Good morning Magic! What cards would go in a Jumpstart pack themed around YOU? Here are instructions for making yours and what mine would look like - build one up and show us what's in it! ? https://t.co/R4iwq5b2Z3#wotcstaff pic.twitter.com/8UaPulLeUE

— Gavin Verhey (@GavinVerhey) August 17, 2020

This week for his Good Morning Magic Youtube channel, Gavin Verhey put out a video talking about how to make your own Jumpstart booster pack. This idea came from his fellow Wizards employee Chris Mooney but it's clear Gavin ran with it. In the video he not only showed how to make your own Jumpstart pack, but also posed the question of what might one themed after yourself look like?

Here are the guidelines set forth:

• Choose one color. This will be the focus of your pack.
• There must be seven creatures and four non-creatures. Among these should be one rare or mythic rare card.
• Choose a mana fixing land or artifact.
• The rest are lands, but choose your favorite since it's based on you.

Looking through the decklists for the various packs Jumpstart offers, you'll find this generally rings true. There's a few places where this isn't quite the case and there might be a few less lands (Above the Clouds 2 for example) or that the creature to non-creature ratio isn't exact. With these cases it's a very marginal difference, though, and works toward their themes. The one thing I did notice when going through these is that the mana fixing land actually counts with the basics, so in the lists where I've chosen a mana fixing land, I've added an extra creature instead.

While as Chris Mooney pointed out on Twitter themselves, the idea is to make a pack around you and not so much a specific theme. The problem I've found, however, is that over the years I've played Magic in so many ways it's hard to properly touch on everything without hitting on certain themes. Otherwise, you'd probably have a lot less synergy between the cards. As such, I'm presenting you a bunch of different packs themed around my time as a Magic player. Today I'll be covering three and next week I'll do another three that stray a bit from the guidelines that Gavin and Chris have laid out for us.

Let's start with the first pack!

Elves | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith

• Creatures (8)
• 1 Ambush Commander
• 1 Frontier Guide
• 1 Heedless One
• 1 Llanowar Elves
• 1 Quirion Ranger
• 1 Timberwatch Elf
• 1 Wellwisher
• 1 Wirewood Hivemaster

• Sorceries (3)
• 1 Elvish Promenade
• 1 Lead the Stampede
• 1 Sprouting Renewal

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Presence of Gond

• Lands (8)
• 7 Forest
• 1 Vivid Grove

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Could there be anything else? Of course not! For better or worse, my time playing Magic has largely become associated with my love for everyone's favorite forest folk tribe. Elves have been a major player in my overall time playing the game. Llanowar Elves was one of the first cards I ever played in a game and is still one of my all-time favorites. Frontier Guide might seem like an odd choice, but I've long felt it to be a highly underrated Commander card - being cheap, efficient ramp. What's more, I think it's a perfect card for the more casual nature Jumpstart is supposed to represent.

During the Onslaught block, I grew even more attached to them, and many of the creatures in this list represent this strongly. Without cards like Wellwisher, Heedless One, Timberwatch Elf, Wirewood Hivemaster, and Ambush Commander (the pack rare), I might not have discovered the love of competitive Magic I would develop. Two of them continue to define my career along with other elvish staples of Quirion Ranger and Lead the Stampede. Elvish Promenade, Presence of Gond, Sprouting Renewal, and Vivid Grove each offer some very flavorful ways to round out the pack. And of course, I have to go with my favorite Onslaught Forest for the basic of this pack.

Elves will continue to be a big part of my life and what better way to memorialize that but showing it on full display here?

Hazoret Red | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith

• Creatures (8)
• 1 Ahn-Crop Crasher
• 1 Ember Hauler
• 1 Embereth Shieldbreaker
• 1 Fanatical Firebrand
• 1 Firebrand Archer
• 1 Ghitu Lavarunner
• 1 Hazoret the Fervent
• 1 Viashino Pyromancer

• Instants (3)
• 1 Abrade
• 1 Lightning Strike
• 1 Shock

• Artifacts (1)
• 1 Hazoret's Monument

• Lands (8)
• 6 Mountain
• 1 Aether Hub
• 1 Ramunap Ruins

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This one might surprise some of you. Why does Hazoret have anything to do with my life in Magic? This isn't anything Pauper related and doesn't hit the old classic nostalgia notes of a lot of this list... right? Well, the answer might surprise you! You see, there's one event I often say changed my life: Grand Prix Seattle 2018. I went on a last minute decision to go out, have a good time, and meet the friends I'd gotten to know online in the content scene over the last year.

