What’s in my Magic the Gathering Battle Box

Battle Box is one of my favourite Magic the Gathering formats. It’s a self-contained gaming environment for 2 players. Mine has 171 spells and 20 lands — 10 for each player. Players draw from a shared deck and the deck is focused on combat and combat tricks.

It’s perfect for quick and casual lunch time or afterwork gaming session. There’s no need to build and bring your own deck or learn deep strategies of a specific deck. You shuffle up, draw and start playing. You read the cards as you draw them into your hand and make decisions one at a time. Every session is different.

I use Gamegenic’s The Academic 133+ XL as the base for my box. I got a couple of those from the Kickstarter back in the day and it’s a perfect housing for my box. The main compartment fits most of my spells and the rest fit on the top token space on the side.

The core of this self-contained gaming environment are of course the spells. It currently has 171 cards with mana costs between 1 and 3 and focused on combat and combat tricks.

In the second token box, I keep 20 lands: 2 sets of 5 basics (one each colour) and 5 dual taplands. All of these are sleeved in different colours to make it easy to disassemble after a game: your lands all come from the Command Zone so they never go to the deck and thus can utilise the extra benefits of differently coloured sleeves.

Even if your opponent who is playing Battle Box for the first time shuffles their lands back into the deck out of habit, you can easily spot them thanks to sleeves.

I also have a stack of blank dry erase tokens so you can draw your own tokens when they come up. I love drawing my own tokens.

On the bottom token box, I have a collection of small things to help out. I designed and printed a three compartment box and in it, I have two 3D printed HP counters, a couple of dice and 3D printed black +1/+1 and white -1/-1 counters. I used to have those in same colour but then I realised that it’s nicer if I can figure out what counters they are from their colours and not if they have a small + or - symbol on them.

In the “side department” of the main box, I have my custom keyword reference guides that I made. They list all the keywords with explanations that are present in this box in alphabetical order as well as a quick speed guide for when you can cast spells and activate abilities.

I like having a printed guide so players don’t have to take out their phones to check the wiki — I generally don’t enjoy bringing phones into game sessions.

I love the ability to bring this to game nights or lunches with friends and playing a game or two without having to own cards, build decks, spend time on drafting (the main downside of otherwise wonderful format) or ending up with two unevenly matched decks leading to a bad time.