Introduction to Commander Deck Building | The Command Zone 372 | Magic: The Gathering EDH

greetings humans you have entered the command zone your destination for all aspects of elder dragon highlander enjoy your stay fill me up build me a buttercup baby just to let me down let me down and mess me around in the worst of our worst of all you never call baby when you say you will say you will but i love you still i need you i need you more than anyone darling you know that i have it from the start so build me up build my not bad this is the first time singing from across the room so i'm gonna blame it on that yeah if you ever catch me or josh looking away from the camera it's because we're actually just looking at each other what's up everybody you are watching slash listening to the command zone podcast i'm your host jimmy wong how is it it's josh lee kwai josh is in uh the steam vents today i'm somewhere on uh korea yeah in a nice nice triumph of sorts uh today uh welcome to 2021 this is our second episode of the year but today we are actually going to be revisiting one of our very first episodes in fact it was our very first episode yeah we did our first episode it was called commander 101 and that was hold on to something jimmy over six years ago wow yeah um so in that time edh has grown it's changed it back then it was like a small fringe format that some people played and now it is the most popular way to play magic yeah as confirmed by watsi and numerous articles now which is pretty crazy yeah so we figured it was probably time to revisit this topic yeah uh so much really has changed especially with commander legends of the year that we just had so this episode today is focused on people who are joining the format uh so you may be a brand new player maybe your friend listens to the podcast and says hey you have to listen to this episode if you want to find out all about deck building and how to get into the format or even if you're a seasoned veteran i think there's some there's gonna be something in here to for everyone yeah i think if you're a seasoned veteran and there's a lot of new people coming to the format because it is so popular now and you're maybe looking for ways to sort of shepherd those new players in hopefully this will be an episode that you can point to yeah or maybe get some tips from and just use yourself yeah and there's gonna be a lot of fun stuff in here but before we get into it six years later one thing has changed we are brought to you by cardkingdom.com command zone we're gonna be talking about building decks and creating car creating your own creations expressing your personality through magic and what better way to do that than just by buying magic cards because that's where you have to start cardking.com commands that's our affiliate link if you use that link every single purchase you make goes towards helping this podcast out but also goes towards helping you make your deck improve your deck bring someone else into the format uh so it's just basically a win-win overall yeah card kingdom is the best and right now i believe you can start pre-ordering ordering caldheim already uh we've seen some of the previews come through already and it looks super sweet so if you want to get your hands on that cardkingdom.com command zone and then once you have all those cards you want to protect them you know magic cards are valuable you don't want them to get messed up dinged up scuffed up anything like that the best way to protect all of your game pieces is with ultra pro products they make the sleeves the deck boxes the play mats everything you need to keep all your stuff safe and not only safe but looking awesome yeah ultra pro really is the stuff that jimmy and i trust our own collections with and really does make sure that none of your cards are going to get damaged yeah i collect play mats and that's one of my favorite parts about eligible they always have something new this is from zendikar josh has one of the first play actually the first play that we ever made a little bit of a throwback as well uh and finally the last way to support the show is directly at patreon.com command zone patrons get all sorts of awesome benefits together watch extra turns and game nights a day early ad free they also get to talk to josh and i on our discord ask us questions and join our amazing community there that is ready to answer questions dive into sweet combos and talk about new previews and all that yeah so make sure you go to patreon.com command zone that's how you join our patreon also another perk is that we shout out one lucky patron every single episode and this episode is dedicated to brandon nguyen brendan brendan you rock indeed okay deck building 101 for 2021 uh we're going to cover some practical steps and thought processes when it comes to how commander works how to go about building your first deck or just your latest deck and it's not going to be a deep dive into sort of the ratios and the numbers we're actually going to do that in a future episode when we update again our commander deck building template because those things have changed quite as well that'll be deck building 102. yeah yeah hey we have a whole college 202 201 i don't really know how those numbers work can we start a college with professor rounds or does he need to like be our headmaster that's a big downside to starting college i gotta say so today we're gonna be focusing on more general tips for newer players and seasoned veterans a light one uh like when it comes to deciding on a deck to build but first off we want to talk about a really general what is commander just for people who maybe have seen game nights or haven't even seen that and found this video another way we're gonna go through it really quickly this is gonna be fast so in the show notes we're gonna have some links if you don't know what commander is or the rules are definitely check out those links but we're gonna go through it really quickly just so we're all on the same page if you're very very new so if um what is commander first of all commander is a special format of magic the gathering unlike other regular quote unquote magic which is 1v1 commander lets you play with multiple people so three players in a single game are four players which is what we suggest in a single game but you can go up to five six seven eight nine too yeah we recommend around four keep things nice and sane and fitting around the single table uh to play commander each player brings a special deck of 100 cards to the table the format was originally called elder dragon highlander and the highlander part is an homage to the famous line from the movie there can only be one with mcleod and the sword and all that stuff so that means you can only have sean connery oh yeah of course the amazing sean connor was always talking about the mother of roons so because it's highlander you can only have one copy of any given unique card so except for basic land so it's it's they called the singleton format the idea is that you're not playing two three copies of any cards there's some cards of course that break the rules but in the in general it's a singleton format so the elder dragon part of that name of l dragon highlander refers to your commander which is the more modern name for the format uh so with few exceptions the commander is a very special part of your deck because it must be a legendary creature from magic's history and it will say that right on the creature type as well yeah and your commander starts in a special area called the command zone and unlike other cards in your deck you always have access to that commander card you don't have to draw it out of your deck as you would your other cards so this means that most decks are built with their strategies and synergy synergies uh surrounding the commander or with their commander in mind because you always have access to it and the possibilities are endless there have been over 20 000 cards in the history of magic so yeah you can build with with all of them in this format basically with a few exceptions that are banned yeah uh gavin verhey a friend of the show has said that commander is an amazing way for players to express their personality and with so many cards and so many commanders especially from last year adding so many that definitely is what this game is all about players start with 4d life instead of the regular 20 in the multiplayer game and the game is over when only one player is left standing and the others are knocked out only one may stand which is our version which is a little close too there can be only one yeah it's kind of like a knockoff t-shirt um one other special rule of the format is that your commander the physical card your commander has a special property in combat it deals something called commander damage to your opponents so if one of your opponents takes 21 commander