How to Optimize Your Commander Deck | EDH | Optimization Guide | Magic the Gathering | Commander

[Music] hello and welcome to the commander's quarters your magic the gathering source that helps you command your budget this show and episodes like this one are possible thanks to viewers like you if you're looking for an easy way to help support this show make sure that you like share and subscribe also hit that bell notification icon so you don't miss any new episodes you can also go check out our playmats and other merchandise at the commanders quarters dot com another easy way to support this show is with our tcg player affiliate links so whether you're buying a deck or individual cards you can use this general link right here or one in the description in the final way that you can support this show is by supporting us directly by becoming a patron there are many benefits to being a patron and i truly couldn't do this without all their support hey everyone mitch coming in from the commander square studio and today i'm joined by alec hi everybody so alec and i are gonna be talking today about a topic that is near and dear to our hearts uh alec actually is probably more near and dear to his he is the optimization expert so if you ever felt like your deck isn't living up to expectations and you need to crank that synergy all the way up to 11 alec wrote this part by the way and i really like it so i'm pretty sure try to say it word for word then you want to pay close attention to this episode so that's the intro anyways so optimization optimizing your deck it can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people it's you know what i'm gonna pass over the expert right now alec what does optimization mean to you sure um to me optim optimizing means making card choices that make the deck flow through the curve easily efficiently and give the deck a clear purpose so for example you can get your deck to run faster as an aggressive strategy perhaps you need to sacrifice some power at the higher cmc level for cards at the lower end of the mana curve but it helps your you know aggressive strategies hum quickly and get you on the board absolutely um you can also adjust your removal to better interact with your play groups and your meta and that'll be super important so to make sure that you don't have like just dead cards in your hand another way i do this is building my land base and ramp to cast the spells i want to when i want to so you can build your lands in a particular way you know choose your ramp cards to adjust your landing and adjust your land count you know in case like you're running landfall strategies you might want to run more lands more ramp yep yeah i mean it always depends on your commander and what your deck's trying to do if you've got a commander that comes out on turn four you probably really want to focus on ramping on turn two and maybe not ramping on turn three with certain cards that might be pretty effective in other decks just not as effective in that one totally and like you know so this comes down to card choices um so for example you guys might have seen the um video where i was playing a cycling deck um certain cards such as like frixion arena might take a backseat to a card like to fairies uh ageless insight which is a better card draw engine when i'm just drawing cards all the time yeah absolutely i mean when it comes to kind of commander staples there are some that yes you can include in a lot of decks but you should also kind of consider what cards might be better for this specific deck again great example with your cycling deck where that one is going to draw you what two cards when you cycle now instead of one versus frixion arena which is like hey every turn you get one extra card each on your turns you get one extra card for one life drawing two per cycle is much better than that kind of a deck yeah totally perfect for what i want to do absolutely now it's important to note that optimization is not intended to give your deck its its purpose or its goal instead optimization is making the card choices and crafting your deck in a certain way uh to make sure that every card and interaction moves towards achieving this goal that makes sense i mean you can't exactly you know optimize something that's not there yet you can't you know not have a plan and then be like all right i need to make this optimized there's nothing for there that's this right so yeah you need to kind of like the base first and then you can you need the car first and then you can sup it up essentially right yeah you [Laughter] you need the wheels still the car has to move first and then you can you know give it the better wheels i'm not a car person i'm sorry the better wheels the better wheels v8 engines hemi i don't know those aren't wheels i know i know but making cars better i don't know okay anyways i'm way out of my wheelhouse right now keep going moving on so the question comes down to then why should i optimize my deck you know it seems like my deck runs fine on the cards that i threw into it you know what are the benefits specifically because your cards and interactions are chosen for a specific purpose moving towards that goal you'll find in games that you have a clear understanding of what your cards can do and then you can have like a better control or feel of the game and what things you might need to do in response to certain threats or how to move forward in order to like take advantage of a good opportunity absolutely i mean i think an important thing is kind of like again when you are playing those games you're learning from them you're seeing kind of how your deck performs maybe where some gaps might be in your deck and then kind of adjusting from there yeah i mean you can you know you can only get so much from gold fishing it obviously you can get some things but until you actually kind of take it out and actually play against you know actual other decks then you might be able to figure out kind of what can be improved yeah think of it like you're a chess grand master okay well i'm i'm a chess grand master as well as a car expert so let's continue this totally so you're going to have a very clear understanding of what you're you know what you're working with your pieces in our case our cards and so we know the limitations and strengths of each one you know where each one excels where you know their weaknesses are where you know we can uh make adjustments you know thankfully we play commander and magic so we're not limited just the pieces that are on the chessboard uh we