How to Build a Commander Deck | The Nitpicking Nerds Official Deckbuilding Strategy

welcome to the picking nerds guide to commander deck building we're offering you our rock solid insider information undisputable best results tips to build a commander deck right now [Music] i'm your host joe cherries i'm your host beezy and that makes us video picky nerds you can check out our discord uh because it's free and you can play commander games in there talk to people like us who are actually in there for reals other fans of the channel and if you want to support us monetarily you can go to patreon.com and click the support button yeah there's a button that says support directly on there and if you want daily content make sure you subscribe to this channel so we got daily mtg content oh yeah we're keeping it going what are we doing right now right now we're gonna show you well how we build a commander deck and our tips for the outline the template if you will the skeleton all the big points of contention when building a deck we're talking about them first before you built your deck hold on there's three things you got to consider what are they they're pretty simple you need to know your commander these aren't these are there's three of them but they're not silly in any order you can determine these in whatever you want but you need to figure out these three things so first we have find your commander you just you need to know who that is it's a central part of your deck almost every commander deck is built around it at least some way you're casting your commander every single game your commander is impacting the game every single time it's cast and you have a card that you always have access to so you should build around it as every deck basically does and you're going to need to figure out what that is before you start figuring out the numbers of cards you want to play yeah you we don't want to determine the number of lands before we know the commander because guess what it will be impacted most likely by the commander yeah your commander impacts everything else it's a ripple effect next find your game plan figure out what your deck actually wants to do i usually call it like the elevator pitch like my deck is going to do this with this and win with this just figure out how if the game goes well for you well what does that actually mean what are you doing no i think and once you have the gameplay i think one thing you can do with this game plans can only fit into circuit archetypes so now you can start looking for your archetypes like if you want to go wide make lots of creatures in attack okay well you're looking to play probably tokens then now you've reached into an archetype and now that archetype will help you determine what card you want to look for yeah and the game plan could be literally anything you can go i want to play this goofy car as my secret commander well now your game plan is or find this goofy card and win with it and then so the archetype is just kind of like it kind of falls into whatever supports that but there usually are things to do it if you're trying to clone a creature maybe you can make you kind of fall into tokens where you're populating and cloning and stuff like that exactly uh though they are similar game plan and archetype they are different and you do want to figure out both of them before you take the next steps which is actually looking at cards to put in your deck yeah for example your your deck archetype is aristocrats but your game plan is flood the board with creatures and then sacrifice them and take advantage of drain effects to win the game exactly um so now we're gonna get into numbers these are just these are the very simple ones you've seen you've seen if anyone's done one of these videos before um you've seen the numbers people give direct numbers so we're going to give our numbers these again aren't perfect and guide to mention right now there's always going to be outliers uh the first one we do is lands here there's i already can tell you right now i have a deck with more lands than we suggest because i have a lens deck and that's an outlier from this yes the nitpicking nerds official tm land recommendation 30 to 36 30 is trending more towards your competitive cdh or just really low curve decks 36 turning more towards land's manner especially when you consider the other part of lands which is mdfc lands and those we recommend zero to eight and you can adjust your land count based on how many mdf seas you have absolutely i think the the if you put two mdf season you can guarantee 100 without feeling bad at all take out a land uh we go one for one usually i'll just take out a plane and put in a kabir's takedown every time yeah we don't really have an issue with that obviously your deck the competitive level only accounts for so many mdfcs or certain types maybe you only want the mythic ones either way you're at zero to really like eight maximum mdfcs and 30 to 36 i'm usually right around 32 33 and then three or four mdfcs yep exactly the same for me another thing about the mds just to mention very quickly your four five color decks aren't going to play almost any where in three colors will play some and two colors i'll play all of them as many as they can and one colors will play as many as they can yeah two colors is where you get the most you end up with like six seven if you really want to play a bunch of them uh how about card draw card draw while we go from six character spells up to around 12 card draw spells on the high end six that's not ten yeah so ten is a number that uh we've seen other places and ten's a good middle point if we want to give like a one if we had to give like a singular number sure i might just say 10 but i don't i'm not a big fan of giving a singular number because no deck is the same um i don't want to