Commander Cube: Drafting Multiplayer Magic

A Commander cube is a cube you draft to build a 60-card Commander deck, then play four-player games with a commander in the command zone and 40 life. It borrows the format Wizards shipped in Commander Legends and makes it repeatable, curated, and owned. For groups where half the table plays Commander and half plays cube, it is the box that gets both halves to show up.

The design problems are different from every other cube. Legends have to appear often enough that everyone has a commander. Picks have to move fast enough that a 60-card deck is draftable in an evening. And the card pool has to produce multiplayer games that end. This article covers all three, with the numbers from public lists and the places where our own house rules differ.

How does a Commander cube draft work?

The structure that Commander Legends established, and that most public cubes copy with small changes:

• Packs of 20 cards, three packs, two cards per pick. Two-card picks are what make a 60-card deck draftable in a normal draft’s time. Sixty picks happen in thirty pick-steps.
• Decks of 60 cards including the commander, singleton, color identity rules apply, 40 life, commander damage and tax as normal.
• Every pack carries at least two legendary creatures, so legends are around 10 percent of the pool and nobody ends up commanderless.
• A fallback commander. Commander Legends used The Prismatic Piper, a colorless legend that any player may take as a free pick. Most cubes keep that rule or something like it.
• Pods of four. Eight drafters split into two games; four or five drafters play one.

The Commander Cube 2024 on CubeCobra documents a variant with four 16-card packs for four or five players and three 20-card packs for six to eight, plus a start-of-game kit: every player begins with a Command Tower, a Commander’s Sphere, and two Prismatic Pipers in their pool. That kit is a good idea. It fixes mana for everyone and stops the land section from eating the cube.

How many legends does a Commander cube need?

More than feels right. With 20-card packs and two legends per pack, a 540-card cube needs at least 54 legendary creatures, and most lists run closer to 80 to 100 so that the legend slots have variety (the Commander Cube 2024 itself is 840 cards). A rough section split for a 540, as a house guideline:

Partner matters more than it looks. The Commander Cube 2024 lets any two mono-colored commanders, or a mono-colored and a colorless one, pair as partners even without the keyword; two-color commanders lose partner even if their card has it. That rule quietly solves the “I drafted red and white and my only legend is blue” problem: the drafter takes two mono-colored legends and builds Boros.

Commander choices worth including because they teach the format at the table: Kenrith, the Returned King as a five-color anything; Sram, Senior Edificer as a mono-white value engine; Syr Konrad, the Grim for black graveyard; Wyll, Blade of Frontiers and Vial Smasher the Fierce for red; Tatyova, Benthic Druid for Simic lands. A Commander cube’s legends should mostly be build-arounds with low ceilings, not Kaalia or Tergrid.

What makes a card good in multiplayer draft?

The Commander player’s instincts are mostly right here, with two corrections for the draft context.

Prefer symmetric value over targeted damage. A card that does something to every opponent (Blood Artist, Syr Konrad, Windborn Muse, Propaganda effects) scales with the table. A card that does 3 damage to one player does not. Burn is the worst class of card in a Commander cube, and red needs to be built around artifacts, tokens, and Treasure instead.

Prefer enter-the-battlefield value and bodies that block. Four-player games last long enough that a 2/2 for two with no text never attacks profitably. Every creature should enter with a card, a token, a Treasure, or a tax. Wall of Omens is a better cube card here than Savannah Lions by a mile.

Keep single-target removal cheap and plentiful, sweepers moderate. Swords to Plowshares, Chaos Warp, Beast Within, Generous Gift, Pongify: one answer per color per pack is about right. Sweepers (Blasphemous Act, Austere Command, Toxic Deluge) belong at a density of one or two per color at most; too many and the games reset forever.

Mana rocks are the ramp. Signets, Talismans, Fellwar Stone, Mind Stone, Arcane Signet, Commander’s Sphere. Twenty-five rocks in a 540 is a floor. Green’s land ramp supplements it (Cultivate, Kodama’s Reach, Farseek), but the colorless layer has to carry every color.

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What should stay out?

The multiplayer context makes a specific list of card types miserable, and the public cubes converge on excluding them:

• Infinite two-card combos. Thassa’s Oracle plus Demonic Consultation, Kiki-Jiki plus Zealous Conscripts, Heliod plus Walking Ballista. Nobody drafted into a game to watch it end on turn five by a pair of cards someone wheeled.
• Extra turns and mass land destruction. Both are fine in a two-player game and bad in a four-player one.
• Stax pieces. Winter Orb, Stasis, Armageddon. One player’s lock is three players’ bad night.
• Individual-target political nightmares. Mindslaver, Worst Fears, Expropriate. Memorable once, resented after.
• Fast mana beyond rocks. Sol Ring is the usual exception; many cubes run exactly one. Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, and Grim Monolith stay out.

The theme that unites the list: a Commander cube is a social format, and the cube’s job is to produce games where the loser wants to play again.

How do you run a Commander cube night?

Pods of four and a time budget. A Commander cube draft with two-card picks runs 30 to 40 minutes; the deck build takes 15 to 20; the game takes 60 to 90. That is a full evening for one game, which is why most groups play a single game per night and rotate a different cube the week after. The team draft and two-headed giant formats are the other cubes that use multiplayer, and they move faster.

If you have eight players, draft as one pod of eight (so the picks feel like a normal draft) and then split into two tables of four by a random draw or by seating. Drafting as two separate pods of four loses the fun of seeing a legend wheel around the whole table.

For three players, the Commander Cube 2024 suggests sealed instead of draft: six packs per player (up to eight for more power), build 60. It works well and removes the one weakness of the format at small counts, which is that three-player pods rarely produce clean color lanes.

FAQ

What is a Commander cube?

A Commander cube is a draftable cube built so that each player drafts a 60-card singleton deck with a legendary commander and then plays four-player games at 40 life, following the structure of Commander Legends.

How many cards are in a Commander cube?

Most run 540 to 720. With 20-card packs and three packs per player, eight players need 480 cards in packs; the extra cards keep the legend slots varied.

How many legendary creatures should a Commander cube have?

At least two per pack, so 10 percent of the cube at minimum. Public lists typically run 80 to 100 legends in a 540 so that every color pair has several options.

Can you play Commander cube with four players?

Yes; four is the standard pod. Draft four packs of 16, build 60, play one game. Three players play sealed instead.

A table of four, a box of legends

A Commander cube is the box that finally gets the Commander half of a game night to draft, and the draft half to play a game that lasts longer than nine turns. The game is the reason. The people are the point.

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