Decks We Built...But Hated | The Command Zone 426 | Magic: The Gathering Commander EDH

greetings humans you have entered the command zone your destination for all aspects of elder dragon highlander enjoy your stay bounce bounce bounce bounce don't do me like that don't do it like that what if i love you baby don't do me like that brown good one nice high fives what's up everybody you are watching slash listening to the command zone podcast i'm one of your hosts how's it i'm your other host josh lee kwai welcome to a very special episode of the podcast you know i think everybody who's played commander for any amount of time has had this situation come up right yes you get the spark of inspiration for a deck you see a commander or you see a few cards that aren't commanders and you think i'm gonna build a deck around this thing and you take all this time and effort and you acquire the cards and you put it all together and you play it and it's not what you were hoping for in fact it actually is everything you don't want to do sometimes you hate it you dislike it and it's a bad feeling yeah it really is a bad feeling you spend all that time and effort and then you dislike playing the deck you realize sometimes it takes a little while because of cognitive dissonance but you figure out yeah i really actually don't like this deck so today we're going to do something interesting we are going to talk to a bunch of members of our team here at the command zone about every day yep about decks they built but ended up uh hating um and we're hoping that we can kind of learn what the warning signs are so that maybe we can avoid doing that in the future yeah and it's great everyone has really unique stories and perspectives and actually some of them caught me by surprise because i only have our own experiences to base it off of so it's great to hear from everyone but before we get into it we gotta talk about our sponsors our brand new sponsor channelfireball.comcommand or you can just use the code command at checkout well we've been talking about this a lot but it is still very exciting they have officially launched their marketplace which is going to be the place to go if you want to buy any magic singles or product basically you want a card you can get at the marketplace for a great price yeah marketplaces in general drive prices down because there's a lot of different vendors offering their products and services on that marketplace so they have to compete with each other which makes the prices get lower also it means the inventory is very very high because there's not just one seller there are tons of sellers there i mean i think a lot of people are familiar with online marketplaces now the different thing about channel fireball and we've been talking about this over and over but i love this about it they're vetting their vendors they're checking to make sure they have business licenses that they are up to a high quality standard so they're not just letting anybody sell stuff on their site yeah and a lot of those places selling are actually lgs's so you know if you can't make it out to your local game store this is a great way to still support that economy that very vital part of what makes magic awesome are these stores that you know their livelihood depends on us buying cards and stuff off of them so you're gonna get those cards anyway just use code command at checkout or go to channelfireball.com command and it's marketplace madness they have daily giveaways for every single game that they sell stuff for and at the end of the month oh their grand prizes are sweet yeah so for the very first month of the marketplace which is all of october every single day they're giving away stuff for people that use the marketplace every ten dollars you spend will enter you to win and then at the end of that they are giving away some really big prizes the grand prizes so you can win things like an unlimited black lotus a first edition edition charizard an alpha welcome to the uh to wrath box from flesh and blood even more stuff um available as grand prizes so it's it's just definitely for this month 100 the best place to buy stuff because as far as i know no place else is saying like hey if you buy stuff here you also have a chance to win a black lotus yeah or any of the other giveaways that they're doing for all of the games that they sell for and like we mentioned they do pokemon flesh and blood and magic so lots of different options there is make sure you check it out channelfireball.com command or just promo code command when you check out uh and we also have to shout out ultra pro our other sponsor you know if you get an unlimited black lotus if you win one some way you know i would trust ultra pro products to protect that thing and there's very few products i would trust in that instance but we've been using ultra pro jimmy and i on our own collections for years and years and years we have big collections we want to keep our cards in pristine condition just like everybody out there ultra pro is the best product to protect your game pieces and not just that they also make the sharpest looking coolest products like they have their playmats are so good yeah the playmats are great they have awesome deck boxes i love that mythic collection with the really classy stitching and everything like that so it's not just high quality it also looks really cool when you set it down on the table it makes the opponents go yeah and ultra also they make those special cases for those very expensive cards that are like clear plastic and will hold it in pristine condition forever so ultra bro they've been doing this they've been in the game for a long long time and they're who you can trust okay uh and the final way to support all of our content is directly if you go to patreon.com command zone we really appreciate all our patrons they help keep uh all of our content flowing they get to see things like game nights next returns earlier than anybody else and another perk is patrons get we we choose one randomly every single podcast episode to shout out and this episode is dedicated to david david you rock and one last thing real quick new kickstarter right now for the token series two make sure you check it out it ends at the end of the month once it is done you cannot get it anymore these are some of the most used tokens with our awesome faces emblazoned on them as iconic creatures and if you're a game knights fan you're going to know exactly where these references are from we also have a cool playmat two-sided that comes along with us at certain tiers so just make sure you check that out all the links are going to be in the show more box below the video yeah limited edition order now okay let's go into the main topic here sorry that part took just a little bit longer than we wanted lots to talk about these days all right main topic though decks we built but hated yeah so our team at the command zone's gotten pretty large i think we just brought on or are bringing on on monday we have one person joining um that is like our 17th or 18th member of the team we're almost out of our teams the great thing is that like the vast majority of them are commander players so we thought this episode would be a great way to sort of tap into that group knowledge um learn about the decks that these that everybody here has built and hated and all it will help us maybe identify steer clear of like you know doing that in the future so i definitely don't want to acquire a bunch of cards that i don't use and i've done this too recently i've been playing for eight years now and i've still make this mistake and this is great advice if you know someone that's just getting into the game you're about to give them a pre-con maybe they can avoid some of the common pitfalls and we also thought this would be a cool way to sort of uh hopefully introduce some of our new team members and our old team members yeah to you um here by getting to hear from them so what we're going to do is we're going to go through and we're going to talk to individual team members just for a few minutes about you know the deck they've identified some some people have this has happened more than once myself yeah but we're just going to talk about one of their decks to kind of get an idea for what types of decks maybe um are warning signs for stuff you might build and end up hating so jimmy and i are going to individually interview uh not all our members of the team but a lot of them a lot of them yeah all right so i think we're going to start up with uh the person i think whose idea this topic was originally yeah which is jake boss ooh let's take it away all right do you want to introduce yourself to everyone hey everybody i'm jake uh i'm post production supervisor on game nights and uh yeah we do a lot of editing on game nights yeah post-production soup editing also has directed some episodes of game nights that's right that's important yeah jake does a lot around here um jake how long have you been a member of the command zone team i started in july of 2019 and moved down here from portland and was the best decision ever made so a little over two years a little over two years and it's crazy gone really well yeah we agree it has gone very very well jake how would you describe yourself as a magic player as a magic player uh i'm definitely more of a johnny uh combo type i like to see something cool happen and i don't really care who wins um but that doesn't mean that i'm gonna do things that are like possibility storm that chaos up the game or anything but you like like to have an idea that maybe puts together a combination of cards that people haven't seen before that kind of that kind of johnny for sure uh sometimes i'll reach for a more obscure commander but what i like to do is take a good commander and do something a little bit more interesting add a bit of english to the strategy that's pretty accepted cool cool cool all right so let's uh let's go over the deck that you built that you ended up hating yeah so a really good example of putting your own english on a common strategy is enchantress uh the commander i chose for this deck is omnath locus of creation so oh so you built enchantress omnath which enchantress itself is not necessarily a strategy we haven't seen but you usually don't see omnath at the at the head of that strategy yeah uh i didn't want to go five-colored because i felt like that's that's the thing everything yeah yeah that's not fair i've seen that yeah well i'm not artist you want limitations that's where creativity happens right so you just take out black and now you're an artist oh so it's kind of like enchantress but i get red but i get red yes um and there are fun enchantments like fevered visions and they're bright of the raging storm yeah there's awesome enchantments in red um but it kind of became if you give it mouse a cookie for me so yeah let's talk about why you ended up disliking it because honestly sounds fun so you play an enchantment you draw a card yeah why not do that more so there's cards like teferi's edges inside which will double up your card draw you play more enchantress cards and you just end up playing enchantment drawing eight cards play another enchantment draw 16 cards and then omnath kind of wants it to be a lands deck too so you've got all these things why don't you just play the lands and get the value and all this stuff and it just got away from me because if you're drawing all these cards why not win with approach of the second son that's not fun to win with because it just says you win the game on it and game's over for everybody it's not really a good time or you win with opalescence but that's kind of a glass cannon strategy that can just wreck you or you deck yourself and win with lab man orthosis oracle it's just not a clean way to win the game that leaves everybody satisfied and they have to watch me spinning my wheels a ton before they're able to do anything yeah i'd say it happens with a lot of enchantress sex if what you're describing sounds like kind of like i spin my wheels a lot yeah and i don't win yeah something that you say to us all the time is is the juice worth the squeeze and if i'm drawing you know 93 cards just to potentially get a win it's not worth it to me so yeah do you remember do you remember the moment where you decided like i don't like this yes uh actually we were playing at a party one time and there was a game that i really wanted to get in with post malone i knew his pod was wrapping up so i'm like i gotta get out of this pod like i cannot win i decided to draw my entire deck and when you're able to decide this game is over i'm just gonna mill myself like i'm gonna draw 60 cards this turn well guess i lose bye guys that deck probably isn't that great so so you did that and that made