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Back when I was 16 or so, I was heavily into Magic, and primarily Commander. I had spent basically all the money I earned that year on making a few commander decks, and then I discovered cube! I naturally merged my two loves, and made a commander cube. Less than a month later, the entirety of my collection except the cube were stolen.
Now, years later, I've been getting back into MTG, mainly limited and commander, and decided to optimize my cube with more wisdom than I had then.
First off, there are a variety of problems I identified, and tried to tackle.
- Commanders are color locked. How do you have a system that isn't everyone forcing colors, or not getting a commander to the deck you were building?
- Grindy decks seem way too good. Commander has higher life totals, as well as 3 times the opponents, so games take a lot longer, so won't grindy decks just win out?
- You won't have enough synergy for it to feel like commander. Due to the nature of making a cube, you have to create cards that fit into multiple archetypes. But how do you still focus on synergy instead of devolving into aggro-less goodstuff?
- The decks will end up the exact same each time. Because certain decks and archetypes are always going to be looking for specific cards, a lot of decks in an archetype will look nearly identical.
I understand why people shun Commander Cube. It has Problems.
Here are my current solutions to these problems.
- How do we assign commanders? My cube I designed to be drafted by a pod of 8, so I have a suite of 40 commander options, 5 for each drafter. Before we draft our packs, we draft a pack of 5 commanders face down as usual. This almost guarantees to allow you to play an archetype you want to play, as well as giving you options switch if you realize someone else is drafting it.
- Grindy Decks OP? This is a problem I still struggle with. However, I reduced the deck size to 60, and you draft 5 packs of 15 instead, bringing the cube size to 600. To fit this, The starting life totals are 30, and commander damage is set to 15. This means you need more interaction against aggro, and while grindy decks are an option, there is a downside associated with it.
- Critical mass of synergy? I feel like this is a standard cube problem, however a key point in commander in my mind is that your deck has a jumping off point for synergy, your commander. This means you just need to be even more diligent about cards fitting into multiple archetypes, as well as having the supported archetypes closer together. For example, in my cube, golgari is sacrifice, which means green cards from selesnya's token theme for it, which uses white aggro cards that create tokens from boros's theme as well, ect.
- Won't you end up with identical decks with more specialized archetypes? Due to the nature of having a strong identity for each color pairing, the decks might look very similar. To keep things fresh, there are 3 commanders of each color pairing that follow a general theme, so your Izzet deck under [[Mizzix of the Izmagnus]] will be a good deal different than a [[Niv-Mizzet, Parun]] deck, or a [[Melek, Izzet Paragon]] deck. To also spice things up, there is 1 commander of each of the 3 color pairings. For example, [[Animar, Soul of Elements]] is an option to merge the Simic 1/ 1 counter deck and the Gruul Midrange deck.
Now while I have put a lot of thought into this, I am posting this here mainly for suggestions, criticism, and people's own insight. I want to know your opinions!
Edit: A lot of people have proposed the idea of dropping color identity, and I don't know why I didn't think of that! I definitely plan on testing that, and adding more fixing during the draft to assist with this. Not set in stone, but seems worth the time to test.
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