Mission Statement
(aka the genius of Kamigawa Block Pauper Tiny Leaders Cube?!)
What if Tiny Leaders was the answer this whole time?
For those who don't remember this brief craze, Tiny Leaders was Commander without its main flaws - a 1v1 format where players started with 25 life (or 20 in the Reborn version) and 50 card decks and every card had to be CMC 3 or less in a dramatic inversion of the average Commander deck's mana curve. The biggest Commander annoyance this format lacked was Commander players - interest quickly dried up as they were reminded of what drew them to that format in the first place. Still, the few months of Tiny Leaders content we did was interesting and useful given that the format is bizarrely close to what many of us are aiming for with our Cubes - a singleton-ish 1v1 format with smaller decks, lower curves, and themes/archetypes with a particular sense of direction offered by the Tiny Leaders (lil' guys). Its inevitable death came before the hard turn towards Commander in official and supplementary sets and a lot of the cool, cheap Legends we've had recently so we just scratched the surface of what was possible here - a format where a General Ferrous Rokiric deck squared off against a Feather, the Redeemed deck with lots of spells flying about sounds like great fun to me.
More recently, I've been
watching a lot of Historic Brawl
videos. Brawl began life as a riff on Commander with smaller decks and card pools but never took off; Historic Brawl ended up on Arena as the closest approximation to Commander in the limits of that platform and another way to use (or reason to craft) cards that rotated out of Standard. Given how arbitrary Brawl, Historic, and Historic Brawl each are there's no reason to expect Historic Brawl to be playable - and yet it's the most compelling Constructed offering on Arena for me!
These formats tend to collapse under competitive scrutiny -
Brawl was just Baral with a drawl - but they are a source of inspiration for a curated format where you get to keep the good parts and cull the rest.
Of course, the official attempt to cross the Commander and Constructed streams was an unmitigated disaster. Companions embodied the worst aspects of the Commander setup - repetitive games entirely warped around the companion - without the sense of identification and inspiration your Commander gives you. Playing with Lurrus didn't say much about you other than that you liked winning and could read its text; you didn't build around Lurrus much other than with changes that probably made your deck better anyway. Instead of having a variety of 1-ofs in your 99 that worked with your Commander in their own ways, you were incentivized to focus on specific interactions in your 60-card deck: you were probably going to draw Mishra's Bauble eventually and you would definitely 'draw' Lurrus so it wasn't hard to put them together. If Ikoria was to companions what Lorwyn was to planeswalkers, we might now live in a world where there are dozens of companions with competing deckbuilding incentives offering tough and interesting choices (...or we might not). Instead, the first batch went so poorly that I'd be shocked to ever see a second.
Commander, Companion, Cube
Competitive and casual Commander run into opposite problems. Either you have to hope your deck is acceptable in its perceived power band for the pod to engage in what's meant to be a fun, social activity, or your cool Commander deck will get railroaded by a more cutthroat one.
Cube replaces these distributed balance issues with an individual one - you, as the Cube curator, get/have to create a shared experience for everyone. It's a daunting challenge but if you pull it off you get what I think is the pinnacle of Magic.
'Commander Cubes' are a familiar concept by now but most deviate from my goals at the first fork by staying faithful to classic Commander as a multiplayer format with a rough approximation of the colour identity rules. Sam Black is putting out content on his Commander Cube which is a great starting point if that's what you want.
For me, I want to see if I can combine the creative puzzle of drafting a complex Cube with the sense of identity and direction offered by the concept of Commanders.
- A Cube doing all the wacky things I want it to do is going to be weird and inaccessible for anyone who doesn't have my unique breed of brainworms. Commanders act as a guide through that maze - pick a Commander early, pick cards that work well with it and some generic support cards, and you're good to go.
Commanders are also an ideal signpost - some Commanders do a very unique thing and others are equally generic at the other extreme but the fact that themed ones are there suggest support for that theme more than any on-theme card in a 'normal' role.
