I swear we’re not going to turn this into the All Commander Cube, All the Time blog, but damn, that shit is a lot of fun. Sam was out of Portland for the past several months because of university, but he’s back now, and that means for a glorious month, we get to Cube draft together. Tuesday this week was the first time I was able to play EDH in quite a while,  what with job and school taking up all my time and my brain meats, and the re-introduction was great. I ended up winning both games I played with my [card]Animar, Soul of Elements[/card] deck, but my victory was never certain until the last turn or two of the game.

I won the first game pretty much through sheer blind luck: I got both [card]Shielding Plax[/card] and [card]Runes of the Deus[/card] on a stupid-huge Animar with [card]Furnace of Rath[/card] out, which meant I was one-shotting people like a boss—I’m talking lethal damage, not just General damage—and then [card]Comet Storm[/card]ed Sam for great justice. A lot of this match involved hilarious plays like somebody enchanting [card]Birds of Paradise[/card] with [card]Eldrazi Conscription[/card], [card]The Mimeoplasm[/card] entering the battlefield as a stupidhuge [card]Stuffy Doll[/card], and me imprinting [card]Gilded Drake[/card] on [card]Mimic Vat[/card].

The second game saw Sam wielding a terrifying [card]Uril, the Miststalker[/card] enchanted with auras like [card]Empyrial Armor[/card], [card]Shield of the Oversoul[/card] and [card]Armadillo Cloak[/card], which meant the whole table teamed up to keep him under control. Ultimately, my [card]Wild Pair[/card], left unmolested for at least five turns (which tells you something about the state of the table, because I’ve never seen a Wild Pair left alone for that long), helped carry the day, because if there’s anything better than one 6/6 dude with stupid-powerful triggered or activated abilities, it’s two 6/6 dudes with stupid-powerful triggered or activated abilities for the same price.

These sorts of games are precisely why I play EDH. There’s very little that’s funnier than a 10/11 trampling Bird with Annihilator 2 beating somebody’s face in, even if that face is yours. (For the record, I was never hit with that Bird because it died before it could, which is cold comfort because the Conscription was [card]Retether[/card]ed to a Sunblast Angel, and that sure did smack me for 14 points of damage before I killed it the next turn—and promptly imprinted it on Mimic Vat.)

The glow of last night’s games had me thinking about why playing with the Cube is, in some ways, more fun than playing with my own constructed decks, and after a bit of pondering, these are the main reasons I came up with:

1. Greater variance. One of the biggest reasons people started playing EDH was because it provided a more varied experience than the standard 60-card, 4x copies model that makes up the vast majority of constructed Magic—not only because of the singleton format, but because we were able to use a lot of cards that had not seen love in a long time, either because they were awkward for other formats, or because their mana costs seemed prohibitively high.

But as people played more and playtested more extensively, certain cards and combos became auto-includes for the colors that supported it. [card]Tooth and Nail[/card] entwined into [card]Primeval Titan[/card] and [card]Eternal Witness[/card] to retrieve the Tooth and Nail and re-cast to toss down, say, [card]Avenger of Zendikar[/card] and whatever other bit of horribleness you can imagine (Ulamog, Consecrated Sphinx, one of the Praetors—you get the idea). [card]Exsanguinate[/card] + [card]Cabal Coffers[/card] + [card]Urborg ,Tomb of Yawgmoth[/card] + your mana doubler of choice. I’ve played games in which a couple of people would pop insane [card]Genesis Wave[/card]s consecutively, or win yet again with [card]Rite of Replication[/card] kicked targeting a Titan, or an Avenger.

Goodstuff cards tend to make their way into most EDH decks, and well they should, but it does mean that it lends an air to sameness to some games. With the Cube, however, decks and games truly ARE varied, simply because every draft is by necessity going to be different.

2. The chances for degenerate combos are almost nil, because the odds of assembling all the pieces in a draft are very, very low. If nothing else, people tend to hate on certain combo pieces; I, for one, always grab [card]Mycosynth Lattice[/card] as soon as I see it, whether or not I end up using it, because I have yet to see it being used for non-nefarious purposes.

3. The power levels are far more manageable. Again, people are going to pick the most powerful cards they see, which means if a pack contains both [card]Consecrated Sphinx[/card] and [card]Primeval Titan[/card], the odds that someone’s going to end up with both are very, very low. Not only that, but even if you somehow become insanely lucky and end up with nothing but top-tier picks, you still need to trim down to approximately 65 non-land cards, often less if you’re playing three or five colors. You get decks that are really, really good,  because all the cards in the cube are pretty powerful to begin with, but it’s rare to play against a deck that’s completely overpowering.

4. The cube forces people to use generals that they wouldn’t normally and to go into colors that they don’t tend to play. Of the times I’ve cubed, I’ve built Animar a couple of times, and [card]Cromat[/card] once—wish I could remember the other generals I’ve picked, but these were the ones that stood out. These are two generals I don’t really plan to build decks for (though a creature-only Animar deck is kind of appealing). I still tend to disproportionately draft green and/or red, because I’m nothing if not a Timmy, and seriously, if somebody’s passing me an [card]Insurrection[/card], I’m damn well going to pick it and I’m damn well playing red. However, I’m determined to build Esper Control and venture into hilarious Zedruu territory the next time I cube. And it’s great, because it expands my horizons and allows me to have a glimpse of what it’s like to dabble in decks that I wouldn’t be interested in investing the time, energy and money in building.

I think an important lesson I’ve picked up from all this is that I need to add more variability when building my actual EDH decks. I need to try and build a green deck without P-tits; a blue deck without Consecrated Sphinx or Rite of Replication; a black deck without Exsanguinate; a white deck without Wrath effects; a red deck without [card]Aggravated Assault[/card], [card]Insurrection[/card] or extra combat steps. My new resolution, inspired in large part by last night’s games: build more decks in color combinations that I’m not too familiar with, like Esper, Grixis, Boros or Orzhov. Commander Cube, man: it changes lives. It’s a fact.