[Anthony Alongi’s “Command The Cube” continues! Catch up on Part 1 here.]
I Command You, Cube: Be Quick! Or At Least Efficient
Let’s be honest: there is no such thing as a breezy-fast multiplayer format. A typical four- player Chaos game will take about an hour. (Yes, there’s a ton of variance. We’ve all experienced ten-minute blowouts, and we can all recall that three-hour game from seven months ago.) On top of that, people need to draft and build. If you schedule 90 minutes for a full evening of Commander Cube, don’t expect everything to go swimmingly. I can give you advice on shortening time, but I cannot twist the time-space continuum on your behalf.
So our starting assumption is that you’re trying this during a day or evening where everyone has already set aside four or five hours for Magic. Your objective is to squeeze as much Magic play into that time as possible.
Not getting to play is the worst thing that can happen during a night of Magic, no matter what format. The three best ways to ensure everyone can play and have a good time:
1) Minimize drafting and building time, so players can play games.
2) Maximize the number of games played to ensure variety of plays and outcomes.
3) Minimize the time spent between a given player’s turn and their next turn, so they remain engaged in gameplay.
The first is the hardest. A conservative time estimate for a Magic draft is about 45 minutes, one minute per card. (Magic Online times out after this long for each pick.) That’s three packs of fifteen cards. With six packs of fifteen cards, you’re looking at double the draft time, an hour and a half, unless you do something.
The best solution to this problem is to reduce decision-making time, which happens when players have an early sense of what they want to accomplish with their draft deck. To do this, we are going to establish color identity as quickly as possible. This is an idea we’ll put a pin in for now and pick up below in the “legend” challenge.
To maximize the number of games, reduce the number of battlefield resets to an absolute minimum (maybe ten total, so an average of one or so per deck), and prefer conditional battlefield wipes like Pyroclasm and Engineered Explosives to unconditional wipes like Blasphemous Act and Nevinyrral’s Disk wherever you can.
“Fewer battlefield resets” doesn’t mean “no answers.” Keep spot removal available, bordering on plentiful. Put in lots of creatures, evasion, and spot removal. This will create an interactive churn on the battlefield, where players try to one-up each other incrementally. A few modest but noteworthy game-breakers like Beastmaster Ascension or Nahiri’s Wrath will create super moments; notice the difference between these cards and the absolute battlefield wipes that set everyone back and prolong games.
To minimize the “turn cycle,” the answer is straightforward. An eight-player draft is fine; an eight-player game is not. When the draft is larger than five people, the group should split into two Chaos games, making the sizes as even as possible.
Busting into smaller games not only quickens most games and reduces turn cycle time, it also gives drafters an excellent reason to cooperate and avoid hate-drafting, which increases the quality of each player’s picks. For an eight-player draft, use alternating seats to set up your two four-player games. Adjust as needed for differently sized drafts.
Beyond that, your best bet for shortening time comes from forcing a limit on deck construction. Have a tight card pool that minimizes chaff, make sure you have plenty of basic lands in sleeves, and set a construction time limit (fifteen minutes recommended). Your friends will understand. They want to play, too.
I Command You, Cube: Be Legendary!
You can’t Commander without a commander. Legendary creatures are critical to the format.
One of the things you should do early in Commander Cube construction is “pull your Commanders” by blasting through your collection and pulling every decent legendary creature you can find. (“Decent” is your own definition.) If your collection goes back to Kamigawa block or if you’ve been keeping up with Commander sets, you’re going to have a nice pool to choose from. If you have enough to get a little picky, try applying the “Rule of Splash,” preferring Sensei Golden-Tail to Eight-and-a-Half Tails and Baral, Chief of Compliance to Kira, Great Glass-Spinner.
Count up your total potential commanders. While a mathematically “perfect” Commander Cube can have up to 120 legendary creatures, enough to fill all eight opening packs in a draft, anywhere north of 30 is fine. Try to use as many as you can, with as many two- or more-color as you can, within reason. Players want to play good decks with good commanders that they can choose, and more colors in the commander mean more choices for all the other cards. Sticking eight drafters with only ten monochromatic choices will mean one decent draft for an evening and then a lot of feeling of repetition in the weeks and months that follow. Creating a Cube is a lot of work; if the host wants it to pay off, players need to enjoy the creation of a cool new Commander deck every time.
There’s another reason to have a high commander count. We’re going to make the entire first pack about color identity, which means all the legendary creatures are going in there. The more cards that aren’t legendary creatures in the first pack, the higher the risk that a drafter will misread a signal and end up with a color combination that can’t be supported.
Below, I provide a couple of different charts with recommended ratios for color identity and legendary creatures. One of them is a “modest collection” scenario that assumes someone who’s a few years into Magic and/or on a limited budget; the other is a “veteran collection” scenario that assumes a deep resource pool.
Both scenarios assume the creator invests at least partially in Commander 2016, given the high ratio of legendary creatures to dollars spent. You don’t have to invest in all five decks for the modest scenario, but that is probably the least expensive way to get over 100 commander possibilities, including all the partner combinations. (It comes out to less than $1.60 per commander or commander partnership, as I write this.)