you decide like oh i don't really want to i don't need this deck what happened to the deck like do you salve it still have it it turned into a canadio center tokens deck that i played on extra turns it's a hidden brutal cloud commander down now okay so it has some of the same elements but it's a totally different deck exactly the canelo sentiro uh they love drawing cards and they love playing extra lance there's a little bit of those remnants in there and then oh it's not enchantress anymore no the enchantress side turned into sithis harvest hand which is much more limited in seleznia so you get to be a real artist you get to be a real artist yeah you're constrained by limitations it's important it's very important all right we are joined by the one and only ashlyn rose ashlynn say hello and uh let everyone let you know what you do here at the command zone and how long you've been here for what's up everyone yeah good to be back um i uh what do i do i am a editor here at the command zone i also help with a lot of the production for our special projects like the dnd thing you may have saw before the uh silver coil promos yeah all that good stuff how long have you been here for oh my gosh uh four years now i think yeah it's been a while it has been i've been very lucky to be your friend for all that time and to get to work with you so it's been a blessing now ashlynn how would you describe yourself now people watching probably will know but how would you describe yourself as a magic player what makes you happy all right first in the chat i want to see in the chat like we're streaming hey uh in the comments i would love to see what you all think uh i am as a player but i would consider myself a big splashy player i love big creatures big cool spells uh i don't really care about the value long term i just i just want to do something cool right eldrazi is the one that comes to mind so big scary creatures and all that stuff is a little bit more on the timmy side less on the the value spiky side right yes absolutely i can definitely identify with that all right so what is a deck that you built in the past but i've ended up disliking or hating or whatever word you want to put for it yeah so i still have the deck actually but the deck i've built that has definitely gathered some dust on the shelf these days is going to be a robbo roar of the wine world kitty tribal yes so why did you build a deck originally uh because i love kitties i have two kitties of my own they are on stream all the time showing their butts and wanting scratches but uh the deck itself the way i built it with the kitty tribal it's super good it gets like really big kitties really buff swole kitties but it's so much math oh okay so much math right so it's a lot of brain power when now when you first built the deck when did you realize like you know what i don't actually like playing the stack way too late in the game like i completely built the deck i've been playing it like four or five times and like i realized maybe the fourth game when everyone's kind of just like sitting there twiddling their thumbs while i'm like okay i've almost got the math here right that like yeah this was not for me right but the cats are super cute so is that what you drew you to the deck originally it was just to sort of the theme of the law yeah i mean i love doing thing ducks as well themed eldrazi themed ninjas kitties so i definitely wanted to go with kitty power and it's powerful but oh my gosh so much math would you do you think you'd ever like retool the deck into something that is more akin to your play style and involves a little less mental work i think it's very possible i think that there's definitely been new things printed since i built this it was a long time ago right when the precon came out exactly yeah yeah so i think there's there's definitely a chance for that to happen arabo still kind of plays into that with like the plus plus plus the imminence ability honorable but there's still a chance i think for for kitty to come back now when you did play this deck is it the deck that won or is it did you even find it didn't win because maybe you got frustrated with all the stuff you had to think about when you're attacking and stuff it definitely won yeah it was one of the decks that kind of hung back for a while and then at the end it's like oh all my cats get plus plus and uh yeah and trample and they're huge and all that stuff um now do you have you know do you think that this is a deck that you will still bring out or is it just gonna sit in the corner with dust uh i think it's gonna sit in the corner for a while until i feel like i wanna buff it up right now i'm just distracted with all the other goodies like my essex deck and that's right those other fun splashy things but eventually so that's cool i actually think you're actually one of the more unique cases because most people built decks other was like really early on in their career for magic and they didn't really know what they're doing put too much other stuff in that didn't work but this is a deck that works is powerful but just actually ends up being too much work at the table and i can totally see why that makes sense because after like three or four games you're just kind of wiped you don't want to play a deck that's going to require you to think a lot yeah exactly like you know it's a problem when other people are helping you do the math mr hurry to turn around like hold on hold on maybe if you did that you could then attack did that happen a bunch too yeah exactly they're like okay no you're actually getting plus this plus this and you're like okay i'm so sorry let's just i'm gonna play a different deck now would this be a deck that you would you wouldn't lend this deck to a new player then would you well even though it's a really basic deck in a lot of ways you just create your base strategy but it's not something you'd be like hey check it out no totally not because not only are you putting like plus one plus one counters on cards you also have the whole like until end of turn this gets plus plus yeah and that's trample and all those things yeah yeah it's too much to keep track of well that makes a lot of sense though it's a really unique case the fact that you still have the deck also i think almost everyone else has disassembled the decks that they don't like anymore so that's really great yeah all right well thank you so much ashlyn for telling us about arabo roar of the world i i think it's worth the wild too i think it's probably because i'm thinking about i i totally think that's it all right well thanks ashlyn it was good to hear about the deck yeah thanks for having me okay we are here with well do you want to introduce yourself hi guys i'm murph um you probably have seen me around so i edit game nights extra turns uh been on some gameplay shows been on the podcast before you've definitely been in a lot of the ads and stuff i'm sure you know who murphy is um but yeah it's good for you explain that you what you do here uh murph is primarily a game nights editor and also kind of post-production supervisor on extra turns recently so he's in charge of that how long have you worked for us um a little over three years now wow over three years so definitely a long-time member of the team murph how would you describe yourself as a magic player um i'm a magic player that likes building things unique we did an episode a while ago now where we talked about the most unique commanders and decks and stuff like that so i like to think out of the box a little bit try to be a little bit cute with the stuff that i try to build um i don't know a little bit of a magic hipster a little bit of a magic hipster what was the um commander you played on the most recent episode of extra turns uh at this point was it ramsey's over dark yeah yeah yeah we're gonna put that on screen because probably most of you probably don't know what that card is yeah but that's not what we're talking about today we are talking about what is a deck that you built at some point uh and then ended up disliking yeah so the deck that i built and ended up disliking was asmira holy avenger all right read that card cause i have no idea what it says this true hipster yeah so it is a four mana creature two green and a white two three uh i believe it's an angel it says summon legend on it probably got it right yeah flying at the end of each turn put a plus one plus one counter on his mirror holy avenger for each creature put into your graveyard from play that turn so that happens at the end of each turn if something on your board died as mirror gets a plus one plus one counter but only at end of turn but for each of the creatures for each of the creatures so if you could somehow sack like 10 creatures then at the end of that turn as mirror would get plus 10 plus 10. yeah so i thought that that would be kind of cool that well let's try to do an aristocrat strategy in green and white because that's not something that you really see super often okay so we already know the outcome what didn't you like about it well now you know why you never see green white aristocrats like there's a reason nobody builds it and i'm assuming that just because i said that it's going to be a challenge to everybody out there to try to build a green wide aristocrats deck uh yeah but the problem with it is the text on it it only triggers on n-step uh so it's really clunky because when it gets to your turn uh you can't really like stack a bunch of stuff and attack with it you have to wait a whole turn rotation for it to actually do anything so oftentimes it'll just sit there spin its wheels a little bit and not really do anything uh but there are a couple pieces in there that are incredibly powerful like lifeline but the problem with it is that at the end of each player's turn that's when you get the plus one plus one counters so on your turn if you do a bunch of cool stuff you'll get a ton of plus one plus one counters on his mirror but only at end of turn so you can't attack or do anything really cool with it that turn so you kind of gotta play as mira do this thing and then wait a whole rotation yeah you do a bunch of scary stuff people are gonna be like yeah yo kill that thing yeah people are just gonna try to kill me kill the thing shut down my engines whatnots what have you do you remember the moment that you kind of discovered was it the very first time you played the deck or did you try it a number of times it was absolutely the very first time that i played the deck i played the deck i got so excited to build the deck i even got an og duel a savannah for it oh i was sure that it was going to work yeah i goldfish on tapped out and was like this is going to work and then i played it in person against my brother and did not work it just flopped hard did absolutely nothing and so i thought okay well just had a bad showing we'll try again played a couple more games with it still did nothing i thought okay well maybe i can go back get another more few more pieces did another card order swapped out about 15 cards oh so you tried to optimize it oh i tried to optimize it i was like super super intent on getting this thing to work um how long did you say that you tried to make it work before you decided like this is not going to work uh like a month and a half or so eventually i realized that because i did put some good pieces in it uh but those good pieces would either just make the deck ridiculously powerful if i drew that one or two pieces or the deck would do nothing so it didn't really have a home at any table was the problem right so it was either too powerful it felt like or just didn't do anything exactly so let me ask you i mean i guess we know because it looks like it's kind of sitting there yeah but what happened to the deck uh the deck is still there uh my intention was to pull it apart but i don't really need the pieces for anything so it's just kind of been sitting there for like a year year and a half or something and i haven't really done anything with it but you don't play it you don't like bring it to command it's not in my deck box it's just sitting off to the side with my collection of cards it's it exists well i'm sorry rip as mira rep as mira everyone say hello to jamie jamie you're brand new here at the command zone so you want to introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do sure hello everyone i am jamie i am a new staff writer here this is my fourth week i believe wow so what i do here is you know i write a lot of the mid-roll ads that you guys see and then just sort of anything else that has a script that might be forthcoming i'll be working on that as well have you enjoyed your time thus far it's been a hot fast month so far i have yes it has been a roller coaster in the best