Foreword
Jumpstart is a format that I have come to love playing after building my cube into a Jumpstart Cube hybrid! I wanted to share my process with you all as a comprehensive resource for you to build, balance, and play with a Jumpstart cube of your own.
Introduction Constructing Your Jumpstart Cube- What Does a Jumpstart Pack Look Like?
- How to Build a Jumpstart Cube
- How to Build a Great Jumpstart Cube
- How to Add Charm Into Your Jumpstart Cube
- How to Manage Your Jumpstart Cube
- How to Test Your Jumpstart Cube
- How to Play With Your Jumpstart Cube
- Other Jumpstart Cube Variants
What is a Cube?
“A cube is a large collection of (often powerful) cards used for drafting and playing Limited. Drafting a cube is similar to drafting booster packs, but instead of drafting from three fifteen-card Magic booster packs, you draft from fifteen-card "packs" that you create from your cube.” - Melissa DeTora (Wizards Articles)
What is Jumpstart?
Jumpstart is a unique format for Magic the Gathering, similar to other games like Smash Up. You take two prebuilt 20-card “Packs”, shuffle them together, and then play games against other people who have built a deck in the same manner. This was brought to MTG by the officially sanctioned Wizards product of the same name on July 17, 2020 to considerable success. Each pack of 20 cards has “lands and creatures, ways to interact with your opponent, powerhouse cards to help you close out the game, and a sensible mana curve—so any combination of two packs is a ready-to-play complete Magic deck!” (Doug Beyer, Wizards Articles).
What is a Jumpstart Cube?
A Jumpstart Cube is a cube that is at least partially designed to support playing games of limited Magic with the Jumpstart structure. Almost every ordinary Cube can be augmented into a Jumpstart Cube, and cubes designed specifically for Jumpstart only need a handful of additional cards to be played as a standard draft format.
Why Build a Jumpstart Cube?
Jumpstart as a format lends itself to board-game style gameplay, where you and your friends sit down and immediately start playing. Since Jumpstart has very little deckbuilding, you can play an entire extra match of Magic compared to a regular night of cube drafting. Jumpstart also helps balance skill differentials, allowing players who are less familiar with the limited environment to have close competitive games.
For cube designers, Jumpstart provides a framework that makes testing new cards and themes far easier than in a normal drafting environment. In Jumpstart, the card in question has already made its way into a deck, while in a normal drafting environment, there are a lot of factors that make it quite difficult for a new card to make its way into a deck. Additionally, looking at a cube through the lens of Jumpstart can identify archetypes that lack sufficient overlap with others, and provide a framework for new cube designers.
Unfortunately, Jumpstart does not give players the opportunity to deck-build. This is a hefty disadvantage for more experienced players, but there are ways to work around this disadvantage. See Jumpstart Variants for specifics! Additionally, since packs are set decklists, there are fewer opportunities for your players to surprise you with new deck synergies, but simultaneously lead to decks and synergies that players wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
What Does a Jumpstart Pack Look Like?
With your plan in mind, what does a Jumpstart Pack even look like? The general “formula” for a Jumpstart pack is a MONOCOLORED pile of 20 cards that can operate on its own consisting of the following:
- 2x Removal spells
- 8x Creatures
- 2x “Flex” slots
- 7x Basic lands
- 1x Dual land
Why are Jumpstart packs monocolored?
Jumpstart packs should be monocolored, since selecting a 2 color pack gives a LARGE chance of creating a 3 or 4 color deck with terrible fixing. Suddenly that player can’t cast their spells, and get steamrolled by a 1 or 2 Color deck.
Unless you INTENTIONALLY want your players to consistently end up with 3+ color decks, DO NOT create multicolored packs.
Which dual land should I include?
Traditionally, the dual land of choice are the Thriving Lands, created specifically for Jumpstart.
However, this should not restrict you. Instead, include a land token in the dual land slot, and allow your players to select which lands they’d like to exchange their tokens for. This allows different decks and strategies to leverage appropriate lands, and allows players some choice in deck building.
What does “operate on its own” mean?
Each half deck needs its own method of winning the game, and its own identity. Do not create jumpstart packs that are just “support” packs, or play out similarly to a pack of the same color. Give each pack a way to win the game independent from any other Jumpstart Pack. You can have a green +1/+1 counters strategy and a white +1/+1 counters strategy, but make them feel different in how they play.