damage from any individual commander so that means jimmy's commander and my commander count their damage separately but if my commander hit jimmy for 21 he would immediately be knocked out of the game it doesn't matter what his life total is at how much health he's gained or anything like that so commander damage is a special rule only in commander basically or commander variance yeah and there's of course a few rules special ban lists all that stuff again the links will all be below now people love to play commander for a variety of reasons either it's the uniqueness of the commanders how you can express themselves and their personality via gameplay or maybe they're challenged because it's super technically difficult to play certain styles or certain deck types or maybe they just love the political atmosphere and the banter around the table and you know for me and josh that was like the first thing that we loved was just like bantering with friends testing our medal against our friends and then building some rivalries and so on and so forth i like how you put down here commander was invented in 1996 which is three years before everquest yes this game has been around a while everquest was seen as like the first big mmo one that josh played i loved it and i think that's sort of where the idea of like a legendary creature is your hero your champion you know that sort of theme started back with commander and everquest and mmos and stuff and so i think this is commander actually kind of started that modern day trend and there are tons and tons of players of commander around the world as we said is now the most popular format we can both attest to this we've literally played around the world i was walking down the street in prague and somebody goes hey i love game nights last year true story okay yeah so if you're gonna play commander you're gonna find tons of people to be able to play with yep and one of the most common questions whether you're a first time player or a thousandth time player is what deck should i build or play next ah i want to do something that's new or different uh how do i get to doing that so that's what this today's episode is all about okay so that's what commander is it's definitely more complicated that please follow the links in the show notes for all the specific details let's talk about the big thing here though jimmy deck building yep i think the really big important thing to start off with is it's daunting to build your first deck or even your second third fifth deck yeah just remember it does not need to start with a perfect idea or the perfect commander yeah that's generally a really bad way to learn how to do anything or to grow and you know if you're like i'm gonna cook something for the first time it has to come out perfectly well that's not going to happen like that you're going to have to do some test runs and the main thing is don't set your expectations up like this is going to be the perfect thing ever because ideas evolve yeah just look for that spark of information inspiration where you're like oh i don't know if this is going to be the best thing ever but it seems like a cool idea and i want to try it yeah absolutely and you know generally the starting point for most decks is choose the commander but that's not always the case you know there's lots of new partner commanders around so there's tons of new possibilities in terms of how what categories or styles you want to go into how you want to customize your deck to really um be up an extension of yourself and also you know you can choose a deck based on colors or maybe a strategy or a play style or a theme a tribal theme and of course josh put this down which is great there are lots of pre-context which is the perfect way to get into the format if you're just daunted by the idea of building a deck from scratch yeah if you don't know what a precon is these are pre-packaged fully functional decks that wizards of the coast has put together that you can just buy and they're they're legal you can play them right out of the box now they're sort of purposefully not final versions of themselves so that you have the opportunity to unders after you play it or look at it to be like oh well i think there's better stuff or cooler stuff i'd like to slot in here but you can sort of slowly do that over time and be like i'm gonna take these these three cards out put these three in so precon is also a really good way to go to give you a jumping off point and a lot of my favorite decks are evolutions of prior decks too so yeah i don't want there to be a stigma out there that like oh if you start with a pre-con it's somehow less than if you didn't jimmy and i have tons of our own decks that were literally pre-co started as pre-cons and we upgraded or molded over time yeah i think jimmy you know we get asked a lot by people one of the questions i i guess i can't answer for you but i get asked a lot and i'm gonna assume you do you can tell me a second is hey i want to build a new deck what should i build right and i'm always like the way i answer that question is to ask that person a bunch of questions yeah yeah yeah it's like almost like a uh what you said earlier which is like find your own spark of inspiration um and how do you figure that out well you could start by asking josh or myself like on a discord but that's not necessarily gonna get you closer to your answer because we don't know who you are the player yeah you can ask yourself the question so we're kind of going to go through kind of uh uh an algorithm almost that you could go through to figure out like what kind of player you are what kind of deck might appeal to you and just to kind of give you a little guidance but i think you can find those answers out for yourself by just kind of some self uh examination yeah and this is the question that i posed uh in the outline which is what kind of fun do you want to have because magically gathering at the core of it it's a card game with fantastical art mythical creatures and an endless universe with endless planes it's a game a game that lava's played as children or maybe we're teaching it to our children if we're parents and having fun right this is like i think one of the driving factors to keep anyone enthused or excited and invested in a hobby like magic so this is sort of the first question we're going to throw around the table here which is like what are the core reasons that you the person watching this video or thinking about building a deck love to play not just magic but games in general so for me this was like a thought experiment i'm gonna look back into my gaming history and the more i can sort of remember about what i did having fun as a kid it's gonna make me be a little more confident when i make a decision later on in terms of like yes this is the kind of deck i like to play because i know this about myself yeah and that's like a famous uh sort of philosophical statement right know thy self right so much of success in life or figuring out what path you should be taking is just about knowing yourself because the answer is different for everybody so if you know yourself you can choose the sort of right path so i like this first question that you wrote which is take a reflection on your gaming history and the more you think about and the more you're informed and confident with you know what your decision is what type of gamer are you yeah yeah so yeah what kind of games did you like right yeah this was a fun exercise so jimmy put down what kind of game do you like and he was like literally put down the three games we each like so jimmy do you want to go through the yes your three games so my first uh game is sort of a combination i played them right around the same time and they were the two role-playing games called chrono trigger and super mario rpg which was uh the reason i loved it was the role-playing aspect i got to embody a character they had special abilities and the cool thing was i was playing with a group of people i was sort of like setting off on the quest everyone had different talents and specialties and i loved oh this person has an awesome sword or this person is the magic caster so i was really involved in that idea that the commander in this case or the main character has this thing it does the music was also amazing uh the second game i put down uh was tetris which is might seem a little weird because it has nothing to do with commander but tetris has a lot to do with commander yeah the more i thought about like this is actually really nice because tetris is all about precision about accuracy and it's really addicting because i wanted to always set a personal record or do something that i felt was impressive i got to level 10 and didn't die for two minutes or whatever and the bragging rights that came with tetris was a part of also why i love that game i think commander and