7 tips for building successful commander decks
Commander / EDH Aggro Combo Five Color Infinite Combo Midrange
Colorless (13)
- 1x Blightsteel Colossus
- 1x Burnished Hart
- 1x Chromatic Lantern
- 1x Eldrazi Conscription
- 1x Eldrazi Monument
- 1x Legacy Weapon
- 1x Lightning Greaves
- 1x MImic Vat
- 1x Nevinyrral's Disk
- 1x Proteus Staff
- 1x Sensei's Divining Top
-
1x
Smokestack
- 1x Voltaic Key
Gold (15)
- 1x Aurelia, the Warleader
- 1x Debtors' Knell
- 1x Experiment Kraj
- 1x Filigree Angel
- 1x Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord
- 1x Knight of the Reliquary
- 1x Lord of Extinction
- 1x Master of Cruelties
- 1x Meddling Mage
- 1x Obzedat's Aid
- 1x Prophet of Kruphix
- 1x Sen Triplets
- 1x Sharuum the Hegemon
- 1x Silent-Blade Oni
- 1x Time Sieve
White (13)
Blue (18)
- 1x Amoeboid Changeling
- 1x Consecrated Sphinx
- 1x Empress Galina
- 1x Enter the Infinite
- 1x Fact or Fiction
- 1x Guile
- 1x Infinite Reflection
- 1x Jushi Apprentice Flip
- 1x Last Word
- 1x Lighthouse Chronologist
- 1x Mind Unbound
- 1x Palinchron
- 1x Phyrexian Metamorph
- 1x Roil Elemental
- 1x Sun Quan, Lord of Wu
- 1x Temporal Mastery
- 1x Thada Adel, Acquisitor
- 1x Treachery
Black (13)
-
1x
Bloodline Keeper
Flip
- 1x Chainer, Dementia Master
- 1x Contamination
- 1x Grave Titan
- 1x Kokusho, the Evening Star
- 1x Mind Twist
-
1x
Necropotence
- 1x Phyrexian Obliterator
- 1x Ravenous Demon Flip
- 1x Reaper from the Abyss
- 1x Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon
- 1x Sorin Markov
- 1x Sorin's Vengeance
Red (11)
Green (16)
- 1x Avenger of Zendikar
- 1x Craterhoof Behemoth
- 1x Essence of the Wild
- 1x Farseek
- 1x Fauna Shaman
- 1x Food Chain
- 1x Glimpse of Nature
- 1x Green Sun's Zenith
- 1x Liege of the Tangle
- 1x Magus of the Library
- 1x Master of the Wild Hunt
- 1x Primal Surge
- 1x Primordial Hydra
- 1x Somberwald Sage
- 1x Sylvan Library
- 1x Tempt with Discovery
Commander (1)
Welcome to the second installment of my commander deck series; in this article I will be covering some points to observe while building a commander deck.
The goal of this article is to help players stream line their deck building process and help to weed out unhelpful cards and to find the cards that will complete the deck.
As with my previous article this is a generic list of thing a that should be observed while building and some observations about commander game play. It should also be worth stating that the list is not prioritized in any order of importance but are simply listed in a chronological order of how a normal deck build will progress.
1). Choosing a purpose and a commander
This is usually the first step in any deck building process and it consists of the following question " what do I want my deck to do?" When you answer this question you have a Deck premise, an idea of what it should do or how it should operate. An example of this would be a player wanted to build a combo deck around Mind Over Matter + Temple Bell . Once this is decided the player will chooses a commander within the color of these cards. The player would the consider his commander options (which are fairly broad with only blue being decided). Considering the options the player chooses Oona, Queen of the Fae for black tutor spells,Grand Arbiter Augustin IV for white enchantment tutors and board wipe, Azami, Lady of Scrolls for raw draw power. By deciding on a commander the player decides on a color identity, a general, and a strategy to use.
Typically speaking when the player chooses a commander the commander should be incorporated into the strategy of the deck in some way, though this does not always need to be true, this helps keep the deck consistent in its ability to play a certain way.
One could also decide on which commander they wanted to play first and the do the process in reverse and choose a commander first and then decide on a theme. This way a color identity is already established and a general principle of play can more easily be decided on.