Both scenarios also assume you can get hold of ten Signets and ten Keyrunes, none of which are rare. Also fine are the Monuments from Dragons of Tarkir or the even the Talismans from Mirrodin. Those are the “two-color production” cards: they fix mana and have a color identity, which gives them a strange but critical role in a Commander Cube.
Proposed Ratios: Modest Collection
|
Identity |
Examples |
Raw Number |
Percent of Pool |
Includes Legends |
|
Five-Color |
5 |
0.9 percent |
2 |
|
|
Four-Color |
3 |
0.5 percent |
3 |
|
|
Three-Color |
40 |
7.1 percent |
10 |
|
|
Two-Color |
160 |
28.6 percent |
40 |
|
|
Two-Color |
20 |
3.6 percent |
0 |
|
|
One-Color |
330 |
58.9 percent |
5 |
|
|
Zero-Color |
22 |
3.9 percent |
0 |
|
|
TOTAL |
560 |
60 |
Proposed Ratios: Veteran Collection
|
Identity |
Examples |
Raw Number |
Percent of Pool |
Includes Legends |
|
Five-Color |
15 |
2.7 percent |
4 |
|
|
Four-Color |
5 |
0.9 percent |
5 |
|
|
Three-Color |
80 |
14.3 percent |
40 |
|
|
Two-Color |
170 |
30.4 percent |
50 |
|
|
Two-Color |
20 |
3.6 percent |
0 |
|
|
One-Color |
220 |
39.2 percent |
15 |
|
|
Zero-Color |
50 |
8.9 percent |
1 |
|
|
TOTAL |
560 |
120 |
Within each row, you’ll want to achieve color balance. Start with your legendary creature pile.
1. Make a pile for each color identity. One pile for each of the five colors, one pile for each of the ten two-color “guilds,” one pile for each of the ten three-color “tribes,” and one pile for any and all four- and five-color commanders.
2. Check the ratios across the five colors. You should check total mana symbols across all five colors, check to ensure each clan/tribe has coverage, and do what you can to keep everything even. One option is to reduce where you overemphasize certain colors or combinations; another option is to add legendary creatures where your colors or combinations are light. Your own budget and interests will play an obvious role here.
3. Don’t forget the Rule of Splash. This is particularly important when comparing two-color legendary creatures to those requiring three colors or more. I recommend at least as many two-color legendary creatures as the sum of legendary creatures requiring three or more colors…even if you’re pushing four-color or five-color.
4. Keep an eye open for themes. Are you noticing that all of the white and red legendary creatures are Samurai? That’s interesting; check your collection for cards that enhance a specific creature type. How about your blue and green legendary creatures; are they all pretty inexpensive, or do most use +1/+1 counters? How can you build from there?
5. Push the themes via a “core” of three- and two-color cards. Using rough numbers from the chart above, pick through your collection for those two- and three-color cards that can make a statement. They can be rares, or there are plenty of strong, flavorful commons and uncommon in the ten guilds. Try to give every two-color pairing a theme. (Read the articles that Wizards staff write about creating sets that are good to draft as to why; the same logic holds here.) The three-color cards don’t have to have as much of a distinct theme; if you pick modal cards like Charms, they’ll glue stuff together nicely.
6. Build from there. Expand your Cube from this core. Keep the colors even and shoot for the rough ratios suggested in one of the charts above. Don’t forget typical good Cube construction: give your drafters a good mana curve, and make sure you have enough creatures to meet player expectations.
Favor themes where you can, but don’t be afraid to mix in cards from your collection that you simply wish you could play more often. The Rule of Splash will become more and more difficult to follow. Try to stick to it, all the way to 560 non-land cards.
Colorless cards are the easiest to splash if they don’t require colorless mana in the casting cost, but take it easy on artifacts, especially if you have legendary creatures like Breya, Etherium Shaper or Sharuum the Hegemon in your commander pool. You want those decks to do well; you don’t want them to dominate an unfair percentage of the time.
7. Add nonbasic lands. Reaching 160 nonbasic lands may feel daunting for newer players. Don’t assume we’re talking about rare lands here, and in fact, you can relax the “one-of” restriction if that makes it easier for you to reach that total.
The “gain one life” lands like Akoum Refuge, simple tapped lands like Foul Orchard, “Vivid” lands from Lorwyn, the uncommon tri-lands from Tarkir and Alara, and the Panoramas from Alara…none of these are rare. Most stores should have tons of these cheap, and many of them have been reprinted in Commander products.
Remember that lands can have color identities, too. Vivid Grove has a green color identity, even though it can produce additional colors. It’s still pretty easy to draft. Jungle Shrine has a green, red, and white color identity. Evolving Wilds has no color identity; it should be a high pick.
Still short on nonbasics after all that? Double up on some series where you have them. Multiple copies of mana-fixing nonbasic lands are not going to warp your draft as long as you keep the color production and identity balanced.
That’s all for today. I’ll see you soon for the exciting conclusion of this series! Thanks for joining me.