The EDH Deck Building Process #4 - Gathering Cards

TappedOut Commander Series

Suns_Champion

15 April 2020

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The EDH Deck Building Process #4 - Gathering Cards

Welcome, my Lords, to Isengard! Err- I mean, my ongoing series about deckbuilding: The EDH Deck Building Process! My name is Suns_Champion, TappedOut’s Resident Boros Commander Pioneer! Since Ikoria just spoiled not ONE, but TWO amazing Boros Legends, my mood is at an all-time high right now! It took all my strength not to switch the commander for this series!

Recap: In my first article, I talked about deck building philosophy and how it applies to the brewing process. In my second, I talked about the inspiration for a deck and where to find it. In my third, I outlined how to get started with your idea, how to get organized and why, using deckbuilder sites, and setting up Custom Categories.

If you’ve followed along, you should have:

• A main idea, theme, or vision for your deck (mine is Gisa and Geralf + Ashes of the Fallen)
• A deckpage on a deckbuilding site (preferred, not required).
• One or two cards you’re building your deck around plugged into the deckpage.
• Some placeholders for lands, draw spells, ramp, and removal.
• Custom categories set up for the previously mentioned cards (Idea/strategy, land, draw, ramp, and removal).
• An undying loyalty to the Boros Legion.

Now we are ready to start gathering some specific cards geared for our deck!

Deckbuilding: the Gathering

Today’s topic is the meat of deckbuilding: finding cards for your EDH deck! Remember, I will be looking for cards for my No Zombie Tribal Gisa and Geralf deck, so of course those cards will be specific to my deck. But I’ll do my best to explain the general concepts and thought process of finding them, so that you can apply it to your own build.

Since we’re finally looking for cards, that means it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.

EDHREC.com

EDHREC is a website you’re probably heard of, featuring articles, videos, data, and information all about EDH. It’s greatest feature is it’s visual database. You can search up a commander and see the most popular and most used cards for that commander (based on deck data from multiple other sites). You can click on a color or color pair and find the most used (aka “staple”) cards in those colors. It’s basically the easiest single search you can make for an EDH deck, and you could easily make a deck just from the cards it provides. It’s the one-shop-stop for EDH decks. It’s the best.

But I don’t use it.

shouts of shock and anger

calls for my burning at the stake

Okay okay! Calm down! Let me explain!

Remember waaaaay back to article #1 when I said: “I love the deck building process” and “I like to take a popular commander and do something very different with them” and “I don’t ‘net-deck,’ I prefer to make my own version of the deck that is unique and different.” Yeah, that’s right. My deckbuilding philosophy affects the way I build decks. See why I started there?

EDHREC doesn’t quite jive with my personal deckbuilding philosophy. Looking at a long list of cards that everyone else is using for a certain commander simply doesn’t interest me. Now, in my searching on other sites, I might find and pick out many of the same cards that are already on EDHREC, that’s totally true. But it’s the principle of the matter for me. I found those cards, evaluated them, and decided to put them in my deck. I didn’t just follow the crowd.

Maybe I sound crazy and like a person who likes to waste time, but searching for the cards that I want and finding them, rather than just being given them by the hivemind, is the challenging hardwork and gratifying payoff I’m looking for in my deckbuilding experience. That doesn’t have to be you! If EDHREC suits you just fine, go for it!

If from here, if you continue on with EDHREC, some things you should think about.

