Salubrious Snail Commander Index

I'm working on a little project right now, and I need your help.
All the details are on a YouTube post I'm linking, but basically I'm building a deck around an unknown event card created for me using feedback from both my in-person opponents and my online audience.
If you want to suggest cards that could go in the deck, you can do that under the YouTube post; and if you want to guarantee an on-color card going in the deck, you can send it to my PO box, address in the description.
With that said, let's get to the topic of your horrible pet cards.

Let's say you have a type of card that you want to see in a lot of games with a given deck: a mana rock, a one mana creature that gains life, or something else.
If that's the case, it can be helpful to run some calculations on how often you'll draw it, either by using a hypergeometric calculator like the one on my website, or by referencing the built-in calculators that a deck building website like Architect might have.
At this point, a lot of players are aware of these sorts of tools, but what they might not be aware of is that you can do the opposite; you can check how often you won't draw cards you don't want.
And just as you could use this to decide how many of a desirable card to include, you could do the same to decide how few of an undesirable card type to add, because it might actually be okay to have some "bad cards" in your deck.
But hold on, let's take a step back here.
What do I mean when I say "bad card," and why would I want to run any of these?

Starting with that first question, the card we're talking about could truly be a "bad card." My Radha, Heir to Keld deck has a single permanent funny seven drop deck slot; it was occupied by Panglacial Wurm in the past, and it's currently occupied by Tyrant of Discord, with both of these being not very good creatures.
However, the meaning of "bad card" could also be a bit more complicated, being a card that is either situational or bad without certain other cards to support it.
As one example, in three different grindy decks I play, there's a card present that is there entirely for the purpose of life gain.
These cards are pretty worthless outside of this task, but they do an admirable job in a mid-to-late game situation where my life total is in a state of peril.
As another example, in my bracket two deck, I run a couple artifact creatures that untap things.
These cards on their own are terrible, but paired with other cards, they can be pretty powerful; and Voltaic Construct is technically part of a convoluted infinite combo the deck can assemble.
As a final example, protection spells fit both of these criteria as cards that aren't useful until you're doing something worth protecting, and whose usefulness isn't realized until an opponent tries to disrupt you.
So, this is what I mean when I say "bad cards": cards that frequently don't feel very good to draw for one reason or another, particularly in the early game.
But why does the category I'm constructing treat these different types of cards as the same?
And if they're bad in some sense, then why run them in the first place?

The answer is that I think of a lot of Commander decks as having two very distinct phases, "pre-engine" and "post-engine." In the early phases of a game, you only have access to a very small number of cards, and a lot of decks gain access to additional cards through the synergies between these early cards.
This could take a lot of different forms: maybe you have a Wall of Omens and a Teleportation Circle; maybe you follow up your Caustic Bronco with an Ishin; maybe you curve Thran Dynamo into a Pull from Tomorrow; maybe you just play a standalone draw engine like an Esper Sentinel or a Phyrexian Arena, or even a series of one-off spells like Night's Whisper and Harmonize.
Regardless, you're using stuff from your more limited early game card pool to help your deck reach a state where it's online and has access to a much wider range of the different tools within it.
And there are actually a lot of things that can help with this: card draw, tutors, filtering, ramp, synergy pieces that assist with any of those last four things.
All of these can help you build up to a point where you have access to a greater amount of your library.
Removal and defensive cards can also help with this, since they buy you the time to get that engine up and going.
Different cards will help different amounts with this, but quite a lot of cards will assist at least a little bit.
All of this is well and good, but you might still be wondering why exactly I'm drawing this "pre-engine" and "post-engine" distinction.
The answer is that once you're cycling through a more significant amount of your deck per turn, whether or not each individual card is useful in a wide variety of situations starts to become a lot less important.
If I draw five cards and one of them isn't that useful to me right now, that's okay; I still drew four other cards.
This is also the point of the game where you're going to start discarding to hand size if you don't have a Reliquary Tower effect, and this is one of my favorite points in the game to be in, getting to purge the trash for the first time in a game and sculpt a hand of seven beautiful, situationally applicable cards, delicious.
As a slight tangent, this sort of reasoning is also why I like a type of budget dual land that a lot of other people seem to dislike, the humble fast land.
A land that enters tapped if you control three or more other lands might seem kind of bad in theory.
In the average bracket three Commander game, you're hopefully making at least seven land drops; so, in less than half of land drops will this land enter untapped.
However, turn four and beyond is also a point in the game at which a lot of decks will be drawing or looting or otherwise filtering, enabling them to find their way to a variety of different lands with relative ease.
The first three turns of the game are the ones where you're going to be the hardest pressed to have a land that both enters untapped and gives the colors you need, and fast lands fill this exact profile.
So, if your deck is one that rounds a corner and starts to see a lot more cardboard at some point, having a somewhat subpar or situational card is a lot less of a problem from that point onward.
But what does this mean for the early game?
Well, as I suggested earlier, you can do a bit of math to see how likely it is for your game plan to get online.

One option here is to separate your non-land cards into three buckets.
"Bucket one" is high-quality drawn filtering, stuff that finds you what you need to succeed quickly and easily.
"Bucket two" is stuff that's basically useless for getting your deck online: hyper-situational cards, protection spells, later game tech pieces, finishers, and stuff that's just kind of bad that you include for shits and giggles, as is your god-given right.
"Bucket three" is all the other stuff outside of these two categories: ramp, removal, somewhat narrower draw, and sometimes applicable tech pieces.
Now, you perform two different checks here.
For one, how likely is it for you to draw one of your "bucket one" cards, your premium quality enablers?
The larger this number is, the better; but there are certainly reasons why this number could be lower for some decks.
Question two is how likely it is for you to draw one of your "bucket two" cards that helps you very little in the early game, and possibly more importantly, how likely is it for you to draw multiple of these?
If you're running five or so hyper-situational cards, the odds of drawing more than one of these is quite low.
By contrast, if that number starts creeping up into the double digits, you might have games where you draw an Overwhelming Stampede and a Heroic Intervention in your first 10 cards of the game, a Fervor and a Full Throttle, a Clever Concealment and a Storm Herd.
You can almost think about all of these "bucket two" bad cards as blank for the purposes of your early game.
Having a lot of these is generally going to slow your timeline for getting off the ground and lead to more stall outs; but you can counterbalance these tendencies with a greater amount of "bucket one" cards, high quality draw and filtering.
Hitting a string of situational cards you won't want until later in the game can be a problem, but it might not be if you have a lot of filtering and draw and tutors at the ready to cut you through this dead air.

I mean, don't let me stop you from living your best life, especially if you're in more bracket two territory, but the realistic answer is that it depends on what the rest of your deck is doing.
If we're talking about some terrible pet cards that you would literally die for, take a look at how many other cards you're running that you'd be kind of bummed to draw before turn five.
If that number is very low, you're probably okay to add some garbage to your deck; treat this as your reward for being such a responsible deck builder in other ways.
If that number is stretching into double digits territory, you'll want to be a bit more careful.
How much general purpose draw and filtering are you running?
How broadly useful is your commander for generating resources and helping your deck get going?
My deck with the highest number of "bucket two" cards is my Meria of Ultron deck with a ton of protection as well as equipments to give extra damage and evasion.
With any other commander, this deck's ratios would make no sense at all and it would flail around doing nothing most of the time.
However, because Meria is a sweet draw engine and one of the best mana producers in the game, and because my deck is pretty decent at protecting her, it ends up working out most of the time.
Likewise, it's not a coincidence that my one bracket three deck where I allow myself to indulge in significantly more janky pet cards is also one where I have a mana dork commander and a massive pile of four cost ramp spells and six to seven cost bombs that I'm pretty much always happy to draw.
Craft the foundation of your deck in a way that's maximally consistent and flexible, and the amount of room to sprinkle garbage into that bad boy might just surprise you.

Thanks for watching.
Make sure to check out the YouTube post in the description if you want to contribute to that.
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At a panel I was hosting during MagicCon Vegas a few weeks ago, an audience member asked a question that really got me thinking: “I’ve been trying to build a hidden commander and I don’t know how to make it work.
It’s the Sibsig Ceremony, it’s green-black.
Creature spells cost two less to cast, and when a creature you control enters, if you cast it, destroy that creature, then you get a token.
I don’t want to just make it a token instead.”

Hidden commanders are an interesting subject, but they definitely aren’t all made equal.
I responded to this person’s question, as well as my co-host’s answer, by saying that some of the classically touted examples of build-around cards, such as Sunforger, are deceptively simple to pull off because the cards they work with don’t eat up that much deck space.
Red and white instants that cost four or less mana are good and you’ll already want some of them in your deck; equipments are also good, and you should be able to find some other options to grab if you want to run tutors for your Sunforger.
However, for a secret commander that typically requires more deck space to support it, as the Sibsig Ceremony often does, you’ll need to thread the needle a bit more carefully in deck building.

The second question to consider is: are there analogs?
Are there cards that will do what you want to do with the Sibsig Ceremony that aren’t it?
Because if people get to know this deck, they will start removing this card very rapidly.
So that’s another thing you want to look at; if you are dedicating a lot of deck space to this card, what else can work with this card?
That’s kind of where you need to be looking.

And that felt like pretty good advice to give generally.
Cards don’t always get drawn and sometimes get removed.
I tangled with the Sibsig Ceremony myself a bit a year prior for a video building a deck based around cards chosen by my patrons, so I had some familiarity with that card in particular and its challenges, but I’m by no means an expert.
That deck was a little on the goofy side and the card isn’t really my first choice as a build-around in the first place.
So I figured it could be somebody else’s job to be a scholar on the Sibsig Ceremony in particular.
However, that plan was upended about a week later when I was spinning a wheel to decide what deck I’d build for the Magic Mirror podcast.

“My card.
Pretty much the same thing.
Dragon swarm, dragon swarm, dragon swarm.
Oh, no. Oh, please no. Oh, yes.
Oh, god, no. The Sibsig Ceremony.
This card keeps coming up.
Let’s go.”

The set of wheels I created spun me into building a $60 budget deck with 50 or more subtypes in some way centered around the Sibsig Ceremony, this old nemesis of mine.
At this point, I just accepted that I needed to create a full-effort build-around for this card in order to shake whatever curse had caused it to follow me.
And to be clear, I do mean an honest-to-god bracket three deck, maybe a little janky by choice and by nature of the requirements going into this deck, but no jankier than that and with plenty of powerful plays up its sleeve.
In the process of doing precisely this, I ended up landing on two principles that should guide anybody building a deck centered around a card in their 99.
One of these being something I directly identified at the panel, and the other one being something I kind of alluded to more indirectly and have since developed further.
These principles are: one, find analogs for your central card, and two, minimize the footprint of cards that synergize with your central card.
Both principles stem from the essential fact that you simply won’t always have access to your hidden commander card.
So, here, I’m going to walk you through my process of building a Sibsig Ceremony deck and in doing so, demonstrate how these two rules produced a successful hidden commander deck.

To start with, let’s discuss the nature of hidden commanders a bit and why the Sibsig Ceremony is one of the trickier ones you can choose.
The phrase “hidden commander” simply refers to a deck where one of the cards in the 99 is built around more heavily than the commander itself.
My Sharuum Astral Slide deck is an example of this, where Astral Slide is a key piece of how the deck works and Sharuum plays more of a secondary role in adding flexibility to the deck.
This type of deck usually involves some number of tutors to find the core card, although whether or not a deck tutors for its hidden commander every game might depend on the nature of the card a bit.
Astral Slide is a ridiculously powerful late-game tool, so I’ll almost always want a copy of the card at some point even if I survive the early to mid game without it.
For purposes of adhering to principle one, having analogs, Astral Slide makes my job easy because it has a functionally identical card as well as a similar enchantment in a different color, effectively giving me three copies of my key card.
I don’t need to get creative finding cards to do something similar; they’re just handed to me.

Other hidden commanders make principle number two the easy one, allowing a player to minimize the footprint of cards that work with their central card quite easily and not feel like their deck space is being gobbled up.
As I mentioned earlier, Sunforger is a great build-around because the cards it works with span a wide range of different roles, and since they don’t even need to be in hand for Sunforger to synergize with them, the challenge of figuring out the right number of instants to guarantee setup and payoff lining up is basically nonexistent.
So, these are two secret commanders where one of the two principles I mentioned earlier is basically guaranteed, easing a bit of the challenge of deck building.
However, some hidden commanders don’t make either of these two principles easy, and this brings us to the Sibsig Ceremony.

Let’s start, as I did when building this deck, by tackling what this card does.
The first line of text is 100% upside: it makes our creature spells cost two less.
That’s a pretty great effect for three mana.
Urza’s Incubator and Semblance Anvil come the closest to this rate among artifact-based producers, but each of these has a substantial downside or limitation.
So does the Sibsig Ceremony, though.
The second line of text destroys creatures when they enter if they were cast and creates a 2/2 Zombie.
This does place a serious limitation on what’s going to make sense to go with this card, though it’s definitely not an insurmountable limitation.

When I was searching for a commander for this card, I knew I wanted it to be something on the more generic side to work out with the other restrictions I’d been given.
And I also knew I wanted it to do something that combines relatively easily with the Sibsig Ceremony to produce positive outcomes.
In other words, I wanted something low footprint, a commander that kind of just works with the Sibsig Ceremony without me needing to put in a lot of extra effort or bring in additional cards.
This is how I landed on Athreos, Shroud-Veiled.
The card is six mana, it’s indestructible even when I have it fully online via devotion, and it has an ability that works well alongside ETBs and on-death effects among creatures I play.
Even without anything else on my side of the board, the card is just pretty solid if I get it into play on turn four off a turn three ceremony and start throwing coins on opposing creatures, effectively making Sibsig Ceremony a worn powerstone for this precise function.

To go along with this, I grabbed a handful of other indestructible and pseudo-indestructible creatures: Erebos, Bleak-Hearted as another god that works well with my zombie tokens, Yahenni as a sac outlet, Breathkeeper Seraph as a unique soulbond creature that can save itself and others, and all four in-color Myojins.
These are eight-mana spirits that enter with an indestructible counter and can remove this counter to do a variety of powerful effects.
So in these instances, we’re taking advantage of the Sibsig Ceremony’s powerful ramp potential with creatures that don’t care about the rest of its text box.
And already amongst these indestructible creatures, we can see a lot of points of cohesion.
Erebos plus Myojin of Blooming Dawn can draw a billion cards, and any big Erebos plays are assisted by a free sac outlet like Yahenni.
Athreos, Shroud-Veiled and Myojin of Grim Betrayal both work fabulously alongside conventional board wipes, as does Breathkeeper Seraph to a lesser extent, and Myojin of Cleansing Fire is a board wipe.
The picture that’s being painted so far is of a big-mana controlling aristocrats-oriented deck.
And to minimize friction, we’re going to want to expand on that vision and make sure it’s a consistent feature of the deck, starting with mana.

The Sibsig Ceremony provides us a lot of mana through its discount, so the first order of business in making sure the deck works without it is adding a lot of other ramp, finding analogs.
Heartless Summoning is the easiest choice here as a similar two-mana creature discount plus downside sort of effect.
Another solid choice is ramp on ETB creatures like Solemn Simulacrum, Scampering Surveyor, and Kor Cartographer.
These work on their own as an alternate ladder from four to six mana to get the commander and give an immediate coin destination, and they also function quite enjoyably with the Sibsig Ceremony in play, costing two less mana and getting their 2/2 bodies replaced with 2/2 zombies.
Past these, I chose to add Crowded Crypt as a synergistic rock, a Sol Ring, Mer Convert for subtype purposes (the wheeled decree that the deck needs to have 50 or more subtypes, remember), and seven other two-mana rocks to round things out.
This deck ended up pretty high-curved, so playing a mana rock is really what we want to be doing with our two-mana turn.

So, okay.
Step one of this was making sure that this deck can make use of the Sibsig Ceremony’s mana generation and that it has plenty of other ways to generate mana in the card’s absence.
Great.
But let’s think a little harder about this second line of text.
It’s intended to be a downside, but does it have to be?
The biggest area where it isn’t a downside is when it comes to creatures that we actively want to die.
Take Junji, the Midnight Sky.
Both the discard and the reanimate modes of this death trigger are solid three-mana effects, and with the Sibsig Ceremony, you get that plus a zombie and a death trigger and a thing in your graveyard you can use for other purposes, more on those things later.
Same with Ao, the Dawn Sky; one mode is a sort of Collected Company effect, and the other is a big amplification to our board if we’re already loaded up with zombies.
Both are great to get for three mana, and even better with some extra goodies tacked on top.
We’ve also got Erebos, Bleak-Hearted and Dark Prophecy as powerful draw engines when creatures die, which pair nicely with both zombie tokens and our non-token creatures meeting an untimely demise.

All of this on-death stuff goes great with the Sibsig Ceremony, though it does also pose a bit of a problem: these cards are a lot less good if we don’t have a way for creatures to die.
If we assume the Sibsig Ceremony will always be in play, we’re going to run into some problems when it’s not.
So, this deck also integrates a number of ways to sacrifice our creatures as well, analogs for the Sibsig Ceremony’s destroy effect.

Season of Loss is a flexible removal tool that can also draw, Fanatical Devotion is a sac outlet that can also save creatures from destruction, and there are five other cards that do some sort of sacrificing task.
These are perfect here because they replace the creature death portion of what the Sibsig Ceremony does, but most of them are also great when paired with the Sibsig Ceremony.
And this is the perfect relationship to create with a build-around card: you want the best possible spread of situational usefulness on a card, not just the one that’s best when paired with a hidden commander.

The same logic applies to this deck’s 19 ETB creatures.
Each of these will have a bit of a spread when it comes to how effective they are, but the floor is decently high, making their footprint relatively low.
As a baseline, they’re fine.
A deck that’s casting a standalone Simulacrum, a standalone Chupacabra, a standalone Grotesque Abomination, at worst, you’re talking about bracket two midrange deck territory.
Bring in the Sibsig Ceremony and suddenly the power of these jumps a couple notches up from that, particularly for the three-to-four-mana ETB creatures.
Those creatures are around 2/2 already, so the Sibsig Ceremony basically just looks like a two-mana discount that shoves their real body into the graveyard.
Speaking of which, this is where the aristocrats stuff we mentioned earlier comes into play again.

This deck has five cards that recur creatures, and it also has the seven sources of creature sacrifice I mentioned earlier for when the Sibsig Ceremony isn’t in play to assist creatures with their journey to the graveyard.
And when you’re using one of those and have a bit more flexibility on your timing for creatures dying, Athreos also works as a recursion engine, offering a ton of value generation alongside one of the deck’s four sources of continual sacrifice.
If you’re getting a Sepulchral Primordial trigger every turn, a Krob Trigger every turn, or a couple Ashnod’s Altar triggers every turn, you’re going to be feeling pretty fabulous about things.

There are also a few flicker cards baked into the deck to enhance the ETB plan further, as well as an extra spicy inclusion: Mirror of Life Trapping, an artifact that exiles creatures when they enter if they were cast and then returns them.

And yet, to lay my cards on the table here, I do not like the new status quo we find ourselves in.
Having every set be a new plane, particularly with five or more sets per year, makes things feel rushed; it makes it feel like there’s no time to breathe and to become immersed in a particular world.
And if I really wanted to let nostalgia take the wheel on this one, I could tell you that the gradual pivot from three-set blocks to purely one-off sets has been an unambiguous tragedy, that we as Magic players are fallen and need to return to the glory days of 2013, where Magic sets came in threes and where bold duels could take place on a middle school lunch table.

I’d love to be able to contribute yet another uncomplicated piece of ammunition to the siege on the decisions currently being made by Hasbro, but in truth, the issue of blocks is a bit more complicated than that.
I do think there is something wrong with what we’re currently doing, where Standard-legal sets take us to six or seven different planes every single year, but three-set blocks don’t really represent a better vision of the game, just one with a different set of problems.
So here, I want to lay out my case for what has gone wrong, both past and present, and talk about an alternative approach to the way we conceptualize sets and their structuring.
And I’ll be getting into a very specific missed opportunity that occurred in 2024 that provides a fascinating case study.

So, as you can tell, I really don’t think what we’re doing in the present is ideal.
However, that doesn’t mean the way sets were structured in the past was necessarily better.
And to explore that, we really need to talk about three-set blocks.

The following two blocks also each contained a set that didn’t really fit in, but in the case of those, it was the middle set.
Theros, the set, established the plane as a setting based around Greek myths and also introduced characters such as Elspeth as a monster-slaying champion and Xenagos as a satyr planeswalker who aspired to godhood.
Born of the Gods was the second set of the block and featured the story of Xenagos ascending to godhood amidst growing chaos within the pantheon.
Journey into Nyx was the third set and focused on the consequences of Xenagos’s godhood and the ensuing showdown that resulted from it.
That all sounds fine and good, but in terms of gameplay, the second set, Born of the Gods, was very strange, and a big reason why it stands out as odd is that the other two sets actually did a really great job conveying the progression of the block through their mechanics.
Theros was more focused on the mortal plane through its heavy usage of heroic and monstrosity as mechanics, whereas Journey into Nyx was much more focused around the pantheon of the gods and the conflict within it, which could be seen in its constellation mechanic and extra high density of enchantments.
Born of the Gods, on the other hand, featured a couple of kind of weird mechanics and didn’t really convey a strong sense of place or time.
It felt more like Theros B-sides than anything else, just some kind of odd designs to go along with a group of five gods in order to allow the fifteen gods to be evenly spread between the three sets.
It played an undeniable role in tracing Xenagos’s storyline, but in most other ways than that, the set was a bit of a disappointment.

The same goes, to a lesser extent, for the Tarkir block.
Khans of Tarkir focused on the five warring factions in a world where dragons have gone extinct, and Dragons of Tarkir features an alternate timeline where dragons are still around and where Tarkir’s clans and characters have altered fates.
The middle set, Fate Reforged, was a little odd, though.
Lore-wise, it involved Sarkhan traveling back in time to when dragons were still around alongside the five clans and intervening in the battle between Ugin and Nicol Bolas.
This is cool as a way to transition between Khans and Dragons, but in terms of gameplay, it just sort of felt like an awkward mashup of the two sets.
Fate Reforged used three clan keywords from Khans and two of the changed ones from DTK; it had some dragons rather than none or a whole bunch; and the clans were less three-color focused than Khans, but not quite the two-color pairings from Dragons.
For a middle set separated from the other two by 1,300 years, this feels more like the middle of an Animorphs cover than it does its own cohesive world.

To be clear, it is still easily the most defensible third set of the three blocks I’ve mentioned, and to be honest, I can imagine this feeling like a genuinely compelling three-set block with a handful of changes to this middle set.
Nonetheless, in the format it ended up in, Fate Reforged feels like a continuation of a trend: one of the sets in a block being a little awkward and feeling more like a stepping stone for story purposes than a fully thought-out landscape of its own.

Ah, subthemes.
They can make your deck better or they can make your deck worse, and either of those two things might be a desirable outcome depending on what you look for in a game of Magic: The Gathering.
Hi there, I’m Alex, and today I’m here to tell you about a passion of mine: making decks do more things.
Most EDH decks will have a theme, merfolk, tokens on attack triggers, and so forth, and this is a nice place to start in getting a deck to do something.
However, eventually that one theme might start to get a little boring, and your eyes might begin to wander.
That on-attack trigger makes tokens; can I play harder into that?
I really like this zombie creature that makes me discard cards; can I make my deck focus more on discard?
This ETB creature searches up legendary cards; I wonder how that might fit into my blink deck.
And this makes sense.
Having your deck do more stuff, have more textured play paths, produce more unexpected results, all of this will be desirable to a lot of players, particularly players who have already played a lot with more linear styles of deck.
So here, I’m going to be making a little guide on how to answer the sorts of questions I mentioned earlier about specific cards you’re finding yourself transfixed by, and at the end, you might have an exciting arsenal of brand new questions to probe your deck with.
With that said, let’s begin.

Assuming you’re not trying to obliterate your deck’s consistency, a good place to start in expanding your deck’s synergy universe is going to be what I’ll call “fulcrum cards.” This is a thing that naturally ties together multiple subthemes, and it can take a variety of different forms but typically comes in the form of a payoff from one theme that rewards another.
Throne of Geth ties together artifact sacrifice and counters; Displacer Kitten ties together the flicker and spellslinger archetypes; Strength from the Fallen ties together enchantments and creature-stuffed graveyards with a resulting payoff that can work well for a power matters deck.
These are pretty clear examples of fulcrum cards, but there are a lot of other examples that are less obvious but absolutely there if you go looking.
Professional Facebreaker rewards a board of evasive creatures with some artifact tokens that can crack for mana; Quicksmith Genius rewards artifacts entering with rummages that can feed graveyard strategies; and Squee, Dubious Monarch rewards a stocked graveyard with a reanimated attacker that generates tokens.
Why were all of those examples read three times, you might ask?
No particular reason, but you should definitely put them all in the same deck.
Regardless, all of these cards represent points of fusion between different archetypes, connective glue that involves setup for one archetype turning into payoff for another.

An important consideration when thinking about this sort of card is the floor of the effect.
I’m stat brained, so I’d be thinking about maybe the 25th-percentile game for a card, but basically what we’re wondering is how will the card feel in a subpar situation when it’s not living up to our wildest dreams.
For some of the cards I mentioned earlier, the floor is pretty high.
Professional Facebreaker will usually manage to generate at least a couple treasures, and Displacer Kitten can at least serve as protection even if no juicy ETB creatures are present.
For others, the floor might be a lot lower though.
Dross Scorpion is a card I run in one of my decks that works as a fulcrum point between artifact creatures hitting graveyard and tap effects, but this card could easily end up being a poorly stated creature with a single untap on death, and that’s important to keep in mind.
It gets even worse for non-creature permanents.
In my most recent deck review, one of my supporters was trying to integrate a smallish Astral Slide flicker package into a deck, and unfortunately, without any cycling cards in hand, that card is just a three mana textless enchantment.
This is where a bit of discernment is necessary.
It’s important to figure out what works as a minor part of a deck and what has no business being outside a deck that doesn’t heavily support it due to its low floor.

As a related example of this, I’ve had a handful of people suggest Ret to my mystic for my Astral Slide deck.
At first glance, this might make sense.
I’m playing a deck trying to cycle cards; this card gives all my creatures cycling, and it’s a wizard to top it all off, grabable with either of my wizard cycling cards.
However, the issue with adding a card like this is that at its floor, it will always consume a card slot that could have gone to an ETB creature or some card draw or a card that itself has cycling and can replace itself.
And then, how high do you think the ceiling will be in a deck where over 40% of the creatures already have cycling?
It looks good at first, and I’m sure it’s great in a more general graveyard deck, but once we do the floor-ceiling calculation, it becomes clear that this little bird gets mugged by a merfolk looter in this particular deck.

As you might have guessed, a major factor in the floor-ceiling discussion is the amount of deck space required to support a particular card.
A lot of possible fulcrum cards might already be within your synergy family of choice and might create resources that are already useful to what you’re doing even if they theoretically might tie naturally into a different subtheme.
We can see this with the treasure example earlier, where treasures are just a naturally useful tool for basically all decks.
This stands in contrast to something like a Doorkeeper in an Arcades, the Strategist deck.
How do you make target player milling feel useful for a theme that usually wins through combat damage and doesn’t traditionally utilize the graveyard very much?
I’m sure plenty of people have done it, but it requires more divergence from the traditional Arcades game plan than a lot of other defenders payoffs and will likely demand more deck space to be any good as a result.

Another angle for thinking about deck space could be to consider how closely interlinked two different themes are to one another.
Sometimes there will be a whole bunch of fulcrum cards for a particular set of two themes, with one I’ve utilized in the past being artifacts and ETB effects.
Thought Monitor, Conjurer’s Closet, Myr Battlesphere, Mimic Vat, the Mages, there’s a whole lot of options there.
And if you’re playing a bunch of these, your dual theme deck experience might end up feeling decently compact despite its somewhat mechanically broad nature.
However, many other sets of two themes have dramatically less innate shared DNA.
If I’m trying to make a deck that combines cast from exile and landfall, well, there are two landfall cards with “exile you may play” text, and there are also cards that reward playing lands from exile in addition to casting spells, which work well for us.
And then if we dive into “from anywhere other than your hand” effects as well, we might find some roundabout synergies in other landfall cards such as Courser of Kruphix and Hedron Crab, among others.
Hopefully you can see what I’m getting at here.
Sometimes you’re just going to have a bit of a hard time combining two themes.

Now, does this mean that you shouldn’t smash together two very different synergy families?
No. Artifacts plus ETB, tokens plus one counters, these have been done tens of thousands of times before for good reason, but you always have the opportunity to do something different, something unique, something more specifically suited to who you are as a player.
What you should do though is know that’s what you’re doing, figure out why you’re doing that, and then figure out a plan of action based on what your goals are.
Let’s say you’re building an initiative deck with a heavy emphasis on legendary permanents in general and the background enchantments in particular.
Cool.
A bit tricky, but there are some possible points of connection here.
Next, it’s important to figure out the reason for building the deck because that will affect the decisions you make.
If you’re trying to build a decent bracket three deck with this set of restrictions as a challenge, you’ll want to dial in hard on the points of cohesion and maybe consider ways you can get the different elements to come together more often.
Maybe we run partner commanders to get full use out of Dungeon Delver and pick colors that offer the most utility in putting together our game plan.
If we decide that Dungeon Delver is a key card for us, maybe we add some cards like Enlightened Tutor, Muddle the Mixture, and a couple other helpful tutors in whatever colors we end up in so that we can get that card more often, and then maybe we pair that with other useful cards that fit the same tutoring restrictions.
If we have the goal of getting the most mechanically fluid version of initiative legendaries, there are some cool decision paths we can run down, and the end result will likely be a very unique bracket three deck.
Some people might worry that tutors will homogenize the play experience of a deck, but this won’t necessarily be true.
Card selection tools like filtering spells and conditional tutors will reduce the play pattern variance of a deck, but if you add them to a deck that would otherwise have extreme levels of play pattern variance due to having a lot of moving parts, you’ll likely end up in a place that is still very fresh and dynamic to play with.

Now let’s say we’re building with a different goal.
We’re just trying to have a good time and are likely aiming for a more laid-back bracket two style deck.
This is also a very valid goal, and honestly, it’s a pretty fantastic reason to make a deck that might be a little bit mechanically dubious.
If your starting point is a naturally slower-paced political mechanic like initiative and if you’re introducing extra layers of synergy rather than filling up your deck with high quality staple creatures, you’re going to end up with something that plays quite well at lower power tables.
You’ll want to make sure you’re running enough filtering so that your deck functions and so that you’re having fun throughout the whole process, but the play pattern of a deck that gradually filters for different elements of its cool funky game plan is one that is perfect for a bracket two game in both pace and nature.

As a final note here, playing at a lower power table is also a great place for a somewhat mechanically disjointed deck because incentives align perfectly on what sorts of vegetables you should be running, particularly removal.
Lower power opponents won’t require all the best removal the game has to offer, and this means that you can do something that’s already nice to do: run some of the higher mana options with added utility for your synergy families.
My bracket two Incubators deck has 16 cards I’ve categorized as interaction, which is a decent number, but if I click through these on the architect page, literally all of them do something else for the deck.
This is nice for keeping a mechanically messy deck from feeling too bad, and it also lets me play with cards that are a bit more unique within the Commander format.
Is Spread the Sickness the best removal this game has to offer?
Definitely not, but it feels immensely at home in this deck and I wouldn’t dare cut it.

Thanks for watching.
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Any deck I find myself playing for a long enough period of time generally earns itself its own dedicated video, a deck tech.
That happened 21 months after I built Shroom Slide, seven months after I built Glissa Incubators, four months after I built my Malcolm Time Sieve deck, one month after building my Radha deck, and also one month after putting together an updated version of my Maga deck.
In part, this is for entirely ordinary YouTuber reasons: I need to figure out two things a month to talk about, and a deck I like to play makes for an easy way to make one of those two.
However, this is also because my favorite decks tend to be evocative, meticulously crafted to scratch a very specific itch, and for this reason they also often serve as good lenses through which to analyze a specific play style or a specific motivation when building a deck.
Relevant to this discussion is the fact that my decks tend to revolve around a specific vibe I find appealing, whether that be forcing the table into a cutthroat low-resource game, unstoppably accumulating resources for myself, or navigating a strategic minefield to a narrow control victory.
Because my decks feature specific play patterns I find personally satisfying, I like to think they can be helpful documents of how I crafted an enjoyable experience for myself, and possible inspiration for how others can do the same.
It’s with all this in mind that we need to talk about the elephant in the room, my Liesa deck.
I first built this deck in April 2023, 35 months ago, and it has stayed among my five to six core decks ever since.
I’ve even talked about it in a handful of different videos because it has accomplished some interesting things and offered some intriguing lessons.
What it hasn’t done, though, is ever be quite satisfying enough to make a whole video about; it’s never scratched the itch I wanted to scratch well enough to be worth talking about.

This is kind of funny to me because I’ve known precisely what itch I wanted to scratch basically the whole time.
I wanted to make my opponents think about their life total a lot.
I said precisely this in a Discord message I sent to a friend in June of 2023, and I also laid out this thought process in a video about aggro in October of that year.
An aggressive game plan can mean the ability to knock opponents out of the game early, but even before that happens, the first 20 to 30 damage dealt to an opponent already influences the way they play the game.
It makes them play more conservatively, attack less confidently, and feel a lot less confident about the life-paid tools that are such a common feature in Commander.
And, relevantly here, a low life total especially does that if I can keep around a creature that drains opponents whenever they cast spells.
So, I was already in a great starting position with my command zone being a commander who dodges the command tax and drains anybody who casts spells.
So, how exactly did I manage to fail at adequately scratching this itch for multiple years?

Well, it’s been a complex road of confused intentions and muddy goals with multiple rounds of heavy reworks; this is where the command zone comes into play for this particular deck.
My hate bears can whittle down life totals a bit and generally gum up the works of the game, and then Liesa is my follow-up that can really start to cut down life totals in this slowed environment.
This theory largely worked out in reality.
I had a suite of 16 hate bears alongside modest counts of protection, ramp, draw, and removal, as well as some extra tools to help Liesa in cutting down opposing life totals.
Still, I found myself having some issues with that original deck.
In retrospect, the biggest one is that it felt more stax than it did Liesa.
However, at the time I was only distantly aware of this, and more focused on another undeniably present problem: the deck didn’t have all that much draw, which just kind of made it boring to play.
My opponents couldn’t do much, but neither could I.

So, in early 2024, I did a round of tweaks on the deck to get more value generation in there and generally to make it more interesting to play.
I added a lot of value generation: three more general purpose options and five cards that contain a particular mechanic I wanted to play around with, the initiative.
The initiative is a mechanic that causes a player to travel through the Undercity, which triggers an effect in a room whenever a player takes the initiative, whenever they start their turn with the initiative, or whenever they take back the initiative from an opponent who stole it by attacking them.
It’s like monarch, but needlessly complicated for entirely aesthetic purposes.
Anyway, this had some undeniable appeals.
In a slow-paced game, any once-per-turn triggers naturally gain a bit of extra relevance.
Also, my deck already benefited from running a small handful of defensive cards due to its grindy, life-total-race-winning commander, and these defensive cards also help with keeping the initiative.
Also, I didn’t have an Undercity token, so I drew one on a full-sized piece of paper and brought miniatures to Commander games so the people could represent their positions on it.
Who wouldn’t love that?
Well, me, and that was part of my issue with this version of the deck.
A commander deck can easily be this pretty compact, self-contained thing, and here I’d introduced an extra mechanic that required me to use this full sheet of paper prop or else buy a replacement that’s irritatingly small.
It just felt like a kind of pointless extra hassle to need to deal with, particularly given that my deck only ran five initiative cards and didn’t draw any of them in some games.
The other part of my issue was that I’d cut a bunch of damaging cards in order to make the round of changes I’d made, and while those damaging cards weren’t great, their absence pulled the deck even further away from the life total pressuring ideal I’d been striving for.
I had a functional deck that I didn’t mind playing, but the itch was still not being scratched.
So, it was time for another change.

One of my favorite cards in the deck was Bruna, the Demagogue.
She is a three mana creature with the text, “Whenever a player attacks one of your opponents, if that opponent has more life than another of your opponents, that attacking player draws a card and you put two +1/+1 counters on a creature you control.” It might not immediately be clear what that means, but basically drawing her instantly granted the deck a whole bunch of both value generation and damage in the form of +1/+1 counters, and also created a sort of political game for my opponents.
In theory, she offered opponents card advantage, but trading a card for two +1/+1 counters on one of my creatures didn’t usually feel too bad, and her benefits were much more consistent on my side of the table.
After four or five games of drawing her and greatly enjoying what she did to the deck, I decided to rework the deck with her in the command zone.
In theory, this swap made sense to me.
Liesa is a damage-focused commander who operates through the use of a life tax, and Bruna is a damage-focused commander who operates through the use of +1/+1 counters; my theory about having a hate bear oriented 99 along with a commander who pushed a lot of damage was still absolutely intact.
The other appeal here was that hate bears are a type of card better suited to somewhat higher power games, and Bruna was a more powerful commander than Liesa, so that was an added bit of congruence.
With this new bird in the zone, I was better equipped to handle the sorts of higher power Commander games that my hate bear suite was itching for.

So, how was that?
Well, in a lot of ways I was correct, and the deck I ended up producing was undoubtedly a workable one that I could have some fun playing.
It got going fast; Bruna’s +1/+1 counters could turn my hate bears into terrifying beaters, and the card advantage options meant it rarely totally ran out of steam.
Even better, with such a potent command zone, I could afford to run more interaction than ever before without sacrificing other things.
So, what was the problem?
Put simply, the nature of a Breena command zone is dramatically different from the nature of a Liesa command zone, and it’s different in a way that totally destroyed the feel of the deck that I was going for.
On some level, Liesa is an “inevitability” commander, an unstoppable life total tax that always represents a way to grind the game toward a single-digit hit point slugfest.
With her in the command zone, the 99 could focus on keeping opponents in check and putting in chip damage, knowing that every chunk of health my opponents lost was a spell they couldn’t safely cast later in the game.
By contrast, Breena is very much a “tempo” commander, as I laid out in my glass cannon commanders video last year.
Like Liesa, she helps me deal a ton of damage to opponents, but the profile of that damage is front-loaded and reliant on creatures sticking around on board.
If I had a smooth first several turns, I might be swinging in with a few 7/7s or 8/8s or 9/9s on turn five, and if those creatures stuck around, there was a solid chance I’d be winning that game.
The problem was, if some of my creatures got removed or if, God forbid, there was a board wipe played that I couldn’t dodge, all of that damage momentum would slow to a halt.
In that case, I’d still have some card advantage from Breena drawing me an extra one to two cards per turn, but it would take some time for me to redevelop a board that could once again threaten opponents, and whether I could pull that off successfully might come down to a variety of different factors.
To be clear, what I’m describing is a very normal type of commander deck.
If your deck works like this, that’s fine, and I did enjoy some things about playing it.
It even makes sense as an aggro deck.
This deck came out of the gate swinging and routinely knocked 50 points of life off of its opponents within the first six turns of the game, even in games it eventually lost control of.
The problem was, I wasn’t just looking for an aggro deck; I was looking for a sort of inevitability aggro experience, where opponents would spend time dealing with the consequences of a painfully low life total.
And this deck was decidedly not that.

So, how did I solve my aggro problem?
How did I create a deck that scratches this itch of wanting opponents to spend a lot of time looking at their life total?
Well, step one was going back to Liesa.
Part of me was a little hesitant to do this for purely power reasons, because the Breena deck had been sort of bracket four curious, and Liesa is a pretty firmly mid power sort of commander.
A small part of me wishes she drained opponents for three per spell, but alas, my girl Liesa just doesn’t quite have that kind of sauce.
However, this fact also gives some opportunities, the biggest one of which I’ll get to in a bit.
To start with though, let’s talk about how I fixed some of the issues from the previous Liesa decks.
A big piece of this was the beatdown suite.
An issue with the previous iterations of the deck was that the 99 didn’t actually do a good job of getting life totals low enough for Liesa to matter.
In the case of the original deck, that was a result of running a bunch of mediocre damage tools such as Blood Artist effects, and in the initiative version, that was just not really running very many damage tools in general, unless you count making target opponent lose five life once every five turns.
So, here, assisted by a more lax budget than I was using in the past, I picked out a bunch of new damage options: Ankh of Mishra, Wound Reflection, Suture Priest, and the iconic political aggro tool Hunted Horror.
This card is so much fun; if you have an opponent who’s receptive to the idea of smacking Frederick over there who’s playing a gross value pile, it’s effectively a 13/13 in stats for two mana.
In terms of value, I dialed into the small creature beats realm and grabbed Enduring Innocence, Assemble the Players, and Elegy Acolyte.
This deck is running more draw-oriented cards than the original, and while it’s running significantly less value generation in total than the initiative version of the deck, much of the draw here is quite dense and impactful.
Barrow Ghoulf was a final inclusion here; it’s just an all-around solid beatstick with a bunch of value attached.

The biggest area I tweaked this deck, though, was dead simple: I cut a lot of hate bears.
This was kind of painful because I really like having hate bears in my deck.
It feels good to have a way to slow opposing game plans, to build around the restrictions of those tools so I’m breaking parity, and to be able to keep a high power table in check with something like a Rule of Law effect.
And to be clear, I’m still running some: taxes, enter-the-battlefield-tapped effects, and even Mindcensor; however, the real game plan smashers like Hushbringer and Archon of Emeria got left behind.
One reason for this I alluded to earlier: these cards feel most appropriate and most needed in higher bracket games, and Liesa isn’t a commander that really belongs at those tables.
The other reason for this choice was that stax in general, and Rule of Law effects in particular, have this weird clash with Liesa because they cause opponents to cast fewer spells, but Liesa wants opponents to be casting more spells, or at least wants the fact that spells cost two life to feel relevant.
It almost felt like doing her a little dirty, as well as undermining the goal of the deck.
Like, think about it: if I have an opponent at a lowish life total, Liesa in play, and also a Phyrexian Censor in play, is Liesa reducing the number of spells my opponent wants to play?
The answer is, who knows?
They’re not running a whole ass Phyrexian deck; they can only play one spell per turn anyway.

Quick announcement up top.
I'm now partnered with Dragon Shield.
Follow my affiliate link in the description to get a discount on your online sleeve purchases, and keep an eye out in the upcoming weeks for an awesome custom sleeve design that me and my artist friend are cooking up at the moment.
Now, on to it.

Lauren Ecliped is here, and my patrons have decreed that I will be reviewing the minus one/-1 counter precon, which is great because Blight Curse has been a lot of fun to dig into and is pretty phenomenal as far as pre-constructed commander decks go, in my opinion.
Not because it's a perfect deck, and we can work on that part a bit later, but for a lot of other reasons we'll be getting into.
As usual, I'm going to start by talking about what the deck is trying to do; then I'll be discussing what I like about it, and I'll finish up with some ways it can be improved.
To start with, let's talk about this deck's main commander, Anti-U.
She is a four mana 4/4 with ward blight 2, and whenever one or more minus one counters are put on a creature, you draw a card if you control that creature.
If you don't control it, its controller loses one life.
The first thing I notice about this is a lack of limiting phrases in the text box: no “one or more creatures” and no “once per turn.” What this means is that this has the potential to be a pretty explosive value generator, easily drawing five or more cards per turn with the right setup, present on a four mana 4/4 commander with a protective ability on it , that's pretty good.
The downside here is the specificity.
In total, there are an okay number of cards that put minus one counters on creatures, but it's not a particularly generous pool to work with when you consider that these cards function in a wide variety of different ways.
Some put minus one counters on all creatures, rewarding wide boards with massive card advantage, whereas others gain minus one counters over time, pushing a slower, grindier play style.
Plenty of others are one-time use.
And a lot of cards that use minus one counters are primarily intended to put counters on opposing creatures and are balanced with that in mind.
Do you put these counters on your own creatures instead for a bit of card advantage?
All this to say, Anti-U is a powerful commander within her own synergy sphere, and the challenge in building her is going to be navigating a limited card pool to create a deck that plays to her strengths without ending up too disjointed.

Looking at this deck's cards that place minus one counters, there are nine cards that specifically place minus one counters on your creatures, another nine that place minus one counters on any creature, two that place counters on each opposing creature, and four cards that place counters on all creatures.
This array of different minus one counter cards is accompanied by a number of different payoff cards, which likewise operate in a variety of different ways.
Eight of these trigger when creatures with minus one counters on them die, with most of these providing either card advantage or reanimating the creatures under your control.
Another four cards plus the commander reward the active placement of counters itself.
And the synergies get much more granular from here, including amplifier cards like Evolution Sage, cards that modify the effect of minus one counters like Kolrath Knight, and weird roundabout synergies like Tree of Predition.
Some of the setup and payoff combinations here are quite good, especially the ones involving cards that place minus one counters onto all creatures, and I expect that piecing together one of these zingy pairings is a big way this deck wants to get ahead.
Naturally, this deck has a lot of tools to slow opposing creature-based game plans given its focus on minus one counters, and these creature shrinking options are joined by five cards that deal with artifacts, enchantments, or both.
Rounding out the 99 of this deck are moderate counts of both draw and ramp, much of which involves minus one counters in some way.
Through some powerful synergies, I expect this deck will try to get ahead in explosive fashion, slow opposing game plans with interaction, and then gradually wear down opponents with a mixture of creature attacks and incremental damage.

To start with, what I like about this deck: this strikes me as quite a “Johnny” sort of precon.
Because the deck was drawing from a limited card pool, the minus one counter synergies take a variety of different shapes, and the setups and payoffs within this deck piece together in some really cool and sometimes really powerful ways.
Just thinking about Anti-U, the cards that place minus one counters on all creatures end up being a Shamanic Revelation for you and a Ratchet Charm for your opponents , both effects that can be very impactful depending on the state of the game.
Any proliferate effects can amplify the effect of previous counters, creating further value and damage at a brisk pace.
These plays can also be doubled down on with an additional payoff card like Hapatra or Flourishing Defenses, which can really put you in the driving seat of a game fast.
This deck also has two different cards that reanimate creatures that die with minus one counters on them, both at three mana, and this means that it's possible to perform some powerful creature stealing maneuvers pretty early in the game.
All this to say, this deck can do some powerful things, and the way it operates seems like it would make for an exciting play experience for any players who are especially interested in the way cards synergize.
Just a minute ago, I talked about the two cards that reanimate opposing creatures that die with minus one counters on them, and one of these two is actually the alternate commander for this deck, the Reaper, King No More.
That's another thing I like about this deck: it actually feels like it has an alternate commander.
The power level of the card is nice, basically being a sidegrade of Necroskitter that trades some raw power for a bit more utility, and the deck does have a fair amount of cards that place minus one counters on opposing creatures in it.
So, this deck has a better relationship with its alt commander than most precons do, in the sense that if you really like this card, you can run it as the commander and probably have an okay time with it.
If you were doing that long-term, you'd want to tweak the deck a bit since Anti-U is pretty pivotal to the deck's card economy, but the Reaper is already much closer to feeling good as a commander in this deck than most alternate commanders.
And I'll talk a bit later about some possible ways to adapt this deck to him.

As usual, I play tested this deck 20 times and kept track of how the first five turns went in an Excel doc.
Overall, it felt decent.
There weren't many games where the deck was really popping off super early like I had when I was testing the World Shaper precon last year, but most games the deck was doing some decent stuff and setting up for some cool plays later in the game.
One neat thing is how varied the deck felt.
There are so many different ways the various synergy elements can be pieced together, whether it be making a value engine, making a removal engine, having a single explosive turn, putting together a wide board, and so on.
The commander also really helps with making the deck feel good for two reasons.
For one, she offers an easy default minus one counter payoff, reducing the strain on the deck to find other payoffs.
Secondly, the fact that she's a powerful draw engine allows somebody piloting the deck to see more of it, which is super useful for a deck whose cards are highly varied in how they work and what they accomplish.
As a final note about what I like here, the manabase is fine enough for what this deck is doing.
Upgrade it if you like, but I'll be leaving it alone in my tweaks.

Getting into what I dislike about playing this deck, the big thing is “dead cards.” I had several play tests where I kept accumulating cards in hand that were entirely useless in my current game state.
A lot of these cards are just a bit more specific in their play pattern or in the way they synergize with other cards, being a little niche or hard to fully utilize with current tools.
There is one frequently dead card that we should get out of the way first, though: Liliana Death Wielder is an intro deck planeswalker from Amonkhet and it is truly god awful.
It'd be barely playable at four mana, and in reality it's seven mana because it's an intro deck planeswalker.
I guess this was added to the deck to be an educational first cut for new players, à la Temple of the False God, but I don't really like that an iconic planeswalker like Liliana is reduced to serving that role here.
Anyway, that's our first cut, and it should be a cut basically regardless of what you want to do with this deck.

Another thing I dislike about this deck's current form is its creature count.
This feels like a deck that wants to be running 35 to 40 creatures based on the number of cards that care about creatures, but instead it's running 27.
This adds to the awkwardness when the deck keeps drawing into enchantments and sorceries and struggles to get much use out of something like Soul Snuffers or Grave Venerations that really want more creatures floating around in the ecosystem.
So, these are the main things I want to be focused on in my upgrade: reducing dead draws and upping the creature count.

Before I get into my other nine cuts though, I really want to talk about alternative build paths because that's another reason I really like this precon as a product.
There are a lot of little elements that could easily spark some inspiration and be expanded outward.
A few proliferate cards help the deck amplify its minus one counters, and one way to modify this deck could be to lean harder into that mechanic and add other cards that can utilize it, such as Astral Chronicopia or Twitching Doll.
There may not be a massive pool of minus one counter cards in the game, but there sure are a lot of other counter cards that can utilize some of the same payoffs and support.
Another synergy area this deck gives a taste of is graveyard synergies.
There are several cards that use graveyards as well as Archfiend that cares about discarding.
These aren't very well supported now, but you could introduce some more looting effects into the deck to help with these, and this extra filtering would also likely help the deck in general in pursuit of assembling engines.
Finally, you could also adapt the deck to work better with the Reaper in the command zone.
There are several great cards that put minus one counters on opposing creatures that you could add if you don't mind paying a bit, such as Persistent Constrictor and Spitting Dilophosaurus, and these paired with a bit more draw would likely make for a very different but still functional play style.
This would also likely work well paired with a more graveyard heavy or proliferate heavy approach as well; you can do a bit of mixing and matching among these.

For my upgrade, I'm choosing to go for a more streamlined approach that eliminates some potential dead weight and shores up some weak spots while increasing the creature count and improving tools for incremental minus one counters.
Let's start with cuts.
Archfiend of Ifnir is getting cut because this deck has five other cards to discard and three of those are cycling lands.
This was one of my first observations after plugging this deck into Archidekt.
I saw an Archfiend of Ifnir, I dropped “discard” into the search box, and boom, that's an easy cut unless you're feeling highly motivated to get more self-discard into this bad boy.
I'm also cutting Puka Covenant and Persist due to this deck's lack of graveyard enabling.
The former requires your creatures dying and stuff in your graveyard to be gotten back, which is too niche a set of requirements for the current form of this deck; Persist will be useful a bit more often, but its ceiling is also much lower, so it doesn't excite me either.
I am keeping the rest of the graveyard synergies around, though, as they have a lot more utility than these two.

Speaking of persist, Puppeteer Clique , this card looks like it synergizes with this deck, but in practice you'll probably be struggling not to turn off its keyword more often than you'll be enjoying that extra Anti-U trigger.
I'm also cutting Grim Poet.
This one is a bit painful as it's a funky card with some neat possibilities here, but seven is such a large amount of mana to pay for something with no guarantee of it doing much.
From here, the final four cuts are non-creature filler, which will be getting replaced with creatures and other options better suited to this deck.
Harmonize and Hoarders' Greed are getting cut for alternate draw, Commander's Sphere for an alternate mana rock, and Cathartic Reunion for a better removal spell.
I will say the fact that I'm spending four of my ten swaps targeting perfectly passable filler speaks well to this deck's card quality; there's just not many truly objectionable cards here.

Now for the additions.
I'm starting here with four low-cost creatures with blight abilities from the Lurein Eclipsed main set: Donhand Dissident, Gristle Glutton, Scuzzback Scoundrel, and Shadow Urchin.
Adding these lowers our curve, ups our creature count, makes it easier to trigger the commander on demand, and as an added bonus, three of these four have fun alliterative names.
You could also add the haste one if you wanted to, but I don't see this deck wanting haste on a single creature all that often.
As replacement creature-based draw, I'm adding Generous Patron, which can potentially net quite a solid amount of cards.
To replace the mana rock and the creature removal we cut, I'm adding Staff of Completion and Grim Affliction, both of which can also proliferate.
From here, I'm also a bit concerned about this deck.

I have been doing reviews of my supporters' decks for almost two years now, and over that time, I've noticed some patterns, some common stumbling blocks that a lot of players tend to hit.
This isn't just the new players, either; I'm sampling here from players who watch my videos and like them enough to give me money about it, and that's to say nothing of the deck building mistakes I occasionally catch myself making and need to correct.
Having just finished up a deck review, which you can check out on my second channel if you'd like, I did the sort of normal thing you might expect of me.
I went back through every single deck I've ever reviewed, looked at what feedback I gave, and tallied up the number of each general family of critique I gave.
We cover the most common deck building mistakes I see and a brief discussion of how to avoid each of them.

If you like we so far, you should smash that like button, eviscerate that subscribe button, and obliterate your current state of not giving me a few dollars by signing up for my Patreon or a YouTube membership.
I made a supporter-only companion piece to this that covers some deck building mistakes I've made this year, and a preview for that will be at the end.
With that said, let's get to number three.

In my last video, I discussed some patterns I’d noticed during my time reviewing decks, and I gave five common deck building mistakes that I’ve seen people make.
However, that video only covered some of my observations; the other thing I calculated was how often I suggested adding more of different types of cards to a deck.
After interaction, the second most common element was a tie between lands and ramp.
To be honest, this surprised me a little, particularly the ramp part.
Adding ramp feels like a somewhat dated suggestion, a tip offered to newer players in 2018 for how to keep up with the competition in the hottest new format on the block.
In 2025, card draw and synergy feel like bigger focal points for EDH critique and where players should be focusing, with a trendy hot take these days being that people run too much ramp, that the focus on ramp of the past decade has gone too far in some cases.
Undoubtedly there is probably some truth to that.
Ramp has become an accepted part of basically every deck, and adding ramp without thinking about why you’re adding it is both a commonplace action and a recipe for decks that aren’t as lean and powerful as they could be.
Yet, there have been nine decks that I’ve seen that I thought needed more ramp, as opposed to only six that needed more draw.
So, here, I want to get to the bottom of that discrepancy and hopefully build a framework that can help you tell if your deck is in need of ramp or in need of something that’s not ramp.
The first point that needs to be made is that ramp spells don’t fulfill one single task; rather, they perform two separate functions: “curving out” and increasing total mana quantity.