When I was getting ready to go I decided to participate in the main event. My deck of choice? Mono-Red Aggro! I figured I hadn't played a big event in years so why not? If I did well then I did well and if I lost then I'd get to hang with my friends. Seemed like a win-win, right? Well not only did I not lose right away, I ended up going 8-0 on day one for an undefeated record. Even better, I started off with no byes!

This was a monumental achievement for me. While day two might not have gone my way, I'll never forget what this deck did for me and the time it allowed me to have. So, while I can't properly represent list due to the number of rares in that deck, I can instead focus on the leading lady of the deck herself. Lots of Mono-Red Aggro staples and a few of great Hazoret themed cards as well!

I am cheating a little bit on the lands by adding Ramunap Ruins in the lands, but it feels like you can't have a Hazoret Red deck without it. Since Mono-Red decks don't like lots of lands typically, it doesn't work as a non-creature spell, so into the land slot it goes! For the land, I'm going with the Unstable Mountain, as it's the one I ran during GP Seattle 2018. I wasn't a fan of the art the first time I saw it, but it really grew on me when playing them all together in a single deck.

High Tide | Jumpstart | Kendra Smith

• Creatures (4)
• 1 Archaeomancer
• 1 Cloud of Faeries
• 1 Mnemonic Wall
• 1 Sage's Row Denizen

• Instants (6)
• 1 Blue Sun's Zenith
• 1 Ghostly Flicker
• 1 Snap
• 1 Turnabout
• 2 High Tide

• Sorceries (2)
• 1 Merchant Scroll
• 1 Ponder

• Lands (8)
• 7 Island
• 1 Aether Hub

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For this one I'm taking things and spinning them on their head a bit. High Tide is a Legacy archetype I became pretty enamored with around 2013 and became something my friends came to know me for. Eventually, Maverick would take its place as my favorite and I never really would manage to get there with High Tide, but I loved it to death.

The way it works is playing tons of spells to generate an absurd amount of mana with the card High Tide and either win via Storm or by forcing your opponent to draw their deck and then some. As you might expect, this means that the deck usually would play more instants and sorceries than creatures, so here we're playing 8 noncreature spells and 4 creatures. This allows us to stay within the theme but do things a little differently in the process.

Because we're a lot more limited and have to kind of hope and pray that we hit another Blue pack, we're not going so all-in on the storm strategy. Instead, we're going for a couple different finishes! We're looking to try getting as much mana out - possibly returning one of our two High Tides which are doubled because of the nature of this archetype. With enough High Tides active, we can use Snap or Ghostly Flicker with our Archaeomancer and Mnemonic Wall in combination with Sage's Row Denizen to mill our opponent out. If we don't have the Denizen, then we can still Flicker a land and the Archaeomancer/Wall for infinite mana and win with a big Blue Sun's Zenith finish!

I love High Tide a ton and this just seems like a great way to go about things in a more custom setting. For the land, I have to use my favorite stormy Urza's Saga Island, which has been one of my favorite lands of all time ever since I began playing the game in 1999.

I hope you've enjoyed this first set of packs! Next week I'm gonna be back with a couple more focusing on something a little different: multicolored packs! These are going to differ quite drastically from how some of Gavin and Chris' pack creation guidelines but I couldn't do some of the things that most representing me without doing so. You'll see what I mean when that rolls around.

For now, I hope you're making some fun custom Jumpstart packs yourself. I absolutely love this idea and consider it almost like a "paperclip idea" as Mark Rosewater likes to call Magic and the idea of trading card games as a whole. It's so good, so obvious, and so incredible that it's a wonder no one did it before. My fellow CoolStuffInc.com author AE Marling is also doing lots of custom Jumpstart packs so make sure you check his content out as well. I'm definitely loving this and can't wait to make more packs around tons of cool themes in the future as well.

Kendra Smith

Twitter: @TheMaverickGal

Twitch: twitch.tv/themaverickgirl

YouTube: Kendra Smith