Seeing several Commanders play the same notes is a loud signal (and if you're seeing them all in the draft it might be a sign that archetype is welcoming you) but choosing one to headline your deck can be a tough decision. My BR Sacrifice deck will happily run all of Jadar, Judith, and Rankle but they each fill different roles and want different things - ideally, I want these choices to be engaging enough that you can consider switching Commanders within an archetype for a large part of the draft. I was happy when I ended up in a Jeskai Storm deck in a CubeCobra draft and ended up pivoting back and forth between Kykar and Lier until the draft was over.
- The promise of a Commander adds new layers to some cards (a flexible glue card like Tireless Tracker is both generally useful and has lots of overlapping synergies but now has links with Commanders like Chatterfang/Mondrak, Lonis etc that you can hope to exploit in most games when you draw Tracker with one of those as your Commander) but can also cause drastic and sudden changes in card evaluation mid-draft that keep the draft process dynamic.
This is at its most extreme with some combo cards that work very well with specific Commanders. I've flirted with Zuran Orb in regular Cube as it combos with quite a few cards I like - Titania, Korvold, Slogurk, Heliod - but you have to draft both pieces (and drafting Orb first is inherently speculative), put them both in your deck knowing the chance of drawing two one-ofs together is small, and have that chance actually come through in order for it to amount to anything. The certainty of access to your Commander changes that - if I draft Heliod and plan to build around it, Zuran Orb suddenly becomes one of the most valuable cards in the whole Cube.
This also unlocks single-card archetypes that would take a lot more support normally. Just having guaranteed in-game access to Aeve means I can create a unique Gx Storm archetype with a single slot. I don't need a bunch of narrow tribal payoffs to have a Goblin deck - I just need Muxus. I won't always want all of these in the Cube but keeping some rotating wildcard slots open for legends like this seems like a great way to add variety.
To some extent this is also just making the obvious bet on the direction of design - more and more build-around creatures are legendary with Commander in mind and with a Brawl/Commander Cube you get to be that much more excited for every eye-catching legend during spoiler season.
Your choice of Commander here also forces you to think carefully about your use of mana in a way that none of these other formats do. It's safe to say the average deck in a format where Sol Ring is legal and in every precon has a loose relationship with mana curves - at the other extreme, curves in Tiny Leaders are so flattened that they don't feel distinct. With a regular Cube deck you want a sensible curve but there's a relatively fixed meaning to that - how about here?
A white aggro deck wants a lot of one-drops and certain Cubers will run the numbers on just how many you need in the Cube to have N of them get to the expected 1.x aggro players so that they can draw Y of them by Turn 2 etc. Having a one-drop on demand throws that up in the air - do you want even more one-drops because that ideal curve of one-drop into double one-drop is more attainable or do you ease up on that since that 'one-drop slot' is spoken for? Kytheon in particular incentivizes you to flood the board early but something like Rhys, the Redeemed or Skrelv, Defector Mite offers different rewards.
The value of removal looks different when every deck has a pivotal creature you need to hit. Every deck having a free extra card makes one-for-one removal less appealing on the surface but the value of many of their cards will be linked to that central one so removing it rebalances that equation. Commanders themselves range from Mulldrifters to Baneslayers or something in between, complicating that further.
Colour Identity
In the beginning, there was colour identity. This made some sense 15 years ago when the card pool was much more shallow and decks were less about the Commanders themselves - if you could just put all the staples across all colours in your deck, too many decks would look too similar. These days there are more cards than you can count, many Commanders are highly specialized and yet have more on-theme cards than you can hope to play, and one of the loudest complaints is about colourless staples like Arcane Signet that go in every deck anyway. The main impact of colour identity is to restrict decks from a vast swathe of cool cards and interactions because they don't have the 'right' colour. I won't ever pretend it makes sense that I can't play Murderous Redcap in a Muxus deck, but I also can't play any of the BR or GR Goblins that I might want to pair with it most. Is there a cool card that isn't mono-white that you want to play with Heliod? You play both as one-ofs in your 99 card deck or not at all.
The mechanics of drafting inevitably collide with colour identity - it can be tough for a two-colour Commander to have enough eligible cards, let alone a mono-colour one. Commander Cubes find various fudges here - give Commanders partner, let you break colour identity for up to X cards, and so on - but these feel like contrived solutions to a problem that doesn't need to exist at all. Let people play the cards they like!