magic in general is also a puzzle at its heart a lot of like how do i move the pieces or play the things in the right order to make this certain thing happen you know elicit a torah who's one of the great magic players ever sort of we'll to often talk about magic in that sense yeah and when you save the uh the really long piece in tetris for that awesome combo whatever it is and then the third game was world of warcraft a game i got hopelessly addicted to because of the social aspect of it i was in the guild i was actually in the same server as dj amazingly yeah we were both in the same server in the same guild at one point too yeah unrivaled dominion you even know that yeah and gorgon actually i tweeted them about i was like dj what uh and i played a tank in that game so i like always had a purpose for raids like i really like that responsibility and sort of like i fulfilled a role in a social setting um and i think if you think about how i plan game nights and stuff i'm definitely not someone that takes the game seriously i'd rather be there to add entertainment and fun to the environment so that was something i think also reflected in my gaming habits also commander is the most social of ways to play magic one of the reasons i think that it is so popular yeah world of warcraft you're a tank huh i played a healer so we would have been good friends yeah yeah all right well what are your top three games josh well similar to world of warcraft but it was the precursor everquest which we yeah referenced earlier i think i liked a lot of the same things about it um the progression of building your character the feeling of accomplishment everquest was a very difficult game of punishing games yeah dying and losing xp losing levels that was horrible losing your body sometimes and not being able to retrieve the items that was a thing in early everquest um so but i liked the feeling of accomplishment and also the like gaining of skills and abilities again like you said i never really thought about it but very much like commander yeah right uh starcraft was a huge one which yeah which directly ties into magic i think in a lot of ways as far as resource management and really understanding like how to move your pieces around the board to get like the most out of them um and we're literally making like value engines right yeah and there's a lot of uh analogs over the years i think i've probably made a lot of comments during the podcast about how like you know ramping is is something that you can do in starcraft you can choose to like sort of skimp on the amount of warriors you have and kind of take a risk and instead build more workers so that you can build more resources so that later in the game you will be more powerful but you kind of take a hit early so there's a lot of analogs that's cool and then the third one wasn't a video game but it was um vampire the masquerade i used to run a live-action game that's yeah when i was in uh when i was in high school but it's similar to your world of warcraft in that what i really learned from live-action role-playing and role-playing games in general is the social aspect and how much of the game caused you to just sort of like use your social skills to like accomplish things because when you're playing live action like what you learn about larping is it's not really about the mechanics after a while yes there are mechanics in the game and in vampire masquerade we used to play and everything was sort of decided with rock paper scissors but after a while you just go whole nights playing the game and never do rock paper scissors you would just play your character and have fun with it it was all about the social uh interaction so i really like it's cool yeah nice man i would have i would do anything to be in that live-action role-playing game that'd be pretty fun vampire masquerade's coming back i mean it is yeah exactly and i see all these shows you know they have all these dnd shows and i've never really been a dnd player and i'm like man vampire i might get back into it because of that okay so now that wait hold on girl by the way oh what what the heck's that no it's okay some people out there okay okay okay those people are just cutting off the comments they're like what right right right now they get the comments this too yeah let us know if you played vampire the masquerade um okay so now that we've sort of examined i think like what our gaming history is and why we like the games that we did it's time to i think figure out right so that's the fun quotient why we enjoy these games now how does that translate into magic the gathering and specifically magic gameplay um and the way that we looked at this was sort of by two i would call them overarching very simplified trinities of three player archetypes and three holy trinities the holy trinities yeah yeah it's like the triforce but there's only two triangles because it's about player archetypes and then by triforce strategy archetypes and this is by no means a full breakdown of what it is to be a magic player or how to express yourself in the game but i think for again you know for the purposes of just understanding what the game is about and how you can play within it will help you tie together what you liked in games and how you can express that in commander yeah it is it is useful to sort of think of yourselves in a combination of these categories even if they're not comprehensive just to kind of understand oh i sort of generally lean this way and knowing that about yourself can cause you to choose like the correct deck that you're gonna have the most fun with or also help you choose as we often do now after you've been playing a while the decks that you haven't tried right oh i know i'm this type and i always go towards that so maybe i'm going to try to play boros or ractos a little more yeah and maybe i can instill some of the things i like about the other colors in these colors like you can sort of bring that element to it which we'll talk about a little bit later all right so there are the three player archetypes or the psychographics as they are often referred to and you've heard us say this on the show if you watch before or you'll hear people in magic often refer to these and so now you'll know what they mean there's timmy johnny and spike those are kind of the three psycho graphics number one timmy i like you have a little quote here this one goes raw yeah timmy's love humongous creatures or really big effects they want to impress their opponents with their splashy plays yeah it's not necessarily complex but they're like very impactful swing the tide of a game they want everybody to be like oh and for them to go like yes they want to just play the huge dragon and just feel like they are that dragon right yeah shivan dragon i think is like the classic timmy card from back in the day or like i love nightmare because i was like oh my gosh it's it could be huge force of nature for me when i first thought i was like what i mean i didn't think about the downsides and i was like that thing is crazy yeah so and this isn't to say that timmy or any of these psychographics are better or worse players than the other right these are just things that hearken to what you like so for instance if you liked you know playing a game where you kind of had that moment where you get to press a button and a massive thing happens that might put you a percentage bit into what the timmy is uh the second type is johnny and then the quote i put for this is and then i go infinite so johnny's are sort of known as your synergistic card users they're trying to combine things together and put a toolkit together to like make some cool you know crazy machine that does x y and z and maybe it's an engine that generates infinite mana or tokens or maybe they're looping some crazy interactions over and over again and just creating a ton of value or they're abusing some mechanic and they're not necessarily winning with this by the way some johnny's just like to enjoy the combo aspect of it but look at this thing i made it's a rube goldberg machine everyone's like do you win like nope but it can make this i think johnny's intrinsically if timmy's want you to be impressed with the the power of the thing they did johnny's wants you to be impressed with how smart the thing they did right is complexity they want players not to go oh they want players to go wait you can do that yeah like they've discovered some secret about the game through their mastery of the synergies of cards right and the third psychographic is the spike and the spike and we'll call them spikes you'll hear us talk about this is the player that wants to win winning the game for johnny and timmy is not necessarily the most important thing it's more important that they play the big dragon or they do something that other players think is smart spike doesn't care as much about