Art by Luca ZontiniThis is the Cricket Bar Cube with Commander Supplemental. One of 40 Legends in the maybeboard are chosen after the draft.
This cube is meant to be drafted by 4 players who then pod up a for multiplayer game of commander.
4 packs of 16 cards. Draft two cards at a time.
After the draft, players choose their commander from the binder of 40+ 2-colored legends (see below).
During deck-building, players are given access to basic lands and one copy each of command tower and commander's sphere. Any drafted card can be included in the deck, but basics much match the color identity of the commander. Fixing lands will be essential for splashes. (Curator note: I want this cube to be a place where decks resemble of normal game of commander, but have the opportunity for unique interactions).
60 card decks (59 + Commander).
Players start with 25 life. The winner is the last person standing.
I realized that the Commanders in the maybeboard may not be viewable by folks looking at the cube list. Here they are presented as visual spoiler. I'll have them displayed as such in a small binder. Maybe we roll to see who goes first and then choose in turn order a commander from the binder.
Cloned from Cricket Bar Cube
Why 192 cards? Packs of 8 or 16 come out even. You can draft 3 packs of 16 or 6 packs of 8 and use every card in the cube with 4 players.
Cricket Bar Cube mechanics are:
Kicker, especially off-color kicker from DMU
Adventure, esp off-color adventure from WOE
Basicland Cyclers, from MOM/LCI
Gates matter, from RNA
Swapping out cards from my collection and buying the rest. Love this cube!
Cloned from Bar Cube
Project:
180 cards, no tokens, no counters, no sleeves (cheap and no double-faced cards).
Shuffle it up for a quick draft with 2-4 friends at the bar, the picnic table, the Convention table, the Kitchen table.
Had a successful 3v3 draft at Ilk Lodge this week! Always fun when a pod fires. The play group had a blast and wants to cube again. This group usually jams EDH, so cube was a welcome change of pace.
We got started a little bit late. Most of the time was spent drafting and deckbuilding. We were able to get a couple of Bo1 games in before the bar closed at 9pm.
I was on Jeskai control after p1p1 of path to exile. To my left: Will was on Simic Ramp after first picking a mana dork. Anthony drafted a Golgari reanimator that had a ton of self mill not sure about first pick. Derek was on Temur. Steve was on a sweet mono-black artifact aggro. Not sure about first pick, but cranial plating sent the signal to go into the deck. Mike was on Selesnya control, first pick was palace jailer and also got reprieve and buried in the garden.
During the draft, the table kept commenting on all the good red cards that were being passed. I was quietly scooping them all up. I took flametongue kavu and wheeled a fiery confluence. I think people were expecting red to be an aggressive color and I find more success with red as a control color in this cube.
We chose teams after the draft to prevent hate-drafting and lower the complexity of the draft portion for new players. We chose teams randomly and teams ended up exactly how were already sitting at the table!
My big takeaways:
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I want to beef up Red aggro. Going to add a Jackal Pup variant or two. Maybe one or more red combat trick. I think Gruul can be an aggressive deck. I just need to figure out how to send the signals.
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Black artifact aggro works. I think this is currently the fastest deck and it was discovered by one of the drafters. Happy curator sounds.
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I'm going to sideboard the monarch cards and bring them in for commander only. It's looking like six player drafts might be the sweet spot for this play group.
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This draft had two wrinkles that can easily be smoothed out in the future. 1) I don't think the cube was properly shuffled and that sent bad signals in pack one. When I showed up, the cube was organized by color and mana value. It should have been shuffled more. 2) I forgot my binder with the 10 trilands at home. Not having mystic monastery and arcane sanctum et al made the draft suffer. My last second fill in was to pull 10 cards from my commander deck I brought to get us up to 270. I had emry, lurker of the loch which has a ton of colorless spells. So I pulled the following cards as a bonus sheet. I this unintentionally boosted the black aggro deck by a few percentage points. Sorry Derek! You got steamrolled by Steve. I think his deck would have 3-0'd the night if all the decks played out. Though, Mike and I made sure to draft some answers to artifacts. Glad they were both on my team!