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A guide for mastering the fundamentals of Magic: the Gathering through the lens of a deck builder.
A guide for mastering the fundamentals of Magic: the Gathering through the lens of a deck builder.
Reading time 12 min
By Alexander Kubierske // 2 Feb 2024
With the decline of the pro scene in Magic: the Gathering in the past few years many players have sought refuge in Commander, also known as Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH), increasing its popularity to what is now the most common way to play MTG. This article seeks to help players get insight into the very intricate restrictions that the format places on deckbuilding and get you right into the most popular format with a bang!
Commander Deck Restrictions
Commander Deck Restrictions
That being said we need to lay some of the format's rules out to help you understand the basic restrictions. Commander is a 100 card singleton format, meaning the deck must contain exactly 100 cards each with a unique name. There are a couple of caveats to that last part however! A Commander deck can contain any number of cards that have the type basic land and a handful of cards which change the restrictions of how many copies are allowed in a deck.
A forest with the Basic land Super Type
one of 7 cards that modify the maximum number a deck can include (as of writing this)
Then comes the most important part of commander, your Commander! A commander is a card with the type legendary. These are often creatures however again there exist some exceptions which again can be noted by the cards text often allowing a planeswalker, 2 creatures, a creature and an enchantment or in one specific case a noncreature artifact to be your commander.
Commanders dictate almost everything about your deck, as you have the ability to play them many times and at any part of the game they often push your deck towards a specific strategy. On top of that the deck can only have cards in them that share colours with your Commander, meaning that the commander also restricts the typical themes that the colours have. This is often refered to as your Commanders colour Identity.
All of these factors make the commander or the strategy a very important thing to consider when choosing what to build. That being said it’s not uncommon for commanders to change between decks but for the deck to remain the same. So don’t feel like picking a commander stops you from experimenting with the deck itself but take note of how much is tied to the face card of your deck!
B.R.E.A.D
B.R.E.A.D
The Concept of B.R.E.A.D. is often used for draft formats where the card pool is set to a small size of curated cards. Although EDH is not normally like that when you find it out in the wild, the concept and structured layout B.R.E.A.D. provides is typical of deckbuilding.
B is for the real meat of your deck, the cards that define the deck and make the strategy really shine. As everyone knows bacon is always the Bomb of your sandwich. These cards often synergies with your Commander.
R is for Removal and is just like a red onion that makes your opponents cry when you destroy their resources! In commander Removal functions a little bit differently and should generally put you ahead of your opponent. This means that by spending one resource (a card in your hand) you should try to remove at best 1 resource from each opponent. Sometimes this isn’t always the case and you may have to use a resource to stop someone from winning, that's also OK!
E is for Evasion as often in a smaller card pool getting to attack your opponent is tricky. As such throwing an egg in their face might just give you the space to get some damage in. In our case we should broaden this category a bit by including ways for you to protect your own resources. Be that through making them hard to target or perhaps even getting them back from the graveyard.
Next up is Aggression. This mostly refers to how fast you can build your position in the early game by getting small creatures to attack with. However avo is really apt for this example as we could also call deploying more mana a form of aggressively growing our position at the table. This could be by putting extra lands on the battlefield or casting artifacts and creatures that provide mana. Like an Avo we grow to bring our strategy to fruition.
Illustration by Caitlin Louw
Lastly we have D for Duds, this category is a little harder to define outright but it refers to the cards that after a few games and perhaps some testing are not achieving the standard that the deck needs. As such this is your reminder that you should revise your deck constantly and be on the lookout for better ingredients. Dijon mustard is perhaps an odd inclusion on a breakfast sandwich. Maybe switch it out for something that complements the other flavors?
The 8 by 8 Concept
The 8 by 8 Concept
Just like bread is the fundamental base to a sandwich there are more in depth concepts that create a meal. Quantity is a big part of finding the balance in anything, Commander is no different. 8 by 8 proposes that for each category, of which there should be about 8, you should run close to 8 cards. Mathematically this means that you should see 1 of each card in a given category and 2 lands in the first 10 cards of the game. When you start off with 7 cards and draw for turn you should see a variety of your strategies and thus many options become available to you.
Understand the odds of what you will get in a game is all well and good but how do we know what categories we should have in our deck? Well B.R.E.A.D already proposes 4 good categories to start with but it is a bit ambiguous as some of the letters could have branching strategies. As such I want to use this budget list for Etali, Primal Storm by Sebacus. It focuses on having its commander on the board at a very aggressive rate and as early as possible.
As such the deck has adapted the 8 by 8 strategy to include these major themes:
1. Draw
2. Removal
3. Bombs
4. Rocks
5. More Rocks!
6. Rituals
7. Haste enablers
8. Extra Combat**
9. Utility/Support
** Also take note that Extra Combat fall under Bombs as they are ways for us to gain massive advantage over our opponents
Because of the deck's aggressive strategy it sacrifices some of the 8 spaces in some strategies in order to really focus on its game plan. It’s also important to note that some cards can fit into multiple categories! Otepec Huntmaster and Generator Servant are great examples of cards that do double duty for the haste and ramp categories. This can however be a trade off between finding cards that can do multiple things and cards that do one thing effectively but stands to show how you can bend 8 by 8 to really suit what kind of game you want to play.