possible way uh but no just a great team to be a part of super excited to be here and we're glad to have you so jamie how would you describe yourself as a magic player what sort of are your favorite things to do or play the game my favorite kind of game is the game where everyone gets to do what they want to do but then i win but no as long as everyone gets to have fun no one's just completely out of the game i'm gonna have a good time i definitely just sort of feed off the energy of other people having a good time but uh yeah as far as my own decks i just like to do things that have a pretty gradual value engine not a ton of building toward an infinite combo but just a steady value engine that gets to do something cool and ideally unique from a lot of other decks out there okay so do you ever feel bad when you have to like team up on someone and have them have less fun it depends how far ahead they are yeah yeah you know if it's taking down an arch enemy like yes please i'm all in on that but if it's uh if it's a situation where we're just worried someone might become a threat ah then you're not going to be proactive on that side exactly good to know that's great okay so let us know what is a deck that you built but dislike or hate yes i built grothama all devouring ooh i've always wanted to build this deck well you would do it better than i did it three years ago okay why is that uh i just i saw the card and instantly just sort of fell in love with the idea of all the weird things that it can do okay just a completely different sort of unintuitive immediately mechanic with all the fighting right uh and just thought oh there's got to be some crazy things that you can do with this you said mimi when we were talking about downstairs like a meme right yeah it's just there are a lot of meme strategies you can do so you can do things where you get value from it fighting your creatures things you can do where you get value from it fighting your opponent's creatures if for some reason they do that yeah and you like unique decks like you said so this had an opportunity to make that yeah exactly the problem came up with uh me trying to make it unique in too many different directions at once ah i see yep over sort of spreading yourself too thin across a lot of strategies exactly i would say that this deck had at minimum 10 different strategies that it was trying to pull off wow each of which involved two or three specific cards that had very few ways to find okay you just sort of hoped that you drew into one of the memes and you would also get the other parts of the meme to make it full exactly and then of course even if it were to have cobbled together one of these memes it probably wouldn't win so it really was just kind of like a deck that had a lot of cool ideas but not that finishing power and did you find that you had fun like you said and win the game with it ever no it was it was fun maybe for the moments of physically drawing a card thinking oh what if this is the card that i see and then it never was i see yeah so yeah it was i will say it was a very fun deck to build it was a fun deck to come up with the cards for think of all the interactions that grathama can have i see but it just didn't come together into something that executed in a fun way yeah yeah that research part i mean i love building decks too but when you actually got down the shuffling it just didn't come together i guess yeah if i think that if i were to build it now again and just focus in on two or three of those memes and actually commit to making them work it could be something that still probably wouldn't be the most competitive deck because that's never what it was trying to do but at least something that would be fun to pilot more consistent yeah and green has tons of creature tutors and ramp and all that stuff so did you at least have some of those components in the original version i definitely had a ramp though it was admittedly uh not the best man not the best ram seat that was available then certainly not the best ramp suite that would be available now but as for card draw it was there a little bit as for tutors maybe a little bit yeah but uh given how much the deck relied on getting specific cards it did not have enough ways to find them yeah and where is the deck now i'm assuming not put together no the deck is fully disassembled it went first it went into a pile and then it went into a binder and now a few cards have made it into other decks i've built since that have green in them and most are just sitting in some pages of a binder waiting for me to find another mono green commander and then i'll only have to get maybe a third to half of the cards because half of them i have all right there you go that sounds like the normal course for a lot of dex life spans okay well thanks jane for sharing it was great yeah thank you okay do you want to introduce yourself to the audience down here sure hey uh my name is arthur meadowcroft i'm an editor on the command zone podcast i've been editing for about a year i never thought i'd be here but i'm thrilled to be here and i'm learning so much every day and having a great time it's almost exactly a year right was it yeah was it november of last year that november first i started yeah so almost exactly a year yes arthur uh you're gonna get the weird experience of editing yourself on this episode which most people do not like you're going to tell that thing to me that everybody says which is like i can't stand listening to my own voice yeah yeah trust me you do get used to it okay yeah um i know from experience arthur what uh how would you describe yourself as a magic player what kind of magic player are you i'd say i'm a bit of a timmy i really like to cast big splashy spells and if i make it to the late game then i'm having a good time so you want to cast something that everybody goes whoa holy crap uh yeah i like to go well holy crap yeah um okay let's talk about a deck that you once built but found out that you hated sure so i'd like to talk about my morophon the boundless deck okay i built it as an elf tribal kind of like a bounce house i tried to get out cloud stone curio uh and then cast low cost else that would essentially cost zero because the uber cost would be less right yeah yeah because more fun would reduce it by green so they cost zero yeah that sounds like a cool idea why didn't you like it so the high end of the deck was that i'd have out like a guardian project or a zendikar resurgent and then i'd just be just spinning wheels and it was either that or i would be sandbagging my favorite elf cards and casting them all on one turn and so it's either go through my whole deck or wait for the ideal turn to pop off so it either didn't do anything or it did the spinning the wheels thing did also it sounds like maybe you have that problem where it spun its wheels and and had trouble like figuring out how i was going to win is that a thing no so the the trajectory the deck went in is that i ended up uh winning with those oracle um and so yeah pretty much it was kind of just a trajectory that led to me adding in tutors doing those oracle and winning and so the the redeeming arc of this though is i still have the deck i've i took it apart i did hate it for that reason but i didn't want to give up on it well so the reason you hate it is it was just going too much towards ceh yeah okay yeah but you still have it yeah so uh i'm trying to make it with the forgotten realms coming out there were a lot of new wooberg elves and that made me really happy because i wanted to revisit it and try to stray away from that win the game with those oracle yeah so now you're trying to actually use the elves from the other colors and just to get the value of the mana from more yeah like shaman of the pack isn't from forgotten realms but that's a really fun one drizda orton is really cool because that can cost three color lists now oh that's perfect three colorless so you want to make it into sort of more of a true elf deck are you like you're just working on the deck right now it's not it's not ready to play or have you played it yeah i played it uh it's kind of funny because you can add in so many different legendary elves that people are confused like craig one time walked by and saw me playing and was just trying to figure out because i had missouri renegade leader out i had selvala uh explorer who's at the head of this deck this doesn't make any sense yeah so that's cool so you were able to pivot off of sort of that path that was making you dislike the deck and sort of turn it into something that you like a little more yeah and that's one reason i love commander is that there's an avenue for everyone no matter who who the commander is like you can dislike it and then think about what you like as a player and for me it's just big cards so i add in more the high cost elves and i'm less concerned with just trying to spin out all these low cost else and instead add in the big fun ones like tristordim for example very cool yeah what's up this is mr jordan pridgen jordan introduce yourself to the audience tell them what you do here at the command zone hi everybody i am a writer and ad producer here on the channel i make a lot of i write and make a lot of the like mineral ads that you see and i also write some of the extra content like the uh strix haven commercials and the afr like little classes playing dodges and dragon sketch and stuff yeah some of our finest work by the way that was a lot of fun thank you uh so how long you've been here at the command zone i've been here about a year now wow that's crazy time flies okay jordan how would you describe yourself as a magic player when it comes to it i am definitely a johnny like i like having like complicated decks and i like them having like systems that i have to understand and work through and and like do that but i also really like the sort of threat answer interaction of magic i really like having to fight my way through the other people's board state and play a lot of interaction a lot of that sort of thing uh i like to earn my wins so you're kind of like the threat assessment police almost do you find yourself convincing other people like hey you got to take care of that thing first i definitely do yeah there's a lot of times where i'm like why am i the only one who's dealing with anything yeah i feel that way quite often too actually okay so when it comes to it then what is a deck that you built but ended up just disliking hating or whatever so i built kadena slinking sorcerer slinking sorcerer yeah as the prof put it when you played it yeah and i i was excited to build the deck because i was there at like gen con when they like announced like oh you know the this is morph is going to be one of the themes for the next one okay yeah and i was like that's so cool think of all the like different things you can do and um i i got the pre-con and then i upgraded and i put it together like kind of how i wanted it to be and i like played it once and uh i hated it wait you only played it once and you hated it yeah and i bet if i had like kept playing it more times i would have like started to like it more but like i just did not want to play it anymore bad first impression well and here's why because you know you play the deck and you're playing all these morph cards face down and i would have like six or seven face down cards and someone would play something and be like any response and i'd be like i don't know give me a sec hold on then you had to look at each card i have to check all the cards that were down and i look i i just know myself and i like assessing the board state i like figuring out what's going on there but like i cannot remember this information that is face down right you know especially when there's like all that stuff even little details like oh how much does it cost to like flip will bender and things like that sure that's on the simpler side of things but when there's like six to eight of those on the board that you're trying to deal with all the time it was just like a nightmare yeah so a lot of information retention and again you're someone that does like to be that person responding to the threats and dealing with all those threats but you're you already have enough information in your hand that even knowing all that stuff hidden as well exactly because you're still trying to assess what everyone else has on their board and you have your cards in your hand and i thought it would be cool to be like ah i have all these tricky little onboard trap cards but what i found out is like it was just like decision paralysis for me all the time oh are you a yugioh fan uh i used to like the show i've never played the game well i guess not because you couldn't play the trap card version of it it wasn't appealing