How to Design A Commander Deck

one of my favorite things to do is Brew up new decks but coming up with a deck can also be very difficult so in this guide I will tell you the three main ways to design a commander deck but before that if you like my videos consider subscribing thanks quick disclaimer this video will not be how to build a commander deck if you want to know how many lands to include or how much removal to pack watch my video here so there are three main ways to design a deck top down bottom up and and sideways I'm going to start with sideways because it's honestly the simplest this is what I call Decks that are designed without gameplay in mind for example I recently saw a Ratatouille movie themed deck at my local game store the deck played rats and made food tokens and had other Chef related cards cards were included because they reminded the player of the movie not because it was good in the deck another example is a buddy of mine made a metal band themed deck where all the art art and card names felt like they could be the names of songs or the art could be on the album cover of some metal band The Deck spoke to him because he really likes metal music and that's kind of all there is to it for these types of decks I only have one piece of advice you're going to lose a lot and you need to be ready for that since you're adding cards for reasons other than Synergy your deck just lacks the power that a more synergistic build might have bonus points though if you can make a deck based on a movie or book and actually have it function well the next way to design a deck and I think the most common way is top down this is where you pick a legendary creature and build your deck around it this might seem very obvious to many players since building around your commander is partly the point of the format it could be a legend you cracked from a pack or some Legend you clicked on from edre once you've selected your Legend the deck can often times build itself depending on the commander if it's a tribal card you want to add a lot of tribe members and tribal Synergy cards if your commander does things when you cast into instance and sorceries then you're going to want to fill your deck with a bunch of instance and sorceries top down design has the benefit of giving you immediate structure to your deck when designing a deck top down one thing to pay attention to is enablers versus payoffs let's compare a few xell commanders rashen gives you a ton of Mana to enable you to Cast X spells for a lot of Mana which is usually what you want to do make X really big now let's compare that to zakara this Commander does not ramp you into X spells nearly as well but when you do cast an X spell you get extra benefits rashen wants you to go all in on one big X spell where zakara wants you to cast many X spells so you might want a higher density in a zakara deck and the most powerful commanders are often ones that are enablers and payoffs something like mic of the is Magus not only makes casting X spells Easier by reducing the cost but when you do cast a big X spell it rewards you by giving you an experience en counter that kind of feeds back into it just make sure if your commander is an enabler to have more payoffs in the 99 and if your commander is a payoff have more enablers for that payoff in the 99 top- down design might feel like the easy way to build a deck and it sort of is but there are a lot of traps that players can fall into mostly playing cards that do nothing without the Commander in play Let's Take Hinata Dawn Crown as an example this Commander reduces the cost cost of your spells by one for each Target so people commonly play cards like distorting wake in their hanata deck this lets you bounce any amount of nonl permanence for just triple blue these two cards in play make a very powerful combo but what if Hinata is not in play well distorting wake is pretty bad sorcery speed makes it kind of rough and it's really not very Mana efficient until you get to the five or six Mark for X especially since bouncing a creature is often a one mana ability this is why distorting wake shows up in less than 1% of decks on EDH wreck it's just not very powerful so without your commander you're now stuck with a bad card in hand many times people who build around their Commander end up with lots of bad cards that only work with their commander in play and if their Commander dies three or four times suddenly their deck just kind of falls apart and does nothing if only there was a better way to build your deck I think bottomup design is the best way to design a commander deck this is what I do with basically all my commander decks and it almost always makes my deck more consistent so instead of starting with your commander you start with a theme this can be anything it can be as simple as I want to play a white enchantment deck or I want to make a go forced combat deck once you have your theme you want to find cards that you want to play in the deck let's use the Go theme as an example you might go to Skyfall and scroll through all the the cards that have the word go let's say you like the cards ghoulish impetus slice your hired muscle and taunt from the rampart cool we've decided on mardu colors time to find a commander now sometimes finding the commander to fit your theme after you've come up with it can be relatively easy if we were in monor red you could just play grenzo but in mardu there are no legendary creatures that go so what now do we just bail on the deck no of course not we can still find a commander that works here we have a few options you can go the just for the colors route where you just play some commanders which provide card advantage or late game value and use those this is very easy to do with Partners so timna plus some other red partner and you can just attack people to draw cards doesn't really matter what your theme is drawing cards is almost always good or you could play a commander like terel who is just a powerful late game card which will give you value as the game drags on these are perfectly fine options for a mardu go go deck but it's often better to find a commander which is synergistic for your strategy when there's not an obvious option though this might require some thinking outside the box so for mardu go maybe you could do queen marchesa go works well with the monarchy since it forces people to attack one another instead of you allowing you to get extra value this way you can keep the monarchy for longer and then also work a monarchy sub theme into the deck or maybe you could play all the legendary creatures that go or Force combat basically all the other commanders in these colors and play Dada which will help you draw into a bunch of Force combat oriented commanders this approach has so many benefits for starters it usually makes your deck a little unique since you need to think outside the box to find a commander I don't think I've seen or heard of Dada oops all go commander deck and because you built your deck from the theme first and found the commander last it means your deck has a stronger Foundation and probably works better by itself without the Commander in play instead of being a commander that has 99 cards to support it this is a deck that functions on its own and has a powerful Synergy piece in the command Zone you always have access to bottom up design decks will generally have less non games you know the ones where you play your commander it dies you play your commander it gets countered you play your commander it gets board wiped and then your deck does nothing anymore I think less of those games means more fun overall which is why I try to focus on making my decks designed bottom up so they function well enough without the commander but that is just my opinion if you disagree as always let me know in the comments below and do you prefer a different way of Designing Commander decks or is there a fourth method you use that I didn't mention here also do you like the new spite work I did a little redesign for the channel if you do check out my friend atbu on Twitter or Instagram they make lots of awesome artwork and feel free to DM about commissions if you want some art for yourself links as always are in the description thank you so very much for watching subscribe for more

Channel: The Trinket Mage

Views: 27,472

Keywords: mtg, edh, commander, elder dragon highlander, magic the gathering

Id: AFS0YWRJF3w

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024