The Curve
The Curve
One way of modifying your deck to dictate the pace it plays at is to look at its mana curve. Almost all cards in your deck will have a casting cost which is generally its mana value (MV for short). Determining how efficiently you can play your cards is a big factor to deckbuilding and identifying the gameplay pattern your deck might have. As such a way was developed to visually represent the turn your deck wants to take a dominant position at the table.
To see a deck's curve, group all your cards by their mana cost and stagger them so that only the names and mana values are visible as shown in the adjacent image. You can see that this Modern humans deck tries to use its mana efficiently on every turn with its power spike being turn 2. Unless cards place a restriction on the deck almost all decks follow the bell curve pattern.
If we assume that having 1 mana means you are on turn 1 and 2 mana on turn 2 we can assume that each card in our curve wants to be played on that turn. Then judging by how many cards there are in any given mana value it's easy to tell which turns we consider our crucial turns where we have the most options to play with the mana available to us.
This is a great indication to us as players of what role we should play at the table, if our bell curve tends to lean to the right we know that we should look to interfere with our opponents more so that we get the opportunity to get to the critical turn. On the other hand if we have an aggressive curve tending towards 0 or 1 we should be looking to play the game fast as our threats lose their competitive edge with how little mana we used to play them when compared to the higher rate cards at higher mana values.
When we look at the Etali decklist from earlier we see that we have 2 potential spikes on turns 2 and 6 which potentially makes this a slower deck due to its right leaning curve. But there is another factor to consider when looking at your curve and that’s that any way you have to increase how much mana you have available on a turn aside from playing the one land generally allowed to you means that you almost skip that turn on the curve.
With this knowledge when we evaluate the curve again we see that 50% of the 2 mana value cards produce extra mana meaning that we are 50% likely on turn 2 to skip casting 3 mana spells on turn 3! But only 3 of our turn 3 spells don’t produce mana so in actual fact we are skipping turn 4 as well.
This trend really points towards us getting to turn 6 spells as early as turn 4 which as we discussed earlier shows you that reading a deck's curve and understanding a bit of the cards it runs allow you to make better gameplay decisions as well. Should you mulligan for a hand with more removal or should you be more aggressive in the start of the game can easily be identified by how your deck plays along the curve.
Commander Specific Mindset
Commander Specific Mindset
That last part about the curve can be quite advanced and I highly suggest you master it but I want to also dedicate a section of this article to some slightly more advanced deck building theory.
On removal in EDH
On removal in EDH
In commander there is a hierarchy to identify how good a card is and it generally shifts between three factors: Mana Cost, Versatility and Effect. Think of it as a sliding scale if it has a low cost it will probably also have low versatility and effect.
This is a major player specifically with removal: take Swords to Plowshares as an example. It costs 1 mana to remove one of your opponents game pieces. Nifty in a pinch, but it leaves you both down a resource as you’ve lost a card in hand and they have lost a piece. When you play in a format where every game has 4 players by casting Swords to Plowshares you have essentially put yourself and that opponent behind your other opponents.
Now if we consider a card like Wrath of God which destroys all creatures on the battlefield you can clearly see the impact. You have now paid for 4 Swords to Plowshares but essentially removed pieces from each player and hopefully set yourself ahead on resources.
There is a little bit of subtlety to the comparison of the 2 cards above that I purposefully left out as this point hopes to demonstrate that in EDH removing pieces 1 for 1 is no longer good enough and that cards should maybe be evaluated from the standpoint of how to gain resources instead. Funny enough I would recommend playing both of these cards in your deck if possible but consider the places they have in your game and really try to dig for those versatile gems!
On Percentiles and Variance
On Percentiles and Variance
Possibly the last thing I want to mention is how easy it is to read your deck from a percentage perspective. A commander deck is 100 cards so each card is worth 1 percent. That being said, if you want to play more of any particular card or strategy in a game you need to boost the amount of that type in your deck. The variance in Commander is naturally high but there are strategies to combat it. Adding more of a specific strategy, drawing more cards or playing cards that allow you to search for a chosen strategy will increase the consistency a deck has.
My only warning to you is to figure out how consistent you want your deck to be. Remember that the format is by nature inconsistent so pushing too far can make games repetitive and potentially boring for everyone. On the other hand you as a player also need to rely on the consistency of your deck to decide how to pair up for games and evaluate your position in any given game. As such I would advise you to try powering up your deck first with cards that play along the same strategy, then by finding ways to draw more cards per game and lastly by adding cards that search your library.
If you skip steps and continually go to the payoff of winning sooner or later you will discover the glaring weakness of your deck which isn’t really the best way to learn how your deck functions or how to improve as a deck builder.
Closing Thoughts
Closing Thoughts
Deck building is no easy feat but it can also be rewarding almost like a sub game of Magic. Use these tools and ideas to help guide you in your building journey but don’t take them as law. You will find the best rewards in discovering crafty ways to break these rules. Go out and practice deckbuilding, it was almost the only way I would interact with magic for months and the more you learn about the balance of deck building the better player you will become.
I suggest theory crafting decks on a website like Moxfield, browsing through cards on EDHRec and looking for specific cards with the Scryfall advanced search feature. If you would like to see a deck that has used all of this knowledge and has been powered up to play a faster game look at my build of Kotori, Prodigy Pilot.
With all of these tools and some of the guidance above you can truly harness the potential of magic’s most popular format!
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