just aim for 10 every time i build a deck and i don't yeah i think it's a mistake half the time to just say you're playing commander well you better play 10 card draw spells like that's just really confusing i'd just so much rather offer you a range of 6 to 12. now the 6 when we're trending towards 6 your commander has card draw on it your deck takes advantage of some other spells to gain advantage you have big tutorable ways of card advantage where you don't need a ton of them and then training towards 12 is well maybe your control deck you're trying to clear the board you don't want to have any threat go unanswered because your deck is slow yeah exactly you want to make sure um carter van when you're attending towards 12 card advantage is going to be one of your main ways to win the game um you're going to be doing that to like get to the point where you're going to win you're going to have so many resources more than your opponents in your hand that that is your win con exactly included within these characters spells also is card advantage so like a bolas of citadel though technically not going to draw you cards is going to provide you access to way more cards than you would have access to otherwise so count that towards your card draw because it is it extensively just is yeah we're talking about like find access to new cards so not like i would count let's say removal as something different it's card advantage but it's not card draw so take all of that into consideration all of your card draw card advantage engines same thing basically so there you go and we're now talking about removal single slash multi-target removal ways to kill one or more things but not all things because that's its own category we're saying 7 to 15. again i wouldn't just say you need 10 minimum it really depends on what deck you are if you are training towards seven you're probably a more competitive aggressive faster combo-licious deck that just doesn't need all of this fancy schmancy just like they don't need a ton of card draw because they just have tutors and they need two cards and they win this is well we don't really need that much removal we're just going to use pinpoint stuff to take out what actually stops us from aggressively winning exactly uh another thing about this is these numbers are very they're so much different here um seven is like going to be your decks that again don't need to interact as much and 15 you're the one you need to interact you that's you're the control type deck you're the policeman yeah also within these uh these singles targeted and multiple rule we're counting counter spells they're not they're not exactly removable but they're interactions they trade trade cards for their cards yeah exactly so we're counting the counter spells we're counting the uh swords the plowshares the beast within uh even the um like what's the one that gets rid of one for each of them oh like crackling doom fact that's a good example yeah i couldn't shatter a shadow shatter soul shatter that was the one with the that art's great wiley beckett did a great job on that yeah this is relevant it is just consider how good wiley beckett is when building your deck i'll tell you one thing i consider that you that is not for power i do put in cool art sometimes sometimes sometimes we do that our decks kind of had somewhere between 11 and 12 so we fell right in the the maybe the closer to the 15. uh yeah bz actually had a deck with 22 in it i had a deck with you know a 16 single or multi-target 22 like removal total oh yeah and then if we look at my cdh uh corridor cdh deck it has way closer to seven it's probably ten or less because it doesn't care that you have a six-six creature i'm just going to ignore it and win yeah it only needs to interact with very specific pieces yeah oh rest in peace well let's get rid of that um another next we have board wipes there you want two to six of these again control the x want the six two is i'm a creature deck i don't wanna wipe the board so i'm not gonna play very many board wipes and if you want to get cdhe yeah maybe you just want zero yeah cda sex can just straight up play zero just care less about that stuff yeah um if you're a green deck that doesn't want to wipe creatures away something you'd get to play things like banana progress still cause the board wipe it's a different kind of board wipe we count those two um because if you're wiping all of any of uh one or more types that's what we consider a board right maybe not the perfect definition but what we use yeah i think people on average tend to play too many board wipes six we have at the top because of like really grindy control decks that want to just slow the game down and try to win with whatever their win condition is we play like two to three i have a control deck i think it has five yes um i don't know how many i have you don't need a ton of board wipes you really don't it's it's it's between two and four for all basically all of my docs i don't really go over that i don't have to i don't have any control box i'm not saying like obviously the six is completely reasonable in the right docs but don't just jam six in your deck before you you know before you assess what you are exactly at two to four just it's probably the better range the five and six is like you're you're a control deck you need to wipe the board it's important there are lots of decks that do need that or it's like some weird meta call yeah exactly next we have ramp 10 to 16 ramp spells um this is a again a big range we wanted to these rains i want to point out this this one more time the range of these is so important um because if i i if we zero in in the middle at 13 i don't think that's helpful you you couldn't be a 10 and have a great duck you can be at 16 and have a great deck you could even be a little higher a little