those things is more uh worried about at the end of the day was i victorious right and and there are a lot of different ways that spikes express that right if and like we said timmy want you to be impressed by the big plays johnny's with the cool combination spikes want you to be impressed almost with how correctly they play how they're so tight they're sequencing things correctly there wasn't a single missed mana you know they used all their mana up and they were super efficient and they played in the most optimal way and as a result they won so they're the closest to competitive if not all the way there okay jimmy this begs the question yes i know that's the improper use of the phrase bags the question just don't just ignore that part of it which of these three are you are we you know i know nobody's holy one of these right you know percentages maybe yeah where where do you sort of where do you sort of lean you know when it comes to commander specifically i'm much more on the timmy side that will occasionally become a johnny just because of the things i play i'm like wait a sec oh cool yeah yeah this i definitely meant to do that in this deck but it just so happened to sort of like fall into place i'm definitely at johnny with a little bit of spike in there i'm definitely not a timmy like yeah my you can look at all my decks and they probably don't have anything that really costs seven mana as big as watching to my detriment many times i'm like you know i really should just have it all drastic in this thing yeah one massive wind can yeah that would probably be better i think when it comes to like limited and 1v1 formats i'd inherit much more of the spike mentality but there's just something about sitting around the table with four people or whatever that that just completely erases that from my psychographic yeah yeah i definitely agree when i'm playing draft or sealed i'm definitely more spike than either of the other two yeah but i don't care that much about winning in commander yep okay so now that we looked at the psychographics and of course these all bleed into each other no one is a hundred percent of anything and there are other places vultures sorry what are those those people that worry about the story and things like that and themes and other things those are definitely not the only three they're just sort of the big three that everybody talks about yeah okay so let's talk about the other holy trinity and this is the three strategy archetypes and this is something that originated from um designers and players sort of analyzing 1v1 magic but with these three categories you can pretty much cover almost every type of strategy that you can find in commander and the three strategies are aggro so aggro control and combo so aggro is all about attacking making it quick aggro strategies are they're aggressive and generally they're linear which means that they're starting at one point and they're drawing a straight line from here to their victory which is i'm gonna smack you in the face until you go to zero life um they're trying to kill you with like damage spells or attacking creatures and they speed up the game because what they're doing is they're threatening to take out players faster than what the normal pace of the game is and so they're winning with damage based strategies whether they're attacking with creatures or casting spells to do a bunch of damage to lower players life totals aggro is the mike tyson ah of nice you know if mike tyson was a commander deck it would he would be an aggro deck he's not so worried about whether he's gonna be tired in round 10 because he's thinking he's going to knock you out in round two right yeah exactly he doesn't need a lot still around 10. he knows yeah and that's how you beat him actually which is control right you try and tire someone out like that so control is the second archetype yeah control is the judo more of uh strategies in that they're going to try and take your punch tire out their muhammad ali yeah they're going to rope a dope they're dodging like dodging getting you tired wait till you're tired and then they're gonna strike wear you down have an answer block everything you're throwing blunt it and then slowly over time they're gonna win in the later rounds when you're tired yeah they're sort of they're they're worried about and they care about disrupting your plays getting rid of something so that you can't actually do what you're trying to do if you're an aggro player the control deck plays a board wipe wipes out your board and and they they draw a card draw spell so they're up on cards and you're down on cards and they're controlling the game trying to almost be a little master of puppets in the way and the final of the three strategy archetypes again there are others but these are the big three is combo and combo is gonna set up for one big turn and win sort of we call it out of nowhere it often your life total won't have changed the entire game and then combo player go this card that card that kills everyone and it feels like it's out of nowhere a little bit i'm not sure boxing analogy wise sugar ray robinson maybe somebody who likes wondering where are you going yeah i didn't really have i didn't think that far ahead somebody who could do both right so could play defensive but wouldn't could still knock you out if if you kind of made a mistake what's muhammad ali's quote about floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee maybe that's a little bit of a combo there right there yeah um yeah and combo players too they're they they care about protecting what they're trying to do so you know you can easily disrupt the combo player and they're sort of in their prerogative to make sure that you can't do that um and there are usually players that play a lot of redundancy so like i got rid of that combo piece good thing i can draw another one and sort of build the machine back up again they're not often worried about incremental stuff like they don't care if they take small chunks of damage and they're not really worried about dealing small chunks of damage they're going to just do everything all at once set up for that one moment yeah and these three are sort of seen as like rock paper scissors in magic where aggro can beat control control can generally beat combo and combo can be aggro but in between each of these archetypes are hybrid ones so there's aggro control and control aggro or control combo and combo control etc there are ways to express all of that and if you look back at the original trendy you could be a timmy in any three of these really so you don't necessarily have to assign one to the other just because it's a combo doesn't mean it's a johnny player you could be a spike combo player as well yep all right so let's go back to that original question we asked so so long ago how is your fun expressed in magix gameplay yeah so this is definitely a personal thought experiment ask yourself again thinking about the games that you liked and why you like them and applying them to what we just talked about are you someone that is interested in playing that fast-paced game and taking people sort of like catching them off guard or are you more interested in slowing it out and having control over the whole thing and you know like the main thing is like what characteristics in style what blend of them because it doesn't need to be 100 of anything here it's going to keep you enjoying the game and want you coming back for more i think is really important especially in the beginning of playing card games um all right so you have a good point here uh we're gonna bring up a graphic and it's gonna say nothing is impossible maybe like a little rainbow will go underneath it that is like oh yeah just stop saying tough people man this ain't reading rainbow so we'll often say things like uh strategies like aggro aren't as viable in multiplayer games and and that is true to some extent but remember when we make those statements we talk about the viability of certain strategies like combo is definitely very strong in multiplayer because a combo tends to not care how many players there are right it's gonna infinitely knock out as many if there's a hundred or one it can still do the thing but that doesn't mean that it's like an on off switch aggro can never win and combo always wins it's just a percentage of like chance yeah yes combo can be advantaged maybe if it's built optimally optimally versus aggro but that doesn't mean you can't win with any given strategy you you definitely can yeah and a lot of the times your strategies and the ability for your deck to win at a multiplayer table it's going to be mitigated with how you build your deck the kind of cards you put in and whether your aggro strategy is you know if you have cards that say deal x damage to each opponent that could also be an aggro strategy that makes it