to you right it's true it would have been a problem also when i was a kid i was like very loyal to the idea of magic the gathering uh um and yugioh felt like it was competing with magic the gathering and you're like no no i'm on magic side you're a magic purist so what happened to the kadena deck is it still around i still i still have it oh somewhere um i'm not sure where because i i like didn't double sleeve it i've never gone back and like really like rearranged the cards and it also is a case where kadena's like a specialty enough commander that i didn't need to like pull the cards out yeah yeah there's so much stuff already built in there that the deck was pretty because you didn't do a huge upgrade to them assuming no but i put in a lot of the cards like that that one card that's like something key that makes it cost less to morph stuff right right and a bunch of like solid morph and mega morph creatures and things like that besides that it wasn't like loaded with my cyclonic riffs and manic crypts or anything like all you're like yeah yeah so it was just like a slight upgrade so it didn't feel that bad then did you like feel pangs of guilt when you're like okay you got to go kadena i don't like you anymore you know i just i i i kind of pushed this aside because i was you make me feel like an idiot [Laughter] i feel bad at magic when i'm playing you right and you want to feel good at magic because again you are mr threat assessment so that makes a lot of sense okay well jordan thanks for sharing very much appreciated and good note to take uh don't build any more morph decks cause there's too much to keep track of look i know a lot of people love kadena just wasn't for me yeah yeah and that's how it goes all right thanks jordan all right and now we're here with shawna shauna do you want to introduce yourself sure my name is shauna gillis i'm a recent junior video editor on the command zone here and it's going pretty well so far yeah you've only been with this for well it's not even months it's weeks at this point two weeks it's two weeks two weeks so welcome to the team sure sure uh we're we're excited to have you shauna how would you describe yourself as a magic player so my playgroup mainly plays cdh so that i know that's not the case here as much but um within that kind of faction i'm mostly a control player so you're a control cdh player pretty much yeah cool cool cool cool cool cool cool that's not how we play here so now i'm scared it's totally fine it'll be fine i have it to fairy chain veil deck so you know it should be okay right i can play that against you um let's talk about a deck that you once built that you ended up disliking this is actually going to be really interesting because you're right most of the people we've talked to are not cdh players so um yeah let's what is the deck you built once and then as you played it you found out you did not like playing it sure so like jimmy i just played against jimmy's paco held on deck and i actually built one of those for cdh and the one for cdh is pretty voltron heavy he mostly presents a threat early and then he's your main win condition um you do have like a seasons past combo that you can kind of win through give yourself infinite amount of infinite turns um but he he mainly he wins through combat damage and so jimmy's deck so um no uh so jimmy's actually so so paco wins through comedy yeah i would say that paco held that in general wins through combat damage i don't think i've ever seen a deck or i would build the deck where he isn't your main win condition um and essentially what the cdh version of the deck does is get is uses seasons past and like a five-man axe return spell temporal chest pass like to give yourself extra turns infinite mana so there's a known deck that you built it's um so there's a pretty well known cdh database that has a good list of everything that the database approves and it's on there so it's i wouldn't say it's common i've seen it twice in my play group including mine but um it does pretty well just because the deck is so resilient and if you keep essentially you can do nothing else but keep playing paco and continuously present a threat yeah okay so what made you dislike it so the main thing that paco does is it uses haldan to steal advantage from other decks so every time he attacks you exile a card off of everyone's library and you can essentially use that to withheld then build a second hand for yourself so in cdh you're going to see a lot of one mana spell removals one mana counter stuff like that and it essentially just gives you an essenti a a second hand that you can use to that sounds good though it does sound good but it's just the kind of i learned um obviously that was my incentive for building the deck but i learned that stealing advantage from other players does not feel good especially if a lot of times in cdh decks people will run 29 30 lance right on the right on the curve so if you just happen to exile off a couple lands they can just be mana screwed if someone's waiting on the land and they're waiting for one of their 29 lands they're just they're screwed for the rest of the game okay well this is really interesting to me because i think we have a view of cdh players as like that would as like only trying to win and not so much worrying about like if your opponents are having fun since the goal of that format seems to be to win but this is evidently not true and i have a misconception definitely not true um it is a little bit more of there's an understanding that the point is to win it's a little more hardcore but if you brought jodo to the table he just slaps him home of the host down and wins usually presents a win turn two turn three right that is not fun so this is a general feeling in my play group right the most fun cdh game is one that is very interaction heavy and it lasts six to eight turns nobody wants to sit down shuffle up and then play two turns and then redo it so that you're spending more time shuffling than playing exactly exactly so um so so paco and haldan you disliked it because it was too mean kind of i would say so it's it's so disruptive to the point where you can essentially put yourself into a three-player game because you either take this guy's lens and he's not playing not playing the game and three-person games as i'm sure you know from casual just builds like this really weird dynamic that um can easily make someone else so it it can be really uh it can go well but generally i just kind of learned that i like those toolboxy decks where i build my advantage by myself i'm not taking it from other players i can essentially just play solitary by myself and it's kind of who gets there first and you're not my own stopping him as much yeah interesting interesting so what happened to the paco held on deck do you still have it no i ended up taking it apart um just because so you committed to i do not like this and i'm just done with it yeah no um i'm definitely i definitely like the controlling types uh paco is just a little too voltron for me i'm playing nimitz at payroll right now which you can argue is kind of voltron because the deck the deck spins wheels off of him but um i definitely don't like the type that i'm just going to play this card and attack you a bunch and if he gets removed i'm going to wait to play him again and that's it so uh nevermind is definitely a little bit more interactive a little bit more toolboxy okay very cool thank you you're welcome hey jimmy what are you up to oh learning how to make a youtube channel uh you have a youtube channel this is a youtube channel we are literally on youtube right now well not for podcast listeners but that's beside the point i'm learning how to make this channel better thanks to this video sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online community with thousands of classes for all sorts of creative pursuits it's perfect for anyone who's trying to pick up a new skill or develop an existing interest like i'm doing now we are always trying to improve our productions exactly that's why i've been watching youtube success script shoot and edit with mkbhd taught by marcus brownlee he's given me some great insight into planning out shots and strong visuals to keep viewers engaged in our content plus skillshare has classes for all experience levels from beginner to pro so there's always something new to learn and skillshare is curated specifically for learning that means no ads or distractions just loads of premium classes to guide you down whichever path of creativity excites you the most with skillshare you get more than just an online membership it's access to a whole community of encouragement communication and inspiration the first 1000 command zone listeners to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can start exploring your creativity today oh sweet there's a class i'm making sourdough bread i gotta take that one oh no that's a little one hey is that sourdough did you take that class already this podcast is sponsored by better help online therapy check out betterhelp.com command zone oh hello it's me carazocar the high tyrant i never wanted to be an eye tyrant though i always wanted to be an eye nice guy but when i get anxious i used to lash out like attack you worthless minions attack but after getting in touch with better help i've been working through my anxiety to become the beholder i want to be and you know what now i feel like a brand new eye in fact hey minions great work today you're awesome hooray better help is customize online therapy that offers video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist so you don't have to see anyone on camera if you don't want to it's much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can start communicating with your therapist in under 48 hours unload the stressors and get some unbiased feedback you'd be pretty surprised what you might gain from it see if it's for you this podcast is sponsored by better help and command zone listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com command zone that's b-e-t-t-e-r-h-e-l-p dot com command zone so first i'll play spore frog uh do you want to pay the one for rustic study no way man paying the one is lame what no no you always pay the one sounds bogus to me yeah ugh man no one ever listens to me hold on i have my blender shades this might be a job for cool jimmy sup i just dropped by because i heard some uncool cats weren't paying the one for risk study even though it's the rad thing to do i'm cool man i'll pay the one sounds great to me and i'm the one not even getting to draw you're the best cool jimmy bring out your cool factor with blender's eyewear blenders have an awesome look that rivals any big brand shades out there but at the price you can actually afford and the blenders team is always brewing up new styles from orange polarized wraparounds to classic gold arms on black lenses but it's not just sunglasses blenders offers prescription glasses readers blue lights and more alright i'm a cast dogma uh do you pay the one no you can draw what to score 15 off your blender's purchase visit blenderseyeware.com and enter promo code command vip that's blenderseyeware.com code command vip for 15 off blenders brought with pride worldwide all right do you uh i'm here with garov grav do you want to introduce yourself sure hi everybody i'm grav golotti and i am a editor here i've worked here since april of this year 2021 and uh mostly i work on the ads here so if you've seen any of the ads which i don't know if this is before the mid-roll or after but you currently do not know presumably they've watched more than just this video of ours yes yes i've worked on the ads here and a few of the special projects we've done here like some of the strict haven stuff and the afr stuff that we did oh yeah the dnd the tavern uh video that jimmy and i where we were talking to the d characters yeah because learn to play video which was one of my favorites oh yeah you've only been here since april i know right it feels super weird you said 2021 i was like that's not true yeah but i guess it was true feels like you've been here for a long time time is wild now groves just fit right in garrov what uh what kind of magic player would you say you are so i would say i'm probably mostly a johnny with bits of spikiness in there but i love building a little engine that you can see little pieces go from top to bottom and hitting little slots um so like building rube goldberg machines yes oh yeah i love watching and building those so if anybody else does that on the on the table i'm just like super satisfied by that happening you're like this is cool yeah i'm not doing it but you are yeah i'm probably gonna lose but it's fun [Laughter] all right well let's talk about a deck that you