lower yeah you could be at 15 see that somebody wants you to play 13 and then go oh i have to cut two ramp spells and then your deck gets worse yeah because you're a deck that takes advantage of those ramp spells in any way if lands into the battlefield helps you the ram spells just become like draw spells like an ac deck yeah there is literally no metric to determine how many ram spells is correct for your exact configuration of 100 singleton cards like that does not exist there is anyone telling you that is just lying to you you need to find the range you can play test every once in a while maybe add one or two cut one or two if you really want to find like what's right for you but you got to play a ton of games we're talking like to get these numbers you have to play like hundreds of thousands of games yes which you're never going to do ever we can give you this rough guide on what has worked for us in the past and what well and again this isn't just based on like what we do too we've i looked at other people's decks we talked to other people we understand where other people are going to and that's i think that's one of the reasons we also like to do the range because some of the ranges are going to be like would be a lot less if it's just us it's like like i said borders should be two to three for us that's that's ours it's not just us it's the format this is like i can say this works for me but now i can tell you send to 16 will work for you i can just say that yes yeah i think if you can aim for in there again okay like i said some i'll play more some will play less than that but if you aim for that you'll be fine yeah you'll be totally be able to compete with all these numbers and then the last one we have is win conditions how many primary ways to win do you have you know direct lines where you can say a plus b equals win or you know your crater of behemoths fall under your expropriates there's one card win conditions and then there's like critical mass where you're comboing and assembling two to three card combos now if your deck has a bunch of different cards that can be combo pieces you're technically going to have like 45 ways to win but we're talking like okay ferexian alter combo that's one yeah uh protein hulk combo that's two yeah i think and also one thing here these are the one condition thing isn't a number for cards exactly like all the other ones are the number of cards you want this one condition thing is two to three ways to make sure you win the game so if you have top reservoir citadel that combo that's one that's one win condition every deck needs more than one win condition if you're like i'm just going to attack them i would say you have a vulnerability yeah exactly um so let's just take uh stomp i play a snompy deck where the main win condition is to attack but there's things like chandra's ignition where i can just potentially have a 21 21 kill everyone's board and then attack and who's going to live through that right that's one for combat and then one for i have these big damage based spells that maybe if you were just saying well combat's enough you wouldn't even play those cards and that's just you're missing out you're missing out on win percentage yes exactly and if you just want to tackle combat there is there are win conditions within combat like i would describe xenoghos is a win condition within combat um he gives you so much more power you can describe kratoff as a as a one kilometer within just combat so you can just go a combat route if you want just make sure there's other ways than just putting my creatures out if the putting creatures out there just vanilla guys and attacking will never get you there yeah attacking with grave titan if that's your that's it that's all you got you're just never gonna win as many games as you could if you double up or triple up on your win conditions i also would say don't try to play more than three you know ish don't try to play more than three-ish if you've got like seven different ways to win it's just overkill you're gonna have cards that don't do anything in your hand because their primary goal is to win exactly yeah you don't want to be caught with a bunch of like high cmc spells um yeah we're going to get into that we have a whole cmc thing coming up yeah but let's just say if you have avengers indica creator of behemoth and expropriate in your hand well you need one of those to win presumably you don't need all three so two cards you just mulligan twice if you have stuff like that and it's going to gum up your openers and just make it tough now that we know the general numbers that we want to fill we have to actually look at what cards we're going to play specifically and that brings up something really important mana curve mana curve is so so important the first three to five turns of a game are gonna determine probably most games they set the pace of the whole thing it's not like oh whoever's ahead on turn five wins but it's whoever's head on turn five is poised to win yeah exactly i think this is uh a great way to show how important those turns are is how much a showing makes a difference in a game if you play it in turn one it basically puts you on turn three now you're so and you're gonna for the next three turns you're gonna be playing cards that no one else has access to because you're so far ahead those early turns are way too important to just take them off and do nothing yeah i think you'll find our mana curves to be very interesting we averaged a total of 10 nipping nerds personal decks that we actually play and we'll get to the numbers in just a second but we we prioritize a little bit lowering of the curve i find that over you know the 7 or 8 or 9 10 whatever years i've been playing commander i've just gradually been lowering my curve and lowering it not necessarily even