So, these are the reasons why you might want to play a lot of ramp in your deck, and I do think it is helpful to start by laying them out like this.
However, this still leaves a couple other questions on the table.
For one, how much ramp should a deck be running, assuming it wants it in the first place?

One of the most controversial and often maligned mechanics anywhere in the Commander format is eminence.
Eminence is a keyword officially on five legendary creatures and unofficially on a sixth, and its effect is simple: it lets one line of text on a commander also work while the card is in the command zone.
So Sedara Jabari of Zafir’s first line of text allows you to loot, to draw and discard, whenever you attack with one or more knights, and this happens regardless of whether he himself is on the battlefield or in the command zone.
Then he has another line of text that only applies while he’s on the field and plays off the eminence line, reanimating a night creature whenever he deals combat damage to an opponent.
This is how all six of the eminence creatures work: there will be the eminence ability that helps the deck a bit earlier in the game, and then the commander will be a sort of follow-up to that once played, amplifying the advantage gained by the eminence ability.
If you’re somebody who’s totally new to the keyword, this could seem like a pretty reasonable sort of ability structure, a relatively unobjectionable way for a commander to be designed.
And here, I’m going to argue just that.
Mostly, eminence is a largely fine keyword that I would like to see again in some form, and its bad reputation is primarily due to some questionable design decisions on Wizards of the Coast’s part when they designed some of the original Eminence cards.

There are a lot of places I could start my daring defense, but I’m going to start with two interesting things that happened this year.
In May, Attra Prader’s voice lost her position as the most popular commander.
Then last month, she lost her position as the second most popular commander as well.
What replaced her was the dragon and Edgar Marov, both commanders with the keyword eminence.
If you’re unfamiliar with these, you’re probably asking, “What could these commanders do to make them this popular?” And let’s start there.
Edgar Marov’s eminence ability reads, “Whenever you cast another vampire spell, create a 1/1 black vampire creature token.” More mid-powered Edgar decks will typically run a wide range of different mana values and enjoy the extra vampire every turn or two.
Whereas higher-powered Edgar decks will blast the table with an endless wave of low-cost vampires to take advantage of the complete lack of any restriction on Eddie’s eminence ability, as well as the plentiful gooffs Mardu vampires has access to.
Edgar the playable creature is a six-mana 4/4 with first strike and haste that gives all your vampires a +1/+1 counter when he attacks.
Not a bad effect, but certainly not something most Edgar players will be rushing to spend six mana to get.

What about the dragon, the current most popular commander?
His eminence ability simply reads, “Your other dragon spells cost one less to cast.” Unlike Edgar Marov, the dragon’s creature form is quite good if you have the mana for it.
With him being a nine-mana 10/10 flyer with the ability, whenever one or more dragons you control attack, draw that many cards, then you may put a permanent card from your hand onto the battlefield.
This collective package doesn’t require much explanation.
The eminence ability is a powerful mana discount for dragons, and the field ability is a powerful value engine with dragons, collectively producing the two primordial resources for generically playing the game as a dragon deck.

So, these are our two most popular commanders at present day.
They’re also controversial and disliked by a lot of players, particularly Edgar Marov.
I am among those players, and I don’t think either of these cards should have been printed in the form they were.
However, the reasons why these cards are seen as problematic by me and some other players are complicated and have layers to them.
The simplest answer is because they’re powerful, and I actually would consider this a major feature in what makes these cards problematic.
However, power alone doesn’t make a commander an issue.
Cece Weatherlight Captain is one of the most powerful commanders in the game, but I don’t think most people would consider her any sort of problem.
She operates in a unique way and within a niche that has other good options for players who want a different play style, and her CEDH variants don’t tend to bleed play patterns into casual in the same way some other commanders do.
So, what makes these weaker commanders more of an issue by comparison?
One of these is simple.
Being associated with an iconic creature type imbues them with a natural casual commander aura.
A tutor engine like sis obviously feels weird at a table of precons, but that big old dragon deck might pass the “vibe check” just fine.
This is the classic feature of a “pub stomper” commander: not strictly being powerful, but being out of place, easily wriggling its way into games it might not really belong in.

Another power-associated issue I’d identify with these is something I alluded to when I was talking about Cece earlier.
These two crowd other commanders out of lanes.
Dragons and vampires are two of the most iconic Magic the Gathering creature types and they’re naturally going to be popular choices for players new to the commander format.
The issue then is that both of these commanders ended up being by far the strongest option for their creature type, and that fact then pushed any new dragon or vampire player looking for a shortcut to a strong deck to get there by paying a lot of money for the singular strongest commander.
Edgar Marov spent four years over the $50 mark and the dragon spent two years at a similar price, with both of their peak periods corresponding with the surge in the popularity of the commander format that started in late 2020.

Initially the connection with eminence might seem pretty surface level.
A powerful eminence card takes over a creature type and a weaker eminence card might not do this.
But this misses a key feature, which is how eminence interacts with colors.
See, the dragon’s color identity is part of its issue.
If dragon had the same eminence text but was mono red or even red blue, suddenly that’s an actual niche.
Bladewing could have stayed the black red choice.
Atark could have stayed the red green choice.
And the ever funky scion of the dragon could have stayed the choice for players who wanted all five colors.
But if you instead make a five-color option that’s dramatically better than the others, and if that power doesn’t even require casting the card, you destroy a lot of the reason to consider other options.
Even if you don’t want to play with a five-color mana base, the discount alone makes dragon already better than most of the other options, even if it’s never cast.
The same goes for Edgar.
Vampires are traditionally mono black, followed by black red, followed by black white.
If Edgar had been put into the relatively unexplored in 2017 color identity of black white, suddenly vampire players would have a choice between the more established vampire identity of black red and the newer Ixelon centered identity of black white with this spicy new commander.
Instead, both of these are slurped up by Edgar.
And the fact that most of his power is in his eminence ability means that players don’t even need to try to be in three colors.
Just stick him at the head of your black red vampire deck and cast him when you draw your command tower and bing bang boom, your deck just received a strict upgrade.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s wrong for Wizards of the Coast to have wanted big powerful uniting options with lots of colors to hand out to some iconic creature types.
However, Eminence has some unique problems in fitting this role.
And for this reason, I would lean toward two colors or less on Eminence commanders as a rule, especially if they’re in a niche where they risk overshadowing other options.
I might have even done this with the more recently printed Sedar Jabari of Zafir, which works with knights, though at least that one has a better balance between the power of the eminence ability and the power of the castable creature.

Now, it might sound like this niche element being tied to iconic creature types is a big part of my problem with Edgar and the air dragon.
And in a sense, it is, but tying Eminence to cards with a creature type actually accomplishes an important goal: increasing the specificity of Eminence abilities.
See, having an effect baked into your gameplay for free is pretty potent.
Some players might find it inherently problematic, and my personal opinion is that those players are underestimating the sheer power that a traditional command zone can offer a deck.
But still, getting an effect without paying for it is certainly notable, and it’s important that this effect is specific so as to contain how out of hand it can get.
This is true for both the trigger of the eminence ability and for the payoff of it.
Ideally, it should be a specific trigger that provides a specific output.
But if you’re going to make one a bit more general, you really need to crank up the specificity of the other.

Let’s take the example of an eminence ability that gets this right in my book, that of Arabo, Roar of the World.
On paper, this ability is by no means weak.
Giving +3/+3 to a creature every combat step from the very first turn of the game is quite powerful, allowing for some hefty beatdown early and amplifying later damage done with various effects that play off of damage dealt.
However, this effect, in addition to typically falling under the generally less problematic aggro archetype, is specific.
It’s an effect that makes a cat more powerful at attacking.
There’s a couple double strike cats and a singular infect cat that will offer the occasional early kill on a blockerless opponent, but with the cat limitation, you don’t have access to a whole lot of cards that would be powerful if they were a lot bigger on an early turn.
This specificity counterintuitively has a diversifying effect on the play patterns of Arabo decks.
Rather than being all-in on taking advantage of the +3/+3 buff on turns two to four when it’s the most powerful, Arabo players need to devise ways to make use of the effect more holistically throughout the game, and this can take a variety of different forms.
Arabo’s eminence is also uniquely interactable among eminence commanders.
A sorcery speed +3/+3 pump doesn’t typically do anything until creatures are making contact during combat, which leaves ample opportunity to interact with it.

I like this design for Arabo, but you may have noticed that I did say uniquely interactable.
All other Eminence abilities are easier to get value with, with Sedar Jabari only requiring attacking with knights, Inala only requiring wizards to enter, and the other three being almost entirely impossible to stop the effects of.
This uninteractability is another point of critique that you’ll most commonly find from the removal lovers of the world.
These commanders all have effects that can’t even be gotten rid of by dusting them with a sword supply shares.
Now, I’ll lay my cards on the table here and say that in principle, this feature of Eminence doesn’t strictly bother me.
There are lots of things that can’t be interacted with.
Barring hard stacks pieces, drawing a card at start of turn, playing lands, untapping permanence, and so forth.
This game is also full of hexroof creatures, uncounterable spells, and abilities that can’t even be responded to.
Setting aside these more specific examples, it’s also important to remember that deleting opposing stuff doesn’t need to be the end-all be-all of EDH.
And I find that this intense focus on spot removal tends to indicate a lack of creativity from players.
A couple months ago, I discussed on a second channel video that I actually enjoy not having many tools to deal with very large creatures in one of my decks, as it forces me to think harder with my attacks and utilize the deck’s more aggressive tools in some situations.
This is a game with many axes on which to attack opposing resources, whether that be board, hand, library, life total, or the stack, and it’s good to be willing to move outside your comfort zone sometimes among those different options.

Now, does all of this mean the uninteractability of eminence creatures is never a problem?
No. And in practice, this feature of eminence can be a real pain point for players, with Edgar Marov being one of the more egregious examples of an eminence ability feeling bad due to its uninteractability.
His Eminence ability triggers on cast for a card type with lots of great low-cost options any number of times per turn.
If I’m at a low life total and I counter two vampire spells that the Edgar player plays, they still get the two tokens.
If they have a source of haste, Edgar’s in red, remember these vampires can attack immediately.
And these easy-to-obtain and hard-to-prevent 1/1s aren’t just creatures to attack and block with.
Vampires as a type have a bunch of really powerful cards that take advantage of the raw number of vampires in play, most of which can only be prevented with a counterspell.
And that’s to say nothing of the blood artists and other aristocrats tools that powerful Eddie decks tend to be crammed with.
An eminence ability that grants creature tokens for casting spells was always going to be a little tricky to pull off regardless of creature type, and that ability being for vampires in a deck with black puts it fully over the line into dangerous territory.
The tokens are too easy to get and there’s too many things that can be done with them.

In this extended discussion of how Edgar plays, the point I’m trying to make is that the frustrating play patterns of him and some other eminence commanders are the result of specific design choices, not a problem with the eminence mechanic as a whole.
Gavin Verh who worked on the desig.

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Take Kaalia.
She's a four-mana 2/2 flyer in Mardu colors who lets her controller put into play an Angel, Demon, or Dragon tapped and attacking whenever she attacks.
The merging of these three big flying creature types associated with three different colors is quite iconic and specific to Kaalia, and though her creature-cheating functionality shares some similarities with more recent designs like Akroma, the Unrepentant and Mister Foxglove, no other card accomplishes this cheating quite the way Kaalia does.
The same goes for Animar.
Though there are other cards that can provide deep discounts for creature spells, such as Rakdos and Hamza, these generally require a bit more specificity in their play patterns to pay off big.
Animar, on the other hand, is a fully preassembled creature storm engine.
The only step to making creatures cheaper is casting creatures, and it's not hard to see how this could lead to some dramatic turns without much setup required.
In short, both of these Commanders have a specific and iconic niche that they embody well.

This is one part of their popularity, and the other is simply that they're efficient at their role.
Each of these cards has a high ceiling, and achieving a powerful game state doesn't require as many steps as a lot of other Commanders, simply requiring having cards in hand ready to deploy and avoiding opposing removal.
But what about the floor?
The biggest weakness of these two Commanders is that their game plans are a bit brittle and not particularly hard to set back to basically square one.
To fully get into why I'd apply a label like "glass cannon" to these, we should really discuss the nature of what Commanders provide for various decks.

Fundamentally, all Commanders will be an "enabler," a "payoff," or something in between.
Payoffs are the most common.
Ishin doubles on attack triggers, amplifying the volume of gameplay produced with these, and Atraxa gives proliferates, which amplify the power of cards that use counters.
These feel nice to play because the play pattern is simple and effective: you start putting together a game plan with cards the Commander synergizes with, and then you drop the Commander after a bit to turbocharge that game plan.
Enabler Commanders are less common.
Zur the Enchanter is the only card in the top 100 Commanders I'd call a pure enabler, as he isn't really a payoff for anything at all aside from maybe having a pair of lightning greaves and some cool enchantments to grab in the library.
You play him so you can start tutoring out enchantments, and then your game plan gets built up from there.
This end of things is closer to where Animar and Kaalia live, with Animar being a slight enabler and Kaalia being a moderate enabler.
On a basic level, being an enabler isn't a bad thing.
My favorite decks feature Commanders that fall closer to the enabling end of the spectrum.
However, enabler Commanders are inherently trickier to make play well because of the nature of the enabler-payoff relationship.
Whereas a payoff Commander is the amplifying adornment atop a solid 99, an enabler Commander will a lot of times be step one to doing anything in the game, with the rest of the deck living atop it.
To be clear, this isn't always a problem.
If there are other ways to get the enabling component, it can be fine.
If the enabling component is hard to prevent or set back, it can be fine.
And if the enabling component isn't essential to the deck's functionality, it can be fine.
The issue should hopefully be becoming clearer.
These caveats go frequently unfulfilled with each of these Commanders.

Kaalia of the Vast's role is to cheat permanents into play, and she's generally an important enabler for the big flying creatures game plans she's played with.
Can the deck do its game plan without her?
Not really.
The average Kaalia deck has 36 lands and 11 pieces of ramp in it, numbers far too small for a deck with an average mana value over four.
Next you might ask, can it at least protect her?
And the answer is kind of.
Hasty boots are golden here, and you can certainly add other cards that can protect Kaalia early, such as Mother of Runes or Deflecting Swat.
However, this is complicated by the fact that the deck is also vulnerable to board wipes, since it's a low-velocity big creature midrange deck.
So ideally your protection suite can help that out as well.
This might allude to the fundamental challenge with building Kaalia: deck space.
Ideally the deck will want some single-target protection to deal with early pinpoint removal, as well as some board protection and a healthy draw suite to let it manage wipes, plus a healthy count of lands and ramp to help the deck bounce back from all challenges.
Going higher on the counts of all of these things could let the deck feel more flexible and resilient, but also risks removing some of the bite of the deck.
As the count of Angels, Demons, and Dragons dips lower to offer other things to the deck, the aggressive options to choose from for Kaalia triggers will also typically dip, and you'll run out of creatures to cheat out earlier and more often.
It's no surprise then that a lot of Kaalia players take the opposite approach: lower land counts, lower protection counts, focusing on powerful beaters rather than card draw, even including amplifier permanents like Ishin and Windcrag Siege that can further pump up the explosiveness of the deck.
Why play some neutered halfway consistent Kaalia deck when you can live out your most daring Mardu fantasies, to stray ever closer to the sun with your cool flyers?

On the surface, Animar might seem quite a bit different from this.
It's typically more reliant on early draws to start presenting a threat at the table, but its relationship with opposing interaction is arguably less problematic.
At worst you'll empty your hand into a board wipe and lose a bunch of resources, but unlike with Kaalia, the 99 typically features a decent amount of draw and ramp, allowing for smoother recoveries.
At best, Animar can turn a deck into a high-velocity machine.
Even without an Ancestral Statue infinite combo, with the right draw engines, ramp engines, and maybe a haste enabler, you can empty a hefty portion of your hand onto the board in a single turn, possibly deleting an opponent in the process if you can swing or get some Terror of the Peaks triggers.
The Commander also has a bit of built-in protection as well, unlike Kaalia, dodging about half of all popular pinpoint removal.
So there certainly are differences between these.
Where these Commanders are similar, though, is in their power profile and in the difference between the floor and the ceiling of their game plan.
Due to the fact that both of these Commanders are enablers that discount large amounts of mana on creatures, in the most ideal games with the best draws and the least opposing interaction, they're exploding out of control.
Meanwhile, if draws are worse, particularly for Animar, or if there's more interaction, particularly for Kaalia, the function of discounting creature spells isn't as helpful.

Quite a lot of Commanders feature the phrase "draw a card" or some equivalent in their text box.
And while you could argue that generic value is a little overplayed as a payoff for a Commander to grant, this design choice has had the undeniable boon of improving the resilience of a lot of play styles.
The Commander of a deck is a card that's available at all times, and assuming the draw condition isn't too hard, having that permanent eighth card in hand be a draw spell reduces the risk of stall-outs and improves recovery.
If you need to hit land drops, drawing cards can find you lands.
If you're looking for specific synergy pieces, drawing cards can get you closer to those as well.
If you just got board wiped, as long as you drew some cards before that happened, you'll hopefully have some options for rebuilding.
A value engine commander typically won't be the most threatening or aggressive choice, but it will usually be a safer and more consistent one, all things equal.
Your command zone secures you exactly one element of your deck, and though you can try to sculpt your 99 to lead to a well-balanced experience, there will still only be one card in your deck that you're absolutely guaranteed to see.

First thoughts: this is fine.
A very normal opinion to have and a reasonable suggestion.
I already do some version of this, as do most people I play with in public.
At least half the time when I’m reading the commander of a stranger I’m playing against or when I make a comment about it, they’ll drop me a basic pitch for how they’re using the commander or what their deck is doing.
The only critique I might have of this idea is that it’s maybe a little odd to have a pitch like this rehearsed word for word and delivered like some sort of theatrical monologue, but the broader point about communication is good.
Or so I thought.

In the broader scheme of things, this doesn’t matter.
A modestly visible Reddit post attracted some people with opinions I disagree with, who then got a handful of upvotes; big whoop.
However, I can’t get this line of thinking out of my brain, and these opinions are similar to comments I’ve received on my channel in the past.
There seems to be a large online faction of Commander players who think this way, who treat Commander as some sort of detective game where a large part of the gameplay is figuring out what’s going on in opposing decks, or alternatively as some sort of show that you wouldn’t want to spoil the ending of.
So, I’m going to take this Reddit post and its comments as a jumping-off point to talk about that broad faction, this group of players that I find fascinating, and I’m going to see if I can figure out what motivates their thinking, why they’re like this, and if there’s anything to the vision of Commander they strive after.

As a disclaimer, we i more conceptual and social-theory-oriented than most of what I make, so I’d recommend treating it as some fun ideas to chew on rather than cold hard facts to destroy the libs with or whatever.
Though this is sort of a soft response to the Trinket Mages video about me in April, so I guess this can be cold hard facts to destroy him with.

The same goes for EDH.
People will create goals in the deck building process, and one of those goals will frequently be making a deck that is good under some set of criteria, at least if you’re not one of the mythical bracket one gamers.
So that will be a part of deck building.
But what about in games?
There are all sorts of skills tested in a competitive 1v1 Magic environment: turn sequencing, mastery of a given deck list, assessment of opposing threats, probabilistic thinking, playing to outs, and so on.
A 1v1 Magic tournament will stress test a player’s skills in all of these things to the limit, and in many cases, gains will be won and lost by the collective weight of a lot of tiny decisions.
As in deck building, EDH’s more casual nature makes things trickier in the sense that winning isn’t as dominant a goal, and plays that are sub-optimal in the strict sense might not necessarily be considered misplays in the same way they are in 60-card formats.

As a result of this, a lot of EDH players subconsciously go looking for something to replace some of these competitive skills, and in a format as diverse as EDH, a very common substitute is knowledge.
A certain and fairly large subset of EDH players seem almost obsessed with knowing as many possible plays their opponents can do as possible.
This is especially true for players playing at a level with sudden ways to win, where not being able to recognize a combo piece or a central enabler for an opponent’s deck can rapidly lead to a game loss.
Whether it’s as an outlet for an underutilized competitive instinct or as a trauma response to getting OTK’d one too many times, being able to shrewdly navigate the ins and outs of opposing plays and figure out how threatening a particular card is within the entire landscape of the EDH format is a skill that a lot of players have built up.

This is especially true for commanders.
A lot of commanders have a handful of cards they pair pretty powerfully with, and having it locked away in your dome what those cards might be for a given commander can give you a leg up in determining the possibilities for what an opponent might be doing.
And if we assume that most decks within a given commander will be somewhat similar, having an encyclopedic knowledge of commanders and what their typical decks look like can actually serve as somewhat of a replacement for “rule zero.” I don’t even need to have a conversation with my opponent; all I need to do is see that TASA pull up and I’m already squaring up for some Ashnod’s Altar BS.
So, this is a skill that a lot of players have put effort into honing, whether consciously or unconsciously, and it shouldn’t be surprising that a lot of them want to use this skill.

For a player who has spent a lot of time around various Magic cards and is fully engaged in a game, it’s not hard to imagine this being a lot of fun.
I see my opponent play a Blood Artist effect and I start looking for possible loops, think about what sac outlets and supporting pieces are in color for my opponent.
I see a Karn’s Bastion hit the board and start trying to deduce what counters are soon to pop into existence.
I see an opponent with two lands untapped on my turn and I try to figure out what sorts of disruption they might be able to put together with red, blue, and white mana.
I would be lying if I claimed that the description of the Commander format I just laid out doesn’t sound like fun; it’s appealing to play a game like that.
So, what’s the problem?
Surely there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying the format this way.

This is an undoubtedly nice feature, but on the flip side, this lack of a metagame ironically poses an entirely different set of challenges onto players that aren’t found in a competitive 1v1 format.
You can’t learn the four most common decks you’ll be playing because there are thousands of possible decks you might find yourself facing.
This might be manageable in a play group with unchanging decks, but playing out in the wild with strangers is a whole different story.
Any set of four EDH decks will likely have more than 200 unique non-land cards, which is a fair amount to learn if the decks are unchanging and an ongoing gauntlet; for newer players in a public setting where each game might present dozens of new cards, it’s even tougher.
I think most of us have been in a game among strangers where it becomes clear that one or more players are checked out from what opponents are doing, fatigued by the process of keeping up with all the new cardboard that’s hitting the table.

So, that’s the case I’m trying to present here.
EDH has three times the opponents and often around ten times the number of unique cards in opposing decks as compared to 1v1 formats.
There are 30,000 cards legal in the format now and thousands of brand new cards entering the format every year.
Each deck tends to play far more permanents than are seen in 1v1 formats due to the high life totals and the multiplayer aspect, and the result is that boards rapidly clog up with assorted permanents for players to keep track of.
The information density of EDH is untouched by any other widely played format, and that is a feature about it that we need to keep in mind when we’re playing it.

All of this is why I find the knowledge competition version of casual EDH a little frustrating and seek to reduce it as much as possible.
And that’s as somebody who is probably better equipped to threat-analyze than at least 80% of EDH players.
It’s not that I can’t figure out how potentially game-ending a sequencing of opposing plays is on the fly; it’s that I don’t think that should necessarily be a constant task expected of all EDH players.
The game of figuring out what my opponent’s deck does is just not one I think is beneficial to have at the heart of the EDH format.
There are even plenty of days that I personally wish to avoid this part of the format, to kick my feet back and focus on resolving my cascade triggers instead of Sherlock Holmesing my way to what the white-knuckled power gamer across the table is packing.
But still, with all that said, I could still see somebody thinking that I’m throwing out the baby with the bathwater here.
Sure, knowing a rough outline of what opposing decks are doing might reduce the mental load of the format and make it more approachable for all people, but what about the theatricality of it?
What about surprises and zany moments and unexpected twists?

At this point, you’re probably asking, “What does this have to do with EDH, Alex?” Well, a very similar dynamic takes place there.
I dedicated a whole video to this topic about a year ago, but the basic idea there was that there are some inherent and unavoidable problems with decks that like to win in some grandiose way.
I have a deck that wins by getting three Fiend Hunters into play at the same time to Fiend Hunter each other indefinitely and cobble together an ETB-based win from there.
I also brewed a list with the goal of casting Rogu Rock an arbitrarily large number of times before Jessaing all three

Early in the process of deck building, I just want to get a lay of the land.
EDHREC is useful as a shortcut for seeing the most popular and often the most powerful stuff you can do with a commander.
In some cases, these will be the flashiest plays you can do with a given commander; we can see Fists of Flame at the top of the Zada page, Curiosity at the top of the Niv-Mizzet, Parun page, and Parhelion II at the top of the Greasefang page.
Even if you don’t intend to use the stuff at the top of an EDHREC page, it’s good to know what’s there.
If you’re looking to build a deck around Animar, a popular commander, it’s good to know that more than half of Animar players are playing him as some form of combo deck, because that will impact how your deck is perceived and what other players will be on the lookout for.
In other cases, the top of an EDHREC page might be more like the points of agreement between different builds of a commander.
For something like Atraxa, Grand Unifier, we see some popular removal spells and some flicker cards to repeat the commander’s powerful ETB, but after that, the play rates of different cards fall off pretty fast with players choosing a variety of different approaches for the specifics of their deck.
In this case, I could go, “Okay, I guess I’ll start with flicker and then decide the specifics of how I want to do that.” And if I want to be among the roughly 25% of cEDH players playing Atraxa, judging by this page, I’ll typically look at an EDHREC page at first to see any super obvious build paths that other people have been doing, but then once I’ve decided to build a particular commander, I’ll click away for a while.
It’s useful to know the basics of what other people are doing, but the longer you spend on this unaltered EDHREC page without looking elsewhere, the more you’ll get sucked into the stuff on this page and subconsciously let it decide what your deck wants to be for you.
In cases when I’m using a top-down approach to build a deck, basically finding a commander I like with a card or two in mind, I like to get away from EDHREC pretty early so that the foundations of the deck aren’t too influenced by what’s popular.
In the early stages of building a deck, I don’t really want to know that 47% of other players are using Deadly Dispute because that colors my opinion of the card at a stage in deck building when I want to be exploring possibilities and keeping an open mind to different options with the commander.
Other players might be different, but I find that the progression of gradually building up in cards and plugging in different Scryfall searches as I figure out different ways the deck could play is really valuable as a creative step; it’s a stage in deck building that I want to preserve as much as possible.
Regardless of your exact preferences, if you’re starting your deck building journey on EDHREC, I strongly recommend you click away to fuss around with your own thing for a while at some point.

For me, EDHREC comes back into the picture a bit later, once I’ve discovered a fair number of cards and have a decently strong concept of my deck but haven’t fully ironed out an initial draft yet.
Whereas the initial usage of EDHREC was to get a lay of the land and see a handful of basic build paths, in this later stage of EDHREC usage, I am looking for specific cards.
Scryfall is a lovely tool, but there are some things that it just won’t hit in any reasonable number of searches.
Dour Port-Mage won’t show up in any common searches you might make for a flicker deck, and if you’re building a Karametra deck, self-bouncers like Whitemane Lion might not even enter your radar if you’re not already in the know.
This is where EDHREC is helpful; it can help you fill in the gaps with popular cards that Scryfall searches might have missed.
Even if a particular card isn’t showing up on the EDHREC page due to not being popular enough, looking at EDHREC can still help you find that card.
If you’re building a cast-from-exile deck, you’ll probably find a bunch of payoffs for casting things from exile from Scryfall searches on your own, but a brief trip to the Prosper EDHREC page might clue you in on the words “from anywhere other than your hand.” Suddenly, that’s a whole new avenue to take a stroll down, and you might find yourself a lovely Memory Worm.
Get in here, you funky little guy.

So, what’s the solution?
The answer is filters, which I make very heavy use of once I’m further along and in that card-gleaning stage of EDHREC usage.
By default, the website will draw data from all decks in its database for a given commander, but the filters option allows you to filter out decks that do or don’t include a given card.
Now, you could put all sorts of stuff in this, but the most useful type of card will be what I like to call “indicator cards,” which are basically just cards that fit very cleanly in or out of a given archetype.
For example, if we go to the page of Kellan, Inquisitive Prodigy, we see a mélange of different elements, but the most prominent ones are things involving clues, which kind of makes sense given that blue-green clues is an established Innistrad archetype.
This is going to be helpful to some people, but what if I’m looking for a higher-curved deck, maybe even considering the inclusion of Keruga as a companion?
In that case, this page won’t do much for me before a bit of filtering.
The one card near the top of the page that really stands out as a big mana option is Map the Frontier, a four-mana sorcery that searches up two basic lands and/or deserts to the field.
Actually, this works great as an indicator card because it’s not the sort of card that most decks will want; mana ramp past two, maybe three mana stuff will typically only be included in a deck if it fits with the deck’s synergies.
So, the presence of more expensive ramp will generally be a good sign that a deck has a big mana game plan.
Sure enough, that’s reflected after filtering: we see lots of higher-cost cards that would require mana investment to succeed, as well as lots of great tools for a Keruga deck.

So, that’s one example, but what about an example of an anti-indicator card?
A while back, I was brewing a Kardur control deck, sort of like a red flicker deck.
A major goal of the deck is to have a basically unlimited supply of Disrupt Decorum available since Kardur has that effect on ETB, and ETBs can be repeated with a card like Jaxis that can produce a token copy of a creature each turn.
I thought this was a sensible enough plan for the commander, but when I went to the EDHREC page, a number of the more commonly played cards themselves did goad-related things.
Initially, I was pretty shocked that around half of all Kardur players felt the need to run cards that do the same thing as their commander, but that’s their business, not mine.
The important thing is what happened next: I filtered the results.
One option could be to filter by cards I know I want in the deck, such as a couple red flicker staples like Jaxis and Conjurer’s Closet.
However, the result is pretty muddy, with Disrupt Decorum now showing up in an even greater proportion of decks.
The issue is that these red flicker cards don’t do anything to indicate a player who is averse to redundancy as I am to some extent; there are plenty of Kardur maxers out there who will take the flicker stuff and the additional copies of goad cards because they just like Disrupt Decorum that much.
No, the way to start sculpting a helpful EDHREC page in this case is to exclude the cards that do the same thing as the commander, such as Disrupt Decorum and Geode Rager.
After that, the page starts looking a lot more helpful.
There’s still some of this that’s probably outside what my deck would want to do, but at least the good stuff is mostly out of the way.
Vengeful Ancestor is only in 12% of the remaining decks after this filtering, down from 43% on the base page.

As a final example of filtering, let’s talk about how to combine includes and excludes.
Back when I had a Liesa hate bears deck, I’d periodically check EDHREC to see if anything was catching my eye, but for this to work, I needed to filter the page first.
The most popular build of Liesa is life gain, and though I don’t mind a little life gain to offset Liesa’s drain, it’s definitely not what the deck is built around.
A first step could be excluding some core life gain cards such as Soul Warden, but this isn’t all that effective because life gain is just such a dominant archetype and there are plenty of life gain decks not including a certain life gain card for one reason or another.
A different approach is to filter for inclusion of Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, which is basically the first card I’d add to any hate bears deck.
This is a bit more effective, but life gain cards still start creeping in at around 25% inclusion.
What works best is the combined approach: if I filter for decks that include Thalia and exclude Soul Warden, life gain is basically obliterated from the page, with Well of Lost Dreams and two Sanguine Bond effects being the only life gain payoffs remaining on the page.
This also still leaves a healthy 550 decks since I didn’t need to throw a whole bunch of cards into my filters in order to get the desired results.
You can do something similar with price.
If you’re looking for a budget deck and a base EDHREC page is helpful aside from the cards being too pricey, you could exclude an expensive card and include something cheap like a solid budget land; suddenly, the cards on the page will be much more in your budget.

It becomes more clear just how important filtering is when you think about an EDHREC page as a cross-section of a handful of different overlapping decks.
Some commanders will be pretty straightforward and less diverse.
If we go to the Prosper EDHREC page, there are almost 30 non-land cards that show up in more than 50% of Prosper decks.
Meanwhile, if we look at a similarly popular but more open-ended commander, Alora, Artful Provocateur, that number is less than half of that, and some commanders like Glissa Sunslayer have almost no cards above the 50% played threshold.
For commanders with a singular, more streamlined play path, the base EDHREC page can be moderately helpful; however, for a more diverse commander, the page might be pure soup, an unfiltered mishmash of different archetypes interspersed across the page.
I actually made a video last year about exactly these sorts of commanders, with Archalos, Francisco/Malcolm, and Skeleton Ship as examples.
The EDHREC pages of these commanders are equal parts interesting to dig into and instructive for seeing the limits of an unfiltered EDHREC page.
I’m also very interested in what causes a commander’s EDHREC page to be more diverse or less diverse, so I actually ended up working with my brother to analyze a whole bunch of EDHREC pages, and we made a whole video about it over on my second channel, complete with a tool to analyze your own commanders.
I’ll include a preview of that at the end.
Regardless of what exact commanders you’re using, filters are an important thing to have in your repertoire if you’re using EDHREC.

In my video about my Malagor deck, I introduced the concept of "counterweight commanders"; these are commanders that, rather than directly synergizing with the cards in a deck, instead offset a weakness of the deck.
That concept, as applied to that deck, went roughly as follows.
I knew I wanted a deck that focused on grindy, low-cost creatures and discard spells.
Grindy, low-cost creatures have the downside that they're small and often easy to block, and discard spells have the downside that opponents can choose to play their most valuable creatures as fast as possible to avoid losing them to discard.
By selecting Malagor as the commander, the deck always has access to a tool that it can use to clear out opposing boards, mitigating the downsides of the cards in the 99.
The cards in the 99 likewise nullify Malagor's weakness of making me hellbent by making opponents lose cards as well and by providing ways of generating value that stick around after my hand is gone.
So here we have a deck where the commander isn't directly related to what the deck does, but instead has a mutualistic relationship with the deck, meshing together with it to form a cohesive whole that benefits both commander and 99.

Now, this is undoubtedly the most elegant version of a "counterweight commander" among my decks, but in retrospect I think that fact almost serves to obscure the concept a bit.
A "counterweight commander" can look like that, but it can also look like a lot of other things.
So, seeing as how this is a subject that is fundamentally related to my deck building, and how I haven't dedicated a video to it outside of a little five-minute thing in July of last year, I'm going to give the concept a full discussion.
I'm going to discuss the conceptual roots of it, give some additional examples, talk about how it fits into the broader EDH ecosystem, and discuss some of the limitations of this style of deck building.

To start with, let's return to the definition I gave earlier: a "counterweight commander" is a commander that serves to cover the weaknesses of a given deck.
It's easy to imagine that this is a revolutionary innovation that I came up with and have been employing under the radar for years before finally now spilling my secrets; however, the truth is much more mundane.
Fundamentally, the idea of a "counterweight commander" emerges naturally from the process of rigorously interrogating what, in exact detail, your command zone is offering you in a given deck.
As Commander players, it's easy to slip into a mode of existence where we forget the rules of the format, or rather, where we calcify a specific understanding of the commander format in our brains.
Almost all popular commanders fall into one of two categories: they're an enabler for a particular thing, or, more commonly, they're a payoff for a particular thing.
Decks are supposed to have one or more themes and then a commander that helps out with one of those themes; a lot of players internalize this as the way to build Commander decks, but this actually misses a lot of the possibility space of the format.

Let's think about the Commander format as somebody who has never heard of it before and is reading the rules of the format.
You have a 99-card deck with only one of any given card, on the surface, not great for purposes of consistency compared to a 1v1 format.
However, this is bolstered by an additional card that you always have access to, an eighth card in hand effectively.
This makes the command zone a critical resource for any player looking to maintain a level of consistency in their deck.
One way to utilize this is the ever-popular payoff card: you can run Isshin as your commander to enhance the effectiveness of your on-attack triggers, or Wilhelt to increase the efficiency of your zombies.
These are reasonable, as they allow a deck builder to focus most of their effort on these sorts of cards, knowing that even if they're a little subpar alone, these cards are guaranteed to have a little boost as long as the commander sticks around.
However, there are lots of other things that a player might want to guarantee, and other ways that guaranteed things can mesh into a game plan.

My high-power Francisco and Malcolm deck is one that tries to land a one-drop pirate turn one, Francisco turn two, and Malcolm turn three, and then uses Francisco's filtering and Malcolm's treasures to curve into a turn-five or -six infinite-turns combo with Time Sieve.
Now, this is not an example of a "counterweight commander" and could even be considered a conventional engine commander: my command zone generates resources given the input of a key card type performing a specific action (pirates dealing damage to players).
However, this is undoubtedly a more intentional command zone than your typical build of something like Admiral Beckett Brass, even as it's similar on paper.
Francisco guarantees that I have a two-drop available every single game, and Malcolm is a key piece of the deck's combo and also guarantees a source of available mana for my thirteen counterspells even when my lands are tapped out.
As I said, this isn't an example of a "counterweight commander," but it involves a similarly meticulous focus on what the command zone offers a player.

For a similarly curve-out oriented example, my Radha deck has the goal of playing Radha, Heir to Keld on turn two as a mana dork and explosive-vegetation analog, on turn three a stream of cascade spells, and six- to seven-cost bombs from turn four onward.
By fully covering my low-cost ramp, Radha allows me to have nothing below four mana in the 99, thereby strengthening the cascade cards and allowing for extremely high top-deck quality even with a land count of 41.
Now, this actually is an example of a "counterweight commander," and a wonderfully simple one at that.
I identified that a turn-two Radha in the command zone could allow me to eliminate the normally space-hogging element of low-cost ramp in a big-mana deck without losing too much speed, and then the rest of the deck was constructed to further take advantage of that choice.
If we think about a commander deck as a stool, I basically removed one leg from that stool and then shoved my commander under there as a replacement, making additions from there with the fantastic fit and wood savings I'd achieved.
Curve-out is almost always a factor in my commander deck building choices, but it's not always quite as dominant a factor as it is in my Radha deck.

For a now somewhat deprecated example of a "counterweight commander," let's talk about my Glissa Sunslayer deck.
Glissa Sunslayer is a three-mana 3/3 deathtouch first strike that allows its controller to choose between drawing a card, destroying an enchantment, and removing three counters from something whenever it hits a player.
When I first saw this card, I noticed two things about it: it can offer a stream of draw, and it's a really good blocker.
What sort of deck makes use of a low-cost creature with that sort of profile?
A greedy battle cruiser deck, of course.
A big-mana deck can benefit from having an early utility play guaranteed, as this makes it possible for a deck to focus more of its space on higher-costed cards while still having early plays.
In addition, the first strike/deathtouch pairing makes Glissa a fantastic blocker, allowing the deck to ward off early aggression, a thing that might otherwise cause problems for a greedy late-game deck.
I eventually decided that my Radha deck scratches the same itches as this one more effectively, but it's nonetheless useful as a case study for weakness mitigation.

As another example, my Liesa deck pairs a commander who is good at deleting opposing life totals with a 99 made up of lower-cost hate bears and utility creatures.
The deck's hate bears hinder opposing game plans and slow down the pace of games, and Liesa is here to be a reliable way of cutting down life totals in that slowed environment since she's a great beater that is effectively immune from commander attacks.
In both of these cases, the commander's mana value is important, and they're often played when that much mana is available, but they can be pushed back a bit if the deck has a better play.

Overall, this counterweight style of commander choice is a really fun one; it provides mechanically textured gameplay, and it also scratches my hipster itches since it means that my decks are almost always different from opposing decks.
However, this isn't a perfect method and indeed can lead to some problems.

One problem that can arise is that when the commander is one of very few cards to play a particular role in that deck, that deck's functionality can be greatly hindered if the commander becomes unavailable.
One example of this is a Torsten deck I built several months back.
It's a deck that's entirely creatures and lands, and which uses playing and blinking Torsten as its only draw, effectively drawing seven cards per Torsten entry.
Upsides: it packs a lot of draw into just a handful of deck slots, allowing space for a ton of ramp to guarantee fast rollouts.
Downsides: oh boy, if this deck draws poorly or gets its board wiped too early, it can sit around twiddling its thumbs for multiple turns on end with all of its card draw behind an imposing seven- or nine-mana barrier.
When this deck works, it really works, but the play pattern can just as often be jarring and awkward.
So this is an issue that can come up with this sort of deck building, but for it to cause problems as it did in this case, two things really need to be true.
For one, the deck needs to have no meaningful backup quantity of the thing the commander is providing.
My Malagor deck would really struggle if it didn't have a way to clear out opposing boards, but it runs a decent removal suite in addition to the commander for that exact reason, including a handful of small-creature wipes intended to hinder token players who might otherwise get out of hand.
By contrast, the Torsten deck has literally no draw outside of the command zone due to how tight space in the deck is, unless you count Savala as draw.
Secondly, the thing the commander is providing needs to be a key requirement for the long-term functioning of the deck in order for there to be a problem.
My Radha deck has absolutely no low-cost ramp aside from Radha herself, and as some people have pointed out, the commander getting removed immediately does cause me to basically skip my turn three; but this rarely happens because it's not actually a particularly good usage of removal.
This is an inevitability deck, not a tempo deck, and a one-turn setback for a slower deck just isn't that big a deal in mid-power EDH.
When Radha dies early, I shrug, garner a bit of table sympathy, and then proceed normally starting on turn four.
By contrast, my Torsten deck requires constant access to him, and any barrier to utilizing him stonewalls the deck's game plan.

The other potential issue with "counterweight commanders" is that it can lead to decks that some might find a bit bland in terms of card choice.
As you might have noticed earlier, I actually titled my original video on this topic "A Weird Trick to Making Cool Midrange Decks," which certainly indicates something.
It is true that a lot of decks do end up moving somewhat in this direction: my Glissa deck is a pile of generic dudes, my Radha deck is a cascade-flavored pile of generic dudes, my Liesa deck is a lower-curved and somewhat staxy pile of generic dudes, and if you squint around the interesting bits, my Malagor deck is also kind of a pile of generic dudes.
This fundamentally comes down to the nature of the strategy at its core.
The "counterweight commander" method is all about rejecting direct synergy with the commander in favor of a game plan that meshes with the commander indirectly.
In EDH broadly, the commander of a deck will often be a central node to begin building the deck's synergies off of, so without that direct synergy relationship it's easy to end up grabbing best-in-class cards rather than ones that perform a specific dynamic or synergistic game plan.
This doesn't mean that all decks with this method need to lack synergy; my Malagor deck has a bit of direct synergy with self-discard and some other synergy packages that relate to the sorts of game states that my demon dragon friend promotes, and my Radha deck likewise features a decent amount of cascade as a natural offshoot from having a commander that allows me to run very few low-cost cards.
It's fully possible to make interesting, synergistic decks within the bounds of this method, but it is undoubtedly more difficult, and I consider finding interesting dynamics and card choices within the "counterweight commander" framework to be one of the fun challenges of the method.

To cap things off, I'm going to give one more example of a "counterweight commander" deck that is something of a deviation from the midrange framework, and, actually, it was the first one I ever built.
In 2019, I built a $25 budget combo-control Orzhov deck with Kambal, Consul of Allocation as the commander.
Unlike a lot of common control commanders, Kambal doesn't help generate value or control the board; rather, he's simply a three-mana 2/3 that drains an opponent for two points of life whenever they cast a noncreature spell.
So what's he here for?
Well, primarily life gain, which Kambal guarantees as a near-constant source.
Now, life gain isn't a particularly useful thing on its own.
Life totals are a key factor for winning the game, yes, but tempo and value tend to be more important contributors to the winning and losing of games, particularly in a format like Commander where life totals are high by default.
Nor is this a deck with much in the way of life-gain synergies or effects that trigger when life is gained, so where does life gain fit in here?
Well, for one, control decks tend to be weak to life-total pressure, so this helps with that, but life gain also helps control decks in another way.
See, in a deck with a lot of board wipes, opponents will deploy creatures in tactical numbers.
If a control player is at 28 life, a midrange player might choose to drop maybe 10 or 15 power worth of creatures on board, knowing that number could threaten a control player's life total without requiring the control player to spend a card to answer it.
In this context, life gain makes it safe to ignore those threats, accumulating advantage through other means.
That's exactly the role Kambal plays, making him a quintessential "counterweight commander" that shores up a fundamental vulnerability of the control strategy.

I made a comment in July that EDH has effectively become the casual way to play paper Magic, and it really has; the days of 60-card kitchen table gaming are in the past, replaced by a diverging path for newer players: either play Arena and get your one‑on‑one fix from the comfort of your couch, or meet up with three other people and play Commander.
The nostalgic part of me certainly wants to push back on this, and I’ve spoken before about some of the reasons why Commander perhaps isn’t the best on‑ramp for newer players, but there are also some clear upsides to Commander.
The fact that it’s a casual format by designation, rather than being casual gameplay on the fringes of competitive formats, means a much greater degree of stability than something like 60‑card kitchen table Magic, a format whose current form basically vanishes off the face of the Earth whenever the friends who want to play it with you stop wanting to play it.
More importantly, Commander as a format clearly isn’t going anywhere in the casual scene, so it’s pointless to try and fight against it.
That said, the collapse of 60‑card casual Magic, along with the slow decline in popularity of draft that I’ve noticed over the last ten years, have had me thinking: what are we losing exactly?
What impact is it having that there is a growing population of Commander players who have played little to none of other formats?
To be clear, this isn’t intended as old man grumbling, I can certainly get old man grumbly sometimes as somebody who has been playing Magic for more than half of my life, and maybe I’d be more old man grumbly if I were a Modern player or something, but no, this is a genuine question.
To get some insight into it, I’m going to answer a slightly different set of questions here, : What is the experience of playing formats that aren’t Commander, and how does that experience upon a player?
What impact might that sort of experience have on the way they play Commander?
And do these impacts make it worth venturing outside EDH from time to time for us primarily EDH players?

To start with, let’s talk about the gameplay experience of a 20‑life 1v1 format.
A defining feature of these formats, as compared to Commander, is that they’re low‑slung and grindy, with smaller threats being more relevant.
With this fact in mind, what I’m about to say may initially seem a bit confusing: playing these formats can directly help with building the skills required for playing Commander.
Commander and 20‑life formats certainly are different, but counterintuitively this is exactly why it can be helpful to have played the latter; it can give a player breadth of experience.
See, playing Commander gives players lots of experience in fighting against big, bombastic wincons.
For starters, you’ve got the obvious examples like combo decks and combo‑adjacent plays, like a massive X‑spell or a Craterhoof on a board full of tokens, plays that reduce one or more life totals to zero in one fell swoop and often do so with large excesses of damage.
Even outside of these, life total can frequently feel irrelevant in EDH regardless of whether it is or not.
Even with a conventional big‑creatures mid‑range deck without a splashy singular finisher, a lot of times most damage will be dealt in one or two attack swings; this comes down to the snowbally nature of a lot of EDH decks.
All sorts of cards are intended to push a deck to greater and greater volumes of gameplay, whether that be effect doublers or mana doublers or other forms of action‑compounding engines.
This often means that decks buckle down until they have a massive board of creatures to attack with before swinging wide, sometimes for entire life totals in one go, somebody might have to count out 35 damage to this player, 29 damage to that player, and so on, and under that context opponents don’t even really need to think about their life total, regardless of if a handful of points of difference would have been relevant or not.
Like, come on, you lost because the opponent popped off, simple as.

However, what this means is that Commander players are often less prepared for grindier games where every point of life total matters.
The results of this can be seen when it comes to blocking and life total management.
Players who are more experienced in formats where life totals are relevant will be much more careful of certain life total thresholds and more willing to block to stay above them.
Players of 20‑life formats learn to internalize the idea that “life total is a resource” and to know when to spend and when to save that resource, but Commander players who have spent a lot of time dealing with bigger one‑ or two‑shot wincons won’t internalize this lesson nearly as quickly.
EDH’s higher life totals also train players to mostly disregard the idea of blocking with useful creatures because it feels better to keep them around, and most of the time that’s the correct decision in terms of strategy as well; unlike in a 20‑life format, where blocking with a key creature to stay alive for an extra turn or two is a very common necessity that players get used to biting the bullet on, this isn’t necessary nearly as often in EDH due to higher life totals and heftier wincons.
This means that when it becomes a necessity, a lot of players instinctually refuse to do it, even when it means sacrificing an amount of life that will almost certainly lose them the game.

Another aspect of non‑Commander gameplay, and particularly limited formats, is low‑resource environments, where players are topdecking or working under tight constraints in some other way.
These games aren’t wildly common in Commander due to how common ramp and draw are, with variation by playgroup obviously, and this means that you need to play a lot more EDH to get comfortable under these circumstances than you would to get comfortable under more common EDH scenarios.
The results of this can be quite problematic.
When a game has involved some form of stacks or heavy attrition and resources are dwindling, you can usually tell who has played other formats and who hasn’t.
A lot of primarily EDH players will be looking at the situation as a lost cause, a game gone wildly off the rails, whereas players who have done their time in the trenches of limited or 60‑card formats will be more engaged and vigilant, looking for outs and bits of incremental advantage to grab on to.

Outside of gameplay, the experience of building 60‑card decks can help with EDH deck building as well.
One way this can manifest is when building decks that are exceptions to traditional norms of EDH deck building.
See, people tend to have rough templates they follow when they build Commander decks, myself included.
A low double‑digit number of draw spells is good for maintaining a consistent stream of cards turn over turn, maybe more if those draw spells are smaller or less if the deck has other ways to compound value or tutors to find its value engines.
Likewise, a low double‑digits amount of ramp will be good for a deck that wants to have a single piece of ramp most games but is fine occasionally not having one, and adjustments will be made up or down depending on how often a deck wants ramp, what size of ramp a deck wants, and how aggressively a player is willing to mulligan.
These are references I follow, and I like them as a starting point because they’re flexible; they prescribe numbers of cards based on what a deck wants to do and what other tools a deck has available to it.
However, the trouble comes when references like these are less flexible and when they’re treated as gospel regardless of what deck they’re being applied to.

Ramp is a great example for demonstrating this because it’s one of the biggest differences between EDH and other formats.
Basically all EDH decks have some amount of ramp in them, and most have a decent amount; eight to ten slots spent on ramp is common.
By contrast, most 60‑card decks do not.
You will get specific decks focused on high‑cost plays, such as Tron, that focus a lot of deck space on ramping, and you’ll get mid‑range decks that run a spattering of efficient dorks to hit their impactful three‑, four‑, and five‑drops a turn early in some games in order to gain a tempo advantage.
Broadly, though, “ramp” isn’t widely played in 60‑card formats because it often isn’t worthwhile to expend a card just for a bit of acceleration.
This is likewise true in limited; I’ll run an efficient dork like a Lir Elves, and I’ll run a card like Dance of the Tumble Weeds or Poison Dart Frog that has some extra utility attached at a good rate, and occasionally I’ll add some lesser ramp if I have critical high‑cost plays that my game plan ended up needing to revolve around.
Aside from these instances, though, it’s almost never correct to play ramp in draft or sealed; draw is usually sparse, and mana and cards are better spent contesting the board and threatening life totals.
The result of all of this is that in formats outside Commander, ramp spells are viewed very critically.
A player must ask themselves, “Why is this here?” and if that question doesn’t have a clear and persuasive answer, the card will generally get cut.
By contrast, many people building a Commander deck will throw together their template‑built EDH deck with the requisite count of ramp cards picked from among the available staples.
These will often be added without consideration for what the cards are accomplishing.
You’ll get Cultivate in two‑color decks with a four‑mana commander, Gilded Lotus in decks with an average mana value of 2.5, Rampant Growth in an artifact‑centered deck with a three‑mana commander, and so on.
Fundamentally, the issue is that a lot of players don’t stop to consider what “ramp” is offering them because they’re playing in a format where it is an unquestionable fact of life: “I play ramp because I want more mana, come on now.” In most decks this won’t be the end of the world; decks do want ramp spells, and even if players add ramp that is a bit sub‑optimal for their deck, their deck is still spending slots on a thing that it needs, and the specifics can be corrected later.
However, just as there’s variety in how much ramp 60‑card decks want, there will be some Commander decks that don’t really want ramp in any sort of conventional quantities.
I have two different decks where this is the case.
In both my Malagor deck and my Francisco Malcolm deck, I don’t want to spend the entirety of my turn two or three playing ramp spells because I have more useful cards I want to be developing.
Both decks include a handful of rocks for purposes of weaving into a later turn, because this is still EDH we’re talking about, and getting a future mana boost off of a one‑mana investment is still useful for keeping up in later turns, but these aren’t really a key card type, and each deck only runs a low single‑digits quantity of two‑mana rocks so as not to draw more than one in the early stages of a game, plus a Sol Ring to cash in on my Wizards of the Coast‑mandated dose of variance.
The step of asking how much mana a deck actually needs and what times it will want to play ramp spells is one that a lot of players forget to complete, and playing other formats where the inclusion of ramp isn’t such a foregone conclusion is great for getting perspective on what these cards are actually accomplishing in a deck.

The same can go for other card types.
When is it correct to exclude or go light on card draw?
When is it correct to exclude board wipes?
These are things that EDH players will consider necessities, but depending on the deck they might not be nearly as important as a player might assume.

One other deck building skill that EDH isn’t great at teaching players is figuring out optimal card quantities.
A feature of Singleton formats is that they restrict how many of a particular sort of card a player can run; some cards will have many similar options, but other types of card will be more unique, and a player will have no choice but to add the number of it that exist to the deck and no more, regardless of how much they like it.
This outsources a lot of decision‑making to the nature of the format.
Players don’t get to choose how many cards to add to their deck that create additional dragons when a dragon attacks; that decision is already made for them.
Whereas in 60‑card formats up to four of a given card can be run, giving players room to flex counts up and down on various cards and see how they feel, in EDH there often isn’t this same level of choice.
The result of this is that when players have access to a greater number of a particularly appealing effect, if they’ve played EDH but not other formats, the instinct might be to load up on all available copies of that effect regardless of how many would actually be optimal for the deck.
This is likely something that will be figured out in due time so long as players are willing to challenge their assumptions about how their decks work from time to time, but having less of an intuitive sense of how many copies of a card is appropriate is certainly something that can lead to wasted time and games played with an off‑kilter deck.