What removal spells do I put in?
The best removal spells to put in are the opposite of the speed of the pack. So aggro decks get expensive hard removal spells, while control decks that get the cheaper removal spells to buy them time for their haymakers. All decks would prefer cheap hard removal, but this helps balance out the aggro decks and the control decks.
What if I want to make a control pack with more removal spells?
Sure! Go for it! I’m not gonna stop you. Try it out! The formula I wrote is just a general guideline for the average Jumpstart pack, but it is by no means a requirement.
How To Build Your Jumpstart Cube
Now that we know what a Jumpstart pack looks like, the first question to ask when building a Jumpstart Cube is how many themes and packs you want for your environment. I suggest 20 packs total as a baseline, since it gives you 190 unique combinations of decks! This means that with an 8 person group meeting once a week, you can go up to SIX MONTHS without seeing a duplicate deck at the table.
With your pack count decided, it’s time to build your list!
Option 1: WOTC Jumpstart CubeYou can make a Jumpstart Cube by keeping and storing the original Jumpstart packs that you can buy in the store. Unfortunately, these packs are hard to come by, expensive to build through singles, and have a lower power level than most cubes.
Steps:
- Select and obtain 20 unique officially made Jumpstart themes.
- Store them, and play!
You can make a Jumpstart Cube by making your own packs and themes from scratch! This process closely resembles constructing a cube from scratch, and can be just as large of an undertaking. All of the normal constraints such as rarity, color availability, or theme that apply as restrictions to a normal cube can also be used for Jumpstart cubes.
Steps:
- Select 20 themes, separated into 4 of each monocolor.
- Build 20 Jumpstart packs.
- Store them, and play!
The third option is what I did with my own cube, where I created Jumpstart pack-lists out of the cards already included in the cube! Any cube with at least 360 cards can take this approach to offer another way to play Magic The Gathering. The main advantage of this method is that you can easily convert between Traditional Drafting and Jumpstart when your players are in the mood. This method does work easier with an archetype-based cube rather than a “goodstuff” cube, but both can be converted.
Steps:
- Own and maintain a pre-existing 360+ cube.
- Separate out your cards into 4 Jumpstart packs for each color.
- Store the decklists, and use them when you want to play Jumpstart, or shuffle the packs together to draft when you want to play that way!
How to Build a Great Jumpstart Cube
So now that we know both how to build a Jumpstart Cube and the general formula for an average pack, let’s look deeper at how to make the experience better! The largest issue that plagues WOTC official Jumpstart packs and many Jumpstart cubes is the complete isolation of themes.
Any Jumpstart pack can be combined with ANY other Jumpstart pack. This means that if your first pack happens to be Blue Mill, and your pack happens to be Green Elves, they will have little to no synergy with each other. This feels TERRIBLE during gameplay.
So, to make a great Jumpstart Cube, we MUST fix this problem. The solution that I reached is to intentionally overlap your themes in each color, in a modern archetype-based cube structure. Let’s take a look at one of my Jumpstart Packs for example.
To break this Jumpstart Pack down, we can see that this pack exactly follows the previous framework. 8 creatures, 2 removal spells, and 2 flex slots. The general theme of this pack is +1/+1 counters, and has 2 cards - Steppe Glider and Abzan Battle Priest - that are explicit rewards for cards with +1/+1 counters.
But what about the rest of the cards in the pack? To understand their specific inclusion as theme overlap, we have to understand the rest of themes in the same color. My other Jumpstart themes in White are Artifacts, Flyers, and Sacrifice.
So in this Jumpstart Pack, I have 2 cards for Artifacts (Farmstead Gleaner & Tumble Magnet), 2 cards for Sacrifice (Steadfast Sentry & Ninth Bridge Patrol), and 2 cards for Flyers (Grateful Apparition & Steppe Glider).
If we look at another one of my white Jumpstart packs, you can see how overlap cards function within a different theme.
So in this Sacrifice based Jumpstart Pack, I have 2 overlap cards for Artifacts (Sorcerer’s Broom & Visionary Augmenter), 2 overlap cards for +1/+1 counters (Unruly Mob & Visionary Augmenter), and 2 overlap cards for flyers (Topplegeist & Belfry Spirit).
