Cube. It takes the normal Cube Draft format—where you pre-select a pool of 360 cards stacked in a rough square to build your decks—and attacks it with a permanent marker.
Cards in Sharpie Cube end up looking like NSA documents, except instead of condemning surveillance recordings, they give a Colossal Dreadmaw the Storm keyword by redacting the rest of its flavor text. Or, in one of my favorite examples, changing Spellgorger Weird to Spell Weird. While the original gave you a +1/+1 counter whenever 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, which plays a great game of Sharpie Commander full of imaginative redacted cards. Some are mechanically twisted, like the one that instructs another player to tap a person’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 fun, childish gags. It turns out that there are plenty of Magic cards that you can destroy until they contain the word “cum” if you erase enough letters.
The Sharpie Cube trend originally spread on Reddit, where it has its own subforum, although it was popularized by a YouTube short film by Magic streamer Ashley Bits. Of course, it has also spread to TikTok. Showing off the best Sharpie Cube cards has become so popular that the main Cube Draft subreddit is sick of seeing them because it’s arguably no longer funny.
I still like the trend, though. While some players carefully blacken cards by writing on the insides, experimenting with removable tape, or printing replacements, I love when a Magic card is treated like a piece of cardboard you can throw away, rather than an investment in your kids’ college fund. Here’s a gallery of some of my favorite doctored cards.
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