A Rough Sequence of Events

The rise and fall of the Commander Cube

Down the rabbit hole...

Let's get this out of the way: Drafting the Commander Cube is, well, not going to work for me.

Here's why.

My 20-year-old self would have played the hell out of that cube. Of course, my 20-year-old self was already playing Magic all night.

What is that glowing ball of fire in the sky?



The me of today, though? Not so much.

It's not that I don't have the desire. I don't have the opportunity.

To make the Commander Cube experience work, you are looking at hours of drafting, deckbuilding, and playing. You have to have a group of people who are already reasonably experienced with both drafting and Commander. And, unless you do a full card-by-card draft, you end up with something that feels more like limited draft than Commander draft.

In other words, that's a lot of "ifs" to line up along with a lot of hours in a row.

Using the Commander Cube for individual deckbuilding instead of drafting is still a good idea. It means that you can spice up your own Commander experience by quickly building new decks in different combinations. The key is to have a good mix of cards, already in matching sleeves.

If you play a lot of Commander, setting your cards up this way is totally worth it. Heck, most of us already have a big ol' box of cards set aside for Commander, so it's reasonably easy to get a bunch of matching sleeves and go to town.

But, here's the thing.

Almost any deck you run into can be roughly assigned to a specific role at the table. You've got your aggro, combo, control paradigm to work with, along with all the fun variations like combo-control, mid-range, theme decks, and silly stuff. The actual cards used to fulfill these roles doesn't matter so much. Magic, in a lot of ways, is the same game it was 20 years ago, but with different pictures and variations on the central themes.



There's nothing wrong with this. It gives the players lots of ways to experience the game, but with a strong thematic consistency and design backbone holding it up. New cards come out all the time, but for the most part, we know what we are getting.

Play what you like.

It's the same advice I gave myself years ago and the same advice I'd give to anyone playing now. Unless you are super-competitive, playing what you like is the way to go. And, in general, Commander is not about being super-competitive.

I like five-color control. It brings everything together.

It can also suck to play against.

You know what's cool? Commander has developed so much in the past few years, that my original apprehension for playing 5c control has mostly gone away. The decks I face now are faster, with more tools, and have better lines of play. It's more of a challenge to play against these decks, but it doesn't have the same soul-crushing, unfun match ups that it did in years past.

In other words, if I am going to play one game of Commander every couple of weeks, it might as well be with a deck I like. And, good news, the deck I like to play has become relatively weaker as the rest of the decks have become stronger over the past few years.

That's a good thing.