The Battlebox Cube

As much as I love cube drafting, getting 7 other like-minded people together to draft on any given day is proving more difficult as I get older. However, Battlebox is one of my favorite ways to play magic as it takes zero set up, travels decently well, has unique and grindy gameplay that rewards smart decisions and resource management, and all it needs is one other person. But what if you could take that same set of curated cards from your Battlebox and use them to create sealed decks or even draft it with up to 8 players? That would be the best of both worlds in my opinion. Games should be focused on interactive gameplay and strategic decision-making, and not whether you ever drew your third land. So that is what I set out to do with the Battlebox Cube

The Battlebox cube is designed to be playable as a 1v1 Battlebox, but with enough synergies and build-arounds to be playable as a sealed-deck for 2-4 people or draftable as a cube for 6-8 players.

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Battlebox Rules

1. Players share a common library.
2. Starting hand size = 7 cards.
3. Each player starts with the following cards in their Command Zone:

• 1x Plains
• 1x Island
• 1x Swamp
• 1x Mountain
• 1x Forest
• 1x Idyllic Beachfront
• 1x Contaminated Aquifer
• 1x Geothermal Bog
• 1x Wooded Ridgeline
• 1x Radiant Grove
• 1x Recycled Waste Custom land with:

1. Once per turn, players may exile a card from their hand facedown and play a land of their choice from their Command Zone. (of note, The Command Zone is not outside the game and does not count as exile for cards that care about playing lands from exile.)
2. If a land would be put into your graveyard or be exiled, it goes to your Command Zone instead.

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Battlebox Sealed or Draft Rules

1. 3 packs of 15 cards per person + (15-card Goblin Lore Seeker pack)
2. Minimum deck size = 30 cards.
3. Starting hand size = 7 cards
4. Each player creates a separate 10-card Land Deck with any combination of the following lands, containing a maximum of 5 nonbasic lands:

• Plains
• Island
• Swamp
• Mountain
• Forest
• Idyllic Beachfront
• Contaminated Aquifer
• Geothermal Bog
• Wooded Ridgeline
• Radiant Grove
• Sunlit Marsh
• Molten Tributary
• Haunted Mire
• Sacred Peaks
• Tangled Islet
• Shimmering Grotto

1. Shuffle your Land Deck separately from your main deck and place it face down in your Command Zone.
2. After drawing your opening hand and resolving mulligans, each player may Scry 1 from their Land Deck.
3. Once per turn, players may exile a card from their hand facedown and then play a land from the top of their Land Deck from their Command Zone.
4. If a land would go to your graveyard or be exiled, shuffle it into your Land Deck in your Command Zone instead.
5. Any spell or ability that allows you to scry may be used on your main deck or land deck.

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Limited Archetypes

Azorius - Flicker
Dimir - Control
Rakdos - Sacrifice
Gruul - Exile
Selesnya - +1/+1 counters
Orzhov - Recursion
Izzet - Artifacts
Golgari - Graveyard
Boros - Aggro
Simic - Proliferate

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Design Notes

Goals
My main goal was to design and curate a Battlebox set that was balanced enough between colors, mana values, power levels, and archetypes that it could also be used in a cohesive and engaging limited environment while still feeling like Battlebox with decision-rich games. It was also important that the set would have a high replayability factor with individual games feeling unique and decks feeling nuanced between drafts.

Challenges
Curating a set where each individual card would need to be useful and function in both game modes proved to be a challenge. The power level would need to remain relatively flat across the set, without having too many power outliers or niche cards. I quickly found that large swaths of cards would be invalidated by that basic criteria.

• Shuffling & Searching - Due to the nature of Battlebox having one giant shared library for both players, no card can cause players to search or shuffle their library.

• Lands - I struggled with how to handle lands and manabases for playing the set in Cube mode. Adding and removing lands from the base set every time I wanted to play different modes didn't sound like fun. But having to stick to one or two colors in draft also didn't seem like an accurate recreation of an engaging limited experience. Where I ended up landing felt like a nice compromise between the guaranteed perfect mana from Battlebox and the imperfect randomness of a limited deck's mana. Mana flood/drought is nonexistent in both formats, however limited decks can still get color-screwed if they get too greedy and draw poorly off the top of the Land Deck. The current method allows for easy 2-color decks with a splash for a third color, but it doesn't guarantee perfect fixing on curve so players will have to build their deck and mana base with that in mind. Is it worth it to go for the 3rd, 4th, or 5th color and risk getting ran over by an opponent with a streamlined 2 color deck that just curves out? Of note, instead of the typical vanilla tap lands, I opted to go with the DMU tapped dual lands that have the basic land types on them because I originally intended on having more cards with Domain effects on them. Most of those have been cut, but the lands remain, as some cards care about specific land types.

• MDFCs, Flip cards, etc. - This was more of a personal design decision, but the base set contains no flip cards, MDFCs, Dungeons, Initiative, Battles, Ring temptations, or Monarch. WotC has been increasing the number of double-faced cards in recent years, I think due to advancements in printing technology as well as the ease of implementation on digital side of the game. However, the more of these they print, the more difficult it becomes to memorize all the effects and stats on the reverse side. And it's a bummer when a player (myself included) needs to unsleeve the card to see how the back side of the card influences their decision during the draft. So for that reason, I have decided to omit any dual face card. The same goes for effects that require a secondary piece of cardboard (tokens excluded) to track.

• Niche Cards & Parasitic Mechanics - Not being able to control what cards are in your library for Battlebox means that every card needs to do something. I prioritized generically useful spells, modal spells, and build-arounds that were either self-contained engines or cards that spotted the player the first nugget of value whenever I could. Cards that overlap in themes and archetypes were a top priority, but as long as you could get at least one card's worth of value with limited effort, it was worth considering. However, because I'm a Johnny at heart, I wanted to include cards that typically require more work to get paid off. My solution?

• Custom Cards - Very early in the process I realized that Adventures were the perfect tool for including a higher density of effects without changing the number of total cards. WotC's Post-Arena modern card design has increased the modality of cards to allow best-of-one matches to not need to rely on a sideboard full of very niche effects. So I took that same approach when deciding which cards to include, and which cards needed reworking to be useful in both of my environments. You will find over 50 modified or completely new cards in the set. Most of the custom cards were designed to give added utility to a card that can’t always get a cards-worth of value in Battlebox, but was a card I wanted to include for Cube. Whenever possible I tried to keep flavor in mind but others were designed to just help fill out some effects.

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