2). Card Choice
This is a bit more intensive as the player now need to decide on somewhere between 55 to 70 individual cards for use in the deck which can be arduous to say the least. One of the things a player need so to look at this point is the deck style, I.E. a control deck will need board control, an aggro deck will need multiple threats, a combo deck will need card draw and tutors, and so on and so forth. One of the things to keep in mind when building a deck is the vastness of choice one has, magic is over 20 years old and has numerous sets across the years; commander can pull from all of these sets far better than legacy and vintage simply because of the higher curve of commander decks meaning more cards are good in commander than I'm other formats.
By choosing a card to go in a deck a player signifies that this card fulfills the roll it needs to fulfill better than any other card that the player has access to (E.G. one would not use a Worn Powerstone where one could put a Mana Crypt however if one didn't have a mana crypt a powerstone would be perfectly acceptable).
In addition beware of awkward placement in decks cards that don't fit the general focus of the deck; for example Grave Pact Is a great card but in a deck with no creatures the card would not do much. The previous would be an extreme example but there are many times where players will use awkward card in their deck for "what if" situations that they have encountered in the past.
In the commander format there are certain cards that are immediately overlooked that are often considered very good in other formats, for example cards like Lightning Bolt and thoughtsieze are not as powerful in EDH as in other formats. This is due to the fact that commander shares a lot of cards that are typically vintage exclusive such as Sol Ring and Necropotence that warps the format away from a small drop format like legacy (note that this is not the case in duel commander formats which lack the a lot of the aforementioned cards). When selecting a card for a deck try to pick two for ones or cards that are high efficiency. For example of this would be Shamanic Revelation which provides card draw and life gain; an example of a high efficiency card would be Treasure Cruise or Vindicate. cards with X in their mana cost are often good to consider because of the large amounts of mana EDH decks have to play with. Cards like Fireball, Blue Sun Zenith, Mind Twist, etc are often better in games than other basic or static spells like Lightning Strike or Duress.
To further elaborate when choosing cards one should try to be as general as possible for example avoid cards that say things like Go for the Throat or Doomblade that say destroy target non-blank creature. The reason for this is even though they are one mana less than cards like Murder and Hero's Downfall they are infinitely worse against decks that play the type of creature excluded. Also another thing to exclude are cards like Choke or Virtue's Ruin that negatively affect only one color type as you might not always face that color type.
There is another general rule of thumb specifically about counter spells and what to avoid and choose in EDH. Counter spells operate differently in EDH than other formats. For example in modern one of the best counter spells in the format is Mana Leak because it hits so many things and it is very hard to pay the 3 to let the spell resolve, in EDH it is useless, cards like so ring Thran Dynamo, and other mana agents make this card very unreliable as well as any other card that would force a player to pay a fixed amount. The same goes for cards like Syncopate and Logic Knot; paying x is usually not a sound strategy because the presence of these cards in hand would reduce the effectiveness of a players own turn due to the amount of resources that a player would have to leave available to make these cards effective. The general rule of thumb is hard counters are best such as Counterspell, Dissipate , Dissolve etc.
Another difference in EDH counters are high mana counters are acceptable as long as they have equally powerful effects. Cards like Counterlash and Spelljack are very powerful counters in mono blue control decks as they not only answer an opponents threat but put a threat into play.
3). Balancing Threats & Answers
The concept of answers and threats is something most deck builders are familiar with or have at least heard of the term. The idea behind the "balance" is to find an acceptable ratio of "threats" to "answers" for the deck in question. For example a control deck will want to focus mainly on answering an opponents threats while only having a few powerful, expensive, and efficient threats.
Aggro is the opposite, aggro presents more threats than can be answered; aggro decks usually demonstrate this idea through creatures or life loss spells.
Midrange tries to find common ground in being able to answer an opponents threats while pressuring life total with their own threats.
These three deck types are about as general as one can go; to go into further detail is to go further into the deck making posses e.g. "what kind of control/aggro/ midrange should I build?" "should this deck be an affinity aggro or a Exquisite Blood + Sanguine Bond combo deck? etc.