Long story short, yes, playing formats outside EDH can imbue players with important experiences, experiences that will be especially useful on the fringes of the Commander experience.
Commander players will have no trouble getting used to playing against snowbally value piles, dealing with board wipes, building conventional synergy‑based mid‑range, developing a growing knowledge of common staples, and so on.
Playing lots of Commander will make you better at a lot of things in Commander, and playing enough Commander in diverse environments will even grant a degree of proficiency in the things I mentioned earlier: life total management, low‑resource environments, unconventional deck types, and so on.
These certainly aren’t forbidden knowledge or anything, but playing formats outside EDH will help to instill certain lessons faster than others and develop an intuitive sense for why they’re true.
It’s also good to play other formats because cards are designed for other formats and the further back in time

I have a question for you: let’s say that there’s a card that by most considerations is a great fit for a deck; it’s pretty powerful, it meshes well with the way the deck functions mechanically, and it improves a specific aspect of the deck that was maybe a bit of a weak spot before.
When is putting that card into that deck the wrong choice?

Let’s take a step back.
Commander, as it is played by most of its player base, is a casual format.
This means a lot of things to a lot of people, but the definition I’ll use here is that a deck is casual when it is not perfectly optimal in terms of its ability to perform tasks and win games and when this state of being is intentional.
If you are a casual EDH player, by definition there are cards in your deck that could be switched to different cards if you wanted to win more games and compete with more powerful decks.
This is intuitively true to people when it comes to the cards that most visibly contribute to that winning: the win conditions.
Not every deck includes the most powerful two-card infinite combos in them, and even among the ones that do, not all of them run the sort of tutor density that would help their deck to execute said combos consistently.
Plenty of casual EDH players understand that they’d prefer to win with Purphoros and a bunch of goblins rather than Dualcaster Mage plus Twinflame, and another segment of casual EDH players understand that they’d prefer to win by attacking with the aforementioned goblins rather than dealing damage just by having them pop into existence.
So this is an area where players tend to understand their preferences.

However, as you pull back away from what shape a deck’s win will look like and dive into the functional meat of decks, things get a little hazier.
You may know approximately how you enjoy winning, but do you know what forms of resource building are most enjoyable to you?
Do you know the sort of interaction suite and style of table engagement that will give you the most satisfying game?
Do you know how powerful you want each of these components to be?
This is likely an overwhelming sequence of questions to a lot of people, or even a baffling sequence of questions to some.
This is a card game where you’re at least in some accents trying to win games, and the natural place a lot of people end up is finding the most powerful options out there or at least playing with the best options they have access to.
And by all means, don’t let me tell you not to play good cards; I play lots of good cards.
However, I am also here to tell you that there are some good cards that, like a Dualcaster Twinflame combo, may influence the amount of fun you have with the game, cards that may not even necessarily have anything to do directly with winning.
What you find fun about playing your deck may be a lot more fragile than you think, much more sensitive to the blunt instrument of an out-of-place card or two than you’d expect.
If this all sounds like it’s gearing up for a bunch of aimless good-card hate, well, why don’t you just hear me out for a bit.
This is all pretty abstract, so a couple recent examples of this I’ve experienced are probably in order.

Quick side note: I also released a Patron video recently that included some discussion of the new bracket system, and I’ll be including a portion of that at the end.
Stick around for that if you feel like, but with that said, I want to start off with what may be a familiar example.

In October of last year I discussed my Malfegor deck, and that one is a Vibes deck through and through.
The basic gist is that it is a deck that pairs discard spells and small creatures to generate card advantage to try and force the game into a scrappy, low-resource state reminiscent of a lot of grindy 60- and 40-card gameplay, a state where my deck has an edge but typically only a slight one.
A gritty game plan, no doubt, and you’re allowed to hate it, but I love the sorts of environments this deck can create, and I likewise enjoy the task of grinding advantage with a handful of low-cost creatures within those environments.
With that in mind, a useful exercise for understanding what this deck wants is to consider two powerful cards: one that ended up in the final deck and one that did not.
Kroxa is a monster of a card; it’s an effective discard engine that can give opponents a whiff of the pain to come as early as turn two, and which also makes for a killer beater that is difficult to get rid of.
It is very good at doing everything this deck wants to be good at: making opponents discard, being resilient, and applying life total pressure, and that congruence is why it works in the final deck despite being a crazy good card in a low-budget deck.
Waste Not, on the other hand, is a card that did not end up in the final deck, and that’s because it is good at things the deck is not supposed to be good at.
This is a grindy midrange deck looking to plunge the game into a low-resource slugfest best, and Waste Not handing me easy resources boosts me out of that state, changing the whole dynamic of the deck.
The fun part of the deck for me is when I’m clawing for advantage in a scrappy game, and if a two-mana enchantment just hands me a bunch of advantage, it shortcuts that, basically just turning my deck into a generic impressive Stacks deck in the process.
This was the example of a good card being a bad idea that got me thinking harder about the concept, but there’s a similar and even more striking recent example that ended up inspiring this piece.

In mid January I was looking at spoilers for Aetherdrift, seeing if there was anything new for my Shorikai Astral Slide deck, and I saw the card Monument to Endurance.
On the surface this thing is a slam dunk in a cycling deck; cycled cards get effortlessly transfigured into resources at the rate of one per turn, allowing for an easy card advantage engine that can pivot into a win condition and which can even provide Treasures where needed.
Can you believe all of that could come from a single Magic card?
It’s almost too good to be true; actually, not almost, it is too good to be true in this case.
I discussed in my video about this deck that at its heart this is a control deck that cares about navigating a sequence of tricky choices about where to divert the deck’s resources: do I tutor for a high-cost artifact that gives me card advantage or one that slows down my opponents?
Do I flicker an ETB creature that shuts down a problematic spell or ability or one that makes my board larger?
Do I use Shorikai’s recur ability to bring back a key blocker or a card that pushes my own advantage?
These are the sorts of choices that make this deck a highly fun and engaging experience for me when I’m looking to sit down and think hard during a game.
The issue with Monument to Endurance then is that it shortcuts around this whole thing; its ability doesn’t compete with anything else in the deck, and the correct first choice per turn will almost always be card draw.
Suddenly easily the most effective draw engine in my deck isn’t a multi-card flicker-based engine that I need to piece together and then operate with lots of decisions along the way; no, this is a “do thing, get card” engine where taking a game action, cycling in this case, is immediately and directly rewarded with drawing cards.
This simplification of value generation decisions has a cascading effect of simplifying my tutoring decisions; it will almost always be correct to hunt up a one-piece engine like this, so my tutoring decisions will reflect that.
I’ll wizard cycle for a Trophy Mage to grab my Monument to Endurance because anything else would be an irresponsible choice.
Suddenly the task of gaining advantage has one simple route of administration: find the card that makes my cycling cards do more cycling, play it, and then the advantage makes itself.
There are two other cards I exclude for similar reasons: the draw doublers Alhammarret’s Archive and Teferi’s Ageless Insight are undoubtedly strong in a cycling deck, but they’re strong by shortcutting the value-generating part of the deck, allowing me to get ahead by simply cycling rather than making use of Astral Slide and ETB creatures.
These generic “do thing, get card” synergies would suck the identity and a lot of the interesting decision-making out of the deck, thereby removing a lot of what makes it fun to me.

Now you might assume based on what I just said that I hate all draw that’s too generic or simple or powerful, or even that I dislike the sort of “do thing, get card” draw I mentioned earlier.
That’s not the case, though; I dislike it in the case of my Shorikai deck specifically because it shortcuts past what I find fun about the deck, simplifying the rich tapestry of decisions that the deck presents me with and rendering the more interesting forms of value pointlessly weak by comparison.
If you find the process of building advantage a particularly fun one, you’ll want to be careful with the cards you add, but this won’t be the case for all decks.
I run a bunch of these sorts of simple, strong value engines; I mentioned earlier in my R deck Beast Whisperer and Garruk’s Packleader and such like, and those feel great there.
If anything, I wish my draw was even more straightforward sometimes.
Many people who’ve seen me playing this deck have witnessed me exasperatedly resolving my fifth Raggadragga trigger in a turn, playing as quickly as I possibly can in order to keep my turn length under 5 minutes despite casting dozens of mana worth of spells.
This is because exactly how I build advantage isn’t something I care about; there are two things I find fun about playing this deck: having a ton of mana, which enables me to have these intense and complex turns with intricate ordering, and figuring out how to beat down my opponents with a big old pile of budget bombs.
I do run draw in the deck, but I treat it as a means to an end, with that end being allowing me to spend my ample mana and not end up hellbent too much of the time.
In the case of this deck, what would shortcut the fun would be running more powerful bombs and finishers that allow me to convert mana advantage into defeated opponents more efficiently.
I like playing the role of a final boss with this deck, pumping my volume of gameplay up to seismic proportions before lumbering in the direction of victory with my large creatures.
I do have ways to close out games, but they’re not super fast or sudden unless I’m at 20 or more mana, and this gives opponents a fighting chance to claw their way back into the game and best me.
In some games, these big, dynamic back-and-forths are some of my favorite games with the deck, and if I spent a bunch of effort tuning the deck to win faster, I wouldn’t get these sorts of games nearly as often.

For a similar example, let’s talk about my friend Hans’s Laya undefeated slick shot deck named “Is it Bizit?” This is a control-oriented deck that plays as many Prophetic Bolts as possible, with “Prophetic Bolt” as a category referring to an Izzet card that can both deal damage and draw one or more cards.
When I asked Hans what he finds fun about the deck, he responded simply, “I like to two-for-one people twice.” Prophetic Bolt in a 1v1 format is the archetypal mana-expensive two-for-one card: you pay five mana to hopefully remove a creature with four or less toughness as well as finding a card in the top four cards of your library, thereby generating two cards’ worth of value with your one Magic: The Gathering card.
This type of card feels less impactful in EDH, what with its ample value engines and two additional opponents and such like, but allowing each of these spells to be used an additional time suddenly makes for a much more tempting proposition.
The resulting deck looks to build value while keeping opponents in check, gradually adding additional mana in the form of mana rocks as well as occasional amplifier permanents before trying to overwhelm opponents with value and gradually burn them down.
It was one of these amplifier permanents that ended up being a problem for shortcutting the fun: Thousand-Year Storm.
See, this deck typically keeps around a handful of plotted Izzet instants that were weaved onto an end step, holding them in exile until they’re ready to be cast for free on a later main phase.
This means that with a minimal amount of planning, a Thousand-Year Storm turn could easily reach five or more spells, which could mean that the final couple spells of the turn are being copied several times.
This won’t always be an immediate game win, but it effectively nullifies value as a concept in the deck; the deck is likely adding 10 or more cards to its hand each turn that Thousand-Year Storm is in play and possibly digging dozens of cards deep into its library.
Worse, Thousand-Year Storm negates the concept of mana as well; when a five- or six-cost card can be copied half a dozen times, the progression of adding on mana rocks and amplifiers becomes entirely pointless.
Anything before the Thousand-Year Storm barely matters, and whether or not it results in an imminent game win more or less comes down to a removal check for opponents unless the deck was far behind when the storm came into play.
So Thousand-Year Storm does shortcut the fun in the case of this deck by pushing the deck beyond what it’s supposed to care about: getting two-for-ones.
However, this isn’t to say that all powerful amplifier permanents are off the table; the new Niv-Mizzet printed in Foundations feels shockingly okay here.
It does end up somewhat negating the resource source of cards, but mana is still a big limiting factor for the deck, and not needing to worry nearly as much about value does change the nature of the deck, but the deck still feels like a version of itself and the things that are fun about it still remain fun even if the play pattern becomes a bit different.
The same goes for the card that ended up replacing Thousand-Year Storm: Swarm Intelligence certainly amplifies the next gameplay substantially, but it’s still in the realm of being reasonable; the difference between a two times amplification and a three to four times amplification end

A common unspoken rule of Commander is that people should get to have a game plan to “do a thing,” to “do their thing.” On the surface, this makes a lot of sense; it’s a casual format and people are here to have fun.
In other casual multiplayer games, universal participation is understood to be a core tenet, and steps are taken to ensure that all players get to play a part.
In a role‑playing game like D&D or Pathfinder, you don’t want to let a player be a wizard only to then have them spend the entire campaign in places with some mysterious anti‑magic field , that’s not ideal gameplay.
So, broadly, it’s understandable that Commander echoes this understanding and even allows players 100 cards’ worth of expression in how they play the game.
This is all fine and good, but what’s easy to forget is that Commander is a multiplayer offshoot of a generally two‑player game, an offshoot that didn’t always exist.

The fact that the format has a higher life total than 60‑card 1v1 formats is intentional; it works to make space for decks that would otherwise struggle.
There are a lot of potential creative strategies that simply can’t hold up in a 20‑health format where attacking people with creatures early is just a bit too good.
In this way, Commander’s 40 starting life itself serves as a built‑in “do the thing” enabler , no extra effort needed from players.
This higher life total was intended to accomplish a task, and it did so admirably; however, over time it has accomplished a lot more than just this.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
Commander has basically grown up with this identity of being a slower format, a more laid‑back form of Magic can be played.
This is reflected in the mana curves of a lot of the original precons; zany high‑cost stuff is a staple feature of the format, and these sorts of cards are often core pillars of their respective decks.

There are a couple frameworks we could use to think about how EDH decks compare to decks in a 60‑card, 20‑health format.
One is the turning point of a given game: basically, if we separate each game into a buildup phase where players are preparing and a climax phase where players are starting to perform whatever action will win them the game, roughly when is there a transition?
In a lot of classic 60‑card decks, this turning point is quite early.
Delver decks look to land a turn‑one threat and gradually chip down opponents, and other decks like Jund similarly look to land early threats.
In contrast to this, most Commander decks spend the first several turns of the game ramping, setting up engines, tutoring, and starting to piece together synergy packages.
A big piece of this likely comes down to life totals: 40 life means that a threat needs to be larger to pose a risk to opponents.
Whereas in Legacy a single mana can be spent on a deck’s win plan, followed by a long sequence of turns spent purely defending that plan and suppressing an opponent, a much larger mana investment is necessary to break through 40 life without the help of an infinite combo.
In addition, even if a deck defeats a single opponent, there are still two opponents at the table, so it’s often wise to invest an even greater amount of mana up front to formulate a threat that can subdue two or more players in rapid succession.

The fact that larger investments are needed to win games means that draw and ramp are almost necessities; plans will involve lots of cards that don’t directly contribute to winning a game.
This is another point of contrast between Commander and 60‑card 1v1 formats.
In a burn deck, an ever‑popular archetype in 60‑card formats, a majority of a deck will often be spent on the task of reducing opposing life totals.
Though you could point to control decks as spending less deck space on direct wincons, these decks still use cards like removal and draw to build up to the dominant game state they need to be in to win; a Lava Spike performs a similar role for an aggro deck as an Up the Beanstalk does for a control deck, and this comes down to the fact that different decks are different.
If we focus on ramp, removal, and draw as categories of card, a large portion of decks in 60‑card formats exclude one, two, or even all three of these things, which is notable when you consider that basically all Commander decks are expected to have all of them.
This is also in spite of the fact that Commander decks have access to, well, a commander , an additional card that is available at all times, a permanent eighth card in hand.
A lot of people fail to acknowledge how incredible that is; a deck could easily pick out a commander that mostly fulfills a particular role to allow their deck to focus less on that, but this isn’t generally what happens.
Taking a look at some popular recent commanders, they are mostly payoff or escalation of some kind: when a thing happens, either more of that thing or something different happens.
A lot of commanders will draw cards in some form or other, but these decks will then still include a lot of card draw.

These features paint a specific picture of Commander as a format: decks are expected to run decent quantities of ramp and draw because they’re expected to be bigger, taller than decks in 60‑card formats, and this is facilitated by having more cards and more mana.
This much is unsurprising; on some level these attributes are encoded into the very DNA of the format.
However, over time this DNA has twisted and metastasized into an increasingly homogeneous version of the format, one where decks are expected to look a certain way.
Decks have grown bigger and taller over time; they gain more mana and draw more cards than decks in the past did.
The funny thing about ramp and draw is that they have an amplifying effect: while a win condition or a removal spell won’t generate more of those things, ramp gives mana to cast more ramp spells and card draw finds more card draw.
As more and more powerful draw engines have been printed over the last 10 years, along with the EDH community developing a more streamlined deck‑building culture, decks that focus heavily on draw and ramp have become more and more prevalent.
In tandem with this, deviation from this version of Commander has become increasingly challenging from a social standpoint.
When players see opponents doing some sort of tall game plan, one deck‑building reaction could be to go under it; this is common in competitive 1v1 formats.
You play aggro to rip away your opponent’s life total while they’re still in the setup phase of their greedy nonsense; you play combo to take advantage of them ignoring you; you play stax pieces to clamp down on specific play patterns.
All of this is possible in some form or other in Commander: you can play Voltron or group slug, you can play combo, and you can play stax pieces.

The issue is, these things are often considered rude at a lot of mid‑power EDH tables.
It’s uncool to see your opponent doing some greedy nonsense and to then try to clamp down on it; the polite counterplay is to go bigger, to get more mana and more cards, and escalate harder.
Commander, as a casual format, has the awkward dynamic that there isn’t a metagame per se, and everything that happens is basically moderated by a giant glob of expectations that players and their opponents decide on verbally or otherwise.
While certain plays might not be explicitly disallowed, there will be varying levels of social acceptance of various different options a player could decide on.
These social pressures then reinforce themselves as different players enter and exit the format under these new conditions.
If a player base decides that Armageddon is unacceptable, well, Winter Orb is almost as bad, and Gaddock Teeg is a bit too staxy as well, and Archon of Valor’s Reach also constricts player agency, doesn’t it?
And I don’t know about poison counters and commander damage either , those seem pretty sus as well.
As countermeasures become less and less widespread, players will feel more and more emboldened to chase big greedy decks to their logical end point; as snowballing mid‑range decks are allowed to become a more and more dominant part of the EDH landscape, they become all but synonymous with the format , they become the way to play casual Commander.

Now, I don’t want to necessarily say that this is inherently a purely bad thing.
I have multiple decks that are absurdly tall or absurdly greedy, and I’ve also made decks with the explicit intent of being taller than other decks.
The dominance of tall Commander means that players are able to do big expressive plays with a wide degree of freedom; it means that new players are allowed to explore the format without getting immediately pressured down by decks built with the intent to kneecap slower and greedier decks.
Any given deck’s “thing” might take more or less time than any other deck’s “thing,” and allowing the most of these things to happen involves pushing back the point at which decks begin to focus on closing out games, letting decks focus more on the buildup stage.
If the goal is to accommodate the most of these and allow the most people to do the most of their thing, tall EDH is really the only way to go.
However, it’s worth keeping in mind that this form of Commander isn’t without issues all of its own.

One issue with the gradual upward race of tall Commander is something I spent an entire 20‑minute video on a couple months ago: information overload.
EDH boards are wildly complex these days.
While 60‑card 1v1 formats feature the relatively simple board state of two players, EDH features the board states of four players , board states that are often far more complex than ones that would be found in 60‑card formats.
As a result, players in a game of Commander need to process a lot more different cards than players in a 60‑card format, and doing so will use mental energy that could be spent on planning turns, strategizing, politicking, or performing alternative forms of threat analysis.
This will naturally fall hardest on newer players, who are familiar with fewer cards and thus need to take more time to process the cards being played in a game.
Some of this added information is inherent to Commander as a format; having four players is kind of baked into how we do things here in EDH, and having a massive 30‑year‑long card pool is likewise a fact of life.
Commander is unavoidably going to be more complicated than 60‑card formats, and that’s just kind of the price of entry; it was originally popularized by judges, after all.
What’s not a fact of life is everybody playing these big escalatory mid‑range piles, with each deck developing more and more utility or value permanents over the course of a game, each with probably way too much text.
Commander is inherently complex, but it doesn’t need to be this complex.

Big complex board states paired with decks that want to perform exponentially more actions as a game progresses lead to an additional problem: turn lengths.
Casual EDH games have a reputation for being mercilessly long at times, and I’d argue a lion’s share of this is due to long turns.
Long games aren’t always a bad thing; I’ve had multi‑hour back‑and‑forth grinds that were genuinely exciting.
However, when turn length is the primary cause of a game’s length, things are rarely this enjoyable.
One of the issues is that long turns beget long turns: if the game’s turns are a sequence of back‑to‑back 5‑ to 10‑minute fiddle‑fests, other people are going to start chatting or checking their phone or gazing off into space.
Then, when it does get back around to somebody’s turn, instead of planning ahead for it, their mind has been wandering and they need to recalibrate on what they’ll be doing, increasing how long their turn takes.
This cycle reminds me of some of the less pleasant D&D encounters I’ve partaken in, and it’s a cycle that can really take a toll on the goal of maintaining a dynamic game of EDH.
The issue of long turns and thereby long games then ends up increasing the social acceptability of more aggressive strategies; this pattern is most clear with Voltron, an archetype that involves putting a bunch of auras or equipments on a particular creature and then defeating opponents with it one by one, but it really applies to focusing down opponents in general.
Despite the fact that strategically it might be correct to fully focus down a particularly scary player, this is somewhat unpopular in part because of how long EDH games go.
If knocking out a player meant them sitting around for 10 or 20 minutes for the game to finish, I doubt most people would have too big of an issue with that; however, when it means sitting around for 45 minutes or even an hour while the remaining players fiddle around with their fussy boards of snowball mid‑range, it’s a bit less ideal.

In addition to the other issues I’ve mentioned, the current Commander landscape is one that favors board wipes quite heavily.
Players will put together these wild snowbally packages that explode out of control in a matter of turns, and when there are multiple of these sorts of decks with taboos against stax and aggro, the only option is to board wipe, and to board wipe frequently.
The collateral damage of this will be the players trying to advance their own game plan at a normal pace, trying to gradually build up something of their own.
This is the paradox of “doing the thing”: the form of Commander that gives players the most time to develop a slower game plan is the exact same form of Commander that cultivates board wipes as this constant and unavoidable factor.
You get to do the thing, and I sure hope you liked doing that thing, because you’re going to get to do it about five more times after getting board wiped repeatedly.

So those are some of my problems with the state of Commander as it currently exists, this wildly tall version of the format, and a natural follow‑up question might be: can those problems be solved in a way that improves the format?
I mentioned the taboos against shorter strategies such as aggro and stax, and I know some of you probably thought to yourselves, “But Alex, even without taboos, aggro simply isn’t a viable strategy in casual Commander, is that?”

Maze’s End is a card that sat in the back of my trade binder as well as in the back of my mind for 10 years: simply get 10 Gates and then you win the game.
It was always an intriguing card, in the way most alternate wincons are, but I could never find a good reason to build a Maze’s End deck.
Every so often I’d come back to it, most notably to ponder a Child of Alara commander deck early last year, but it wasn’t until September that I finally found a good vehicle for it.

The issue with Maze’s End is that it’s both visible and slow.
Opponents can track the progress of the deck to its wincon with pinpoint accuracy, and the time frame to arrive at that win condition leaves a long period where opponents can apply pressure.
In addition, the 10 Gate requirement means that deck builders are encouraged to play a sequence of pretty mediocre tap lands or else need to activate Maze’s End a large number of times.
However, there is a way to get around all these problems: what if I simply played all the Gates at once?
Cards like Scapeshift and Reshape the Earth allow deck builders to do just this, getting all the necessary Gates for Maze’s End out all at once.
This can leave a turn cycle before victory due to the lands entering tapped, unless a player has an Amulet of Vigor in play or, rather, an untapped Turtle friend causing all other permanents to enter either tapped or untapped depending on his own status.
Archelos is a fantastic vehicle for this sort of deck because not only is he a combo enabler, he can also help out with ramping faster as well as slowing down opponents.

In addition to running 12 Gates, the deck ended up running several bounce lands to give a mana boost with the commander, some basics to be grabbed with land-grabbing spells, and a handful of other utility lands, for a grand total of 43 lands, not including Maze’s End.
Of the two cards that allow the deck to win, one costs nine mana and the other requires 10 lands, so naturally ramp ends up being a very big part of the deck.
There are 20 dedicated ramp spells, as well as an additional four ramp spells that serve double duty by also offering a way to tap down the commander; being able to force everyone’s stuff to enter tapped until my next turn is a pretty sweet side benefit.
From there, the deck mostly consists of draw, tutors, and interaction.
The most potent of the deck’s tutors is Emergent Ultimatum, a card that basically serves as an additional combo piece since any combination of Reshape the Earth, Scapeshift, and Boundless Realms will result in getting enough lands to win.
As far as interaction goes, I always like to have a lot of counter spells in my blue combo decks, so this deck runs 11 of those and six other cards intended to control the state of the game in some capacity.

The deck took a lot of tweaking to get it to the point where it functioned appropriately: how much ramp?
how much draw?
what sort of lands?
how should the deck go about surviving and preventing opponents from winning?
how important is the commander, and how much should I be leveraging him for non-combo purposes?
I spent several weeks and dozens of hours tweaking and tuning and pruning and answering tough questions until I’d finally achieved the seemingly impossible: a deck that could pull off a Maze’s End win consistently by turn seven or eight, with plenty of interaction held up, all for a bit over a hundred bucks.
It was an accomplishment, a realization of my past ambitions, an optimized utilization of a silly alternate wincon card I’d been thinking about for 10 whole years.
And if the story ended here, it would be an unambiguously happy one, an uncomplicated tale of self-actualization and cardboard triumph.

However, it was in fact somewhat complicated by a simple fact: Magic: The Gathering is a card game, and decks are meant to be played in games against people.
In my first few games with the deck, I was kind of surprised with the way people responded to me pulling off my massive land swing.
I’d get excited and start grabbing Gates, and other people would basically go, “Oh, you got the combo?
Okay, cool.” Another game: I had constructed a grand narrative for this deck because it was genuinely challenging to build, but in an actual game of Commander, this plays just like any other “one card plus Commander combo deck.” Satisfy conditions, get pieces, stop opponents from winning long enough to put things together, protect the combo, and do the combo.
It’s not necessarily that the deck was entirely uninteresting or entirely devoid of fun gameplay; it’s an acceptable combo deck.
The real surprise was the expectation versus the reality of the situation.
I had constructed narratives of grandeur as I was reaching out, striving for a powerful Maze’s End deck, but once it was in my hand, it was clearly something far more mundane than I had expected.

On some level, it’s a little strange that this happened to me because I had watched my friend Hans have a very similar experience a few months prior building a Yidris deck.
This was a deck that used Yidris’s unique combat damage ability to cascade into an “each opponent discards their hand, you draw 28 cards” combo off of two cantrips.
It was otherwise built in a midrange shell containing ramp, removal, value engines, and some very specific protection spells that were chosen in order to still get value when they were cascaded into.
So what’s the problem there?
Well, once again, despite having a creative execution, the Nexus combo was still a combo, and opponents treated it as such.
In fact, this deck was even more problematic than the Archelos deck due to the fact that all of its shenanigans could be stopped by simply killing or fully blocking the Yidris, and since not doing that meant possibly ceding a massive value swing to the Yidris player, players would religiously hate out the Yidris.
On paper, everything lined up for the deck, but real life is not made out of paper.

A question I’ve asked myself is, what are these decks saying exactly?
They say something about combos, about humans, and about how we build decks, but that’s not the most interesting thing they say.
The most interesting thing these goofy combo decks tell me is that deck-building creativity is not rewarded in and of itself in Commander games.
That might sound like the whining of some hipster, but I’m not intending that statement as any sort of value judgment about the state of the game; rather, it provides an interesting jumping-off point for thinking more critically about the game and how it’s experienced by the people who play it.

An inherent weirdness of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering is that deck building and playing are two separate phases of the game.
You’re not playing Dominion or some other card game where deck building and playing happen in tandem; no, these things are clearly demarcated.
Limited formats provide the most conventionally game-like structure for these phases, in the sense that a four- or five-hour limited event literally contains separate timed phases for assembling decks and playing the game.
A Magic: The Gathering draft, where players pick cards from packs in a circle and build decks with their resulting card pool before entering a series of timed rounds, actually resembles a lot of board and card games in structure.
As a simple example, For Sale is a game that contains one phase where players bid against each other on property cards, and then a second phase where players use their lineup of properties to secure point cards.
Like a Magic: The Gathering draft, the first phase involves a mixture of strategy and luck to determine how good a player’s group of cards is, and then the second phase uses the quality of that group as well as some further strategy and luck to determine the ultimate outcome of the game.

This is a clear enough line to draw with limited Magic: The Gathering events, but the relationship between these different phases gets aggressively more convoluted from here.
Let’s think about a low-level Standard event.
In the deck-building phase, players on their own time and in their own spaces complete the task of assembling the best Standard deck they can and the best sideboard to face off against the decks they expect to face.
Then the playing phase sees the players, now congregating in a game store at a specific time, play a sequence of games to determine a winner.
This is very different from most games in that the different phases occur in different settings on different timelines, but the structure is still roughly the same: the first phase sees players complete one goal, which then contributes to the outcome of a second goal.

However, taking things a step further into the realm of Commander, things get even murkier because you lose a lot of the element of competitiveness.
The first phase does still involve building a deck, and the second phase does still involve playing that deck, but the goals are less clear.
Unlike a Standard tournament, there isn’t usually a prize for winning an EDH game aside from bragging rights, and even in store-run casual Commander events, the subject of prize support is one with no shortage of disagreement and controversy.
Simply winning isn’t codified as a goal in the same way as it is in 60-card constructed events.
This difference in how winning is perceived then trickles back down to the deck-building phase.
If everybody was sincerely trying their best to make the most powerful deck in that deck-building phase, Commander games would be full of net-decked cEDH lists, but most players choose to show up to EDH games with decks that look quite different than that.
Winning will be a contributing factor to the sorts of decks that EDH players will build, but it will be accompanied by a mélange of other factors rendered subtle in competitive 1v1 formats: wanting a deck to do a certain cool play, wanting to have a deck feel a certain way, wanting a deck to look a certain way, wanting a deck to produce the funniest moments, and so on.

A lot of these goals will mesh well with the task of having fun in that second phase, the playing phase.
Obviously, players playing decks that feel expressive or cool to them in some way will usually lead to them having more fun, and the goal of winning will likewise produce a lot of fun moments for people.
However, there are also goals that don’t mesh as well with having fun in a game of Commander, and the best example of these is decks that try to win in some especially creative or expressive way.
As it turns out, winning the game is generally a pretty brief process; a long period of back and forth can be fun, but when a game reaches a point where one person is all but guaranteed to win, it’s generally for the best that things stop very soon after.
This is also why non-deterministic combo or lockout decks are often unpopular: they stretch out the length of a win, requiring opponents to make an unfortunate choice, either concede to save time or waste an extra 10 minutes on the 5% chance that the comboing player fizzles.
But okay, I’m getting off topic.
The platonic ideal of an EDH win is brief; there is no ceremony where the winning player gets to revel in their glory and be celebrated for their deck-building or gameplay accomplishments.
The game just ends and people move on to either another game or any of the other things that might occupy their life.
Winning in that creative way might be cool for that first time or two, but maybe not even that.
The really memorable games are usually the ones where something unexpected happens, not the one where a player trots out their creatively devised wincon they spent hours creating.
But spending hours to creatively devise and perfect a wincon still has an allure to it, doesn’t it?
Despite understanding all of what I just said, I have a pattern of continually coming back to build new creative combo decks.
It’s an itch that I can’t seem to stop scratching.

Another one I built in paper a few months back was one I like to call “tribal Fiend Hunter.” The basic idea behind it was this: you know Fiend Hunters, those creatures that exile something else until they leave play?
Well, what if you built a deck with the goal of getting three of them and then having them exile each other repeatedly in an indefinitely long loop, just a few fellas having a really phenomenal day of fiend hunting?
This is a somewhat unique spin on a combo deck; instead of finding a handful of different pieces in separate categories, you just need to find three of the eight Fiend Hunters that exist within the green-white color identity.
The deck then wins through some means or other, a couple of the Fiend Hunters also create tokens or counters, and three of them exile multiple cards, which allows for infinite ETB triggers.

Speaking of ETB triggers, I went with the commander choice of Torsten, Founder of Benalia.
Torsten has a lot of benefits, with the biggest one being that he draws a bunch of cards on ETB, a fact which can be paired with cards that flicker in order to draw the number of cards that the deck needs to draw in order to find three Fiend Hunters: 37 on average.
So the deck begins with a mixture of Fiend Hunters and sources of blink.
From there, most of the deck ended up being occupied by lands and ramp creatures, 42 and 29, respectively.
This might seem like a lot, because it is; I have a seven-mana Commander I want to cast, and since he’s the only source of draw in a deck that wants to draw a ton of cards, the deck doesn’t really do anything before he gets cast.
The mana dorks of the deck are carefully selected to offer the most utility during the fiend hunting combo step: there are six different ones that can give infinite mana, infinite +1/+1 counters, or some other resource that can hopefully lead to me winning, and the next removal likewise fits into this mold.
Overall, the goal here was to have a combo deck that is as fluid and flexible as possible, using the power of Fiend Hunters to creatively piece together wins in a variety of different ways.
Initially I considered using some pricier cards in the deck like Preston, the Vanisher, or even switching the commander to Atraxa for a four-color version, but eventually I came to the conclusion.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve never heard of a board wipe before, no Wrath of God, no Blasphemous Act, no Toxic Deluge, and certainly no Farewell.
Alternatively, we can imagine that you have heard of these things like you’re vaguely familiar with them, but nobody really plays them because why would you?
That’s not how Commander is played.
We can imagine the resulting environment of decks that commit hard to the board with no fear of punishment, decks that prioritize proactive plans and pushing damage rather than developing slower engines and sculpting a hand.
Players run less ramp and likely less card draw in some cases as well, because there’s less of a need to weave that stuff into the rest of your game plan, and there’s a heavier focus on building an unbeatable board of synergistic nonsense.
So let’s say that’s the universe we live in now.

Now let’s say somebody casts a Wrath of God.
Everybody’s collections of mid-range are wiped out in one fell swoop; backup plans are scarce, hands dwindling in size, and looks of dejection, resentment, and anger even cross the faces of everybody else at the table.
The unspoken rules have been broken, and the format as it was known by these hypothetical people thrown on its head with a single card.
Nobody prepared for this because why would they?
This isn’t how the format is played.

Where am I going with this?
Well, one could argue this is very similar to the relationship the current EDH community has with mass land destruction.
Just as there are ways people mitigate board wipes now, there are all sorts of ways you could mitigate the impact of a mass land destruction spell like Armageddon: you could play more indestructible lands, you could diversify your ramp package with creature- and artifact-based ramp, you could place a heavier emphasis on land recursion or run Second Sunrise effects, you could run more extra land play effects and be careful to keep some lands in hand at all times, and you could run lower-curved decks that require less mana to do effective plays.
Mass land destruction is acutely painful largely because people don’t prepare for it, and people don’t prepare for it because it’s not commonly accepted as a major part of the format.

It’s worth keeping in mind that frequent board wipes being accepted as a fact of life at most EDH tables isn’t some natural fact that got plucked out of the ground wholly formed, and the fact that mass land destruction is mostly absent from EDH tables isn’t a natural fact either.
The reason why people are frequently prepared for one and frequently unprepared for the other comes down to social factors.

Now, does that mean that Armageddon and Wrath of God are equivalent cards in some objective sense, sharing a common DNA even if they’re interpreted differently by the people who play EDH?
The answer to that is more complicated than it seems, and I’ll touch back on the question a little later, but I’ll start by exploring the answer that most players would give you: no, they’re obviously not.
Why aren’t they?
Well, lands produce mana, a fundamental resource required for playing the game, whereas creatures are just the guys you hit your opponents with.
If creatures are wiped, players can usually keep casting spells, whereas if lands are wiped they often cannot.

To bring a key piece of vocabulary into this, mass land destruction is a form of “stax.” Stax is a broad category of card with conflicting etymological claims that I will not be getting into, but the most basic definition of stax is that it’s resource denial.
A 2013 post on MTG Salvation’s EDH forum lists 14 cards as the universal colorless stax package; of these, four remove lands, four keep lands or other permanents tapped down, three increase the cost of spells, and the other three perform other effects that are broadly in line with the rest of these things.
The common theme is that all but one of these target mana in some way, and it’s also common to see cards that target card draw among classic stax pieces.
Broadly, a stax deck is one that looks to restrict the table’s resources and then break parity on those restrictions, basically, to do something to everybody and then play in a way that isn’t as affected by that thing.
Examples include playing a Winter Orb with a bunch of mana rocks on board, playing a Smokestack with a Bitterblossom on board, and playing mostly creature spells with cards that tax noncreature spells on board.

In common EDH parlance, there are a number of other cards that also fall into the stax descriptor: cards that prevent players from casting certain spells, cards that limit how many spells a player can play, cards that prevent abilities in some way, and even cards that prevent players from using graveyards.
These are also sometimes called “rule cards.” The stax archetype is traditionally all about denying your opponents the tools they need to play the game.

A Modern deck known as Lantern control is the most distilled version of this idea: control opposing draws to prevent them from finding anything useful, prevent the opponent from attacking with a card known as Ensnaring Bridge, and then eventually win with incremental mill or another slow but compact win condition.
As Sam of Rhystic Studies laid out in his video on the deck, the gameplay goal of the deck was less to win than it was to prevent the opponent from playing Magic: The Gathering, to assemble a Rube Goldberg machine that could prevent the unlucky opponent from taking any meaningful game action.
This amplified version of things makes it clear why many stax strategies are taboo in EDH: they are all about restricting the agency of players.

This stands in contrast to the most popular visions for the EDH format, that it’s a palette to be drawn upon, a format where more expressive strategies have room to breathe.
This vision of the format was codified by the RC (rest in peace) in the cards they choose to ban and why.
Sway of the Stars is banned because it nullifies all the gameplay that came before it, making those actions irrelevant; Iona is banned because it has the potential to lock a whole player out of casting spells if their deck is monocolored; a number of other cards are banned for making agency-denying strategies just a bit too easy.
Whether these bans were deserved is outside the scope here, but they do indicate a pattern: player agency is important in EDH.
On this much I agree, it’s good when all players get to play a part in an EDH game, and it’s never a great feeling when somebody feels truly left out of a game.

However, over time we as players have developed a skewed vision of what player agency actually looks like.
Being able to perform meaningful game actions is the bar for player suppression when it comes to Lantern control, but when it comes to EDH the definitions are much murkier.
We can think about two different situations in an EDH game as an example.
In situation A, the table is in a soft lock from a stax player with a 90% chance of losing to that player in the next few turns.
In situation B, the table is wildly behind in resources compared to an Ur-Dragon player and has a 90% chance of losing in the next few turns.
These situations are identical in terms of ability to perform meaningful game actions; it’s just as easy to break out of the stax player’s grip as it is to catch back up to the Ur-Dragon player, yet the first one is generally thought of as the much more objectionable one.

One possible reason for this is that a lot of players seem to think of their deck as more of a “fidget toy” than an actual game piece.
You have some sort of synergy thing that your deck is meant to do, and being able to complete a few entirely insignificant game actions on your turn to scratch that brain itch registers as a more positive thing than being able to do nothing at all.
This isn’t some radical observation, but things get a bit uncomfortable when we consider that large portions of Commander decks are snowball mid-range in some form or other, decks with abundant tools to keep getting ahead once they’re already ahead.
Why don’t these violate conventions of player agency?
Shouldn’t decks give opponents more opportunities to catch back up?
I’ve mentioned excessive counts of “win more” cards as a strategic folly in past videos, but isn’t this deckbuilding choice a bit rude as well?
You can say “just play removal,” but that logic works equally well for a stax piece like Ward of Bones as it does for a turbocharged engine like Kamahl, Fist of Krosa, even as the former is going to catch you a lot more side-eye than the latter.

As another example, let’s talk about one of the most agency-denying cards that’s widely played in EDH: Teferi’s Protection.
Being completely disallowed from interacting with a player in any form for a whole turn cycle is wildly disempowering.
A core feature of Magic: The Gathering is that there are different axes on which to attack your opponent, life total can be hit, noncreature permanents can be knocked out with removal, spells can be countered, and creatures can be hit with either removal or by forcing blocks.
Even if somebody plays a fog or counters a removal spell, there is still usually a counterplay that a prepared player can execute; not so with Teferi’s Protection.
For three mana, all board interaction and forms of damaging a player are shut down until that player’s next turn, with a counterspell being the only possible option for counterplay.
It’s the sort of effect whose all-encompassing nature would be valid at an inflated mana cost of something like five mana, but instead it’s costed at three, the same amount as most board wipe dodges, you get invulnerability as just a little bitty tacked-on side benefit.

I have a similar problem with The One Ring.
It’s a powerful draw spell for four mana; it’s indestructible; and it makes a player invulnerable to most forms of life loss until their next turn.
In both cases, these are cards with one primary mode but also a stapled-on effect that dramatically reduces the number of meaningful game actions opponents can take.
People know these cards are strong, but I haven’t seen much complaining about these particular clauses being on these cards, and it’s not hard to guess the reason why: these cards don’t restrict the “fidget toy.” Opponents can still putter around inconsequentially with value permanents even if they’re about to die to a massive turn from the Teferi’s Protected or One Ringed player.

What I’m illustrating with these examples is my biggest issue with the way people talk about stax, and really the term “stax” itself, in the context of EDH: it does a poor job of describing the things people have a problem with, and often excludes a lot of other cards with very similar play patterns.

Looking at the stax primer from 10 years ago is fascinating, as a number of cards listed as stax or stax-adjacent sound weird to a modern Commander player’s brain.
Edicts are one instance of this, and wraths are another.
These may seem like strange inclusions for a stax-specific guide given the current dominance of these cards and the current unacceptability of stax as an archetype, but in the context of older eras of Commander and 60-card formats it makes a lot of sense.
It’s accepted as a fact of life now that board wipes will be lurking around every corner of a Commander game and that every deck will have one or more of these sorts of tools, but most 60-card games feature decks that have none of these things.
Developing a powerful board in a 60-card format is a genuinely game-winning proposition, and creatures are useful as tools to deal damage to opponents, not just as another permanent type that draws cards or has a cool ability.
Under this previous conceptualization of the game, wiping a board full of creatures is ripping away resources from opponents in the same way that ripping away artifacts is, or maybe even lands.
These aren’t identical, but the parallels are absolutely there.

Another card type that echoes back to my frustration with Teferi’s Protection is defensive cards.
Attacking a player is a game action, and when a Lantern control deck runs Ensnaring Bridge, that is one of the game actions they are looking to curtail.
We can even think about goad, Mound was correct to call it a cousin to stax, as though it does have the escape valve of getting less effective once the table is down to a 1v1, it’s still a form of limiting player agency.

All of what I just said is fun theorizing, but it doesn’t paint a full picture of stax and what it means for the EDH format, both as a style of card and as an archetype.
The subject of player agency naturally dovetails into a strategy that is very much adjacent to stax: control.
Some of you probably raised your eyebrows at me using Lantern control as an example of stax, it’s right there in the name.
Well, the two strategies are deeply intertwined; they both care chiefly about the range of actions opponents are able to take.
However, there are a handful of commonly cited distinctions between the two.
The most basic distinction is that stax is predominantly permanent-focused, whereas control is typically instant- and sorcery-focused.
This is largely true in that the cards people associate with stax are often permanents and the cards people associate with control often aren’t, but this isn’t a distinction that tells us very much about the game.

A more interesting distinction I’ve heard is that stax is proactive whereas control is reactive.
This isn’t exactly true within the context of EDH, but it’s not true in a very nuanced way that is interesting to explore, so explore we shall.
To start with, when I say stax is proactive and control is reactive, what I mean is that stax plays its answers before problematic spells are cast, whereas control plays its answers after problematic spells are cast, often to counter or remove them.
Neither of these styles are considered proactive in the broader landscape of Magic, but positioning them as proactive versus reactive in comparison to each other isn’t an unreasonable distinction.
On the surface level, there is an undeniable pattern here; a decent portion of stax pieces

Howdy, folks.
My throat is feeling better, enough to record a YouTube video, so here I am.
I plan to upload weekly for the next month to clear out the backlog of videos I’ve been working on, so hopefully that can fill the deep hole in your heart that I’m all but certain my absence has wrought.
I also have a big video about manabases coming up later this month, and with that in mind I figure I may as well run back through a subject that is near and dear to my heart: land counts.
I did talk about this a bit in my lands video almost a year ago, but there was a bunch of other stuff in that video and my thinking has developed a bit since then, so I figure this piece can serve as a more targeted guide.

The question I’ll be looking to help you answer in we i, how many lands should my deck have in it?
And, perhaps more specifically, should my deck have more lands in it?
To help me out with answering this question, I’ll be using a deck I built in March of last year: my R battle cruiser deck.
You can watch the original video about it if you want, but the relevant information for we i that it is a deck with a mana-dork commander, a pile of four-mana ramp spells, and a bunch of six- and seven-drops filling out the rest of the deck, resulting in this deranged mana curve.
It also runs 41 lands.
A bunch of people have made decks riffing off of this deck, which is super cool; I always love to see my decks being an inspiration for people.
What I’ve also noticed, though, is that a common first change for people is cutting three to four lands from the deck.
I guess people must assume that I pulled the number 41 out of a hat, or maybe that’s just my personal preference.
I know I’ve frequently seen land counts referenced online as an across-the-board preference of sorts for people; you’ll see people say that they prefer 35 lands or 36 lands, or that they’re a 38-land sort of person, and other such statements.
I suppose maybe people consider setting the land count of a deck they’re adapting to their preferred number as a part of putting their own spin on it, maybe.
I’ve also seen people react with shock or skepticism when I mention that one of my decks has a land count in the 40s, so maybe people just aren’t sold on a count that high.
Regardless, I want to discuss the different factors that should influence land count, discussing how each of them applied to this deck as an example, and at the end of that process maybe it’ll be a bit more clear why I went with the number I went with, and you might have a bit more insight on how many lands might be right for your deck based on its particular attributes.

For starters, let’s talk about mana curve.
Mana curve refers to the mana costs of the different cards in a deck, and on the most basic level the average mana cost of a deck is an indicator of how much mana that deck needs to do what it wants to do.
As a general pattern, lower-curved decks will want less mana than higher-curved decks and will thus also want a lower land count than higher-curved decks; however, in the context of Commander this is more of a correlation than it is a rule, and there are two main factors that contribute to this correlation.
One of these factors is how quickly a deck is looking to win the game, with lower-curved decks typically winning earlier than higher-curved decks.
Power level and how proactive a deck is will both affect how quickly a deck looks to be closing out games, but regardless, this land count versus win-speed pattern tends to be a reasonably consistent one to see; simply put, you don’t need to play a land on turn seven if there is no turn seven.
Another way that mana curve can influence the number of lands a deck wants is in terms of how accessible the deck’s ways to dig for more lands are.
A deck with lots of low-cost draw and filtering can afford to run a lower land count as long as it can find the colors to cast those digging cards, whereas decks that feature draw and filtering that cost four or more mana will want to run a higher count in order to consistently get enough mana to pay for that draw or filtering, or at least supplement with ramp.
Likewise, decks whose source of dig is more complex, such as a deck that needs both a Garruk’s Uprising and some big creatures to trigger it, will want to be careful to run enough lands to avoid getting stalled out on mana before getting the chance to fulfill the condition that will draw them into more.

Most of my reasoning so far has been in terms of how low a land count a deck can afford to run, but it’s also useful to think about the question of mana curve in terms of how high a count a deck could afford to run.
More complex or mana-expensive forms of draw also typically draw more cards, and if a deck has a lot of heavy-duty draw, such as a green deck running a number of cards that draw cards equal to a creature’s power, it can be possible to run a quite high land count without really feeling negative impacts from it.
What happens if you draw 10 cards and then end the turn with a hand containing six lands and eight non-land cards?
You discard four or five lands, that’s what.
When a deck can readily access powerful draw that is a bit mana expensive, running a higher land count is often an all-around win; either you haven’t gotten enough mana to play the draw yet, in which case a high land count helps you have a higher chance of getting there, or you have played the draw, in which case you’re turning through enough cards to render that slightly increased land density negligible.

What this relates to really is how good a deck is at spending its mana.
Let’s think about what we’re worried about when adding more lands to a deck: it’s flooding, right?
We’re worried that we’ll draw a bunch of lands and, instead of having cool, impactful plays to make, will be stuck sitting around with a handful of lands.
This is a valid concern, and one way to mitigate it is to run fewer lands, but another way is to make sure that your deck is consistently able to turn through excesses of mana.
Having a higher curve alone will provide some insulation against getting flooded, since playing a six-drop is twice as card-efficient as playing two three-drops; this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should pump up your curve to avoid getting flooded, but it does mean that drawing a lot of lands will be more problematic for some decks than others.
As far as tools to reduce flooding go, the sort of big draw I mentioned earlier is a fantastic way to improve a deck’s ability to spend mana, and there are a few different options here.
Decks can run a lot of it, decks can run less of it and run filtering or tutors to find their way to it, and decks can also just put it in the command zone.
There are also other ways to improve ability to spend mana; MDFCs can be nice non-land plays if a land isn’t needed, and there are also impactful mana sinks like X-cost and multi-use activated abilities.
Utility lands can be another great way to avoid running out of gas, as long as their abilities are relevant to a deck’s goals.

So, to pivot over to our example here, how does my R deck do on these criteria that I’ve mentioned?
In terms of mana curve, it has a horrendously high average nonland card cost of 5.33 and nothing below four mana in the 99; its cheapest ways to dig for additional mana are some draw effects at four mana that require additional game actions to actually begin drawing, and I guess some cascade cards on five.
You could say that the deck’s ramp helps it out in terms of getting lands, but this deck would much rather ramp and hit its land drops; each land is effectively worth two mana, meaning that every land drop that this deck needs to ramp out rather than playing normally bears an expensive opportunity cost.
I bumped the land count from 40 up to 41 specifically because I had too many games where I was having precisely this experience, effectively paying mana for land drops that I could be making for free normally.
Okay, so high curve and a high threshold to dig for more lands, these features tell me that a low land count would be tricky to pull off with this deck.
But what about its ability to spend mana in effective ways?
For one, the high curve alone gives the deck a nice boost in maintaining cards in hand; it just can’t play cards very fast early in the game, so its hand size stays big for a while into the game even as it’s spending similar amounts of mana per turn as the rest of the table, and sometimes more.
In addition, though the number of draw spells in the deck isn’t wildly high, like 9 or 10, if I’m being generous about what I consider draw, the deck sees a ton of cards due to the amount of cascade in it, and the fact that several of the draw spells cost four mana means that they pop up reasonably often due to the nature of the mechanic.
Finally, I play a handful of mana sinks such as Captivating Crew for the situations when the deck has an absurd amount of mana but is low on places to put it, and I also have a Panglacial Wurm for when I top-deck a ramp spell and would quite like a wurm to go along with it.
With all of these tools for spending mana, I rarely feel flooded with this deck even though the deck runs 41 lands.

That covers the biggest factors that influence the deck’s land count, but let’s talk about a handful of others that can come into play in certain decks.
For one, the power of mulligans.
You can watch my mulligan video if you want a full rundown of this topic, but the basic gist goes something like this: depending on how they’re built, decks will use their mulligans to find some things more than others.
Some decks will be prioritizing having a piece of ramp in their starting hand, some will prioritize a synergy piece to go with their commander, some will prioritize a low-cost creature, and some will prioritize having three or more lands.
In a probabilistic sense, this is kind of a zero-sum activity; you can only use your mulligans to hunt for so many things, and if you stretch yourself thin on this front you might find yourself dropping down to five-card hands more often than you’d like.
What’s good to keep in mind then is that running a land count closer to your ideal land proportion in your opening hand gives you more wiggle room to use your mulligans to hunt for non-land cards, and 42 is the number of lands in a deck that offers the highest chance for a three-land hand.
My R deck wants a piece of ramp every game without exception, a fairly stringent goal for non-land cards, so running a land count close to this three-land proportion means more three- to four-land hands and more ability to aggressively mulligan for ramp.
Your deck may be more flexible in what non-land cards it wants in its starting hand, in which case a lower land density and a focus on mulliganing for lands may be a more worthwhile plan, but it’s good to consider the trade-offs regardless.

Another reason somebody might want to run a higher land count is that it can allow a deck to have extra lands in hand more of the time.
An obvious application of this is extra-land-play cards; these are often some of the most efficient ramp spells out there, but being able to take full advantage of them requires running a land count high enough to have extra lands in hand.
A less obvious application is that a higher land count gives a player greater control on the timing of when certain lands are played.
A 32-land deck will often need to play a Bojuka Bog on curve in order to not miss a land drop, and this may end up greatly reducing the effectiveness of the card’s ETB; the same goes for Mystic Sanctuary, Mortuary Mire, and Talon Gates of Madara.
Getting substantial utility out of these lands without missing a land drop gets easier the more lands a deck runs.

Finally, let’s talk about one reason a deck might want fewer lands.
Some decks care about what’s on top of their deck more than others, an attribute that I like to call the “krip coefficient.” An example of a deck with a high krip coefficient would be a conventional build of a commander such as Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain; most Jhoira decks run lots of low-cost artifacts, often alongside cost reducers, and then seek to cast a ton of artifact spells in a single turn.
This is a play style that draws lots of cards one at a time and wants drawn cards to be either an artifact or an artifact payoff card, and as a result these decks will generally want to run as few lands as they can get away with.
Storm decks, as many Dargo decks might be considered, care more about the top of their library than just about any other type of deck and will thus usually try to run a very low land count.
A lot of enchantress and spellslinger decks will also rank highly on the krip coefficient, wanting to run as many of their respective card types as possible.
Even my Shorikai slide deck could fit into this mold to some extent with its relationship with cycling cards, though the existence of cycling lands and land-cycling cards makes its relationship with lands quite different than these other decks.
The biggest factor here is that these are high-velocity decks, decks that churn through cards at a fast rate, and also decks that run lots of low-cost cards.
On the other end of things, you’ve got decks with larger-scale draw, particularly ones that have lots of high-cost cards.
My R deck is more on this end of things; it runs a couple cards that draw cards one at a time, like Beast Whisperer and Soul of the Harvest, but outside of top-deck situations with these in play it doesn’t care too much about what percentage of lands it draws.