built but found out that you hated it yes so a deck i built and this is pretty early on my edg career this was like four or five years ago when i had my first play group when i was starting out on commander i built a xe drew the great harder deck which is a jet sky deck that is uh basically this card gives permanence to other players that usually don't help them the way i built it is that some of them did help so at the start i was like i'm helping everyone but eventually they're like wait a lot of these don't help me as much as they're helping the person who's playing zudra which i get to draw a card and gain life based on how many permanents other people control you give them like howling minds maybe yeah then you give them the ones that like deal 20 damage to them or whatever right so like one one card that i use like statecraft was basically prevents combat damage from the person who has that so i would give it to somebody and if they had an aggro deck like they do nothing then basically unless they get rid of the enchantment which is hard for them to do most of the time because they're playing an aggro deck um so yeah there's that other card that like you don't take damage but you don't have no drawstep that kind of stuff stuff like that so what made you want to build this uh zedrood group hug deck uh so before that i had basically just made pre-cons and kind of upgraded them and i was looking online for other cars that were really weird and someone had talked about this car and the potential it had to make a sort of group hug deck that is super political and i hadn't not made a political deck one that makes deals and stuff and like i said it was very early in my career playing uh commander so i wanted to build something that was very different and uh required me to like talk to other players and make deals turns out the play group i was with uh didn't like politicians very much and figured out that they were scheming liars most of the time and uh after a couple games they were like oh i know what this deck does i'm just gonna kill you first most of the time i'm not gonna talk back to you i'm just gonna kill you yeah so it just didn't work out the way i wanted it to and i think if i rebuilt it it might be very different now because now i have a play group that i think would appreciate that that's our play group by the way yeah yeah exactly yeah so like i think that's the thing is like this deck wasn't great for that play group and probably wasn't super optimized either but at the same time like depending on the playgroup i would play with maybe they would like it more maybe it would work out well um so it was a type of deck that needed certain kind of opponents or a certain kind of culture among your playgroup for it to really work yeah it also like it also did kind of make games a bit longer than people liked which i didn't know at the time was a bad thing right i know now like going a game going three hours like isn't everybody's cup of tea and not even mine at this point like i'd rather get more games than longer games interesting interesting so what happened to the deck is it still put together or is it uh it is still put together for the most part i've taken powerful cards out of it because i had like land tax and some other cards that were like really really good so i just put them on their decks but it i it for i think it's like 80 still there so i can still maybe bring it back at some point so like it's sitting there sort of half disassembled in the in the corner somewhere yeah i have it in a box it's labeled it's i guess a lot of those zedroo cards are just not useful anywhere else so it's not like yes yeah a lot of them just don't apply for other decks it's a very specific kind of deck so they're going to be in there unless i find a different i don't think anything else works with it though yeah so do you think you'll put it back together i think i will now that i've looked i was josh asked me like hey you talk about decks that you don't work so i started looking into this and a lot of cards have come out that make this deck way more fun and weird and do strange things so i'm kind of i kind of do want to rebuild it now i don't know if we did the right thing here we might have talked him into rebuilding the deck it's gonna be great i'm very happy maybe an extra turns or something we'll see we'll see yeah all right we are joined now by damon damien you're brand new here at the command zone so why don't you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do of course so my name is damon lenz i'm a junior editor here at the command zone i just started here about two weeks ago from the time of this recording so uh you know really excited to work here and i've been a fan of your guys's content since basically the beginning oh wow really yeah i remember just looking at the when you guys just had generic magic art up on the screen and i remember like the first time i saw your guys's faces like i i knew you from pghs but uh seeing josh for the first time that was that was really interesting so that's fun yeah i remember that when we decided like we're gonna do video now and we're like are we video people like i guess we are because you actually always work behind the camera as well right uh so damon how would you describe yourself as a magic player what are your favorite colors what's your favorite style all that got it all right so my favorite color by far is blue nice i'm definitely a control player at heart uh but i'm the kind of guy where it's like i'll figure out how to win later on as long as i'm drawing cards then i'm having a great time when i'm not playing control though i i lean very uh heavily into tribal decks oh cool what's your favorite tribe if you had to name one my favorite tribe is definitely vampires i started playing uh magic in original innistrad and just fell in love with the the way that they designed the vampires uh yeah entirely other than that probably werewolves i do love vampires as well so wow you just love instruct then i do i'm a huge fan of vintage strat it's a good time for you to be a magic player right now exactly okay so what is a deck that you built but now hate don't have or dislike got it um well for me i'd have to say it's my marikeru barrett deck i built it many many years ago uh i i love the idea of it you know i leaned really heavily into the control aspect running some of my favorite cards like sphinx's revelation and the like stealing all the people's stuff that was the control element exactly so the whole point was i didn't build any win conditions into the deck i would rely on stealing my opponent's stuff to win the game you know i just figured i'd i'd figure it out with their tools and it was kind of like a puzzle i was figuring out right that ties into here i'll draw enough cards and win eventually sort of whole thing exactly and you know for a little bit it was really cool and the issue that i kind of ran into is very quickly you know people don't like getting their stuff stolen so true uh you know my play group would end up targeting me first and so i'd end up not doing a whole lot and it'd be really sad so i ended up taking it apart you know what i was like you know what i'll take one for the team and i'll just i'll just play something else now was it the only deck that you had at the time or did you have a lot of other things to choose from just when that deck came out people were like kill him first uh it was not my first deck uh i'd been playing commander for a long time before that but you know it was it was still sad because i invested all that time and that money into it and every now and again i think about going back to it but like then i remember like i don't know if i'm ready to be that guy again you know but the deck was functional right it worked it's not like it was janky or had too many high cmc cards and all that stuff right oh no it worked great yeah when i wasn't targeted immediately the deck functioned how the deck was supposed to function you know i had the right amount of card draw right amount of ramp all that stuff everything you'd possibly you know need but it was just one of those things where when it was functioning optimally other people didn't like it so impressive yeah did you play it at game stores as well or did you find this mostly like in your own personal meta it was mostly my own personal meta uh me and my friends play at a at a game store so we would occasionally play with randoms and then during those games there's a bit less of an issue but anytime i was playing with my friends they they knew what the deck was about so they're like nah we're not having it now were your other friends decks did they any of them veer into that control range or were you kind of like that type of player at the table and the only one there doing that one of my other very close friends also enjoys control i think i kind of pushed him in that direction like hey look at all this cool stuff um but a good blue player exactly but i am definitely the one that was like leading the charge when it comes to being the control player like i i always play the decks where it's like i will handle the threats on the board i like being the answers guy if then i see yeah yeah yeah well that's great i think thread assessment is like one of those things that really is challenging uh and being the control player that's kind of the job you assign yourself to right exactly yeah and and i like being that you know it's it's kind of an unfortunate thing when i'm playing like certain decks certain aggressive decks where it's like somebody does something and i and i feel it in my gut and i'm like i can't do anything about that it physically hurts me but it's like when i'm playing my favorite decks my control decks i'm like i can relax i know i can answer that and that and that and i'm having a good day you know i think that's that's why you're a good editor too then right you're kind of lining up your options and knowing how to attack a problem exactly exactly like i like figuring out solutions to the problems i'm having and i like answering those problems you know well that's great you're one of the few people that had a functional deck and it worked but the play group and sort of the effective cause is what made you disassemble it yeah exactly my little sister still gives me uh grief over it to this day she's like oh yeah i remember your mariki deck and like i'm like yeah i know amazing wow let's become a part of your personality exactly very nice okay cool well that's awesome thanks so much for sharing damon yeah thank you so much for having me absolutely peace all right okay and suddenly i have changed clothes because we are recording this on a different day but we're here with truck trucks you want to introduce yourself to our fans out there yeah so i'm truck i am uh pretty new here i started around a month month and a half ago i am uh josh's assistant so i mostly uh just hop around where i can provide snacks moral support you know all the good stuff he's in charge of all the scheduling and make sure we don't forget things around here um yeah snacks very important job thank you truck uh our snack game has been up since you got here so i gotta say because i used to take care of it and i'm way less uh i have a less imagination for snacks than you do yeah i take i take a lot of pride in the snacks i know the the team is appreciative uh okay what kind of magic player are you i would say i like doing really cool stuff um but i like doing it really weird ways so basically if you can do a combo in two or three cards with six mana i will look for a way to do it in with 15 mana and like seven cards okay so just strictly worse but you're trying to do it pull off similar things but in more unique ways how about yes yes i want to do something that you you may have likely seen before like make tokens make mana but i want to do it in interesting ways with cards that you may have not seen before okay so let's talk about a deck that you built but ended up hating yeah so uh pretty early on when i got into commander i built a lathral deck she's elf tribal you know pretty standard um and for anyone who's ever built a tribal deck before especially elves it kind of builds itself kinda um so you just play mana dorks you ramp um you get a bunch of elves you always make more elves your elves buff elves and then you just hit people in the face and then you win um but but it is a tried and true strategy it is powerful it is very powerful no doubt um i got a lot of good wins with the deck but my problem with it was always after a game or two it just it felt like i was playing the exact same game plan every time and i'm being completely honest with myself i i'm kind of a hipster so it it feels really boring to be like okay guys for the fourth game