MTG Salvation

I love deckbuilding, and I love playing a variety of decks and strategies. Ordinarily, this is not a problem, but when you try lugging around a bag with 24 Commander decks week after week, it gets a bit tiring. And expensive.

We were discussing this in the Compulsive deckbuilder's thread a couple years ago, and a few people mentioned building a Commander "cube" - a modular box of cards used to build and rebuild a variety of decks. It took me a while to come around to the idea and even longer to acquire 2,000 matching sleeves and organize the cards (which I'm finding is a never-ending process), but for the past several months, I've been using this system for most of my decks.

Advantages
- reduces need to acquire duplicates of expensive cards
- less space to store cards
- lower barrier to building an all new deck just to try it out
- forcibly restricts me to whichever decks I bring each night rather than having the option to just grab the same deck each time

Disadvantages
- need more time to rebuild decks rather than just keeping them together
- need to be organized
- need lots of matching sleeves
- can lead to more homogenous decks (running all the same staples/goodstuff)

I admit this is definitely not the right solution for everyone, but it has been very helpful for me. I've found I have less inhibitions about just slapping together a deck and playing it without the need to get every single card. I've been able to play a larger variety of decks and finally got around to a few I had always planned to do "some day." And I was able to liquidate or trade a number of valuable duplicates, which in turn allowed me to get cards I had wanted but never owned.

However, it does require more time. I can't just leave all the decks in a backpack and forget about them until it's time to go to the game store anymore. Each time I go, I have to reassemble 2-4 decks, or I am stuck playing the same ones I played last time. Overall, though, I think it's worth it.

I also need to note that not every one of my decks is in the cube. I have a few that either just don't share enough cards in common (Ezuri elfball, Edric evasion, Lazav clones, Talrand pauper) or that I just don't want to disassemble (5-color superfriends). So each week, I take 2 decks from outside the cube and another 2-4 decks from the cube, which gives me a good variety to play.

Supported Decklists

Organization
Organizing is a bit of a pain, as I need to maintain an organized list of the cards in the cube, as well as decklists for anything I want to rebuild. Occassionally, I'll just grab cards and build a close version - for example, the last time I rebuilt Atarka, I later compared what I had built to my previously recorded decklist, and I found about 12 cardslots that had been changed. I mean, I know what type of cards work well with Atarka, and both decks functioned, so this just added a bit more variety rather than being an exact repeat.

I've found it easiest to organize first by color identity and then alphabetically; lands are kept separately. I've had to shift my deck organization from card type to color identity because there are just so many in the cube. This will be an ever-changing collection as some cards rotate out and others rotate in.

There are a few glaring omissions, in part because of the decks that I chose to keep out of the cube. For example, every shock or fetchland that I own, as well as most of my planeswalkers, are in my superfriends deck. I need to start acquiring extra shocks to put in the cube. It just hasn't been the highest priority for me because I didn't run those in any of my other decks anyway.

Some of my decklists don't have or really need their own threads, so I'll put them here.

Out of curiosity how do you transport this collection of cards? Various deck boxes or just a very big container?

Don't forget the benefit of actually playing all your decks. Before I went the EDH boxroute, I would tote around 36 decks, which is both heavy and awkward. Then 4 would see play and I would head home.

Being able to trade off multiples of staples to acquire new cards has been a good feeling, too.

Cheers!

Quote from Relic171 »

Out of curiosity how do you transport this collection of cards? Various deck boxes or just a very big container?

Quote from krichaiushii »

Don't forget the benefit of actually playing all your decks. Before I went the EDH boxroute, I would tote around 36 decks, which is both heavy and awkward. Then 4 would see play and I would head home.

Yeah, that pretty much answers it. I leave the full commander cube at home and just assemble 2-4 decks at a time to take with me (along with 2 non-cubed decks). It makes the backpack a lot lighter.

I will say the biggest pain about this route is organization - having to re-organize every time I strip a deck down, and keeping my lists maintained. If I had a static collection, it wouldn't be a problem, but I've been building decks like crazy (still need to update the list for the Hapatra, Sigarda, Mizzix, and Daxos decks I've added) and adding some awesome goodies from the latest sets. I suppose it may stabilize after I hit the end of my 2,000 sleeves, but I'm still not there. I think I underestimated just how many slots were taken by land before - now I just need 50-60 of each basic land type rather than the hundreds I used to run.