• A long list of cards might be difficult for newer players. I think the long list of cards that EDHREC presents can be overwhelming for new players, because rather than searching out what they want for the deck, they’re hit with everything the deck could be all at once. It’s overwhelming.
• A quick look at the Gisa and Geralf page brings up over 255 cards! That is way more than the end goal: 100. I’m afraid that newer players will simply plug them all in and be left with needing 150 cuts. It’s hard to evaluate, compare, balance, add, and cut all at once for every category in your deck, especially if you’re new to deckbuilding.
• During the above process of mindlessly adding cards that everyone else is adding, I think players miss the opportunity to actually read the cards and truly, critically evaluate them. Thus they miss out on gaining evaluation skills helpful in everything from searching through binders to drafting.
• Finally, EDHREC doesn’t have every card ever that would be great for your deck. Of course no site could ever accomplish this, but understand you’ll miss out on some gems because the hivemind that EDHREC mines data from might have missed them. For example, the EDHREC page for Elenda, the Dusk Rose doesn’t have Haakon, Stromgald Scourge, a card I’ve had a blast with in my Elenda deck.

For this series, I’m looking for a more unique version of Gisa and Geralf, so I don’t think EDHREC can help me much. I don’t want to find cards that are good for any old Gisa and Geralf deck, I want to find cards for my deck, my unique deck that I am building for myself.

All this said, of course I still suggest using EDHREC. It’s easy, fast, and effective. Take your commander or strategy and plug it into the search bar, and you’ll be well on your way to creating your very own fun (if not exactly unique) EDH deck!

Connecting Custom Categories to EDHREC: Staple Cards.

If you are new to EDH and EDH deckbuilding, you might not know what a “staple” card means or what the “staple” cards are. A staple card is a card so generically and flexibly good and so easy to cast that it’s included in basically every deck it could possibly go in. There's a reason why EDHREC is so great. It tells you what the staple cards are. If you don’t know them, you can look them over. Looking over the “top cards'' section of EDHREC, we can see the most played cards in every color. Sol Ring, Swords to Plowshares, Cultivate, Counterspell, Smothering Tithe, Kodama's Reach, Rhystic Study, among so many other great cards. Now think back to our custom categories (ramp, removal, draw). Remember how we set up placeholder slots for draw, ramp removal? You can add the best draw, ramp, and removal from the list of staples into your 10x representative slots, and you’ve started collecting cards for your deck! Later we’ll talk about category overlap and finding cards that do staple things while also furthering your strategy, but at the end of the day, staple cards are good for a reason, and they’re usually a good choice for your deck.

Card Searching Sites and Strategies

Well, this got off to an unexpected start. Besides using EDHREC, how do we find cards? How do we “next level” our deck building skills?

Introducing: MTG Assist, my #1 prefered site to find cards.

MTG Assist (not to be confused the Assist mechanic ) is a neat site where you can search up a single card, and the site will give you cards that are similar to it, making your search for consistency and redundancy easy and fast!

Let’s try an example. Let’s suppose I want a backup effect for my commander. I will plug Gisa and Geralf into the “Similar to” search bar, specify what colors I want (blue, black, and colorless), and hit search.

What I see is a few cards that do similar things, Emry, Lurker of the Loch, Rona, Disciple of Gix... but those don’t really fit what I want to do. I see a few zombies, but for this deck the gimmick is NO zombies. Not very successful so far. But what I do see is something that might interest me: a few self mill cards. Gorging Vulture, Mindwrack Demon, and on the second page, Taigam, Sidisi's Hand. Those are interesting because they draw cards, and can put creatures in my graveyard, which is a place I want them because I can cast them from there using my “combo.”

That brings me to Looking for Cards Big Idea: Figure out what cards you might want, based on the cards you have.

Let’s look at the two cards I have so far and do some thinking. Play along with your deck idea. We need to ask, 1) what do these cards WANT? Then ask, 2) how do we get that?

1) What does our commander want? Gisa and Geralf want zombie cards in your graveyard. Ashes of the Fallen makes whatever we get into the yard a zombie, so all they really want in my deck is creatures in the yard. 2) How do we get creatures in the yard? Many different ways: discard, self mill, casting and sacrificing creatures, or tutoring straight to the yard. Here’s another thing to think about. Our commander is guaranteed every game, but Ashes of the Fallen is in the 99, so it is not. 1) What does the card want? It wants to be found, put into your hand, and cast. 2) How do we find it and put it into our hand? Lots of tutors and card draw.

