Intro

Welcome! This cube is designed for 4-8 players: draft and then play commander in a self-contained casual environment. It can also be played with 4-5 players in a single commander pod.

The goal of this cube is to maximize gameplay time by encouraging games based around board tempo, interaction, and combat.

There's strong emphasis on preserving the natural curve-based momentum of Limited while also rewarding the explosive synergies found in Commander.

The list is intended to be high synergy with lots of overlap. Themes are based around each color's common mechanics and incorporate archetypes familiar to commander players.

Special Rules

• Commander draft:
• • 3 packs of 20 cards
• • Take 2 cards each pick
• • Build a 60-card deck (~26 lands)
• Everybody gets Command Tower in their pool.
• Use any commander from among your drafted cards.
• Color identity does not matter for deck construction.
• Colors of mana outside your color identity cannot be used to pay commander tax.

Color identity doesn't apply to deckbuilding because your colors will naturally be limited by your card pool and manabase. Instead, the only color identity restriction is on the command zone itself, to discourage splashing random commanders.

Commanders

There are a lot of legendaries in the list, with plenty of overlap between the themes and synergies.

Legendary creatures are plentiful among the monocolored cards, and each two-color pair has at least three. For the three-color combos, there are two potential commanders for each. They should synergize well with multiple strategies within their colors. Lastly there's one 5-color commander.

Themes and Archetypes

I'll write it up better once we get to play it and see, but in short:

Overall we don't want to be too fancy. Trying to focus on what you'd expect for each color. There's a lot of card-type stuff: enchantments and artifacts. Plenty of graveyard recursion. Selesnya tokens, black sacrifice, green landfall, etc.

This is not comprehensive, there's additional synergies and many of these themes cross into other colors as well.

Here's two primary archetypes for each color-pair:

- Blink

- Enchantment Control

- Evasive Rogues

- Reanimator

- Aggro Slug

- Artifact Sacrifice and Recycling

- Aggro Stompy

- Land/Ramp

- Go Wide Tokens

- Enchantment Midrange

- Lifegain Aristocrats

- Sacrifice Attrition

- Prowess Spells

- Artifact Copies

- Graveyard Token Recursion

- Self-Mill Landfall

- Token Army

- Attacking Army

- Landfall Value

- Clones

Others

• Goblins has some incidental synergies as a tribe but it's not pushed as a main archetype
• Storm: the classic combo deck is possible if everything comes together, but should be rarely seen. With the exception of Brain Freeze as a signpost, storm wants cards that have utility in other decks without being strict combo pieces.

Lands

Full cycles of original duals, fetches, shocks, checks, triomes, landscapes, and the battlebond lands.
Then, for each color pair, there's one more (from among other dual cycles). Example:

Lastly, there's a handful of general any-color lands and basic fetches to round it out.

Notes

• No fast mana rocks (Sol Ring, moxen, Mana Crypt, etc.)
  We have mana rocks, but their primary purpose is for color fixing. As ramp, it should come at a tempo cost: there are no rocks that costs less than 2 mana. Lack of fast mana also preserves green's mechanical identity.
  In the draft itself, must-picks make for less interesting decisions- it's disappointing to open Sol Ring because you feel like there's no choice.

• No tutors
  With the exception of getting lands, the only searching is very specific and situational.
  Whether or not you prefer the consistency that tutoring provides, it's awkward in multiplayer games because it makes three players wait for one-- especially with draft decks where you might not know immediately what you want to get. Plus, (just like the fast mana) every deck would want a good tutor, making for a boring auto-pick during draft.
  Instead, every color has a lot of card draw.

• No free instants (Force of Will, Deadly Rollick, etc)
  Excluded to encourage quicker gameplay. Otherwise, players need to constantly be aware of them. It makes for interesting complications in 1v1, but is tedious in multiplayer.
  (The only "free" instant spell in the list is Gush, which doesn't interact with opponents.)

• Excluded Rhystic Study and Smothering Tithe
  These tend to completely tank entire games-- which might be interesting if only some builds wanted them. But they are must-take picks for any deck regardless of synergies, which makes them just as oppressive in the draft itself.

• No initiative, dungeons, or ringbearers
  Too much complication in a game with naturally complex board states-- not to mention the annoyance of drafting cards that don't explain what they do.
  Monarchy's good though-- it encourages aggression and is simple to explain and remember.

• Less board wipes than a commander player might expect.
  There are important sweepers available for control decks who need to slow things down, but (unlike constructed commander) they don't belong in every deck. Most of the board wipes are one-sided so they continue to progress the game forward instead of stalling things out.
  We want to avoid games that grind to a crawl-- instead, reward momentum. If someone has an overpowering board presence, let him use it to win the game so we can play another round!