One Sleeve to Rule Them All: Building the Commander Cube

In the past couple of weeks, I've had the opportunity to play Magic with several new groups of people. It's been great.



One group is into jamming the most powerful spells in the format. It's still Commander, but it's board wipe city and devastating lock cards from here till the end of time. If you are going to play at the table with these guys, you better come correct. They "go hard."

The other group is almost the opposite. I say, "almost" because they are playing a very different game of Magic, but they aren't doing it on purpose. Six or even eight players jumping into the game is par for the course. Decks are a seemingly random number of cards between 80ish and "stack too big to count." It's not exactly Commander, or any format, per se. It felt like I was back in high school, playing Magic on my lunch break.

In other words, there is no overlap between these two groups. A competitive deck for the first group is utterly dominating in the second group. And a fun deck for the second group doesn't stand a chance with the first group.








A while back, I posted about building a Commander Cube for rapid deck building. I went ahead and bought a bunch of matching sleeves so that I could put all of my Commander decks into a big pile. This makes building new decks way, way easier. After poking around the ol' Internet for a while, I came across this Commander Cube. This guy is doing it right.

Every color has an identity. Red feels red. Blue feels blue. There are plenty of Commanders to choose from (or draft from). And, the balance between the colors is great. My goal is not to actually draft from the cube. I have another cube for that. My goal is to build something like what this guy has that I can use to build lots of different Commander decks for different groups, on the fly.

Jason Alt over at GatheringMagic.com has been writing a series on building a "75% Commander Deck." The basic idea, as I understand it, is that you don't actually want to tune and tune, you don't want to jam every powerful combo and synergy, into every deck you build. 75% of the way there is actually the right amount for a solid game of Commander.

For the most part, I agree. 75% means different things in different play groups, but if you build with this idea in mind you automatically build a deck that's more interactive, more fun, and a little more random. The Commander Cube concept does this. Instead of putting every conceivable version of a card like Grave Pact in your cube, running only Dictate of Erebos captures the flavor without pushing the theme.



This approach also puts an upper bound on the card pool. The cube I linked to is about 750 cards + basic lands. With a pool of that size, you can build dozens of different Commander decks in every color combination. I love bringing a new deck to the table. The Commander Cube is a good, efficient way to do that without dialing it up to 100%.

Instead of evaluating a card and saying this particular card would be perfect in this particular Commander deck, you start looking at cards and saying this particular card would be good in lots of Commander decks. In the example above, Dictate of Erebos is one more mana than Grave Pact, but slightly easier to splash cast due to requiring one less B mana. It can also be flashed into play, giving the card an additional dimension that can be used lots of different ways in lots of different decks. The themes don't get pushed as hard, so the variety goes up considerably. And hey, if you do decide you have the time for an actual Commander Cube draft, you're already there.