much more viable so there's lots of ways to obviously do that um and you know in general like we will be talking about this in the future and when we revisit our deck building template so man you were pricing us into having to do that i know i mean we talked about it and it didn't do it this year it's been like four years yeah yeah so just keep your mind open though and don't feel like oh but i want to do this but i can't it's like no commander by this point it is flexible enough for you to do pretty much whatever you want and that's part of the beauty of the format yeah one of the great things i think and strengths of commander is that it's not focused around tournaments it's not focused around winning there are generally no stakes when you're playing so it does open up the field to a lot of strategies because not everybody's just trying to do the best thing all the time people like jimmy and i are just trying to have fun a lot and that opens the door to basically any strategy you want to try at least has a chance to spread its wings all right we're going to get into sort of learning about maybe what colors you might want to choose talking about different archetypes and what they offer to you and all kinds of other stuff for introduction to deck building but before we continue we're going to take a quick break and hear a message from our sponsors what's up i'm ralph zarrick planeswalker inventor and all-around electric guy i tend to over complicate things combos inventions you name it but frankly i'm tired of over engineered projects blowing up in my face so i've made a resolution to keep things simple from now on that's why i started using harry's razors they give me a smooth clean shave that i love and to top it off with harry's you can start the new year with some savings new customers can redeem a harry's trial set for just three dollars when you go to harry's dot com slash command plus there's no ridiculous extras like oh i don't know a button that turns your razor into a tiny self-driving thopter for hands-free shaving actually that sounds like a pretty good idea no ralph too complex you said you wouldn't do this just stick to the basics harry's artificers have devised a simple 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expressvpn.com command right now to learn more all right welcome back to the deck building 101 2021 edition the number one place for you to get lots of advice one one one just saying one a bunch okay so it feels like there should be a pun there with 2021 and deck building 101 but there isn't no i can just i'm just thinking about the freeway so that doesn't help anyone okay so it's like the californians oh yeah yeah perfect now that's the rest of the episode this is just in that accent okay so now we've talked about sort of how you want to have fun in the psychographics and the archetypes that match it let's get a little more in depth now into the colors of magic so this is going to get a little more in the weeds of things but this is really important because learning your colors in relation to how they affect the types of gameplay and how you're going to express your version of fun is really important because magic if all the five colors did the same thing then nothing would matter fortunately magic is not like that each color is very unique and powerful in different ways and again no nothing is absolute there's always going to be exceptions to the norm um except for a couple of colors are a little more disadvantage unfortunately yeah but it's good to know what each color sort of is is good at and what they like to do because again it's kind of like the psychographics and whatnot it helps you make your decision you're like oh i'm this kind of player i know i'm a timmy i know i'm you know interested in building more of a control deck right you know maybe i'm gonna lean towards black a little bit more than i would towards whatever other color just because i know that's kind of doing what i like and that's leaning already in the direction i want to lean so let's talk about the five colors and sort of what each one is good at or what they like to do yeah so let's start with white so at the glance white is the color of morality order holiness unity life gain order's the big one yeah or is the big one they like they like rules rules and so of course you would think okay well if they like that and rules and stuff what are their strengths well white's really good of removal of most permanent types they can get rid of most everything they love wiping the board going wide with tokens because order means you know armies and working in conjunction with each other they're also a lot about life gain as well with clerics and all that stuff and they can be very good with aggro strategies yep um they also are one of the better exile colors so they're good at exiling things usually when they remove them or not usually but often when they remove it they will exile them which is a lot better in commander than just destroying uh like you said board wipes mass removal not just wiping the board of creatures but they can often say all permanents let's just get rid of all of them yeah yeah or all enchantments so that's a good thing uh making a lot of tokens that's similar to going wide that is a thing that white's really good at a lot of little creatures one one soldiers is like the ultimate white uh token creature and of course because they're all into order that means they also have elements of control so taxation and stacks which is sort of the ability to make your opponents pay more for something or it's harder for them to attack you or do something or cast a spell or they can only cast spells on their turn or cost more mana yeah so they're sort of creating laws yeah rules um and then unfortunately white's main downside is that they don't have great card draw so it's hard for them to refill their hands as well as the other colors and ramp they're not very good at getting extra mana onto the table those are kind of their two big weaknesses which is unfortunate because those are kind of the two most important parts of building a commander deck yeah if you listen to this podcast you'll know that we talk about it all the time all right blue the greatest color hold up at a glance blue is the color of logic cold calculating logic they're the color of technology of learning of intelligence right your mind is the most powerful thing not your strengths or muscles yeah it's all about what's up here um so obviously their strengths is because it's all about intelligence and drawing cards is this the closest you can get in magic to the idea of getting smarter they're they have great ways to draw cards and they have great ways to also steal stuff like your opponent's creatures and they are in general a bit more tricky because again they're using sort of their brain power over yours and they're very much into the control world of things as well yeah blue's definitely the tricky color they have all the weird effects we're like wait what i gotta read that four times to understand what that does that's probably a blue card also maybe red because of chaos we'll talk about that in a second indeed so looking in depth uh they have tons of card draw and card advantage blue also has counter spells which are catch-all answers for almost anything you know a lot of colors have to uh like if you're black you have real trouble getting rid of enchantments or something blue can catch the spell as it's being cast and stop it right um now you have timing restrictions on when you can do that if it's already on the table you can't do much maybe if you're blue but that does give them a lot of versatility and able to answer a lot of different kinds of things if they just have that two blue mana open as a result they're not great at removing stuff that's already on the table they can destroy some things here and there but it's definitely not as robust as like white or black or green even what they can often do is bounce the thing back to the player's hand which is twofold uh in how why it's good one is because if you try and recast it now maybe they can counter it right because they got it back to your hand and you have to cast it again also often bouncing a thing to a hand to somebody's hand is similar to removing it in that like you get that effect off the table in the moment that they were about to use it and yeah it's bad if it comes back uh next turn but that's next turn yeah and it also makes them basically replay their turn so it's called like time walking someone making them basically take their turn again at a later date and speaking of time walk blue is also the color where you get to take extra turns dang knowledge is powerful technology is powerful the next color is black um and at a glance black is all about power parasiticism amorality but it's very important to know not immorality uh black