For the past two weeks, I’ve been in the tank reworking and tuning my personal Battle Box stack, “The Danger Room,” and today I’m excited to share my updated list.
It’s been several months since the last time I posted an up-to-date Danger Room deck list (I’ve instead opted to review expansions for cards I like and want to try out) and have subsequently gotten a lot of interest from Battle Boxers about exactly what my stack is. Today, I’ll be sharing my significantly revised Danger Room and provide insight about why I made the sweeping changes that I did.
In case there are prospective Battle Boxers in the audience today, let’s start with a brief introduction to the format and a few “getting started” resources.
A Battle Box is a Magic format that plays like “ready to go Magic in a box.” It’s similar to a Cube but doesn’t require drafting. It’s ready for any number of players to battle as soon as they sit down at the table.
Instead of each player piloting an individual deck of cards, all players draw from one big shared stack of preselected cards. The other defining characteristic is lands start the game “in exile” (not in the deck itself) and can be freely played, one per turn, as though they were in a player’s hand.
I typically use one of each Basic Land and one of each Invasion ETB dual lands for each player’s mana base:
I’m fond of the Invasion dual lands because they were the only option when I brewed up my first Battle Box, but there are now tons of customization options for Battle Boxes.
As long as both players use identical sets of land, both players will always curve out smoothly and always draw spells from the shared deck, thus eliminating games decided by mana screw and mana flood.
The first “How to Battle Box” article written about my Danger Room by my friend Doug Linn, which you can read below:
Introducing a New Format Called The Danger Room
What if you could play hundreds of the best cards in Magic and not worry about mana? Isn’t it cool to think about drawing off the top of a giant deck and playing what comes up? The Danger Room is a new way to play Magic. It uses a shared box of cards, meaning that you can play it with everyone, and…
I also did a primer on building a Budget Battle Box, which you can read below.
Beginner and Budget-Friendly Battle Box Blueprint
Looking to get into Battle Box, but don’t want to start with a rare-laden, expensive stack? Brian DeMars has built out an entire list with a budget-friendly price tag but the same great play experience.
There’s also a Pauper Budget Battle Box primer (with some interesting alternate rules).
How to Build Your Own Pauper Battle Box
Building a Pauper Battle Box can be cheap, fun and easy! Battle Box inventor and master Brian DeMars has some tips and tricks to get started!
There’s lots of Battle Box content to consider, but the key is to build a stack that you and your friends really enjoy playing with.
The short answer is: a lot. Here are the bullet points:
I cut 250+ cards.
I made a lot of budget-friendly cuts.
I put greater emphasis on graveyards and discard synergies.
I cut the weakest and strongest cards. The greater consistency of power level (and emphasis on graveyard / discard) makes the stack feel a little more mid-range overall.
The first change I made was to get my stack back to what I consider to be an ideal and manageable size – about 600 cards.
Here’s the breakdown:
75 cards of each monocolor (375 total cards)
20 cards of each dual color combination (200 total cards)
40 artifacts (40 total cards)
Three cards of each three-color shard / wedge combination (30 cards)
In total, 595 cards.
So, that’s cut back from:
100 of each monocolor (500 cards)
25 of each dual color combination (250 cards)
Three of each three color combination (30 cards)
60 artifacts (60 total cards)
In total, 840 cards.
The first tangible difference is that Danger Room once again fits in its original 1000-count long box! There’s not much (if any) advantage to having a 600 or 900 card stack other than enjoyment of collecting. Ideally, I’d like to keep my stack between 550 and 600.
A year and a half ago when I did the major re-balance of the stack, I introduced what I called “The Bench.”
I went deep back into The Bench this time around and brought back many of my favorite cards from the past. My “The Bench Box” is approximately 1500 additional cards I’ve used (or considered using) at some point in time.
I’ve said it many times in the past, but the biggest selling point of Battle Box as a format is that it offers players a ton of customization and replayability. My Battle Box stack is highly personalized and I try to build it in such a way as to facilitate games that are fun, dynamic and offer players a ton of opportunities to make decisions. I try to include cards that I’ve enjoyed playing with over the years and that represent the entire history of Magic based on my experience.
One element of playing Magic I personally find very frustrating is how expensive the game has become to play. It bothers me that what is essentially a new Jackal Pup variant costs $250 for a play set.
I ordered 100 of the 2020-2021 foils I needed to complete most of my Battle Box and it only cost me about $150 total (and for foil copies nonetheless). $150 isn’t cheap, but bear in mind that is total for foil copies of nearly two years worth of Magic expansions.
I also went back and cut some of the more expensive cards from the stack that I think are prohibitive to a lot of players because they’re individually very expensive. Most of these cards were only $5 to $20 when I bought them, but are now significantly more expensive.
Since the game is played with a 600-card deck, it isn’t really necessary to spend tons of money on individual cards to have a great stack. I know all of these particular cards have gotten expensive because I’ve been asked for recommendations to replace them by players who didn’t want to invest so much into a single card.
If you have these cards available to you… absolutely put them in your stack! Just cut a similar card with a similar converted mana cost to make room.