So that’s how I came to the land count in this particular deck: very high average mana cost, a high threshold to access draw, strong ability to spend mana and maintain cards in hand, and a need to mulligan aggressively for ramp rather than for lands.
You can follow a process for this like I did here, and I’m showing a checklist on screen right now that you can screenshot if you like, though this is a rather crude summary that shouldn’t be treated as gospel for every deck.
I should also note that, though I position 35 to 37 as a moderate count with the number of MDFCs.

I am a hipster.
I am an honest-to-god, dyed-in-the-wool EDH hipster.
I like to play weird, unusual decks that do weird, unusual things with weird, unusual cards.
The idea that I might be playing a deck that does something nobody has done before is extremely cool to me, and that specific task is something that is far more possible to do in EDH than in just about any other format.
The format has a card selection that's almost as wide as Vintage is; it has thousands of different options for commanders.
The fact that it doesn't have a single set power level means that no deck is fully squeezed out as long as you're willing to shop around for an appropriate table to play at.
The level of freedom that the format offers to deck builders can be genuinely overwhelming for the people who aren't used to that, but for the most dedicated brewers of the world, it's basically one big playground of possibilities.
Do you have a funky vision you want to realize?
EDH can absolutely accommodate that.

I do firmly believe all that about the format, and I have long had the goal of pushing the envelope on how weird and niche casual EDH can get.
But for the past couple months, I've also had a nagging thought.
Is the version of the EDH format I'm describing actually a good one?
One that leads the most people to have the most fun?
Is having a weird-off with the table where everybody tries to do the most performatively unusual things actually a good way to play Magic?
Might it even be more ethical, better to one's fellow Magic players, to play a deck that's simpler or does something more common?
So, here, I'm going to explore that nagging doubt.
But first, I need to lay out a bit of context.

The period between 2002 and 2011 saw the EDH format grow from a scarcely known novelty to a format Wizards of the Coast was willing to print cards specifically for.
A big step in this process was its adoption as a casual pick-up format among Pro Tour judges, with the late Sheldon Menery effectively serving as the format's guide and foremost advocate during this period and beyond.
The appeal here is clear; it was a more casual way of playing that could manifest at events once the more cutthroat 1v1 matches of the day had been concluded.
Even after the first precons were released, this culture of pickup games remained strong across the format.
Anecdotally, I played a decent amount of Commander during downtime at local limited and standard events in 2014 and 2015, and it just made sense as a format to play when people were looking for a bit of variety.
In his article for Polygon a few years back, Charlie Hall highlighted some of the appeals.
If a handful of people want to play a game of Magic, rather than figuring out an appropriate format to play or double-checking that a couple casual decks are built under similar ethos, Commander offers an elegant one-size-fits-all solution with a broad card pool and a slim ban list.

Though EDH has since become its own main event in most cases, played among friend groups and in dedicated leagues at local game stores, there are visible indications of the lingering influence of pickup games in the direction Wizards of the Coast has taken with the products they market to Commander players.
While they used to sell a product called Deck Builder's Toolkit as a way for casual players to build their first deck on their own time, these got phased out a few years ago to be replaced with greater Arena support and more products for Commander, the now de facto casual format of paper magic.
Relevant to my point here, most of these products are preconstructed Commander decks, which are ready to play out of the box.
If you're sitting in a game store and a few other people start to play Commander, you can walk up to the counter to buy a precon and some sleeves, and you'll be good to go in a few minutes, assuming you have a couple helpful compatriots to help you sleeve up.

Now, at this point you may be saying, "But Alex, how is this relevant?" Well, let's take a minute to think about the pickup EDH experience, where you sit down to a table and start up a casual EDH game with three unfamiliar opponents who are playing largely unfamiliar decks.

Put simply, it can be a little overwhelming sometimes, and I'm speaking purely from an information standpoint.
With the format being slow and four-player, the board gets gradually clogged with increasing numbers of assorted permanents of various stripes, with the purpose of any single one being potentially unclear.
And this is EDH in the year of our Lord 2024, so all of these have a lot of text, too much text, some might argue.
With thousands of Commander options, there's a good chance of at least one of these at the table being one you haven't played against.
Knowledge of how your opponents plan to win will likely be incomplete at best, and next to nonexistent at worst if nobody bothered to pose that question to the table.
Pickup EDH can be an absolute information overload, and this broader problem can be broken down into two separate subproblems: "card diversity" and "gameplay diversity."

As far as card diversity goes, the EDH format has tens of thousands of cards available to it, and a much less restrictive ban list than Legacy, which otherwise shares a similar card pool.
Not only this, but since the format is 100 card singleton, seeing any singular card in a deck gives far fewer implications for what the rest of the deck might contain compared to other formats, and also results in far more unique cards in each deck.
Multiply this by three to account for the multiplayer aspect of the format, and there will be a lot of cards to keep track of just as a baseline.
Traditionally, veterans of a given format will be better able to keep up with different things opponents are playing due to wider card knowledge, but with Wizards of the Coast increasing the number of brand new cards they print into the Commander format from the high hundreds per year to multiple thousand per year, keeping up even as an experienced EDH player can be difficult.
My friend Hans built a funky new deck recently, and even as somebody who basically thinks about EDH as a profession, there were a surprising number of cards from this deck that I had no familiarity with whatsoever.
In a game with several decks containing unfamiliar cards, just processing these new pieces of cardboard and figuring out how to play against them in real time can eat up precious mental energy that could otherwise go toward planning future turns, politicking, and performing threat analysis on other cards.
And that's with a group of experienced players.

The new player in EDH is a whole different beast.
While the number of different non-land cards in opponent's decks in a 60-card 1v1 format might be somewhere in the 15 to 20 range, in EDH that number might be 10 times that amount.
Getting a foothold in that environment will be a difficult and time-consuming process even in a setting with somewhat consistent decks and players; in an environment with rapidly changing decks and players, this is amplified.
I'm not saying it's impossible.
There are plenty of magic players who have learned the game through EDH, and I'm sure there are some who even thrived in this high-stimulation, information-dense environment.
There are also likely plenty of people who learned the format somewhat more gradually, but who had plenty of fun throughout the whole process, even if they weren't keeping up 100% the whole time.
I certainly don't think it's worth anyone's time and energy to push players away from the Commander format; it has clearly taken a hold of casual magic, and there are lots of aspects of it that are likely fun for newer players.

What I am saying, though, is that increasing the card diversity of decks does meaningfully increase the length of time it'll take for a new player to get a foothold within the format.
When I made my video about cEDH a few months back, I got a number of interesting comments from people who prefer competitive EDH specifically because there are fewer viable cards in the format that require keeping track of.
A few of these were people who had jumped straight into cEDH from a 60-card format or a different card game entirely, and this makes sense on some level.
If you're looking to play Commander seriously, and you don't want to have to bother with learning the thousands upon thousands of cards you might see in casual EDH, cEDH is a nice alternative.
It may even be, as a casual EDH player in the comments pondered, a smoother experience for those wanting to play Commander with strangers for more reasons than one.
I see this as the most reasonable response to my main gripe with cEDH.
Yes, fewer cards are viable, and that's good, actually.

The issue of the EDH format's card diversity is compounded when decks are equally diverse in their play patterns.
The origins of the format were people throwing together their bulk cards they couldn't play in Standard and playing them under the banner of a commander that was vaguely related at best, and this likely resulted in unfocused blobs of mid-range being a dominant deck type, maybe with some funky synergies coming to the fore here and there.
And as a casual pick-up format, this makes sense.
If decks are built more to produce relaxed games and showcase unusual cards than to win, the presence of those cards can take center stage.
Like, sure, you might have to refresh yourself on what Frailly Supplicant does, but it's probably not going to rapidly spell your downfall.
However, as decks have gotten more streamlined and have started to accomplish increasingly specific tasks increasingly quickly, lacking knowledge of the ins and outs of what your opponent's deck is doing starts to become more of a problem.
As you might expect, this effect also scales with power level up to a certain point.

If you're playing against unaltered precons, you can usually at least assume there will be some sort of synergy-based mid-range thing going on along with a couple predictable side synergy packages.
If you're playing against a handful of mid-power mid-range decks, there will likely be less certainty and more surprises, but you still can probably get at least a rough idea of what's going on without knowing the opposing decks.
However, it's the power level I'd describe as "high-power casual" where things start to feel really weird when playing with strangers.
Infinite combos, locks, and back-breakingly powerful value engines get assembled on a whim, and with only relatively subtle hints to indicate their approach.
Whereas in cEDH, there is a smaller group of viable strategies with off-meta tech being a spicy exception rather than the rule, high-power casual is packed to the rafters with off-meta because there isn't a meaningful meta beyond some archetypes being a bit more popular than others.

Now, I do love me some high-power casual, and I can even see a sort of weird allure in playing with unfamiliar people and unfamiliar decks.
It's a zany, explosive form of magic where games are often quick and where there's a ton of sleuthing the ins and outs of opposing decks that happens on the fly.
But I'd also wager that this is where a big dose of frustration comes from in pick-up magic, particularly in games that straddle the line between mid and high power and where players enter with differing expectations.
If everybody is already needing to process the cards and decks of three different opponents, and they don't know the cohesive plan of any one opponent, let alone three, well, this is an environment where it's very easy to slip through a power play that opponents just aren't equipped to challenge.
Sure, one could argue just hold up removal, but that misunderstands the nature of threat assessment.
If I know my opponent's decks, I can think to myself, "Okay, I'm 90% sure player A doesn't have the pieces to combo off on their next turn, and player B should be two mana short of a game-winning spell." And then decisions can be made on whether to hold up interaction based on if I have other useful plays to make that outweigh that risk.
But, if instead of being 85% sure it's safe to tap out, I have no firm estimate whatsoever, what exactly am I supposed to do?
Hold up mana every turn?
The answer is probably hold up mana when it's nice to do so, and don't when it's not, and maybe do my best to follow context clues; but then on some level it's just a random luck check for whether or not I lose to some right?
This effect is unfortunately amplified the more unique ways of gaining advantage and winning exist within a game.
You can keep track of some number of cards commonly associated with combos, but when decks have plans that are weird or unconventional, there will be plenty of things that slip through the cracks.
In competitive terms, you might call this "brewer's advantage," but in a casual context, it can create dynamics that aren't necessarily positive for everybody involved.

With all that in mind, it might make sense that the experience that gave me my love for weird offbeat EDH decks was actually an environment that had basically none of these problems.
From the fall of 2019 to the summer of 2021, my playgroup of five people played about 200 games with a set of 10 budget decks, with each deck seeing an average of one major rebuild over the course of those two years.
Though several of these decks were quirky and evocative, and though the card choices in them got pretty funky, the fact that we were exclusively playing with these 10 guild divided decks meant that the plans for each deck and the cards used within those plans became all but public knowledge.
Multiple players basically learned the game through this pool, and despite the diversity within the pool, this was an ideal environment for that.
You could learn the game pieces and what each deck was doing reasonably easily, and even if you'd forgotten something, other players at the table were li.

Magic: The Gathering is a card game where cards are drawn from a deck, and this naturally introduces a certain amount of randomness.
Sometimes draws are good, other times they're less good; I imagine this isn't news to you if you play this game a lot, either that or you've had a luck streak worthy of legend.
In the worst case, you've got the dead card, a card that you draw and it doesn't do anything meaningful whatsoever.
To some extent, this sort of draw is just a fact of life, and it's not something you're going to be able to fully avoid.
Drawing a land when you don't want one, or not drawing a land when you do, will always be a struggle.
And though MDFCs, utility lands, and other tools can mitigate some of this unfortunate variance, it will always be a somewhat present force.
But what about among non-land cards?
Well, the number of non-land draws that end up being more or less dead can vary immensely deck to deck, and this number will often result from the specific choices that went into the deck building process.
So, here, I'm going to go through the sorts of cards that often end up being dead draws in a deck and how to make your deck play more smoothly without harming the things you enjoy about it.

To start with, let's talk about an example of a deck with more or less no dead non-land cards: a deck with 35 swamps and 64 rat colonies.
All of this deck's non-land cards synergize with each other, and you'll generally never draw a card and have it be entirely useless.
However, this obviously comes at a cost.
An exclusively rat colony and swamp deck has an exceptionally specific game plan with little to no flexibility; either a board with a moderate number of high power, low toughness creatures wins you the game or it doesn't.
I choose this example not as a point of aspiration, but rather as an indication of what reduces dead draws.
These rat colonies have no variation in the tasks they perform, all creatures that can beat down opponents, and they also all synergize with each other.
So, the start of dead draw mitigation starts by paying attention to these two things: what does a card accomplish, and what else does it synergize with?

Let's start by discussing the latter.
EDH as a format encourages synergy, and by synergy, I simply mean cards doing more together than they do on their own.
This is the case because the format is 40 life instead of 20 and has three opponents instead of one, conditions that necessitate that gameplay be volumetrically larger; you simply have to have more stuff going on.
Obviously, the most simple version of this is the rat colony example: your deck is made up of a creature that will have more power the more copies of it that are in play.
But this isn't enough volume for a lot of EDH games.
So let's take the example of a somewhat larger lad: Kyler, Sigardian Emissary.
Kyler is a five mana 2/2 that gets a +1/+1 counter whenever another human enters and gives your other humans +1/+1 for each of those counters.
So, this is a commander who can dramatically power up a board of humans if left unchecked, but whose high mana cost and small starting stat line make him a bit of a removal magnet.

Naturally, the primary synergy package here is humans, but different cards have different profiles of the situations in which they're good.
Copper Coat Vanguard is good as long as you have other humans, a pretty decent assumption for a humans deck, and also gives the commander a bit of extra protection.
This card should rarely feel useless and could even be a pretty solid anthem if there are tokens out.
That brings me to another card: Increasing Devotion.
This is a large-scale token creator, and this one is slightly more complicated in its power profile.
It's fantastic if you currently have Kyler on board plus some other humans to swing with, it's decent if you have some other human ETB effects on board like Lossarnach Captain or Champion of the Parish in play, also decent if you have an anthem at the ready to pump them up in size, and pretty mediocre if you have none of these support cards.
The flashback prevents it from ever feeling truly horrible, but it might be a passable play at best if you have neither the commander available nor any of the 15ish cards in the deck that can amplify this card up to being a decent play.
Most of the popular synergy cards for a Kyler deck will do things with humans, and with some exceptions, most of these will be pretty okay.

However, synergy can go a bit deeper; you can venture into the magical world of sub-themes.
Take +1/+1 counters.
The commander uses them, and the average Kyler deck has around 12 cards in the 99 that also feature +1/+1 counters.
So, some players choose to add Metastatic Evangel, a card that proliferates whenever another non-token creature enters under your control.
Paired with the commander, this card can turn powerful plays into utterly earth-shattering plays, but it also doesn't do much to smooth over Kyler's weaknesses; if he gets removed, the counters go with him.
Put into the average Kyler deck, this card benefits 12 other cards, which isn't nothing, but also isn't great.
Paired with its somewhat ephemeral support of the commander, I'd skip this card personally.
Now, does this mean our Phyrexian cleric friend belongs in no decks?
Not necessarily.
Some players might be running larger numbers of +1/+1 counter cards than the average player does, and others might be building the deck in a way that's likely to keep Kyler around more of the time.
This card might even be a star player in some of these decks.
It's certainly not a "bad card," but these are the sorts of considerations you should be making when you're deciding whether or not to add a synergy piece.
How often will it be in a situation to support other cards, and how substantial will that support be?

When I'm building decks, I'll typically keep track of support for different themes and sub-themes via Architect's category system.
I'll have the baseline categories I put cards into, but also secondary categories for things like flicker, ETB, graveyard enabler, graveyard payoff, and so on.
When I'm adding cards and trying to flesh out a list, I'll be mostly viewing the deck on the primary categories tab to keep things visually neat.
But as I start to prune and sculpt the list, I'll start bouncing back and forth between that and the multicategory tab and see if the various parts of my deck have the right amount of support.
This multicategory approach is also nice for evaluating individual cards because I can immediately see and be reminded of all of the reasons I included a particular card, which also indirectly tells me the situations in which a card will be useful.

As an example, let's take a card in a subtheme-heavy Phyrexian deck I recently built: that of Rebirth.
The categories here tell me that it's a source of value that's payoff for having things in the graveyard.
So, as a baseline, I can check how much stuff I have that helps me get things into the graveyard with a focus on creatures since that's what this can reanimate.
However, the other categories also tell me things about this card; it will be stronger alongside counter amplifiers like proliferate cards, and it'll also be stronger when I have untap effects on the field.
It's also an artifact and a low-cost one at that, so it'll synergize with several other cards for that reason alone, and those cards are already helpfully organized into a category for me to check on.
I can think about all the other combinations of cards this card may or may not be on the field with, and based on that, I can approximate roughly how often this card will be useful and roughly how often this card will be dead.
The answer for this card is that it'll be dead some modest percentage of the time in the early game, maybe 25% of the time, but there are also situations where it'll be very powerful due to other supporting pieces being around.
So, I've currently deemed it worth staying in.
I also love the art and flavor of the card, which does end up being a non-negligible factor for a lower power deck like this.

So, that's synergies, but that's only one part of what makes a card dead or not dead.
Another big factor to keep in mind is what stage of a game a card is useful in.

And before I get into that, I briefly want to introduce a concept: quadrant theory.
This sounds complicated, but it's basically just a way of analyzing different situations in which a card could be played.
A basic example goes something like this: we have this four-quadrant box, and in this case, we'll choose to label the top side based on the size of an opponent's board and the left side based on the size of my board.
Now, let's consider the card Teleportal.
How is this in different situations?
Well, if we both have small boards, this card sucks, not many creatures to affect and not many creatures to get past.
If I have a small board and my opponent has a large board, this is still pretty bad, but maybe there are some niche scenarios where it lets me get in for the last couple points of damage after my opponent has stabilized against my aggression and it can be cast single target for two mana in a pinch.
If I have a large board and my opponent has a small board, the unblockable isn't doing much, but at least I'm getting a power buff on all my creatures.
Where this card is a straight-up banger is when we both have large boards; this is the sort of situation where I'm probably praying for this card as a top deck since it's getting maximum effect.
This concept was originally designed with limited formats in mind, where cards are typically simpler and players tend to be on the lookout for narrow slivers of advantage.
Fundamentally though, quadrant theory has a straightforward and universally applicable purpose: it exists to make sure that you're thinking about all of the situations a card might exist in, not just the ideal ones.

A variant of this might be to analyze a card based on the stage of the game we're in.
Take a card in a mid-power deck.
How is that card in the early game?
How does it fare in the midgame?
Now, decks will typically gain more card advantage over the course of the game, so it's fine to weight your analyses a bit more heavily toward the later parts of the game as long as you have the support to get there.
But you should still consider different versions of that late game.
There will be the version of the later game where you're hitting your stride without setbacks, but what happens if a board wipe is played?
How about if you have your board, but your life total has been taxed heavily by a more aggressive deck?
How about if a mid-range opponent is pulling far ahead and you need to either kill some key permanents or heavily diminish their life total?
Different games will demand different things, and you should figure out how your different cards play in those different games.

For a simple example, let's talk about my Rata deck, a deck designed to be as resilient and consistent with its gameplay as possible.
It typically curves mana dork commander into four mana ramp spell into six and seven drops with the goal of continuing to ramp and eventually getting to 20 or more lands.
With that in mind, let's talk about a couple cards that are present here.
Drakuseth, Maw of Flames is a seven mana 7/7 flyer that deals four damage to one target and three damage to two targets when it attacks.
Oddly, this is a card that I'm actually most excited to see early, as landing it on turn four onward can be a pretty backbreaking opener if it doesn't get removed due to its sheer power as a removal engine.
However, it's still plenty solid as a top deck later in the game, what with its good flying statline and attack ability that remains respectable even if the creature size game has been heating up a bit.
This sort of card is a good symbol of what this deck is best at; it's just always decent.

For an example with a decidedly different power profile, let's consider a different card: Captivating Crew.
Now, this card is pretty bad in the early game.
Four mana to threaten an opposing creature is just never what I want to do with my mana in the first six turns of the game, and I'm rarely all that happy when my turn four or five cascade card pops out this treason-triggering troop rather than a ramp spell.
However, what keeps me from cutting the card is its sheer versatility in the late game.
As long as I have enough lands, it almost always feels good.
If I'm ahead on board, I can pull the last two or three blockers out from under an opponent and smack them down before they have the chance to stall things out.
If I'm behind on board, it often means that I had a more aggressive but worse scaling roll-out in the early game, in which case I can often leverage opposing life totals to get some favorable jump blocks or at least utilize some abilities on opposing creatures.
If the board is in a state of parity, it's the best of both worlds; I can nab my opponent's best threats and turn a five-attacker, five-blocker standstill into an 8/2 or 9/1 smackdown.
I was a bit hesitant to add this card to the deck initially, but the sheer consistency with which it feels great in the late game has made it one of my favorite top decks.

So far, the lesson of we have been more or less: be careful with cards whose use cases are highly specific.
But I can already hear some of you saying, "But Alex, I want to play those cards.
You're describing a lot of my favorite cards.
Are you telling me I need to cut those?" And the secret third part of we i that you can play those cards, and you can do it fully responsibly, but doing so requires one specific thing: card selection.
This may be achieved by playing lots of filtering or by playing a generally high-velocity deck, but the basic principle is simple; dead cards won't matter as long as you simply see more cards.
A basic example of this might be an ongoing source of draw.

Let's say it's a lovely Tuesday evening and you're out there living your best life, building a new commander deck from the comfort of your couch.
You start by finding cards; maybe they're from EDRE, maybe they're from Scrifall Searches, and maybe they're from your friend Brad, who happens to be an expert on four-toughness creatures.
Regardless, you're finding lots of cool stuff for your deck, and you're tossing them into some sort of deck building website, watching them neatly segregate themselves by card type before your very eyes.
This is fine at first, but over time, things will start to get a bit muddier.
You know the numbers of the card types, which will be helpful for some decks, but additional information is hard to come by.
What if you need to know how much low-cost ramp you have to decide on how many higher mana cards you can support?
What if you need to know how many cards allow you to cast things from outside your hand for the purposes of Flaming Tyrannosaurus?
What if you're trying to make sure that you've got the right number of things to slow down opponents and protect what you've got?
This is where categorizing starts to become really useful: you can lump a specific group of cards into their own little bucket and keep track of them that way.
Though a lovely tool on the surface, categories can range a bit in their usefulness.
They can be a helpful tool in deck building, but they can just as easily add more confusion than they elucidate or even lead players down unfortunate deck building paths all on their own.
So, here, I want to talk about what categories accomplish and how to get the most utility out of them in deck building, as well as how some people are setting back their own decks by using them wrong.
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Okay, so the first thing categories do is capture the core tasks that the cards in your deck are performing and allow you to specifically look at these subsets.
I always start out with categories of card that most decks will want at least some of, principally "lands," "ramp," "draw," "protection," and "interaction." These categories are useful because, all on their own, they start to paint a picture of the shape of what a deck is doing.
If a deck runs a lot of lands and ramp, I know I'm going to be looking at a big mana mid-range deck that's looking to outscale its opponents.
If I see a deck that's lower on cards intended to interact with opposing plays and higher on protection, I know I'm going to be looking at something that's faster and more proactive.
I'm going to get more into constructing these categories and when to break them up, but first, I want to lay out a cautionary note.
I've seen a lot of guys recommending people include a category such as "theme" as a discrete entity alongside these other sorts of function categories, at least in the early stages of deck building, and I simply cannot recommend that as a general practice.
This is a somewhat misleading piece of advice because in most successful decks, a large number of these "theme" cards will also be accomplishing the other core tasks I mentioned earlier: mana acceleration, value generation, protection, and ways to slow opponents.
There may be some cards that only do their theme, such as one mana birds in a safara deck or muroke lords in a hackball deck, but a whole lot of other theme cards will often be contributing to one of these core categories.
If somebody asked me for healthy starting ranges for their core categories for a bog standard EDH deck, I'd say something like 35 to 40 lands, 15 to 20 pieces of removal equivalent, 13 to 18 pieces of draw, 7 to 12 pieces of ramp, and 3 to 8 pieces of protection.
What you may notice about that is that if you go on the higher end of each of these values to be safe, that adds up to 98 deck slots; you've got a whole one left over to work with after these core categories.
This is not to say that you necessarily need these numbers in every deck or that there won't be overlap between categories, but the implication here is that cards that don't fit into one of these categories are inherently charging your deck an opportunity cost, and you should keep that in mind when deciding how many of them to have.
With that out of the way for now, let's get into the meat of these core categories because there can be nuances in what a category should cover.

Lands are the simplest because the deck building role lands generally matches up one to one with the card type of land.
You can make an exception for non-mana producing lands such as glacial chasm or specific centerpiece lands like Mesa's End since these won't be producing mana as their primary function.
But for most other cards, I keep them categorized as a "land" first and foremost with any other functions entered as subcategories I can look at later.
In this case, the utility of including or excluding lands from your lands category comes from how you use that category.
As long as the cards in your lands category are cards that you personally consider a land drop, you can do some math on the resulting number and figure out how successful you'll be at making it up to your higher costed spells.

Speaking of which, let's talk about ramp.
This is one of the trickier core categories because it can vary so much.
Most decks want some of it; some decks want a lot of it; a handful of decks won't want much at all.
So, when constructing your ramp category, you should be asking yourself, why am I ramping?
If your ramp is geared to hit specific cards a turn early, you'll want to be specific with the curve of your mana, and it even might be worth including ritual style cards that can give temporary mana in some circumstances.
By contrast, if your ramp is generally geared toward increasing the volume of your mana without specific timing goals, less card efficient options like smaller ramp and ritual style cards won't make as much sense, and bigger options will likely work out.
You'll sometimes catch me saying something like, "Warn Power Stone isn't a ramp spell if you're playing a Cranco deck," because it's fun to speak in cryp absolutes; but what I really mean when I say that is that if your acceleration category is mainly intended to get you to four mana a turn early, Warn Power Stone doesn't fit that function and thus probably isn't worth playing unless you can find another purpose for it.

The same goes for interaction, which I choose to define here as cards that exist to set opponents back in some way.
The card murder performs one game action, destroying a creature, but this game action can accomplish a number of different tasks: killing a big attacker, clearing out a blocker, stopping a combo, taking care of a value engine, eliminating a stacks piece, and so on.
This fact gets a bit more puzzling when we consider that there are lots of cards that perform some of these tasks, often better than a murder can, but can't perform others.
Fogs are great defensively and even against some combos, but they're useless for slowing opponents down.
Counter spells will be good at protection and combo breaking, but the timing will restrict their usefulness in limiting opposing value, and they can't deal with things already in play.
Your instinct might be to back away from this fact and pretend it doesn't exist, but for purposes of categorization, all this means is that in lieu of perfectionism, we can focus on building categories that are flexible and work with our deck's needs.
One categorical starting point I've used before is having two slightly fuzzy buckets: protection plus counter spells, and removal plus defense.
This might sound odd at first, but it makes some sense if you think about all interaction in terms of how proactive versus reactive it is.
Protection is very proactive in the sense that it purely supports your own game plan and involves thinking ahead toward possible issues, and counter spells are similar but with a bit more flexibility to hit opposing threats.
Removal of all types will be a bit more reactive since it gets played after a problem card has resolved, though since it can target value engines, it could still play more of a calculated long-term role in a deck.
Defensive cards like attack and damage prevention are the most reactive in my mind since they're a thing whose only purpose is preventing a player from losing, the final line of defense in an EDH game.
With these different types of cards laid out, the two buckets approach basically just draws an arbitrary line somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of tools, though it might be useful to get more specific.
If you have a deck that cares about a particular interactive tool like defense or stacks to hinder things that might otherwise give you problems, give it a category.
If you have a deck that cares about protection, definitely give it a category; it'll be good to keep an eye on.
Putting this extra thought into categories will also give you a better idea of what your deck does or doesn't need.
I'll often include graveyard exile in a removal stacks or general interaction category because most decks won't gain anything by granting this necessary tool its own category.
This won't be the case for all decks though.
My Malfagore deck has three separate categories for his interaction sweep because they all serve different roles.
Discard effects put my opponents behind in value; removal deals with active threats on the board; and graveyard exile serves an unusually key role here in preventing opponents with graveyard oriented decks from getting use out of the cards I'm causing them to discard.
On the other hand, if different interaction pieces aren't serving clearly defined roles that you want to keep an eye on, it might be perfectly fine to throw them together in the same category; it all depends on how much you care about distinguishing somewhat different effects from one another.

The same is true for draw to a lesser extent.
If you have a bunch of normal card draw in your deck, you might call that category "draw." If you add in some handful of draw adjacent things like Leia or Futureight, those are also probably fine in the draw category as long as you're not a quasa player, though you could also rename the category to "value" or something; the name isn't too relevant.
What is relevant is when different draw adjacent cards start to perform different tasks.
In my draw video, I laid out that various things that allow a player to see and play with more cards can be placed along a continuum based on how much of a player's library they allow you to see.
In the middle is ordinary draw, seeing as many cards as it acquires, and on the edges are pure filtering spells which generate no card advantage and pure value cards which don't even interact with the player's library.
In some cases, all of these can be lumped into the same category: tutors, card draw, recursion, and so on.
But other times, different cards might start to take on different roles.
You might run tutors or filtering spells to allow you to find the tools to build up some sort of central engine for your deck, and in that case, you might want to keep the digging cards and the value cards in different categories to keep an eye on how many of each you've got.
That's just a case where categories might be nice.
Depending on how you're building value, it might be essential to lay out more clear roles.
Some decks might run a bunch of draw, discard, looting cards as their card selection to find what they need, and also some recursion or other graveyard synergies as their sources of value to get advantage over their opponents.
In that case, those two things are going to be playing quite distinct roles in the deck to the point where they basically become a whole separate thing: a synergy package.

This is the second major thing categories do, allowing people to keep track of synergies.
Specifically, for each synergy package, I'll typically include two categories: "setup" and "payoff." As an example, in a flicker deck I have, I include a core cards category that includes my three flicker engines plus a card that increases the overall velocity of the deck, and I also include a category called "m tasty slide" that features creatures with ETBs I might want to repeat through flickering.
Relevantly, the former category is a primary category because pushing my flicker game plan is the only thing these cards accomplish, whereas the other category is a subcategory that I don't need to see all the time.
This is because being flickerable isn't the primary role of these cards; it's simply an attribute about them.
The fact that they have an ETB that's useful to repeat is only a relevant fact when I have an astral sight effect available, and their role is typically the same in either case, just amplified if they're being flickered.
There might be other situations where both setup and payoff are in their own subcategories or where these things are layered into different categories, whatever ends up making the most sense to you.
Regardless, the utility that the categories are creating for you in this case is allowing you to keep an eye on how well supported a specific theme is.
It's easy to throw a flicker thawsa into your deck after spott.

The task of symbol management exists in all formats, limited, 60-card constructed, and EDH, but when it comes to how this task is accomplished, things diverge.
Whereas in limited your task will generally be to create the least bad mana base you can out of basics and whatever non-basics you were lucky to get your hands on, in EDH your options will be a whole lot less limited.
Dual lands can simply be put into your deck, and not just guildgates or gain-one lands; a plethora of different high-quality fixing lands are available, from pain lands to fetches to triomes and beyond.
The available fixing is so good, in fact, that EDH decks often include some number of lands which are lackluster in their color-producing abilities, instead played for other benefits they provide.
These are usually called “utility lands.” But how many of these is it appropriate to play?

There are plenty of ways we could come up with these categories, but I decided to just have one category for each possible combination of the five colors, giving us a total of 32.
This is also the number of unique values that can be represented by five bits, which means that if we number those categories just right, the bits that store the number for each category will also store the combination of colors its lands can produce.
If we’re willing to get our hands dirty with some bit-level operations, we can get a ton of mileage out of these categories.
This is ultimately how we determine if a set of lands can cast a spell, but that process is a little too complicated to explain here.
If we test every combination of lands to see if they can cast a spell, we can get a probability for how often a given number of lands will be able to cast a given spell.
By running this for different numbers of lands, we can get an idea of how many lands we need to cast the spell, and by factoring in the land count of the deck we can figure out when we will draw those lands.
This lets us determine how often we can cast a spell on curve and how much time we spend waiting for the right lands to cast it.
If we do this for all the spells in the deck and average the results, we can get an overall representation of how well a deck’s manabase can cast its spells.
Once we have a way to score a manabase like this, we can test out small changes to find the best way to improve it.

So this is the backbone of the tool.
Average delay in casting spells is the benchmark here that is used to judge decks, alongside “cast rate,” which here means how likely it is that a card will be castable on a turn on or before its mana value.
The tool also tests small changes in the deck, seeing how it is changed by adding a single basic land for each type among the next colors as well as a Wastes.
This is helpful for pointing out which colors are most needed, and the inclusion of Wastes also gives insight about how a deck’s land count is looking.
Adding a Wastes to a deck shouldn’t really help it cast spells with less delay, or at least it should help a lot less than adding something that actually taps for colors.
If adding a Wastes reduces the average delay of a deck by a substantial amount, that’s a good indicator that it might need more lands, or at least that land count is a bigger problem for it than color fixing.

Interaction is a well-trodden question within the EDH community, with raging debates over how much is too much, how little is too little, what types are the best, and what types are the rudest.
I've thrown my hat in this ring before, but what has struck me recently is how many people seem to not really understand interaction as a concept and what it is accomplishing for any given deck.
As with many subjects, we as the EDH community have created lots of little myths about interaction and removal.
When I say myths, I don't mean strictly untrue statements, but rather kind of true things accepted as undeniable fact or sometimes true things overgeneralized to be always true.
So, I want to tackle some of these misunderstandings and, in the process, drill into the fundamentals of what interaction does, why different decks want it, and how best to use it.

To start with, let's talk about what's worth considering alongside your removal when deck building.

I've occasionally gotten some flak because I tend to have a pretty wide scope of what I consider "interaction" and "removal," and I'll sometimes organize my interaction suites in ways that other people find unintuitive.
Graveyard exiling is a form of removal; bounce spells are a form of removal; and defensive cards like Propaganda are a form of removal, though the degree this label fits will depend on the deck.
I think the reason this rubs people wrong is because they have a very specific idea of what "removal" entails.
Removal is when you remove an opposing thing, and more specific tools like defensive cards, graveyard hate, protection, and pinpoint land destruction deserve to be placed in an entirely different mental category, their own boxes on a checklist.
In some decks, these things will warrant this sort of separation, but in many others, doing this is a waste of time at best, and in the worst cases, actively counterproductive to constructing a functional deck.
No, instead of this sort of checklist approach, the best way to think about interaction is as a network of overlapping solutions to a number of specific game states.

Let's say an opponent plays Animate Dead to bring back an Archon of Cruelty, and let's say this poses a problem to us.
How can we shut this down before they start attacking us with it?
Well, we could destroy the Archon of Cruelty with creature removal; we could destroy the Animate Dead with enchantment removal; we could counter the Animate Dead with a counterspell; and we could use instant-speed graveyard hate to exile Archon of Cruelty in response.
There are some less common approaches as well, but let's stick with these four.
In this case, all four of these options would be ways of removing this threat, dealing with this game state that I've decided is problematic to us.
I'll allow myself a single cheeky comment here and point out that, for our purposes, a Braids is not a removal spell and Cremate is.

For another example, let's say our opponent is playing a Krenko deck and is starting to pop off: several goblins, a couple sources of untapping, an Anger in the graveyard, the works.
A piece of instant-speed creature removal could deal with this so long as Krenko isn't wearing Swiftfoot Boots or something.
However, there are a number of less absolute ways to slow down or survive this sort of play.
You could have a Soul Sister route out to allow your life total to keep pace with the number of goblins on board, or you could have a defensive card like Ghostly Prison already in play to limit the number of attackers; you could even have a Thalia, Heretic Cathar to have the goblins enter tapped as punishment for their token crimes.

Now, just what point am I trying to make here, you might ask?
Put simply, in EDH, problems are often more complicated than one single problem permanent that needs to be removed, and even more complicated than just being the occasional spooky board that needs wiping.
Single-target removal and generic board wipes can be the solution to a lot of problems, and I'd never tell you to avoid these cards; but they're far from the only options available, and a lot of times they won't be the most efficient way to tackle a given problem.
Sources of graveyard exile are generally extremely cheap per mana, as are stax cards, defensive permanents, and other things that stick around to hinder multiple opposing plays.
As a result, it's beneficial to get to know these types of cards and the sorts of decks and metagames where they could play the role of more traditional removal better.

When newer players are being inducted into the ways of the Commander format, discussions of interaction tend to center card types as the thing to focus on: you want a way to hit creatures, to hit artifacts, to hit enchantments, and so on.
To be clear, I have no problem with this; card types are undoubtedly a good thing to think about as a starting point.
However, as you get acquainted with more common play patterns of decks and which ones you tend to have a problem with, it becomes much more useful to focus on situations that need to be remedied.
Some decks won't care about certain types of threats as much: a go-wide token deck isn't going to be as spooky if you're playing a thick-boarded mid-range deck; a pinging engine isn't going to be as spooky if you're playing a deck with a good amount of life gain; decks with more explosive plays aren't going to be as spooky if you're already packing a handful of hate pieces, and so on.
If you're playing a deck with a focus on some defensive cards, you're already going to be somewhat shielded from a lot of plays that involve large combat steps; and if you're playing a deck that runs some counterspells for protection, you're already going to have some ways to nail critical centerpiece cards or combos.
Likewise, an interaction suite that does a good job of handling the threats of one table might not do as good a job at a different table; you need to know the environment you're stepping into.

To clarify, if what I'm saying sounds overwhelming, you shouldn't worry about it too much.
What I'm describing is what takes place during a potentially months-long process of tuning and pruning a deck, not necessarily what you should be doing when you're first putting together a deck.
It's fine if you're using templates or rough rules of thumb to start out with, but as you get deeper into tuning an individual deck, and as you get more experienced as a deck builder, it's generally good to move away from deciding counts of different cards using a simple template.
There's no way to know exactly how many removal spells or overall interaction spells you need, because different forms of removal will have overlap in the profile of what they can answer, and different interaction spells will have different degrees of how much they hinder opposing plays.
Not to mention, different decks run different amounts of draw.

Some of my decks will run interaction counts in the teens, but others might run twenty-some or even thirty-some cards that interact with the resources of opponents in some way, excluding life total, and excluding life total isn't even necessarily a fair thing to do.
I don't know if you've ever watched how a person with 14 life conducts themselves in a Commander game, but it's generally very different than how somebody with 34 life conducts themselves.
That 14-life person will often find themselves holding back on attacks and chump blocking more often than they'd like, and they're also going to be more conservative in the sorts of spells they play.
Tapping out to draw a bunch of cards or play some powerful amplifier permanent is perfectly commonplace for somebody at a higher life total, but it's a terrifying proposition when finding just a little bit of extra damage could let an opponent swing lethal.
For that reason, having a higher degree of life total pressure can often allow for a bit smaller of a removal count.
All sorts of late-game permanents that would generally be good candidates for removal become a lot less of a concern if their controller is in range of being rapidly focused down.
This is one reason why Magister Sphinx is such a useful card in my Sharuum Slide deck; the deck generally looks to build toward a late-game win, so having a way to put an opponent on death's door if they're pushing out of control a bit too early is a sweet escape valve that takes a bit of pressure off the deck's control spells.

Overall, though, this life total rule is generally going to be most pertinent in aggro decks and especially in Voltron decks, which typically look to knock down players one at a time with commander damage.
Careful threat assessment and a few swings with a big commander can be worth countless pieces of removal; and for the pieces of removal that do exist in a deck, it can be beneficial to have them be targeted more towards the stages of a game that are worth worrying about.
Get rid of some blockers; kill something that can let an opponent stabilize; remove a bigger mana dork that might let an opponent contest you.
Flame Slash isn't going to be a great card in most slower decks because it misses a whole lot of stuff that you'll see in the later stages of a Commander game, but that's not super important if your most important turns are going to be happening earlier.

Ultimately, all I'm trying to say here is that different decks will utilize removal for very different purposes.
If you're playing a creature-based aggressive deck, you might want to focus on options that can clear out blockers, and you likely won't want much in the way of conventional board wipes unless you have ways to make them one-sided.
If you're playing a combo deck, you want to focus your interaction on dealing with obstacles to your combo and spending removal on only the most imminent of threats.
In either of these cases, your interaction will exist predominantly to buy yourself time, and things opponents have that require time on their end, like draw or a mana engine, might not be a concern to you at all.
By contrast, if you're playing a slower, more controlling deck, you'll want to focus more of your removal on knocking out resource generation, such as card draw engines, since not letting opponents get ahead of you will be important in winning in the long game.
You also might want to focus on interaction that targets multiple things or which accomplishes multiple tasks, since those tend to be more card efficient.
These cards do tend to cost more mana, though, which brings me to the final myth I want to tackle.

Let's talk about the interaction staples of the format, specifically when they should be played or not played.
Typically, the forms of removal considered "staples" are the ones that cost very little mana and hit a limited range of targets, such as Nature's Claim, or which cost a bit more mana but which hit a variety of different targets, such as Generous Gift.
There are also a handful of board wipes that end up heavily played because they're just hands down the best thing available in a given color.
Now, am I about to explain to you why these cards are garbage that you need to rip out of your deck?
No. In fact, I'm about to tell you exactly why these cards are generally so good, because I think a lot of people have a tendency to accept that these cards are always the best option and treat it as dogma, a primordial and unshakable feature of our world alongside gravity and the rising of the sun, and this does these cards a bit of a disservice.

Let's start with flexible removal spells.
Why are Beast Within, Chaos Warp, and Generous Gift good cards?
Right off the bat, let's make something clear: one of these cards I'm a lot less likely to play than the other two.
Can you guess which one?
If you said Generous Gift, you're correct.
And that's not an insult to the card itself; it's functionally identical to Beast Within, after all, unless your opponent is playing an elephant deck.
No, I merely say this to gesture at the fact that Beast Within and Chaos Warp are exceptional cards.
They are hard removal in colors that don't really have access to much hard removal for creatures, and in the case of Chaos Warp, in a color that lacks enchantment removal on top of that.
There are several two-color combinations in which these will be some of the only removal for certain permanent types you'll get, and that's to say nothing of our monocolored compatriots.
So, you won't catch me wasting my breath trying to get people to take these out of their decks.

However, there are also two-color combinations where you'll have access to lots of other options.
Beast Within won't feel as essential in a green-black deck since you'll have a number of other reliable ways to remove creatures; and as I alluded to earlier, any deck that includes white is going to have ways to deal with a variety of permanent types already available.
So, does that mean these cards aren't worth playing in color combinations where they're not in some wholly unique niche?
Not necessarily.
For one, these hit lands, so the importance of that can vary a lot depending on the power level and matchup you find yourself in.
Secondly, if your interaction suite is relatively narrow, somewhere in the ballpark of 8 to 12 cards, there will be a lot of utility in having each of those cards be as flexible as possible.
If I'm packing nine pieces of interaction, after my first seven draws of the game plus my opening hand, I've on average seen around one and a quarter of these.
If I'm running 14 pieces of interaction, I've seen around two instead; and if I'm running 18 pieces of interaction, that number is more than two and a half.
If I have a diverse interaction suite and I'm seeing multiple pieces of interaction pretty early into a game, there's a good chance I'll have a way to deal with a specific problem unfolding in front of me.
But if that average is lower, running more of these versatile staples will likely be a good idea.
Personally, I prefer to run a higher.

When it's already a foregone conclusion that a powerful card is going to exist in your deck, the question of whether to run tutors for it then becomes the question of whether you'd prefer to have that powerful card frequently or infrequently.
On a probabilistic level, the deck that runs the tutors will be more powerful than the deck that does not.
Let's say we're using a, I don't know, seven-point power scale; that's a fun number.
If drawing into a particular power card naturally leads to a six-power game, tutoring it leads to a five-power game due to the extra cost and/or inconvenience of the tutor, and not having the card leads to a three-power game, the expected power of the deck that runs tutors will be higher than the deck that does not.
If you're figuring out what power level games to play the deck in, and you're a certified math dork running the odds, you could say, "Well, the expected power level of the tutor version is 4.1, and the expected power level of the non-tutor version is 3.3," and then this could determine the decks you choose to play this deck against.
Problem is, both of these decks are going to have that power level six game 10% of the time; it's just that one set of opponents is going to be a bit better prepared for that situation than the others.
This abstract approach demonstrates the core of the issue with decks having a higher degree of power level variance, but that abstractness makes it a bit less helpful in understanding real-world cards because different powerful cards accomplish very different tasks.

Following the pipeline model, what falls on the opposite end of the line?
Well, it's ways to win the game, typically ones that are near instantaneous, such as combos or combo-adjacent cards.
These tend to lead to the most jarring instances of power level variance because the table doesn't have much time to react; you go from playing the game to having it end without enough time for any sort of table-coordinated response.
I'll elaborate more on why this sort of thing constitutes a problem in a bit, but naturally when there is a problem, a card that wins the game immediately will be the problem.
Incidentally, this pipeline model also makes it clear that removal can be a tool for power level variance mitigation on the scale of a game.
Between Sol Ring and cards that outright win the game will be a bunch of cards somewhere in the realm of what might be considered an engine.
The engines that only provide card advantage will typically be closer to Sol Ring in terms of their position on the pipeline; card advantage is quite good, yes, but it can take a little while to fully pay off into a win since mana will still be a limitation.
The One Ring can feel quite powerful, but the table should still have a decent bit of time to work together and stop a One Ringing player if they start to get out of hand.
The engines that are further down the pipeline are the ones that grant mana in some form as well; think something like Bolas's Citadel or Arcane Bombardment.
When one of these hits the board, the table might be a single turn cycle away from fully losing control of the game, or even less in some cases.

Two weeks ago, I announced a deck building challenge, and that challenge went as follows: choose a commander from among Éomer, Marshal of Rohan; Yomiji, Who Bars the Way; Egon, God of Death; Shizuko, Caller of Autumn; and Senator Peacock, and build a deck with it, prioritizing creativity, cohesion, and likelihood to produce dynamic gameplay.
Over the course of the ensuing week, an explosion of deck building occurred, far more than I expected, honestly, and at the end of this period, I was left with around 250 decks to dig through.
I went through every single one of these decks, reading primers and scoping out card choices and feeling out the vibes until I was left with a handful of finalists for each of the commanders; I then discussed these finalists with a couple friends, who helped me pick out a winner for each of the five.
I will now be announcing those winners, talking about each of those decks, and also giving some honorable mentions, which will be shown off in the “r” tab on my website.
I’ll also give some ideas for improvement where I see fit.
These are all great decks, and many are creative in ways I probably wouldn’t think to be, but the task of improving an already great deck is a fun one, and I love having fun.

Let’s start with Senator Peacock, a five-mana commander who makes all your artifacts Clues, artifacts which can be sacrificed to draw a card, and who makes a creature unblockable whenever you sacrifice a Clue.
Most decks submitted for this fell into one of two categories: “artifact good stuff” decks and “political” decks that played off the commander’s Senator status.
For a few honorable mentions, we had an artifact-based combo deck, a ninjas deck, and a stax deck, all of which can be found in a link in the description.
However, for this commander, there was a clear winner among both me and the people I discussed things with: a Modular Beatdown deck.
One of the difficulties with Senator Peacock, and a reason she likely had so few decks as of the start of this challenge, was that for each of her two abilities, there are commanders that do something similar at a better rate; this makes her hard to justify as a commander choice if you’re primarily only using one of her two modes.
So a clear goal for building a Senator Peacock deck is figuring out how to use both halves of the card: the sacrifice to draw as well as the evasion.
“Modular” is a brilliant solution to this challenging question.
Artifact creatures that transfer their +1/+1 counters to other creatures when they die have both a clear reason to want to hit the yard and a clear reason to want to be unblockable.

Now, all of this comes at a cost, and that’s that there aren’t very many modular creatures, and a lot of the ones that do exist are terrible.
This deck runs all the ones within its color identity that cost four or less mana, which ends up being a total of nine.
Some of these are still pretty bad, such as Arcbound Hybrid, a 2/2 haste creature for four mana, but the keyword is what really matters, and the rest of the deck is built out to bolster that keyword.
The deck is running a number of other cards that can grant and gain counters, as well as nine proliferate cards and eight other cards that can utilize counters in some way.
These include things like Danny Pink that provide payoffs for counters moving around, as well as cards like Giggling Skitterspike and Inkmoth Nexus that provide excellent destinations for counters to be placed on.
I like that this deck doesn’t overuse infect; it’s common for players to throw some extra infect into a proliferate deck as an alternate win condition, which works but can really put opponents on edge and attract unwanted attention.
Here, the infect cards are kept exclusively to Inkmoth Nexus as a potential one-shot with modular, and Plague Myr as a card that doubles as a dork, and this definitely is a healthy place to stop.
Overall, this deck’s beatdown game plan seems quite decent and even features Tangletrove Kelp as a top-end card that goes unbelievably hard with Peacock to bolster its artifact beats.
This deck also features a lovely suite of support cards; it’s packing plenty of interaction, with seven cards aimed at countering spells or protecting things and nine cards aimed primarily at removal or defense, and there are a handful of cards in other categories that can also serve removing purposes, such as Contagion Engine.
There’s also a quite nice card draw and ramp suite: ten cards each that I’d categorize as primarily in one of those categories, but also a lovely range of cards that serve double duty with other purposes.
Tezzeret’s Gambit draws and proliferates, Staff of Compleation ramps and proliferates, Cryptic Trilobite ramps and holds counters, Defiler of Flesh draws and ramps, and Season of Weaving does all sorts of stuff.
This overlapping of roles, along with the deck’s relatively low mana curve, likely lets it play quite smoothly.
So overall, I’m a big fan of this deck; it uses the commander excellently and features a well-chosen and well-rounded suite of cards within it.
It looks capable of putting on pressure in multiple different ways, dishing out good damage but also being resilient and able to play into a longer and grindier game.
To get to some points of improvement, I personally would try to build out more of a recursion suite: Scrap Trawler, Myr Retriever, even something like Inventive Iteration.
All of these provide nice ways to bring back some of the lower-cost sacrifice modular creatures and utilize them further, which could allow the deck to maintain pressure better.

Moving along, the next commander is Shizuko, Caller of Autumn, a three-mana 2/3 that produces three green mana for each player on their untap step that sticks around for the whole turn.
This one is definitely the most open-ended out of the bunch and is also a pretty “group hug” card in general.
Most of the Shizuko submissions involved some blend of “battle cruiser,” “group hug,” and “stax,” roughly in that order of popularity; however, there were also some very different submissions as well.
Honorable mentions for this category included a storm deck, a face-down creatures deck with the goal of not tapping lands on its own turn, and a Protean Hulk combo deck sped up by Shizuko’s mana boost; you can check out all of those in the link in the description.
The winner of Shizuko was once again relatively clear to my team: Spelltex’s land deck.
This is a deck with the goal of repeatedly looping Talon Gates of Madara in order to keep Shizuko phased out on opposing untap steps, preventing them from gaining her mana.
This is a great concept I wouldn’t have ever thought to try, and fully breaking parity on Shizuko’s ability, I definitely asked myself the question of whether it’s worth the effort, and from a strategic optimization sort of standpoint that’s a valid question, but I think there’s enough there to work with.
A one-sided three-mana boost on a three-mana commander is nothing to sneeze at, and worth putting a bit of effort into maintaining, and keeping Shizuko phased out also has some side benefits like strengthening the deck’s boardwipe resistance; it’s also, if nothing else, very funny to play a group hug commander only to put a lot of effort into denying opponents the hug.
As you might expect, this deck runs all the cards needed to enable the Shizuko phase-out plan: tutors to find the Talon Gates, means to sacrifice lands to perform effects, and cards that allow the deck to access lands from its graveyard.
All of these are already great things for a lands deck to have, so the fact that they’re all that’s required to enable this deck’s devious hug denial is a big point in its favor.

As with most land decks, this is a deck that will be looking to acquire different lands for different situations.
Cavern of Souls helps get around counter spells, Boseiju, Who Endures can deal with artifacts and enchantments, Glacial Chasm stonewalls aggression, Scavenger Grounds deals with graveyards, and so on; these lands make up this deck’s toolbox, its base of cards that it can draw on through tutors to help remedy various problems that it might encounter.
In addition, a good portion of these lands have effects that involve sacrificing or discarding them, and then this allows these effects to be utilized multiple times.
Life from the Loam can repeat cycle lands or Bojuka Bog, and all manner of sacrifice land can be repeated through Undergrowth Recon, Ramunap Excavator, or Anus Gloomstalker; this allows the deck to be quite grindy, usually having something it can put its mana into.
The deck also has lots of other neat utility cards woven throughout it.
A number of different options for stax, defense, and removal can be found throughout the deck, many of them concentrated among the lands; though the deck doesn’t have a ton of options for each different type of effect, its toolbox in nature and high density of recursion likely means it should be able to repeat various interactive effects as necessary.
Finally, this deck has a few different options for winning.
The first is a classic: Thespian’s Stage can become a copy of Dark Depths, original Depths is sacrificed to the legend rule, the former Stage is sacrificed to create a 20/20 Marit Lage because it has no counters on it; rinse and repeat with land recursion if the Marit Lage dies.
The deck can also go wide with Field of the Dead or Titania, Protector of Argoth, and Helix Pinnacle serves as a last-resort mana sink win con if the board is forfeit and the deck is buckling down behind a Glacial Chasm or a Constant Mists.
The deck’s looping nature also means that there are some incidental infinite combos if it gets enough mana and pieces, but these feel more than fair; they’re more a byproduct of being a value engine rather than setting up for a combo in the traditional sense.
So overall, the deck seems well-rounded and fun.
If I were to offer a point of critique, I’d say that this deck could use some more options for extra land play; being able to loop a utility land two or three times a turn rather than one is a big deal and could allow the deck to spend its Shizuko mana more effectively.
My friend 33 Elk, who’s a lands aficionado, also suggested Nissa’s Intervention as a good card, as well as a card like Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth that could allow Glacial Chasm and Dark Depths to tap for mana, just a handful of ideas for land players out there.

