Schaf's Peasant Commander/EDH Cube

Cube ID
Art by Chris RahnArt by Chris Rahn

610 Card Peasant Commander Vintage Cube

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Designed by SchafkuraiRSSQR Code

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Owned
$472
Buy
$177

General cube ideas and color balance

Archetypes were a bit of a headache. No one wants to pick a commander that ends up not giving a viable deck and commanders that are too weak are also not optimal. The options are limited though and power level differences too high to make this straight forward. Custom commanders that cater to the different archetypes more specifically will come in over time.

Since I wanted to give the players the "commander feel" they're used to from normal commander games it is high power for peasant, while keeping power balance equal across colors.

Decks contain 59 cards plus the commander making 540 cards plus 70 commanders a good number for 4-8 player drafts.

Deck color identity & Commanders

All mono-color legendary creatures have "Partner" and all two-color legendary creatures have "Partner with mono-color commander". This way it's possible to make two or three color decks, allowing more flexibility when drafting and building the deck. Additionally it makes multicolor cards less narrow.

The card distribution loosly follows a typical commander deck (e.g. Command Zone deck guideline) concerning card draw, ramp (mostly as artifact ramp), removal (kept lower than in most cubes) and lots of synergy cards. Therefore I tried to include the general best (but not broken) peasant legal cards Swords to Plowshares, Talismans, Young Pyromancer, as well as many cards that tie different archetypes together (e.g. Mire Triton for Mill/Reanimator and Blink or Cloudgoat Ranger for Tokens, Sacrifice or Combat oriented decks).

Commander Breakdown (turquoise tag)

This area still needs some work and I'll address some holes in deck archetypes with custom cards but each color has 7 legendary creatures that cover most archetype strategies and 3 legendary creatures per guild color pair. I found it important to increase the number of mono color legends to give the players more flexibility when building their deck.

How to draft

The idea is to end up with 60 card decks that have to be within your Commander(s) color identities. For 4-player or below drafts and more experienced players I suggest a different method than for 5+ players.

Low player count draft (experienced):
A type of pick-burn draft. 10-12 packs with 10 cards each and then some combination of pick a card, remove a card from the pack. As long as everyone ends up with 45+ cards it should be easy to assemble viable decks.
Higher player count draft:
Normal Commander Legends style draft works well. Each player gets three 20-card draft packs and picks two cards at a time before passing them on.

How to draft the commanders?
For newer players or when you just want to play and don't care for the draft portion so much, I would suggest to have commander packs before the real draft with three multi-color and four mono-color commanders in each and then pick one pass the pack.
For more experienced players I suggest to also draft the commanders but in packs e.g. 2 multi-color and 2 mono-color commanders in the middle and at the end (or shortly before) of the draft. This way building a cohesive deck is the main priority followed by finding an on-theme commander to lead the deck (which worked well so far).
Another option is to shuffle the commanders into the draft packs, which also works.

Deck Archetypes

The archetypes went through a lot of iterations with over 25 archetypes at the beginning of the cube based on the commanders I wanted to include to roughly 7 archetypes now. Decreasing the number of viable archetypes should make the drafts much more enjoyable as the picks feel more meaningful and there is much more overlap between different strategies. Also, most of these archetypes have sub-archetypes that become apparent when looking at the different color combinations. Tokens for instance manifest as go-wide aggro in wr, token aristocrats in wb, a mix of both in br, go-wide midrange wg. Even u get's some tokens! Another good example is graveyard which is mainly based in b : here ub is a classic looter-reanimator archetype, whereas wb goes the small/value reanimator route, bg rummages more through the graveyard with selfmill and Regrowth effects and br is a mix between value and grind with some sacrifice.

GuildsArchetype 1Archetype 2
wuBlink - ValueCombat - Evasion
ubGraveyard - ReanimatorDiscard - Value
brTokens - SacrificeDiscard - Grind
rgCombat - Hasty BeatsRamp - Aggro
gw+1/+1 Counters - Go-WideTokens - Go-Wide
wbTokens - ValueGraveyard - Reanimator
urSpells - ControlDraw-Two - Value
bgGraveyard - ValueTokens - Grind
rwTokens - Go-WideCombat - Equipment
guRamp - Value??? - Value