When building any deck the primary mode of thought is to either be proactive or reactive and this is completely based on play style and personality.
for example If I were to build a control deck my first thought would be how do I want this to play; do I want a lot of counterspells or do I want less counterspells and more combo pieces and draw power.
These decisions are usually refined later on in the deck building possess usually after extensive testing.
4). Why Infinite is important
"You should always try to have at least one infinite combo in a deck, for the simple reason you'll always have an out in a hard game."
A friend of mine told me this one day while we were working on a Prossh, Skyraider of Kher deck I was having some trouble with. This makes a lot of sense for the simple reason there are some games that can't be won after a certain point by normal means. This is where the infinite combo comes into play, once a player reaches a certain board state it becomes very hard to overcome or even impossible, when that becomes the case a player can shift their focus from normal game winning strategies to working towards "comboing out".
One thing that's often said by many players I come into contact with is that they hate infinite combos and that they are cheating; this isn't true, combos are perfectly fair because they take multiple piece to work and are very vulnerable to removal and counter spells. There are some combos that aren't fair such as Time Vault + Voltaic Key and these cards become banned for that reason, they are simply too good for fair play.
Here is a small list of infinite combos in mono colors.
As more colors are added more combos open up such as food chain + misthollow griffen or spike feed + archangel of thune. The following is a link to a discussion page with a more complete list of combos that can be used in EDH.
5) Its all about recursion, recursion, recursion
Being able to recover a win condition from the grave yard is essential for many commander decks weather they be creatures, enchantments, artifacts et. al. when building a deck. It is important to plan for when a particular win condition falls through either by having a backup or by having a recovery method (every deck should have more than one win condition).
Every color has some form of Recursion for example the following mono color recursion spells.
In addition there are numerous multi color spells that bring cards back like obzidat's aid as well as colorless options such as elixer of immortality . Being able to bring cards back into the game after they have been sent to the grave should be taken into consideration during any building possess; For example when I built the deck The Will of Gaea I built it around Gaea's Cradle and relied on the card heavily. In addition to many clever ways to protect the card I included many cards to bring the cradle back into the game should it be removed as it was the back bone of my strategy.
6) Card advantage wins games
Top deck mode is always a bad mode to be in, As such its always a good idea to have some form of card draw or card advantage within a deck. This can be in the form of spells like Divination, creatures such as Mulldrifter, as well as artifacts and enchantments with recurring card advantage.
As with Number five here is a small list of cards that can be used in each color.
In addition to draw power tutor effects can also be utilized to fulfill the card advantage role. Tutor effects are very powerful as they can bring out the right card at the right time in many cases. Although not nessissary tutor cards should be considered in every EDH build at least as a one of.
Again a small list of examples
7) Testing makes perfect
Testing in any format of magic is essential to determining a decks strong and weak points or if the deck is even viable. When testing always try to play strong decks that are known to work and see how the deck you are testing fairs. If it does well then the deck is on its way towards completion, however if the deck does poorly it may need go back to the drawing board. Take notes when playing on how certain cards preform or combo's that you come up with during testing as well as singling out the cards that preform poorly.
That concludes this article as always thank you for reading if you have any questions or comments please leave them bellow and will respond to them in due time.If you enjoyed or found some interesting info in this article please upvote and share with people around you. For any further ideas on formatting or if you want me to look over a deck you have made please leave it in the comments on my main page and subscribe to see any future decks and article I post.
In addition to this article here are 99 more commander cards that you guys wanted to include in my last posting 99 Cards Every EDH player should know about, please enjoy.
JS
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| Top Ranked |
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| Date added | 9 years |
| Last updated | 5 years |
| Key combos |
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| Legality | This deck is not Commander / EDH legal. |
| Rarity (main - side) | 33 - 0 Mythic Rares 59 - 0 Rares 5 - 0 Uncommons 3 - 0 Commons |
| Cards | 100 |
| Avg. CMC | 4.57 |
| Tokens | Angel 4/4 W, Copy Clone, Dragon 6/6 R, Plant 0/1 G, Vampire 2/2 B, Wolf 2/2 G, Zombie 2/2 B |
| Folders | EDH, staples, notdecks, EDH, Reference, How To, decks to watch, EDH Staples, Utilities, Good EDH |
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