The third commander among the five was Éomer, Marshal of Rohan, a four-mana 4/4 haste creature that grants an extra combat once per turn when another attacking legendary creature dies.
This was actually the card that inspired the challenge; here was a commander with a wonderfully textured ability on it, and yet it only had around 100 decks on EDHREC.
There were a lot of super cool versions of this commander submitted.
A few honorable mentions were a goblin deck that paired Éomer’s ability with a variety of different goblins, a toolbox combo deck that focused on staying flexible while keeping opponents on their toes, and a hyper-budget “pingers” deck with no sacrifice outlets; all three of these can be found at the link in the description.
For the number one deck, though, we have Lockfins Reanimator deck, yes, that’s mono-red reanimator.
This deck focused around a specific critical card: God-Pharaoh’s Gift, a seven-mana artifact that reads, “At the beginning of combat on your turn, you may exile a creature card from your graveyard; if you do, create a token that’s a copy of that card, except it’s a 4/4 black Zombie.
It gains haste until end of turn.” Extra combats from Éomer mean extra Zombies from God-Pharaoh’s Gift, allowing the deck to build advantage as successive combat phases pass.
Naturally, there are a number of different components that the deck needs in order to accomplish its God-Pharaoh Gifting.

The first of these is tutors, of which the deck is running four.
One of these is Gate to the Afterlife, a card that searches up God-Pharaoh’s Gift by name, so that’s pretty cool; the other three tutors are Gamble-style effects where cards are searched up followed by a discard at random, and these are nice because even if the tutored card gets discarded, the deck has plenty of ways of reanimating artifacts.
Speaking of which, the deck runs four cards that return artifacts from its graveyard to play, including a new one that’s being printed in the upcoming Bracing-themed set; three out of the four of these cards require artifacts to sacrifice, so the deck also contains five cards that generate artifact tokens, and that’s in addition to the fact that about a quarter of the deck is artifacts that themselves can be sacrificed.
The final thing required for this deck’s reanimate plan is ways to get cards into the graveyard, and it has a wide variety of these: there are several filtering cards like Faithless Looting and Brass’s Tunnel Grinder that help the deck selectively toss stuff into the yard, as well as a handful of mill effects like Millikin or Altar of Dementia.
This list of different things required for the artifact reanimation plan may sound like a major hurdle to the deck’s functionality, but thankfully all of these different tools are helpful on their own and most serve other purposes for the deck, which is good because all of that was just to get God-Pharaoh’s Gift on board and fueled up in the first place.

From here, we need to gain some extra combats in order to take advantage of the card.
To do this, we really only need three things: on-board legendary creatures to die while attacking, and effects to ensure their death.
There are some number of fairly conventional sac outlets but also some fling effects and some cards that can copy legendary creatures.
One of these is Blade of Selves, a card that goes infinite with Éomer by creating two copies of him when he attacks that immediately see each other die to the legend rule, giving two additional combats, and this then continues until there are fewer than four players in the game.
A number of submitted Éomer decks included this card, but the fact that this deck gets additional value on each combat phase gives it a much better chance of being able to win the game right then and there rather than just deleting.

Hey folks, welcome to the cute Woodland creatures edition of my precon reviews.
A plurality of my patrons thought I should look at the group hug precon, and in we I'm going to accomplish a simple set of tasks: I'm going to lay out what I think this deck is trying to do, I'm going to describe what I like about the deck, and finally I'm going to talk about what I dislike about it and what changes I'd make to fix the things I dislike.
With that in mind, let's jump right in.

The commander for this deck is The Honorable Ms. Bumbleflower, and the first thing I note here is that her effect is quite cool and unique.
Just the line “whenever you cast a spell, target opponent draws a card” is wild.
Part of what lets me consider this a group hug commander of sorts is the sheer amount of value you can give to your opponents.
There are general politics commanders like Breena and 2023’s Rocco that passively offer opponents resources but have a built-in way to twist things back in your favor; however, with Ms. Bumbleflower, you’re actively handing your opponent cards when you cast spells, and if you don’t cast exactly two spells per turn, she gives your opponents more cards than she gives you.
The second spell clause gives you cards when the ability triggers for the second time each turn, and this really hones the blue identity of the card: you want to cast two spells per turn, unless you just love giving your opponents cards.

In the deck list, we can see a number of things that fit in with what this commander is doing.
For one, there are a fair number of decently chunky beaters, most of which would enjoy being given +1/+1 counters and flying; a lot of these utilize +1/+1 counters in some way, and to go with this we can see a handful of other cards with some sort of counter synergies.
In addition to the +1/+1 counter beats, there is some degree of giving other players resources present, as you might expect for a deck labeled “group hug.” There are five cards that utilize Bloomburrow’s gift mechanic, where a spell can have an additional effect if an opponent is offered some sort of resource; there are also 11 other cards I’d describe as “huggy” and six cards that are vaguely political in some capacity, though the line between these two categories I’ve constructed is a bit fuzzy.
There are also other cards whose effect depends on the actions of your opponents, and you could argue that these are political; however, this deck is relatively beatdown oriented, so I’m not convinced it will be easy to talk opponents into feeding these, results may vary.
Basically, it seems like this deck is looking to gradually develop beaters and value engines while currying favor with various opponents, right up until it starts to snowball out of control and can drop the friendly pretenses.

So that’s the deck, but what do I think about what this deck is doing?
Well, I’ll start with what I like, and there’s actually quite a lot of that.
This deck broadly has a decent card quality, a focused enough plan to win, and good amounts of different types of support cards.
There are several quite decent quality beaters, and Ms. Bumbleflower is solid for purposes of amplifying and pushing through damage for both these and the cards that are more in the realm of support creatures, side note, I find the aesthetic contrast between Psychosis Crawler and the rest of this deck very funny.
The +1/+1 counter package of this deck, though not super wide, has some real all-stars in it; there are several different threats that grow over time, and among the handful of counter synergy pieces, Rishkar, Peema Renegade is a pretty sweet ramp tool, and Colossus and Hydra is a counter-pumping bomb that will run away with games if left unchecked.
The deck will likely be able to politically navigate through the game using its commander, offering some opponents resources while beating down others with its suite of growing threats.

As I mentioned earlier, the quantities of support cards here are also quite decent: there are 14 cards that I categorize as ramp and 15 cards that I categorize as draw, and these should prepare the deck decently well to accelerate into a game plan and keep up momentum even if the deck hits some setbacks.
I playtested this deck a decent number of times, and the average curve out that this deck manages is far better than in either of the other precons I’ve looked at; the deck is able to ramp, build resources with the commander, and set up value engines with quite a decent degree of consistency.
Obviously, when I’m playtesting the deck, I’m kind of abstracting away the cards that opponents are being given, and I like to think that this is reasonable enough.
A lot of EDH games will have one or two players who are lagging behind a bit for one reason or another, and while giving these players resources doesn’t necessarily come at no cost, the gameplay cost will be lower than the cost of giving all opponents resources.
For that reason, I mostly think about this resource donation as being probably not an issue, as long as this deck is meaningfully progressing its own game plan at the same time.
While you could reasonably argue that this means the deck should be held to a slightly higher bar than some other precons in terms of how it plays, it most likely passes even that bar as well; this is just a deck that plays pretty smoothly.

A big part of this is likely the mana base.
The mana base of this deck is pretty similar to the mana base of the Outlaws of Thunder Junction precon I looked at a few months back, which is to say it has a healthy land count and a really robust amount of color fixing that results in quite healthy symbol counts.
Now, this isn’t at no cost: of the 38 lands, nine always enter tapped and seven sometimes do, and I’d guess that these two figures average out to a roughly one-in-three tap land quantity.
While this is a bit higher than most players will want long term, it’s far from a terrible starting point, and this tapland density doesn’t feel particularly bad in practice.
In addition, in the lens of considering this precon as a product, giving players more fixing lands to work with is undoubtedly a good thing, even if it means the deck includes tap lands that might later get cut.

Finally, this deck has an adequate amount of ways to interact with things opponents are doing: two counterspells, three board wipes, five single-target removal spells, and a smattering of other cards that play related purposes, such as slowing opponents, defending against major attacks, and protecting key pieces.
Now, one of those categories I’ve been historically less of a fan of: I find that space dedicated to defensive spells would often be better allocated on actual removal or on things that push a player’s own game plan, and I will be cutting a couple defensive cards from this deck, kind of.
But this deck’s plan of building large evasive threats means that life total races won’t be an uncommon situation, and having a “fog” around in that case might be quite helpful.
The existing political tools, namely the commander, also give it a decent option for negotiating with opponents and avoiding pressure if it seems worth the price of an opponent having some cards.
I can see the appeal of this deck’s political and defensive elements, and I imagine they work decently in tandem with the deck’s more concrete removal for keeping the game under control.

Alright, it’s time to get into what I dislike about this precon, and also what I’d change to help it out with those things.
I mentioned that the mana base of the deck reminds me of the OTJ Gonti precon, and there’s one other way that this precon reminds me of that one.
In we where I reviewed the Gonti deck, I highlighted that it feels like the deck list was designed to be a generic theft deck rather than a semi-theft deck tailored to what Gonti does.
This precon is similar, in that it seems like Wizards of the Coast added a bunch of “group hug” stuff to this precon because the commander does something vaguely group huggy; but Ms. Bumbleflower is not a generic group hug commander.
No, Snail’s Theory of Optimal Bumbleflower dictates that I want to be sharing card draw with my weakest opponent, maybe playing politics with it here and there, and also making optimal usage of the +1/+1 counters and flying that Ms. Bumbleflower gives me.
In addition, a lot of the group hug elements currently in the deck don’t even feel like they play that nicely with the rest of what the deck is doing.
Basically, what I dislike about this deck is that it’s a bit unfocused, including lots of stuff that is outside what I believe the deck wants to be: a high-velocity, politics-heavy +1/+1 counter beatdown deck.

Now, I understand if somebody wants to play harder into the group hug elements, since group hug precons don’t come that often, but in my mind there’s just not enough to work with here for that.
I will preserve the group hug element on some level, though, in that I don’t feel the need to prevent or take advantage of the cards that Ms. Bumbleflower gives my opponents; they’re allowed to have a little gift.
Another thing that might be nice is making the deck slightly lower curved to allow for double spelling with Ms. Bumbleflower earlier in the game, as the current deck is a bit high-curved for my taste.
Overall, I’m going to make 20 card swaps, and all of these will be done with a precon budget in mind, so I’m not going to add anything over $3 and I’m going to try to end up at a lower overall price for the deck.

With that in mind, I’m going to start by cutting some of the hugger elements of this deck.
I like the idea of extra land plays in the deck, but I don’t really want my opponents to have extra land plays if they’re going to be getting fed cards by me, so I choose to swap out Rites of Flourishing for Wayward Swordtooth and Ghirapur Orrery for Case of the Locked Hothouse.
Case is a really powerful card in general, and Swordtooth is a nice option as a creature to give flying once Ms. Bumbleflower is in play.
I’m also choosing to cut Tenuous Truce and Intellectual Offering; these cards are doing something similar to what the commander is doing, but the rate on the cards per mana just isn’t that great on either of these.
Kwain, Itinerant Meddler and Selvala, Explorer Returned likewise get cut, because I like being able to choose which of my opponents get fed cards; if one of my opponents is ahead, I want to be able to avoid giving them extra resources while still being able to utilize my cards.
Another type of card I choose to cut is cards that cost too much mana, since I’m trying to drop the mana curve.
Octomancer is a funny card, but this isn’t really a token deck, and five mana is just too much to pay for some vanilla stats.
Another cut is Coveted Jewel; it’s a funny card, but this deck doesn’t have enough ways of preventing opponents from snagging it, and when it does get taken they don’t even need to pay that expensive six mana upfront like I did.
Most other cuts I made were cards that just don’t do enough.
Bloodroot Apothecary, though it’s pre-selling for upwards of $10, seems highly mediocre to me as anti-treasure tech; opponents can still afford to crack a few treasures at a table without other poison, and then the rest can be saved for after the Apothecary is off the board.
I’ll take a Manglehorn over this any day of the week.
Now, a cut that truly pains me is Jolly Gerbils; this card is extremely cute, but the deck simply doesn’t have enough gift cards to justify its inclusion, and even if I added a few more, I’m still not convinced it would be preferable to a better two-drop.
Another cut is Hoofprints of the Stag; this is a decent incremental value piece if it’s played early, but it’s a very dead draw later in the game.
Triskaidekaphile is another card I opted to cut; this deck wants some number of no-maximum-hand-size cards, but the deck already has several other ones, and this card just doesn’t offer enough outside of that to warrant keeping it in, in my opinion.

What goes in in place of these cards?
Beyond the replacements I already mentioned, a big area is +1/+1 counter synergies.
A lot of these are reasonably basic: Conclave Mentor is a bear that amplifies counters; Dusk Legion Duelist is a bear that’s a draw engine; Benthic Biomancer is a similar card for one mana that loots instead; and Kami of Whispered Hopes is just a fantastic card, well worth the $2 or so price tag.
A couple others I picked out that likewise offer a bit of ramp were Incubation Druid and Freestrider Lookout.
Importantly, I tried to pick out stuff that’s good in general and relatively low cost; the issue with picking out big, fancy payoff cards is that opponents can just deny your commander with removal, and then suddenly you invested heavily in something that can’t actually materialize.
Kami and Druid in particular are especially great, because without the commander they’re still mana dorks, but with even a single targeting with Ms. Bumbleflower’s ability, either of them can suddenly tap for three whole mana, and Kami only goes up from there.

There are also a few more specific cards from Modern Horizons 3 that I added, as that was a fantastic set for +1/+1 counter synergies.
Dreamtide Whale is a card that feels like it was made for this deck; it proliferates +1/+1 counters, it has a high power for delivering flying beats, and this is a deck that wants to double spell anyway, so the Whale should be sticking around.
Evolution Witness is another pretty sweet card; it’s not going to be wildly powerful in the early game, but later in the game it can be an unstoppable torrent of value.
The third card from this set I added is Envoy of the Ancestors, and this is my answer to the question of defensive cards and life total races: just gain some life.
This card sets up a player for a truly impressive quantity of life gain, which will help when facing off against the final player and needing to survive long enough to get the necessary attacks in to finish them off.

Beyond these, I also tweaked the interaction suite a bit.
I added Negate as a nice general-purpose counterspell to help with avoiding board wipes.

Hey folks, it’s precon review time.
I’m going to be critiquing the Eternal Might precon for Aetherdrift and offering some potential points of improvement.
The last two precons I’ve discussed have impressed me with their construction, seeming surprisingly streamlined in their functionality and easily upgradeable into a quite decent Magic deck.
It’s actually been a bit disappointing; like, what am I supposed to say aside from “this is pretty good, cut these five bad cards and it’ll be even better”?
Thankfully, that’s not a problem with this precon, though.
Containing good card quality, lots of nice assorted zombie cards, and some nice attention to detail in terms of aesthetics, in terms of construction this deck is a hot mess, a disgusting mishmash of conflicting game plans and synergistic dead ends, and I’m excited to tackle it.

To start with, though, let’s talk about what this deck is trying to accomplish.
The commander of this deck is Temmet, a five-mana 4/4 in Esper colors with vigilance and menace, as well as the following text: “Whenever you attack, draw a card, then discard a card.
Whenever you draw a card, Zombies you control get +1/+1 until end of turn.” So on the surface, this is a card that rewards token zombies or otherwise wide boards of zombies, and also a card that rewards big draw that happens before the combat damage step in a turn.
Simple effect, but there are a lot of implied features of this card that we should keep in mind.
To be maximally effective, Temmet wants a large board of zombies to attack with, as well as a large draw spell to amp up the buff it grants; it’s also a thing that is likely going to be a removal magnet if we have a large board, since it can threaten a lot of damage.
Importantly, this means that the deck will want a lot of mana, both to pay the five mana casting cost and also either draw some cards or hold up mana to protect it.

Looking at the rest of the deck, some parts of it reflect these specific needs.
There are eight cards that create small zombie tokens and three Army generators, cards that create or add counters to a single growing zombie token, and there are also a handful of cards that create 4/4 zombie tokens as well.
The deck also contains a healthy nine ramp spells to help bolster it up to larger quantities of mana.
From there, the deck also has a large number of zombie creatures in it, which range from cards that drain opponents to lords to draw spells and beyond.
An interesting additional package in the deck is the discard package.
The alternate commander for this deck is Hasan, Scarab’s Fist, which can allow a player to make 4/4 zombie copies of discarded creatures; the deck also contains a handful of other discard payoffs.
The amount of discard in the deck isn’t wildly large, though, consisting of five or six cards that allow you to discard, plus a handful of cycling cards.
There’s also a light graveyard package to go along with this.
Rounding out the deck, we have a pretty average number of removal spells.
Overall, this deck will be looking to create a wide board of zombies, utilize its cute discard and graveyard subthemes, and swing in at opponents with a Temmet-buffed board.

I obviously preempted my overall thoughts on this deck a bit, but I’ll start with what I like about what’s happening here.
As I said earlier, it has a larger than average ramp suite for an Esper deck, which I think is appropriate for this game plan.
Crowded Crypt and Bontu’s Monument both stand out as fun ramp options with a lot of utility in this deck, offering token production and drain respectively.
This deck also contains some number of token producers, and some of these are pretty good.
I like the ones that create 1/1 white Zombie tokens, and On Wings of Gold’s flying plus anthem effect is good enough to make the card seem worthwhile, even though this isn’t a deck with a super heavy graveyard theme, at least by zombie deck standards.
The manabase here is excellent: really robust symbol counts, even with a couple of great colorless utility lands, and a moderately high but not overwhelming tap land density that also gives players room to gradually update tap lands with better untapped duals.

There are also some number of cards that slot in quite elegantly to this deck.
Forgotten Creation pairs perfectly with both Temmet and Hasan, as do the newly printed Profit of the Scarab and Rhet-Crop Mystic.
There are also gestures at a number of packages that could exist: a couple Impact Tremors, style cards paired with the token package, and a selection of different graveyard and discard enablers and payoffs to give a sampling platter of what that could look like.
That’s the most generous way to view this deck, in my mind; it is a sample of possible game plans and/or a toolbox of possible implements for beginning the journey of building them.

So what about this as a deck that’s trying to play a game of Magic: The Gathering?
Well, it’s a bit disappointing.
Hasan has gotten a lot of attention as an undeniably cool secondary commander, but it doesn’t even really work as a secondary commander.
The deck just doesn’t have enough discard to consistently enable Hasan’s ability; with Hasan in the 99, you at least have the consistent discard effect of Temmet, but he’s also a five-mana card with an overrun-esque ability, so trusting him to stick around as an engine is highly optimistic.
This lack of discard likewise stands out in the case of other discard payoffs, such as Liliana’s Caress and Archfiend of Ifnir, though those at least get triggered by the deck’s cycling lands.
The deck’s graveyard package is another thing that stands out; it’s not massive, but it is decidedly present, as you’d expect with a zombie deck.
This deck is kind of thin on ways to enable it, though.
Most zombie decks would be using sacrifice abilities in addition to discard, and while this deck does have the sorts of payoffs when creatures die that those decks tend to have, it’s almost entirely lacking in ways to sacrifice creatures.
The result is that this deck really lacks a lot of what might give a Zombie deck a sense of mechanical identity; its disjointedness causes both play pattern issues when disparate synergy packages don’t line up, and vibes issues when it plays just like a generic blob of typal midrange gameplay instead of, you know, like a Zombie deck.

Okay, so I obviously have issues with this deck’s handling of some traditional key zombie subthemes, but let’s set that aside.
This is a precon; this is meant to be a toolbox and/or a sampling platter.
We can give it some slack.
Does this deck at least hold up in supporting Temmet as a commander?
Are we forging an alternative zombie play style here?
In some ways the answer is yes, but in a lot of other ways the answer is no. As I said earlier, this deck’s ramp and mana are well constructed, which is good, as Temmet is the sort of card that’s going to work better when the deck has mana to play him plus something else in a turn.
The token generating suite is okay and actually contains some pretty high quality stuff, but there are fewer cards that create small zombie tokens than I’d like.
Creating 4/4 zombie tokens is cool and all, but Temmet’s design heavily incentivizes pairing him with lots of small zombies, so the bigger tokens with more rigorous requirements to be created simply feel out of place, even if they’re more aesthetically fitting.

Even more problematically, this deck doesn’t have much of the sort of bursty draw that pairs best with Temmet.
There isn’t a lot of draw overall, and a lot of the draw that is here isn’t great for taking advantage of Temmet’s ability.
There isn’t a reliable way to sacrifice Corpse Augur, nor any good way to let Midnight Reaper or Undead Augur translate into Temmet triggers, and you’re not going to tap down your zombies to Cryptbreaker if you want to swing in that turn.
Most of the other draw options are mana expensive, so you’re looking at ten mana minimum to do a Temmet plus draw maneuver.
The one thing working in Temmet’s favor here is the half dozen or so cycling cards in the deck, but at that point you’re paying five mana for the commander plus two mana to cycle during the combat step for roughly an Undead Warchief’s worth of anthem.

The final problem is this deck’s interaction suite.
It has ten cards to perform a removal role in some way or other, which might work for a faster Zombie deck, but I’m not sold on this deck’s ability to win quickly.
Worse, it has very little protection and no counter spells.
A blue deck that’s vulnerable to removal and board wipes runs no counter spells?
Come on.

I don’t know.
This deck isn’t unplayably bad or anything, but it fails to meaningfully commit to any of its subthemes, and with the way it’s currently built, its command zone feels, at best, just a generic zombie guide that gives the deck its colors.
It is a bit more cohesive when we look at the visual presentation, with a clear emphasis on Amonkhet-style zombies, and there’s certainly some admirable effort put into new art for a lot of the cards present.
I don’t usually treat precon reviews as product reviews or value reviews, you know; I’m much more interested in the deck and the sort of experience that Wizards of the Coast is handing to a newer player who is pulling this out of a box to play a game of Commander with.
But I’ll make a minor exception here.
As a product, there’s a lot going for this, and if you are a zombie player who’s looking for a bundle of good zombie cards plus some cool new arts, this might absolutely be a great purchase.
Just don’t buy this if you’re looking for a cohesive deck out of the box, because this is not that.

With all that said, I still want to try an upgrade for this.
When I first saw this precon, my immediate thought was that it’d be cool to morph it into a full Hasan deck, but honestly, this deck is so far from enabling Hasan well that I’m inclined to stick with Temmet instead and see what we can do with 15 swap-outs to try and actually let him feel like a legitimate commander.
So let’s do that, and I’m going to start by talking about what we’re cutting.
Binding Mummy and Twisted Abomination aren’t great in general, and I’m also going to cut out a couple discard payoffs that aren’t adequately supported here, sorry, Hasan.
Beyond that, Mystic Nexus seems out of place here; my best guess is it’s just here to give more people access to Mystic Nexus, and I’m going to also cut out a handful of zombies that are just a bit mediocre.
This is a rare Gravecrawler L with no sacrifice; this card just doesn’t really do anything.
Nothing beyond these particularly offends me, but I will trim a handful more mediocre cards just to make space for better support.
These are cards that are just on the weaker side mechanically, or which don’t tie in particularly well with the game plan I’m trying to cultivate.

For our additions, the first order of business is that I want to add a bunch more draw and filtering, since they do double duty in smoothing out the way this deck plays and making it punchier with Temmet.
Keep Watch, Distant Melody, Pact of the Serpent, and Raffine all allow the deck to give its zombies a massive pump up for a reasonable amount of mana.
In addition to these, I’m choosing to add three cards for protection that can also draw cards, which are Change of Plans, You Find the Villains’ Lair, and Your Temple Is Under Attack, and these are nice because of their flexibility.

The other thing I’m choosing to add is cards that create zombie tokens, three total in this case.
Siphon Flesh and Dark Salvation both provide removal and token generation, and Endless Ranks of the Dead is a good singular zombie token maker.
Honestly, there are a bunch of other zombie token generators in the $2 to $10 range that I didn’t add due to price, and if you’re really trying to build a good Temmet deck, you should probably go find some of those.
Varina stands out as a card that is absurdly good in a Temmet deck, performing both key tasks I’m looking for at a good rate.

For a few final additions, Diregraf Captain is just a generically good zombie, and I’m basically having it replace a couple zombie typal cards I’m cutting.
Lethal is a removal spell that also includes a good amount of draw/discard filtering, and it’s easily payable with black zombie tokens.
Fellwar Stone and Ponder are here to give some extra ramp and filtering respectively, just smoothing out the overall game plan.
The last addition is Cephalid Coliseum, a land that can provide a burst of draw triggers at a great rate at a point in the game when the deck is looking to close things out.

Through these changes, my hope is that Temmet will be more consistently useful, sticking around longer and providing larger buffs to zombies.
The addition of more zombie tokens and removal will hopefully also direct the game plan of the deck in the right direction.
Temmet definitely isn’t my favorite commander; like, there’s definitely less depth there than with the alternate commander Hasan, but I still can’t help but respect the attempt at making a different sort of Zombie deck, one more based around drawing and discarding than around death triggers and sacrificing.
Hopefully we see more exploration in this direction in the future, and hopefully future zombie precons end up a bit more coherently constructed.

An announcement: I have a P.O. Box now, and the address is on screen.
Feel free to send me your favorite card or a handwritten poem proclaiming your love of Brushwagg.
The P.O. Box isn’t wildly large, so don’t send me anything bulky, as there is a solid chance it will be thrown away instead of finding its way to me.
This should go without saying, but please also don’t send me anything dangerous or disgusting.
Thanks!
If I get enough cards, I might turn them into a deck or make them into a video of some sort: delicious future content for the gaping, content-hungry masses of the world.
With that said, thanks for watching, and thanks to Architect for supporting us.
I’m a fan of Architect’s UI, a thing that was on screen basically the whole time, and an especially nice feature for tweaking decks is the maybeboard categories, which let me keep thoughts and card additions nice and organized.

In my last video, I discussed how adding a single card to an EDH deck that simplifies or circumvents a task a player finds fun can have a negative impact on how playing that deck feels.
That video generated a lot of buzz and discussion, which was great to see, and it also helped crystallize a handful of ideas that have been sloshing around my brain for the past several months.
These ideas are complicated and span a variety of subjects, but they can be pretty straightforwardly introduced with a simple thought experiment.

Let’s say you have a tutor and there’s a “Bonkers card” , something very powerful , in your deck.
Do you tutor for the “Bonkers card”?
Just so things are a bit more tangible, let’s say you’re Enlightened Tutoring for a Skullclamp in a mid‑power tokens deck: a decently powerful tutor and a draw engine that is probably leaps and bounds better than the next most powerful draw engine in the deck.
So, do you Enlightened Tutor for the Skullclamp?

I have devised four answers to this question, which segment four different perspectives on EDH philosophy.
They go as follows: “Yes, I tutored for the Skullclamp because I like Skullclamp and I want to draw a shitload of cards regardless of situation.” “No, I might choose not to tutor for the Skullclamp because the number of cards it draws might not fit the vibe of this game.” “No, and in fact I cut the Enlightened Tutor because I don’t want the option of tutoring for the Skullclamp.” “No, and in fact I cut the Skullclamp because the number of cards it draws doesn’t fit the vibe of my deck.”

It may be clear which of these quadrants I personally fall into most frequently , the fourth one, or sometimes the first depending on deck , but I want to acknowledge that the others exist.
I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who likely fall firmly into one of the first three quadrants, people saying something to the effect of, “But wait Alex, have you considered this?
I think you forgot to consider this.” So I now want to consider the other three of these perspectives in depth and where they come from, what core animating forces drive people to engage with this format the way they do.
I’ve split we up into two parts because I found that the first two perspectives here and the last two perspectives really demand two different lenses of analysis.
If you want to hear me discuss the final two, you can keep an eye out for that video about a week from now; for now, let’s get into the first two quadrants.

The first one is the person who does tutor for the “good card” because they want to play the “good card.” This is, on its face, entirely understandable.
Magic: The Gathering is a card game where players try to win games, and winning games is fun.
More powerful cards win more games, so they end up being seen as especially fun in some sense.
This may be directly related to the fact that they win more games, but in a format like EDH it could also be a more indirect force: they feel good to play, they generate reactions from others, they have a mystique about them born from years of being heralded as powerful.
There’s a reason why Vintage Cube is one of the most popular Cube formats on MTGO.
Are these powerful cards more inherently fun than any others?
No, but they’re famous and alluring, and playing them pokes a little “good card” dopamine button residing in the brains of a lot of players.
The EDH player who runs good cards and tutors to find those good cards more often may be doing so because they want to win more games, but they also may just be looking to poke that button more.
And can you blame them?
It’s fun to play a Skullclamp and draw a ludicrous number of cards.
I think most players go through a stage of this at some point in time; I certainly had the experience of optimizing a mono‑black pile with Cabal Coffers and Necropotence and such like 10 or so years ago, and I remember the excitement I felt.
For some players, that excitement persists long term, and I’m happy for those players.
Maybe they make their way to cEDH, or maybe they just have a good time playing sweaty high‑power piles against other sweaty high‑power piles.
However, for myself and many others, the excitement of playing good cards for the sake of them being good does start to fade with time; trotting out the same old powerful cards in the same ways just might not remain as enjoyable, and even if you do keep playing with them, you might need to change the way you play with them to keep them fresh.

One way this can be done is changing the context in which you play a powerful card.
An Ancient Tomb that curves into a Bolas’s Citadel is very different from one that curves into a bunch of Treefolk, and a Necropotence that draws into an infinite combo is very different from one that draws into a bunch of clerics from the 2000s.
Put another way, powerful cards can go from a fun thing in their own right to a way to enable some other fun things that are a bit less powerful.
This isn’t really a realm of deck building I tend to find myself in, but I can absolutely see the appeal: you get the enjoyment of playing powerful Magic cards and the enjoyment of enabling offbeat archetypes that might not be good enough with weaker support cards.
And going back to the premise here, tutors can help with this.
If you want to guarantee having a piece of powerful support to hold up your otherwise questionable game plan, tutors can be a good way to do that, to have a consistent experience with your janky deck.
This game doesn’t have ten Necropotences you can slip into your deck, and even if it did, that might not even be desirable; tutors are a nice way to work around that fact.

Okay, so that’s one way powerful cards can stay fresh: playing them in unusual contexts.
The other way is getting to the point where you don’t even feel the need to play the “good card” every time it’s available, and this brings me to the second group of players.

These are the players who have the tutor and don’t tutor for the Skullclamp , or at least they don’t always tutor for the best possible option.
I found that these are players who see tutors as a wonderful and freeing tool; you can find whatever you want with them.
You can find a Skullclamp, you can find a land, you can find a Leeching Licid , the world is your oyster.
And there is a certain logic to this.
Some games you might want a power card, maybe you’re behind or maybe you want a chance at catching up with somebody running away with the game, but there also might be other games where you’d prefer to take it a little easier, play a little lower caliber, tutor for something a bit more mundane if it better fits the vibe of the game you’re playing.
I believe this to be the least popular of the four quadrants I laid out earlier, but for the people who fall into it, I’m genuinely happy for them; they are able to have fun doing something that I struggle to have fun doing: playing suboptimally on purpose.

See, I treat the format of EDH as a two‑stage game, as I discussed in more detail in a video about combo decks last fall.
During the first stage, that deck‑building stage, I’m in creative mode, crafting an experience for the future me to play with, thinking about the sorts of decks I might be facing and trying to fine‑tune what I’m building to create the most enjoyable games.
During the second stage, though, when I’m actually playing a game, my goals are somewhat different: I treat it as a game where my objective is winning and where I’m pursuing that under a set of constraints.
These constraints consist of the tools given to me by my deck‑building self, as well as the limitations of the type of table engagement I prefer , which is generally very open and disclosing of information I think my opponents should have.
I’m not doggedly pursuing victory at all costs, but I also don’t like playing suboptimally once I’m in a game.
If I need to make a suboptimal choice or hold back in some way, it pierces the immersion of the game and kind of takes me out of it.
I still will do this under some circumstances, but I don’t like doing it, and I certainly wouldn’t set up my deck in a way where I expect to need to do it on a regular basis.
I know I’m not alone in this either; a lot of people dislike playing suboptimally, and another segment of players dislikes playing against somebody they know is playing suboptimally.
It almost feels like an insult; you can interpret somebody choosing to make worse choices as them saying, “Oh no, I don’t need to put full effort into this game; what you’re doing there isn’t requiring that of me.” Now, realistically, the sort of player who is okay with playing suboptimally probably isn’t thinking this way, but for somebody who is in a somewhat more competitive mindset, it’s not hard to take this interpretation.
This type of player may also seem very different from most other ways of playing the EDH format , and indeed it does take a different mindset, a different perspective on the nature of winning a game, maybe even different ideas of what a game should look like.
However, going back to the two‑phase model of Magic: The Gathering, this difference could be as simple as reversing the ordering of optimization in terms of deck building versus playing.
I play in a more optimized style and deck build in a less optimized style, but it’s easy to imagine a type of player who puts more optimization effort into the deck‑building phase and is a bit more laid‑back and casual when they’re actually playing.
I might feel a little weird about somebody else making choices that notably worsen their chances of winning, but I’ve also had people complain about me making the same sorts of choices in the deck‑building stage of things.
The most dominant feature of casual EDH is some degree of suboptimality, and I generally think of that as being in the deck‑building part of things, but it seems reasonable enough that it could exist in the playing stage instead.

As a final note, going back to the comparison between these two player types, a way that these two players are a bit more similar is in the character of their decks.
They’re generally both happy to play tutors, and they are both happy to play with powerful cards as well, maybe even when those cards feel a bit overtuned compared to the rest of the contents of a deck.
Fundamentally, these things are just game pieces, and having them in a deck isn’t an obstacle to the fun for these people.
What I’ll be talking about next week, on the other hand, is the opposite: it’s players who are much more critical of what they put in their deck one way or another, and as you’ll see when that video comes out, those particular perspectives have philosophical roots about as deep as it’s possible to be.

With that said, thanks for watching, and thanks to Architect for supporting us.
I’ve been doing a lot of brewing lately, and Architect makes it easy to keep my thoughts organized with its nice visual layout and helpful category system.
A link to my is in the description if you want to check out what I’ve been working on lately.
I’d also like to thank my patrons, some of whom are on screen now.
I just started taking submissions for this month’s deck review, so if you want a chance at having your deck reviewed by me, you can sign up to my Patreon at the link in the description.
You can also check out the podcast I’m on if you want to experience more words exiting my mouth without giving me more money; a link to that is also in the description.
All right, bye now.

For a few honorable mentions, we have a deck based around the card Dawn of the Dead, a deck that focuses on the card Etheral as a way to help with getting creatures back into play, and a spell-less “spellslinger” deck; that one is a funny one, and it was a favorite among people on my Discord server.
For the winning deck, though, we have a returning winner: filthy Stacks player submitted a sneak attack deck with Guild Artisan chosen as the partnered background.
Now the choice to run sneak attack wasn’t a unique one for this challenge; getting creatures out at a discount to be sacrificed at end of turn makes sense as a way to utilize Allora and was a reasonably popular choice as a result.
However, this deck had a handful of construction choices that made it stand out above the rest of the crowd.
For one, its utilization of its background Guild Artisan wasn’t a wildly popular background in the challenge, but it could be a nice treasure engine.
More importantly, though, this deck pairs it with “polymorph” effects.
That’s right: this deck can tutor out a sneak attack effect via one of two cards that remove a permanent to grab one of the same type, doing so by polymorphing its own background, which is conveniently castable from the command zone.
This can also work with the treasures produced by Guild Artisan to polymorph for artifacts, since Chaotic Transformation can target multiple permanent types and Reality Scramble can be cast multiple times via retrace.
These are supplemented with a handful of tutors that can find instants and sorceries, enabling the deck to have consistent access to its key enchantments.
One natural question for a sneak attack deck is what is being snuck out; in this case, there’s a total of sixteen creatures of mana value six or greater, a pretty robust number.
Among these, some are your typical cheat deck beaters such as Ancient Stone Idol and Cityscape Leveler, but past these there are some more interesting ones.
Balefire Dragon provides a source of large-scale removal, Knollspine Dragon can allow for some big draw with creative turn ordering, and there are also a number of ETB creatures that can get value turn over turn utilizing sneak attack, including Tyrant of Discord, Astral Dragon, and Trumpeting Carnosaur.
There’s also another key top-end creature, Nezahal, and that one can serve as a gesture to a key subtheme within this deck: flicker.
Flicker cards perform two functions here: as with the commander, they can recycle ETB creatures, and they can also flicker a creature put out with sneak attack to keep it around permanently at no additional expense.
This gives the deck a great degree of flexibility in how hard it wants to commit to the board and in how much it wants to grind value.
There’s also a good amount of redundancy in key types of effect; there are four total cards that can perform a sneak attack-like role, two enchantments and two non-enchantment cards that are similar enough, and there are likewise multiple alternative options for keeping around sneak attacked creatures outside of the command zone.
Overall, this is a super deck; great job again, filthy Stacks player.

Really, this deck focuses on one specific variety of creature: that being clerics and dwarves that sacrifice creatures to accomplish tasks.
We’ve got eleven of these along with twelve other clerics and five other dwarves.
The basic idea here seems simple: dump these creatures into play alongside Amber and Haunted One, and then swing in with Amber in order to both wheel and use sacrifice abilities on the now undying clerics and dwarves.
This can produce effects such as destroying a creature with Blind Zealot, tutoring out black creatures with Shadow-Rite Priest, and drawing cards with Skullport Merchant.
The deck also contains five cards that reanimate in some way, including three attached to a cleric, as well as three madness cards, so there’s some degree of synergy present to work with Amber’s attack trigger.
Her power and toughness aren’t great, only 3/3 on a four mana creature, but this doesn’t matter as long as the deck has Haunted One in play.
This might prompt a follow-up question: what if you want to sacrifice a creature that already has a +1/+1 counter on it?
The solution to this potential issue comes in the form of a handful of cards that remove counters from creatures; there are nine of these total, and while most of these feel more like filler than anything else, the two enchantments seem great.
I Sandstorm provides a quality source of repeatable burn damage, and Retribution of the Ancients is an even more potent tool, particularly when the deck’s board gets bigger.
The other standout element of this deck is its suite of board wipes.
The deck runs an eye-watering nine board wipes, which the deck can break parity on through Haunted One.
One of these nine is Yako Hops, which can provide a game-warping nuke once the pilot of this deck trusts their board to run to the finish line.
These board wipes seem like an appropriate tool to help the deck’s honestly mediocre creatures get around the large boards of modern-day EDH decks, because that’s the most palpable vibe this deck gives off: the jank factor.
The cards here are at best normally mediocre cards being used in their narrow use case window of being decent, and in some cases mediocre cards even in this deck; we’ve got late 90s dwarves, various mediocre commons from across the years, Grimoire of the Dead, there’s so much nonsense here united in flavor or function or both.
This feels appropriate, though, for a few reasons.
Amber is a fundamentally janky commander; she’s a draw engine, but one that requires playing in a very scrappy style and one who doesn’t even reward that style that heavily.
Her two creature types, cleric and dwarf, are not generally great ones to build around.
Clerics have gotten just enough love to make Shadowborn Apostle decks look a cut above respectable, but dwarves?
Yeah, no, forget about it.
In addition, this deck’s budget is quite low; it’s sitting below the $50 mark if you exclude Haunted One, a card which, as Lord Reverend alluded to, is basically free as long as you win this competition since the prize card is an altered art version of the card.
A wildly polished deck with top-tier card quality this certainly is not, nor was it intended to be.

As a final note, this deck also has an undeniable thematic core to it.
We have themes of death and dying riddled throughout this deck, including the Haunted One background, a whole lot of cultist-type creatures that sacrifice things to perform rituals, and board wipes that represent great dying-off events.
Lore-wise, Amber herself is a cleric with connections to the Shadowfell, carrying a certain degree of liminality with her, tugged between life and what lies beyond.
This further helps the deck in communicating itself as a cohesive unit, and the end result has an undeniable sense of style to it.

This is a deck focused on effects that untap all of your creatures; four of these untap all creatures on opposing untap/tap steps, eight untap all creatures once, and a few other cards untap creatures more selectively.
To go along with these, this deck has eight creatures that tap to create a token, seven that tap to add mana, and two cards that tap to create Treasures, effectively doing both of these things.
Once this deck has Ellyn and some of these effects online, it can start to do some cool stuff; the deck can use all tap abilities creating mana and tokens and filtering, and then it can play a card that untaps all creatures to refresh all these tappers.
Mana creators let the deck avoid running out of mana too fast, and creating tokens allows the deck to dig deeper and deeper with Ellyn on each round of tapping, hopefully finding additional untapping effects for as long as the Ellyn player wants to keep going.
The deck doesn’t have an explicit win condition in the 98 outside of maybe Halo Fountain, but the elegant thing here is that the deck doesn’t really need a specific payoff card for a big tapping and untapping turn.
Agent of the Iron Throne in the command zone means that a board full of tokens already contains an implied level of damage, and several Ellyn activations will mean a well-curated hand of cards when passing after a big turn.
To go along with the rest of this game plan, the deck also contains a handful of one-time token producers, some protection for the commander, and a small suite of other support cards.
What’s interesting about this deck is that I think both Agent of the Iron Throne and Haunted One work well as backgrounds, though they lend very different play patterns for finishing off opponents.
Agent of the Iron Throne gives the deck a more measured play style that focuses on optimizing twiddle turns in the moment and worrying about finishing the game later once a whole lot of tokens are in play.
Haunted One, on the other hand, is more explosive, rewarding careful planning and avoiding opposing hate with the potential for some truly disgusting alpha strikes.
Either way seems valid to me, though something nice about Haunted One is that it also gives the deck a bit of something that it’s a bit low on at the moment: protection.
Ellyn can tap herself at any time she’s untapped to grant the benefit of Haunted One even if no tokens were created during a turn, which gives is a pretty sw.

Arcanum Dagsson is a spicy commander from Coldsnap, and he’s one that has the potential to be quite powerful in modern‑day unrestricted EDH.
Four mana for a creature that can sacrifice an artifact creature to find a non‑creature artifact every turn is quite potent, and the non‑creature artifacts we have available to search for in the year of our Lord 2025 are quite horrifying compared to what existed back when Arcanum Dagsson was printed in 2006.
However, what do the top‑tier tutoring targets like Darksteel Forge, Portal to Phyrexia, and God‑Pharaoh’s Statue all have in common?
E’s, of course.
So, naturally, any Arcanum Dagsson enjoyers had to get a bit more creative, which brings me to the tutoring targets of choice for this deck: stations.
There were four cards printed in Fifth Dawn with station in the name, and it just so happens that none of them have E’s.
Two of them you may know as classic combo pieces, Blasting Station and Grinding Station, whereas Summoning Station and Salvaging Station are somewhat less popular cards that only hipster YouTubers play.
However, when the four of these are in play at the same time, all of their respective abilities and untap clauses merge together to form an infinite combo with each other, so long as a low‑cost artifact for Salvaging Station is in the graveyard.
The two high‑cost stations are activated to create permanents, which untaps the low‑cost stations, and then those two are activated to sacrifice the permanents and inflict harm on opponents, which untaps the high‑cost stations; rinse and repeat until opponents are dead.
So, the heart of this deck is these four artifacts and a commander who can find them.
But what supports that?
Well, first, artifact creatures.
This is the resource that Arcanum needs to create his stations, so naturally, there are 19 of them.
These cards span a variety of purposes, with the most common being to help the deck ramp.
Some of them are a bit filler, but with a commander like Arcanum Dagsson, that’s not really a problem.
The other key thing this deck has is protection.
Arcanum is a scary commander, so to keep him alive, this deck is packing nine counterspells and five other pieces of protection.
Filling out the rest of the deck is a handful of removal spells, as well as a variety of other artifact‑related cards.
There are a handful of cards that seem here specifically to synergize with certain stations, a number of one‑cost non‑creature artifacts to allow Salvaging Station to come online, and there are likewise a couple cards that can let artifacts untap.
Trading Post also lightly synergizes with a couple different stations, yet another possible machine that can be cobbled together.
All of this has a very retro energy about it, and I enjoy that.

Lost and lacking will, Momir looks through his list of organisms.
“Nothing is worth his scrutiny,” Momir complains.
Finally, his scanning finds a grand form without fault, BioVisionary.
Thinking hard, bold but rational philosophy turns logic through airtight analysis.
Satisfactory strands of thought align into his magnum opus: Simic Assistant Tutor, a Cryptid Zoologist, a Quandrix Cultivator, an Amped Entomologist, a Bookworm.
All paths find BioVisionary.
Momir looks for mana through dirt, rocks, and things part both.
His supply is found.
A cunning trick finds its way into his mind.
Bouncing his assistants, a Portal of Sanctuary, a Shard of Crystal, and an Umbilicus fulfill his fantasy.
With BioVisionary on board, many cards copy it.
Organisms such as Mockingbird, artifacts such as Soul Foundry, and surprising magic such as Sakashima’s Will allow Momir to join in, too.
Four mirrors from a primordial first, a smiling Momir claims victory.

That story laid out a lot of what the deck is doing, but let’s do a brief rundown.
Momir Vig is a commander with two abilities attached.
Casting green creature spells lets you tutor up creatures to the top of your library, and casting blue creature spells lets you draw the top card of your library; casting blue‑green spells puts cards directly into your hand in classic original Ravnica fashion.
BioVisionary is a card that wins you the game if you have at least four copies of it in play on your end step.
In a singleton format like EDH, this means that some form of copying is generally required to make it work as a win con, and naturally, this deck has a fair amount of that.
12 cards exist to copy it in some form or other, though these span a wide range of things.
You’ve got the basic copy plan, which will take a bit of effort; you’ve got the stronger, though non‑tutorable plan of using a card like Sakashima’s Will on a wide board; and you’ve got riskier plans such as exiling BioVisionary under Soul Foundry and hoping to be able to activate it four times.
As for finding each of these components, the deck features nine Simic creatures for purposes of tutoring up clones, as well as a number of other green creatures.
There are also cards like Crystal Shard and Umbilicus, which bounce creatures to be recast, and which can also let the deck repeat ETBs on top of that.
Outside of that, this deck features a good amount of ramp, which seems like a good idea for a couple reasons.
For one, Momir Vig is a five‑mana commander with a concerning effect, so that’s basically a seven‑ or nine‑mana commander if you think about it.
Outside of commander tax, Momir Vig also feeds the deck card advantage at a healthy clip, so naturally, it makes sense to make sure to have a way of spending that.
In terms of green symbols, this deck contains 15 amongst its lands and two amongst its colorless ramp, for a total of 17 symbols, which certainly isn’t great, but can be made workable enough with a somewhat aggressive mulligan policy.
This deck certainly represents a fun navigation of this challenge’s tricky requirement.

“It’s missing.
How?” Tony hasn’t got an inkling.
With a total of 62 4K cams running constantly throughout this wing, saving and backing up 2 TB worth of visual data to his main SSD array hourly, no burglar of any amount of skill could slip through such vanishingly slim cracks.
Still, Jarvis had scrupulously dug through it all at his insisting, only to turn up nothing.
And what was Tony anticipating to find anyway?
It’s not a physical thing that’s missing.
No, this was a villain’s doing, not your bog standard cat burglar.
But who?
Doom?
No, no motivation.
Loki?
Now that would fit, but it’s difficult to sort out his thoughts without such a vital symbol.
And Tony Stark’s a man of action anyway.
Sitting around ruminating isn’t his strong suit.
As his armor’s hydraulics hissed into motion, Iron Man sighs and shrugs.
Just got to go out and find it, huh?

Iron Man himself is a five‑mana flying beater who creates treasures and offers a birthing pod sort of effect for artifacts each turn.
Should I have heard that sort of effect as an Oswald effect?
A repurposing effect?
Anyway, he turns artifacts into other artifacts.
The silver border card this deck features is Now I Know My ABCs, a card that wins you the game on your upkeep if you control permanents with all 26 letters of the alphabet in their names.
Iron Man is actually a great choice to go with this for a couple reasons.
For one, treasures, that’s an E.
Secondly, it allows the deck to go hunting for some of the less common letters out there that might be attached to artifacts.
Naturally, this deck has a number of artifacts with less common characters: Tamiyo’s Journal, Blazing Torch, Drivers’ Familiar, Acquisition Octopus, and so on.
There’s even Spy Kit, an equipment that gives a creature the names of all legendary creatures, which certainly simplifies the game plan a bit as long as you can keep the creature in play until your upkeep.
Even outside the artifacts, there’s a lot of variety; we’ve got Accumulox here for that lovely French Vanilla Mirrodin gameplay, as well as Grass Lak and Zorn.
The core of this deck is Now I Know My ABCs, but this deck has a good number of options to pivot into a more conventional artifact beatdown sort of plan if needed.
Sharding Sphinx and a handful of other flyers make for a solid plan alongside combat damage to player effects.
All of this and more is explained in the deck’s 700‑word primer, also including no E’s.
I have to respect the effort on display here.
I briefly toyed with the idea of writing this script E‑less, but quickly abandoned that idea when it became clear how difficult long‑form writing without E’s is, particularly when it comes to navigating around common words I might normally use, like commander or deck.

Is a potentially repeatable recursion source like Evolution Witness a card draw spell?
How about something that draws and discards, like Matsilantly the Great Door?
Is that considered a draw spell?
What about so-called “impulse draw” options like Leia, the Blade Reforged?
I imagine you might have opinions on any one of those questions; maybe you said yes to all, maybe you said yes to none, and maybe you’re a diehard Great Door fan, no more, no less.
It would be satisfying and lovely if I could just flat out say exactly what does and does not count as “card draw” among these, but unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
Fundamentally, the source of ambiguity here is that “card draw” as a concept often gets treated as one singular thing, but it’s actually more like a web of overlapping solutions to achieve a handful of different goals, and different decks will want different sorts of things deemed “draw” for completely different reasons.

This is actually pretty similar to the process of learning a real-time strategy game.
Becoming an average skill Starcraft player basically just requires two things: building up resource generation and then being able to spend all the resources you end up accumulating.
We can see parallels to EDH battle cruiser decks with this.
As long as you’re completing basic tasks like hitting land drops, playing some ramp spells, and spending all your mana each turn, you’ll probably be having an okay time; and once you’re at that point, you can turn your attention to the specifics of what your mana is actually accomplishing.

In the context of this type of deck, a deck chiefly concerned with managing mana gained versus mana spent, all sorts of things can loosely fit into the category of “draw.” Adding X spells to a deck will typically reduce its need for draw since they’re very effective at spending mana, and the same goes for X abilities and other abilities that are useful to sink a lot of mana into over a turn cycle.
These aren’t exactly draw, and you’d get some weird looks if you tried to call them that, but they absolutely perform some of the same functions as draw in decks mostly focused on spending mana.
The key here is going to be making sure that mana is being spent in ways that are actually effective at pushing toward a deck’s goals.
Throwing a random Fireball in an Asheen deck might make it better at spending mana, but an X-cost damage spell probably isn’t a type of card that will generally progress the goals of a creature-based mid-range deck.
The best available ways to spend mana in a nasheen deck will typically be creatures with on-attack draw abilities that synergize with the deck’s commander, and there are also a number of utility lands in Mardu colors that can soak up mana while accomplishing useful tasks for a combat-centered deck.

Another popular non-draw source of value generation is recursion spells, cards that return things from graveyard to hand.
This could be a big one-time option such as Seasons Past, and it could also be a recursion engine such as Evolution Witness plus counter shenanigans, scrapler plus some artifacts, or even something discreet like Forexian Reclamation.
You could even include graveyard abilities such as flashback or escape in this category.
All of these options serve a similar task, allowing already played cards to be reused again in some way.
These sorts of effects are typically going to be strongest in decks that involve lots of redundancy and similar cards, since returning a common card type from graveyard to hand is going to be pretty similar in effect to drawing one of those cards.
However, these still tend to have limitations in that they require having stuff in the graveyard to function.
For a deck with lots of sacrifice or which is based around instants and sorceries, key cards will get into the graveyard all on their own, but other types of decks might want sources of self-mill or self-discard to keep their graveyard stocked with juicy options for returning.
Generally, the more self-mill or wheel-style effects you add to a deck, the more your recursion spells will stray away from the task of spending mana and start to gain some genuine selection potential.
And this brings me to the second goal.

If we want to stretch the definition of “filtering” a little, and I certainly do, tutors are the ultimate example of this: cards that search a player’s library for a card that fits some set of constraints.
Solve the Equation is basically a Solundai vision that looks at unlimited cards instead of six, and Demonic Tutor is basically an Impulse that looks at unlimited cards instead of four, sorcery speed though, so it’s pretty balanced.
So, do tutors count as card draw?
Do cards like Impulse count as draw?
It depends on what your deck’s goals are with running these cards.
In some decks, it might be important to distinguish between what cards give card advantage as opposed to what cards only give card selection.
A spellslinger deck might run Impulse, and it might be a helpful card for smoothing out gameplay, but if the deck is currently running a fairly low number of draw engines, it’s not necessarily going to be a helpful addition for purposes of maintaining cards in hand.
Likewise, if you have a really impactful card you’re tutoring for, a tutor very well could feel like a draw spell, particularly if it’s a tutor that generally searches up some sort of value engine.
A Steelshaper’s Gift that exclusively finds a Skullclamp followed by Sword of Frontier, that’s a draw spell.
Get it out of that tutor category.

When I’m deck building on Architect, I’ll generally put tutors in my draw category in two cases: if they generally find a source of card advantage, or if the function of tutors wholly lines up with the function of drawing cards.
For example, if I’m playing a combo deck where the main thing my draw spells accomplish is digging for combo pieces or tutors, then the purpose of my draw is almost exclusively card selection, and tutors accomplish that.
I’ve also reached the same conclusion in the opposite direction.
My Brina deck is an aggro deck with lots of redundancy, so tutors aren’t much better than basic card draw.
When I added IR’s Oathworn because of its synergy with the commander, there was no reason for me not to group it with the deck’s draw because it’s performing the same task.
However, in other decks, tutors play a somewhat distinct role.
In my strongest deck, I run tutors to find Time Sieve because that’s what I need to win, but I also run bite and defasa effects, which generically draw cards when my creatures hit players.
This can help find Time, but it can also draw me into counterspells to protect my combo.
And if Time Sieve is up and running, but I don’t have a full combo, having an engine that gives me an extra three to four cards a turn is typically enough to turn a couple extra turns into a win by helping me find things to give extra artifacts.
Card selection and card advantage are both helpful, and having a mixture of selection-only cards and generic card draw that provides both works out to fulfill the deck’s needs in the draw department.

Nearing the center of the spectrum, you’ve got things that generate a decent bit of card advantage but that also do a bit of extra digging.
This includes my personal favorite draw-X card in most decks, Pull from Tomorrow.
It’s instant speed, reasonably costed, and the disadvantage of discarding a card is typically negligible since it’s attached to a card that draws a bunch of cards first.
You could also put something like Necropotence here, since absent a Reliquary Tower, you’ll generally be exiling some amount of what you draw, even if there’s a lot of volume of cards entering your hand.
Generic card draw leans a bit toward advantage compared to other options.
Though a lot of the strongest draw is just generic card draw, so oftentimes decks will focus on this even if they care mostly about card selection.