have a lot of different options and while that pro that can make the process a lot more challenging when optimizing your deck um it gives us a lot more freedom to make choices that are um great for you know what we're doing our specific goal and for like what things identify us as commander players absolutely i mean that's kind of thing about commando that's great you have so many options right you've got almost every single card in magic to choose from when it comes to making your deck so yeah there's a lot of kind of choices that you have to make and so there's a lot of things that you can optimize but also you're kind of making it unique to yourself as well i mean you're going to be hard-pressed to find someone else that has the exact same deck card for card in fact i only know what the percentage chance of that is unless you just kind of pull up you know a list and just build that same list but if you're making your own from scratch probably not going to make the exact same list as someone else yeah well and like sometimes you know it's it's it's really common to um and like tempting to try to um just take like a list from online or to look at like edhrec and just say like these are just all the cards i'm going to add to my list um you know that's probably going to be a fine deck but it may not be you know personalized to you to what you want to do with the deck and you know doing something that's a little different optimized to you know how you like to play can be rewarding too because then you can uh you know give your deck its own sense of identity and you know how it partners with you and you can kind of like get to be known for this particular version of the deck that is something that you own and people will know you for it yeah absolutely and if you want to use the kind of those decks online you know whether that's a deck tech or getting something off of edh rack like that's going to be a great starting point for you and again that's that's the car right that's car that has the wheels already and then you soup it up with your own kind of you know special sauce so yeah yeah cars and sauce never talk about chefs grand masters everything they're all shaking their heads yeah everyone's like this episode has gone off the rails so now how do we do this how do we add our special sauce to these wheels um so we want to make sure to talk about our specific tips for optimizing um the main one i think i like to talk about is optimizing for balance and moving your game game process forward there's a there's a deck building guide that i like to reference and specifically it calls out that you should be really looking at 30 to 35 of your deck being devoted specifically to your primary game plan um so ensuring that you get to that 30 is really important because it's really those cards that you're going to be drawing that are moving your strategy forward absolutely yeah i think part of that is consistency right like if you if you you know are finding that your deck is working sometimes but not other times you know maybe you need to kind of readjust and you know again like i think you said 30 right dedicated to your main strategy then maybe you need to kind of pick and choose and say like okay maybe these cards are more so just kind of good cards in general but not really go with the strategy you know so maybe take some of those out and try to add in more synergistic pieces to it yeah and we play commander the reality is is like we don't have the flexibility that say modern standard decks where they can play you know up to four of of a specific card we don't have that flexibility to add in that redundancy i am very happy with that if we don't have four cyclonic riffs coming at me there are ways to like ensure that you're doing this relatively the same thing or pushing your strategy forward um by utilizing cards that are similar now it can be attempting to uh you know cut into that number when you're making cuts of um adding new cards um but you really want to try to avoid doing that because um again this that's the process that's moving your deck forward moving you towards your end game um for example i've got a bread deck which is specific around artifacts and specifically small artifacts which i like to call eggs such as chromatic star chromatic sphere now you know those guards are functionally the same and they don't really do a whole lot on their own but because i have two of them i have much higher chance of drawing them and they push me towards my primary game plan yep absolutely the more of them i can draw the better for anyone who enjoys playing against my jewelry deck you're definitely going to enjoy playing against that bread deck very similar again where it comes to yeah you want in just an over abundance of those kinds of pieces so for like joy you want you know those can-tripping artifacts when they come in versus kind of the ones made that you sacrifice to you still want those too but you want all the artifacts just artifacts everywhere everyone loves playing it's artifact storm decks so when talking about our primary strategy uh we also want to make sure that we're clear um which cards are enablers in that they push the strategy primary strategy forward and what we would call support cards so these are cards that accentuate cards that are your enablers or push the strategy forward um but they don't really do anything to enable your process by themselves i think the biggest example of this as i would say doubling season sure you know obviously amazing in like plus one plus one counter strategies or token strategies but if you don't draw any of those cards when doubling season is in as on the battlefield it doesn't really do anything i mean it's a nice looking card you know it's got some good art on it you know it probably would get some removal targeted at it but yeah it's not really do anything for you right so like say you had like a a few different cards that did the same thing as doubling season in your deck um but then you've you've cut out say like dragon fodder in order to replace that if you just cut too many of those dragon dragon fodder effects you'll find that all of a sudden your supporter cards like doubling season just don't have any function in your main strategy yeah that when they when they do kind of hum they hum really well but there's sometimes when you're just not drawing into those cards that actually do what your strategy wants right totally okay the next thing we want to talk about too is uh looking for synergies across your other functions such as like your ramp