A very good friend of mine, and supporter of this site, Jonathan Medina recently published two articles at Gathering Magic about a casual format that he’s delving into, BATTLE BOX. His first piece, A Boy and His Box: Hello World is a well-written introduction to the format. Jon’s second article A Boy and His Box: What’s In the Box? outlines his particular flavor of Battle Box which is a Commander box.
Although I was inspired by his articles to look into the format, I’m admittedly very new when it comes to Commander of any variant. I don’t know what goes into a good Commander deck, and wouldn’t even know where to begin. After some digging, I found a slew of resources over at mtgbattlebox.com. This site is loaded with project ideas for all different flavors of boxes, and I was now determined to build one of my own.
I found the section of mini-boxes and immediately knew what I was going to build. I was going to use the massive pile of cards I had from Kaladesh (KLD), and try to build out a KLD Battle Box Mini. The minis are smaller boxes (usually 90-100 cards) designed for 1v1 casual play. The KLD box has a land set (1 of each basic, and 1 of each fast land) for each player, and 98 hand chosen cards that highlighted the main mechanics of this set (energy, vehicles, and fabricate.)
I instantly got to work on building out the list and found myself about 18 spells and two sets of fast lands short from finishing. I headed on over to the PucaTrade discord server and hit up my fellow traders in #trades-paper chat for the rest of the cards. Within minutes the list was committed and the remaining cards were on their way. Thanks Puca!
After receiving the last of the cards, I sleeved up my KLD Battle Box for FNM. I was able to test the box between matches, and it was awesome! The games were super fun, very intense, and extremely balanced. I found the perfect mana base to be nice and the top decks to be extremely interesting due to the fact that both players share the library and the graveyard. At one point one of my opponents ‘accidentally’ revealed the card that would have won me the game, as he scryed it to the bottom the of the library before my draw step.
Earlier today my son wanted to play some Magic so I broke out the battle box, explained the rules to him, and we started playing. He didn’t understand all of the cards because he hadn’t played with them, but he still had a blast. The Battle Box proved to be a lot of fun, and a great tool to educate a newer player on certain card interactions. One of my future projects will be building a training Battle Box specifically to help new players.
All and all, I am extremely happy that I build a Battle Box and I plan to build more. My next project will be building the Shadows Over Innistrad (SOI) list from the site, and then probably an Origins Box. My only gripe with the Origins list from MtgBattleBox.com is that they’ve omitted the best limited card, Topan Freeblade!
Help Me, Help You
Every article I throw a blurb at the end of the article about the Patreon. Today I wanted to take a second and talk about it a bit more about the giveaways. All patrons at the Rare level of $5+ are entered into a drawing for a monthly Premium Giveaway. This is in addition to the entry to win 1,000 Puca points (or $10 card), which all Patrons get. January’s Premium giveaway prize is sealed product, 2 Eternal Masters packs. If I can reach $50 for the month of February, I will give away a Battle Box Mini that I have built. This box will contain some random foils and promo cards. It will be sleeved and ready to play upon receipt for the winner.
Don’t Forget to laugh,
Strictly
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Jeremy aka “Strictly Average” is an ‘average’ guy with ‘average’ plans. He is the creator and overboss of Strictly Average Gaming, which includes the Patreon group and StrictlyAverageMTG.com
It is constructed as either wall or island units.