After that, you’ve got impulse draw and recursion engines.
While the former is relatively straightforward, the latter will vary a bit depending on how well it’s supported.
Recursion spells might lean very close to advantage, though they also might have some degree of selection as well, depending on how much self-mill and discard a deck has.
It’s often far easier to get cards to the graveyard than into hand, but the tools for hating on graveyards are far stronger and far more ubiquitous than cards that force opponents to discard are, so recursion has some natural limits in how reliable it can be.
On the far end of things, we have abilities that can soak up an unlimited amount of mana.
Kessig Wolf Run is a land with a powerful activated ability that a deck can sink as much mana as it likes into.
It will never find you any cards, but it can grant the value of giving a creature you control +X/+0 and trample, and the only cost to have this ability available is running a colorless land.
So, this is a spectrum of what different styles of draw and filtering will accomplish in terms of value and card selection.
But I worry that all this categorization and visual flourish and such like might serve to abstract the issue beyond what’s helpful.
So, how do you find the best options for your deck?
And how do you know when you have enough?
Let’s start with that first question.

The reasoning for this choice on Wizards’ part was simple: Sol Ring was considered by some to be a must-include in the then-small Commander format, since, on account of it being banned in Legacy, its low double-digits price was pretty affordable for its power level, so the precon decks should also include Sol Ring.
I could say a lot about this logic, most prominently that Sol Ring’s relative affordability was a product of it not being played in large formats.
Printing sets specifically for EDH was a great way to inflate the size of the format, a process which, without a reprint, would have caused a demand spike with a fixed supply and increased the price, likely relegating Sol Ring to higher power level EDH decks.
It’s a problem that solves itself, one could argue.
Also, the pre-con Commander decks weren’t exactly well constructed, so the idea that they need to keep up with the decks of long-time Commander players is pretty laughable.
But something you might notice is that there’s a small difference between me and Wizards of the Coast: I don’t make money off of how many units of the Commander pre-cons get sold, and they do.
So I guess I’m a little biased that way, but okay.

I think it would have been fine, or even advisable, to let Sol Ring’s price soar as the format size grows; let it be a toy for the power gamers alongside Mana Crypt, Moxen, and the like.
I understand why some people might disagree, but that’s my opinion.
There are also people who have argued that it should be banned, such as a writer known as chisholicious two months after the Commander set’s release in 2011.
And, well, unless somebody goes around burning every single copy of Sol Ring on Earth released after 2010, a ban would really be the only solution, but it’s not going to happen.
Commander’s ban list is, hot take alert, kind of a stupid mess that very clearly underscores the difficulty of moderating such a large format played in so many different ways and with such a wide potential pool of cards.
On top of this, Sol Ring has been printed in over a dozen Commander sets; Wizards have done their utmost to place the card within the pantheon of EDH.
Sol Ring is here to stay.

As a counter scenario, one can imagine a universe in which a player’s removal options solely consist of Naturalize, Murder, Lava Coil, and Banishing Light, to be played in whatever quantities the player wants.
In this universe, a player is forced to spend more time thinking about questions like, “How much am I worried about enchantments and artifacts?
How many creature removal spells do I need to deal with opposing pressure and win conditions?” The question isn’t what specific removal spells a player needs but rather how much of these sort of stock options.
Back in the real world, things end up working out a bit different than this.
This is especially pronounced if a player is using a website like EDHREC or some other metric that orders cards by popularity or quality.
If you’re looking for counter spells in Scryfall ordered by EDHREC rank, as I have been spotted doing from time to time, you first see Counterspell, a card that’ll set you back a dollar, great, I love it.
Then you see a couple of other options that are similar with a downside, as well as a couple that cost a lot of money.
By the time you get down to your standard staples, your kitchen table kings, your Modern machinations, or whatever, it’s looking a lot less tempting.
You have your Mana Leak type cards that fall off fast in power in later turns, you have your more specialized options, and then you have your counter spells that commit the cardinal sin of costing three mana.

It’s easy to imagine a player seeing the rapid price increases and power decreases that happen when you scroll downward from Counterspell, going, “Well, okay, I guess I’ll run Counterspell and a couple of these other ones, and then I’ll have the good counter spells within my budget.” Now, it should be mentioned that Counterspell is an incredibly powerful card.
Most other counter options that players can run are worse than it, yes, but I’d guess that most blue decks want lowercase-C counter spells enough that they’d benefit from running cards that are kind of a lot worse than Counterspell.
A joke in my play group is to respond to the question of “Oh, what does that card do?” with something like, “Oh yeah, it’s like a ‘worse Soul Ring’” or “Oh yeah, it’s basically a ‘worse version of Lightning Bolt.’” The joke here is that these statements tell you almost nothing about the actual power of a card; it’s like somebody asking how old a person is and you saying, “Oh yeah, they’re younger than Henry Kissinger,” helpful, thank you.

As a point of contrast, we can consider other types of cards somebody might choose to run, ones whose power is less obvious.
It’s pretty easy to go, “Oh, Wizards’ Retort, that’s strictly worse than Counterspell,” but what about if I want, say, a card that generates value when I play creature spells?
All right, Scryfall, let’s go green cards that have “whenever cast” and “creature” in their text, and let’s rank them based on EDHREC rank.
And there, well, okay, so there’s Beast Whisperer, and there’s The Great Henge, and there’s Silverback Elder, and there’s Primeval Bounty, and there’s Glimpse of Nature, and there’s Wild Pair, and there’s Matthew Admirers, and there’s Benjamin.
So which ones are the bad ones?
Which one should I add, and where should I stop adding them?
These cards are pulled from all across the 57 ordered cards that pop up with my search inputs.
Some are more flexible, or more bursty, or lower to the ground, but analyzing them is a much trickier value proposition than looking at counter spells.
It’s possible I did the math on my deck ahead of time and went, “Okay, I need two or three of these cards, preferably at least one in the four-to-five mana range and at least one in the six-to-seven mana range,” but if I didn’t, gee, there are sure a lot of good-looking cards here.
I could run “worse Counterspell” or “worse Soul Ring,” or I could run more of these.
And counter spells aren’t the only thing to get neglected.
If I’m looking for creature removal, Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile are both under two bucks and absurdly powerful, with other white creature removal being much worse or much more expensive.
If I’m looking for artifact removal, red has Abrade and Vandalblast, with other options once again being worse or more expensive.
If I’m looking for general-purpose draw for blue, there are a few low-budget options: Mystic Remora is fabulous, especially with its price halved by a Dominaria Remastered reprint, and Mulldrifter, Treasure Cruise, and Archmage Emeritus all have decent spots in several different archetypes.
But beyond that, things get weaker, more specialized, or more expensive.
If somebody isn’t setting out a framework for their deck, it’s easy to imagine underdoing it on the more generalist stuff and overdoing it on the more synergistic stuff, and a deck running too much synergistic stuff and not enough general stuff is at risk of getting itself into a bimodal pickle: a state where it either falls on its face after getting a key piece removed or it goes on to a Mach 10 march toward victory.

There are certainly powerful cards that are cheap due to wide reprints or another reason, such as Sol Ring, Counterspell, and Swords to Plowshares, but there’s an even sneakier type of budget card: the ones that cost zero dollars.
A quick anecdote: I recently built a Meria, Scholar of Antiquity deck.
It’s an equipment deck; you throw a bunch of equipments on Meria and then tap them to generate mana and value.
I kind of built it as a meme, but it’s a genuinely delightful mid-power level aggro deck.
Anyway, after ordering the forty dollars’ worth of mostly random bulk I needed for the list, I sat staring at the Sword of the Animist and the Sword of Forge and Frontier I had in my collection.
They cost no money to add and would be so good in the deck.
I put them in the deck for a few games, but they had such a warping effect that I decided to take them out.
My deck’s mana and value engines were pretty solid for an aggro deck but decidedly reasonable in scope; while Explorer’s Scope and Rogue’s Gloves both feel very appropriate within the list, when I played Sword of Forge and Frontier it felt like a totally different deck.
And I know the fact that’s within the realm of possibility naturally shifts the way my opponents will think about my deck.
Ultimately, it wasn’t meant to be a particularly high-powered deck, nor could it hope of performing like a high-powered deck on the current budget, so I cut the swords.
The point being made here is that you should add cards to a deck under consideration of how they’ll impact the games you play with the deck, even if you own the cards and they’re free to add.
My quasi-meme equipment deck has a handful of specific weaknesses, and adding power cards to the deck doesn’t help it manage those weaknesses with any consistency; it just makes people want to play better decks against it.

An even better example is graveyard decks.
Graveyard synergies are wide-ranging, fun, and potentially quite powerful, but they exist within a game that has a lot of really heavy-duty graveyard hate.
There are the options like Tormod’s Crypt and Rest in Peace, which straightforwardly demolish graveyard strategies, and even cards like Nihil Spellbomb and Bojuka Bog, which do so without even spending a card, and with the latter dodging counter spells on top of all that.
All this to say, decks heavily based around graveyards need to make a decision: accept the need to be resilient against this stuff, usually by winning quickly or being loaded with counters for the hate, or play at a power level where these hate cards are less common.
This puts a lot of mid-power graveyard decks in an awkward spot.
Adding stronger synergies will lead to crushing unprepared decks even more than before, but will still end up with getting wholesale dunked on by hate cards unless the efficiency of the deck is vastly improved to guarantee quicker or more abrupt wins.
There’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer here, but my mantra is that if you don’t want to play higher power level, don’t play higher power level.

Another example of this is cheap infinite combos, namely Niv-Mizzet and Curiosity.
I’ve known people who went, “Well, this deck is running red and blue and I’ve got the card sitting right here; why not add them?” If you’re purely looking to increase the power level of your deck, this is fine logic, but adding an infinite combo to your deck changes the whole dynamic of games once people know it’s there.
As a frequent enjoyer of aggro, I often find myself asking the question, “How will each of my opponents be trying to win this game?” If the answer goes from “I don’t know, Drakes or something” to an infinite combo that requires very little setup, I’m probably going to be hitting that player with my creatures, and they’re definitely going to deserve it.

As another anecdote about building decks for the types of games you want to play, my brother recently got his first Commander deck, a decently built Jodah.
In a night with several EDH games, everybody pulled out one of the more powerful lists every time he played the Jodah deck, resulting in games where he was doing a lot but also eating a lot of removal spells and needing to deal with a bunch of powerful nonsense from other people.
The games were close, but the only gam.

I think most of us have seen games like this.
It's turn five or so, and a player is getting ready to go to attacks.
Immediately, a chorus erupts from the would-be attacker's opponents: "Come on, man, I don't have anything." "Hey, don't attack me, I missed a land drop." "Really?
You're going to attack me?
But I guess I was just trying to be funny." I like to call this style of table engagement SBS, "small bean syndrome," when a player goes out of their way to paint their deck as being in a bad spot and deserving nothing but mercy.

Now, Commander's nature as a multiplayer format means the table politics naturally play a major role in a lot of games.
In addition, a lot of people play EDH specifically for a less cutthroat MTG experience; not everybody at every table is looking to win quickly or even win at all.
I'm not a big fan of most forms of small bean syndrome, due to their tendency to discourage attacks and artificially lengthen games, but I can accept that not everybody is trying to play the same kind of EDH I am.
However, there are also people who share my desire to play quicker and more cutthroat games and who employ small bean syndrome more tactically.
This may be intentional, but it also might not be, which brings me to a major reason for SBS's existence: deck inconsistency.

If somebody has an inconsistent deck, one with some powerful and/or explosive cards but a lack of support or connective tissue for such cards, there will naturally be moments of popping off and moments of the opposite of popping off.
This means that such a player can be telling the truth when they say they're having a whiff moment, but this can still be a deception in some sense of the word.
Let's try an exercise real quick: here's a graph of their deck's performance, with the Y-axis being power and the X-axis being percentile of power at a given moment (you know, 20% of the time they'll be at least this level of powerful, 80% of the time they'll be at least this much lower quantity of powerful).
Make sense?
No?
Great.
You obviously got this moderately small percentage of the time where their deck is going absolutely ham, doing whatever it is the powerful decks do, but also this gulf back here where their deck is farting around doing nothing.
Certainly, they're having a bad time here, but this is often a situation arising from deck-building choices.
A deck that dedicates too much space to the synergistic and the explosive will have some big turns and occasionally massive wins, but also a lot of moments where it withers to a single removal spell or just can't quite put the pieces of the puzzle together.
These moments could be made less frequent by running more of that connective tissue: more filtering, more small-scale draw, and more creatures and low-cost interaction spells to protect themselves.
If they're ramping to big cards, they could run a larger proportion of small-scale ramp spells in their deck so that they successfully ramp where they want to be more than 40% of the time.
When a person is piloting a sort of all-or-nothing deck, small bean syndrome is a form of "power level smoothing," a way of papering over the power crater they made for themselves and bolstering these weakest moments.
And I don't mean this as an attack necessarily; if this sounds like you, please take this as deck-building advice.

A related concept to small bean syndrome is people who don't verbally talk down their game state, but who do play in a way that conceals how well they're doing.
At a cEDH table, this is the norm, as it should be at that power; you're trying to win a cutthroat game of Magic against other people trying to win even more cutthroatly, and you have every right to bluff, to downplay your game state, and to otherwise engage in low-level deception.
At a more middling power level, though, this might not be the best way to go.
If you're playing a deck with a clear win con, people might know what to expect even if they're a bit scared about it, but if you're playing a deck whose wins result from weird tech pieces interacting to create unexpected avalanches of value and board state, well, people might get a bit apprehensive.
When a deck is doing a lot of things, but it's unclear how it wins, people may be asking themselves the question, "Oh God, is it that?
Or is it that?" Additionally, there are some strategic ways of playing that might involve saving resources and trying to force other people to use interaction first.
You might say to yourself, "Hmm, that card is spooky, but if I hold no removal, somebody else might deal with it, and then they'll have less removal when I want to do something spooky later." My friend Mr. Hans calls this "playing like a nerd," and though it's decent from a strategic standpoint, it's the kind of slightly baddie play style that people will eventually catch on to.
Whether or not you get punished for playing shady or playing nerdy will depend on the table, but you should keep in mind that human beings have a natural tendency to fear the unknown, even if being unknown might feel like the correct play.

For an example of a deck that performs almost the opposite way, let's talk about my Glissa deck.
I talk about it a lot, and I will do so again here.
The deck consists of ramp, draw spells, removal, and big creatures: no bursty wins, no surprises, and no weird tech pieces or out-of-place synergy cards hogging space.
There's nothing spicy with the commander either; she just adds draw to improve consistency and is a good blocker to help with survivability.
The deck simply does its battle cruiser thing.
People who've played against the deck know that's what it does, and if people ask me what it does, well, that's what I'll tell them.
If I'm currently behind while playing that deck, well, guess what?
When I get back on my feet, you can expect more ramp, draw, big creatures, and removal.
Get ready.
It's a very consistent deck; it's also what I'll call a "transparent" deck.
By this I mean, you can always approximate how well it's doing by looking at the board state, cards in hand, and land count of the deck.
If the deck has a big board, well, the threat is right there, no extreme synergies or combos to worry about later.
If the deck has a lot of cards in hand, there's a good chance it's packing a lot of removal.
If the deck has a big land count, there are all sorts of moderately scary things to worry about, but the odds of the spookiest outcomes are lessened the fewer cards in hand the deck has.
It's a powerful deck against a lot of conventionally built mid-power decks; I call it "Midrange Crusher 5000" for a reason, but the transparency and absence of sudden win cons means that people tend to worry about it less than they probably should.

Another transparent deck I have is my Meria deck.
Although that one has more unique tech and response plays, it's transparent because it's a Voltron deck.
The problem is right there on the board in front of you.
If there's a Meria on board with a lot of equipments, I'm doing pretty well.
Most of my draws will be exiles off the top, so you're seeing most of the stuff I'm seeing; the scary stuff is all visible.
There might be some protection spells in my hand, but the deck devotes a full 10% of its space to protection, so that much shouldn't be a shock.
Meria also has the advantage over Glissa that it's low to the ground.
My deck can create a value engine with its commander to exile cards, but that value is more small artifacts and creatures, and the deck doesn't do much if the artifact count is low or if the commander gets removed.
Even with a higher artifact count, the deck still only hits one player a turn and gains maybe four cards' worth of value.

My $25 Rakdos discard deck is even lower to the ground, only incrementally drawing cards with a handful of scrappy creatures, and honestly, that's the deck's only saving grace.
It deletes people's hands and makes them upset, but the rest of the deck is just grindy creatures and a commander to clear the way for my small group of 2/2s and 3/3s to attack.
People will sometimes attack it out of spite for a bit, but the non-discard portion of the deck is so utterly fair Magic that people will usually go, "Oh, you're just doing that now." Huh.
And won't worry about it too much.

All three of these decks pair well with a style of table engagement I like to call "fight the table ideology." They can happily admit to exactly what they plan to do; they can do it fairly consistently, and they are prepared for the consequences if they become an enemy.
Me and Mr. Hans originally coined this phrase to describe the optimal play style for mixed power level games, or alternatively, games where one player gets a decisive advantage early.
If you're playing more powerfully than other people, you could play close to the chest before popping off with a power turn and deleting the table, but that's not really fun for anybody.
However, give your opponents the information they need to know and be open about the general shape of what your deck is doing, specifically how it wins and what cards you're playing are doing there, and suddenly you've got a dynamic game where your opponents are strategizing about how to keep you in check while managing their own individual plans.
Any deck can partake in this ideology in a game playing against lower power decks, and I encourage giving it a try.
But as a method, it also works as a more general style of deck building and play.

Now, I can already hear some of you say, "But Alex, why would I want to be the enemy?
I don't want my life total to be eaten into the sun by a bunch of quivering nerds who I've been smugly informing of their impending demise at the hands of my deck." Well, first, if you are in the dominant position, doing literally that can lead to some really fun gameplay as long as you're not an ass about it.
But more broadly, this method can actually save your deck from some hate, and let's talk about that.

This might seem odd for hate dodging, but step one of fight the table ideology is that you should pose some sort of clear threat to the table with a good degree of consistency.
This could be early damage, big mid-game beats, board wipes, stax, and so forth.
This will mostly come down to building a deck that's focused and isn't filled with unnecessary tech pieces or creatures out of sync with the game plan, and you can accomplish this step on a shockingly low budget.
The point of this step is that what you're doing needs to be visible.
To go back to an earlier point, I've seen hyper-techy mid-range decks which fill their board with unusual permanents with no clear sense of how they'll be used.
If you do this, people might feel a looming sense of threat, but with no obvious sense of what to worry about, this might simply result in them attacking you.
By contrast, if the threat is visible, people can make their own educated calculations, and that calculation might just be, "Eh, it's probably fine." Similarly, consistency is important because that will be baked into people's calculations as well.
If we take the inconsistent explosive deck I was talking about earlier and average out the power, it might very well be lower than a deck engaging in fight the table ideology, but people aren't going to be thinking about averages; they're going to be thinking about the fact that you swung at them for 90 on turn five last game.
That's a lot scarier than a deck that consistently swings for 15.

Step two of fight the table ideology is to be open about the threat that your deck poses to the table.
This doesn't mean you need to overhype yourself or give people constant updates on your draws, but be straightforward with people.
Verbally, this could mean saying, "Yeah, my deck generates a lot of artifact tokens, which I can use to accomplish various effects.
I don't have very many right now, so I'll need to get a lot more and have an outlet for them before I can do anything too scary." In terms of play, being open can just mean having a thing you're clearly doing.
Don't let your opponents imagine what you're doing with all of these fishy plays; have a goal and execute clear steps along the way.
One easy example for this is hardcore ramp decks, which work well because everybody knows they're scary at a lot of mana, but there's no singular land drop that signals the deck being a problem.
It evokes more of a gentle gradient of concern from your opponents rather than the black-and-white concern of a random spooky permanent, and this can lead to the deck flying under the radar.
This is doubly true if you're not running a singular win card like "Torment of Hailfire," but rather a win involving multiple cards used in a complex way, since decks can kind of just blend together in people's minds as, "Yeah, the deck does big things when it gets a lot of mana," which is conceptually less scary than a one-shot.
This sort of ramp deck is a great example of transparency being unexpectedly effective at avoiding attacks compared to more opaque play styles.

I've laid out the basic framework, but a natural question that might arise is, "Can my deck be played this way?" I do my best to play decks that are relatively consistent, so a lot of mine do end up following this mold, but even in my case, some decks will be trickier to do this with than others.
Decks with combos are generally more difficult to do this with, as they're naturally less transparent due to the level of importance they place on cards in hand, which is by definition a hidden zone.
For this reason and others, sometimes a deck isn't a great candidate for this kind of transparency treatment.
However, I think that a good exercise for every deck is thinking about what it would have to do to become a good candidate for this.
What happens if you remind your opponents of the strongest win con in your deck along with the conditions required to get there right at the start of every game?
What happens if your opponents treat that.

The other day I was exploring options for a go-wide beatdown deck, so naturally I was on the EDHREC pages of Toski and Tovolar, and on those pages I found something that bothered me: on both pages, 60% of decks run Cultivate.
Now, obviously EDHREC has some inherent flaws that get further compounded through users of the website, it would be cool if somebody made a video about that or something, but still, 60% with a commander that’s low mana enough not to be boosted out by the ramp part and who draws enough cards not to need the tacked-on land to hand; you could spend that three mana on literally anything else.
There’s also some questionable draw run in these decks whose commander is an insanely powerful draw spell.
So what gives?

When I started playing Magic, the mulligan seemed like a largely uncomplicated subject; if your hand is okay, you keep it, and if it sucks, you don't.
For the most part, this analysis reflected the actual state of the game.
See, for the first several years I played the game, the official mulligan rule was the Paris mulligan.
If you don't like your hand of seven, you can draw a new hand of six; if you don't like that hand, you can draw a new hand of five, and so on.
In some competitive constructed applications, you might have planned out some sort of mulligan policy for yourself, but the general idea, especially in limited, was “uh, try not to mull again because it sucks,” especially with regard to mana screw.
If your deck is 40% lands, a seven-card hand averages 2.8 lands; if you mulligan after drawing too few lands, the six-card replacement hand will average 2.4 lands.
God forbid you need to go to five, because that hand will average two lands and will have a greater probability of having one land than having three lands.
Yikes.
In addition, if there are a couple of pivotal cards in your deck, every mulligan you take means a turn later that you’ll see one of those cards, meaning that your midgame potential is compromised as well.

However, this all changed in 2019.
The introduction of the London mulligan meant that, since you get to see a full hand of seven cards with every mulligan, it’s no longer the painful choice it used to be.
This is all the more true in Commander, where you get one for free.
The filtering value in being able to pitch a hand and get that same number of cards again is legitimate and shouldn’t be underestimated; taking that first mulligan has no cost to you other than that it requires taking your first mulligan, so if you aren’t using that mulligan regularly every few games at least, you’re actively giving up on a resource the game is handing you.
In addition, going down to six cards or even to five cards isn’t that big a cost for a lot of decks.
It’s a bit painful in limited, because card effects and power levels are less diverse, so drawing a different set of lands, generic beaters, and non-creature spells often won’t feel worth the cost of losing one of them.
However, in Commander, cards vary wildly.
Despite my personal wishes for the format, just about every deck runs a piece of fast mana that will dramatically warp its early turns if drawn, and there are a number of other cards that will similarly have an outsized impact if drawn in the opening hand: other low-cost ramp spells like Birds of Paradise, low-cost draw spells like Mystic Remora or Skullclamp, and high-impact creatures such as Professional Face-Breaker or Academy Manufactor.
A six- or even five-card hand with one of the deck’s best cards will often be a lot better than your average seven-card hand.
In addition, as I mentioned in my lands video, the existence of a commander creature means that decks will have a pre-selected card that’s effectively in hand at all times.
This means that when you mulligan, you know that whatever hand you draw will have access to that creature; as long as you like your commander, it’s literally impossible for a hand to have access to no good cards.
So mulligans are a great tool, and developing your skill in something as superficially simple as saying yes or no to a given hand will generate you tons of advantage through additional free filtering in the long term.

In addition, not only are there relevant decisions to be made during a given game, but the influence of mulligans on your decision-making process begins while you’re still building your deck.
We can see an indication of this immediately with the number of lands people choose to run in decks.
If everybody had to keep their first hand every time, I suspect that you’d see way more decks gravitating toward land counts in the low 40s, the range that maximizes the odds of a three-land hand.
But nah, if we draw too few lands, the cost of drawing a new hand is relatively low due to the previously mentioned factors, and the odds of drawing a workable hand within the first three drawn is pretty high.
There are also people who adhere to this principle much more strongly than just absent-mindedly tossing 30 lands in all their decks.
There’s a particular person in my comments section who advocates a land count of around 28 for most lower-curved decks, with the logic being that an aggressive mulligan policy can be employed to guarantee a high probability of drawing into enough lands to function.
Let’s consider that plan for a moment.
A given hand in a deck with 28 lands will have a 36% chance of having zero or one lands, a 33% chance of having two lands, and a 31% chance of having three or more lands.
If we’re willing to mulligan into six to see up to three hands of cards, this gives us a 95% chance of seeing a hand with at least two lands and a two-thirds chance of seeing a hand with at least three lands.
These aren’t the worst odds, especially when you consider that there might be low-cost draw, low-cost tutors, low-cost ramp, land cycling, and other tools that can make a two- or even one-land hand keepable.
However, this also calls back to the idea of mulligans as a resource: getting to see more hands of cards has filtering value, and constructing a deck in the 28-land framework means that filtering resource is basically spent exclusively looking for the right land count.
Now, this can be fine if you really trust your non-land cards to be valuable and trust your mana base to give you the symbols you need, but you’re still giving up a bit of ability to hunt for good nonland plays.
As a demonstration of this, we can think of a hand that has two lands and some desirable non-land cards; a decent hand I’d happily keep.
But what if we just made some changes to the deck and one of these lands got cut for a Ledger Shredder?
Suddenly this hand has a very high risk of missing at least one early land drop, and we might need a mulligan for a different hand, a hand that will likely have worse non-land play.
The point here is that running fewer lands will lead to a greater frequency of needing to reject hands with desirable non-land play.
If we’re looking for a hand with two to four lands, running a land count of 30 will give us that 66% of the time, whereas a land count of 40 will give us that 76% of the time.
Ten percent might sound like a small difference, but think about it this way: almost a third of the hands that the hypothetical 30-land deck needs to mulligan due to land count are keepable by the 40-land deck, and those hands might contain some really great cards.
This doesn’t mean that running more lands is objectively correct; there definitely are decks where having a lower chance to top-deck a land is especially desirable, but it does demonstrate some of the trade-offs involved with running different land counts and the way that higher land counts and better mana bases, for that matter, can increase the filtering value of the mulligan step.

Let’s say you decide to lean more in the direction of filtering for non-land cards.
What’s a good thing to do with this filtering?
Well, a lot of decks will have a particular thing they’re looking to find; for example, a piece of ramp is a frequent want for decks with a specific curve in mind, as is the case with the Goreclaw deck I mentioned in my lands video.
In cases like this, how many of a particular type of card a deck should run often comes down to whether the deck is okay with drawing multiple copies.
In my lands video, I showed a formula for finding the probability of drawing a card of a type, and while 20 cards of a type does give a comfortable 80% chance of drawing at least one in any given hand, the flip side is that there’s also a more than 40% chance of drawing two or more, and there is actually a lower chance of drawing exactly one copy than there is running a count of 15 or even 10.
Some decks won’t mind multiple copies of whatever they’re looking for, but for a deck looking for a diverse range of cards or a deck that is tight on space, running 10 to 12 copies and mulliganing aggressively for them might be a better plan than running 15 or 20.

Another consideration that’s especially relevant for higher powers is that decks can be built with the intent to mulligan in different ways based on the opposing decks and the turn order.
In certain matchups, it might be correct to mulligan aggressively for a hand that will make a bunch of bold plays early in a rush to gain dominance, whereas a different deck pool and turn order might make a grindier hand with quality drawn interaction a much more appealing one to stick with.

At this point, I think I should mention I’ve been presenting mulligans as a filtering resource, which might imply that each deck has a set quantity of this resource that it should spend all of, and this is the easiest way to think of it, but it’s not exactly correct.
Willingness to mulligan will differ person to person and deck to deck, and how tightly a given player leverages their mulligans will generally depend on three factors.
One of these factors is how much they care about the quantity of cards they start the game with.
I mentioned that constructed EDH decks have more card variation than limited decks, and this effect scales with power level.
In cEDH, a single power card like Dockside Extortionist or Esper Sentinel might redeem an otherwise painful five-card hand, and a high density of specific stax pieces means that ditching a hate card against three commanders that aren’t generally all that affected by it isn’t a large cost at all.
Another factor that will influence mulligan willingness is a player’s risk tolerance, and this actually works in both directions.
A player who wants to sit down at the table and have a game where they’re guaranteed to do something might be willing to keep a slow hand rather than risking finding a worse one, and a different player could use the same reasoning to mulligan aggressively for a great hand because they don’t trust their topdecks.
On the flip side, we can imagine daredevils of multiple stripes boldly keeping or mulliganing and believing in their deck to deliver them greatness; ultimately, this factor is a matter of personal preference more than anything and will mainly come down to what different people find fun.
The final factor in determining mulligan willingness is how confident a player feels in their mulliganing skill.
Less experienced players and players who don’t know their deck as well will often be inclined to keep a mediocre but workable hand that a more experienced player would happily toss out to hunt for a better one.
This is a skill you can work on, and the best way to do this is to understand the ratios of different things in your deck and how likely each is to get drawn, either in an opening hand or in the first several draws of the game.

It’s useful to know that your opening hands will contain an average of 2.5 lands and 2.2 cards above three mana, and that they’ll have a 70% chance each to contain at least one piece of ramp and draw.
If this feels like a nebulous process in practice, you can also do lots of play testing: draw opening hands, play out the first few turns, rinse and repeat.
And actually doing a combination of these two, pre-play analysis and play testing, is the quickest way to build intuition as to how various deck building choices will turn into practical early game results.
It’s easy to see your library as a mystical black box, to deify it as an entity that will either bless you with wonderful cards or curse you with all the wrong stuff, but it’s not that.
The way the cards in your library turn into hands is predictable in a probabilistic sense, and getting a better feel for that will improve your ability to play your deck both in the mulligan phase and beyond.

The three decks I mentioned in my last video, my $25 Ratos deck, my Maria deck, and my Glissa deck, all basically do variations on a theme.
With Glissa, the deck might take different opening plays depending on the game, but at the end of the day the general game plan will be ramp, play big stuff, and gain board dominance.
Similarly, with my Maria deck, the deck is always looking to play a bunch of equipments and swing big in the mid-game, but that can take a bunch of different shapes.
If you want to learn more about the Maria deck, I recently posted a ten-minute deck tech over on my Patreon that covers the process of how I built it, a breakdown of the list, and some takeaways I had from the deck-building process.

Let’s say I want to look at how often I get a particular type of card by a particular turn, using the example of a Goreclaw deck I’ve been building.
The deck always wants to play the commander by turn three, and this means that it needs to get a piece of ramp by turn two every game.
Disregarding mulligans, lands, and other factors, the probability of this happening is modeled by this function, where X is the number of ramp spells in my deck; it can be used to graph out how likely it is to achieve this goal based on that number.
As we can see on the graph, if I have 10 ramp spells in the deck there’s a 63% chance of having one on turn two; if there’s 15 in the deck I have a 79% chance; if there’s 20 I have an 88% chance, and so on.
Alright, now let’s say instead I really want to see ramp in the opening hand and we happily mulligan to get there.
If I decide to run 15 ramp spells, then for a given seven-card hand there’s a 69.6% chance of having at least one ramp spell, and this graph lays out the probability based on the number of hands drawn: for one hand drawn it’s 69.6%, for two hands it’s 90.8%, for three 97.2%, and so on.
A simple benchmark you can reference is that you need ten copies of a card in a deck to have it show up in a given hand more than half the time.

You could also do this sort of modeling for a combo deck.
For this hypothetical persist combo deck running no tutors and no partial pieces, in order to have a better than half chance of drawing one of each piece to have the combo you need to draw roughly half the deck, and there’s about a 1 in 400 chance of drawing it in the opening hand.
Another possible calculation would be modeling land drops given a certain land count.
By showing you this kind of modeling I’m certainly not trying to say that you should go out and get a degree in math before building a deck; I almost never run this sort of calculation while deck building.
What I am trying to say, though, is that it’s good to have a rough idea of the actual numbers of the situation.
I think a lot of people tend to underestimate how many cards 100 actually is, and that tends to result in people putting in fewer cards with a particular effect than would be ideal.
This also then has other effects on the card quality.
You might build out the core of a deck and then go, “Wow, I’ve got so many slots left, I could put all sorts of stuff in here.” I’ve been there, and let me tell you, those decks end up turning out way worse than decks where I’m sweating and dying trying to fit everything in.
When slots are plentiful, filler that weakens the deck as a whole will work its way in: cards where you go, “Oh, this seems decent in a couple niche situations,” or “Oh yeah, this card has slight synergies with a couple other elements of the deck.” These cards are probably there in place of other, better-suited cards.

Once you’ve figured out your categories and considered what sorts of cards should make up a given category, the next question might be how much of each to run, and this will vary deck to deck.
Things like draw and ramp can be tested via playtesting, but reactive elements will be trickier to figure out.
For removal, I’d recommend starting between 8 and 14 and adjust from there, keeping in mind that slower decks and lower-velocity decks will usually want more removal than faster decks and higher-velocity decks will.
Protection is the most variable of all: I run zero in a couple scrappy decks that don’t give a heck about anything, and 12 in the Maria deck whose supporting categories are currently on screen, where my commander staying alive an extra turn might mean a dead opponent and a bunch of value.
How much protection is correct for your deck will depend on how much it cares about its commander and other key cards surviving, and if you care about that a lot I’d like to remind you that if you’re only running the two Boots, your odds of drawing protection in your first five draws of the game are a hair under 23%.
That’s not great.
A helpful side effect of categorizing is that it will naturally leave some cards in undeniably naked view.
If a card doesn’t fit into one of your key categories, you should be asking yourself what its purpose is, and the answer should be simple and straightforward.
If the answer involves scratching your head and vaguely gesturing at a couple other cards, that’s a card that deserves a more robust evaluation.
In my mind, the optimal state of a deck list is one whose components exist in comfortable tension in your mind, where there are constantly questions on the back of your mind like, “Hm, should I swap out a ramp spell and a finisher slot for two more draw spells?” The answer to that can be no, but asking that kind of question in the first place will improve your decks and make you better at deck building.

For a couple examples of toolbox decks at a lower power, I can talk about my Shimmer Slide deck and my friend Mr. Hans’s Vrock deck.
In Shimmer Slide, the primary objective of the toolbox is grabbing Astral Slide, but there are a ton of other options embedded into this enchantment, artifact, and wizard-based tutoring framework: board wipes, recur spells, draw spells, life gain, and so forth.
This means that the deck can flow nicely once it gets into the mid-game, even though the interesting mana base can often lead to slow early games.
In the Vrock deck, equipments are the primary card type that the tutor base is oriented around, with the equipment base containing value, protection, defense, graveyard hate, and Sunforger.
With Sunforger, the deck can hit a ton of different cards, including a convoluted infinite combo, which results in a mutate deck that’s a little strange but very fun and flexible.

A lot of EDH discourse exists around the concept of removal, and specifically around the question of whether people should be running more of it.
In that great battle of ideas, I fall firmly in the camp of incessantly telling people to run more removal; I will happily be that annoying guy.
However, I also understand why this advice might not be enjoyable to receive for a lot of people.
In conventional EDH deck building, ways to interact with your opponents often ends up in the category of “vegetables”: it’s a type of card that’s not flashy or exciting but that you need to include regardless.
If you’re building a cool EDH deck around a particular idea, sloughing off deck space to spend on interaction might feel disappointing; you’re effectively diluting the quality of what’s happening on your side of the board in order to set back opponents.
If this line of thinking sounds like you, I understand that, and I’m not here to perform the role of the chiding parent telling you that you need to grit your teeth and choke down those vegetables.
There certainly are plenty of reasons to run more ways to interact with opponents.
The two big ones are that it leaves you a better rounded deck and it leads to more dynamic and interesting games, rather than luck-based one-sided stomps, but no, I don’t want to focus on that because on some level you probably already know that.
Rather, I want to offer an alternative vision to the vegetables analogy.
What if you could have all the benefits of running a lot of removal without feeling like it’s gobbling up your deck space?

I’m going to talk about a couple methods for accomplishing this task, and the first method is to make the slots you’re already spending on removal do more for you.
When we look at the most popular removal spells in the EDH format, it’s mostly single-target removal, typically either low-cost options or all-purpose options that can hit any target.
To be clear, these things absolutely have their place, but they are an entire deck slot spent removing one card.
What if there are two concerning cards on board?
What if somebody plays another one the turn after you remove something?
Running enough single-target removal for all potential targets can really tax your deck space, and there are two alternatives that can be comparatively compact: multi-removal and removal engines.
Multi-removal is exactly what it sounds like; it’s a spell that removes multiple potential threats.
Board wipes are one example of this, but there are plenty of other options.
Some of these are pretty straightforward: Hull Breach can destroy both an artifact and an enchantment, and Soul Shatter forces each opponent to sacrifice a hopefully valuable creature or planeswalker.
However, as you get to higher mana costs, there are some spicier options too.
Windgrace’s Judgment can destroy each opponent’s most valuable nonland permanent, and both Decimate and Casualties of War are capable of blasting cards of several card types all at once.
A really cool thing about these is that you’ll typically destroy one or two things that are currently problems but also a couple things that might cause problems down the road.
A big mana rock, a utility land, or a low-level value enchantment won’t be priority targets for removal that can only target one thing, but being able to clear out multiple of these at the same time as a higher-value target can really pay off in the long term in terms of denied advantage.

Removal engines are another way to make your interaction suite more compact, and these are cards that can destroy things over time.
Aura Shards is one of the most powerful examples of this, but there are also creatures like Royal Assassin and Trygon Predator that can remove one permanent per turn.
Removal engines can also involve multiple cards, and you’ll find this most often in control decks.
In my Astral Slide deck, the singular control deck in my current lineup of decks, there are only two cards in the list that could reasonably be described as board wipes; however, the deck frequently engages in heavy degrees of board suppression through the usage of removal engines.
Astral Slide can recycle explosive ETBs, including that of one of the board wipes, and there are also a number of ways to get control pieces in and out of the graveyard.
The deck even has a Stifle engine; what kind of goofy deck has a Stifle engine in it?
Other examples of this might include a pinger paired with a deathtouch enabler, Containment Priest paired with a flicker engine, and Muldrotha paired with a Fleshbag Marauder effect.
In general, these are great for conserving deck space.
In a toolbox control deck that has networks of ways to find different cards, a small handful of removal engines can free up a ton of deck space to go toward counterspells, tech pieces, draw, and other categories that might otherwise have to be a bit leaner to fit an adequate amount of removal.

Now, I should say in the case of both multi-removal and removal engines, you’re generally going to pay more mana for the added benefits as compared to single-target counterparts of these cards, and for the leanest, most unapologetically proactive decks out there, that extra cost will likely be an unacceptable downside.
But not all decks fit that description.
We’ve seen low-cost all-purpose removal become the “staple” choice even though plenty of decks absolutely can afford to pay a little more mana in order to get more out of their removal.
Board wipes are the model of this that most people are familiar with, and these are nice but not perfect; they often destroy your stuff as well, and another downside with them goes back to the temporality of removal.
If you purely focus on blasting all the creatures off the board, you’ll be safe the turn the board wipe is cast, but a lot of decks can bounce back shockingly quickly from a board wipe or even mitigate it entirely.
Your opponents have been through this before; you’re not catching some dewy-eyed Timmy off guard with the first Wrath of God he’s ever seen in his life.
This isn’t to say that you need to avoid board wipes , they’re a great option for a lot of situations , but if you’re considering your fourth or fifth board wipe for a deck, maybe consider that there are other options out there for accomplishing a similar task.

Okay, so that was the method of densifying the part of your deck that you dedicate to removal.
The second method is to widen your removal suite but to make an effort to pick out removal that blends into the rest of what your deck is doing.
This allows it to feel less space-gobbling even as the number of removal cards in your deck stays high.
One way of doing this is picking out cards that align with your deck synergies, and this is typically easier the more general your deck synergies are.
One of the most general options is card type.
If you’re running a deck based around artifacts or around instants and sorceries, I can guarantee you that there are a ton of options for interaction that will slot in nicely with the synergy core of your deck.
This is similarly doable in decks that focus around core game mechanics; there are lots of great options for decks based around counters, tokens, and graveyards.
For a few examples of synergistic picks, you could run Drown in Ichor in a deck with a focus on counters, you could run Trygon Predator in a deck that is looking for evasive attackers, and you could run Lethal Scheme in a deck that gets a wide board of creatures and wouldn’t mind a bit of extra filtering.

An extension of this principle is modal cards.
Cards like Valorous Stance, Silverback Elder, and Gix’s Command are solid for both removal and non-removal purposes.
There are also plenty of cards that are effectively modal without explicitly invoking the word “choose”: cycling cards like Angel of the Ruins as well as MDFCs come to mind.
The important thing is that these cards allow a deck to pack a lot of removal that can be used when needed but not feel like its deck slots are being actively gobbled up.
This leads to more fluid gameplay since these cards can be lands or draw or ramp or protection in addition to being removal.
This is also why counterspells are good if you can afford to hold up without falling behind, but this is a video about removal spells, so I’ll leave it at that.

As an example of removal blending in, my friend Hans has a deck he likes to call “Is It Bite?” It’s a Lilah, Undefeated Slickshot deck that runs as many Prophetic Bolt-style cards as it can possibly get its hands on; we’re talking any red-blue instant or sorcery that both deals damage and draws cards in some capacity.
As a result of this, even though the deck is packed out to the wazoo with creature removal, since almost all of that removal draws cards and works with the commander as well, it feels perfectly fine.
Another example of this is my Mayael deck, and that deck actually takes advantage of both methods I’ve mentioned here, .
For the blending-in part, all of the removal in this deck is attached to either a big creature or a cascade spell.
This is great because these are things I want anyway.
Cascade spells will usually grab me pieces of ramp to pump up my land count, and big creatures are what I use to pressure life totals and eventually win.
This is compounded by the density of these: a full seven of these are one-card removal engines, and a single one of these sticking around for multiple turns on end can wildly warp the shape of a game.
As a result of these things, the deck is very much so eating its removal vegetables, but when I play it, it just feels like a big dumb cascade ramp deck even as it eats opposing permanents at a healthy pace.

I’ve given a couple of nice options for fitting more removal into a deck.
Densifying the existing removal suite through multi-removal or removal engines can let the same number of cards do more, and blending removal into the rest of what the deck is doing through synergistic or modal options can similarly offer more removal in practice without it feeling like it’s hogging too much deck space.
However, putting these options into practice requires understanding what removal is actually doing for your deck.
Even here, about removal, I’ve so far largely abstracted away what removal is actually accomplishing in a game, letting it sit simply assumed that it’s a good thing to have.
So what is removal doing for your decks?
This is a question with a clear, specific answer.
In my Francisco-Malcolm deck, a deck that fits the lean and unapologetically proactive descriptor I mentioned earlier, removal principally exists to kill creatures that threaten my turn five to six win or that might allow opponents to win faster than that.
If I’m playing the deck and my opponents play out some scary engine creature on turn four to five, I don’t generally need to remove these as long as my combo is on track to end the game before those creatures have a chance to cause problems.
For this reason, all of the deck’s dedicated removal is two mana or less to allow it to be weaved into a turn comfortably; I run the low-cost staples because I don’t need to care what’s happening on board two turns from now.
Similarly, I run a lot of mana-efficient single-target removal in my Marisi deck as well because it’s a voltron deck.
Player removal is absolutely on the table, so my removal is there to deal with obstacles to my beatdown rather than controlling the board.

By contrast, I run removal engines in my slower, grindier decks because the time frame for winning is a lot less concrete.
I’ll usually have some tools to put pressure on opponents relatively early, but the plan to win isn’t focused enough to be relied upon as any sort of clock to calibrate the rest of my game plan against.
Thus, in these sorts of decks, my removal exists to let me stay alive and prevent opponents from winning for some unknown duration of time, and as a result I need to prepare for a wider range of situations and run removal that works better in the longer term.
There will also be the question of instant-speed removal versus sorcery-speed removal, and this will come down to power level above all else.
If you’re playing at higher powers where sudden infinite combo attempts might happen, and especially if you’re not playing blue to allow for counterspells, instant-speed removal will likely be kind of a must.
Likewise, if you’re holding up removal at instant speed just in case, you also want that removal to cost as little as possible in order to avoid wasted mana if the removal is unneeded.
Staples are staples for a reason, and this is basically the reason; you might even want to include a handful of these in a slower midrange deck just for the sake of contingencies.
They’re good cards, and if you failed to slow down a player earlier in their game plan, having that insurance policy to prevent a blowout can be important.
However, if you’ve already got your first three or four single-target staples, maybe try branching out a bit from there and consider alternatives that work better for your deck in particular.
Your deck will likely thank you.

You've probably had a game like this: somebody starts doing some nutty stuff surprisingly early in the game, really going ham with their pieces of cardboard, and by the time they've achieved a decisive win a handful of turns later, one or more other players are sitting dejectedly and grumbling to themselves that this matchup was unfair.
Power level differences within a table can be a tricky thing to navigate; it's not fun if a game ends up being an absolute blowout with some players feeling like they didn't even get a chance.
I generally encourage trying to coordinate power levels to some degree at your tables, but do you want to know a secret?
In most cases like this, the relative power levels of the decks aren't even the main issue.

I'd categorize payoff cards into two types.
One is "amplification cards": cards that convert your tokens into more tokens, your counters into more counters, your damage into more damage, and your draw into more draw.
Some number of these cards can be decent for a deck, especially cards that can rapidly lead to a win or which synergize with a type of card you'll have especially ample access to; however, if you run too many of these and too few things to be amplified, your game plan will be fragile.
A while back I had a series of games with a Zaxara player who would play multiple counter doublers and mana doublers and various other doublers, followed by a single premium Hydra (maybe a second one if they got lucky).
If that Hydra had survived a turn cycle, they probably would have smacked down the table in short order; but in all the games this happened, a single removal spell was played.
The Zaxara player had no countermagic, and just like that, they and their pile of synergy permanents were rendered a total non-threat.
I don't want to be too hard on this player since it seemed like their deck was pretty newly built at the time and hadn't been tested much, but this is an example of a trap that's pretty easy to fall into if you're not careful and are just adding stuff that looks good without thinking about the implications of those additions.

The other main type of payoff card is what I'll call "conversion cards": ones that give you one type of resource as a result of having or spending a different one.
For example, spending mana to draw cards when you've gained life, drawing cards based on having a bunch of creatures of the same type, creating wolves based on how many cards are in your graveyard, and creating Angels when you play enchantments.
As with amplification cards, these aren't inherently bad and are indeed a perfectly solid type of card in moderation; but running too many of these resource conversion cards will have problematic results for deck consistency.
If your deck's core building blocks already require you to be doing well in some capacity, you're limiting your ability to get your game plan going in the first place.
Pair this with running an excessive quantity of amplification cards as well, and you'll find that your deck will struggle to get into gear consistently, will struggle to play through interaction, and will struggle to get up off the floor after it's been shut down.
Sure, you'll have the crazy pop-off games from time to time where things line up just right, but the overall result of a high-variance deck like this is this sort of all-or-nothing dynamic that I find very negative.
If the whole table is playing this sort of deck, differences in deck power levels will naturally be amplified wildly when one player gets the lucky pop-off whereas the others get stuck with dead hands full of unmet payoff cards; and especially when nobody has interaction to close this sort of gap in performance, decks can feel poorly matched and power imbalanced even when they're the exact same power level.

The funny thing is, despite these decks being built on a low budget and designed to play exclusively against each other, most of these decks still hold up in games with decks that are much more powerful on paper.
A big piece of this is because of their relationship with interaction.
Take a Dimir Rogues list I built: it runs six counterspells, six removal spells, two modal cards that can counter or remove, and three stax cards.
In addition, the proactive cards in the deck don't rely on it being ahead or avoiding opposing interaction; even something like Bident of Thassa generates acceptable amounts of value with a single evasive creature, of which the deck is running 25.
These factors work together to make a deck that is very flexible and which can perform actions like hindering its opponents, chipping in damage, and drawing extra cards even when it's behind.
Not only this, but the high water mark of the deck is genuinely pretty high, with 30-plus damage combat steps, massive draw, extra turns, and forcing opponents to discard their hands all options on the table for the deck; and these plays are important for allowing the deck to get to the finish line once it's ahead.

A Rakdos discard deck from the same pool is similarly heavy on interaction: it's running 10 cards plus the commander for removal, as well as 25 cards that cause opponents to discard cards.
The deck's cards also work well on their own, as a matter of necessity.
When a deck's game plan involves forcing the table into a hellbent state, it's not going to play a bunch of stuff that requires lots of setup, because that's the exact sort of deck it's looking to disorient and hinder through discard spells.
Both of these decks are consistent, grindy, and interaction-dense, leading them to fit in quite well at a variety of different tables and always feel like they're contributing something to the game, even when other decks have significantly stronger cards.

When I reflect on games with these old decks, there's something almost paradoxical at play.
These highly optimized decks, decks that are overwhelmingly dedicated to nuts-and-bolts functionality over all else, led to gameplay that was way more fun to me than a lot of games I've played with more conventional EDH decks that have wacky card choices and perform lots of big, splashy plays.
Playing decks that are packed with interaction and also resilient to setbacks leads to fewer feel-bad "I'm doing nothing" type moments and way more moments where it feels like you're actually playing a multiplayer game where different players are trying to navigate their way to a win while also keeping their opponents in check.
This is certainly not to say that playing with a pool of hyper-optimized $30 decks is the only way to achieve this; there are plenty of things that people find fun about EDH that won't be found in an environment like this, and there's a reason my playgroup doesn't play exclusively with these decks anymore.
However, I think it's worthwhile to consider these sorts of decks as an example of how EDH can be played.

A few months ago I had a brilliant idea: I’d make a tribal gate stack with Child of Alara as the commander.
I’d run 55 lands along with a bunch of drawn ramp, with Maze’s End, Crackling Perimeter, and a handful of beatdown options being my wincons.
A plethora of ways to sacrifice Child of Alara means that I should have board control mostly handled, so I only need a mere five slots of the deck dedicated to interaction of all types, how efficient.
Finally, a few options for big life gain means that once my land count is up where I want it, I can heal up the damage it took me to get there.
It’s not a high caliber deck, but it certainly scratched my goofy deck itch, and it seemed pretty solid for what it was.
Unfortunately, it was a terrible idea, chiefly because of the commander.

Now allow me to lay my credentials on the table.
I am a cruel control player at heart.
My first commander deck was mono black “ruin your day” with Children as the commander; my first deck I played with at sanctioned events was a standard Grixis control deck I built just after the release of Born of the Gods; and my favorite draft I ever played in was the Dragons of Tarkir draft where I picked up five Flattens and seven other removal spells and spent my night gleefully watching the joy drained from my opponents’ eyes as creature after creature bit the dust immediately after it was played.
So when I tell you I want a commander that just repetitively board wipes to be a good idea, I mean it.
But it’s not a good idea.

In the context of Commander, “board wipes” are a type of effect that I would call “asymmetric.” This is confusing on the surface because they’re generally literally symmetrical effects, you know, they destroy everything, but what I mean here is that they impact different players massively differently.
Somebody playing a low- to mid-power synergistic mid-range deck will feel them very brutally, but there are a lot of types of decks that just won’t really care as much.
Board wipes won’t stop combos; they won’t prevent aggro decks from abusing your life total; they won’t slow down large land counts; and they won’t shut down your opponents generating a lot of instant- and sorcery-based value.
The best option my Child of Alara deck has for dealing with somebody suddenly winning is using one of the two counterspells within the deck or preparing to instant speed sacrifice Child of Alara and hoping I don’t encounter interaction of any kind.

Okay, so the Child of Alara, dependent game plan has some holes.
Big whoop, I’m playing a gate stack, man, no, my deck has some weaknesses.
However, this is a bigger problem than it seems.
Going back to the idea of the card being “asymmetric,” we can think about how it is experienced by the decks that are more vulnerable to it, and the answer is it’s hell.
It sucks so hard for these decks; they can barely even start to build a board before they’re staring down the barrel of another Child of Alara sacrifice.
Even if they deal with one of my wipes, as long as my ramp game worked out as intended there will be another one immediately following it.
This is similar to the graveyard decks analogy from my last video: this deck will ruin the day of casual synergy decks, but against a less board-dependent deck it’ll putter around and be a mild nuisance before getting ultimately crushed with little to no chance of actually pulling off one of its wincons.

Now, Child of Alara is the most extreme example of board wipes creating highly asymmetric game experiences, but this is an issue with board wipes as a whole.
I talked a bit about my glitter deck in my mid-range video, and that deck operates as a kind of homage to the mono black Sheoldred deck I played when I was 15: get card advantage on a ton of mana and proceed to throw bombs and one-sided board wipes at the table until my opponents fold.
Now, that deck is much more well-rounded than the theoretical Child of Alara deck; it has a lot of single target removal to deal with key threats and a variety of wincons which can all eliminate a threatening player much faster than Maze’s End or Crackling Perimeter.
Nonetheless, the profile of how it fares against different decks looks very similar.
I try not to pull out the deck against the low- to mid-power mid-range decks that make up a decent portion of the decks in my play group because it generally stomps on these decks in theatrical fashion.
However, when my opponents have pressure to prevent me from fully greeding out or counterspells for my massive mana investments or combo wins to catch me and my mostly sorcery speed removal suite off guard, it’s much worse; against these sorts of plays my deck ends up looking like one of the clunky mid-range decks that I usually crush.

