Aelbert Cuyp, Cows in a River (1650). Dromoka The Eternal by Eric Deschamps.
In this week's post I'm going to explore an idea that Wizards of the Coast has never done, and probably will never actually do - release a set of booster packs specifically for Commander players and specifically designed for drafting. Drafting Commander Decks???
Yes. Not setting up a cube. Drafting designed for the unique interests of Commander players.
At first glance, that seems crazy. If we were to build 100 card decks out of 14 card booster packs you would need 4 boosters just to get to 56 cards without adding any lands. You probably wouldn't get a legendary creature and even if you did, the chances you'd have your colors right are negligible. It makes little to no sense to try to draft a commander deck out of regular booster packs.
Of course, when Standard and Modern players draft, they don't actually draft Standard and Modern decks - they draft and create 40 card decks.
In the same spirit, we won't be drafting 100 card Commander decks. We'll be creating our own "singleton limited" format designed by us, for us, specifically to cater to the things we love about the EDH format.
At least, that's the idea. Let's see what would be involved in making it actually happen.
So what do we love about EDH?
If this seems like a familiar topic, you must be a regular reader and I thank you for that!
What we love about EDH is what we need to have in our boosters when we draft.
History
EDH deckbuilders love pulling cards from the entire history of Magic. Rare, weird, obscure cards are awesome when you can put them in the right deck, play them into just the right boardstate, and win games with cardboard nobody else at the table has ever even seen on a battlefield. We need to have cards in our boosters that reflect this history. You want to be excited to see what will be in the next set of cards you are passed, even if they are just commons.
Variety
You know I love opening boosters, finding great cards and not having to get 3 more to fill out a playset. Predictably, I hate opening multiples of the same card and knowing I'm never going to use them all. About a third of my first dozen Kaladesh boosters had Captured by the Consulate as the rare. I was done with that card after the first one I opened. Most EDH players want variety in their boosters. They want piles of cards where every single one is different. We need to satisfy that need by making more unique cards in this set than ever before.
Quality When you build an EDH deck, you usually don't even consider including "vanilla" creatures. Everybody has to bring something to the party. I would suggest that there should be no cards in this set that don't bring something extra. They don't all have to be particularly good. They just have to be better than a vanilla creature.
Legendaries
We love our legendaries. We love building around them. We love breaking them. This set is going to have to have lots of legendary creatures. We obviously aren't going to build truly ruthless decks where every card is built around breaking our fearless leader, but that doesn't mean legendaries aren't going to be important. They will be one of the key foundations of this new draft format.
Crops & Bleeds
For the past 20 years I've been working in web development but just after college I spent a few years working in printing, prepress and desktop publishing. For this article one of my first concerns was finding out as much as I could how Magic sets are printed.
Magic sheets are sometimes given as prizes at major events, and can be purchased from collectors. If that sounds like a neat idea, be aware, it should go without saying that they aren't cheap.
Just looking at them, it becomes clear that a single sheet has 11 rows and 11 columns of cards, for 121 total cards per sheet.
All the other data I have is from research online. Currently a large expansion set of Magic has 269 cards broken down into 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, 15 mythic rares and 20 basic lands evenly divided into four different arts for each of the five land types.
Wizards of the Coast prints 6 basic sheets of Magic cards: 1 rare sheet, 2 common sheets, 2 uncommon sheets and 1 lands sheet.
The printing distribution breaks down like this.
1. Two of each Rare, One of each Mythic. (2x53) + 15 = 121.
2. Two each of 60 Commons and one extra Common. (2x60) + 1 = 121.
3. Three each of 40 Commons and one extra Common. (3x40) + 1 = 121.
4. Three each of 40 Uncommons and one blank. (3x40) + 1 = 121.
5. Three each of 40 Uncommons and one blank. (3x40) + 1 = 121.
6. Six of each Basic Land, with four arts per land, and one blank. (6x5x4) + 1 = 121
Booster packs have a well-known ratio of cards.
1 Basic Land
1 Rare (7/8 being Rare and 1/8 being Mythic Rare)
3 Uncommons
10 Commons
Our set has to have at least as many rares as a normal set has, so we'll look at a target of at least 68 rare cards in our plan. if there is 1 rare in every 14 card pack, we're going to need 68 x 14 = 952 unique cards. We'll also need that extra card, so it's really 68 x 15 = 1020 unique cards including lands.
