Commander Cube

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3drinks
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Post by 3drinks » 4 years ago

Hi. Maybe a couple people here will recall my [brief] perilous forays into a commander cube, and probably the only person who centre'd it around my Mardu collection only. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't so popular and I lost interest in it. I kinda miss it, but admit I really don't know *** about cube creation except that I really enjoy playing it. So what I'm looking for is (the cube subforum is dead so I'm asking here) is what I need to know, cube sizes, how to select cards for cube, the works. I have an encyclopedic memory for cards, so I'd enjoy putting that to work in this project.

I want it to be a commander cube, and I'm at least aware of the cube needing to draft commander packs separate. I'd like to accommodate up to eight players, although six is likely my ceiling I'd reach but that math doesn't work out so well. I'd also like it to be 5c, distributed evenly, and I'm very interested in making snow a central theme. Legends can be any rarity, but everything has to have been common/uncommon in a paper set.

Idk how many of each card/colours I need, colourless support, nonbasic lands. I'd like to support Kaalia (both, tbh), astral slide, cruel control archetypes and r/g beats, reanimator, blink, and tokens. I'd love to utilize Tinker but unsure what it could grab of value. As you can see, I'm pretty all over the place (at least it reads that way to me) and feeling overwhelmed.

Modern
R{R/W} 87guide Burn
Commander
WRKellan, the Fae-Blooded // Birthright Boon (local secret santa gift)
RTorbran, Thane of Red Fell (Red Deck Wins)
WBRAlesha, Who Smiles at Death (Slivers)
WBRKaalia HQ

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Mookie
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Post by Mookie » 4 years ago

'How to build a cube' is a pretty open-ended question. I'd start by narrowing down exactly what the intent of the cube is. Some things to think about:
-is the cube going to be multiplayer or 1v1?
-what will be the life totals / deck size? (default limited deck is 40 cards / 20 life, but you could change those to be more commander-y)
-how commander-y do you want it to be? (do you want it to be a peasant cube that happens to have commanders, or a cube where it feels like you are building / playing a commander deck?)
-how will you account for color identity rules?
-limiting things to common/uncommon significantly limits the card pool, so things may not feel as commander-y (ex: no board wipes)

Looking on CubeTutor, there are plenty of existing Commander cubes if you want ideas re: these configurations. If you're keeping to 40 card decks, a 360 card cube (+some number of commanders) is the simplest for 8 players. If you want larger decks, or a different number of players, then adjust that number appropriately.

As for building the cube... I would start out by making a design skeleton - how many cards you want of each color / type. After that, start thinking about what archetypes you want to support. Alternatively, figure out what commanders you want to support. I wouldn't allocate cards specifically to archetypes / commanders at this point - rather, this is good way to think about what sort of cards you want to include later on. (ex: if you want a blink theme, prioritize ETB creatures and blink effects, instead of explicitly saying that you will run some number of those cards) If a card fits into multiple archetypes, you can prioritize it over a card with fewer synergies.

After you decide what you want want to do, start choosing cards. There are three things I would suggest when choosing cards:
-look at other, similar cubes - both to potentially use as a base, and for ideas of cards to include
-go through your collection and see what cards you want to play
-look at EDHREC for what sort of Commander staples to include
There are lots of other cube resources out there that are useful references.


As an example, my own cube had '50 of each monocolor, 5 of each guild, 30 lands, and 30 colorless nonlands' as its skeleton, for a total of 360 cards. From there, I split each monocolor into creatures and noncreatures and started filling slots using cards from my collection. Once I had more than enough cards picked out, I trimmed things down to look like a more reasonable curve, referencing other cubes on CubeTutor that I wanted to emulate when I was unsure which card to cut.

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Post by 3drinks » 4 years ago

Okay, so lots of questions here (see, things I never thought of).

Multiplayer, commander.
deck size: 66+1(cmdr)
life: 40
function: we are playing commander, i feel comfortable enough to sift through cards to find my desired function. conventional wipes may be few, but spot removal isn't.
colour identity: as is
cube size: 600/8 = 75 cards/pool, on a 66 deck size you're gonna want ~27-28 lands. 66-27=39 spell slots, which means of your pool to deck ratio you'll have 47 in the pool not played and 39 being played. Hmm, that sounds too high, let's try this again.
440/8=55 cards drafted and you're playing 39 of them. that gives a smaller margin for error, leaving just 16 flex spots unplayed. or you'll have more cards drafted in an under 8 player game. 440 sounds good. 360/8=45 drafted cards which gives a small margin for error of just 6 cards undrafted. Sounds like hard mode to me, but also fewer options.