lowering the power level or increasing the power of my deck but just lowering the mana curve making my spells easier to play so i play more spells per game get more stuff done have more efficiency when i do things and i feel like it definitely increased my win percentage like a ton yes it helps so much when you again when you can double and triple spell and your spells are still just as powerful because you know you built your deck correctly with the synergies you wanted it's going to feel really good yeah what i'm casting nature's claim instead of crossing grip and then i'm casting another spell instead of spell b i'm just saving all this mana and winning the game with efficiency so just going to run through these numbers real quick and then we'll talk about them after but zero drops on average we have 1.9 so basically two cards that cost zero in uh in one of our decks and these don't have to be like chrome box or jewel lotus we're talking stuff like mishra's bauble too or hanging back walker uh one drops what about that one jerry's uh we have 12.9 which is basically about 13 one jobs per deck get those one drops in your deck they're so important if you can do something on turn one when all the other players play tapland it feels real good especially if it's a mana dork i mean a lot a lot of these uh green decks have contributed to one drops that's metadorks yeah mana dorks absolutely amazing uh at two we have about 16 two drops on turn two basically with this with these numbers that we have we have 16 two drops 13 so we're up to 29 and at zero we have two so after 31 we're almost guaranteed to do something by turn two at the latest in these docs i refuse to pass turn two having to nothing i feel bad i feel behind in a lot of games if you pass turn two without playing a signet or a creature or anything see i don't feel bad doing it it happens it does happen it definitely does but you want to build for it to happen as little as possible it's gonna happen sometimes still doesn't matter how many you do yeah you can have 98 and then you're going to draw the hand with six lands and the seven drop you have exactly that can happen and that's gonna that's going to happen but you'll want to lower that you want it to happen as little as possible yes uh three drops right about 16.7 so 17 three drops i think this is the three drops are the danger zone when you build commander decks uh based on how we build which we'll get into after this you're gonna end up with like 45 three drops you have to cut it so that it's not you just can't play 25 three drops in your deck it's it's just a weird spot where you just stop being able to double spell as quickly and a lot of them can be cut for one or two drops in some cases so be careful on your three drops it'll get real crowded it is yeah i mean there's just the reason that i think we peak at two three here um your two auger three is going to be your highest spot usually in your deck well inaudible should be i think we think that it probably should be for an efficient deck overall but like three drops there's so many there's just so many good three drops i think i think this is why we talk against like carrots like cultivate um they fit into this three drop slot they are cultivate like i want to explain that this is a good card cultivate does good things it's a solid card but i feel like it clogs up that three slot when you can be playing things that have more synergy on your deck yeah if you're a creature deck cultivate gets edged out by every single mana dork that's ever existed all that like the wood elf variants which are more efficient and put a creature in play when you care about it but uh three drops yes we have about 17. four drops we have 9.5 so less than 10 by slightly less than 10 four drops in our decks this is where i feel like cards start to get a little clunky not necessarily right at four but everything above four for me is like uh i do not play those cards very often so i think not and we're not cdh yeah we're talking about those um well we play a lot of them we do we play almost ten four jobs right um it's not like we're not playing these cards this is the point on your curve where double spine becomes very very hard because the cast of four drop oh two four drops two four drops it just doesn't happen so you don't want to be clogged up at this point you but you can go four drop into one or two drop that is pos that is totally reasonable and that's why having the higher amount of the lower ones is so important but these spells are going to be very powerful usually and they're going to be potent so make sure you're using the right ones for your deck yes uh five drops this is going to be so much lower than so many people think it is it's 4.4 basically we got four five drops in our deck and i it's not that i want to cut five drops so i want to play only one drops in my deck i compare all these cards and i'm like what's the best cut well it's between this five drop removal spell maybe i can cut this two drop removal spell well guess which one's getting cut it's always the card that's five when i'm comparing it if that's a tiebreaker it's just such an easy thing to go i get to play more magic with this card not in my deck it's going to increase my rent percentage yeah exactly the curve we just you look it's literally a curve you go up you peak and as you go to the end you just get lower and lower and that's where do you peak you don't peak at five i think you're in trouble if you're peaking at five yeah if you're picking five you're going to be in trouble you want your average emc much lower than that i i would caution against peaking at four too honestly actually it's not cmc anymore it's mana value that's man of value i actually wrote that on the script i see that yeah actually yeah wow look at me look at me go what a professional at