or your removal slots your lands etc looking for options that can function across multiple roles these are super important because you can buff up your percentage of those different areas by playing cards that can play multiple roles gotcha so like an artifact-centric deck wait hear me out with a card that's called wayfarers bobble it ramshu and it's an artifact and if you've got like sacrificing synergies or whatnot it's a perfect card should be reprinted at some point yeah so beyond giving more cards better functionality to be impactful across a wider range of situations doing this also increases the pure percentage of cards that further your primary strategy so like in an artifact-centric deck like you said drawing a wayfarer's bobble even though it may not be super important at the time like if it's later on in the game it's still an artifact yeah absolutely like and like the jewelry deck you know you still cast it you still draw a card because it's an artifact so it can still serve a purpose even if its main purpose is something else right absolutely uh the next section you've got here is optimizing for your meta i think this is a really important thing because if let's say even the same player but let's say you know that they're in two separate metas okay the separate timelines sorry you know they met this one group and then this other you know butterfly effect happened they met another group in a different you know universe or whatnot parallel universe anyway this is a really roundabout way of saying that the same player could optimize the same deck in a different way depending on what group they're playing with totally yeah and you might find too if like you're swapping between groups you know you're playing with certain group some days and then another group and other days you might find that your deck is uh you know well suited for one group and horribly suited for the other that's a lot more confusing than the parallel universe let's stick with that but uh you know to that effect we want to make card choices that taken into consideration who you normally play with um you know if you see a lot of reanimation you're going to want to make sure and play graveyard hate eddie uh you know you play a lot of token decks lean into wrath to you know make sure that you're staying high in your life total yep uh you know if you're combo you're facing combo a lot maybe permission might be a good way to interact absolutely i think something to note on that though especially with this kind of reminds me of kind of when i first started building decks and kind of optimizing a bit too much maybe with wrath specifically for me that was kind of my problem where when i built my selenium dark angel deck originally the best strategy for that deck is keep the board clear all the time so i was running like 15 or so wraths in that deck even though that might be optimized it's not a fun play group experience for certain play groups and so it's not exactly optimized for that group even though it's the most optimal build for it that i could you know build on a budget and i really enjoyed other people might not enjoy that so make sure you're optimizing for your group too again the same kind of goes with like mass land destruction that kind of stuff certain groups love it that's completely fine it may be the most effective thing for your deck but other groups maybe not so much so just kind of adjust to your group and that's okay yeah and you can kind of like hedge your bets too you can make sure to include cards that like um you know have a specific purpose uh against a particular strategy but um can also like replace themselves by you know drawing or cycling such as like soul guide lantern or chromos vengeance you may not have the situation you need to play those or like have a particular hate at the time that you need it but in that case you can just draw a card yeah flexibility is always important all right so next we want to talk about optimizing to the way that you play so this is refers to you know the preferred style that you like to play you know if you've played as long as we have uh you'll start to notice that there's a particular strategy you tend to lean to maybe you're typically the person to get more creatures on the board first and want to go aggro all the time maybe you enjoy just sitting back and durdling for forever drawing all the who likes to do that no it wouldn't be any of us so you know you want to you want us you know kind of lean towards card choices then that best support the way that you like to play you'll feel kind of feel like your decks just like work well with your uh the way that you enjoy um playing absolutely and everyone's got pet cards and stuff like that actually kind of that's an interesting thing there can be pet cards that work really well with certain decks and like are very synergistic but you kind of have to notice when that pet card might be coming a bit too spread across your decks like maybe it's not a perfect card for another deck but you really like it and you kind of have to realize that so there is something to be said about optimizing for the way that you play but also something optimizing you know per deck too yeah well and sometimes too you just want to try something different too and so it might be a good idea to make intentional choices around like okay i play cultivate in say five out of my six decks the next deck i want to play yeah it's got green but maybe do i really need to play cultivate maybe i want to try something a little bit different yeah like grow from the ash is fantastic heart i love it yeah more than cultivate sorry cultivate anyways i'm not gonna get any comments on that next up we've got optimizing for your budget it looks like you said would like to lean on mitch to fill out this section i mean he is the expert uh i've built a couple decks anyways um i think the the main part uh that i want to point out this is basically just because you're building on a budget doesn't mean that you can't build in you know in a deck in an optimal way that's synergistic obviously you can't use you know the top end pieces or whatnot but what you can do is i guess my biggest kind of roundabout way of saying this is i'd like to recommend that when it comes to building these kinds of decks you don't get stuck on certain cards counterspell is a fantastic card yes it is is it one of the best counter spells out there yeah i mean counter spell is named after counter spell right it's still a two dollar card and one that doesn't seem like a lot you know for most stacks