in a row i have ten one one elf tokens and i play crater hoof behemoth and i win okay i mean i get that sort of had sort of a linear play style or it felt like the uh each game was not different than the last game yeah yeah i would say something like that um i also like just like again i like doing cool things i like uh kind of like being contrarian or things like that so my my currently my favorite deck is uh oh becca um i really really just love the deck because it's not like any other deck exactly exactly you get to do so many cool things with the stack and ending turns and like i just i love like putting them on my imaginary glass and like maintaining priority i end my turn so what happened with your latheral deck is it still together or do you take it apart all the way no it's it's basically all gone now like all the l's are still there because i don't you know l's aren't as useful in other decks but uh i pulled out the good mana dorks for my other green decks used the mana base in another way yeah i had a good lands yeah and then um all the good artifacts i pulled out for other decks you know i had uh boots and you couldn't pick it up and play it tomorrow it's just it's gone oh no i'd have to it would take me a long time to put it back together you truly hated the deck yeah i mean i don't hate and like i love magic i don't hate any deck but like if you made me play it i wouldn't be too happy about it all right now i am here with manson manson do you want to introduce yourself yeah uh so i'm manson i'm one of the game nights editors here at the command zone and yeah how long have you worked uh here on the team manson it started here 2020 january 2020 right at the new year so it's almost two years now just under yeah yeah kind of crazy yeah manson i mean you almost exclusively are editing on game nights these days right yeah i used to work on the podcast for a while but now transitioned over to game nights and that's that's his day all the time so uh in the comments make sure to throw him inside thank you because i know a lot of people like the show okay manson how would you describe yourself as a magic player um i think i'm more well i like to be more of the control player but obviously that's not you know something that the table really likes people don't tend to give you a lot of love for being a control player yeah not really does that mean you've changed like you don't play control that much or what yeah not really i play a little more i guess battle cruiser now where i just have my own board and then do my own stuff while not really interacting too much with anyone else's things it's interesting i'm sure some people have seen manson on our content you've been on extra turns uh the zada deck was one people liked a lot or the um the polymorph deck yeah yeah polymorph so definitely some cool stuff okay let's get to the subject at the hand here what is a deck you once built and found out you hated so this deck was my marchesa the black rose deck so og marchesa yep um this was actually one of the first decks i've ever built for commander actually like when you were new to the format yeah brand new to the format this was like the first deck i've built and it was all about and it's the deck you found out you hated yeah that's hard yeah it's a little bit that's not a deck i would think of you know some of these people are going to talk about or have talked about where you're like yeah that makes sense marchessa just off the top doesn't make me think of like not like jimmy's favorite deck is his martinez right so yeah what what how did you build it first of all well first i built it where i would be stealing everyone's creatures basically with like threatened effects like active treason so yeah if you don't know marchessa the way it reads is um if it has a pleasant source counter when it dies a creature you control it comes back to the battlefield under your control not under owner's control so if you can threaten affect somebody's creature sack it it was under your control when it died it'll come back to your control as long as that plus one supposed to encounter yeah so you were using direct effects to just steal people's stuff forever right so i give it a plus plus one encounter with like the dethrone because martial gives everyone dethrone so that was pretty easy and then i just steal it yeah basically forever that sounds fun it was fun for me anyways stealing everyone's commander everyone's creatures it was a great time for me but it turns out i found out that everyone doesn't really like their you know creature stolen so is that why you found out you disliked playing it yes exactly because every i saw everyone else's faces at the table they were just like oh man this again they didn't like it not at all so you were receptive to your player did they come to you specifically and say it or you just got the vibe playing how like how many times did you play it before you kind of decided you weren't going to anymore uh so this was like so this was like pretty much my only deck for a while because it's still brand new right so me and my playgroup be playing for a while and i figured out that you know once we played you know a couple games everyone's like well here we go again and you just read their body language they're just slouching like back on their phones like all right well he's gonna do the marchesa thing again and see a lot of creatures so what did you do with the deck so i actually toned down a lot of the threatened effects for the deck i still kept a couple because i do enjoy playing with other people's cards yeah um but now it's more of a reanimation deck where so you still have the deck but you just sort of uh pivoted away from its original theme yes exactly although i don't bring it out much because i found out that marchiso is still not too fun to play against because it's just so hard to get rid of if it gets a counter yeah but that's that feels like every deck now is hard to get rid of yeah that's kind of true too uh okay that's awesome um so the deck still exists i think a lot of people we've talked to like that deck is just gone and they don't play anymore but you managed to like pivot out of it and just be like okay i still how many commander decks do you have now though uh maybe like 12 or something so a lot yeah i haven't kept count too much but there's just 12 i only rotate around like five or six that i like enjoy playing and is more chasing the five or six or is it outside of that no it's definitely more outside of that because yeah people still don't like playing against that card maybe it's just the memory of what happened originally maybe it was all right so great to hear from everyone at the office we really hope that you enjoyed meeting some of them for the first time as well and you know for being first time on camera for some of them they all did great you all did awesome all our people are so photogenic and charismatic it's awesome that we're gonna be out of a job soon jimmy okay that's fine we're being replaced by them okay so i think it would be interesting before we kind of wrap this up and talk about our takeaways uh for you and i to really quickly talk about a deck or two we have that fits uh that fits the discussion here so definitely do you have any decks jimmy that you built and then discovered that you hated the first deck that i built but i really don't like was a super friends deck with child alara at the helm a five-color deck but that sounds like a really good idea uh yeah it's not because it blows up everything when child alarm goes away and there weren't that many five color options at the time so i was like this one sounds fun because i'm only gonna have planeswalkers turns out it's not that fun when everyone just gets wiped the moment it dies and it yeah so this is why it didn't work but i i love the idea of super friends this was like three or four years ago uh before oath of the gatewatch come out so i was like you know what i think that the inner the interaction between doubling season and super friends is so cool you can instantly ultimate your planeswalkers and i just went directly into that idea specifically i only put in planeswalkers like a double ultimate immediately doubling season and i only built ways to get the doubling season out and all the tutors all yeah and it was just so boring because one every single person knew what you were trying to do and it played out the exact same way or it just completely fell on his face and i had no creatures and everyone just attacked me and i died so it was like a good idea because i wanted to build a planeswalker deck super friend sec but i just didn't have the right sort of like way to make it fun i just made it very much like buy the book it was almost like a black and white deck if that makes sense like it was just very clear-cut what are you trying to do how are you trying to do it are you going to execute on your plan yes or no if not you lose if so you win so that wasn't very exciting to me um and i the deck is still together but i'm i'm waiting to retool it into a more fun interactive planeswalker deck jimmy doesn't really ever take decks apart he's got some decks in his it is so old being they're like yeah i haven't seen that deck in like five years yeah and there are dual lands in it yeah there are no two main rocks in it either yeah very old build style uh and then another deck that i actually played on game nights that everyone saw it was a very early game nights again that's the theme here it was in the heb the worthy and it was the first time i really built like a tribal deck i was like oh they make minotaur tribal work but the problem is i didn't really think about the balance in rakdos because you don't have access to a lot of the rampant card draw and i was trying to keep flavorful as well as make it effective but i just didn't have that balance right the deck almost never plays well and it never comes together uh and so just always falls flat in his face and i played reactors a bunch of times on game night so i've just kind of tried to learn the lesson over time but this was like my first reel tried it and boy it sucked and i hate playing it and it's just not fun because minotaurs overall not very powerful so you hate playing it because it's just not good the idea didn't come not good the tribe isn't even that interesting we didn't have all the change links from like caldheim and stuff to make it more impactful and all that and in black red tribal just it doesn't feel great unless you're playing like vampires or something the other monorail nahab is more airspeed yeah the one where i try and kill everyone by turn three yeah that one for sure um how about you josh decks you built but you don't like anymore yeah i have two i'm gonna talk about as well although there's been many um yeah i built i built and we both built this deck i built a music stack and it was uh sort of ex-tribal music stack and famously i think earlier in early days of this podcast i would talk about how i just never lost with that deck and i think i went like the first like 12 or 15 games with it just never having lost um but it was built around x counter spells you know counter spells that make you pay x or more yeah because you know eventually you're paying only one for those and mystics is filling in the exercise like 12 20. do you can you pay can you pay 37 more um which i thought was cool but then i realized what i think a lot of our our team members realized which is that people just didn't like playing yes it was just too mean it was just too much of a permission deck it could get to the point where it could just counter everything for the entire table oh i see yeah and that's just kind of oppressive and so yeah i eventually did take the deck apart uh because it had things like force of wills and you know yeah blue and red very powerful cards yes powerful and expensive cards i don't have you know i think i only have three force of wills so it's like if one is stranded in a deck i never play that that's not something i want uh and then the second deck is a deck i've also talked about on the show a decent amount it's it's a thing of legends dude it's the stop hitting yourself deck it was kind of built around boris reckoner and some other cards that are basically like if i have these cards that wouldn't yeah stuffy doll that when they take damage uh brash taunter's a new one yeah when they take damage it'll do stuff like and then so i wanted to build a deck that was like the entire point of the deck was to deal damage to my own creatures or own stuff to some effect and how that affect the table and yeah that's the theme you're building around yeah and it it just doesn't work oh no yeah oh it didn't like four or five years ago and i think this is the insidious thing about these deck