six shops we're at about 3.2 so that's three on average we don't want to go much over that six shops again clunky powerful spells but you're only ever gonna be able to play one of them a turn like we said six and uh six drops and higher are where you start to draw opening hands that are non-functional if you have too many of these in your deck and that's what i'm trying to avoid with at least cutting six drafts we go way low on six drops sometimes it's zero one two or three and i don't really play more than five ever just that's my personal preference from what i've noticed and i've had very good results with the changes i've made six drops just has to be really good and some of them are like bolas's citadel it's like well i'm just gonna win the game this card's insane or completely insane if you will but then some of them are like like grave titan is just the perfect example do i need this no can something else do this exact effect for cheaper lots of things yes i think something about these high drops is this is all curve is all about knowing what your deck wants to do i have decks with like 20 cards over 5cmc it's like i have a deck like that of course i have a ton of early game to like ramp into that but i my deck wants to be big stumpy it wants to be big and stupid it knows what it wants to be it's averaged in here it's part of the the 10 decks we averaged exactly and it's like we still end up at three yeah it's just it's all about again you want those three questions you asked beforehand are just so important when you understand your deck you can really make better choices for deck building yeah if you're an aristocrats deck i get this example a lot so i'm just gonna throw it out there because it applies perfectly if you're an aristocrat's deck and you're like well one of my win conditions is comboing nem death mantle and astronaut's altar to make infinite mana with creatures that produce multiple other creatures on etv yeah you could play grave titan uh-huh it's six mana so then let's say i'm looking at this deck that's mine and i have grave titan and these two things will go is there anything cheaper that makes two bodies and has an etb oh yeah there's like five other creatures that do that so cut gray i cut grave titan we'll throw in weapon craft enthusiasts i'm not winning with a 66 vanilla anyway so it doesn't matter that this thing is a one one that makes zero zeros it just oh zero ones uh it's gonna enter do its thing provides bodies to sacrifice if i'm not comboing and then just the same as grave titan wins me the game and gets infinite mana exactly um and the last thing seven plus drops we play 1.9 or two these are absolutely like super strong spells you gotta really talk me into this and we are not including for seven plus uh i feel like no website has gotten this right yet but treasure cruise is not an eight minute spell dig through time is not an eight minute spell vlasmus act does not cost nine uh this is this isn't going to matter but emerical promising does not cost 13. so a lot of those plus the seven mana mdfcs they're not seven mana spells that's what's so good about them they're fans yeah the bant ones those are all seven mana they're not seven mana spells they're not really seven mana spells so you can when you're doing your deck and you're trying to fit like our numbers sort of um don't aim for exact numbers don't aim for exactly our numbers these are averages um aim for what the card will actually cost you in the game treasure cruises like three so you know throw it in a two or a three slot or even a one if you're super heavy on that and throw the mdfcs in for free don't worry about that but actual cards that will always cost seven or more we're on like two yes all right so next we're heading into general tips these are just general overall deck building tips and i want to start with one thing um again i'm why am i avoiding saying the command zone did a template video and they talked about i was avoiding saying if i'm like why am i they'll come after us they're gonna come for us um they did one and they talked about like number of enablers payoffs and stuff like that i don't i don't think we can even give numbers for those because i think literally every single deck is different um i think an aristocrat techniques different number of enablers than a token's duck than a uh a land stock control deck might have none control deck dana planeswalker then i don't even think there is numbers to give for those honestly i think it is so case-to-case basis that giving you general numbers will not be helpful no these are broad tips that if you haven't you know heard them before you internalize them they're really going to help you when you're doing the other two things big things when you say how many of each card do i want what does my actual 99 look like how do i want to organize my mana curve determine how i'm making the final cuts for this deck so what's the first one the first thing is get as many cards as you think might make the deck together in either a decklist online so this is how we do it we go to moxfield and we type up our whole deck there's uh probably usually somewhere between 110 to 150 cards and not that's not cutting lands that's not counting lands we just throw everything like does this have a chance of being in this deck of course it does so we throw it in and we just get as many as we can and then we start cutting from there uh another one if you're more of a builder with your character throw all your cars in the pile yes that could be in this deck be like okay this is all the cards i can play with and then start cutting as you go lay out the curve yeah you want a real quick way to start cutting cards lay out your curve and you will make a lot of cuts that would have taken longer if you're just flipping through the cards in your hand uh