Jumpstart Your Commander Cube
Commander Jumpstart!
In 2020, Wizards of the Coast introduced two of my favorite products of all time: Commander Legends and Jumpstart. The first ever Commander Draft format and the first ever "draft without drafting" gameplay, both of which are ripe for cube-lovers and those sorts of Magic players who enjoy crafting not just decks but biomes and environments.
It's been three years since both forms of play came about, and now we're getting Commander Masters, an all-reprint Commander Draft format. This set had a potential problem: what to do about colors. Drafting allows for players to pivot colors, but that's harder with Commander rules in the mix. For this set, they settled on an interesting choice: all mono-colored legendary creatures in the set are treated as having partner when drafting.
I love this idea for Limited environments! It does something cool for a format I had been bouncing in my head for eons: Commander Jumpstart! While I've been working on making a Commander Legends Jumpstart Cube on and off, the possibility of widening the options to any mono-colored commander has really gotten my Biome Brain rolling.
In this article, I'll talk about why one might build a Commander Jumpstart Cube, how to best go about it, and what to consider in the process! Let's take command and jumpstart those cubes!
What Are the Ingredients Here?
Jumpstart is a Limited format where players take two 20-card pre-constructed packs (usually 12 spells and 8 lands) and shuffle them together to make one 40-card deck to play against one another. There are different ways this goes: players may just pick up two at random or grab three and then pick the two they prefer.
Jumpstart themes are traditionally flavor-based with a light mechanical throughline (Jumpstart 2020 had Angel packs with only two cards that cared about you controlling the namesake creature). This is important because they're intended to be mashed up with a random deck and shouldn't be too parasitic. Typal themes are fine, but it's important to keep them light unless you have a lot of Shapeshifter cards in the packs.
Commander Draft is not the same as regular Draft formats. I'll only highlight a few key differences needed for our new, mish-mash format: the resulting deck is 60 cards as opposed to 40, and a given deck is allowed to have more than one of a card.
So, for Commander Jumpstart, our packs will consist of 30 cards. Each pack should be singleton (unless you want to throw in a Seven Dwarves pack), but the cube as a whole doesn't. I'd reduce duplicates where possible, except for one card: Command Tower, an easy must for mana-fixing.
Speaking of mana, I'm going with 13 lands per pack. All the decks will start with nine cards in hand, so guaranteeing land drops by starting everyone with 26 lands in their 60-card decks sounds right to start.
Why Make a Commander Jumpstart Cube?
Now that we understand what the format is, let's talk about some reasons why. I'll come at this from a few different angles, so hopefully it clicks with most people reading.
If you like the idea of a custom Commander Draft cube, but are unlikely to get the full eight players (or time) needed to really get a good draft going, Jumpstart Cubes are the way to go. They let you build an environment for others to experience in more convenient time frames.
If you like the idea of specific pet cards or even commanders that are normally too hard to get to work in most games of Commander, this is a great way to construct an environment where it can shine!
If you're overwhelmed by the number of really cool legendary creatures every year and just want to dabble with a lot of them without actually committing to building a full 99, this is definitely the format for you! (This can't just be a me problem, right?)
Let's Build One Already!
Okay, okay, hang on.
We've got to talk about some considerations here. This is a cube, after all, and it's intended to be an intentionally constructed environment. There will be 30-card packs, but how many? What are the themes? That's ultimately up to you, the builder, but there are some questions to answer in the process.
How Big of a Cube?
1. How many players do you expect to play?
This sets your base number. If you know this is just for you and the one person you live with, it can be a really small set! If you plan to bring this to some form of game night, adjust accordingly!
2. How do players choose packs?
If everyone picks two packs from the cube directly (either at random or through some other method), then you'll only have to have twice as many packs as players. If everyone is given three packs and chooses two, you'll need three times as many as the base number, and so on.
3. Does the set minimum even out to five or zero?
Unless you're going for a quirky cube, color-balancing is important. If you know you're getting three players regularly for the cube and you want them to have four packs to pick from, that's 12 packs for the cube. You'll want to bump that up to 15 so each color is equally represented at three packs each.
Minor caveat: you could make one or two packs that are either colorless or five-color, as wanted.
4. How replayable should it be?
If you have a simple two-player cube of five packs, how many games can you play with it before it gets stale? Once you play your third game, you are guaranteed to have opened at least one of the packs twice, with only ten total combinations available. Boost the size to fifteen, and it'll take eight games before you definitely repeat a pack, with 45 combinations available.
You don't have to directly double or triple your minimum size to adjust the replayability. If you have a 20-pack cube for your four-person playgroup, an additional five packs could go a long way to tweaking the environment.
