5 Reasons To Play Less Colors In Your Commander Decks

[Music] and welcome back to edh deck building i am your host demo and i am gonna give you five reasons that you should be playing less colors in your commander decks so i have sort of advocated on my channel a little bit at least for playing less colors i have gravitated towards playing less colors myself because you have a color identity in commander it's a very important part of the format it restricts the cards you can play so in the beginning you're like hey well why don't i play more colors because then that will just allow me to play everything i want to play and i won't be restricted at all this video is just me giving people reasons particularly maybe newer players reasons why maybe you don't want to play more colors in your deck because it can be tempting it can be very tempting to play more colors in your deck like i said i did it myself when partner commanders first came out man i must have made at least 50 partner decks most of them were four color partner decks because i wanted more colors so i could play more cards but as i learned there is a lot more disadvantages to playing more colors than you would think so first of all color specific cards this is something that maybe a lot of people don't think of when making a deck there's lots of color specific cards out there i made a video about it those color specific cards and what i mean is protection from whatever color or whenever your opponent casts a black spell or a blue spell stuff like that those kinds of cards get a lot better the more your opponents are playing more colors because it increases the chances that they're going to be usable and if you're that player who's playing the four color or the five color deck it's going to really increase the chances that that mirror and crusader is going to be good against your deck or that death grip is going to be usable against you or any of those cards that i put on my color specific video or a lot of others coming in at number four and of course this is probably the most obvious one is the mana base right and this is again a fundamental part of the game which is really quite brilliant and it's one of the most important parts of the game that makes it so interesting is that you need certain types of mana to cast certain types of spells right you need that color of mana to cast that kind of spell this is why multi-colored cards traditionally were always a little bit cheaper than a card that does something similar that is mono colored right a multi-colored card is harder to cast because you need those pips right you need those different colors in order to cast it so it's gonna be a lot more difficult to cast things you know people playing mono color decks are not going to have any issue casting any of the spells in their deck but if you're playing an attracts a deck even just getting your commander out on turn four can be difficult because you need that one white that one blue that one green and that one black and if you don't have exactly that you're not going to get your commander out maybe as soon as you'd like it makes it a lot more difficult to cast things to do things you have to be very careful with which lands you're tapping so that oh i can't tap my godless shrine i'll tap my hollowed fountain instead right and you got to be very careful with that just makes everything so much more difficult then on top of that again sort of getting into those specific hate cards blood moon man there's a card that i absolutely hated back in the day when i played four color decks and now i don't think i have a single deck that a blood moon is really gonna shut down most of my decks are one or two colors so a blood moon it's like meh i'm okay like there's maybe one or two lands that are shut off the rest i'm just perfectly fine because basic lands aren't going to be hit by that and a one or two color deck is able to play mostly basic lands so you're going to be all right with a card like that in play whereas a four or five color deck is a lot of times going to be completely shut off coming in at number three card choices and this is for me probably the main reason that i have sort of benefited from playing less colors and i why i really really am gravitating towards especially even playing mono color decks is i just found there was so many neat interesting and fun cards that i wanted to play and i just couldn't find room for them in decks because i was playing three and four color decks and well i gotta put an assassin's trophy in all my decks and i gotta put a smothering tithe in there and i gotta put vandal blast and i gotta put you know whatever the staples of the format are if you have a four color deck the staples are gonna fill your entire deck right i'm gonna have a path to exile or i'm gonna have a consecrated sphinx or you know whatever the typical cards that you would cram into a deck would be those are gonna fill your deck up you're not gonna have room for anything else you're not going to have any room for any of those fun maybe fringe cards like i mentioned in my 10 cards videos all the time that i love seeing in commander games you're just not going to have room to fit those cards in there if you're playing a mono colored deck now you are you're not going to be putting an assassin's trophy or a dockside extortionist in your mono white deck right so now you can probably find room for that eye of singularity for example right now you can give that card a go and see how it works for you cards like that just aren't gonna see any play in any of your decks and you're never gonna realize how good they are because you're never gonna have room to fit them in your deck because there's so many other staples of the format that you gotta try to cram in there so playing less colors sort of gives you that wiggle room to fit those cards in your deck that maybe you normally wouldn't even give a try coming in at number two and everyone knows this one very well and that's cost and this sort of goes into the last two ones that i just talked about with mana base and staples that you want to be putting in your deck right those assassins trophies and those smothering ties that you want to put in every single deck those are expensive cards because people want to put them in all their decks right now that doesn't mean you have to right you can make a five color deck and not have either of those cards you can make a five color deck and not put dark side extortionist in there your deck probably would be better if you did your deck would certainly be better if you put a smothering tithe in there but again you got these really hard choices that you have to make because those cards are expensive the mana base though is a million times worse right obviously it's going to be really expensive to put all those dual lands shock lands fetch lands whatever the case may be in your deck again those lands are really expensive for a reason because everybody wants to play them and the more colors you play the more you're going to need them and this plays back into the whole mana