Before going further, I should take the opportunity to state that board wipes aren’t bad overall.
A lot of decks are heavily board based, and it’s good to have a solid way to deal with that.
A better version of my Glissa deck would probably be running three to five board wipes instead of eight, with tutors to bridge the gap, but years spent as a mono black player forced me into the hard truth that unconditional tutors are bland as hell, so I don’t play them.
Ultimately, the deck is what I want it to be, and I’ll happily let it serve as a teaching point as happily as I’ll play it.
The real thing I’m trying to convey here is the need to be mindful when constructing your deck; the “interaction package” of your deck and what things it is particularly good or bad against is something you should think about.
Ideally, it should be well balanced, and if there are holes they should be intentional rather than incidental.

As an example, my Marath equipment stack has very little hard removal, burn, and non-creature permanent destruction, yes, but not much for big creatures.
This is mostly a matter of the fact that I’m playing an aggro deck and I’m looking to get a substantial board presence early and be threatening life totals.
The next removal serves to slow down my opponents and deal with pesky cards like Dragon Predator, but ultimately the next solution to later threats is to simply deal with the player or politic around the threat for a while.
My deck’s removal suite has a hole, but it’s a calculated one.
Another common hole in an interaction suite would be fast blue decks that choose to almost entirely run counters that don’t target creatures, a choice motivated by the fact that most forms of interaction from their opponents are non-creature, and in essence Scatter isn’t going to help protect a Turn 4 combo win.

As a final note, let’s return to the idea of asymmetric effects.
A lot of “stax” effects and hate cards also fall under this label, but stax effects generally operate the opposite way as board wipes, choking out bursty strategies that carefully plan out their resources to execute a specific game plan while having less of an effect on a deck whose game plan consists of “play Treefolk” or something.
There’s a reason why running a bunch of stax effects is a better idea than running a bunch of board wipes: the sorts of decks shut down by an Archon of America are generally stronger and more carefully constructed than the sorts of decks shut down by a Plague Wind.
You can build a deck with a bunch of stax effects and a win plan that can outrun a mid-range deck, but you can’t build a deck full of board wipes with a win plan that can outrun a combo deck.
And if you build a deck that massacres casual mid-range decks but flails around against everything else, you’re going to be struggling to create interesting and dynamic games.

A lot of the discussion around Commander deck building often revolves around the commander, and this makes sense; it’s right there in the name of the format.
Specifically, how to best utilize your command zone is a big area of discussion, and it’s certainly one that I’ve dabbled in plenty.
It’s good when you can get more out of a card in your deck that you’ll always have access to.
However, there’s a specific deck-building choice I’ve noticed that results from this goal, and it’s one that kind of bothers me: that choice is when a player takes their lovely “synergy engine” commander and turns it into a “combo piece.”

As another example, let’s talk about Tivit, Seller of Secrets.
Now, Tivit is a bit different from Zaxara in that its combo plan is often the primary plan.
While I’d estimate the number of real Freed-from-the-Real Zaxara players who would consider their deck a genuine combo deck is pretty low, Tivit’s one-card infinite combo with Time Sieve is the first thing a lot of people think of when they think about the commander; indeed, we can see 72% of players are running this combo.
However, if we dig a bit deeper, we can also see that about 45% of players are playing a Tivit deck that is based around voting.
Sorting by inclusion of Brokers Representative, we can see that people building this sort of deck are running lots of voting-oriented cards, as well as some flicker and artifact synergies; it seems like a pretty reasonable midrange deck.
Let’s say that it’s turn five or six and this sort of Tivit player is casting the commander, and let’s also say I’m holding up a counterspell.
Well, Tivit is certainly a bit concerning: the card is a strong engine, and him sticking around to get multiple triggers could lead to the Tivit player pulling ahead.
However, there are plenty of cases where I’d be fine with Tivit resolving, especially if there are more opposing turns before mine.
What if another opponent is pulling ahead and I want a chance at nailing a critical spell of theirs?
What if I have a big board I want to protect from potential board wipes?
What if I’m holding up a board wipe and have the ability to clear out the Tivit later with counterspell backup anyway?
In those cases, I might just let the player have their Tivit and get a bit of mana and card advantage.
But wait: I forgot to mention, 63% of voting-oriented Tivit decks run Time Sieve.
Statistically speaking, no shot that’s resolving; get your one-card infinite combo deck out of here, nerd.
Once again, this Tivit player could just be looking to do fun voting things and have a grand experiment in mildly rigged democracy, but unfortunately for them, they decided that grand experiment in democracy also needed a one-card infinite combo, so no, I think I’ll pass on that one, thank you very much.

This is a video about a mechanic I love, a commander card I hate, and a bizarre deck I built out of spite.
Our tale begins in 1998, with Urza’s Saga bringing all sorts of horrendous to the world and also a gift: the cycling mechanic.
It’s a beautifully simple mechanic; you can pay an alternate cost on a card and discard it in order to draw a card.
This began in simple fashion during the Urza block, but five years later Onslaught block added a ton of dimension to the mechanic: varied cycling costs, triggers attached to cycling abilities, cycling for basic land types, and six cards with triggered abilities when other cards were cycled.
These six were of varying power levels, with one in particular being just excellent, but we’ll talk about that a bit later.
Cycling has seen additional prints every few years since, and for a simple reason: people like this mechanic.
As an alternate cost ability, it adds a lot of flexibility to cards, which leads to interesting decision-making.
Every cycling card a player draws prompts the question, “Is this card better than a different card plus a small mana commitment?” This is nice in aggro when running out of gas might be a concern, and it’s even more useful in a control deck, where that mana cost can be spent on the end of an opponent’s turn or even in response to things to dig for answers.
On top of this, since cycled cards are discarded and go to the graveyard, they work well with graveyard synergies, providing a near effortless way to put cards in the yard; and that’s only the play styles helped out by the mechanic innately.

Remember that cool Onslaught card I mentioned earlier?
Astral Slide has seen a ton of experimentation ever since it was printed, as it synergizes with many different cards and offers a ton of flexibility.
As a result, it was kind of understood as the core of any cycling deck before 2020.
Astral Slide decks have a super interesting play style that revolves heavily around strategic resource management, and in a way that feels very in line with the fundamental nature of the mechanic.
The number of cycling cards in hand constantly dictates the strategic direction of the deck: when you have more, you can get bolder and set up for more daring turns, as well as using Slide triggers more liberally as blocker elimination, to net small value off ETBs and so forth, or casting a card normally.
By contrast, when you have fewer cycling cards in hand, each one is pure gold; you always want to save them for protecting a critical creature or disrupting a dangerous play from an opponent, but if you feel the game slipping away, you can also choose to gamble that lifeline on an end step for a little bit of value.
In addition, mana is a super important resource for both Astral Slide and the mechanic as a whole, as land counts dictate how safe you feel playing setup pieces and how bursty your turns can be.
A more controlling cycling deck constantly forces a player to think probabilistically: “If I spend mana to play a spell on my turn, what are the odds I’ll be able to handle a key threat on my opponent’s turn if it gets played?
What are my odds of drawing an additional cycling card or an answer off the top?
How much mana would I need to have the best chance of averting death in a worst-case scenario?” These questions are also fundamentally tied to deck construction, since a player must always weigh the strength of a cycling card versus the cycling cost of it as a card.
Akroma’s Vengeance is wildly more powerful than Winged Shepherd, but if I’m sitting there on an opponent’s turn with four mana open, looking down the barrel of defeat, I know which of the two I’d rather have in hand.
In short, the cycling mechanic creates and promotes far more textured and strategic gameplay than the vast majority of mechanics in Magic: The Gathering.

With all of that deep strategic texture in mind, let’s talk about Gavi, Nest Warden.
It’s a five mana 2/5 who makes the first cycle each turn free and who creates a cat when you draw your second card each turn.
This card is strong enough to be a natural choice for a cycling commander and also deathly boring.
Free cycles on each turn remove an entire dimension of the cycling mechanic, and on top of that, it highly encourages a stable quantity of cycling: one per turn, maybe two on an opponent’s turn sometimes.
Every cycle past that is a waste, since you have to pay for it and you don’t even get a cute little Dino cat, and every turn you fail to cycle is also a waste; come on, it’s free real estate.
This ability and the associated incentives remove the status of cycling cards as an important resource to be saved and used carefully, and also in turn leave players with a lot of extra mana that they didn’t have to plan out.
What does that mana get spent on?
Well, permanents that generate value when cards get cycled, of course.
Gavi destroys most of the cool strategic decision-making generally involved with playing a cycling deck and replaces it with yet another “do the thing” value pile midrange deck.
The design of a Gavi deck is such that if you do the thing, cycling in this case, you get an effortless mixture of card advantage and board advantage spread out over time, just like the other 80% of EDH decks that exist out there.
And this isn’t because Gavi players are people who like especially boring decks; the card is precision-designed to encourage exactly this type of gameplay, even if you build it from scratch rather than buying a precon.
It’s a betrayal on the part of Wizards of the Coast of everything cool about the cycling mechanic, and it creates totally predictable gameplay.

Well, except for one thing.
You see, the other thing Gavi incentivizes is cards with high cycling costs.
This is maybe the one thing about the card that’s not dead boring, but not really in a good way.
Okay, so this incentivization is most relevant for one specific cycle of cards from Scourge, and since Gavi doesn’t pay the bonus cost of Decree of Justice, it’s actually mainly relevant for two cards.
The first is Decree of Silence; big whoop, it’s a free counter spell you’ll have sometimes, not much to say here.
The other is Decree of Annihilation.
I’ll here deliver a hot take: nuking lands is maybe okay, maybe pretty cool, if your playgroup is down for that and also if you actually have a way of ending the game pretty soon after using that wild swing of momentum.
But nothing else about Gavi really promotes that sort of deck style; more likely, you’ll keep slowly getting cats, everybody’s mana base will gradually recover, and congratulations, you’ve just doubled the length of this game.
Gavi into Decree of Annihilation, while certainly unusual, still kind of fails to be interesting.
So we have here this pretty bland commander, and if you ask an EDH player what they think about cycling, she’s what they think of: this cool mechanic with a rich history and tons of synergy potential reduced down to yet another value pile commander.

Now, to any Gavi players out there, I want to say this is not an attack on you, and Gavi is more interesting than a lot of commanders out there.
There are still some interesting synergies and fun instant speed plays to be had piloting a Gavi deck.
I don’t hate it because it’s a uniquely bad design; it’s not.
I hate it because it’s a total betrayal of one of my favorite mechanics.

And this isn’t just about Gavi either.
Wizards has a habit of printing what I’ll call “designer commanders,” which I hear used to mean commanders that take a particular mechanic and fully dedicate themselves to it, dictating a very specific and often very boring type of deck based around that mechanic.
Another example is Eligeth, Crossroads Augur, taking scry, a neat top-of-library manipulation mechanic, and literally just replacing it with value in a way that doesn’t synergize with anything related to the original mechanic.
Cool.
These commanders push players toward less interesting decks, and their specificity causes them to offer a narrow range of possible decks to be built.
A popular typographic format for this sort of commander is one with two lines of text: one that says “whenever X happens, Y happens,” and another that says “whenever enough Y’s happen, a Z happens.” This is a template that builds its own deck; you run some cards that do X and Y, and maybe some Z payoff if you’re feeling nutty.
Some people might enjoy this type of deck, and to those people I have to say that’s great.
There are certainly people out there who want these kinds of cards: newer players, people who don’t want to spend too long on deck building, or people who like to make unexpected versions of seemingly straightforward commanders.
And I think it’s cool that Wizards of the Coast has given them lots of options to work with.
But if you want to try out an alternative form of commander deck building, I’m here to offer you a vision of what that could be.

For the rest of this piece, I’m going to talk about how I took one look at Gavi and then turned around and built a truly bizarre cycling deck.
It started with me absent-mindedly cruising through random Onslaught cards looking for deck ideas, as one does, and as expected I saw Astral Slide but also another enchantment I wasn’t familiar with: Oversold Cemetery.
These seem kind of neat together, right?
One promotes cycling, the other works well after I cycle creatures into the graveyard.
With these in my pocket, I decided to include blue as well, since it’s a very useful color for both cycling and instant speed shenanigans, and I started shopping around for a commander in Esper colors.
My hope was to find a commander that could be a flexible value engine when I flickered cards with Astral Slide, and this was my short list.
Eventually I decided all of them were either too generic, too niche, or not the right vibe; all except good old Sharuum.

With my commander selected, I set some healthy ground rules: no Sculpting Steel-type combos and a $100 budget.
I’m not building a high-power Sharuum deck; I’m building an Astral Slide deck.
A good place to start is always win conditions, and one that leapt out immediately was Magister Sphinx, which combined with Sharuum can one-shot a player.
Sharuum’s nature as a reanimation tool means that a beatdown suite with a number of big flying artifact creatures is likely to be a good bet at $100 cycling deck power levels and will hopefully offer enough beef to win even when Magister Sphinx isn’t available.
However, this beatdown step will likely be tricky unless I’m mostly stabilized against hate and attacks, which can be accomplished through my core card of Astral Slide.
The card offers so many use cases; it’s a reanimation engine with Sharuum, it can be a value removal, ramp, or life gain engine with other artifact creatures, and that’s to say nothing of the built-in protection and disruption utility of the card.
Since Astral Slide is so key to the deck and I can only run two in the deck, enchantment tutors were a must, so I started out with Idyllic Tutor and eventually settled on Zur as my other tutor.
His wizard tag is oddly important, as Wizards of the Coast has printed two wizardcycling cards, basically instant speed wizard tutors that count as a cycle.
Out of these strange cards organically grew a toolbox that expanded as I found new hurdles my deck needed to overcome.
Wizardcycling grabs a tutor for Slide, a tutor for my top-end boys, a recursion spell for my Slides, and a Stifle effect that’s also an extra cycle for my big turns.
A mixture of tutoring, discard outlets, and my recursion spell commander means that my deck’s key pieces generally get into play mana-efficiently.
The deck does a great job scratching my itch to play a complex and strategic deck, and it does so at a middling power level that feels good in quite a lot of pods.

A key takeaway from this deck building process for me was the strength of flexible, ground-up deck construction.
By starting with a mechanic and a couple key cards and selecting a commander afterward, my deck ended up with a foundation that includes the commander but doesn’t wholly consist of the commander.
It’s built to follow best practices for a cycling deck, and though it does include the occasional stormy element or value engine, each of these pieces are intentional and most of them are tutorable if I decide that’s what a given situation demands.
The most important thing I prefer to avoid is having the entire deck stand on the shoulders of the commander; at least, not unless you’re ready for that kind of responsibility.
I could have made the commander Zur, but then the issue of not having a consistent value source combined with Zur being a removal magnet would have rapidly turned my deck into one more Zur than Astral Slide, as draw enchantments and protection spells gobble up my deck space.
It’s good to keep in mind the sort of deck building incentives a given commander pushes onto you, as even one that seems like a good idea on paper might make your deck take a turn that isn’t what you were looking for.

If I was to wrap this up with a bow, I’d go with this: when you’re building a deck, figure out what the deck wants to do and try to turn that into a somewhat focused plan, except that you won’t nail the first version of the deck and that there’s room to adapt as you encounter further problems.
I’d say there are four key versions of a single deck: the first-principles version in your brain, the draft version after you actually hammer out a 100-card list, the streamlined version completed after you solo playtest a bit, and the final version completed after you play against other people for a little while.
Each of these steps will solve a different set of problems that the deck has, and that’s a strength.

It seems like a lot of people have a particular experience while getting into the EDH format, and that experience goes something like this: they find a commander and a deck they really gel with, like it speaks to them on some deep level, and then they embark upon a great optimization quest, pouring increasing amounts of time and money into making the deck as good as it possibly can be.
I went through this process about 10 years ago with my first commander deck, and I understand this impulse; you’ve got your baby and you want it to fly.
This process can work to some extent, especially if you have big piles of money to throw at upgrading a deck, and I encourage everybody to put effort into making their decks as enjoyable as possible for themselves, which may mean power upgrades.
That said, there are actually some pretty compelling reasons not to upgrade a deck further once it plays smoothly at a healthy middling power level; so here, I’m going to go through each of these reasons using one of my mid-power decks to exemplify each of them, and then I’ll be talking about what decks are the best candidates for an upgrade.

The first reason not to upgrade a deck is that some decks have natural bottlenecks in their functionality that make it difficult to give them a cohesive upgrade.
The most common bottlenecks here are being vulnerable to a particular type of hate or having a game plan that is fundamentally difficult to speed up.
If your deck relies heavily on the board presence of a commander that’s more than three mana, your opponents only need to hit out your command zone a couple times early in order to shut you down.
If your deck heavily relies on building up a graveyard over the course of several turns, a single piece of graveyard hate can totally blow you out; and card quality improvements alone won’t generally change this fact.
If your deck heavily uses board wipes to maintain control over the game, or something like goad for that matter, you’ll struggle against decks that don’t rely on combat damage or which are more explosive, which get more common at higher powers.
Ultimately, trying to improve a deck with a bottleneck like this will generally lead to some very good games with the deck but much worse consistency, with the deck getting dragged down to the dirt by bottlenecking factors a decent portion of the time.
This is the reason I don’t upgrade my Sherm slide deck.
There are ways to make it much more efficient at generating value and controlling the game, but the deck has several vulnerabilities: its Astral Slides getting hated out, its artifacts getting wiped, and/or its graveyard getting exiled.
The deck can play through these things happening a little bit, but decks generally run much more of these things at higher powers, and if it encounters too much of these sorts of hate, the deck will fall flat on its face regardless of card quality upgrades.

An extension of this problem is what I’ll call the “cheap deck.” This is a deck that works pretty well at low budgets but is very logarithmic in terms of how it translates additional budget to additional power; it gets rapidly more expensive to improve it past a certain power level.
The best example of this I can think of is Feather.
It’s a commander that has a decently beefy Voltron game plan if you build your deck specifically around it, which usually means running a lot of one- to two-mana instants and sorceries that target creatures, along with some cards that work well with these sorts of spells.
It’s hard to end up with a Feather deck that’s bad, but it’s also hard to build a Feather deck that’s really good.
One-mana instants and sorceries that target creatures are cheap, so you’re already running the best ones, meaning that the only option for trying to improve the deck is cutting some of these for generic value cards in the colors; and the weakening of the Feather game plan that this results in will negate some of that increase in power.
This reason is also why I don’t try to improve my Maria deck.
One- to two-mana equipments are the deck’s bread and butter, and there just aren’t that many options in this category of card outside of the dirt cheap ones I’m already running and ones I consider prohibitively expensive.

The other reason not to increase the power level of a deck is if you simply don’t enjoy the power level you end up at.
If you’re playing in a group of beatdown decks and everybody is relentlessly tuning the effectiveness of their beatdown, that might feel okay in that context; but your deck might end up on the power level of a deck that consistently combos off on turn five, or Voltron kills you on turn four, or forcefully suppresses your deck into the dirt with an unending stream of hate.
Even if you’re still pulling off your fair share of wins against these sorts of decks, as a player you’ll need to ask yourself the question of if that’s the sort of MTG you want to be playing.
You also might need to slip combos into your deck instead of winning in ways that play more to your deck’s strengths, which a lot of players might not find to be a satisfying way to go with their deck.
This reason is why I leave my Gissa deck at a middling power level.
It’s a deck that wants to build up resources and then play a bunch of big stuff, winning through gaining board superiority and beating down its opponents rather than playing some sort of explosive card like Torment of Hailfire or tutoring up a combo.
I play the deck to do beefy battle cruiser things and become the big bad of the table, not to pull off a sneaky win when my opponents aren’t looking.

Okay, so the point I’m trying to make here is that some decks are less ideal candidates for upgrading past a certain point; you should maybe call them good enough.
I do fully believe in this idea, but I think it’s also useful to consider the terms here: what do we mean by upgrading a deck?
I’d say there are two main factors that determine a deck’s power level: card quality, how good the cards are, and cohesion, how well the cards are put together.
I’d say we as Magic players tend to overwhelmingly focus on the first one when we think about a deck’s power level, particularly when it comes to the question of upgrading.
And I actually think this makes perfect sense to do; when you’re asking whether or not you should improve your deck’s card quality, you’re talking about an unambiguous exchange of resources, money for power level, whereas cohesion is a much more challenging factor to modulate, particularly for a deck that’s already fully built with that in mind.
I’d like to offer an additional framework: you can think of upgrading your deck’s card quality as a tool for obtaining the deck’s desired power level.
If you have a fundamentally janky premise for a deck that you want to end up decently powerful, running good card quality can accomplish that goal to some extent, as long as you tread carefully around potential bottlenecks.
If you have a fundamentally powerful deck concept and you want to play in a group of more middling power decks, you can restrict your card choice by budget or theme or some other factor.
But to this you might ask: what does it mean for a deck concept to be fundamentally powerful or fundamentally weak?
This takes me back to the core question here, the question of when a deck should be upgraded with better card quality.

I mentioned Feather as an example of a deck that generally performs solidly on a low budget but which could be difficult and cost-inefficient to improve past that point.
As a point of contrast, I want to talk about a different popular commander that, like Feather, tends to convert a specific card type into resources for a fast game plan: Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow.
Yuriko decks span a range of power levels and contain a lot of variety in subthemes and card choices, but all of them share a fundamental game plan: play evasive creatures and/or ninjas and utilize these cards with Yuriko to whittle down your opponents through a mixture of combat damage and Yuriko triggers, generating card advantage in the process.
Yuriko just doesn’t have the same ceiling as Feather because she’s fundamentally a faster, more resilient, and just simpler card.
Commander Ninjutsu at two mana immediately puts her head and shoulders above Feather in terms of raw power; and instead of being fiddly and requiring constant upkeep or extra steps to reach her full power, she converts low-cost ninjas and evasive creatures into very fundamental resources of the game, card advantage and life loss for opponents, and can do so with minimal mana investment.
Decks can vary in how many ninjas they run and what sorts of evasive creatures they play, but these cards are basically guaranteed to be effective due to the speed, resilience, and simplicity of Yuriko; and as long as the deck is above a certain minimum number of these supporting creatures, these cards combined with Yuriko form a very powerful core to the deck.
It’s this strong core for generating generic resources that makes a deck especially upgradeable.
There’s a good amount of diversity in what a successful Yuriko deck can look like, and there are lots of piecemeal card quality upgrades and packages that can be added to modulate the deck to whatever power level the Yuriko player wants to be playing at.

I think it’s worth clarifying here that there’s nothing wrong with commanders that are better suited to mid-power, nor is a commander like Yuriko or Korvold that inherently pushes a higher power necessarily more interesting or more worthwhile.
There are also the players who like the challenge of trying to boost a commander or theme that isn’t inherently high power up to that point, and that can be a fun process.
I personally like the challenge of building powerful decks on a low budget, as it forces you to put a lot of effort into the cohesion of a deck since the card quality is naturally going to be a bit lacking.
At the end of the day, I just want people to know what they’re getting into when they decide to pour time and money into a deck.
If you have a limit on how much you want to spend on decks, it’s valuable to know when you’re dealing with a commander who will naturally take more money to boost from a mid-power deck to a high-power deck; and as stated earlier, this will fundamentally come down to how powerful a deck’s core resource-generating and game-winning pieces are.
Even if budget isn’t a concern, it’s worth keeping an eye on a deck’s weak points and making sure that they aren’t going to be exacerbated by playing against more powerful decks.

I feel like there’s a culture among a lot of EDH players of higher-powered decks being considered cooler or more interesting, which leads to this sort of rat race of chasing generic staples and applying formulaic rules to every deck to bump up its power level.
I don’t want to tell anybody not to improve a deck they want to improve, but I just want to tell you right now that if you have a mid-power deck you really like, you don’t necessarily need to change it.
If you want a higher-power deck, you can pick out a couple things you like from an existing deck you enjoy, such as a card or a theme, and then build a new, more powerful home for it.
This also goes for putting pet cards in decks, but that’s a topic for another day.

The deck building began in an interesting place.
Though I knew the Sheoldred deck of my youth had problems, I was still a black player wanting to do black player things, so I opted to build an Orzhov control deck.
Putting Kambal in the command zone offered a great way to keep the deck’s life total up while chipping away at opposing life totals and allowed the rest of the deck to focus on removal, draw, and various life-gain-related combos rather than trying to develop beaters.
Likewise, my friend Hans built a pretty brutal Azorius control list with Noyan Dar in the command zone, and the fact that the pool began with two control decks is a factor that shouldn’t be overlooked.
As other decks got flushed out, this influence can be seen: of the pool’s five mid-range decks, three were some form of aristocrats and another was a land-focused deck that didn’t rely on keeping non-land permanents in play.
The pool also ended up containing a few more explosive, combo-oriented decks, and these were likewise well situated to handle control, consisting of a graveyard-centric artifacts deck, a big mana deck, and a deck with a number of its own counter spells.
Finally, we have what ended up being the hardest color combination to build a $25 deck for: Dimir.
For my first attempt, I opted for an artifact tokens list with Rona as the commander, a mid-range deck that could hopefully be flexible enough to survive in a wide range of scenarios.
So this was the first pool we had, and we played about 30 games with it before going back to make major changes.

And the funny thing is, the fact that I had this major period of EDH deck building during my college years almost certainly contributed to my decision to begin making videos about the format.
So, in a sense, Salubrious Snail is brought to you by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Garbage sponsor, honestly, would not recommend.

As a final point, this process of building decks formulated a lot of my understanding of the Commander format, and when I started building decks outside this pool in the first half of 2023, I had kind of a rude awakening where most of the games I played were way less dynamic and interesting than the games with these $25 decks.
My first Magic: The Gathering video was partially inspired by this experience of playing against bland, formulaic decks without enough interaction to make for a dynamic game.
And while I’ve had plenty more interesting games since then, I try to keep the mindset that I had when building these $25 decks, which is to say: try to present a specific problem for your opponents and be prepared for when your opponents present a problem for you.
To me, multiplayer games are more fun when people have to think about their opponents rather than when everybody is just racing engines against each other like we’re all playing some kind of second-rate Euro game.

Thanks for watching.
I linked a folder in the description that contains the final versions of all 10 of these decks, though some cards have gone up in price in the past few years, as cards have a tendency to do.
I’m also releasing an end note over on my Patreon where I discuss the Orzhov deck in a bit more detail, so if that interests you, you can head on over there and throw some money at me.

Thanks for watching.
If you’ve got some pet cards you really like, you can let me know in the comments, both because I like hearing about fun cards people like and also because it serves my algorithmic overlords.
That’s a win-win if I ever heard one.

Thanks for watching.
I had planned to release a video about navigating power levels this week, but I couldn’t quite get the script where I wanted it in time, so I decided to make we instead.
You can expect that power level video next week, though.
I will also be posting an end note to we tomorrow over on my Patreon that discusses a particular deck building style that was used in making this deck, so if you aren’t giving me money yet, now is a pretty cool time to start.

I had the idea to do a 10K Q&A sort of thing about a month ago when I was at 9,000 subscribers, and somehow the passage of time took place and now I’m creeping up on 15K, I don’t really know how that happened.
In all seriousness, I appreciate all the support.
It’s just cool to make things and have a lot of people enjoy those things, so that’s been cool; thank you.

Part of the reason I’m making this is because I want to share some updates about what’s going on with us and what I want to do with it.
You may have noticed that I am posting more often; indeed, I am posting weekly at the moment, on Thursdays.
I’m currently trying to alternate between the higher-effort content, the kind of deep dives into a particular deck-building subject, and the more fun content where I, for example, analyze a precon or just talk about whatever it is that I want to talk about that day.
One particular type of off-week content that I’m going to start next month is Patron Deck Reviews.
These deck reviews are going to be very much in the style of the precon review, so I’m going to try and figure out what a deck is trying to do, how well it’s doing at that goal, and some potential routes for improvement.
As I said, that’s going to be starting next month; I’m going to be picking decks through a lottery system, and you can go check out my Patreon for more information about that.
Also on my Patreon, I am going to be posting a Glissa deck tech very soon, so that’s two different reasons to check out my Patreon, that’s pretty cool.

With that out of the way, let’s get to questions.
These are going to be mostly taken from a post I made on Patreon recently.

About a year ago, I needed a username for some website or other, and just my two-second, on-the-spot smash-together of words was “Salubrious Snail.” Cut to a few months later, I was trying to come up with a name for my YouTube channel, and that one popped back into my brain.
I kind of liked it; it’s snappy, it’s alliterative, has a fun word, seems pretty cool, so that’s what I went with.

I learned to play Magic in 2011, and the way I got into the game is that Mark Rosewater gave a career day presentation at my middle school.
At the end of it, he handed all of these eleven- and twelve-year-olds starter decks from M12, and I got the red one and then just went from there.
I started playing Limited in 2013, so my first draft was Dragon’s Maze, and then in early 2014 I really got into the game; I started playing Standard and EDH.
I’ve played off and on since then, picking back up very heavily in early last year and starting to build a whole bunch more Commander decks.

I’ve always been a black player, and my first deck that I can remember was a sort of black life-gain-ish deck.
It ran a fair amount of removal, because that’s just who I am as a player.
The specific interaction that I can remember between two cards is it had Tormented Soul, which is an unblockable creature, and Vampire Outcasts, which is a bloodthirst creature, meaning it’s bigger when it enters if an opponent was dealt damage, so it almost always came in as a four-mana 4/4 lifelink, which is honestly not bad.
Lifelink is one of the best keywords; pretty solid.

Jace, Unraveler of Secrets has always been a card I love, and it’s funny because I feel like it’s known for Cube, you know, you do the splash Jace, but I’ve never played with it in Cube.
The place I’ve played with it was in Standard Grixis Control; I ran three of it, and it was fantastic.
In the matchups, it soaked up damage for my deck, which sadly did not run life-gain, and against the control matchups, of which there were many, because that was Standard at the time, all the abilities are great.
The plus-two lets you exile cards, which is great against Azorius control that kind of cycles through the deck repeatedly; the minus-ten, if your opponent lets you get up there, just blows out a control deck.
So just a great card all around, and I also just love the flavor.
I’m a big horror fan, and the idea of this kind of unknowable, otherworldly entity who’s weaponizing the fears of its foes to destroy them, that’s just incredible to me, I love it.

This is a good question.
I think for starters it’s good to make sure that decks are at similar power levels, so figure out what decks are doing, how fast they’re doing them, and just make sure there’s not going to be any crazy discrepancy.
Then, for middling to lower power levels, it’s good to check in with what people’s intentions are for the game and what they find fun.
There are things like board wipes or combos or heavy-duty stax pieces where some people might not have as much fun if they’re playing against those; that might not be a thing that they want to see a lot of in their game, and I think it’s fair to try and navigate that to some extent.
I will sometimes ask somebody not to play a particular deck, even.
For example, I have a friend who has a Tergrid deck, and three nights out of four I don’t want to play against a Tergrid deck, not really, no. I think that’s fair, although there are some limits to what you can request of somebody, and it’s a tricky thing to navigate.
You can’t just ask that every deck your deck is bad against isn’t in the game; that’s not really fair.
At the same time, when I build a deck, if it’s a particularly feisty or mean or suppressive deck, I have some understanding that it might see less action than a deck that is, you know, nicer or offends people a little less.

The EDH ban list is tricky because it’s really trying to be two different things: it’s trying to dictate what’s too strong for cEDH, and it’s also trying to dictate what’s not fun for casual.
I think answering these two questions at the same time is difficult.
We can think about some different cards that we might think about banning.
Let’s say Dockside Extortionist, very good card, maybe it should be banned.
But that would be mainly a ban for cEDH and the top levels of high-power casual, because it doesn’t matter for random midrange beats decks: there aren’t that many artifacts at that power level, you’re not going to be doing the same sort of value loops, and it’s just not going to have the same horrifying power level as it does in other EDH contexts.
Similarly, we could think about a card like Armageddon; you can ban that because it’s not fun, but that’s not a ban in the conventional sense of a card game.
You’re not banning it because it’s too strong, you’re banning it because it’s unfun, and I think there is a little bit of tension there, that you’re trying to solve these two different problems.
So really, I probably wouldn’t be that comfortable dictating a whole bunch of new card allowances or disallowances for EDH, just because I think it’s a really hard thing to do.
What I would encourage is players having more of a Rule Zero conversation, more of a conversation about what they find fun and what they don’t want to see in their game.
You shouldn’t roll up into a game with strangers and destroy all their lands if they’re just trying to play their upgraded precons or something.
I think it’s good to have an understanding about that, and I think that’s an okay solution because EDH fundamentally is a social format.
If I had to ban one card for very petty personal reasons, it would be Farewell.
I hate the card; I just think it’s very lazy design.
It’s a six-mana board wipe that has no downsides other than that it’s a six-mana board wipe.
It’s probably not broken from a power-level standpoint, but I just hate to see it, it’s lazy, don’t like it.
It also kind of crowds out other cards like Merciless Eviction or Austere Command, so I don’t know, not a fan, not a fan of Farewell.

I actually really like explicitly political cards.
Council’s dilemma and will of the council, I think, are both cool mechanics with a lot of cool design space.
I think it’s unfortunate that the two cards from those that actually ended up being good in EDH are some of the less interesting ones, but I think there’s plenty of other design space; I think it’d be cool if they printed more of those type of cards.
I think goad is actually a super cool mechanic, I love goad, and I think it would be neat to expand the mindset of goad outside of creatures, just because I think goad has kind of a natural power limitation where it’s not going to be good above the low-midrange level of power.
I think that’s valid for a type of card to be, but it would be neat to see more cards that are explicitly political but play around with other resources like cards in hand and that sort of thing.
I don’t remember what the mechanic is called, demonstrate, maybe, the one where you can copy a spell if you let an opponent copy it as well; I think that one’s kind of neat, that’s cool.
So yeah, I think more stuff like that would be neat.

Sometime last year, I played against a Tymna / Jeska tribal Ball Lightning deck, and that deck’s vision is splendid to me.
I love decks that take a really juicy, powerful commander or pair of partner commanders and use them for a ridiculous end; I just love that.
I love the idea of swinging with a Ball Lightning for eighteen at somebody’s face, that’s just a vision I can appreciate, let me tell you.
So I’d have to go with that deck; that’s the only one that comes to mind.

I’ve gotten a handful of comments asking about the cat post and the implied cat that goes with it.
Thankfully, he made an appearance for this.
This is my boy Nico; he loves to bounce off the walls when I’m trying to record.
So yeah, he’s a great guy.

When I got into Standard ten years ago, the question of what constitutes a "wincon" was one with a single standout answer: Aetherling.
It was a control meta, no doubt; if you weren't playing a devotion deck or attempting in vain to play green, you were playing one of the many variants of control, and you were almost certainly running one or two copies of Aetherling as a way to close out the game.
For a relatively new player, it was a comforting type of card: you input a bunch of mana over two or three turns, and in return it reduces your opponent’s life total to zero.
So that’s what a "wincon" is, right?
Or maybe a wincon is when my brother played an Overwhelming Stampede into a cluttered board state to cut through my modest suite of blockers like a hot knife through, I don’t know, a handful of 4/4 vampires.
Or maybe it was a wincon when I played Angelic Gift on a 4/4 land at the Battle for Zendikar prerelease and smacked my opponent four times for the win.
Above average two-mana enchantment, honestly; some might even call it a wincon.

We all come across the concept of a "win condition" somewhere along the line in our existences as Magic players, and this is for a reason.
MTG’s defense-friendly combat system and hand-emptying mana system means that it can’t always be assumed that the game will end naturally; there are all sorts of game situations that might sprawl out and demand some sort of remedy.
There are lots of situations where the phrase "win condition" has a fairly understandable meaning; however, as with most pieces of terminology, it becomes a lot more challenging in Commander.
Sextupling the life total of your opponents makes a lot of things challenging, to be honest; not only does it take more to win an EDH game, but the concept of what winning means shifts wildly.

Conventional EDH wisdom might have you gesturing at various things as a "wincon": Craterhoof Behemoth is a wincon, Torment of Hailfire is a wincon, Purphoros, God of the Forge is a wincon, Sanguine Bond is a wincon.
And sure, this classification does work on some level; there are lots of situations where these cards will win you the game, and they each gesture at a different plan for winning the game.
But is this a useful category of card?
I don’t think it is.
Anything can win a game if your opponents play no cards; a 1/1 squirrel is a quality wincon if your opponents are playing nothing but archers and bears.
A single Siege Dragon is a great wincon.
You shouldn’t ask the question, “What cards in my deck are the ones that win the game?” because the important question is, “What cards in my deck are the ones that don’t win the game?”

Now, let me clarify that last statement.
What I don’t mean to say is that you should cram your deck full of big, splashy bombs; quite the opposite, even having too high a density of splash in your deck will leave you too little room for the building blocks that actually lead to victory.
What I mean here is that if you’re building a deck with the intent of winning a game of Commander, that goal should be present in some form or other throughout each and every one of your card choices.
The number one criticism I have for people when they ask me to look at their deck, a criticism I give about half the time, is “this looks unfocused.” This phrase can mean a couple different things in practice, and to start thinking about those, it’s useful to first lay out a framework for how EDH decks work fundamentally.

Most decks involve a system of inputs and outputs, with inputs being conditions that need to be met and outputs being the results of those inputs that contribute to the deck’s game plan.
My Sharuum deck’s primary inputs are Astral Slide and cycling cards, and its primary outputs are flickers, which allows Sharuum to recur large artifacts onto the board.
My Marad deck’s primary input are equipments, and its primary outputs are mana value and my commander hitting your face for 14 damage.
I could give more examples, but long story short, inputs and outputs are the name of the game for decks with any amount of synergy, and this framework itself points us to the two places a deck can stumble with regard to focus: it can have “unfocused inputs,” and it can have “unfocused outputs.”

For an example of a deck with unfocused inputs, a viewer emailed me about their Missy deck that contained both artifact creature and face-down creature synergy packages, with a couple narrower sections of sub-synergies within these.
Within the deck there are the components to make some decently powerful board states, but the issue is that there are too many different types of card and ability present, and they don’t really connect with each other outside of all being related to the commander in some form or other.
Ultimately, a deck like this with unfocused inputs will naturally have a lot of dead draws and will struggle to put together a cohesive board state with any consistency.
It’s possible to build a deck that can pivot between a few different plans, but these decks are tricky to build and typically involve paying close attention to the points of connectivity between various types of card.

Some examples of decks with unfocused outputs would be conventionally built variants of what I like to call “value tribal” commanders, and I’ll use Gavi, Nest Warden as an example since I’ve already talked about her before.
Your average Gavi deck is pretty good at maintaining cycling-based value loops, but when we look at the actual payoffs for cycling aside from draw, it’s a lot of small token creation, some larger token creation, some soft creature removal, some incremental damage, some creatures getting bigger, and so on.
Theoretically you’re getting a lot of stuff when you add the input of cycling, but those outputs are so diverse that these decks don’t end up actually doing any one thing in particular; it’s just a flood of generic Magic: The Gathering gameplay.
This is probably better than a deck with unfocused inputs, since it’s actually doing something pretty consistently, but it’s a generally toothless type of deck that will struggle to win against decks that have more refined win plans, even if those decks generate a smaller quantity of total resources.

Both unfocused inputs and unfocused outputs are problems that will lead to challenges in ending the game, but for different reasons.
Despite this, the solution to the two problems is pretty similar: you should be asking what each card in your deck does, how often it will fail to perform its intended function, and whether it contributes toward a cohesive plan for your deck.
A common first step in building Commander decks is to lump together a bunch of cards that synergize around a particular one or two things, and while this will lead to a deck that does do something, if you’re trying to win games, it might take a bit of tuning beyond that to make sure the deck can actually make it to the finish line.
And for a bit, I want to zoom in on a particular type of deck that often falls just a little short in this regard.

All right, so this is a transition point in a longer video where it might make sense to put a mid-roll ad, but I don’t like mid-roll ads, so I don’t run them on my videos.
That said, if you like what I do and have a spare three bucks a month to support me in making high-effort videos like this one, there’s a link to my Patreon down in the description.
As I was going through the EDHREC page for Gavi while writing the previous section, there was one standout exception to the lack of good options for closing out the game: Moonshaker Cavalry.
The card is a brutally efficient finisher, capable of converting a board full of tokens into a bunch of dead opponents in short order, and its presence here gestures at a specific type of card: mass buff cards, whose usage could lead to a Gavi deck with a more definite identity.

This brings me to the subject of midrange, which I’ll define here as decks that want to get a big board of creatures and then attack with them.
Now, I’m sure when playtesting we all like to imagine the ideal scenario for a beatdown deck: we play out a bunch of creatures and swing into the big empty boards of our quivering hypothetical opponents.
And this might occasionally be the case, but in most games your opponents will have creatures as well, even if their deck isn’t a purely midrange deck.
So here I’m going to introduce an important phrase: “parity.” Parity means a state of standstill, basically, and in the midrange context it’s usually when multiple players have decent-sized boards but can’t swing in for large damage due to a lack of evasion or a risk of counterattack.
In a game like this with multiple midrange decks, we can divide the game into two key steps for a given player: create parity and break parity.
Creating parity just means getting your beefy midrange board up and going and not falling behind.
This sounds simple, and indeed it’s not too hard in the abstract, but there are lots of places to go wrong.
You can fail to draw mana, fail to draw beaters, fail to draw the right combinations of beaters, and even if you succeed at these three things, you can still get board wiped or lose to a non-combat wincon before you’re able to do an adequate quantity of beating.
For this reason, lands, ramp, draw, protection, and a varied mixture of creatures might all be parts of how you get into a state of parity with other decks.

Breaking parity is where you do something to the board that allows you to deviate from the state of parity, which generally means letting your creatures hit for a lot of damage.
The most popular “parity breakers” in Commander are overrun effects, but there are a myriad of other potential options: targeted buffs, extra combat spells, mass evasion spells, and cards that disable potential blockers or even remove them altogether.
I am on the record saying that Mass Calcify is the best evasion spell.
Now, if I were to rank these in terms of raw power, the bigger overrun effects like Craterhoof Behemoth and Finale of Devastation would be easily top of the pile, with Moonshaker Cavalry being a similarly powerful option in white; however, I’d argue that these are also probably the least interesting options as well, given how straightforward and hard to interact with they are.
So if you’re not playing at a super high power level, you should go with whatever parity breaker feels most appropriate to you.
The important thing is that you should have at least something for this: some number of cards played with the goal of converting that cool board you worked hard to build up into a win.

With all of that said, and to crib shamelessly from EDHRECast, one challenge in navigating parity breakers is being able to distinguish a card that helps you win from a “win-more” card.
The goal of a parity breaker should be to turn a game state that’s not quite winning into one that wins, but some cards will only win with a board state that was probably already about to win.
For example, Epic Struggle wins the game outright if you have 20 or more creatures on your upkeep, but there are tons of cards that can win off of a board that massive, and most will be useful in situations with fewer creatures as well, rather than being a four-mana enchantment with no text.
Crucible of Fire is a less extreme example; it’s an anthem for a creature type that’s generally already quite big, and most Dragon decks would probably be better served by running an additional dragon with useful abilities instead.
Ultimately, the way to navigate these sorts of cards is just to think about all the situations in which a given card is useful and also the situations where it’s not useful.
If something is a kind of dead card two-thirds of the time, that other third had better be really good.

Parity also exists as a relevant concept outside of midrange decks, specifically for aggro and control decks.
For an aggro deck, parity is what you want to avoid, and if your momentum does come to a bit of a stall as your opponents catch up on board, you at least want them to be low enough on life or other resources to be deeply uncomfortable in their position within the game.
This is the general conceit of a lot of 60-card burn decks: throw creatures at your opponent’s face until you can’t anymore, and then hope you got your opponent low enough to finish them off with burn in time.
Control, on the other hand, is similar to the classical midrange parity plan in the sense that it’s looking to create and then break it, but it is very different in that control decks will often create parity by using board wipes or stax pieces that slow down the table, and then break parity using carefully picked out cards that are less affected by these tools.
Control decks are also typically chiefly worried about resource management; compromises must be made between how scary the board is allowed to be and how many control spells are kept in hand for contingencies.
For these reasons, control is sometimes easier to finish off opponents with than midrange, since small boards and suppressive methods mean that less potent finishers can still do the job and that winning over the course of several turns is acceptable.
You do still need to think about the deck’s win plan, though, and balancing that with the deck’s controlling element is naturally going to be part of the challenge.

On that note, let’s talk about removal in a more general sense.
Based on the amount of removal people seem to run in casual EDH, it seems like a lot of people might not be aware of this, but if one of your opponents wins the game, your odds of winning that game actually drop quite precipitously; you might have a bit of a hard time pulling off that W.
So, seeing as how this is Snail’s Guide to Winning an EDH Game, it is my duty to tell you that preventing your opponents from winning the game is an important concern that you shouldn’t take lightly.
However, despite my smartassery, I understand why people tend to run low removal counts.
Let’s assume for a moment that we’re thinking about the archetypal removal spell: a spell that destroys a spooky thing on our opponent’s board that may or may not lead to our demise if left unchecked.

EDHRec is a fascinating tool that has grown to monolithic stature, eclipsing most other resources in the EDH ecosystem, and this is not for no reason.
A neatly organized, ordered list of what cards other people play is a useful tool; other people put thought and effort into crafting decks, and you get a summary of that effort delivered directly to your eyes via a snappy UI.
However, it’s not a perfect tool, due to a variety of factors.
In the first Magic: The Gathering video I posted to this channel, I made a point to discuss some downsides of EDHRec that I hadn’t seen mentioned before, and while it’s a cool video that you should definitely go watch, the contents of that video aren’t what I want to talk about today.
Instead, I want to talk about a point brought up in the comments to that video: that displaying cards by percent inclusion in decks flattens a lot of information about the decks they’re played in.
If there are three cards each played in a third of decks, it’s difficult to tell whether they’re all played in the same third of decks, if they’re all played in different decks, or something in between.
This is a flaw pretty inherent to the construction of the website; it’s not some emergent problem that popped up and is awaiting a solution.
But it got me thinking: is there anything that users of the website can do to adapt to this fact?
When I look at a card on EDHRec, can I figure out what it’s doing there, what other cards go with it, and what all that says about the decks it’s played in, or even the players that built those decks?
The answer to this question is complicated, but as a process it’s taken me down a series of rabbit holes as useful as they are bizarre, and I want to share that journey with you today.

As a fairly straightforward example, in late December I was looking to make an aggressive partner commander deck, and I was intrigued by the commander pairing of Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator and the freshly printed Francisco, Foul Marauder.
The appeal to me was strong: two low-cost partners, one of which ramps and the other of which filters, which can be paired with a further slate of low-cost pirates to enable all sorts of shenanigans.
EDHRec had a mere 310 decks for this freshly minted pairing, so a question we can ask is: who else jumped on these two as a worthwhile commander pair?
Looking at the ten high synergy cards, the ones disproportionately run in this commander pair compared to the color as a whole, offers a clear picture.
Almost 60% of Francisco/Malcolm decks run Thassa’s Oracle and Demonic Consultation, an instant-win combo requiring a mere two cards and three mana.
Looking further, we can see a bunch more high-powered staples also at around 60% usage, but scroll down a bit beyond that and we can see a very different type of card at approximately 35% usage: a couple four-mana pirates with abilities useful in slower, more midrangey decks.
Ramirez DePietro and Hostage Taker are both fun cards, but they’re decidedly not mana well spent in a cEDH Thoracle deck.
For this reason, I’m going to call these two cards, along with Thoracle, “indicator cards”, cards that give you a rough idea on the upper bound of players playing a particular type of deck.
If I use the indicator cards of Thoracle and Ramirez, I can start to construct a Venn diagram with a combo circle containing 58% of decks and a midrange circle containing 36% of decks.
I wouldn’t expect a ton of overlap, and indeed a search with EDHRec’s filter feature plus some quick math tells me that there’s about 7% of decks that run both cards and about 13% of decks that run neither card.

Now, what does this sort of analysis tell me?
Well, my first takeaway from seeing the 58% Thoracle play rate was “goddamn, I guess I’m on the right track if I’m looking to make a high-powered deck.” To be clear, Thassa’s Oracle plus Demonic Consultation will be run in some percentage of any deck with blue and black in it, but 58% is a lot of decks.
While it’s not a wincon I’d go for, the fact that such a high percentage of people building Francisco/Malcolm run Thoracle communicates to me, somebody who’s building on a budget, that I’m probably getting a lot of bang for my 84 cents from the command zone.
For my part, I ended up including none of the indicator cards I mentioned in the deck I ended up building, because I’m a unique and special boy.

For another example, about a year ago I was building a Skeleton Ship deck.
It was intended to be a glacially slow proliferate deck, and it had all the fixins: the Parallax enchantments, some impressively slow wincons, and the original storage lands that enter tapped and don’t tap for non-stored mana.
The commander was a card that could be played as a mediocre removal engine, but most games it just sits there as a meme, a perfect encapsulation of the slow mass of nothing I was doing.
So what do other Skeleton Ship players build?
Looking at the high synergy cards, the top five are all cards that pair with Skeleton Ship’s ability, so already other people are deviating from my game plan by actually caring about the commander.
Next up, in roughly 50% of decks, are a bunch of proliferate cards, which seems sensible enough to me, that’s what I’m doing.
After that, in about 30% of decks, are a bunch of skeletons, and in about 15% of decks are a handful of questionable but undeniably skeleton-themed cards.
Excellent.
Okay, so these are going to be the three archetypes, with our indicator cards for each being Freed from the Real, Thrummingbird, and Reassembling Skeleton.

We can now make a triple Venn diagram and fill it out by simply plugging in every combination of these three cards in EDHRec’s filter tool.
Upon doing this, the first thing I noticed was that “cares about commander ability” and “cares about counters” seem almost like one diverse super-category, whereas skeletons were definitely more distinct.
If you’re a freak like me, you’re probably also wondering: what is that other 15%?
I did another filter excluding these indicator cards plus an additional one for each category to account for slight variances in card choice, and the result is pirates and cards with ships on them.
Respect.
Honestly, the Skeleton Ship page was fascinating for the opposite reason as the Francisco/Malcolm one.
This EDHRec page looks something like a tour of low-power EDH: there’s the players who are earnestly building around the glorious card known as Skeleton Ship, the players who took it as a jumping-off point for some strange quest into the unknown, the people who are here for a commander for their janky skeletons deck, and the people who just appreciate the card for all its skeleton and ship goodness.
I picked out Skeleton Ship as the commander for a bad meme deck, and it looks like I’m in good company with that fact; but the interesting thing is how many different types of meme are present here.
Honestly, the process of making this piece and returning to the glorious EDHRec page has only increased my amount of love for all my bone homies out there living their best Skeleton Ship lives.

For our third example, let’s talk about Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle.
This page has a lot more decks than the previous two I mentioned, and yet somehow it’s honestly the most confusing EDHRec page I’ve ever been on.
High up on the page we get some stuff that makes sense: things that tap and untap the commander, and lands-matter cards.
Sure, that makes sense; cards that lead to lands entering tapped are good when the commander has them come in untapped.
We also get Villainous Wealth, okay, yeah, I guess if you’re playing a lot of lands you may as well have an appropriately colored outlet.
And then you get down to stuff like King Macar, the Gold-Cursed.
Are people playing him because Arixmethes has a “may tap” ability and thus lets you get an inspired trigger a turn early?
Maybe, but there’s also a lot of tap/untap synergy sprinkled throughout the page, not enough for me to get a confident idea of what people are doing, but certainly a handful seemingly present in a hair over 20% of decks.
Next up is tribal turtle decks, and for this we can see a bunch of turtles played in roughly 15% of decks, with about half that many decks also running a bunch of questionable turtle-themed cards.
We’ll call these “turtle players” and “dedicated turtle players.” Finally, let’s talk Gates.
The indicator cards I’m going to use here are Baldur’s Gate, Nine-Fingers Keene, and Maze’s End, cards played in a decent portion of decks that you’d probably only want in a Gates deck.

Now, these play rates confuse me a little, because in my opinion as a professional Gates enjoyer, Baldur’s Gate is a much worse card than these other two for early game purposes; it’s a waste in a three-color deck, and the limitation to three colors means that even if you run every single in-color gate, only a third of your lands will be Gates.
I don’t love Keene either; its triggers will whiff more than a quarter of the time in a three-color deck, but at least it’s a decently statted creature.
Maze’s End is my personal favorite in an Arixmethes deck: it comes in untapped and can find you an untapped gate immediately, and can be paired nicely with extra land play effects, and that’s not even the strongest way to use Maze’s End in an Arixmethes deck.
I recently posted a video to my Patreon discussing what ended up being my highest-effort deck, and you can stick around to the end for a preview of that.

On some level, these adventures are cool simply because I enjoy them; I enjoy a good puzzle, I enjoy putting myself in somebody else’s brain and asking why they decided to run a particular card.
In theory, EDHRec has an archetypes feature that gives breakdowns on different deck types, but it’s not very good.
“Wow, you’re telling me there are Francisco/Malcolm decks that involve Pirates, treasure, and sacrificing?
That’s crazy, I never would have guessed.” So, in absence of a feature like this, I enjoy the challenge of snooping around and figuring things out.
However, this is also the part of we where I tell you that this goofy little thing I like to do while using EDHRec is actually a fantastic exercise that will prevent all sorts of mistakes down the line.
One of the biggest pitfalls I’ve seen EDHRec users fall into is when they add cards that look good without thinking about what deck those cards belong in, or how many of a single card type belong in a deck.
This results in decks which have some amount of synergy in theory, but which in practice feel disjointed and clunky, containing a Frankenstein-like mishmash of components from various decks.
For this reason, I’d advocate spending an extra moment trying to parse what specific types of deck are actually being built with the different cards; even just keeping in mind that there are different decks doing different things within a given commander will likely be a great help to newer players.
EDHRec is a good tool, but it’s not one you can go on autopilot with.
To echo the conclusion of the EDHRec Effect, you should try to keep in mind where the cards you’re looking at are coming from, and that no matter how snappy the UI is, the stuff you’re seeing isn’t magical, it’s just data slurry.

With that said, thanks for watching, and here’s a preview of a bonus video I made about the Arixmethes deck I ended up building.
I had begun to mentally catalog this deck idea as a failure when I once again stumbled upon Maze’s End, and this time the gears really got turning.
Fundamentally, the issue with Maze’s End is that it’s both incredibly visible and glacially slow; that slowness is due both to the extremeness of the win condition and the requirement of running a ton of taplands, downsides which exist in a state of tension.
Every turn of playing a non-gate land means an extra Maze’s End activation that’s required down the road.
However, these downsides can be mostly eliminated by simply playing all of the gates at once through an effect like Scapeshift or Reshape the Earth.