From this thought process I’ve learned a lot about what my deck might want. Self-Mill, Discard, Tutors, Draw. You’ll notice these are starting to look like more custom categories, and that’s right! I’ll get back to that a little later. First let’s think about Taigam, Sidisi's Hand a little. Look at what he does: he draws cards in a weird way, he puts cards into the graveyard, and he can act as removal too! He fits into two of our categories from the last article and one of our new ones! If you think that would be a good include in my deck, I’d agree with you, so I’m going to add him!

You might be struggling to apply this to your cards when I’m talking about my cards. Again, look at the cards that your deck is built around, or your idea. Ask “what are they asking for?” figure out the answer(s), then ask “how do I get that for them?” And from there you can discover other things the deck might want.

However, a problem presents itself here. A big problem.

What if I ask “what is Taigam, Sidisi's Hand asking for, and how do I get that” and come up with an answer (card) that is totally unrelated to my commander and my original deck goal?

I’ve committed the deckbuilding sin of improper deck layering.

Deck Layering

Now, in EDH it’s natural for the deck to be capable of doing many different things. But beware, when searching for new cards, of getting too far away, or as I like to call it, too many “layers” away from the original deck mission. This is an easy thing to do, I’ve done it many times. As an example, Taigam, Sidisi's Hand synergized directly with my commander Gisa and Geralf, and is thus one layer away from my commander and original deck goal. Suppose I looked for cards that synergize with Taigam. The card Uba Mask goes really well with Taigam. But Uba Mask does not go well with my commander, and is therefore two layers away from my commander and my original deck goal, and is an effect that might actually be bad with my commander in the end. Make sure what you’re adding to the deck always goes back to the commander and original strategy.

User TypicalTimmy and I had a brief conversation about layering after my last article. They brought up a good example while talking about the 8x8 theory of what can happen while you’re searching for cards:

• Obviously I want draw so that's one.
• Maybe I want some kind of taxes. That's two.
• Now let's say since I'm going taxes, I want counterspells to really stall the games out. That's three.
• Well if I'm stalling, I might as well go big so let's go with Planeswalkers as they build up over time. Four.
• Now since I have Planeswalkers, let's go with proliferate. Five.
• Okay, we need to protect them so let's generate passive methods to make token creatures so we can focus on casting other spells. Six.
• It'd be really nice to have some graveyard tricks to get my Planeswalkers back should they die or I use their ultimate. Seven.
• Lastly, consider ramp. Land drops and / or rocks. Eight.

In this example, the original deck goal or idea was taxes. Counterspells and planeswalkers go well with taxes, and are thus one “layer” away from the original deck goal. But then we keep following that path into tokens and proliferate, which do not necessarily go with the taxes theme. Suddenly our deck is too complicated and convoluted, and we’re trying to do too much at once. We are two layers removed from our original deck goal. This is bad because drawing cards from the newer layers before the original layers can accomplish nothing. If I draw a proliferate spell and don’t have a planeswalker, what do I do then? The proliferate spell and my original taxes cards don’t mesh together. Same thing if I draw a recursion spell first, I don’t have any planeswalker spells in my graveyard! My taxes, the original deck goal, aren’t getting the support they need because I have useless cards in my hand.

This is a common deckbuilding trap that many undisciplined deckbuilders will fall into. Hopefully, with this new awareness, you will be able to avoid it! If you can’t avoid it, well, that is what next week’s article is for!

Now then, let’s go back to MTG Assist. Suppose I want redundancy for Ashes of the Fallen. Using the same search parameters, I can plug in Ashes of the Fallen and get:

There are a lot of cool cards here, but none are exactly what I wanted, these cards seem to be focusing on the similar converted mana cost, and not the “creature cards in your graveyard are…” part. It could be that there simply isn’t another effect like Ashes of the Fallen, but at the moment I doubt it. Maybe it’s time to try more advanced searching. On some sites you can search terms and words that will bring up cards with those words or terms in their text. For this, you have to look at the text on the card you want and pick out text that you think will be the same on other cards that do similar things, because not all Magic cards are worded the same.