ideas that like are kind of flawed concepts are not supported it's like every time a brash taunter comes out i'm like maybe that'll make the stop hanging yourself deck and it's like no josh about 15 cards needs to come out before it'll work right because i know i've been talking about like the ooh the the forced fighting deck for so long it's like still not quite there yeah to have a commander deck that you know that's a wild concept uh work it has to be supported enough you have to have a high um a high density of the key cards and that's just a really hard bar to clear especially as the format keeps getting faster like the stop hitting yourself deck is worse probably now than it ever was because now you can't even play three mana rocks as much right like yeah it's just the format is sped up because more cards will come out and i don't know how it there's no way it functions in a world where jessica's wills and underworld breaches and smothering ties exist yeah you're sitting there trying to make your little rube goldberg machine yeah you're like hey everyone look how cool that i'm dead yeah exactly i turned 12 i could do something but the game just won't get there yeah there's a lot of things that i think have to go into to make it work and the more you start putting it in the worse it just gets because those are slots that should be with better cars or whatever yep so okay so pretty interesting to hear from everybody here and i've made a little list on my phone of whatever just so we can refer to it here what everybody said there's so many people um so takeaways i think you know one thing from listening to everybody talk about their decks is we can kind of sort there's really only like four or five categories of decks yeah like every a lot of people had similar reasons for disliking dexter yeah that sort of boils down to a few of the same key elements right yeah so the first one i think is the most obvious which is you know my music's deck um i think uh damon's miriki deck damon talked about this shauna which i found was interesting because she's a cdh player and she had i didn't realize that this was actually still a thing in cdh which is a deck that's just too mean quote-unquote something that your opponents don't like playing against yeah we've we heard from a couple people that just like stealing everybody's stuff um tends to be something that people don't like uh manson was another person that said that like hey i was playing marchessa stealing every stuff and my player paid it it's interesting because nobody said i was playing a land destruction deck and everybody hated that right and we said i'm playing a stax deck but stealing just tends to people hate that more than almost than just like comboing out or destroying their stuff right yeah and dan was talking about control specifically so he was like the music deck where he was always permissioning he was doing the thing where you know he loves thread assessment and he's the one deciding is that going to resolve or not and for him too he didn't play as much outside of his regular play group so over time that same deck is just going to feel more and more oppressive and just like oh that again and so i can totally understand why that might make you start to not like it either arthur mentioned an interesting thing when when i was talking to him about his elves deck and how he didn't like it because he saw the path it was going towards and it was really like c-e-d-h it was going towards too powerful which i think is kind of the cousin to to mean um you know some groups want to be more powerful than others but if you don't want to be in cdh territory with your deck then you know too powerful almost as similar to being too mean if that makes sense yeah it's tough with elves too because the more you put elves in the more you go into those legacy combo decks that are all trying to win the same way and then after a while it's like can you actually build certain tribes without eventually devolving into that interesting yeah i'd say the one that people said the most out of all of these is like this this i the idea for my deck was inherently flawed yeah so that's kind of you're in a heb deck um i think jamie talked about it with growth yeah two mimi too many ideas yeah didn't work out but there's this this thing where like oh this is my stop hitting yourself deck as well murph talked about uh as mara and a deck that he just couldn't get to work even though he was tr he tried many times you know he said he tried a couple of months to like optimize it and just could never get it to a point where it really felt like it could actually tangle with real decks it's kind of like that design theory like it's either bottom up or top down and when you start with the idea and build from that it's actually sometimes just not possible you have the tools at your assistant yeah that's it that's interesting so it's just inherently not going to work um you know everybody has cool ideas and then you get into an actual game of magic a real game and you realize oh this just will not function because the way that games play out my opponents never let this happen or they never i never have this opportunity that in theory i thought i had yeah it's interesting with jamie's grathama deck too because it wasn't like i'm gonna make it less you know i have 20 ideas in here let's take it down to two and make it more it's just like you know what i'm just not even gonna bother i'm gonna do something else entirely which i thought was interesting yeah if i can't do the cool thing well i don't really want to do this stuff yeah yeah sure i could turn into like a big monster's deck but that's not really what i set out to do right right i think this one is not so much a problem right i think too mean or whatever but though i like having ideas trying them out and it's okay if some of them work and some of them don't and i just keep the ones that do i think that's kind of like it's like kind of the creative process yeah it's less that you hate your deck at that point you're more kind of disappointed that your thing didn't come to fruition it's like the dad i'm not mad at you just disappointed your dick's like [Laughter] there were some interesting answers i found um jordan and ashland's particularly interesting that was really interesting too yeah because they didn't they kind of hated dex for reasons of like this doesn't match my personality or what i like about playing the game yeah and that's so important when you sit down these decks are all supposed to be personal expressions of who you are as gamers and for ashland it was like this deck works it functions it wins games powerful it's powerful but it's just too much mental work and that you know after two or three games of a commander night sometimes you don't want to have that in your arsenal because it's like do i want to sit here and have to sit and calculate till end of turn effects yeah do i want to like have to have like a notepad where i can do the math yeah yeah no i get that because i i'm actually like ashlynn where those type of decks i literally steer clear of attracts a proliferate yeah so many counters and all that yeah it's just like this gets one this gets two oh crap okay so it doubles and then doubles again which is what is this then it's just like this is not why i want to be playing yeah it also takes away from the other decisions that you want to be making that are important like for instance we just play the game with a coat of arms and it's like wait this affects the whole table and every time we went to comments like okay let's go over every single creature's power and toughness again this is not like online where the numbers are just written there or game nights you have to calculate each time and then making mistakes and then going back it's like oh headache yeah so and i think some people like that and that's totally fine yeah they would play the arbo deck or the plus one plus encounter deck it's just interesting that if you know yourself pretty well you kind of you won't know until you do it but then you go through and you're like oh i don't like this like yeah i don't mind anybody else playing an airboat deck with one encounter as long as they're keeping track of their own stuff that's totally fine but i've definitely like not built the corvall deck because i've watched people do it and i'm like that's a lot of stuff it's like this i suck that it triggers this which triggers the thing over here and then i draw a card and then you have to sack and then it's just like i don't want to do that i just want to play two cards that let me draw seven cards that's it yeah actually when you say about like uh in the last round table you're like i don't want to build my deck to beat you i want to play my deck to beat you right and sometimes when you have so many things that are happening it's just like it's a headache you don't want to have to sit there and have to calculate and think of all of those elements i don't know if this happens to you but i definitely think about it when we're building decks specifically for camera which is like i am likely to screw that up which means i'm going to look really stupid because i'm going to get some rules wrong and everyone's going to yell at me so i will literally not play certain things because i'm like listen there's somewhere in that chain of events yeah i'm going to mess something up and i'm going to look dumb so i'll just rather put in simpler cards so that it's just easier for me to not make a mistake yeah you won't see music's mastery in your decks anymore yeah that was the worst and you won't see garnet the blood flame in my decks anymore either as much as before because it's true you don't want to be like oh shoot it's the worst on camera everyone's sweating we're in hour four of the game you're looking at your hand and going there's like a thousand options i just want to swing and attack exactly whatever i do i i'm gonna be making the wrong decision i'm gonna get yelled at yeah you don't know the pressures we're under out there everybody yeah uh go ahead oh i was gonna say the last one the last takeaways i loved with murph especially because you call him a hipster and it's true because sometimes we want to feel cool and do things with our deck and sometimes if it doesn't pan out or if it's too much like oh this is just what everyone else is doing you know that is a way that we express ourselves be like you know what i'm not going to do that i want to be unique i need to do something interesting and cool yeah i don't think any of our team members really underline this but i have definitely i don't know if you you're the same way but i've definitely built decks or been in the process of building decks and just looked at it and been like nah this is just all the same stuff that a lot of decks run and so it's not very interesting if every card is just kind of a staple it's just kind of a good stuff deck and it's like no i want to build you know that's that why i built the dragon's approach deck for the last episode right i started to build that giesa deck and as i looked at it it was just like a lot of black good stuff and it was going to kill everybody's creatures and make it yeah but it's like really i'm going to play a deck that's just like damnation toxic deluge plague crafter like yeah all the cards that everybody's seen a million times that does just didn't sound fun to me yeah on the flip side of that jamie with his growthama deck saw that when this is such a cool unique thing but then went too far into the cool uniqueness none of this is good too much of it and they just spread out apart yeah so there's an interesting balance there in the middle for sure then there's one other thing and again i don't think anybody here alluded to it but as we were talking about it um about this episode with everybody in the office one of the things we kind of underlined as a reason that people you know make a deck and then find out they don't like it is when it does the same thing all the time oh yeah wins the same way or plays out the same way now again in cdh and a lot of people they don't mind that they're just trying to get the win and that's what they like and i think that's fine but i think a lot of people and i don't know if you're like this but myself included is like i like my deck to have some variability and it's not trying to just tutor for the exact same piece and win the same way every time right yeah i think for me specifically and maybe a lot of people actually it's more the games are about the journey not the destination right because even you know jamie said like i just want my play styles i want everyone to have fun and then hopefully i win at the end right you know and that's sort of my attitude about it too because i think we've all