I finally hit the end of my 2,000 sleeves, which means I need to cleanup my organization (not sure if I've transcribed them all here). Also, I had tossed in some cards that I wasn't currently using but thought might be eventually useful, so I need to start clearing those out. Now that the sleeves are limited, I have to determine exactly which decks are worth running in the cube. My hope is that it will become easier to maintain the lists once I find my focus.

I started putting together a bunch of my extras and duplicates and whatnot as a wedding gift for a couple friends who I play EDH with. Lots of staples, but lots of higher-end cards, too, because there were lots of things I had more than one of. (I think I can live with just one Karn, one Rings, etc.)

I found this required me to somewhat organize my collection (at least by color identities, artifacts, lands) and also disassemble most of my decks and sort them into these groups to help find those duplicates. I kept the cards from the disassembled decks in their sleeves though, and decided this is a good start to my version of such a cube.

I'm excited to finally be doing this!

And you're right about the lands. I have so many duplicates of staple utility lands, too.

There were some large chunks of cards that are unique to certain decks. Like there's a group of 30 cards or so that are unique to Zada and very unlikely to be used elsewhere, and there's a chunk of a dozen or so goblin cards that Zada and Norin had in common.

Quote from lyonhaert »

There were some large chunks of cards that are unique to certain decks. Like there's a group of 30 cards or so that are unique to Zada and very unlikely to be used elsewhere, and there's a chunk of a dozen or so goblin cards that Zada and Norin had in common.

This is soon to be the biggest part of my focus purging. And, funnily enough, Zada and Purphoros are the two decks that I feel eat the most real estate in the cube. I may eventually have to break them out of the Commander cube and form their own mini modular list, just because they incorporate so many cards that are used nowhere else.

I plan to do some other packages, or at least put the ubiquitous cards in certain colors in the front of that section (like W: a b c, Ba b c, R a b etc.). I almost want to put color mana rocks like signets alongside dual-color lands that produce the same colors.

I'm not sure yet whether I want to have separate section for certain functions like ramp (maybe split between green and non-green), draw, removal. Then I might have smaller sections to thumb through when I'm looking for specific things or when I'm looking for the other stuff (threats, bombs, combo pieces, enablers) and won't have to deal with the noise.

This thread, along with Adam Styborski’s similar articles on GatheringMagic, are what has inspired me to (finally) cull down my MtG collection. It’s way too big. I don’t even know exactly how big it is. But it doesn’t really matter, because for the last 6-7 years I’ve only been playing Commander, and I can’t really see myself ever going back to Standard, Modern, or even Pauper.

My question for you is: how to you store your cards? It sounds like everything is sleeved (or double-sleeved), so I am guessing boxes. That would make for easy access. Do you use binders at all? And if so, why?

Quote from Mordrammu »

My question for you is: how to you store your cards? It sounds like everything is sleeved (or double-sleeved), so I am guessing boxes. That would make for easy access. Do you use binders at all? And if so, why?

In my case, I only double-sleeve foils or very valuable cards and I use BCW boxes for storage. They're more space efficient than binders, but it's also because I prefer thumbing through a handful of cards when I'm looking for something instead of turning pages. There are a handful of expensive cards shared by more than one deck. For those I use a google sheet (and the app on my phone) to track where those are.

Quote from Mordrammu »

This thread, along with Adam Styborski’s similar articles on GatheringMagic, are what has inspired me to (finally) cull down my MtG collection. It’s way too big. I don’t even know exactly how big it is. But it doesn’t really matter, because for the last 6-7 years I’ve only been playing Commander, and I can’t really see myself ever going back to Standard, Modern, or even Pauper.

My question for you is: how to you store your cards? It sounds like everything is sleeved (or double-sleeved), so I am guessing boxes. That would make for easy access. Do you use binders at all? And if so, why?

This thread needs to be updated big time - I've added so many cards and had to cull some. The concept still works really well, but keeping the accompanying thread up to date is a chore. I actually ran out of sleeves and decided to pull my entire mono-red Purphoros deck out of the commander cube because it just doesn't share a lot of cards with the other decks. I'll try to update my lists sometime in the next few weeks.

I have all the cards sleeved in boxes (the white card boxes that you get at a game store). Binders would be a pain, in my opinion (especially when you add a new card and have to shift all the others). I try to keep the cards organized first by color identity, then alphabetically.