Size Matters, and So Does Theme
Original Jumpstart had all sorts of packs and created the very real feeling of a Limited deck because plenty of the packs did not synergize at all. Sure, you had your occasional Angels-Flyers mash-up that went swimmingly, but Elves and Discard... well, they didn't exactly have the same plan.
The packs being made aren't going to exist in a vacuum, so you'll need to decide exactly how much synergy there should be. Ideally, every combination should at least function as a deck (so try to avoid throwing a no-interaction combo pack into your cube full of aggro packs), even if the packs don't care about everything the other is doing. Let's talk about a quick scenario, using Commmander Masters cards as a guide!
Selvala, Heart of the Wilds is an easy go-tall deck, wanting several big-stat creatures to draw some cards off of her first ability and an X-spell or two to pour mana from her second ability into. She wants big creatures and bigger spells.
Neheb, the Eternal is an aggressive deck that wants to deal damage to opponents and use Neheb to turn that damage into mana. Neheb likes burn spells, punching fast, and a big spell or three.
Kemba, Kha Regent is go-wide/go-tall deck that wants to suit Kemba up with Equipment and swarm the board with Cats. If an opponent has an army of their swarm, send the 2/2 Cats their way. If an opponent has a big creature, send in a much bigger Kemba. Kemba likes Equipment and anthems.
There's natural synergies here between big power, go-wide/go-tall, and big mana. The rest of the packs in the ecosystem are going to want to work alongside that. Spellslinger decks are less likely to work here. There could be an artifact subtheme if Kemba's Equipment theme is cool enough to warrant a second pack like it. There's a lot of interrogating and iterating to do here!
There's no one way to work on this sort of thing. You can set out to make sure every pack cares about the same thing or work slowly around like the above example to make sure that most of the packs have some synergy, even in different ways. Consider a secondary, back-up commander in the packs, one with a slightly different application.
For Your Consideration!
I've already written a lot on this introductory topic, so I wanted to include a few passing questions and considerations without writing a novel here.
- What's your budget for the cards?
- What kind of power level do you want the cube to be?
- How many players do you expect to have for the cube?
- How many packs do you want each player to choose from?
- Will each pack only have one commander, or will players have options?
- Is the cube going to lean towards aggro, midrange, control, or will it be balanced?
- Are the packs going to share a similar mechanic/theme?
- If all the packs share a theme, is it broad enough across colors to flesh out in every pack?
- Will the cube have sub-themes? How many packs will carry that sub-theme?
- Are packs going to have a sub-theme?
- How singleton will the Cube be?
- Will the set be restricted by plane? (If your plane isn't Dominaria, Ravnica, Innistrad, or Zendikar, good luck!)
- Is there going to be a gimmick? (Mono-green Cube, Grixis Cube, every pack in the Token Cube has an Idol of Oblivion... that sort of thing!)
Once you've answered these questions, don't spend too much time theorycrafting! Make sure to play the decks sooner rather than later. Playtesting is infinitely more valuable for your time's worth than any amount of examination and cross-referencing against Scryfall and EDHrec!
The last thing to consider is storage. There are a lot of different methods to storing a Jumpstart Cube. I'd recommend looking at BurgerTokens deckboxes; they sell them in different sizes, allowing you to pick based on how many cards you expect to store. People have been using the 22S for regular Jumpstart packs, so 30S would be needed for Commander Jumpstart packs.
Whew! With that, we're all done.
Oh wait, I should show off a sample pack!
[deck title=Cats & Claws]
[Creatures]
*1 Kemba, Kha Regent
*1 Danitha Capashen, Paragon
*1 Sacred Cat
*1 Adorned Pouncer
*1 Armored Skyhunter
*1 Regal Caracal
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
*1 Valorous Stance
*1 Intangible Virtue
*1 Glimmer Lens
*1 Greatsword of Tyr
*1 Horn of Valhalla
*1 Vanish into Eternity
*1 Mace of the Valiant
*1 Maul of the Skyclaves
*1 Brass Knuckles
*1 Kemba's Banner
*1 Argentum Armor
[/Spells]
[Land]
*1 Command Tower
*12 Plains
[/Land]
I'll be working on a little Commander Jumpstart Cube over on Archidekt (right here) that I'll be building up exclusively from commanders printed in Commander Masters! All my packs will be prefaced with CMJ. Follow along as you please, give me ideas, or talk about your own Jumpstart Cubes! Be sure to check out Justin Fanzo's excellent Commander Cube article (and the rest of his articles on the topic) as well for other information about this great format!