you know if you're running on a 50 budget or a 25 budget that's a huge chunk of your budget and if you kind of cut you know a little bit off of that counter spell price and you know maybe using a gate maybe use some other counter spells like unwind or whatnot then you can kind of utilize that you know budget that you save there elsewhere for some more pieces the biggest example of this is the git rock monster deck that i built that has basically two pieces that you have to have or the deck doesn't work in the way that you want to work and i believe those are vigor and dread and at the time i built the deck they were five dollars a piece or whatnot so took up a huge chunk of the budget and i had to make cuts everywhere else to make it work but you and sometimes you have to do that in order to make your deck function the way you want to function into optimizing the way that you want to optimize you need to make those sacrifices elsewhere and put the money where it needs to go that a pretty weird way of saying that but let's just go with it well and also sometimes by exploring other options you can be pleasantly surprised by the functionality of the particular card so for example i play nyandar which benefits you by casting as many instances and sorceries as you possibly can because then your lands become giant uh beat faces um yeah speed faces that's that's a that's an official magic term that's a few phrases on this channel this episode um now normally you know when you look at blue instance and sorceries especially ones that draw you cards you know typically your mind goes to say like preordain you know premier blue can trip great um but you know when looking at potentially cheaper options you look at cards such as like think twice which actually benefits the deck more because yeah it doesn't give you the sky option but it gives you two casts off of one card absolutely um so you know being significantly cheaper and also like potentially impacting the game more with your primary game strategy is perfect addition yeah absolutely and if i i don't think i've shared that knowing dar decklist but i love that deck so i should probably just include the link in the description for anyone that wants to beat their opponents with with lands they're not flying lanes though right i don't think so you can you can make certain ones fine okay yeah okay there you go if you want to beat up your opponents with lands or just one i think one lane usually you just make one big land generally and then just smack people's faces lots of fun so yeah i'll share that link in the description below it's a fun one so when you're when you're not on the receiving end of it it's it's fun oh you know you can enjoy it i still enjoy watching it go all right so you know of course we talked a little bit here about like how to open optimize what we think about when optimizing um now we have to go like look back on what we've done and say like so i've made all these changes and thought about how my deck is put together how do i know if my deck is optimized does this mean that i'll like win all the games going forward uh no uh i mean if if you do that's great you're the only person who's ever won every single commander game you've ever played right most likely so comment below and let us know because we'd love to meet you uh but no i mean i don't think it's kind of interesting because i don't know if there is like a final optimization ever for a deck right you can always improve i think i think and obviously with new cards coming out and whatnot you kind of always want to have kind of that on your mind you know maybe this card would be good for this deck or this card would be good for this deck obviously the more decks that you have the harder it just kind of keep track of all those things but basically kind of just have that in your mind even if you're just kind of playing with you know people you know in a new play group or if you're playing you know with people at your local game store when we can do that again uh and basically kind of just keeping your eye out for you know certain cards that you maybe never seen before and you're like wait actually that would be perfect for this deck you know i don't think it's possible to fully optimize a deck ever and it's definitely not possible to win every single one of your games and that's not really the point of commando though right the point is to have fun yeah you know i guess i guess the way that i would look at it is the deck is optimized for you when you don't feel like changing anything and you just really enjoy playing it totally and also too that you felt like you've perhaps learned something in the process uh that you know tried out new cards you know it can be kind of disappointing to see say like the cultivate kodamas reach across the table all the time um so you could try like new cards you know see if they work for you or for you just like enjoy playing something like recross the paths you know hey you know you can get random cards and like hey you like to gamble a little bit perfect card for that oh yeah gambling magic that's how magic started actually that's what we're promoting yes just kidding no don't gamble anti-cards abandoned commander for a reason yeah so ultimately the goal here is to build the deck in the way that you want and to to make it so that way it suits you in the way that you like to play magic in the way that you have fun playing magic and the way that suits your you know the the people that you're playing magic with um and so we hope that we uh provided you some insights you definitely did i probably just more said spouted nonsense as usual but otherwise provided insights into like how that might be useful for you um maybe perhaps give you some ideas of what things to think about yeah and we'd love to see uh you know the things that you come up with yeah absolutely so remember car with wheels sauce hemi v8 uh grandmaster chess yes totally perfect all those things uh and anyways thank you alec for joining me on this episode of course thank you i hope you enjoyed it and i hope you all enjoyed it because yeah that was fun there's gonna be some comments below about all the weird things that were said in this one and as always thanks again and have a good one have a [Music] good [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Commander's Quarters

Views: 94,022

Keywords: Optimized Commander, Optimize Deck EDH, Optimize Deck EDH, Magic the Gathering, MTG, Commanders Quarters Pod

Id: KhO3R_cDxVw

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020