Modern
R{R/W} 87guide Burn
Commander
WRKellan, the Fae-Blooded // Birthright Boon (local secret santa gift)
RTorbran, Thane of Red Fell (Red Deck Wins)
WBRAlesha, Who Smiles at Death (Slivers)
WBRKaalia HQ

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Post by cryogen » 4 years ago

For my cube, my thought process was this:

- We are drafting fuve 15 card packs so 75x# players for a cube size
- divide the above total into balanced sections by color and guild
- 2 generals from each color pair/guild looking for unique build around strategies and avoiding too much overlap (so that everyone didn't fight over cards and your snap pick might be that other person's hard pass)
- figure out themes and goals (for example one of my goals is to play a lot of the banned cards)
- Start pulling cards, focusing on staples that yet used across themes, and unique theme cards
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Post by 3drinks » 4 years ago

So it sounds like I'm looking at 300 cards (360, really) for a 4man cube, or 600 for twice that. That's a lot of cards, hmm. Probably 600 because one person wants to cube a 99 card deck (despite everyone informing that this is a 3hr endeavour, without even counting the game itself).

80x5 = 400 mono cards.
100 = artifacts & lands
20x5 = wedge/on-colour guild pairings.

Does that sound about right? Am I too high on colourless? Too low on mono? Too high on mono?

Modern
R{R/W} 87guide Burn
Commander
WRKellan, the Fae-Blooded // Birthright Boon (local secret santa gift)
RTorbran, Thane of Red Fell (Red Deck Wins)
WBRAlesha, Who Smiles at Death (Slivers)
WBRKaalia HQ

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Post by cryogen » 4 years ago

3drinks wrote:
4 years ago
So it sounds like I'm looking at 300 cards (360, really) for a 4man cube, or 600 for twice that. That's a lot of cards, hmm. Probably 600 because one person wants to cube a 99 card deck (despite everyone informing that this is a 3hr endeavour, without even counting the game itself).

80x5 = 400 mono cards.
100 = artifacts & lands
20x5 = wedge/on-colour guild pairings.

Does that sound about right? Am I too high on colourless? Too low on mono? Too high on mono?
600 is a lot lower than it sounds when you start pulling cards, let alone making future cuts. Personally, I would trim from the Guilds a little and add to the colorless. Initially my cube was 600 cards and I think it was 15 each 80/15/150, so pretty close to what you're looking at.

The biggest issue I had/have is I like balance so some colors fare better than others. For example, mono blue is more spell heavy than I would prefer but I was drawn to spells more than creatures. And with the guild colors I filled it with a bunch of fixing cycles, but then some cycles were really bad in certain colors (such as creature lands).
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Post by Mookie » 4 years ago

3drinks wrote:
4 years ago
Does that sound about right? Am I too high on colourless? Too low on mono? Too high on mono?
Five cards per wedge/shard sounds a little high, given that those card pools can be fairly shallow, and there aren't as many decks they can go in. On the other hand, the pool gets deeper once you consider full text boxes (ex: Ana Sanctuary and Tasigur, the Golden Fang). Hybrid cards and off-color activations also make things more complicated, especially if you're enforcing color identity rules. I think that number of cards from guilds should be fine, although that ultimately depends on how many colors you want/expect people to play, and the fixing that is available.

Be sure to also allocate spots to fixing and acceleration - it wouldn't be Commander without a pile of mana rocks in every deck, after all. :P Having multiple copies of Sol Ring in the cube could also be amusing, although probably a bad idea from a balance perspective.

Overall though, tuning the cube should be an ongoing process - don't expect it to be perfect from the start. If people are having mana issues, add more fixing. If people don't have enough playable cards in their colors, add more colorless / monocolor cards. Keep track of what does (and doesn't) see play. Note also that some colors / archetypes have a tendency to be stronger / weaker in EDH, so you may want to account for that too. (ex: balancing graveyard decks vs grave hate, and having enablers for aggro)

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Post by cryogen » 4 years ago

Oh I completely missed the mention about wedges. I dont run any in my cube because unless you're in those specific colors they're dead cards. Much better to use those slots for flexible cards that more decks will want.

And since Mookie brought up Sol Ring, I give each player a Sol Ring and Command Tower so everyone has a little bit of fixing (probably going to start throwing in a Terramorphic Expanse as well).
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Post by 3drinks » 4 years ago

A sponge.

Me, soaking up all this information like the aforementioned sponge.