doesn't necessarily mean evil a lot of people will very much go like oh white good black evil that's very much an over simplification so much simplification so black is often more interested and you know how do i extract this you know at any cost and it doesn't mean that i have to turn into an evil person maybe it means i have to hurt myself to learn this or whatever it is so they're more in that realm of things their strengths are very much playing around with their own graveyard or other people's graveyards reanimating things from graveyards zombies of course are black right they're very good at creature specifically creature removal might have trouble with other permanent types like enchantments but preachers they've got a million ways to get rid of creature board wipes uh and they are the two the best tudor color so they are the ability to search and find any card in your deck and get it into your hand black is better at that than anybody yeah and that's definitely what makes it very powerful in commander as well because again you have 20 000 cards to choose from and you've got 100 cards in your deck you can only have one of any given card so your chance to just draw that card is much less in commander than other formats where you have four of something and there's 60 cards so the ability to go find the specific card you need at the right moment works for all the strategies especially combo which we've already said is powerful pretty powerful uh in depth black also has access to sort of big manor ramp because it knows how to double the power of their swamps with specific cards um and also there's like we said tons of removal um but more so on the creatures side and board wipes as well so that shares it in common with white um and black also likes to sacrifice creatures again when we said at any cost black is trying to use things almost as currency and they don't care what it is you're a creature yeah get out of here i'm gonna sacrifice you for some other gain so to that degree they use life their life total as a resource um and as a result black actually has tons of card draw as well will yeah it's i think it's worth noting that life as a resource is a very powerful thing in commander because one of the commander rules that changes from normal magic is going to 40 life instead of 20 and that interacts interestingly with cards because if a card says pay to life do something that was balanced and based on pay to life if you have 20 life right so pay two life is actually sort of the equivalent of paying one life because you start with 40 life right if that makes any sense so those are cards that can sort of be abnormally balanced in commander and that's stuff to look for uh for sort of powerful things you can do that maybe are unique to commander yeah definitely one of the really fun parts about building decks in this format is getting those small cool little interactions because of that stuff yep oh now we're talking about the best color it's red um this is my favorite color obviously josh's is blue um red at a glance this is the color of passion impulsivity chaos freedom red wants to express their emotions in a big way they're not afraid to hide that sort of part of them uh they're definitely out there and they let themselves be known both in game play and sort of in the way that they deal with cards and cardron they wear their hearts on their sleeves yeah absolutely yeah their strengths are damage most of what red's gonna do is damage base they're not going to get all tricky with you know trying to mill out their opponents or something weird they're like no you have 40 life i'm going to try and take that down to zero yeah as fast as possible as well whether i'm swinging with 50 goblins or just a bunch of little creatures that are hasty so they're they're all about aggro and speed and the chaos part of it is one that's not as seen as much in commander but they do add an element of chaos and randomness to the games often times whether they're flipping coins or maybe flipping cards off the top of their deck or other player's decks or other player's decks right and playing them like that yeah the the chaos the variance the randomness part they really played into in recent years and it's a pretty fun part of red which is like this could be very powerful or maybe not we're not really sure but we're gonna go for it yeah but it adds a fun layer of who knows what's gonna happen in this game but as a result red plays a bit more linearly so again they they have a clear starting point and ending point for most of their strategies and how they're trying to win the game uh okay uh in depth they like direct damage via spells and abilities card draw their form of card draw in red and they've done this more in recent years is what we call impulsive draw so instead of drawing the card into your hand and you play at any time it usually says exile the card face up and then you can only play that card for a specified amount of time either until the end of your turn until the end of your next turn this is usually not as good obviously as having in your hand everybody can see it you have a time limit on when you can cast it but it is a way to get card advantage and card draw which red didn't used to have so it's definitely come up in recent years i'd say red was the worst color probably when we started this podcast about six and a half years ago and now it's probably in fourth place but it's moved up a spot and it and not just that it's closed the gap with the other colors i would say it's not as far behind whatever the third and fourth or second and third place colors are as it used to be yeah thank goodness um so you know this is something that's awesome and why we're doing these updates is because we had a much different conversation about red six years ago all right the last color it's green actual best color the actual best you mean most powerful yeah yeah um so at a glance green is you might have guessed it nature it's about growth it's about natural growth it's not about you know blue or black which may use like mechanized ways to grow stuff no green is about huge creatures massive trees instinctual things um community sort of what nature and that world brings you yeah their strengths are mana ramp this is the really really big one especially since they are the only ones really that consistently do land based man ramp getting extra lands into play uh they are able to therefore do their powerful things earlier than the other colors because they just have more mana earlier uh and they got creatures that they can and spells they can cast with it because they've got some monsters out there yeah they are the creature color so they have the most powerful creatures in magic large and small you know it's not just like they have the ten-tens which they have but they also have the tutus with crazy abilities because green is just the creature color and as creatures have become more powerful and magic and more of an emphasis in design has been put on creature combat green has sort of continued to become more powerful as as a result and they have creatures that even tap for mana yeah so a whole section of elves and things and dryads that give you more mana but on the creature and a lot of the other colors don't have the same access to just as many for sure now one of the downsides of green is that they are not very good at actually destroying other creatures at reaching out and killing your opponent's creatures or getting rid of them they have some ways to deal with fight spells and things but they require you to have other things going on in your board but they are good at removing specifically artifacts and enchantments right so they do have pretty strong removal packages um they do not board wipe though with very few exceptions green is just not good at getting rid of a lot of stuff all at once yeah and it makes sense they can kill artifacts because those are like weird metallic e objects in the natural world nah green doesn't need that naturalize it get out of the way um in depth of course green is just the best ramp color by far uh they're the only color that can consistently get out lands from their deck on the battlefield and increase their mana very quickly in a way that's really hard to interact with um and of course there's a lot of card draw as well these are creatures that like to fight each other and trample over so green really does have a bit of it all when it comes to powerful color abilities again i think in recent years green has gotten a lot of card draw and that's really pushed their power level up because that was the one thing they were missing it's usually based on your creatures but because green is the best at creatures you're already doing that anyway yeah green definitely a good choice if you're building a deck or one of your first texts green's going to cover most of your bases for