After some trial and error (yes, searching requires some trial and error), I finally plugged in “creature card” and “chosen” into the card text box, and what I was looking for pops up right on top: Arcane Adaptation!

It does exactly what I want, maybe even a little more than Ashes of the Fallen, but the important thing is that it can make my graveyard creatures zombies. Now I can add that to my mainboard under the custom category “Strategy.” Back at MTG Assist, I also see the card Conspiracy, which does much the same thing as Arcane Adaptation, at a higher cost. Perfect, I add it to the mainboard with the other two. Now I can click Arcane Adaptation and Conspiracy to hopefully find cards similar to it, but no luck, they just refer me back to eachother and a bunch of Un-Cards. From this search I can pretty confidently conclude that there aren’t any other effects like this in Magic.

What did we learn from this experience?

• You can search for cards similar to the ones you have
• You can use the advanced search options to specify what you’re looking for
• Once you find one card that’s similar to what you want, you can click on it and start chaining discoveries
• Finding the right search terms requires some trial and error

So that’s one search site, here’s a few others.

Scryfall.com is great, perhaps even better than MTG Assist, for looking up the actual text on the cards. Again you have to be very careful with the wording, but if you have a piece of text you want, you can copy paste it into the advanced search and go from there.

For Scryfall specifically, I recommend only the advanced search. A lot of MTG search engines have a bad habit of thinking you want to just look up a card you already know the name of. If I wanted to do that, 99.9% I would just use Google once and move on. So just skip to the advanced search so you can look up text. Let’s suppose I wanted effects like Taigam, Sidisi's Hand, specifically the “put one of them into your hand and the rest into your graveyard” draw part. I can plug that into the advanced “text” search, which gives me:

This shows me a lot of cool draw sources that also serve as self-mill, like Fact or Fiction, Forbidden Alchemy, Ransack the Lab, and Strategic Planning. Taigam of course makes an appearance. I’m going to add those into my “Draw” slots. That brings me to an important point: While searching for cards, you might come across cards that go along with your strategy, but also draw, ramp, or remove something. These cards overlap categories, which I’ll talk more about next time. These kinds of cards are great cards to replace your placeholder or even staple cards in the 10 ramp, draw, and removal slots. For example, Ransack the Lab might be great for my deck because it draws me a card and can put creatures in my graveyard. I might play that over a staple card such as Brainstorm. Look for cards that go with your strategy while also filling those basic Custom Categories. This creates category overlap. For now, place cards in the category that best suits their main purpose.

Again, you can do this for any kind of effect you think you might want. Just like MTG Assist, Scryfall searching will require some trial and error to find the right search terms.

Home Base: The Mana Base.

After searching for your non-land cards for a while, you might want to take a break and find some dual-colored and utility lands to replace your placeholder basic lands. For that, I suggest plugging in your commander at manabasecrafter.com and looking at all the lands in your budget. Mana Base Crafter is great for showing you all the possible single and dual colored lands you could run, as well as common utility lands run by your commander, and even ramp options. Now we can find some good ramp cards to replace our 10x Arcane Signet placeholders, if we haven't already.

This discussion would be incomplete if I did not mention The Gatherer, Wizards of the Coast’s official card search engine.

The Gatherer is the tried and true, the old veteren of the Magic card searching scene. It has been somewhat outclassed in recent years by the newer, sleeker search engines already mentioned. The Gatherer can still be a useful tool, but it’s advanced search is harder to use than most others and is difficult for newer players not attuned with Magic card wording. I find it’s best to use Google to help get the search parameters you need, which conveniently brings me to...

Google.com.