Modern
R{R/W} 87guide Burn
Commander
WRKellan, the Fae-Blooded // Birthright Boon (local secret santa gift)
RTorbran, Thane of Red Fell (Red Deck Wins)
WBRAlesha, Who Smiles at Death (Slivers)
WBRKaalia HQ

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Post by PrimevalCommander » 2 years ago

My commander cube. Always work in progress, but the games always seem to flow very well. I do have many of the format staples in there so players never feel like they are drafting a watered down deck. Note that only about 1/2 the card pool is drafted with 4 players, so it adds even more variation to the draft.
  • 65 each mono-color. Split 35/30 between creatures and non-creatures depending on that colors focus. Green gets more creatures, Blue gets more spells
  • 10 each of the 10 guilds, so 100 gold cards. This isn't that hard to fill if you look.
  • 100 lands. 60 duals (fetch, abur dual, shock, temple, filter, check). and 40 utility lands mixed color and non. Proxies are your friend here.
  • Bunch of artifacts. No hard number here, just as many as I think are practical. 45-50 mana rocks so everyone has a chance to see ramp. 15-16 equipment to encourage combat. All the swords of x&y. Ramp has never been an issue even for non-green decks because I really leaned into having a selection of playable mana rocks.
  • 42 Commanders, drafted separately in a single pack of 5 cards. 2 each color pair, 2 each color trio, 2 WUBRG commanders just for any of the adventurous players.
I did allocate 4 copies of Command Tower just to make fixing easier on everyone. I may do the same thing for Arcane Signet once I get enough copies. It homoginizes the decks a small portion, but only one Sol Ring and one Sakura-Tribe Elder means players still need to think outside the box.

The cube is built to be a bit goodstuff and create as few dead cards as possible. I have been wanting to build in a couple more strong themes to make it easier to wheel the niche synergy cards and prioritize ramp and removal on the early picks. This is where the cube will be going in the future as I work to support strategies other than goodstuff builds that are currently winning the pods. I don't want to go too hard into too many different themes because then the draft pool becomes diluted with cards that may have no value if the matching commander was not drafted.

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Post by Kelzam » 2 years ago

PrimevalCommander wrote:
2 years ago
My commander cube. Always work in progress, but the games always seem to flow very well. I do have many of the format staples in there so players never feel like they are drafting a watered down deck. Note that only about 1/2 the card pool is drafted with 4 players, so it adds even more variation to the draft.
  • 65 each mono-color. Split 35/30 between creatures and non-creatures depending on that colors focus. Green gets more creatures, Blue gets more spells
  • 10 each of the 10 guilds, so 100 gold cards. This isn't that hard to fill if you look.
  • 100 lands. 60 duals (fetch, abur dual, shock, temple, filter, check). and 40 utility lands mixed color and non. Proxies are your friend here.
  • Bunch of artifacts. No hard number here, just as many as I think are practical. 45-50 mana rocks so everyone has a chance to see ramp. 15-16 equipment to encourage combat. All the swords of x&y. Ramp has never been an issue even for non-green decks because I really leaned into having a selection of playable mana rocks.
  • 42 Commanders, drafted separately in a single pack of 5 cards. 2 each color pair, 2 each color trio, 2 WUBRG commanders just for any of the adventurous players.
I did allocate 4 copies of Command Tower just to make fixing easier on everyone. I may do the same thing for Arcane Signet once I get enough copies. It homoginizes the decks a small portion, but only one Sol Ring and one Sakura-Tribe Elder means players still need to think outside the box.

The cube is built to be a bit goodstuff and create as few dead cards as possible. I have been wanting to build in a couple more strong themes to make it easier to wheel the niche synergy cards and prioritize ramp and removal on the early picks. This is where the cube will be going in the future as I work to support strategies other than goodstuff builds that are currently winning the pods. I don't want to go too hard into too many different themes because then the draft pool becomes diluted with cards that may have no value if the matching commander was not drafted.
What deck size do you intend for your players to draft? Some people do 60 because of draft time etc., some try to make 100-card decks work. Very curious.
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Post by PrimevalCommander » 2 years ago

Kelzam wrote:
2 years ago
What deck size do you intend for your players to draft? Some people do 60 because of draft time etc., some try to make 100-card decks work. Very curious.
I split that down the middle. 79 cards + Commander. Since cube is only meant to play one or two games per draft, having 100 cards is too much. You won't ever see them all. I think 80 cards gives you the commander feel, while making the deck just a bit smaller to work with and needing less cards to draft.

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