sure and just make sure that you have a good time because you're able to play your spells and do the things you want to all right so we went through all the colors and you might be thinking do any of these speak to me which ones of the colors that we just talked about sort of sounds like it's most up your alley you know if it's blue and you want to do tricky stuff maybe that's like uh that tickled your brain and you're like that sounds fun or maybe it was like oh no red and just throwing fireballs on my opponent's faces that sounds fun yeah fortunately you don't just have to play with one color in fact you can play with one two three four or five colors in commander depending on your legendary creature so we're gonna go through sort of what commander options feel like for each of the colors again this is going to be broad you know big paintbrush one color pun intended so let's start with one color deck so this is just white blue black red or green mono color decks are actually quite popular these days in commander because you know as magic's growing up there is more and more and more cards to help those colors be viable because they don't have access to the other ones but typically male color decks are very good at serving a single purpose just because their card quality overall is a bit limited by not having access to the other colors yeah they're a little less flexible they can't cover their weaknesses that much um this is something that's slowly improving over time though uh the colors are not created equal so some are more powerful than others full stop that's just the way it goes just because of historic qual card quality and recent design choices and it's fine i don't think all the colors could ever be exactly equal i don't think you want them to be either because that's just going to lend to less inventive i think deck building over time because right you're not going to have access to certain types of effects if you're in certain colors and but they can all win i don't think you have to stay away from any color because it can't win maybe mono white i would say of all of them if you're building a deck early on maybe don't do that but yeah you know there are modern white decks that are very strong once you sort of are a more veteran player i think yeah and maybe that's a fun challenge for you or it's a handicap that you want to build around and challenge yourself with so you know don't be afraid of anything just because it may not seem as powerful on the surface um and then in terms of commander selection you're gonna be a lot more limited here because i would say generally when legendary creatures are printed back in the day even they always had multiple colors in them and that's sort of been the pattern um for the most part most legendary creatures are going to have multiple colors when it comes to building a commander deck but there are strong entries for aggro control combo anything you want to do you're going to be able to find in the mono colors yep all right let's talk about two color decks because this is where it kind of starts to get interesting and there's ten combinations of two colors so we're gonna have to go kind of fast here yeah um but this really does sort of start to open you up to all kinds of strategies it's it's um it it's not like it's it's not incremental it's what a multiplicative what's the word i'm looking for yeah it's a lot more complex as soon as you start putting two colors together yep yeah and the doors really are thrown wide open because what happened in magic's most recent commander set uh from this uh recording date was commander legends where they introduced a bunch of these cards called partner commanders where if they say partner on the bottom you can just grab that and any other commander that has a partner on that and they can both be your commander and then your color identity becomes those two colors and because so many options were made at each color all of a sudden all of these new archetypes and ways to play are open and you can be like i want a little bit of control and a little bit of aggro or a little bit of combo and a little bit of control and now you can actually just make those with a lot of those combinations as well as just the long history of two color commanders because these are the you know ravnica is one of the really popular planes in magic and their main theme of ragna cup ravnica are these two color guilds yeah and i would say that two color deck is probably one of the best places to start if you're building your first deck monocolor is going to be a little bit too restrictive oftentimes you're going to wish i wish i could do this kind of thing but my color doesn't really do it three colors going to be a little bit maybe too complex just because it opens you up to so many cards that your head might begin to spin two colors are really nice in between point where it's like yep i can cover all my weaknesses i can kind of do what i want to do but the choices are not so much it's like when you go to the restaurant and their menu is like 12 pages that's the worst how long is it going to take me to order five days cheesecake factory yeah exactly a lot of times it's better if you just have less choices because you're like well i have to choose one of these seven things that makes it a little bit easier yeah totally now of course don't cheesecake factory you're gonna get access to most abilities and effects definitely look on uh what all the partner commanders were from commander legends because really you can be like i want plus one plus some counters and are the facts and you can find that combination guaranteed um but some colors are going to be a little bit hampered by lack of options so like boros red and white typically the main commanders printed for this especially recently they're all about attacking they're all about equipment so there aren't as many options as some of the other ones uh all right let's talk about three color they're they're shards and wedges is what people will often call them but these are three color pairings and there are ten of these as well um and i think a general rule for three color commanders is that they're more focused on what the commander card can do and much less flexible uh than sort of the two color partner pairings that we were just talking about um if a card's three color it'll pretty much on the card say like this is the kind of deck i'd like you to build around me they're often two more strongly in two of the colors and one of the colors is just kind of a little bit of a splash so very rarely is it like 30 of the cards in the deck are definitely do this 30 of this and 30 the other color it's usually more like you know 45 40 15 you know right right yeah so and that also helps you i think when you're building is like okay i know that you know black is gonna be the color in this deck that there's not as much of so i just need to choose eight or nine good black cards and i'm not going to try and have everything be black yeah that's actually kind of how i build a lot of three color decks because you don't want you know mana bases another thing that i'm sure we'll retouch on at some point is it the more colors you're adding the more complex it gets you don't want to necessarily burden yourself with that when you're just getting going um and there were actually partners from the original partner set that were two colors so you can make a lot of three color decks with the partners there but because again there are not as many of those partners you're a little bit more limited yeah but there's been a lot of creatures especially in the last few years that have just naturally have three colors yeah um sorry a lot of legendary creatures that just naturally have three colors in their casting costs so there's definitely a lot of choices and three color and two color decks are the the the decks we see the most in the format for sure yeah and as you know i was looking at through all the three color pairings i was like what kind of strategies are they all the same it's like no actually they're very different and that's the cool part about three colors is that because there are three colors you can be more in with some of the others and that's going to change what the deck wants to do and sort of how it's themed all right now uh four color pairings pairings groupings are the squares are are the ones we have the least of uh there are only the five four color groupings because you have you put the nephilim names here yeah that's what sort of people referenced them as before there were these non-legendary creatures called nephilim that all had four colors in them and people were like oh why can't we just use those as our legendary creatures and then watsi printed actual four color legendaries yeah i'm just gonna call it greenless whitelist bluelist because if you say doonbrood i don't know which one