played now enough to get over the winning itch right sometimes games i lose some games yeah one more winner loss you know tonight or tomorrow isn't gonna change my overall percentage at all so yeah big deal and you'd much rather lose while having fun in the game than win while not doing something that you're enjoying either i think i think you know that one of the most interesting things about this entire discussion though is well sort of two things is one is what sort of when you think about this what you discover about yourself what kind of player you are we didn't say what kind of players we are jimmy what kind of player do you think you are i'm definitely i like splashy i like big but i also like doing stuff that is just like kind of like craig style i would call it because craig was on the first pill that brought me in the game which is just like check out this blam oh i did something and i want everybody to be like wow yeah i'm definitely not like a control player i just i don't like sitting and have to make so many individual decisions i kind of like doing what's on my board and occasionally dealing with things in the whole political aspect too i'm i'm a value player so of course i like to you know have a lot of options of things to do i don't like to ever feel like well i have to do this i didn't i can't make a choice because i only have this option in my hand so that's why i like drawing cards actually it's not just for the sake of card drawers it's just feeling i think i have a feeling of being safe when i have a lot of options at my command so i guess that is inherently a little bit controlly i do like to feel safe like oh i can i can affect things i have if this happens i got this and if this happens i got that and if this happens i got that and you can only do that if you have 27 cards in your hand yeah we are strategists too i think which is important because you're the one ultimately like i get to make the decisions that determine if i'm going to win this game or not right and i think even though that's not always true yeah you like to feel that way yeah the same with the politics right you like to be like cool i got to control this and sort of mesh it to mess it around to make it work for me and if it didn't work out then you know oh maybe i can learn something from it which i think is a big element to your playstyle too um so anyway one of the interesting things about this entire sort of exercise was understanding i think as we talk to each person like well but everybody doesn't like the things you like about the game as you talk to them you're like oh you like different things about the game than i like yeah and garov likes different things about the game than either of us like and you know jake has his own certain way that he's you know makes him happy when he's playing yeah and it doesn't necessarily have to do with the cards or the style rights everyone has a different thing that makes them like or not like things it's not always a universal yeah so i think keeping that in mind is actually really healthy in a really good way to understand when maybe things aren't going away or people are playing in a way it's like don't get mad at the person because they have a certain thing they enjoy about the game that they are trying to get to and and this also demonstrates that we're not always good at executing on that sometimes we do things that are straight up counter to what we like and then it's in those moments that we discover that's not what we like so again give people a break maybe when they're doing something true that you don't like because a that might be what they like again about the game but also b that might be what they don't like about the game and they are learning that in that moment in that moment yeah i heard this really great quote which was uh you know like how you deal with problems that you have in your life and in this case games it's like well first write down all the problems you have cross out the things you can't control like what you're doing at the table or other people doing and just focus on things you can do right so there are moments where it's like i'm not enjoying what's happening but maybe i can change a way that i play to actually find more fun in this moment and that helps you learn a lot more about yourself and what you're in control of and that ultimately i think leads better to better play experiences all right very cool i hope you enjoyed this episode it was fun to get to talk to all of our team members and get an insight into how they think about the game to the listeners what is a deck that you built at some point in time in your commander career and then found out that you hated it yeah was it because of the any of the numbers reasons that we listed above is there someone in the uh the office that you like really you're like yeah just like that i'm just like that let us know in the comments yeah if you didn't like a deck for a reason that's different than what we listen we'd love to hear it as well yeah totally uh yeah so post in the below you can twitter all that stuff email good stuff yeah if you want to uh get a hold of any cards for a deck that you might be building that you haven't found out yet whether you like or hated it just got a channel fireball it's a good endorsement go to channelfireball.com command or use promo code command you know channel fireball we talked about it a lot has just started their new marketplace and i think the coolest thing right now that's happening is the marketplace is tied to a whole bunch of giveaways jimmy and i signed a bunch of soul ring promos they might have given them all away by now there was like 20 25 of them but maybe not anyway there are giveaways every single day in the month of october if you use the marketplace you're entered to win for every 10 you spend but really the grand prizes at the end are the big ones black lotus if you want to get that black lotus boom yeah first of all charizard if you're into that too yeah i mean i would still take it even though i'm not a pokemon yeah just cause it's because of the value i would go buy one ten dollar pokemon card and then like you know what let's roll the game yeah exactly so channelfireball.com command or use promo code command at checkout and big thanks as always to ultra pro they supply us with all the awesome game nights pieces that you see when we play the play mats that are matching the sets all the most beautiful are in the world i have a yes per icing playmat in front of me and rossum you know we like yes so much that we were like yes bro we need you to make a play mat with us so we can print it on an ultra pro player yeah and so you can always get that art from the same artist for multiple because they are the ones that have that official license and they make all the best game pieces to protect your stuff including that black list you're going to win from channel fireball yeah put that thing in an eclipse sleeve for sure whoever wins it wait don't it you know what i just realized we cannot win the black letters it would look really weird no i'm so sad well every time we make a purchase if we don't actually enter in the raffles you know so it'd be weird if i got my own sign soul ring in the video it's fine it's fine it's fine it's fine we're doing it for you the people out there jimmy's just going into all his decks signing his soul rings i mean like he judged me maybe i like playing this deck now all right uh now it's time for the end step where we talk about something cool outside the world of magic first i was going to put down squid game but then i realized like everybody already knows about it yeah no one needs to do i don't want to hear more about squid games it's the most talked about thing in the world right now um but i was curious jimmy yeah have you seen it yet i haven't okay so me neither um i was curious what your thoughts are leading up to the new movie release which will be i think this week this friday as you're watching this dune specifically with the us because it has actually come out true yeah so i like to read reviews and i try not to get hyped up uh sorry um preliminary question have you read the books i have read the book okay book book you read the book read the book but you're a fan of the world yeah i like the world a lot uh it's one of the most iconic sci-fi franchises ever however i have avoided every adaptation of it uh because you never saw the other ones no because i've heard awful things about all of them i mean the 1984 movie is really bad yeah yeah um but that's what it is oh if it is and you're a genius that's great um so i haven't seen all that stuff but i think the director is really good for this new adaptation so dennis villanov he did blade runner 2049 he did a rival uh he has just amazing work and he he has that great cinema quality to all this stuff i love oscar isaac timothy chalamet zendaya the cast looks really good jason moe right so i have typically i try not to have high expectations but i got pretty high expectations for this movie oh not uh oh because i think it's going to be bad but it's just it's so much safer to go in with like moderate or low expectations and be yeah and be blown away by it especially considering the history of the projects in the past and you've read the book so you know that like how hard it like oh yeah just thinking about the book it's like how how do you even do it yeah so much there's so much that you can get the reason i didn't like the harry potter movies is because the books were able to describe things in a way that the movies could never even come close to showing me and making me feel so i think dune has a lot of that too but but you know not to not despoil you because i haven't read a lot of reviews but i know that they've been generally positive generally favored though yeah i'm trying really hard not to get excited for that reason no but it looks sweet it does like it looks beautiful and i guess you know even though it's gonna be on hbo max and stuff too this is a movie that i would go out to try and safely see in the theater for sure i would prefer and i'm gonna try to see it in the theater it feels like it's going to be big and loud i want to i want to feel that worm you know warm side yeah i want the my seat to be shaking when that thing comes out comes out yeah yeah so hopefully we can make that happen fingers crossed now if we have some international viewers that have seen it don't spoil it for those in the comments but uh know that we're jealous and uh we just say whether you thought it was awesome or not there you go yeah get our hopes up so that we can they could be dashed dang it like our day we're not sponsored by hbo max i have we i think we might have been for something in the past but currently we are not we just you know dunes fun to talk about i hope it's good i love the books or i love the book um it's a cool world it is a cool world if you haven't read the book that is something that we can reliably one of the greatest of all time yeah yeah for sure frank okay big thanks to our amazing team at the command zone boy we have we just met a lot of them yeah yeah yeah so let's arthur middle class lady danger manson lund craig blanchett ashland rose out for the soccer josh murphy jake boss patrick nan jordan bridget and sam walter garfield golotti and our newest team members welcome them to the team truck tie jamie block damon lens shawna gills and evan limberger evan actually starts on monday but at the time you're watching this that will have been yesterday we'll have to ask him what his decks they built are that he hates as well maybe we'll just we'll just snip that into like a future episode that's not even about that absolutely and big thanks to jeffrey palmer he does the living card animations that often leave us behind us on the set but more importantly start our show at youtube.compodcast you can find them on twitter at livingcardsmtg alright everybody thanks for watching and we'll see you next time thank you for your attention for further inquiries send an email to commandcast rocketjump.com or ask us on twitter at jf1 see you later alligator greetings humans

Channel: The Command Zone

Views: 379,341

Keywords: video game high school, ted wong, vghs, wong, jfwong, jimmy, magic, the, gathering, mtg, magic the gathering, strategy, game, trading card game, deck, tactics, commander, general, elder, dragon, highlander, politics, josh, lee, kwai, cards, Card Game (Game Genre), negotiations, command, zone, podcast, the command zone, edh rules, mana, mana bases, Game Knights, GameKnights, gameplay, arena, brawl, oathbreaker, historic, innistrad, midnight, hunt, crimson, vow, secret, lair, stranger, things, kamigawa

Id: 6BpqARm8zZI

Length: 87min 15sec (5235 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021