When a friend of mine suggested we Brainstorm a Commander Cube, my exact words were "Now I'm dying to hear what you see when you picture a Commander Cube."
I ended up pleasantly surprised that the two of us had different things in mind, as it allowed us to scrap the obviously bad ideas, and combine the best of both of us. Since we are still in the honeymoon stage of theory-crafting, things tend to keep changing, but we have a strong sense of direction now. What follows will be as brief of a description as I can manage of our vision for EDH Cube, the context of which is probably necessary to properly appreciate/assess the cube we build.
We begin with 4 drafters and a small, hand-picked pool of commanders. Since I do not think that listing the ones we have as of now would be relevant (due to the high likelihood of change,) I will leave them out. Each drafter will receive a handful of commanders at random to use as they please.
Each commander comes with a "preset package," which I will explain further below. The 4 players will then proceed to drafting, where the current test numbers are 4 packs at 16 cards per pack, but that will likely change. Players may draft whatever they wish, "switching lanes" or "pivoting" as many times as they like, keeping in mind the commanders they were dealt. The only requirement is that at the end of the draft a player must select one Legendary Creature from among either their dealt commanders or drafted cards, and must use the rest of their resources to construct a Commander-legal 100 card deck (including colour-identity restrictions.) As always, extra basics are free for everyone.
As for the "packages" mentioned above, they are all the same size at 45 cards, and include similar swaths of cardboard. Loosely, each package of 45 contains 15 basic lands, 5 nonbasic lands, 5 mana-producing artifacts, and 20 low-to-medium power but high-synergy cards. Also found here will be the types of cards that would simply not be fair to deprive all but one deck of, as they are such an integral core piece of the game of Commander e.g. Sol Ring, Cultivate, Command Tower, et cetera.
The catch with these packages is not simply that you have access to them if you want the cards there to fill out your 99 after drafting, but rather that you mustrun the entirety of your commander's package in your 99. This allows us several affordances beyond just helping drafters overcome mana limitations and such. By changing not only what gifts a commander comes with but also what burdens as well, we can directly control the general power level of the base commanders. Directly controlling the environment
in this way allows us to experiment with even more exciting things, including (but not limited to): restricting a particular commander's access to a particular card by not including it in their package or the cube itself, and also allowing the use of normally banned cards such as Tinker, Braids, Cabal Minion and Sylvan Primordial.
In closing, I will try to make a short blog post for every list change, and keep this not-so-brief overview updated as well. If you have any questions, or comments, concerns or queries, I would love to hear them. Happy cubing to all, and remember, there can be only one.