If all else fails, a google search might do the trick. Suppose I got frustrated with MTG Assist while searching for Ashes of the Fallen, and I haven’t found the other two similar cards yet. I can skip on over to the Googles and type up “mtg cards like ashes of the fallen.” From this we might see other card searching sites, other deckbuilding sites, Reddit posts, and some decks with it in them. If none of that looks promising, try searching for a question, as that can get us into the MTG forums more easily. Perhaps someone has asked a similar question. Search “mtg are there any cards like ashes of the fallen?” on Google. Clicking on a few links to comments sections and forums will usually get you to what you want to find, if it exists. Again, assuming I didn’t already find these and don’t know about them, that is another way I could find the cards I need.

Hey, you can use TappedOut to find cards too!

Another great way you can find those diamond-in-the-rough cards, those little known pet-cards that go well in the deck, is looking at actually built decks. Decks with your chosen commander and/or strategy. I tend to do this later in the searching process, after I’ve collected a good deal of cards. Looking over decks built by others is a great thing to do. Decks with Primers (long, detailed descriptions) will be especially helpful because you know that person has built and tested the deck thoroughly. From primers you can usually get a glimpse of the deckbuilder's deckbuilding, evaluation, and thought processes. Similarly, finding decks with the custom categories we talked about last time can clue you into strategies and sub-themes you hadn’t thought about for your deck. These can be very helpful with your own build, and even better, if you are using custom categories for your deck, it will in turn be more helpful for later deckbuilders. If you’re looking through someone else’s deck, feel free to comment asking them questions. You might get answers you can utilize for your deck. Also, if you found their deck helpful in any way, give them a “like'' or an “upvote.” It’s a nice thing to do.

Ahh… EDHREC… my old enemy.

Two final strategies, both involving our old friend EDHREC. While finding cards for your deck, you might come across Legendary creatures that go in the 99 quite nicely. I already found Taigam, Sidisi's Hand. What I like to do is look at the EDHREC page for those legendary creatures, hoping to find some great card used there that hasn’t been applied to my commander yet. Again, beware of the layering pitfall. Pick stuff that still goes with your commander, not the 99 legendary you’re looking at.

The last suggestion is using EDHREC normally, looking through the page of your commander. I do this as the very last step in my search. I heard it called the EDHREC “idiot check” by the Commander Theory Podcast. The idea is that sometimes in searching, you’ll simply not see a certain card that is really good with your commander, or you’ll see a card and not make the connection. One final check of EDHREC to make sure you know all your options and don’t make an embarrassing omission is acceptable in my book.

Recap:

You are now equipped with enough knowledge to go out and start finding cards! To recap:

• Search sites: EDHREC, MTGassist, Scryfall, ManaBaseCrafter, The Gatherer, Google.
• Figure out what cards you might want for the deck, based on the cards you have.
• Ask what those cards want from you, then ask how you can get that for them.
• Whatever those cards are asking for might become new custom categories.
• When chaining discoveries, be careful not to get too many layers away from the original idea.
• Regardless of what sites you use, the advanced search will be your friend.
• Getting the right search term sometimes requires trial and error.
• There’s more than one way to find what you’re looking for.
• Fill in your placeholder slots with staples and/or cards specific to your deck.
• Look through other people’s decks for ideas. Ask them questions.
• Use the EDHREC “idiot check.”

From here, there isn’t much else I can do, it’s choose your own adventure time! So go on! Go find some cards! Start exploring, and chaining discoveries! This is the most fun step in the process in my opinion! Have fun! But beware the rabbit holes and layering pitfalls. While you’re searching, start thinking of some new custom categories based on the things you think you might need and the cards you find. Be thinking about how you’d like to win. Also make sure you’re filling in your original categories either with staples or deck-specific cards! Good luck!

Thanks for reading, and good luck on your search! Join me next time for The EDH Deck Building Process #5 - Cutting Cards, where I’ll continue my discussion on custom categories and talk about the #1-rated hardest part of deckbuilding: Cutting cards! Until then, happy searching!

For the Legion!

Suns_Champion