THE CALIFORNIA COMMANDER CUBE DRAFT STRUCTURE:

• 4 players: 7 packs of 9
• 8 players: 4 packs of 15

COMMANDER ALLOCATION:

At the end of the draft players can choose any legendary creature to be their commander. Popular and well supported commanders will be readily available. If a player chooses a commander not in the current pool a proxy will be prepared for them to use and that commander will be added to the pool by the next draft.

DECK BUILDING:

Players will construct 60 card decks + 1 legendary creature to act as their commander. If a player picks up a legendary creature during the draft but decides they want to use it as their commander, they are not allowed to play their chosen commander in their 60 card deck.

PLAYING THE GAMES:

• Games will be played in pods of 4
• Players will start with 40 life
• 21 commander damage taken from a single commander is lethal
• Each player will have one free mulligan, afterward following the London mulligan
• Player going first will still draw a card on their first turn

SUPPORTED ARCHETYPES

• Artifacts
• Spells
• Lands
• Tokens (go wide, aristocrats, populate)
• Graveyard
• ETB

OVERALL DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

There are as many Commander Cubes as there are stars in the sky, and each cube owner handles the draft of their commanders differently. The most common method is to have the players draft the commanders before the actual draft from a commander pool. This has the advantage of helping to ensure every player will end up with a functional deck, even with the color identity restriction in commander. Having tried this method though I've found it tends to lead to "drafting on rails" and trivializing most of the decisions in the actual draft. By drafting the commanders first most players already have a pretty clear idea of what commander they will use and what their final deck will look like. With that knowledge they will more often than not draft that deck regardless of the cards opened in the packs or signals sent by their neighbors. Even when I recognize I'm doing this myself it is almost impossible not to do this. After all, cube is full of good cards and even a forced deck will be playable. Why try to speculate on an archetype that I may not even see a commander for?

In an effort to combat this some commander cube owners have their players draft their commanders along with the rest of the cards. I also tried this method and it helps less than you would expect. Really it just means the drafting of the commanders happens in the first half of the first pack rather than before the draft itself. As soon as drafters find an interesting potential commander it's straight back on the rails like before for exactly the same reason. In an effort to keep the draft format as interesting as possible, I've decided to allow my players to pick any legendary creature they want to act as the commander of their deck at the end of the draft. This removes the anxiety of not ending up with an on-theme on-color commander and allows the drafters to read signals, speculate on picks, and takes risks in the drafting portion. To facilitate this I have a wide range of popular or on-theme commanders for my supported archetypes printed out. However, players are also allowed to choose any commander printed (ban list pending?) and I will have a proxy ready for them and add it to the pool for the next draft.

As for the cube itself it is important to acknowledge certain aspects of the format. As a multiplayer format EDH has the tendency to lead to intractable board stalls until one player draws a Craterhoof Behemoth or puts together a combo win. Even if a given attack is "free" many players are hesitant to enter combat, either out opening themselves up to attacks from the other three players or creating enemies from spiteful opponents. With that in mind I have tried to minimize the number of cards that make it difficult to attack (e.g. Ghostly Prison). In addition, I've limited the number of board wipes in the cube. Enough so that truly clogged boards can be reset when needed, but not so many that players are unable or afraid to develop their boards (which was a real problem in earlier versions of the cube). There are also several cards that can protect a given player's board against board wipes, such as Luminous Broodmoth or Heroic Intervention, giving creature-based decks the ability to fight through them. In the place of these prison cards and wrath effects I included cards across colors that enable and/or reward attacking (e.g. Militant Angel, Keeper of Keys, Rankle, Master of Pranks, Ogre Battledriver, Ohran Frostfang, Blade of Selves).

Beyond cards that prevent board-wipe locks, I've added cards that ensure the game ends in a reasonable time frame, such as Chandra, Awakened Inferno. In my experience these design decisions lead to faster paced and more exciting games. I have also tried my best to keep the curve of this cube as low as possible. This leads to efficient decks and dynamic game play. Having three 3-drops in had on turn six gives players way more decisions than a 4-drop and two 5-drops. More efficient threats also allows players to develop their boards while leaving up interaction.

CURRENT QUESTIONS, CONCERNS, AND THOUGHTS AS THE CUBE'S CURATOR

• Ways to use/abuse tokens are almost always sexier that the cards the cards that make them. In fact most cards are sexier than token makers. When adding new cards I need resist the urge to cut "boring" token makers.
• Enchantments may not be supported enough with either payoffs or raw enchantment count. Needs more testing.
• Many of the core archetypes span four different colors and have supporting commanders in a wide variety of color combinations within those four colors. I will need to watch these to see if two or three of the four colors end up being more popular, or if a given color combination is not as well balanced as other ones (for example, maybe white/red and white/green tokens are fine, but red/green tokens never comes together)

LIST OF COMMANDERS CURRENTLY PRINTED:

https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/ccc-pc [https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/ccc-pc]