If you have the cards, enjoy them! All of these expensive cards are sweet and fun to play, but the point is that you don’t need individually expensive cards to play Battle Box, which is a characteristic of the format that makes it relatively unique compared to most ways of playing Magic. Players and Battle Box deck builders don’t get punished for being frugal.
As was the case with my older Battle Boxes, the graveyard will again be playing a larger role in the synergy of the stack and is one of the primary ways of generating advantage over the course of a game.
Draw and discard is already an area of filtering I’ve been high on trying to maximize and the graveyard is a natural extension of building looting into the stack. Per capita, there is more card advantage in the stack, but I’m still on board with scaling way back on cards that net two or more cards. Therefore, cards like Tidings, Allied Strategies, Opportunity and Braingeyser remain on the bench.
I’ve also added several madness spells to the deck to tap into the looting synergies.
The last time I overhauled my list, I made a concerted effort to lower the curve and make beating down an actual viable strategy. I did this by lowering the curve and heavily stacking the deck in favor of one and two-drop creatures.
I do think this action made the game play of my stack considerably better, but after lots of testing, I knew it could be tightened up a bit. In particular, in order to get the correct ratios of cheap drops in an 850+ card deck, it forced me to include too many loose cheap creatures that were not completely up to snuff.
Having 250 cards to cut obviously gave me opportunities to nix the most pedestrian one and two-drops, which I think leads to better overall consistency of draws. I still kept a high density of one and two-drop aggressive creatures, but was able to cull the objectively weakest ones which brings everything closer to a median power level. I also cut back on sweepers relative to the overall size of the deck. So, one-drops, two-drops, three-drops, removal and wraths are still in balance but the overall quality of cards is higher.
So, the average power level of a card in my Danger Room ticked up slightly by virtue of eliminating the standout weakest cards (like Savannah Lions).
The better overall cards tend to be stickier in play and capable of generating advantage, which makes the overall feel of game play a little bit more grindy.
The cuts slice both ways. In addition to cutting cards I perceived as the weakest, I also cut from the cards I considered to be the strongest (including some of the expensive cards like Sun Ce, Vendilion Clique and Tymna.
Other notable cuts of powerful spells:
The goal, for me, is always to get a nice balanced stack of cards where people don’t notice that specific cards feel way too good or way too bad. All of the cards are sweet, some are better than others, but they all feel pretty reasonable to play together in a game.
I’ve done a lot of experimenting with my Danger Room (as well as building new alternate Battle Boxes) over the past few years.
One thing I noticed as my stack began to bloat over the past few months was that I felt like it had lost some of its identity. Wizards prints so many new cards every year now that I noticed the cards I felt nostalgia and happy memories towards were becoming a bit outnumbered by new, efficient cards that happened to hit my power level wheelhouse. There were too many Savannah Lions and not enough Coffin Queens.
There are no cards in the Battle Box stack that I feel “lukewarm” about. I actively like every card I’ve selected and many of the sacred cows have returned from the bench, but in a capacity where I think they will be legitimately better cards in context. I do think that power creep in general has trended my stack toward having a higher average power level than before (especially by virtue of eliminating so many of the weaker spells).
Last but not least, I’ve reigned in my stack a little bit and have a clearer idea of what it is as opposed to being an experimental “anything goes” stack. For instance, I cut the snow cards and my opponent’s and I will be playing with Invasion ETB lands (or Thriving lands to mix things up). I think Danger Room has regained some of its original flavor and character.
With that said, the experimentation wasn’t in vain. I’m more open to trying new things in my stack. You may notice I have some incidental Treasure token generators in the stack and an Ornithopter of Paradise. I want to get a feel for perhaps incorporating more Treasure into the stack.
Another notable way the dynamic of the stack has changed is that, while I shaved cards up and down the curve relatively evenly, that I did not cut as much Equipment as other effects. So, relative to its representation in the stack, it will feel like there is more Equipment. There are also more enchantments in the stack and I’ve removed most of the creatures that incidentally blow up artifacts and enchantments (such as Viridian Shaman) to make casting these card types less punishing.
Most of the artifact and enchantment hate is incidental on modal spells like Charms or Commands. So, finding ways to make these card types “suck less” has been a dynamic I’ve been tinkering with. I’d like to find ways of incorporating more of these cards in the future, but without making them oppressive if unanswered (like Righteous Cause, Lashknife Barrier and Tawnos’s Coffin).
Last but not least, (and I haven’t gotten there yet) I’d like to have at least one card from every Magic expansion ever released in my stack. I haven’t had a chance to cross reference yet, but I suspect I’m already very close to having one card from every set in my stack. If anybody notices sets that are not represented, I’m open to suggestions for sets I’ve missed.
Since my Battle Box, the Danger Room, is very much about my experience playing Magic from the beginning to present, and playing my favorite old cards alongside my favorite new cards, it makes a lot of sense to get a card from every set in there.
Brian DeMars has played Magic pretty much since the beginning. He has three Grand Prix Top 8s with a win in Boston-Worcester in 2012. He was also recently a 2015 Open Champion in Indianapolis. Brian plays and enjoys all Constructed and Limited formats but has a particular fondness for Vintage. His proudest accomplishment in MTG is that he is the creator of the Danger Room/Battle Box Limited format.
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