not knowing what what cost everything is oh i have there's 12 cards that cost seven or more well if i'm going to use a nippy nerds deck building guide tm i'm going to cut like nine of them right away i don't need all of these and now suddenly i go from 150 to 141 and it's just going to be easier from there yeah exactly that perfect perfect perfectly sad and if you use the websites they literally are built-in yeah they sort it for you um again let's just max field great for building decks yeah we used to use tapped out nothing against tapped out i just think moxfield works a little bit better and it's so much flashier it's much easier to use yes it is very good and they have a great community next thing that we got here is building towards your theme oh my god we've we've we've said it probably five times this video already yeah but and we've also said it every time we tune up one of your decks every time we do a precon power up it's just like one of the core things you need to understand uh if you don't already i think this is like this is a core thing to fund an adh actually i think yeah um and that's why i think we bring it up so much i never i actually just thought of this right now when you build towards your themes and you actually go for the themes rather than just throwing in your staples you're really going to have a more fun more interesting deck whereas if you just throw in all these staples not that you won't have fun and not that you won't enjoy it but it's not going to be as unique it's not going to feel like you're doing the thing and i generally building towards your theme is going to give you a higher win percentage your deck's going to do the thing it wants more hardcore more streamlined and you're going to save multiple turns versus if you had played random you know staples that don't do anything for your strategy exactly put put in extra life gain cards put in extra uh landfall cards put an extra whatever your deck is doing big stompy creatures like again i i like the stompy thing again i ignore basically our own rules because i know the deck is something else i understand it's like this is a big stompy deck it wants stupid six drops all the time yes it's gonna be able to mitigate the fact that they cost a thousand by ramping extra there's more ramp there's more ways to do this um and i'm not saying don't play rustic study we're talking about like you can still play all your core like top 10 staples we're talking about this is the best example in the world so i'm gonna keep using it like cultivate if you're a creature deck or a graveyard deck or any deck that cares about any card type that is not a sorcery get cultivate out of your friggin deck and play card like what else i understand that what else gets one forest and cultivate gets two forests i am aware of that uh difference what elves is a creature in your deck that cares about creatures how many creature cards are in my graveyard well three but i could have four if this cultivate was a wood elves how many creatures do i want to sacrifice this turn well i don't have as many as i want because i cast cultivate and out of what else there's gonna be 85 little corner case scenarios that while you can say cultivate gets two lands but what else gets one i can type up a ten thousand word document of what what else does for your creature deck or your elf deck or whatever else that cultivate can't ever do because it only has one effect that's it exactly that is very very well put again yeah that was a good good little rant there uh next i also want to say for the staying on theme so this is just a random thing i could play i'm playing a life game deck my goal is to gain life i could play that's just two characters uh forexing arena which is a fine draw spell it's okay um or i could play cosmos elixir faction is better i mean it is better i mean it's not that it's not this great card cosmos elixir is not a great card either but it's cool because it's on my life theme i love going to i love playing themed cards just for the record i think it's close and i have decided which one's better oh okay well interesting i actually didn't think about that i thought it but that's interesting i i just like playing the card that is um the way more the theme yeah that one is more of um well i guess cosmos elixir is just better than fraxing arena in like a life game deck where your deck's just gonna be at 50 life okay uh so there's plenty of spots like that where you can go these cards are very similar but this one wants me to do the thing and when i'm doing the thing it's better yeah well if you're if you're not doing the thing you're aiming to do the thing and if you're doing the thing congratulations your card's better than a random staple yeah i don't think it's very good anyway yeah it does it does draw in stop that isn't upset it has on arena you get that the first turn you put it out if you have 40 or more life well it replaces itself fraction doesn't replace itself until your next turn yeah exactly i actually do like the car it's very cool um what's next what are we doing next we got to understand the strengths of the archetype what is your deck what is your archetype well we already know that because we figured out before we even built this thing so we got an aristocrats deck what are the strengths flooding the war with creatures being resilient to board wipes etc as long as you understand that you can play the cards of the choice like the removal spell that best suits your style yeah these are this is where the number things come in and they this will help you adjust like we have those big ranges because when you go okay i'm building the we'll just do the control deck again the weaknesses of my deck are i don't put creatures on the board i can't interact in or i can't stop creatures from getting on the board at all