Applying this idea into a general “formula”, the average Jumpstart pack for a 20 pack cube should roughly be built as:
- 2x Cards that overlap with Theme 1
- 2x Cards that overlap with Theme 2
- 2x Cards that overlap with Theme 3
- 2x Payoff cards for this Jumpstart Theme
- 4x Flex slots / curve fillers
- 7x Basic lands
- 1x Dual land
Building your Jumpstart packs in this manner more closely follows the common archetype based design found in most modern limited environments, and provides a method for tying pack themes together even if no other synergy exists.
For example let’s now look at how this plays out with our Blue Mill deck and Green Elves Tribal Jumpstart combination from earlier. If your archetypes for the overall cube were GB elves and UB mill, the core themes of these two Jumpstart packs still have little overlap with each other. However, if your UG archetype was Ramp, you now have cards from both packs that support a ramping strategy, giving the two Jumpstart packs SOME cohesion during gameplay.
Although decks can be more powerful when both halves match the same theme, this strategy improves the average experience between any two random decks by guaranteeing SOME overlap between themes. The main downside of this method is that it gets difficult to maintain outside of a 20 pack Jumpstart cube, but it should be doable up until about 6-7 packs per color.
How to Add Charm
From my experience with my own Jumpstart cube, there are few elements that can add a LOT of enjoyment to playing this format!
The first of these is to name each Jumpstart Pack something unique and evocative to the theme, so that you get an idea what each Jumpstart Pack does before you look at the card contents, and you get a deck name whenever you combine the two Packs. The best name that I’ve made in my Jumpstart Cube so far is “Sneaky Beef”! When naming packs, you’ll generally want about a 3:1 ratio of Nouns to Non-Noun words.
Along with this you can make custom pack faces with the names thanks to the template made here!
The other element to add charm is to make your basic lands thematically match the Jumpstart Pack! I took this one step further and used normal basics for all but 1 of my lands, and put a full art land in that slot. During play, I found that people would ALWAYS announce whenever they played the full art land, and enjoyed the additional flavoring.
How to Manage Your Jumpstart Cube
Here on CubeCobra, you can assign different Tags to each card, which is the easiest method I’ve found for managing the different decklists.
How to Test Your Jumpstart Cube
Now that you have built your Jumpstart Cube, how do you test in order to check pack balance? Outside of just playing a whole lot, which has a lot of variance, my girlfriend and I devised this method to guarantee every pack is tested! Additionally, we created this spreadsheet to help automatically record the data as you play to give proof to which Jumpstart packs are under or over powered!
Steps:- List out the names of all 20 Packs in your cube.
- Randomize that list, then separate it into groups of 4 packs each.
- Within each group of 4 packs, there are 6 possible combinations of decks, and 3 possible matchups, since you can’t use 1 pack on both sides.
- For each matchup, play 1 game on the play and 1 game on the draw.
- Then, swap decks, and play 1 game on the play and 1 game on the draw.
- Then repeat this process for each unique matchup!
- Then repeat this process for each group of 4 packs!
This helps control for any player skill differential, and is an equivalent number of games to playing 4 best of 3 matches. This technique allows a mere two people to test the game balance of the entire cube!
How to Play With Your Jumpstart Cube
There’s an official WOTC article detailing different ways to play with Jumpstart packs, but I have found the format that was offered on Magic Arena to be the most fun.
Steps:- See 3 random packs, then select 1.
- See 3 new random packs, then select 1.
- Combine the 2 selected packs, and play!
Other Jumpstart Variants
This guide is not meant to prescribe a singular way of creating a Jumpstart cube, but provide a template for people to build and play in new ways compared to before.
Some other methods or versions of a Jumpstart cube that I’ve seen or thought of are:
- 25 Card Jumpstart - It’s Jumpstart, but with 25 cards packs instead of 20
- Sideboard Jumpstart - 22-24 card Packs that you cut down to a standard 40 card deck, putting the cut cards into the sideboard for games 2 and 3 like normal best-of-3!
- Jumpstart Commander - 30 card Jumpstart Packs with a commander, and any commander selected gains the partner keyword
Jumpstart is a format that I have come to adore designing for and playing with. I hope that this article has helped inspire you to make your own Jumpstart Cube and explore the possibilities within this space.