Casual Commander is the most difficult format I’ve ever tried to approach. I have a pretty good understanding of how the games want to play out, and which individual cards tend to be disruptive for the format. I have an idea of which commanders might look fun, but will tend to be too strong. But at the end of the day, it’s hard for me to build a deck which feels “right” for the format.
This is an issue a lot of competitive players struggle with. I’m not going to try to speak for all of them, I’m going to discuss how I experience this. I suspect it’ll be relatable to some other competitive players who would like to play casual commander.
My first step is to handicap myself–I’ll add rules like banning all the strongest cards, and/or not allowing myself to search my library. Rather than thinking about how I’m going to win or what my plan is, I choose a commander which wants to pursue some broad strategy or synergy. I think about how I can do the thing, regardless of what the plan to win from there is.
None of that makes my commander decks comparable to casual players’ decks I run into. It might sometimes make the decks weak enough so we can play a reasonably balanced game, but it still barely feels like we’re playing the same format.
The problem is I want my deck to make sense. I want to set rules for myself, and then find the deck best suited for whatever it’s trying to do. I don’t want to play the wrong number of lands or a bad curve just to make my deck worse, because it’ll end up frustrating me in my games.
The issue is whatever you’re optimizing for, an optimized deck is simply not what most players in the format are working with.
When I built a Raffine, Scheming Seer deck, I knew I wanted creatures that cost one or two mana in large numbers so I could immediately trigger Raffine when I cast it on turn three. When I look at other Raffine decks on Moxfield, they’re inexplicably playing cards like Arcane Signet. Why would you want Arcane Signet in a Raffine deck? It doesn’t accelerate your commander and it doesn’t help with its ability.
Humor me while I look at some decks completely at random on Moxfield. I don’t want to call anyone out, so I’m not going to link to the exact decks, but the first deck I looked at was an Atla Palani, Nest Tender deck. This is a pretty straightforward commander; you want some ramp because your commander costs four, some big creatures to hit off your eggs, and some sacrifice outlets. It’s commander, so season to taste with whatever interaction you happen to like. This deck is mostly there; it’s leaning into dinosaurs in a way that isn’t really offering enough payoff to be strategically correct, and taking it to weird extremes by playing stuff like Universal Automaton that’s never going to pull its weight, and might brick an egg trigger. But the bigger issue is this deck is playing 33 lands and 4 nonland mana sources. Ignoring mulligans, this deck will fail to cast its commander on turn 4 over a third of the time. If the commander dies, it’ll be able to play it again on turn 6 barely over one third of the time. This deck is about 10 mana sources short of being functional at a minimum.
The next deck is Klothys, God of Destiny, and I’m not immediately sure what to expect. This isn’t a commander I’d think to build around, because it doesn’t provide a lot of direction. After reading the deck, I’m still not sure what it does, but it seems to be remarkably in line with Klothys–it contains a lot of cards which repeatedly deal damage to each opponent like Ankh of Mishra, Cindervines, Manabards, and Harsh Mentor. These are mixed with cards like Big Score and Unexpected Windfall that aren’t exactly ramping into anything, but I’m sure the deck will find things to use mana on. But the deck has Thrill of Possibility as well.
Why does this deck, which plays Ruric Thar, the Unbound, and already has card selection from Big Score and Unexpected Windfall want Thrill of Possiblity, and, if it does, why does this deck that primarily operates at sorcery speed prefer Thrill of Possiblity to Bitter Reunion or Invasion of Mercadia? It plays a lot of three mana ramp spells–Springbloom Druid, Harrow, Roiling Regrowth, Cultivate, and Kodama’s Will. These are reasonable cards in Commander, but what’s the plan here? Are we casting them or are we casting Klothys on turn three? I’d guess ramp first, but then why does this ramp deck have Klothys as the commander? I’m not saying it’s wrong to build the deck this way–it’s very much what the format’s about, my point is that the reasoning is inaccessible to me.
Next up is a Volo, Guide to Monsters deck with a Phyrexian subtheme and a proliferate theme. Volo’s entire thing is having creatures which don’t share types, and I’m pretty sure if I were to build a Volo deck I’d make a rule for myself that no two creatures in my deck would share a type. I believe 13 of 31 creatures in this deck are Phyrexian, though many are only Phyrexian due to errata. So, I’m not sure if it’s intentional on the part of the person making the deck or not. This deck contains a lot of weak cards, like things I wouldn’t want to play in limited that don’t get better in any meaningful way in Commander. Mostly, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t use a commander like Ezuri, Stalker of Spheres for a deck like this, or, if the idea was that you wanted to play Volo, why you’d build to make the ability not work very often.
Again, my point isn’t “Commander players build bad decks.” It’s that casual Commander players approach deckbuilding in a way I can’t.
So the question I’m struggling with is, how do I approach the format in a compatible way instead.
Greg Hatch offered excellent advice, which is that you should build with the following framework: “A win doesn’t count unless it’s cool.” I suspect that that advice is perfect for some people, but it’s something I still struggle to wrap my head around properly. I don’t think I have great intuitions about what’s cool in this way.
Philomène Gatien has an article series called Do Your Worst on EDHREC which looks at conventional strategies ported to colors who don’t usually support those strategies, such as Mono Blue Aristocrats or Gruul Mill. I kind of wonder if “Volo but it’s tribal” is trying to do this kind of thing, but I like this structure as an additional hoop to jump through. For me, the natural approach has always been, “choose a commander, build a deck that does its thing,” which felt like what the format told me to do. I needed to choose a commander whose thing wasn’t too strong, but this mix and match approach where decks have to be built around some kind of unlikely pairing feels like a reasonable evolution. That approach is to find a structure that allows me to approach deckbuilding with rigorous precision, without automatically optimizing my way into High Powered Commander.
EDHREC offers a list of themes, such as Artifact, Lifegain, +1/+1 counters, Aristocrats, Spellslinger, Auras, Blink, Cantrip–some of these have a lot of overlap or similarity with others, and most of these are possible in a wide range of colors. Often porting these decks to weird colors has to rely heavily on artifacts, for example, if you wanted to build a Mono Red Lifegain deck, your lifegain would almost all have to come from artifacts.
Rakdos Blink is a combination that comes to mind as potentially interesting. This would borrow from the “scam” decks in Modern, using Undying Evil style cards with a sac outlet to replicate blinking, and using red copy effects and maybe red searching for artifacts to find Conjurer’s Closet, and possibly Erratic Portal. This doesn’t seem wildly original, but moving the focus away from “make a lot of fodder, profit from the fodder dying” to “sacrifice high impact triggers to get the trigger again” sounds like a welcome departure from the standard Rakdos Artistocrats style. This would be a good fit for a commander that could sacrifice things, but maybe with a tap to sacrifice ability to really lean into sacrificing one thing at a time, rather than mass sacrifice. Ayara, Widow of the Realm would be perfect for this, but I almost wonder if it’s so perfect it wraps around into “this isn’t doing something weird, it’s simply using Ayara as intended.”
Now I find myself back in the same trap I did with Greg’s advice, where once I start working on something, I lose track of whether the thing I’m doing is actually cool. I have no solution to this problem. Again, the purpose of this article isn’t, “This trick solved casual deckbuilding,” it’s to explore the nature of the problem and my quest for solutions.
I’m going to leave you with that before I convince myself this is too introspective and pointless to be worth sharing.
Sam Black (any) is a former professional Magic player, longtime Magic writer, host of the Drafting Archetypes podcast, and Twitch streamer. Sam is also a Commander Cube enthusiast, and you can find Sam’s cube list here. For anything else, find Sam on Twitter: @SamuelHBlack.