base issue where yeah you can make a five color deck with only basic lands i've seen people do it it's doable it's tough if you want to make it so that your deck is easier to cast your things though you're probably going to want to put some of those more expensive lands in there and the fetchlands to go get them which is going to bring the cost way way up it is way cheaper to play monocolored decks or even two color decks than it is to play a four or five color deck i mean there's just no comparison without sacrificing too much yes you can do it you can make a five color deck that only costs like 40 bucks i'm sure you could do it i mean if i just do a quick search here on mtg goldfish i see a lathro blade of elves deck is 586 dollars that's a two color deck then i go up to acalia of the vast deck which of course is a three color deck that's 833 dollars and i imagine again the increase in price is the lands that i have to put in my deck to make up for the fact that i gotta cast three different colors but also i've increased the choice of cards that i can play i can't play a dark side extortionist or a smothering tithe in the lathral deck i can play at my cali of the vast deck then i go up to four colors to say an atraxa crater's voice or omnath deck and they're both over a thousand dollars and then i go up to a five color deck like in a secret god of the tree deck and i'm up to almost 1600 and again you don't have to right you can make a cheaper version of the deck but if you're going to be making a really good aseka deck chances are you're going to be spending way more than if you make a really good lathro blade of the elves deck it just goes without saying that if you play more colors you're probably going to be spending more money and coming in at number one for why i think that people should play less colors is i actually think it's bad for the format you know i did my color combinations video a while ago and five color commanders are far and away the most popular in the format even though golos got banned recently i still think five color is gonna be the most popular like i said kenneth the return king is going to be the most popular commander in the format i'm calling it guarantee that that's gonna happen he's right on korvald's tale as of right now and i imagine that's gonna change very quickly and then joda and some of those other five color commanders that lost popularity when golos came around i think are gonna regain that popularity again as it stands right now there's still three five color commanders in the top eight commanders in the entire format on edhrec sise and the erdragon both have over 4 300 decks on there i just don't think that's great for the format i really don't i think color identity is a fundamental part of the format it really is if you were explaining to someone how to play commander someone who's already familiar with magic they played modern or standard and they're asking you what's commander all about you know what would you say you would say well you have this legendary creature that you're building your deck around and it has a color identity you can only use cards in your commander's color identity you're restricted to that so if someone's playing a five color deck that part of the format doesn't apply in a five color deck you don't have a color identity i mean i know people will say well your color identity is five color that's not a color identity every card in commander is available for you to play right there's no restriction there i don't love that also what five color decks enable a lot is sort of good stuff decks or decks where you're not really building around your commander anymore another thing that i'm just not a big fan of i'm not saying people can't do it people can always do what they like i just am not a big fan of it myself it's not really in the spirit of the format i think it just seems more and more like people just want to play five color commanders so that they don't have any restrictions and you know having those restrictions is really a part of the game in general it's always the case that you have certain lands that produce certain mana and then you can cast certain spells with it that's a fundamental part of the game you really don't see this in other formats who plays five color decks in other formats it's almost unheard of to play a five color deck in standard or modern i mean i'm sure it's happened before but it's almost non-existent to be playing a five-color deck in any other format other than commander and then in commander it's the most popular color combination i mean it really is kind of bizarre i know people have become accustomed to it especially with wizards of the coast constantly printing all these really busted generically good five color commanders enabling people to do so people have become very accustomed to it in commander but if you think about it it's really bizarre to be playing a five color deck for five color decks to be so common in commander is really bizarre and for wizards of the coast to be making commanders that give you a benefit to playing five colors like playing all colors is already a huge benefit you have access to every card in the game so you already have a huge benefit i don't love it myself you know i just i don't think it's great for the format you know in my personal opinion i would like to see people gravitate towards less colors in their deck that's why i'm making this video you know i sort of advocate for certain things in this format at the end of the day like i always say though i want to play a casual game if you're playing your five color deck and it is a casual fun game great fine you want to play your five color shrines deck terrific that is what's most important to me at the end of the day i will say though on my underwhelming commander series far and away i'm doing mono colored commanders more than any other because those monocolor commanders just are not getting any love so it would be great if they did clearly on my channel that is a direction that i'm going is moving towards underwhelming commanders and as it happens the underwhelming commanders tend to be the ones that are less colors particularly mono colored right so i want this format to stay fun and casual i want this format to stay diverse i love when people show up at games with a commander that i've never seen before or particularly a deck that i've never seen before it's always lots of fun but i'm just trying to give you guys some reasons here to play less colors i know it can be really tempting to play more colors because it opens up the gates to have more available to you but i think you're missing out if you don't have at least a few monocolored decks it can be lots of fun but what do you guys think leave your comments and opinions below on how you think i might be wrong about this nevertheless that is it for today and thanks for tuning in [Music] you

Channel: EDH Deckbuilding

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Id: JySKZFIcxFg

Length: 12min 15sec (735 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021