Pictured is the complete cube, the commanders list, and the free picks handed out at the start of draft.
I had a blast working on it and I’m definitely going to build a second at some point once this one is in a state where I am confident it’s fun.
So as the title says, I’m building my first commander cube and I’m in the stage of digging through bulk to work out the rough cards I want to put in the cube before I cull my numbers down to meet the 720 card limit.
I am working off a template I found in a YouTube video of:
80 commanders, 85 for each colour, 100 multi colour, 100 lands and the rest colourless.
The hardest part by far has been selecting commanders and archetypes. I’ve had to fully reset my progress back to square one 4 times. The biggest thing I learnt is that 720 cards I a lot until you start putting cards into your very limited colour pool. With the images you can see my early drafts and ideas in my spread sheet (I’m not posting link because it will dox me). But realistically I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. My initial idea was 10 archetypes, 1 for each colour pairing. This was too broad a scope. Every time I got past that phase I ran into immediate issues. I had too many cards that only fit one archetype and drafting was going to be a nightmare. Also commons would compete hard with rares (they still do but less so)
This also led to a second smaller issue, it pidgeon holed you into hoping you get the right number of cards in your draft and in the right colours or hope to get one of the 10 3 colour commanders.
My solution was to just narrow my scope to 5 archetypes. This still enabled 8 2 colour legends for each archetype with room for partners and a cycle of 3 colour commanders.
The break down currently is:
40 2 colour commanders (enemy colours)
10 2 colour partner commanders (one for each pairing)
20 mono colour partners
10 3 colour partners that have overlap with the archetypes (1 for each shard)
This should enable 2/3/4 colour decks, with the more colours you go the more generic your piles so there is some trade off. I’m also intentionally not worrying about mono coloured legends on their own, they’re going to be in the set but not counted as legends because it’s not really feasible to build a deck with them, if someone does succeed I’m okay with it though.
My archetypes are:
Orzhov aristocrats/tokens
Izzet spells/prowess
Golgari reanimator
Boros aggro
Simic ramp/big stuff (less focus on landfall more on getting to huge mana and casting big blue spells or green stompys)
White: will do tokens and going wide well
Blue: will be spells and a heavy focus on draw for lab maniac and WOTS Jace. (No good removal in colour though)
Black: will be renanimation and sacrifice
Red: will be prowess and general aggro
Green: will by stompy
Some lessons I hope I can learn are:
Balancing mana curves in the cube so drafts feel more fair mana curve wise
How to handle more generic cards that are pet cards like wheel of misfortune
How much removal to add to cubes to make it not feel like a slog while enabling more slow midrange/control de is to exist.
Any extra feed back or tips are appreciated. I will edit this post over time and add my commanders list when I get home.