"Weakening" an EDH deck
Commander Deck Help forum
Posted on March 1, 2016, 12:54 p.m. by TheDracogenius
Building a moderatly powerful deck is actually way harder than it sounds
It is easy to make a deck intentionally weak or way to powerful in EDH if you really want to, but finding a balance has turned out pretty hard for me. And while I would never concider myself to be a spike or desperate to win, I want my decks to be fairly strong and put up a fight against the other decks at my LGS. The problem is that my LGS has a wide variety of different players with every type of commander decks, from preconstructed decks to vintage singelton, so I obviously need to find a deck with the appropriate powerlevel to combat these decks. The problem I have is that most of my decks turn out way to strong to play against newer commander players.
It might sound really weird, but I want my decks to be as powerful as they can be, as long as it is still reasonable. This means that I do not want to run strictly worse cards or exclude certain cards from my decks to make them weaker or power them down to the needed level.
My question is: How would you go about building a deck that is at its maximum power but is still only as strong as an average 70% build of other commander decks? Would you try to construct the deck around a theme, like building a bird tribal Derevi, Empyrial Tactician deck, even though a deck that would not constrain itself with this theme would probably be stronger, or would you switch out the commander, like using Surrak Dragonclaw for your Temur deck, since he allows for way less broken plays than for example Riku of Two Reflections? These decks could still be optimally built, but the power level would be kept a little more in check.
Are there any general methods or philosophies you use when building a deck to secure that you can control its power level?
TheDracogenius says... #3
Thank you, clayperce! I have not seen his article before, but I think that he has some great points that will probably help me a lot! This is exactly what I was looking for!
March 1, 2016 1:21 p.m.
Generally, I built my decks around a theme and usually following the theme makes the deck suboptimal, but a general way to make a deck better is consistency. Having 14 tutors in your deck means you're much more likely to get what you want to win, but if you cut half those tutors, you're still likely to win, just less. Disrupting your consistency without breaking the deck is a fine way to make the deck weaker.
March 1, 2016 1:29 p.m.
My instinct for weakening a deck that was too strong for my meta would be to reduce the number of tutors I run first. Second, run a less optimal mana base with any number of possible changes. Then, if necessary, start looking for cuts into the meat of the deck.
The reason why I'd leave the main parts alone until last is because this way you're still trying to do the same thing, and they know what your goal is with the deck, but you won't have the same consistency or speed in achieving it. A deck that can build up to comboing out in 5-8 turns may be unfair in some metas but if it's more likely to take you 12 turns or more or if you can't set up the combo all in one turn they have ample opportunity to disrupt it.
clayperce says... #2
TheDracogenius,
Are you familiar with Jason Alt's 75% deck design philosophy? He speaks to precisely the challenge you're facing, and I really like his approach.
For whatever it's worth, I personally enjoy working within strict budget and theme constraints, and I hate the concept of making a strong deck weaker.
March 1, 2016 1:03 p.m.