The Story So Far...

Back in 2014, I bought a copy of the Built From Scratch commander deck at a card shop somewhere in Sacramento. This deck featured the first printing of my favorite commander: Feldon of the Third Path.

Ever since then, I've tinker-tailored my Mono- commander deck, slowly molding it into a perfect jank machine that creates its own lines of play in every game. This commander really does it all: plays with the graveyard, creates clones, powers artifact payoffs, builds token armies, abuses ETB/death triggers, and loves to double-dip by copying his own activated ability. I’ve had so much fun building and playing this deck that I started to wonder if I could design a whole cube where every player could construct their own version of the machine, exploring the whole color pie through the lens of these mechanics.

At first, I thought this weird cube would be limited to a firm 360-card size. But over the last few years, MANY sets have contributed new cards that are perfect for my design. Most notably, Modern Horizons 2, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, and of course The Brothers’ War gave me a lot of amazing tools for the key themes of this cube: graveyard recursion, artifact synergies, and token strategies.

So here we are: it's my cube! It's:

Welder's Workshop

My cube is divided into two lists:

• The Cube Itself, which is your standard-issue 720-card cube list.
• The Commander Module, a separate list of legendary creatures, which can be distributed into packs, grids, pools, or whatever, depending on how you're drafting the cube today. These cards are highlighted purple in the list.

At first glance, Welder's Workshop has an overall mana curve that looks a little wonky, with huge crowds of cards at the 3 & 4 mana slots. But keep in mind that the Commanders will be treated as "pseudo-rares," and the curve smoothens out. Just like my brain.

The discerning cubesperson can use the Commander Module however they want. You might make 20-card packs and seed 3 Commanders into each pack to emulate the retail commander set draft experience. You might draft a whole pack of them at the start of each draft, or build a starting pack with 8 Commanders and 7 Regular Cards. I've been thinking about trying a Minesweeper Draft variant where the outer border of the first Grid is made up entirely of Commanders. And here's a secret: you don't even have to include the Commanders at all. The Cube Itself should draft and play just fine without them.

Fun Cards to Play in This Cube

Design Philosophy

I think of Welder's Workshop as a "live the dream" design environment. This applies both to the players and myself as the designer. I'm more likely to add another 100 cards to this cube than I am to try and cut it down to 360, and the Commander Module lets me continue to add new legendary creatures with impunity, since their impact on the cube's mana distribution is minimized by their pseudo-rarity in a given draft. It's not a disciplined approach, and that's what I like about it.

I want the gameplay to emphasize big, weird boards with lots of game actions and options on the table at all times. The draft should feel somewhat chaotic, with a broad enough overlap in card synergies that a player can explore and get lost, but still have something functional as long as they don't completely disregard their own mana curve. I want the graveyard to be a live zone in every game.

Archetypes take a backseat to synergy in this design. While building the cube, I basically imagined it as a single gigantic 5-color commander deck, where I would always have access to a "Welder," which was kind of my shorthand for legendary creatures such as these:

Using cards like these to direct my selections, I found a lot of cards that interact and synergize in novel ways. They all kind of wobble around in one another's Venn Diagram. I this allows players to "brew" while they draft, rather than simply unshuffle the cube into ten or twelve preconstructed decklists.