What is Jumpstart?

Jumpstart is played by shuffling 2 random monocoloured packs together to make a 2-colour deck. This cube presents a format of 27 unique half-decks, with over 350 possible combinations.

The Appeal of Jumpstart

Jumpstart's best feature is its convenience. No minimum number of players, no time spent deckbuilding or drafting. You can play a round waiting for people to arrive for a draft. No need to stay shackled to a bad deck, just grab a new one. While I love drafting and building decks, sometimes you just want to sit down and play a bit of magic.
Similarly to cube, Jumpstart is also an opportunity to try out some neglected cards. Supporting energy consumes a cube, but can be a single pack in Jumpstart. Orzhov Euthanist, Chandra, the Firebrand, and Siege Wurm can't go in the same cube, but happily coexist in Jumpstart.
Jumpstart is the opposite of vintage cube. There's no aggro, control, or combo decks. Every deck plays on the same axes and games are the sum of small advantages.

A Common Mistake

When choosing cards for a Jumpstart pack, the most obvious approach is to treat it like designing a deck. For example, you might set out to build a Rotting Regisaur deck. Designing the madness deck is a fun process:

• "Twins of Maurer Estate is the perfect card to play with Rotting Regisaur."
• "I should put in Hell Mongrel in case I don't draw my regisaur."
• "Wow, I've never seen Dark Withering before."
  Unfortunately, playing a game of magic with this pack is not engaging.
  Discarding Twins of Maurer Estate to Rotting Regisaur is not a decision. Casting Dark Withering for full price is miserable. You're not excited to see how your madness deck interacts with your auras deck because they don't interact. The winner is the player who drew the right half of their deck.
  That's not to say these cards are unfun. Drafting around Twins of Maurer Estate is great, and casting it on turn 3 I felt like a deck building genius.
  But Jumpstart players don't get that satisfaction; they didn't build the deck.

Player Agency

You have to shift your thinking away from drafting and into the games. Give players agency by baking difficult choices into the decks.
Rotting Regisaur discarding helps Cabal Initiate reach threshold, but you have to give up real cards. Is it worth playing out your hand to get hellbent for Tragic Fall? Casting Murderous Compulsion for madness is a rare treat that makes the player feel like a genius.
In cube, the packs are the canvas and the deck is the painting. In Jumpstart, your deck is a blank canvas and the art happens in the games.

Constants

To help the packs work together, some elements are common across the cube:

• Creature Combat
• +1/+1 Counters
• Graveyard Synergies
• Use for Extra Lands

Creature Combat

The cube centres around combat with small to medium sized creatures. 2/2s are the standard currency, with plenty of 3/2s as well. Creatures with more than 3 toughness are used sparingly. Ari Lax wrote a good article (https://bit.ly/3kU7wgW ) about the importance of this sizing. In brief, you want most creatures to trade in combat to reduce stalemates and make every card count. Combat tricks, evasion, and crowd control are relevant in every deck.
Without the streamlined efficiency of deckbuilding, players can have trouble ending the game. To combat this, decks are better at attacking than blocking. Blocking is still important, but players are rewarded for finding ways to push the game towards a conclusion. This is also important for keeping the planeswalkers in check.

+1/+1 Counters

A natural extension of the focus on creature combat. Players need to consider combat abilities like Flying or First Strike when allocating buffs, and the 3/2 size limit rewards players for buffing their */3 creatures.

Graveyard Synergies

Most decks benefit from having cards in their graveyard and have ways to fill it up. To avoid synergy decks playing on auto-pilot, I've set two rules for the graveyard:

• Nothing puts a card in your graveyard without you looking at it first. It sucks to mill good cards and then draw cards you wanted to mill. Explore, surveil, looting, and Ransack the Lab effects give you a chance to keep your good spells, but graveyard synergies can make it difficult to decide whether you should.
• Cards don't remove themselves from the graveyard. This means no flashback, unearth, or scavenge. Surveiling should be a difficult choice, but binning flashback cards is almost always the right move.

Use for Extra Lands

Rather than having ramp or big mana as themes, every deck can make use of extra lands/mana. This ensures effects like explore and treasure are useful for all decks, and that players aren't as affected by mana flood.

Interaction

Each pack has 2 pieces of interaction, the equivalent of 5 cards in a 40 card deck. These spells are overcosted compared to most cubes. While cheap removal is usually important for dealing with snowballing creatures and degenerate strategies, those aren't a factor here. Cheap removal tends towards stalemates in creature combat environments.

??? 16 Card Packs ???

Yes, 32 card decks are a bit weird. I personally find that smaller decks are better, until you get in danger of decking out. Drawing without replacement from a small deck makes you less likely to draw land when flooded, and more likely when screwed. It makes your colours more consistent and removes the need for redundant copies of key cards. Small deck size is one of the reasons you can play 2 colours without duals in retail draft.
16 cards specifically took some number tweaking. 7 lands in 16 cards is the equivalent of 17.5 in 40, the ideal land count. Every deck has 2 utility lands (MDFC, cycling, manland), the equivalent of 2.5 in a draft deck. Each deck has 4 taplands, which shakes out to 5 in 40 (the max for most draft decks). The 9 spells are a good size to arrange into a decent mana curve and flesh out the pack's theme.
It also looks nice in the visual spoiler view, if your window is the right size.

Implementation

I wholely recommend giving Jumpstart cube a go. It's a great way to get some raw gameplay and test cards in 1v1 without the lengthy drafting process. If you'd like to see some sample packs, go to the Random.org list shuffler (https://www.random.org/lists/ ) and paste in the following: