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Lily's Library: A Commander Cube

By lilyhaaron

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Description

Introduction and Goals

Hi. I'm Lily. This is my cube. It's still in its early stages, and needs a lot of both cards and testing, but I'm excited about it.

It takes it's name from that of my youtube channel, which itself is composed as a variety channel on nerdy topics that I love. Likewise, this cube is a composition, a library if you will, of my favorite things in my favorite format: Commander.

This is a commander cube, which if you haven't played one before is a cube where, as you may well guess, you build an EDH deck - all 100 cards, with a commander in the command zone. It's made to be drafted with a small group of 4 people, although if the cube were to grow large enough, I could see it possible to do an eight person draft, splitting into 2 pods.

As I said, this cube is a tribute to all that I love about the commander format, and thus it is generally designed with a few things in mind:

  • I love drafting way too many colors in my decks, most of my decks being 3-5 colors. This cube encourages you to have the most horrid manabases around.

  • There is no zone like the red zone. This cube isn't built around infinite combos and stuff like that (they exist, but not as a primary component). Rather, you gotta close out the game the good ol' fashioned way by turning creatures sideways.

  • I love building way too many tribal decks. This is a tricky thing to accomplish in an EDH cube, so see below for info on a new mechanic called tales and poems.

  • Panharmonicon is a beautiful card. I didn't change how designed the cube (beyond, well, it being in the cube), but y'all should just know it's a thing of the divine.

Rules Changes

There are a few things I tweak in the rules of the game to make this cube tick.

Enabling 3- and 4- Color Decks

As stated above, I want to encourage jamming too many color than is wise into your decks. However, the commander color identity rule is still a thing, and there aren't that many commanders for 4 colors (as well as a few 3 color combos being very restricted as well). To get around this, every single 1 and 2 color identity commander is considered to have partner.

This opens an immense number of possible commander combinations, allowing for a plethora of strategies to come up. Wanted to run a Valduk, Keeper of the Flame deck, but found monored too restrictive? Well just team him up with Sram, Senior Edificer or Nazahn, Revered Bladesmith to cover your weaknesses. Brago, King Eternal not busted enough for ya? Well give him access to brand new things to flicker every turn like Noxious Gearhulk and Trostani's Summoner. Or just make a ton of Saprolings with Slimefoot, the Stowaway and Tana, the Bloodsower.

Note: This does mean some commanders from Battlebond will have both "Partner" and "Partner with" - You can run Krav, the Unredeemed with any other 1 or 2 color commander, and still tutor up Regna, the Redeemer when Krav ETBs with his Partner with ability.

702.123. Partner

702.123a - Partner is an ability that modifies the rules for deck construction in the Commander variant (see rule 903), and it functions before the game begins. Rather than a single legendary creature card, you may designate two legendary creature cards as your commander if each has partner.

702.123b - Your deck must contain exactly 100 cards, including its two commanders. Both commanders begin the game in the command zone.

702.123c - A rule or effect that refers to your commander’s color identity refers to the combined color identities of your two commanders. See rule 903.4.

702.123d - Except for determining the color identity of your commander, the two commanders function independently. When casting a commander with partner, ignore how many times your other commander has been cast. When determining whether a player has been dealt 21 or more combat damage by the same commander, consider damage from each of your two commanders separately. See rule 903.11a.

702.123e - If an effect refers to your commander while you have two commanders, it refers to either one. If an effect causes you to perform an action on your commander and it could affect both, you choose which it refers to at the time the effect is applied.

702.123f - “Partner with [name]” is a variant of the partner ability. “Partner with [name]” represents two abilities. One is a static ability that modifies the rules for deck construction. Rather than a single legendary creature card, you may designate two legendary creature cards as your commander if each has a “partner with [name]” ability with the other’s name. You can’t designate two legendary cards as your commander if one has a “partner with [name]” ability and the other isn’t the named card. The other ability represented by “partner with [name]” is a triggered ability that means “When this permanent enters the battlefield, target player may search their library for a card named [name], reveal it, put it into their hand, then shuffle their library.”

Planeswalkers

To further increase the number of options for your commanders, planeswalkers may also be your commander, with one and two color 'walkers having Partner, like legendary creatures in this cube. Make your Elsepth/Arlinn slashfics a reality (or at least a deck).

Ninjas

To allow for more sensible usage of older legendary ninjas, any legendary creature with ninjutsu (such as Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni) instead is considered to have commander ninjutsu with the same cost as their ninjitsu, like Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow.

The Draft

To begin, each of the four player drafts the main part of their deck. This is done over the course of 7 packs of 15 cards each (although these numbers are subject to tweaking) - resulting in 420 cards (lol nice) from this set being used any given draft. It then runs just like a normal draft (well, closer to a conspiracy draft) until all the cards have been drafted.

After the main part of the draft, the lands draft begins. Each player gets 3 packs of 10 to draft from the lands cube to help with their mana - this is still under testing and I may increase the amount in the future if I find people aren't having consistent enough manabases.

You can check out the list for the lands draft here.

Once these two are done, players build their decks and then sit down for the game. The game is played just like commander - starting at 40 life, commanders in the command zone, etc. Before the game begins, the players reveal their commanders and any conspiracies drafted they wish to use. Any setup from some of the custom conspiracies in the set are then taken care of before the game begins.

Unlike other Commander Cubes, you do have to draft your commanders. The changes to the rules regarding partners will help with getting your color identities sorted. Having to draft your commanders also helps balance the power increase all 1 and 2 color commanders receive from now having partner. I cannot possible check every single possible combination of legendary creatures and planeswalkers for busted combos (and I also don't want to have to say "Oh all of them have partner, except YOU Ramirez DePietro. You're too powerful."). Having you draft your commanders makes this a bit easier to manage.

In the event of not having all your colors you want in your deck covered, there is also a set of commanders you can take after the draft (only as your commander - not in your 99/98) - these are in the mono and allied two color pairs and are intentionally bad - you don't want the commanders of shame, so prioritize getting your commanders.

Tales and Poems

One thing that commander cubes have difficulty is supporting tightly synergistic decks. This includes things like small, specific combos like assembling Kaldra and tribal decks. Now, I as a player absolutely love these things in commander, and this cube wouldn't be a proper reflection about what I love in the format without them. So to get around this problem, I am implementing something called offerings.

Tales and poems show up in packs along with the rest of the cards in the cube. Each of them has a card in the cube representing them, which will read their name along with a cost and the colors included. These represent a premade set of cards you can take, which can range anywhere from a couple cards meant to work together (These are poems - Ley Weaver and Lore Weaver for example) to a whole section of your deck to help define a decks archetype (These are tales - Edgar Markov and a host of supporting vampire tribal cards for example).

If you chose to draft a tale or poem, you can draft it face-up, announcing you are doing so, and then you must pay the cost. The cost is a number (usually around the number of cards in the tale or poem.) of picks you do not get to chose from the packs - for the next X picks, you must simply take a random card out of the pack, which is then not added to your pool. Once you have paid the cost, you resume looking at packs and drafting like normal.

You can also chose to draft the tale or poem card and not take the tale or poem if you do not want it yourself, but wish to hate-draft it.

I am still very much in the process of making more tales and poems and balancing them. I'll often be adding new tales and poems, as well as tweaking the cards included in each. The cost mechanic lets me fine tune the offerings' balance without changing the cards as well - a tale or poem that is weaker I can lower the cost (thus actually increasing your card pool at the end), while a tale or poem that is overperforming I can increase the cost for.

You can check out the current tales and poems in the cube here - new suggestions for tales and poems are welcomed.

Custom and Not Listed Cards

There are a few things I wanted to incorporate into the draft that existing cards couldn't handle - specifically the use of supplemental game types like planechase and archenemy. The following are a few conspiracies created that can be drafted in order to enable certain supplements (or, can be drafted to be the one to choose to enable said supplements). These certainly won't come up every single draft, but will give nice flavor to the entire draft experience.

Just a Spark...

Conspiracy

Before the game begins, you may choose to use the Planechase variant for
the game.

Once per game, if you would roll the planar die, you may instead treat it as if it had landed on the side of your choice.

If you've never played planechase commander, you really should check it out. I really hope they do new additions to Planechase in the future with all the new planes they've gone to (and locations on old planes that weren't covered).

Machinations Come to Light

Conspiracy

Before the game begins, you may choose to become the Archenemy.

I still need to get all the original archenemy cards for the cube (currently only have the ones from Archenemy: Nicol Bolas), but it is definitely an interesting way to play the game.

Note - The Archenemy goes first, as per the archenemy rules, even if another player has the Conspiracy Power Play. This supersedes the text on Power Play. To compensate, a player who drafted Power Play instead may take one additional free mulligan. This just is to get around weirdness with turns since all non-archenemies take their turns simultaneously.

Set Course for the Golden City

Conspiracy

Before the game begins, you may choose to use the Explorers of Ixalan
variant for the game.

At the beginning of your upkeep on your first turn, look at any face-down tile.

Not many people have checked out Explorers of Ixalan, but it is really a neat supplement with some interesting additions to the game. The length of commander games means that all the tiles will often be revealed long before the game is done, but the game continues to be affected due sites staying around and being something players contest over, similar to the monarch.

Who Died and Made You Queen?

Conspiracy

You begin the game as the monarch.

I love the monarch mechanic, and while I do include most of the cards that enable the monarchy in the cube, this conspiracy ensures the monarchy is active from the very beginning - it makes early aggression (which is often near meaningless in EDH) a lot more important as well.

If you don't know, Heroes of the Realm are a series of cards made each year for achievements of Wizards employees. They're not available anywhere (besides by like, being the person they were made for), but they have neat mechanics that I wanted to incorporate into the cube. I tend to avoid proxies in this cube, but due to, well, them not being available at all, I made an exception. All of 2017s weren't revealed, so only M'Odo is from that one.

  • Chandra, Gremlin Wrangler

  • Dungeon Master

  • Nira, Hellkite Duelist

  • M'Odo, the Gnarled Oracle

Plans for the Future

Obviously a lot of the smaller tweaks and changes will simply come over the course of testing the cube - cards being added that don't work, cards being grouped into Tales (or tales taken apart and put into the cube), etc.

And of course I will always be on the lookout for trading for new things I want for the cube, as there are a lot of cards I want but simply do not own myself - one thing I definitely want to do as a longterm goal is to get every single legendary creature and planeswalker for the main cube, poems and sagas, or the commanders of shame (for the not strictly playable ones). That said - that goal is a long ways off, but I'll make incremental progress over time, especially early on when I'm just picking up like 20 commanders that are less than a dollar each when I go do my weekly drafts.

I'm still growing the cube and not making too many cuts - I want each color to get to around 200 cards and stay around that point for now. That's a fair bit more than the cube requires, but I do wish to have a good deal of variety so each draft feels distinctly different.

I also plan on creating a lot more Tales and Poems - I'd love to have one for any supported tribe, as well as parasitic/tightly synergistic commanders and mechanics.

Tribes:

  • Pirates
  • Minotaurs
  • Werewolves
  • Merfolk
  • Allies
  • Wizards
  • Spirits
  • Elves
  • Warriors
  • Dinosaurs
  • Humans
  • Horses

Mechanics:

  • Energy
  • -1/-1 Counters
  • Host/Augment
  • Dice Rolling
  • Expanding the Poem of Wisdom and Chaos into a full coin-flipping tale.

  • Kicker

Tribes:

  • Slivers

    • Mechanics:

    • Contraptions
    • Cycling

    Colorless (170)

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    • 1x Archfiend of Dispair

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    Green (176)

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    Cards 1160
    Date added 5 years
    Last updated 5 years

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