the time there's going and if they want to attack me they can just knock me out of the game so understanding that you go okay i need more board wipes because that's one of my weaknesses i need more spot removal to keep things off of my back yeah you get to play tricky stuff like oh i'll play thematic compass so now they're deterred their best creature can't attack me so maybe they just won't attack me with anything that happens all the time understand the strengths and the weaknesses for example my strength is i have much creatures well that means flashback marauder is a net positive for me just a lot of little realizations like that they're gonna get your win percentage way up yeah exactly you should you need to realize one card because um flashback martyr or what's the good one play crafter yeah playcrafter's the really good one um you have to understand that's not just a that's not any duck car it's just not um if it's if you're gonna play it and then sack it and that's the play that's not good but if you're gonna play it sack a token leave it on the battlefield and potentially do anything else with it that's so much better and understanding that you're an aristocrat stack your token that just died might have drawn you a card yeah or i mean play grafter if you suck it and you draw two cards off of it well now i'm in exactly no no we're talking and this works for every archetype we're using examples basic examples too there's plenty of more complex examples yeah exactly so you just need to understand this whatever your archetype is you need to look into it and it's i love this about this like i play uh we'll go to stompy really quick here for another one more example of its strengths in the archetype i understand that i'm going to have the biggest baddest creatures on the field so board wipes i'm at like two two board wipes in the whole deck because i don't need to wipe the board my stuff is ridiculously big yeah if in terms of rumbling and like actually attacking and blocking uh it's just not a big issue for you i have uh the god eternal catcher deck i have i'm gonna pump out like six four fours that have vigilance so they're attacking and they're not really worried about blocking because they have vigilance and they're four fours it's pretty big i i don't know if i play any boardwalks in that i think i play one exactly you don't have to play a lot of board wipes if you're the rumbling duck you just that's all about understanding what you have to you have to really understand what your deck is what it wants to do and this this goes back all this is all the pre-deck building things again it's so important to have an understanding of what your deck wants to do yeah and the last thing we're just going to stress real quick again now when you have car draw removal and ramp and you got to fill it in well guess what my top priorities are besides the best of the best staples like storage to plow shares or whatever top priorities are cards that now synergize with my deck for example if um the flashback were everything we'll just go back to that that's better than terminate because terminate doesn't do anything for your deck if you're an aristocrat stack it has literally no text that's it destroy a creature yeah two mana ain't bad but i'll take any creature that does any removal instead yeah exactly i think the best examples are the ones we put in the video if we're you want a creature and you want removal shriek ma sure more expensive uh on one end the other one doesn't hit none it's not black and white it's a trade-off the card is more expensive but it's better in your deck and has that 10 000 word page document of corner cases and regular cases where it's just better i think i think what is undervalued um here and what is missed um this is this is all actually this is this little thing about our terminate video it's this is this literal little thing we're talking about is where our terminated video comes from i think that little these synergies that will add up over a game and that you can get everywhere and every little card you put in is why we don't want to play terminate just terminates efficiency is very good it doesn't really synergize the place that you know why i'll play it i'll play it in my cast deck where it actually makes sense then that's where you start to make sense actually i can cast it twice but i can't cast revenue or twice exactly but everywhere else you know first of all if you're in like a three color mid-range deck that just needs removal spells well terminate may be efficient but guess what its versatility is like a big fat goose a doesn't do anything except destroy a creature well we're talking about now stuff like chaos warp or deadly rock is like okay i'll exile it for free or i'll target any permanent in play and we do plenty of stuff like that yeah and a last note we understand budget is a thing but some videos aren't about budget and terminate that terminator but yeah but again right to this here do put the card drawing that fits with your deck again cosmos elixir fits with my deck i'm always over 50 life in that deck liza attacks once i'm at 45 right so pretty simple easy things like that um removal like we said creatures in ramp we literally had an example of what else so perfect examples for all three of those but do you have any more general tips before i end this video no i do hope this video was of help to you i think we got a lot of big key things some things we haven't even said before out into the open they're here to help you build a deck increase your win percentage have more fun even just increase your fund percentage and i'll just say the one thing again because i think this i uh because it's the end of the video it's the last time i'm gonna say it i know i've said that like four times understanding your deck is the most important step