1020 cards / 121 cards per sheet = 8.43 sheets.
We'll round up to 9 sheets because we have to round up, not down, so that means 1089 unique cards.
We have to maintain the same (1/8) : (7/8) : 3 : 10 : 1 ratio for MR : R : U : C : L in each booster.
If we were to divide up our 1089 unique card slots by the booster pack rarity distribution ratio, we'd have the following unique cards.
10 Mythic Rares (normally 15)
63 Rares (normally 53)
218 Uncommons (normally 80)
726 Commons (normally 101)
72 Land Arts
While 10 Mythic Rares is a step down from 15 in a normal set, we'll be getting 10 more rares and 726 unique commons is an enormous step up from the usual 101 commons. In this plan, rarity is really being used to describe power level rather than actual rarity. We'd be reprinting cards and honoring the original rarity of each card, but making sure each of our printed sheets has no duplicates in the layout.
This is a set designed for Commander so let's assume that ALL of our rares and mythic rares are Legendary Creatures. That would be essential for players to be able to draft and assemble commander decks.
New Legendaries
If this set is just reprints, it would still be amazing, but part of the fun of making a set is designing new cards.
We have 10 Mythic Rare slots. We will use all of those for new Legendary creatures.
We're going to be making new commanders.
The new commanders should be stuff we've been yearning for, like a 5-color Myr commander. These new cards certainly shouldn't be utterly broken. They should be balanced, interesting, and should try to fill known gaps in the EDH landscape. I think having them all be 5/c commanders might make sense, as this set will want to have more options for creating draft decks. Also, there really aren't that many 5/c commanders available to us, so I'm sure printing 10 more would be a huge hit with players. Because we really want to avoid having any draft players stuck with unplayable combinations of legendaries and other cards, our non-mythic rares will be made up of reprints of other legendary creatures.
The Decks It isn't realistic to think we'd be building 100 card decks, but it also wouldn't feel like EDH if we were building 40 card decks. For that reason I think the format would have to go with 50 or 60 card singleton decks and the draft would probably have to include 5 or 6 booster packs. The cost of each pack is a concern. We'll have to be drafting more packs, so they can't be like the $10 Modern Masters packs. We also don't want to price this so high that you would be better off just buying a precon for the cost of what you'd be paying for your draft. If you went with 5 packs per draft you could price it at $20 per 5 boosters, and if the draft had a prize structure it might cost each player $30. I'm sure you couldn't push the price up higher than a normal booster, and one could probably argue it should be lower or at least in the range of Conspiracy booster packs.
5 Packs means 5 possible legendaries or more if we added in the occasional foil legendary as a bonus. With fourteen cards per pack we'll be building our 60 card singleton deck from a card pool of 70 cards. Chances are good that every single one of those will be a different card. I can tell you that I once did a "chaos" draft where we cracked 32 packs of Magic cards, each from a different set and it was some of the most fun I've ever had outside of EDH. We didn't wind up with great decks but the variety of cards we saw was fantastic and the experience was one I'll never forget.
That is the feeling we are shooting for with this set - that you will have absolutely no idea what will be in the pack you get passed and that you'll be really excited to find out what's coming next.
A Sample Booster
Before we wrap up, let's see at what a sample booster might look like. The cards below were randomly drawn according to our plan - 1 rare legendary creature, 3 uncommons (which could include a reprint rare shifted down to uncommon) and 10 commons (no vanilla creatures). We'll throw a foil rare into the final slot just for funsies.
I created this mock booster using iMTG on my iPhone and clicking the "I'm feeling lucky" option until I had filled in each row, with some consideration paid to making sure there was some degree of color variance. The first two rows are commons and the last row is for our uncommons and rares.
So if this was your first pack, how would you draft it?
I'm not sure what ratio of printed sheets get foiled, but just imagining having old legendaries who had never been printed in foil pop up in that foil slot would be fantastic.
Final Thoughts
This wound up being an interesting article to write. The card distribution tripped me up pretty good, but I think what's in this final draft makes sense. I don't know if Wizards would ever run a massive reprint set like I'm proposing but as EDH gets more and more popular, I have to think at some point they'll consider the idea.
If you have any feedback for me, please let me know in the reddit post below. Thanks for reading!
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