A now infamous sentence in my playgroup is, “Wow, this opening hand would be great if it had more lands.” Whenever it’s said, either me or my friend Mr. Hans will sit up straight, get a devious glint in our eye, and say, “Yeah, nine-card hands are pretty good.” This is a joke that will never stop finding funny, but the frequency with which people express the original sentiment also speaks to a broader point about lands: despite their centrality to the game, a lot of people don’t really see lands as a part of their deck in any meaningful sense.
If your hand was missing something else you find vital to your game plan, like an artifact, a creature, or a piece of ramp, you wouldn’t say, “Wow, this opening hand would be great if it had an artifact in it,” because that’s a silly statement to make; an opening hand without an artifact in an artifact deck is a bad hand, not a mildly flawed good hand.
To take this a step further, I think a lot of people have a mindset of lands being a sort of necessary evil, a card type that dilutes the “gas” of a deck and one that should be played in the lowest quantity that a player can get away with.
I don’t necessarily want to invalidate the desire to draw gas, but I do think that what I just described is a mindset that will naturally lead to deck-building mistakes.

So to start with, I want to lay out a basic framework for the approximate number of lands that you should be running in your deck.
I’ve seen a lot of numbers paraded around by various people as general reference points, and to be frank, I think a single number does a poor job of answering the question.
Speaking of Frank, let’s start there.
Frank Karsten has done an admirable job of answering questions of mana and mana fixing, and his analysis on the subject of land count is as good a place to start as any for the topic.
The format-agnostic version of Karsten’s land count analysis goes something like this: he takes a whole bunch of match data from across a couple years of online MTG events and excludes any deck that didn’t have more wins than losses.
He then does a regression analysis on the remaining decks, which sounds complicated but is actually pretty simple in concept.
A regression analysis basically just cares about how a bunch of predictor variables correlate with an output variable.
In this case, the question Karsten’s analysis is asking is how do mana curve, quantity of cheap draw spells, and quantity of cheap ramp spells affect how many lands a successful deck plays?
The result of this question is then turned into a formula that can be used to determine the number of lands that a given deck should play, and as a starting point I like this.
I’d argue that average mana value, as well as quantities of cheap draw and ramp, should be major factors used to decide land count in a deck, and I’ve left a link to that article in the description if you want to give Karsten’s formula a try.

However, since it was constructed from 60-card deck data, Karsten’s analysis here misses out on some specific factors involved in EDH, and he himself is aware of this.
Another article of his lays out a different set of criteria for mana curve, ramp, and land count in an EDH-specific context.
Due to the absence of good data on EDH games, this article obtains its findings through simulated games against a passive opponent, with the model optimizing for the highest quality curve out.
This quality is defined here as a single number being composed of the mana value of each card played, repeated on each turn thereafter to simulate the value of having played a spell that influences the game.
The model factors in a number of Commander-specific assumptions, such as the free mulligan and the commander being effectively an extra non-land card available at all times, and honestly, I like this model a lot, not because it’s perfect but because it’s simple and specific.
It gives land count, ramp count, and mana curve recommendations based purely on the goal of curving out.
Cards aren’t “Necropoent” and “Rewind” and “Aquaa”; they’re hypothetical pieces of cardboard with mana value three, four, and two respectively, and to assume that they’re different from each other beyond this information would introduce an unreasonable level of complexity to the model.
So as with the land count formula, it’s a good starting point.
It offers some neat recommendations on optimal land counts, mana rock counts, and mana curve, and comes to the conclusion that for purposes of curving out properly, decks would be well served to run at least 37 lands and as many as 42 in some cases.
This is good information, but the simplicity and specificity of the model mean that to get the full picture we need to venture a bit beyond its scope.

Karsten’s assumptions themselves offer a neat place to start thinking, and I’m most interested in his assumption about the commander.
His model assumes it to be effectively a non-land card like any other, but one you have available all the time.
This is a decent shortcut for purposes of putting together a model, but the commander of a deck can have a wildly important impact on the curve and desired land count of the deck beyond just occupying a mana slot.
Specifically, there are commanders that offer some form of draw or filtering, and these will influence the number of lands a deck is looking to run.
If you’re building a Rona deck with lots of one- and two-cost legendaries, as long as you run enough blue sources to guarantee playing Rona on turn two, your black sources and land count as a whole can be a bit lower since you know you’re going to turn through a lot of cards on turns three and four.
Similarly, a Yar deck can go a bit heavier on ramp and a bit lighter on lands, knowing that as long as it’s able to get up to Yar, it’ll have its next couple land drops for free.
These examples make sense as there are cases when a player will have guaranteed access to a high-quality tool for drawing into additional lands.
However, I also want to talk about a different type of commander that I think will be more controversial, that being the high-costed commander that draws a lot of cards.
If your commander costs four or more and draws cards, not only should you not run less lands than you otherwise would; you actually should run more.
That’s a draw spell you’ll have every single game, and your only barrier between yourself and those sweet, sweet cards is drawing enough lands or ramp to get there.
Ditto if the deck is very heavy on draw that costs a lot of mana: medium to large draw will cut through that slightly higher density of lands with no problem, so running a higher land count won’t hurt you; it will only serve to lessen the chance of screw.
And I’ll go a step further here.

I suspect the reason a lot of people end up running low land counts isn’t because they’ve done a lot of field testing and decided that they need to be drawing more gas; it’s because they get finished adding cards to the deck and feel attached to the non-land stuff they put in.
Making cuts can be a somewhat painful and difficult process, so if EDH Fan99 tells you that you can run 33 lands, a lot of people will take that advice very eagerly, and then down the road they’ll curse the luck gods when they get stuck on four lands in their deck whose average mana value is 4.5.
I say this with a heart full of empathy; I’ve been there.
But sometimes you just got to bite the bullet and make those cuts.

Another factor that influences land count is colors, both the number of colors and the symbol density.
Well, kind of.
See, this is a subject that’s a bit harder to solve with big-brained deck-building tips.
The annoying truth is, if you want to run a lot of colors and you don’t want to run a whole lot of tap lands in order to actually get the colors you need, you either need to spend hundreds of dollars on a mana base full of fetches and shocks, or you need to run a lot of lands.
I do not say this from sitting on top of my throne of paper-made copies of “brisk study.” I don’t run many fetches and shocks in my decks due to their cost, and I honestly find the effectiveness of them to be a little upsetting.
If you’re willing to spend money, you can run a lot of colors with basically no downside, and if you aren’t willing to spend money, you can’t do that.
But I’m not here to get upset; I’m here to give you actionable advice.
That advice is, if you can justify buying fetches and shocks, or if you feel like proxying, you should run them.
If you’re like me and you can’t justify that purchase, you should either play fewer colors or run more lands.

As an example of this principle, I built out four manabases for a hypothetical four-color deck with blue and green being dominant colors.
The first one was 30 lands, $300, and a 10% tap lands allowance, a decidedly solid mana base if you’re okay with the low overall count.
Symbols-wise, it’s 22 each for green and blue and 16 each for red and black, pretty good numbers for coming from just 30 lands, not even including any sort of ramp.
The second one was 30 lands again, but $50 this time and a one-third tap land allowance.
The symbols for this deck are 20 each for green and blue and 13 each for red and black, definitely worse but not horrendously so; as long as you’re okay with tap lands, a well-built ramp suite should be able to patch up those numbers to something that ends up being pretty reliable.
The third one was 30 lands and $50 once again, but going back to the 10% tap land allowance.
This is where things get painful: 16 symbols each for green and blue and 10 each for red and black.
This is rough.
Our core colors aren’t even well supported, and 10 is a low enough count for our off colors that we’ll quite frequently be missing one or both of them.
However, if we dial the land count up to 40 with equivalent per-card budget, our count jumps back up to 20 for the core colors and 13 for the off colors, the same as the more tap-land-oriented 30-land option.
I should reiterate that this still isn’t amazing, but it’s a good demonstration of the trade-offs involved with building a mana base.
I could go into specific cycles of lands and when they should or shouldn’t be used, but we i long enough already, so I won’t.

Instead, I want to talk more about the mana symbols and how to know how many of each you’ll need.
This is another area where lots of people have posited various counts and formulas and such like, and to start with I’m going to stick with a familiar face.
Frank Karsten also posted an article offering an analysis of the number of each symbol a deck should run in order to be able to consistently play a card when they have enough total mana, with consistently being 89 plus m percent of the time, where m is the mana value of the card.
One application of this formula and resulting table would be to apply it to every single card in your deck and then build a mana base that gets as close as possible to satisfying this for every single card.
This works in faster formats where most or all cards want to be played on curve, but it works a bit less well at EDH.
I do think it’s appropriate to apply this strict 89 plus m percent standard for pivotal cards you want to land on curve, such as a commander or ramp spell.
However, for stuff you need a little later, such as high drops, combo pieces, or removal, you can put them behind a substantially lower symbol count as long as you’ve got enough draw and ramp to help you get the needed symbols by the time you need those cards.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should totally let your guard down on that sort of stuff, though; certainly if you’re running a lot of colors or if you’re running symbol-heavy cards, it’s worth taking a careful look at your manabase to make sure things will work out.
I recommend checking out the chart in Frank Karsten’s article, which I linked in the description, but as a bit of shorthand: 30 symbols in your mana base will give you great access to all but the most symbol-intensive cards; 25 symbols will give you great access to single-symbol cards and decent access to double-symbol cards; 20 will give you decent access to single-symbol cards and mediocre access to more symbols; and 15 symbols will give you okay access to single-symbol cards but will be unreliable beyond that.

For an example of one of my mana bases, my Maria deck runs 37 lands with 23 red symbols and 22 green symbols.
The deck is pretty low-curved and has a three-mana commander that ramps, so the lands and symbols are mostly to make sure that I can drop the commander on curve consistently.
When I run the deck through Frank Karsten’s land count formula, it’s right on the money, which makes sense to me since the commander ramps, which would make me okay with fewer lands, but also draws, which would make me fine with more.
For my Gissa deck, I’m running 41 total lands with 31 green sources and 22 black sources.
This count might sound high, but it’s totally justifiable; it’s a high-curved deck, it has card draw in the command zone, and its ideal mana curve is Elf on one, commander on two.
Having mana issues in my first three turns will dramatically slow down the deck as it won’t be able to get its draw and ramp online, so I’m pretty comfortable with a high land count.
In fact, Karsten’s formula generates an even higher count of 43 and some change, which might partially be because the deck’s average mana value of 4.71 would likely be an outlier in Karsten’s data set, but there are legitimate arguments for adding lands to the deck regardless.
A general pattern across my decks is that even when they’re relatively low-curved, I still generally run a high-30s quantity of lands in them as long as they can draw a lot of cards.
Mana screw is optional, and if you run a deck with big draw, running more lands is your way of unticking that box.

I’ve covered a lot of stuff here, and I’ve meandered a little bit, so let me clarify what I’m actually trying to say here.
For one, you should be intentional with the number of lands you run and keep in mind that the optimal number might be higher than the sorts of numbers that get thrown around on the internet.
Frank Karsten’s formula for the ideal count is a good start, though, since it

Hey folks, happy Wednesday, or Sunday, or whichever day it is you're watching this.
I figure instead of spending days engineering the perfect 15-minute video script while I could be spending time with my family, I'm just going to spend five minutes shamelessly riffing on a concept brought up in my comment section: that being slot compression.

The idea of slot compression is basically this: you can fit more stuff into your deck, more things of each category like finishers, draw, or removal, if you pick out and play cards that do multiple things.
For midrange decks, an easy way to do compression is to run decently statted creatures that do other things your deck wants to do.

In a dirt cheap Rose deck I built a while back, the creature count is decently high, but the vast majority of creatures in the deck either draw me cards or make my opponents discard cards.
Even among the more finisher-oriented creatures that don't fit into these two categories, most are blood Iris effects, which still perform a secondary duty of discouraging board wipes; so the compression is still there.
My Gly deck is a more high-curve example of this principle.
Fun fact: if you pay a lot of mana for a creature, it will often be great for multiple things.
My deck cashes in a hefty 20 or so slots up front for ramp, but it is rewarded for this with a creature base consisting of powerful removal and draw spells stapled to 5/5s and 8/8s and 10/10s, which means that the deck ends up being able to win games without a single dedicated wincon slot.

Another example of this is hate bears decks.
By running stax effects that are also creatures, these decks are able to heavily oppress their opponents' game plans while still having a board state to block and pressure life totals.
Sometimes this pressure will be pivotal to winning, such as in my Liesa deck, and other times it will serve more as an alternative wincon or as hate toward life pay; regardless, this flexibility is very useful.

For more combo-oriented decks, one way to have plenty of space for both pieces and supporting cards is to pick cards that do both.
If you need a sac outlet for your combo, you'll naturally run into the issue that some games you won't draw one and other games you'll draw multiple.
You could run only a couple and some tutors, but you could also run a bunch of Altars in a deck with some artifact synergies, or sac outlets that get buff if you want an alternative beatdown wincon, or cards like Fanatical Devotion and Greater Good, which might just be generically good cards in some decks.
There are also combo decks looking for a lot of certain types of cards to go off, such as with a Midow Nila deck; there, a reasonable plan might be throwing in low-cost warriors you like from any color, which will further the beats and combo potential offered by the commander while also letting you have high-quality creatures.
The general gist here is that if you can make cards needed for your combo be also valuable in their own right in the deck, the combo will feel much less space-gobbling.

This logic also applies for heavily synergistic decks.
If you have a deck focusing on a particular card type, such as equipments or auras, having a lot of your supporting cards also fit into those types means that your wincons will pack a ton of power, and it will also have the added benefit that conditional tutors will give you access to a good portion of your deck.
The same goes for decks that focus on a particular creature type or particular attributes: if you're building a Goreclaw deck and your deck's draw and removal mostly consists of creatures with power four or greater, suddenly you can fit a whole lot more beef into the deck while still having it feel smooth and well-rounded.

Finally, let's talk lands.
MDFCs, utility lands, and other dual-mode cards that get you lands are great, and I highly encourage using these.
I sometimes see people run land counts in the low 30s in decks that aren't that low-curve, and while I appreciate the desire to draw gas, I echo Interesting Failure’s thinking here: at least do your future self a favor and throw in some MDFCs or utility lands to bring your count up to 35 or 36.
This goes for high-curve decks running 36 lands as well; don't be afraid to MDFC your way up to 38 or 39, or even break into the 40s.
I plan to do a longer video about lands and mana bases sometime soon, so I'll save further discussion of the subject until then, but long story short, lands are good and people often don't play enough of them in casual EDH.

I've discussed some different ways to compact your slots, you know, to run cards to satisfy multiple things your deck wants, and I think a logical question to ask regarding this is exactly how valuable it is to have compacted slots.
I like to think I've laid out a decent case for doing such a thing: you can run more of each supporting card type while still maintaining a solid curve to your deck, and you can run a higher land count for purposes of not getting screwed while mitigating some of the downsides of mana flood.
However, an important thing to remember is this: at its core, your deck still needs to do a thing that wins.
In the past, I've sometimes fallen deep into the hole of synergy and support cards and built a deck that runs very smoothly and feels good at the table but ultimately lacks substantive wincons and usually just succumbs to getting outscaled by somebody else.
I advocate for people to put more support cards in their decks because I think the average EDH player is on the opposite end of the snappy-to-smooth spectrum as me, but it's good to keep in the back of your head that playing smoothly and having interaction isn't a substitute for having a good way to end the game.
You should try to have both of these things in your deck.

Picture this: it's an average Thursday night, and you're just doing your thing, that thing being playing your groovy blue-red combo deck in a game of Commander with all your cool friends.
You're out there drawing the cards, making the plays, living your best life.
The pivotal moment fast approaches; a pesky Thalia hits the board.
Not to fear, you've got a counter.
Your Kiki-Jiki meets a Dissipate, and though the ensuing counter war is lost, you've got a backup plan.
You throw down that Splinter Twin.
What follows is those dreaded words: “in response, it’s a removal spell.” Suddenly this game has become a lot less cozy.
What’s the backup plan, champ?
You keep cycling through your deck, finding plenty of draw and mana but nothing much of use.
Things are desperate.
Where do you even go from here?
Well, you don’t go from here.

I mean, combo holds an interesting position within the landscape of Magic: The Gathering.
Is it a type of deck, a type of win condition, a flavor of play style?
Yes, it is indeed these things and probably many more.
The basic gist of what combo is is exactly what it sounds like: a combination of cards that together do something much stronger.
The spooky, scary version is a two- or three-card combo that wins on the spot, such as Splinter Twin and Pestermite, but there also exist infinite mana and infinite life combos that need additional cards to win, as well as less game-ending combos that only win situationally or even just generate a lot of value.
Though combo is wide-ranging and has undoubtedly been part of the game for basically its whole existence, a lot of players have a negative association with it, and I think it's useful to explore why that might be.

To start with, it's pretty common for combo decks to feel uninteractive and like they win out of nowhere.
You can be doing your own game plan and watching with dread as your opponent spends very little resources on board state and interaction, instead relentlessly digging their way toward a one-turn win until either they find it or you reduce their life to zero.
This kind of Magic isn't particularly fun for anybody; it's just another kind of solitaire.
The other thing I've seen complaints about is the fact that, in a way, a lot of combo decks break the rules of the game as understood by most players.
Games that involve conventional aggro, midrange, and control decks feature a common language: board presence is a thing to be fought over, and cards in hand and life total exist as resources to be taken into consideration and leveraged.
By contrast, combo decks throw this playbook in the toilet.
They operate using additional, more subtle resources, and they can win even when they are behind in board state, life total, and hand size.

Now, there are a lot of things to be said about these points, but I'll keep it to this for now.
The volatility and uninteractivity of combo decks can indeed be negatives, and I will be talking about how to minimize them; however, breaking the conventional rules of the game can be a good thing, particularly in a format like EDH.

The fact that Commander is a format with 40 health per player and three opponents rather than one encourages some styles of play which are too risky in 20-health, 1v1 formats.
These empowered styles tend to be slower and greedier than a lot of what you find in other formats.
In mid-power EDH, it's very common to see decks that pile on heaps upon heaps of creature-based value, and then you get decks like my Gissa list, calling card “Midrange Crusher 5000,” that make it their whole goal to demolish these sorts of decks by piling on an even larger amount of greed.
And though I enjoy playing Midrange Crusher 5000, I know that this environment isn't always a very dynamic one.
A game where everyone always has big piles of value-generating permanents and where turns involve five minutes of abilities and triggers with little movement, strategy, or actual action isn't one I enjoy finding myself in.
The fact that there are decks that can cut through the slow, greedy, board-centric decks is a good thing.

Now that I've laid out why I think combos and combo decks occupy a useful niche, we can ask the core question: where do they usually go wrong in EDH?
I think a lot of it comes down to the structure of the decks.
The example I gave in the intro is a deck that's basically an EDH adaptation of 2015-era Modern Splinter Twin, a pure combo deck, and the operative word for why that doesn't work so well is “pure.” So, okay, there's this weird paradoxical thing: as you get to higher and higher powers in Commander, combo becomes more and more ubiquitous, for the simple fact that everybody's got 120 health to chisel through, right?
And it takes a lot of time to fair-Magic your way through that level of meat.
But what this also means is that stax cards to slow down and break combos also become ubiquitous, much more ubiquitous than they are in a 20-health, 1v1 format.
The result is that pure combo actually works better in conventional formats, and it is indeed very common for combo decks in these formats to have no other win conditions.
By contrast, for a high-power Commander player who must always contend with the possibility of encountering a quagmire of stax effects and counterspells, it's a good idea to run alternate win conditions just to be safe.

As a high-level example we can consider Dargo and Thrasios, a partner commander pair that is sometimes played in competitive EDH.
Thrasios is a beast of a card; it's a generally decent value engine and, more importantly, it's an outlet for infinite mana combos that's in the command zone.
You combo off to get your infinite mana, and then you play Thrasios and draw through your deck to find the kill.
Good stuff, Thrasios is real good.
Dargo is there to add a bunch of utility: he can be used with Life's Legacy or Greater Good to generate cards, and he can also be sacked to Neoform or Pod to grab Tidespout Tyrant for one of the deck's combos.
He also, more pertinently to the point here, is a beefy boy who can threaten your opponents, and that can be a useful thing to have in your pocket if your combo plan gets shut down somewhere along the road.
The multiple different combo win conditions, along with the backup beatdown win condition, make the deck exceedingly flexible and adaptable and help it to weather a lot of challenging situations.

However, I hear a clamoring.
“But Alex,” I hear some of you say, “I'm not a cEDH player; I'm not going to be facing a wall of stax high enough to be an eighth wonder of the world.” And you know what, that's fair.
So for now, let's stop considering what's good and switch to considering what's fun and what works well within a somewhat lower-powered group.
For starters, I'm going to have to crush your dreams a little.
Combos are powerful and can be quite fun, but it's important that the combos be well situated within a deck.
This means that if a combo is central to the deck, the deck should be able to pull it off reasonably consistently, with the assumption of at least light resistance from your opponents.
If the combo is less central to the deck, it should blend in naturalistically with the deck, requiring mostly cards and types of setup the deck achieves through its normal game plan and not feeling wildly out of sync with the normal game plan.
If you put a two-card infinite combo in your low-power midrange deck, your deck is going to be a low-power midrange deck 90% of the time and an unprotected infinite combo deck 10% of the time.
That's going to give your play group some serious whiplash, and it's decidedly not an example of fun and dynamic gameplay.
See part two of my budget cards video if you want to hear me waffle about this topic for another 5 minutes or so.

For an example of an elegant execution of a lower-power combo deck, I'm going to use a deck from my friend Mr. Hans, because he's much more of a Johnny than I'll ever be.
He built a Vadrok deck; it's a toolbox mutate deck that tries to generate value through its commander and a suite of other value engines throughout the deck.
An equipment subtheme with several tutors also exists within the deck, giving it access to several reconfigure cards which offer various forms of utility, as well as the central pillar of Sunforger.
With Sunforger, the deck has access to yet a further suite of options: assorted interaction, draw spells, and burst damage, and also a couple of distinctly spicier cards.
Glorious End can put an immediate stop to a problematic combat phase or effectively counter a concerning spell, and Chance for Glory is an extra turn spell that also doubles as a protection spell.
For both cards, Angel's Grace can be played on the following turn in order to prevent the “lose the game” clause.
This is a decidedly useful tool on its own, but it is also within the interaction between these cards and the mutate mechanic that the combo exists.
Vadrok can repeat low-cost noncreature spells from the graveyard when creatures mutate onto it, and since the mutate stack counts as a single creature, a bounce spell returns the entire stack to hand.
So the combo goes something like this: get an extra turn via Chance for Glory and prevent loss on that turn via Angel's Grace, then repeat this on each subsequent extra turn by mutating three creatures onto Vadrok , one for Chance, one for Grace, and one for a bounce spell.
If you have the correct setup, this means infinite turns and infinite combat steps, swinging with a body that rocks.

Something you may note about this is that, as combos go, this one is very convoluted and difficult to achieve.
In addition to the three cards required for the combo, there is also the requirement of having 14 mana and three mutate creatures, as well as the commander.
However, this is actually okay for a couple of different reasons.
For one, Vadrok isn't a pure combo deck.
Maintaining a solid mutate stack with the commander leads to having a decent beater that deals commander damage and generates a lot of value.
The deck isn't playing at high power levels, and it can and does win games simply by hitting people, drawing cards, and holding up enough protection to prevent the stack from dying.
A common strategy for the deck is to build the stack on top of a manland, which allows it to dodge sorcery-speed removal in general and board wipes in particular, and the pivotal Sunforger boosts Vadrok's power to seven, the exact amount you need to kill a player in three hits.
It's a very real win plan with a solid shell for generating value and controlling things.
The other reason the difficulty of setting up the combo is okay is that all three of the combo pieces have their own utility, and more importantly the requirement of having a lot of mutate creatures and mana is achieved by the deck just generally doing what it wants to be doing.
Generating a lot of value leads to drawing into mutate creatures and mana rocks, and successfully protecting its ever-important Sunforger allows the deck to grab its combo pieces.
Everything needed to set up the combo is a solid goal in its own right, so simply playing the deck in ways that are generally effective also naturalistically leads into having the combo.
Sometimes the combo will get stopped, but if it does, guess what?
The deck has been doing a good job of pursuing its general goals, so you're still going to have a decent shot of winning via commander damage.

This idea of combo fitting naturally into the deck is the biggest thing I want to convey here.
A combo you run shouldn't feel abrupt or out of place; it shouldn't feel like the deck does nothing or everything depending on if it draws a certain three or four cards.
If you've got a deck with a combo as the centerpiece, you should run tutors or big piles of draw in order to get there, with control cards used as a sort of extending element to buy the deck time.
If you have a deck where it's going to take a long time to put together the combo, you should fill up space in the deck with a game plan that works concurrently with that setup process.
That can be ramping in a deck where the combo is mana intensive, or running lots of draw in a deck where the combo involves looping with a number of different cards, or running tutors in a deck where getting combo pieces together is a challenge.
And then once you've constructed a framework for piling on particular resources, you can devise how to fit in an alternative win plan that also takes advantage of those resources.
Don't trust your combo to win you the game, because guess what: removal, counters, and stax exist, and optimizing your combo deck is going to put you at power levels where increasing quantities of these roadblocks exist.

As a final point, I want to discuss the opposite of a combo deck with an alternative beatdown win condition: that being a beatdown deck with an alternative combo win condition.
Now, this is a little more unusual, but hear me out here.
Sometimes a beatdown deck is able to get ahead on resources, but then it gets locked out of swinging for on-board damage for some reason or other.
For example, a couple years back I built a $25 Grismold, the Dreadsower deck, a fast midrange deck.
Plan A of the deck is the pseudo-Voltron beatdown plan, where the deck creates a bunch of tokens on board and then deletes said tokens in order to swing in for lethal amounts of commander damage.
You might note, however, that the deck is not running blue, and a $25 budget is too small to afford nice shoes for my Grismold.
As you might expect, there are games where Grismold kind of just gets bullied out of existence by removal.
So what else can you do with a lot of tokens dying?
Run some Blood Artist, of course.
The win plan of generate tokens, play your Konrad, and then kill the tokens isn't as effective at killing players as a pure Voltron Grismold plan, but relying on the Grizzy plan alone is a bad idea, and having a backup means that the deck can win even if it just gets a couple medium-sized Grismold swings rather than living the dream and one-tapping three players back to back.
The important point here is that both of these win conditions use the same basic resource: tokens.
So the deck doesn't really need to do anything different to have both of these win conditions, and this is the crux of things, really, at low power.

Howdy, folks.
My last video got a lot more attention than I was anticipating, and I have a couple of non-Magic: The Gathering videos that I’m currently doing research for, so I figured I may as well put out a short little video with a few more thoughts on the EDH format.
Today I’m going to be talking about a couple different ways of orienting a deck in relation to its commander, and one in particular that I find to be underrated.

To start with, let’s talk about a pretty conventional way of constructing a commander deck.
You find a commander that looks cool, find cards that synergize well with said commander, and then fill in the gaps with other things the deck needs to succeed.
This is a simple and malleable format, but there are other options out there.

To talk about those, a useful exercise is to think about the rules of the Commander format as if you’ve never seen them before.
You’re building a 99-card singleton deck, something with a naturally high degree of variability, but you have an ace up your sleeve: a card that you will always have, every single game.
You could make that card Krenko, Mob Boss and then play a Goblins deck, and that’s a perfectly valid plan.
But something you might notice about that plan is that the commander and the deck do basically the same thing: play goblins.

A lot of strong decks will opt to have the commander do something tangential to the rest of the deck, tying in with some key cards but broadly offering something different in nature than the rest of the deck.
However, my favorite form of this relationship is where the commander does the exact opposite of the thing that the rest of the deck is trying to do; basically, you pick out a commander and then build a mid-rangy deck with a glaring weakness solved by that commander.

An example that comes to mind is a Glissa Sunslayer deck that I built several months back.
The card is a fantastic creature for three mana: an absurdly effective blocker, a draw engine, and a source of endless sadness for decks running enchantments.
The EDHREC page seems to consist mostly of decks trying to capitalize on +1/+1 counters from your cards, but I instead opted to build a hardcore battlecruiser deck.
The commander’s flexibility and daunting presence mean that I can fully forget about early game creatures and not worry as much about draw, instead jamming my deck to the brim with ramp, removal, and massive haymakers.
I have a top-notch blocker that’s also a draw engine every single game, and that lets me use my deck slots to focus on being the greedy deck that I truly want to be deep inside.

Another example of this is a Liesa deck I built recently.
When I first saw Liesa, I went, “God, that card could absolutely beat the tar out of people.” All I want in this world is to mercilessly beat my opponents with that angel.
So great, my commander is selected.
How to build a deck around it?
Well, judging by the EDHREC page, most people’s answer to that question is to put it in a lifegain deck.
Now, I don’t hate this approach; you run a bunch of cards that gain life, some lifegain synergy, and a commander that will sap life out of both you and your opponents.
It makes sense, and you could even argue that it sort of fits my template here, but that’s not the direction I went in.
Instead, I decided to build a deck that’s just dying, craving for a beater to cut through a stale board state.
I built a hatebears deck.
I crammed as many hatebears as I possibly could into the deck, just truly an upsetting wall of little guys trying to ruin the day of my poor opponents.
And the deck has ended up working exactly as intended in a good portion of games.
The cards in the deck chip in damage, prevent damage coming at me, and generally hinder my opponents in all sorts of ways, and then Liesa cuts through the resulting board quagmire to reduce my opponents to a paste-like homogenate.
By design, it’s a deck with roughly a Liesa-shaped hole, and I’m able to play Liesa for five mana anytime I want, in any game I want.

There’s a lot of room for variation here, but this gives a decent idea of the basic formula.
Running a commander that covers a particular element of the deck allows a player to build a deck that puts that element on the back burner, instead focusing all its effort on the things it knows it can succeed at.
This way, you can effectively just solve the problem that you know your deck will have ahead of time, instead of agonizing over how many deck slots to devote to it.
I certainly don’t like the prospect of figuring out how to kill my opponents consistently with a low- to mid-budget hatebears deck, so I just avoided that question.

Midrange is often something that people look down on for being boring or bland, but with some creative usage of the rules of the format, you can build a really fun deck that exists within the midrange realm, and I think more people should give that a try.

Hey there, my name is Alex.
This, fundamentally, is a video about data; more specifically, it's a video about data scraping and the sorts of feedback loops that can occur sometimes when using scraped data over long periods of time.
It's also a video about Magic: The Gathering, although hopefully I've made it somewhat accessible to people who haven't made the terrible mistake of playing this game.

Magic: The Gathering was released in 1993 and followed the template of a lot of card games: there was an opponent to defeat, and defeating them requires some little dudes that do things, as well as other types of cards.
It's a game whose play formats are mostly designed for two players, which always brings up the natural question: well, what do my other one to four friends do, just stand there looking sad on this Flooded Strand?
I certainly remember being twelve and sitting on the floor with five other kids playing a game that gets abandoned after 90 minutes, but that's not ideal.

Enter Elder Dragon Highlander, known more commonly now simply as EDH or Commander.
EDH is a format with four players where each person picks one of their little guys to be a commander that they can play multiple times at escalating cost.
With origins in Alaska in the late 1990s, the format gradually gained popularity over time, with Wizards of the Coast finally printing a set specifically for the format in 2011.
This set was more of a toolbox than anything else; the pre-built decks were technically playable but not very good, containing a mishmash of themes and random unrelated cards.
They were seemingly intended to be hammered out with other cards into a more functional deck.
This is probably a good thing, as it gave newer players a gentle push toward building their own deck.

Building a deck is one of the most fundamental processes in any collectible card game, but people don't often think about the intricacies of how decks actually get built.
It usually starts with formulating basic ideas and a bunch of rummaging, whoa, Plumon Spontaneous Flight, that's a wombo combo, by rummaging I mean looking through cards.
This can be looking through physical cards in a collection, or looking through card galleries, or even performing searches with websites like Gatherer.
With these various methods of rummaging, you're going to be asking questions like: Is this card good?
Does it fit into my deck?
How many cards of this type should I be running?
How will this card work against the people I'm likely to play against?
Does this card fit the aesthetic of my deck where all the facial expressions in the art are funny?
Yes, yes it does.
Different players will be asking different questions, but every player uses some criteria or other.

Another major piece of deck building is looking at other people's decks, either physically or through websites where people post their decks.
This could be the last step in deck building to find cards you might have missed, the first step where you're trying to get a bit of inspiration, or somewhere in the middle where you're trying to hammer out the structure of a deck.
Now, this is all well and good, but let's try out a little thought experiment and say that we're trying to use the power of technology to simplify deck building.
A lot of the rummaging, either digital or physical, is hard to directly replace, but the act of looking at other people's decks theoretically could be.
Looking at individual decks is relatively slow, since each individual deck has the biases of its deck builder; meaning that unless you really trust the deck builder, it's a good idea to look at multiple different decks.
What if we could look at all similar decks at the same time, seeing cards based on how often other people choose to run them?
This is where EDHRec comes in, for the Commander format.

In theory, a website that aggregates deck lists is going to allow sorting through a ton of potential card choices very efficiently; we aren't trusting the card analysis of just a single person, but rather the analysis of the collective, thereby reducing the risk of bias.
Now, something to watch out for would be if these decks are influenced by each other, which could compound bad card decisions by people.
This effect will probably always exist to some extent, since people look at each other's decks and generally exist in the same ecosystem, but by default it likely isn't going to be pronounced enough to undermine the idea behind an aggregating website.
The fact that people aren't perfect analysts of cards and sometimes trust other people's imperfect analyses isn't a particularly devastating critique; rather, it's more along the lines of saying that we live in a society.
Everything I just said applies to EDHRec as it existed at its launch in 2015.
As a website, EDHRec scrapes deck lists from websites such as Archidekt and MTGGoldfish, where players post their deck lists to receive feedback.
These deck lists are then organized by Commander, as well as by other categories like price and sub-themes, and then within each tab cards are displayed by the frequency with which they appear in decks.
If I'm trying to build an Arcades, the Strategist deck, I don't have to scroll down far to find Overgrown Battlements, a card that is found in 95% of the Arcades decks that EDHRec has scraped.
Nice, that seems good; I should put that in my deck.
Ah, Shield Wall Sentinel, that goes too.
Wow, I've got all these great cards for my Defender deck and I didn't need to put in very much effort to find them.
Time to log into my favorite website and post this deck so I can send it to all my friends.

It's at this point that EDHRec goes, "Wow, a new deck was posted.
Time to add this useful data to my Arcades, the Strategist page so that other players can benefit from this original card analysis." You might be able to see the problem here.
In this case, instead of getting data from independently operating deck builders, EDHRec is receiving a regurgitation of its own aggregated data, plus maybe a bit of the deck builder's discretion on which specific cards to add.
A little bit of this type of deck doesn't really change EDHRec's methodology, but since all posted decks are treated equally and decks made heavily using EDHRec are much quicker and easier to build than decks built from the ground up, the proportion of decks built mainly with EDHRec naturally balloons over time.

As this proportion increases, we get two compounding effects.
For one, cards that didn't quite make it into the EDHRec lists, or which are lower on the page, get artificially tanked further; this, in turn, makes the EDHRec card suggestions artificially sluggish to changes in how decks are played and which decks are played, since for every time a player thoughtfully puts a less played card in their deck, there's another player building a deck straight off the EDHRec page that doesn't include that card because they weren't presented with it.
Secondly, the cards already high up in the EDHRec recommendations are bolstered regardless of how useful they actually are.
The cards at the very top are generally good, but there are a lot of cards that get played in 10 to 50% of decks that are peculiar.
When I think of the archetypal overplayed card in the format, it's one that is questionable on its own but is good in a game where the deck's commander sticks on the battlefield untouched by other players at the table; you could also call this a "win more" card, a card that's bad when a player is behind or when a game is tight but strong when a player is already ahead.
Commanders are the flashiest and most visible part of Commander decks, so even without something like EDHRec, players tend to overrate cards that are better when the commander sticks to the board.
EDHRec compounds this, as these questionable synergy cards are pushed high up in the results and tell players that they're played in 40% of decks, thereby amplifying the deck-building mistakes of EDH players.

As an example of this, a friend of mine was building a Volo, Guide to Monsters deck recently; let's call him Bartholomew.
Bartholomew sent me the list asking for suggestions, and it had several of these "win more" cards, with the two that caught my eye being Second Harvest and Junk Winder.
These cards aren't bad necessarily, but he was building a deck with a number of powerful format staples like Rhystic Study and Consecrated Sphinx, and by comparison these "win more" cards are really only good when Volo sticks around for multiple turns in a row; and if you're that far ahead that's the case, there are much stronger things that you're probably able to do.
I told Bartholomew that he should cut these cards and I wondered to myself why he'd included them.
When I went to the EDHRec page for Volo out of curiosity a bit later, I got my answer: the website is here to quickly inform me that 48% of Volo decks run Junk Winder and 47% run Second Harvest, proportions high enough to make even an experienced player think twice about calling them "bad cards."

This also speaks to a broader issue with giving high-powered deck-building tools to inexperienced players.
EDHRec can tell people what cards are being played, but it can't tell them why or what they contribute towards a well-rounded deck.
There are some pieces of a deck that are clear as to why they run: I want to run Axebane Guardian because my commander, Arcades the Strategist, encourages me to have lots of Defenders, and I run Slaughter the Strong because most of my creatures have zero power.
However, there are other cards that aren't as obvious.
Why run Path to Exile or Negate?
They don't relate to my commander in any direct way; they just interact with my opponent.
A lot of players don't understand why these cards are good, and I'd speculate that this results in these players adding only a handful of these cards and adding them out of a sense of obligation rather than any clear vision.
This results in a casual EDH format where most of the decks are stuffed with "win more," only-good-with-the-commander cards, with these cards taking up space that could have been occupied with cards that are better in the deck but whose purpose is less immediately obvious.

A general trend I've noticed is that most casual EDH decks don't run nearly enough of two key things: "pressure" and "removal." Pressure, essentially, is just things that make your opponent's life totals go down, usually creatures that can attack them.
If you know your opponent is playing a deck stuffed with "win more" cards, one that will do nothing and have no defenses until later, then snowball out of control, a natural response should be to turn your creatures sideways and punish that deck before they randomly pop off.
Removal is similar: if you know your opponent is running a deck loaded up with cards that do nothing when their commander doesn't stick around, then all you have to do to keep that player in check is make sure a Doom Blade gets tossed at their commander whenever it's played, and that's a small price to pay to basically shut down a player.

So what does it mean that people don't run enough pressure and removal?
It means that the sorts of decks that are stuffed with "win more" cards go unpunished, and large sections of the casual Commander format become akin to "multiplayer solitaire," with each player racing toward their own win plan and just praying that they can outrun their opponent.
I don't love this fact, and this is where some people might say, "But Alex, EDH is a fun casual format; play with your friends." This is true, and honestly, if doing wacky hijinks with your commander and playing against other people doing the same is something you enjoy, I'm not here to tell you're doing anything wrong.
I'm also not telling you're doing anything wrong if you use EDHRec to help you build your decks; I use it pretty regularly when building Commander decks, typically in the later stages of deck building where I'm looking for cards I might have missed in my earlier stages.
It's a good resource as long as you treat the cards that it shows you with the same criticality as cards you find anywhere else, and also recognize that there are cards it's not showing you.
If there's any message I want people to take away from all this, it's just that EDHRec isn't a magical website; it's a website with all the advantages and all the flaws of anything in our modern age that exists through the wonders of sifting through data slurry, and that fact should form the way we use it.

Well, as far as synergies go, there are 19 cards that recur, exile, or otherwise remove things from the graveyard, along with five things beyond the commander that are payoffs for cards leaving the graveyard.
To pair with these, there are 12 cards outside the commander that help cards get into the graveyard.
Though, seven of these are pretty insubstantial, so I guess we could say that there are five cards that are proper graveyard enablers.
As an added layer of synergy, there are some discard payoffs with Currency Converter, Conspiracy Theorist, and Containment Construct all letting the deck accumulate extra resources off of discarded cards in some form or other, and these compare nicely with the commander.
As a final bit of cohesion, the deck has 19 creatures that are spirits, five other cards beyond the commander that create spirit tokens, and another few cards that synergize with spirits in some other way.
Between this wide-ranging synergy core, moderate counts of draw and ramp, and a nice though somewhat narrow span of cards to interact with opposing plays, this deck is looking to out-grind opponents and assemble an army of spirits before swinging in big.
So, that's the plan.
But, how is this plan likely to work out in practice?

After my recent video about Rhystic Study, I got a lot of comments saying one specific thing: What about Sol Ring?
Why is it that Rhystic Study should be banned, but not this all-powerful fast mana piece?
Bits and pieces of my answer to that question are sitting around in plain sight.
As I mentioned in that video, the reason to ban things is having a high power level plus having a bothersome play pattern, and I find the play pattern of Sol Ring less bothersome than that of Rhystic.
Not a very high bar, I know, but the ring has cleared it.
I also had a segment in a 30-minute defense of tutors I put out last year where I discussed what causes cards to feel problematic and why a very early game threat like Sol Ring feels less game-warping than other very powerful cards that exist.
Not un-game-warping, but less game-warping.
Still, I think it's worth returning to the question of Sol Ring and asking some questions about it and giving the question of whether it should stay legal a fair shake.
I still firmly lean on the side of not banning it currently, and I'll be laying out my reasons for feeling that way, but the arguments in favor of a ban are also fascinating, and I love being fascinated.

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Okay, so we're going to start with the play patterns of Sol Ring and why I find them sometimes problematic, but unobjectionable a lot of the rest of the time.
The card's most obvious feature is that it warps early games.
Turn one Sol Ring, as well as its mean older brother, turn one Sol Ring or Arcane Signet, can really set a player up for a nasty turn two and turn three.
I think most casual EDH players have been flattened by a killer Sol Ring roll out in their time, but that earliness of Sol Ring is actually a reason why I don't always mind it so much.
Turn one Sol Ring is amazing; turn two Sol Ring is also pretty juicy, but what if you draw into it on turn three?
How about turn four or five?
At a certain point you might not even want to draw into this little guy, and that points to something important about the card: its ephemeral nature.

To briefly return to a metaphor I used last year, Sol Ring is strongest when it comes earliest in the pipeline toward victory, but it falls off fast compared to a lot of other especially powerful cards.
Smothering Tithe is another card that offers a lot of mana for its cost, but in that case the mana is dynamic in how quickly it gets generated, it's storable, and since it's in the form of treasures, it can also enable some powerful artifact synergies.
It's still just mana, but it's a decidedly more scalable and flexible form of mana.
Next up along the pipeline might be a powerful draw engine like Rhystic Study or The One Ring.
A strong flow of cards will almost always be useful, whether that be in an early setup turn or when a player is drawing their way toward a kill.
The potency of one of these could be limited by the amount of mana a player has, but drawing cards can also draw into ways to solve a player's mana issues, so for most decks this will be a temporary limitation, if even one at all.
Finally, we could talk about a powerful end game card that will usually spell out victory if a player is ahead, and could give a shot at swinging the game back around if they're behind.
Bolas's Citadel is a very powerful card, and the point in a player's game plan where it fits in is often quite far along, just before a player is looking to win.

All right, so what am I trying to say by constructing this scale?
Well, it's a useful data point for analyzing cards that most people would consider powerful.
Let's consider how often a Bolas's Citadel will feel especially powerful, maybe even too powerful for some games.
The answer to that might vary a bit by table, but I'm willing to bet it's reasonably frequent that this card feels out of place.
That's not any sort of complaint about the card; I love Bolas's Citadel, but it is an interesting fact about it, and it's a fact that has a lot to do with the point in the game at which this card is powerful.
If a Bolas's Citadel hits the table, the game will usually be over if its controller is allowed to untap with it, and it might even be over the same turn it was played with the right setup.
This means that the social tools of the EDH format, the fact that you have two other opponents in the game basically, aren't very useful at dealing with Bolas's Citadel.
If people happen to have big boards right now and are able to get an opportunity to swing big at the Bolas's Citadel player, that could be a good way of containing the card, but it's kind of rare that your options will be this good unless the Citadel haver played it when they were pretty far behind.
More realistically, the other players at the table will get maybe a single turn cycle to either come up with a piece of artifact removal or have their own crazy pop off turn, and if neither of those things happen, you're kind of cooked.

This stands in contrast to the way things play out with a card that is powerful earlier in the game.
A powerful draw engine like Braids or Toski can generate a lot of card advantage if not addressed, but these are significantly more manageable through the social nature of the format since they won't be typically winning the game super imminently.
If somebody is getting a lot of cards off of one of these, their opponents can attack them and or interact with some of their stuff in order to slow them down.
This is even more true for a mana tool like Sol Ring that comes into play early.
It will absolutely accelerate the game plan of its caster, but in a bracket two or three game, there will typically still be a lot of turns for the table to work together against the Sol Ringing player before a win is threatened.
To be clear, this is not to say Sol Ring will never be a problem.
If the player who draws it is playing the strongest deck, if that player draws other powerful stuff in conjunction with the ring, if one or more of their opponents has a rough start, all of these could result in Sol Ring causing a blowout, turning an uphill battle into a non-game.
This absolutely does happen sometimes, but it's not the norm of the card in my experience.
More frequently, players do get ample opportunity to gang up on the Sol Ring player, and that's assuming it's a problem at all.
Many a player has kept a questionable hand with a Sol Ring in it, and in those cases, it's pretty common to see a scary first three turns followed by a rather un-concerning turns four, five, and six.

Another factor that's worth considering with regard to banning a card is how much a card dominates the landscape of a particular game it's in.
If the legends about Primeval Titan are to be believed, it basically transformed the Commander format into the Primeval Titan format for a year or so, with everybody playing it and stealing it and copying it in order to get their favorite lands out onto the board as fast as possible.
The same goes for Prophet of Kruphix, instantly transforming a game into a Prophet of Kruphix game the second it hit the field.
This can even be the case for Rhystic Study; a player getting to draw a lot of extra cards might trivialize any other set of value engines they were playing, turning their game plan from insert complex synergy web here into Rhystic Study, end of story.
In contrast to these examples, Sol Ring is humble and task-oriented.
It enables a player's game plan early on, but the card lacks any sort of identity or scaling, so after a few turns, it often slips into the background.
I've had multiple games recently where I entirely forgot it had been played, only remembering about it after a moment of marveling at how sleek and tuned an opponent's deck had seemed.

To be clear, this isn't necessarily a perfect defense of a powerful card.
You could make similar arguments about Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus, and I'm perfectly happy with them staying banned.
Still, I do see some appeal in the fact that this is a universally available tool that can give players a chance to play an accelerated version of their game plan.
To me, getting to be the "big bad" is one of the defining experiences of playing EDH, and it's an experience that everybody deserves access to.
Now, just to be clear, I have seen some bad defenses of Sol Ring that argue that it's a "tool of the people," an equalizing factor between the stronger players and the weaker players out there, or the stronger decks and the weaker decks.
These are bad defenses because anybody can draw Sol Ring, including the strongest player, and I prefer a modified defense of the card that focuses on its ability to increase early game variance.
Increased variance won't necessarily create fairer games, nor is fairness a particularly good metric for analyzing Commander games in the first place, but what it can do is create more balanced play experiences on the aggregate, offering exciting games to players playing decks that might otherwise be slower.
And that's worth something.

So, ultimately, I've grown a bit more tolerant of Sol Ring over the past couple years, even as I remain a fairly variance averse player.
Random power spikes in a game plan can make for frustratingly unpredictable play experiences, making it impossible to predict opposing decks and strategize.
A deck looking very different power-wise game to game can also make it tricky to set the table up for success, to find a pairing of decks that will result in something satisfying for everyone involved.
In principle, this logic could provide a reason for me to hate Sol Ring, but the profile of the card manages to minimize some of the issues that significant power level variance can cause.
Being strong early means it is a thing that can be considered strategically right from the outset of a game, and this feature also offers plenty of time for players to collaborate in dealing with a Sol Ring fueled game plan.
Being a background enabler whose presence in a game diminishes over time does mitigate some of the power spike it provides; a deck that drew Sol Ring will usually feel much faster, but it will still feel like a version of itself, rather than a mid-range deck that it's transformed into a combo deck or something.
The biggest remaining issue I see with Sol Ring is that sometimes the strongest deck at the table will get it, and that deck will then get to wipe the floor in a way it might not have otherwise.
This undeniably does add to the difficulty in constructing successful Commander games, adds to the uncertainty of how much power level difference between decks is too much.
Whether that fact overshadows the other aspects of the card I brought up is up to you.

All right, let's move on to the logistics of banning Sol Ring.
I wanted to separate the theoretical case for banning Sol Ring from the practical case for banning it, in large part because I find the practical case for banning Sol Ring almost impossible to really consider, an insurmountably challenging proposition.
It's been printed in every single precon since 2011, and it's played in over 80% of decks according to EDHREC.
Banning Sol Ring would be a massive and monumental undertaking, requiring a prolonged communication campaign to reach all sectors of the player base.
I think we as EDH players on the internet have a tendency to assume the community as a whole is far more cohesive and engaged than they really are, like surely these spicy musings on Reddit or YouTube are an accurate reflection of the player base.
But no, the EDH format is full of people who don't consume much content about it, who haven't heard the latest announcement about the bracket system, who don't pay much attention to current sets, who don't spend a whole lot of time building decks, and who don't get together to play more than once a month, if that.

Take a moment to think about it.
For a 60-card format, the people playing it competitively will be actively listening for ban updates because that affects the meta game and also seems to happen a lot now.
We can also think about the average Commander player who ran Jeweled Lotus or Mana Crypt or even the still legal Rhystic Study.
These players will be relatively in tune with the Commander format compared to most players and will be able to actively receive any news about these cards getting banned.
Meanwhile, if Sol Ring was banned, the median Sol Ring player would probably hear about it 3 months later and go, "Oh, why?
Okay, guess I have some swaps to make." In addition to being challenging to fully convey to the player base, banning Sol Ring would also fundamentally muddy all Wizards of the Coast communication about the Commander format.
Precons serve as an example of what Commander deck building looks like, the tools it should use, the features it should have, and on a fundamental level, how the format works.
To ban a card that WotC has chosen to put in every precon would destroy any sort of messaging consistency about what the format means and would make any future messaging power significantly weaker.
In this way, I do think part of the discussion.

In an October 2025 announcement, Wizards of the Coast floated the idea of a change to the way hybrid mana is treated in the deck building rules of EDH.
This caused quite a lot of discourse, which I laid out some thoughts to in a previous video that was uncontroversial and universally beloved by the EDH community.
However, that October 2025 announcement also featured some other things, one of which was the proposed banning of Rhystic Study, the powerful blue draw engine.
That particular card has been in a perpetual state of low-level controversy for some years now, being both the third most widely played blue card, but also the second most hated blue card according to salt polls conducted by EDHREC.
I won’t bury the lede here: I don’t like this card, and I absolutely think it should be banned.
However, my reasons for thinking that are different than those of a lot of people, and I actually think that this card and the discourse around it is a fascinating window into some of the grittier instincts of EDH players, the ones we don’t like to think about or talk about.
At the end of the day, Rhystic Study’s power level is certainly quite high, but the destructive social dynamics it creates are the more pernicious element of the card, and these two factors combine to make it a card that absolutely warrants a ban.

To start with, though, we need to understand what it is we’re talking about.
Why is it that a card should be banned in EDH?
After all, it’s a casual format; a lot of the usual rules of tournament frequency and meta dominance don’t really apply.
We can look at the current ban list as well as other actions taken against specific cards to start to paint a picture.
I choose to begin in a familiar place.
Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow spent seven months on the “game changers” list last year; it was eventually delisted under the reasoning that a “rule zero” tool like the game changers list is far less necessary for policing commander cards, which are visible at the outset of a game.
But Yuriko still works nicely as an example of a card that sometimes feels problematic in EDH.
As I laid out a couple months ago, Yuriko feeling problematic comes down to two things.
For one, she is efficient and powerful, being very cheap to play and providing a ton of utility through her mixture of damage and card draw.
Secondly, her play pattern is frustrating; since her commander ninjutsu ability dodges commander tax, it is quite hard to keep her off the board, and it often feels like the Yuriko player effectively gets to cheat the normal rules of the format.
So these are typically the two things required to make a card truly problematic: a high power level and a play pattern that is frustrating.

We can see this echoed in some cards on the ban list.
Hullbreacher and Leovold are efficiently costed creatures, and they also easily combine with wheels to blast away opposing hands.
Primeval Titan and 15-mana Emrakul are both high-quality bombs that would see wide play if legal, and their abilities also let their controller rapidly snowball and end up playing a lot more Magic than opponents.
We can even see this in the fast mana bans of 2024: Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus are obviously very powerful, and the fact that they allow such explosive turn-one plays can be frustrating and disempowering for opponents in a way that some other powerful cards might not be.
Not everything currently on the ban list or the game changers list perfectly fits this framework, but this power-level-plus-play-pattern pairing is still a decently reliable template.
For something to be worth banning in EDH in the year of our Lord 2026, it needs to be frustrating in a way that creates bad experiences for people, and it also needs to be powerful enough to see wide play and make that bad experience commonplace so as to actually warrant a ban, rather than just being an occasional annoyance.
As we will see shortly, Rhystic Study checks both of these boxes.

To start with, let’s talk power level.
On an objective level, Rhystic Study’s power level is quite high, and this is evident in the fact that it’s one of the best cards in cEDH.
Surely these expert gamers know how to play around this bad boy, right?
But no, Rhystic Study is quite powerful even if all your opponents are being tactical about paying the one.
If somebody wants to cast a piece of interaction that spends all their mana, they’re not going to be paying the one; if somebody has a pivotal play on their turn and no extra mana to pay, the correct choice is to play the card and let the Rhystic Study player draw, not to skip your own turn.
There are all sorts of cases in which it is absolutely the correct choice not to pay the one, and that makes Rhystic Study a pretty great draw engine on base.
Now, as you move down in power level, decks will get a bit less lean, have spare mana a bit more often, and cast fewer overall spells each turn.
If I’m being generous, I think this is where a lot of people get the idea that Rhystic Study isn’t really problematic; after all, it does scale with power level to some extent, especially when we consider that the maximum card draw in a game with three spells per player per turn cycle is significantly more than in a game with one to two spells per player per turn cycle.
However, this still misses some things.
For one, at bracket 3, cards are going to cost more mana typically: whereas an engine in cEDH might be two or three mana, it’s pretty common to see engines in bracket 3 that cost four or five mana, and if you only have four or five mana to work with, one of these cards is going to be much more possible to pay the tax on than the other.
This is true for engines, and it also certainly applies to removal.