to building a deck understanding everything your deck wants to do is so important because you can just if you don't know what you want to build all you're going to end up with is a pile of staples and like the deck's going to be fine it's going to be strong and you can do that there's not even anything necessarily wrong with that but you can build a much more efficient better and synergistic duck if you take the time to understand what you want to do all right i think we got to end it absolutely so special shout outs to every single one of our patrons we love you all as much as we can without making you uncomfortable obviously we would never want to make anyone uncomfortable never never but you can also go if you don't want to support us on patreon you don't have to go to the tcg player link now when you buy cards or tcgplayer just navigate buy the cards like you normally would but start with our link we get a kickback on the order you didn't spend any extra money and as a side bonus you're supporting local game stores yes you're supporting exactly supporting local game stores and you sports without spending an extra cent that's pretty awesome yeah that's like a way your way of tipping us the next time you go to buy cards it's a free rule it doesn't look like a free roll until you roll the dice i'm so sorry okay shaking like that there we go sorry my bad okay do you have a tidbit a tidbit oh yeah no it's actually something i wanted to mention because okay um we our ultimate goal is for overall for our career is just to do this um there isn't something greater than this this isn't like this isn't a stepping stone to doing something that that else yeah if you ask me where i see myself in 10 15 20 years uh hopefully making the magic the gathering content on whatever social media is preferably youtube but whatever social media i can spread the message of most people that's what i'm doing i'm gonna make magic the gathering commander content exactly that and that's our goal yeah so we were thinking about it and we know that this is what we're gonna do you want you ready for something busy this is pretty this is this is well it's something i haven't said to you and i think it's if we are coming out i'm already getting oh okay i've been out of the closet since i was 16. it's been it's been literally 14 years for me half of my life uh regardless if well not if not if when we reach this is so many subscribers 250 000 subscribers i'm going to officially change my name to joe cherries when do we reach that goal you're going to literally i'm going to literally change many i know you i i didn't tell you because i legally changed you i know you talked about it i remember going oh man because it sounded like you were actually interested in it i'm like you actually liked it and i'm like oh dang he's being he's being kind of serious yeah but it's so it's fun who cares about last names it's literally my person it's literally my persona it's who i'm known as it's what everyone knows our friend who i've been playing magic with for well over a year maybe two years i don't know of the time frame actually literally went and said your last name is in cherries he was like no no it's not it's not actually cherry that was the spark that changed all this cherry's like now i gotta make it so that my last name is cherries so now when someone asks why is your name joe cherries that's my legal name dummy that's my legal name my mom named me joe cherries but i thought it was a cool little thing to like set a huge goal like that's pretty cool i we're getting i'm gonna put that as many places as i can because i think a lot of people would like to see you maybe we'll vlog it yeah as soon as as soon as it um it's it's far away i mean it's one of the mill it's more than ten times our sub quarter mill yeah i'm not saying this is going to be soon but as soon if it happens which no when it happens it's not there's no if i don't do ifs here we're going to keep going we're not going to stop this some something would have to go off the rails completely for us to want to even come close to stopping this no i'll have to die and when it happens i will illegally do it and i'll don't worry i'll show the court papers i'll do all that stuff we'll make sure we get it done right i was actually i googled it to make sure it was doable and possible before this why wouldn't it be uh because some places it's like a pain like uh you have to jump through 25 hoops to do it um but it's not that bad in new york state actually well you have that to look forward to this 250 000 sub goal which is now the highest goal before i think we had a hundred thousand subs we're going to get a life-size anakin action figure so because those ones are too tiny oh no oh we want we're getting old yeah we're getting life size oh we wanted a hundred thousand yeah not life size but like it's like this tall expensive figurine size yeah like two thousand dollar obi-wan uh and uh so that's our hundred thousand and at two hundred fifty thousand look forward to actual factual joe cherries i wonder what that's a weird scale of change a hundred thousand will buy an action figure but double it and i'll change my name forever i mean i basically have accepted that my name is just joe cherries at this point well i think this video's over it is peace out tripe scout [Music] that

Channel: Nitpicking Nerds

Views: 153,278

Keywords: Your Guide to Commander Deckbuilding | The Nitpicking Nerds Official Deckbuilding Strategy, how to build a commander deck, building your first commander deck, building a commander deck, commander deckbuilding template, commander template, edh template, building your first edh deck, how to build an edh deck, mtg, edh, commander, nitpicking nerds

Id: B_tswyATOeA

Length: 41min 54sec (2514 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021