that yeah me neither that's by the way so basically every uh four color pairing is just missing one of the five colors and they're almost more defined by the color they don't have than they are defined by the colors they do have ah yeah since they're four out of five already there haven't been very many of these and there was only one set which was commander 2016 which had four color um commanders naturally in their casting costs and then the old partners which were two color which also came from commander 2016. you can put two of those together i wouldn't recommend this as a starting point for people that are building new decks this is something i think you go into when you've been playing edhl a little bit longer just because there's less choice for one thing and for two now you're you've got a lot to juggle a lot of things going on and it might not be the best place to start although you know atraxa or something does give you a pretty clear path of what you want to do once you've chosen if it's one one counters or super friends or whatever so maybe i'm i may contradict myself a little bit tough i think the mana bases are just one of the more daunting parts especially if you're on the budget it's hard to really build that super efficient mana base so from josh and me to you all two three color is where and that's generally where i build most of my decks as well so yeah and definitely starting out i think that's probably a good safe place to be and you'll be able to stretch your wings in whatever direction you want you're not going to feel like you're too restricted yeah and then of course there's my favorite which are five color decks all the colors um and that allows you to play any card that's the thing i like about if you think of a card you're get you're on scribe fall or gather or whatever and you're like you know searching for that keyword or the that phrase and it brings up a card and you're like that's going to be perfect in my strategy and my deck oh no but it's not my colors you never run into that if you're in a five color deck that's the thing i like about that's the most johnny thing right i know it's i found this card i play this card yeah and it's a great because there are often times when you're like dang if only i had access to that color because of these suite of cards well five color commanders let you do that um and watsy we've seen isn't afraid to print five color commanders there have been a lot of options that cover the spectrum in terms of like big mana decks or like dragon tribal um or you know what josh likes to do is sort of like the commander might not matter just play a commander that has five colors in it you don't even need to cast them because you're all about what the five color brew it is that you made in your deck yeah if a commander doesn't exist in your strategy right you you decide upon some strategy that they just didn't build commander for yet werewolves or something like that five color might be a way to go because if you're gonna have to run a strategy where there's not synergy in your command zone then you may as well have access to all the colors yeah totally again not something i would suggest for your early deck building though yeah like we said two and three colors is probably the way to go but i will also reference you to uh the sweet kenworth brew that mitch brought to extra turns which was a budget five-color deck showing that it is definitely possible because you have green green makes it all possible all right so as we were going through these hopefully some of the options kind of spoke to you and sounded cool are like oh i want to do that make write it down make sure that you write it down so that when you're deciding to build your deck later you know as soon as you hit pause or stop on this podcast you're probably going to be deck building right you want to be able to go back to that mental note and be like yeah you know it sounds like i'm i'm more of a timmy it's green and red sounds really fun you know that'll give you a direction going yeah totally okay so your head might be spinning at this point apologies uh now that we've talked about colors color combinations player archetypes strategy archetypes let's just go over some of the most popular deck types in commander so you can get an idea of how these colors play into certain themes and how certain colors are going to add to certain strategies and how the lack of them sort of take away from that for instance blue and black what you'll find are more heavily into control whereas red and white are more aggro and green's going to be more combotastic etc etc again no hard fast rules here okay these are not going to be all the arc types that exist there are a lot in commander again because it's casual anything you come up with is viable we're going to go over sort of a lot of the major ones yeah and then we're going to talk about the three archetypes of aggro combo and control and then which one of them is most you know if we say it's control first and then those that idea of a deck is more on the control side less on the aggro side for instance all right so the first archetype is artifacts blue and red are very strong in the artifact colors white and black also kind of play around in there green does not really have that many cares about artifact commanders yeah and you know artifacts are cards that you can play in every deck typically because they don't have any color but the cards and the colors that can make the most use out of it would be blue and red you'll notice that green is not on this list because green again thematically they don't want artifacts as much they want to destroy artifacts right not necessarily like play around with them themselves yeah and artifact decks they're all about control either you're putting tons of pieces on the board and you're using them to combo out and control people by doing effects with them or you're sacrificing them to create lots of value and then you know burn people out with damn or you know hurt people or ping people or do other things like that or generate tons of mana so control and combo is definitely where artifacts are at and they're much less on the aggro side yeah i can't think of an aggro artifact deck unless you count like equipment-based decks right because that's their own archetype yeah yeah uh the next archetype which is like the most popular archetype i think insanely so yeah is what we call aristocrats and that's a reference to a certain cards that have the word aristocrat in the name but what aristocrats really means is you're purposefully sacrificing your own creatures usually over and over for value yeah you're gonna deal one damage to everyone in game one life yourself so the colors that really tie well into this are black and red those are sort of the prototypical sacrifice creature colors but green and white you'll find are really good accompaniments and there will be a lot of great aristocrats type stacks that have a combination of three of these yeah because green and white offer you a lot of graveyard recursion so they're also good in these colors um aristocrats tend to be combo type decks they're gonna set up some sort of board state where they're gonna sacrifice the same thing but it's gonna come back for whatever reason yeah over and over again or you know some every time they sacrifice a creature everybody else has to sacrifice creatures and so nobody else can have creatures only they can yeah they're stacking just for mana using that man to do other stuff um to that degree they are i think a little bit aggro because typically the way aristocrats decks win is by continually draining everyone of life and giving you that life and so once you get into that cycle you're able to really end the game a lot more quickly because you're just continually pinging everyone down i might say they're more controlled than aggro just because they also tend to go in the direction of like we they don't care if their creatures die so they're not gonna like board wipe they don't care yeah i guess aristocrats maybe it's so popular because it kind of lets you do yeah yeah yeah all right the next is life gain life gain decks i think are very popular especially for i would say newer players in general um because the idea of like gaining a ton of life and getting out of reach of aggro players seems pretty fun and the main colors for this of course white and black because black is using life and white is gaining it they make a really nice pairing and then green also has a lot of life gain effects as well that help out here yeah i think newer players are drawn towards life gain because when you're new to magic the only scoreboard that you that makes sense to you is the life totals and what everybody's at and so being ahead on that seems like you're winning yeah you're not playing golf here you're trying to yeah keep it high once you sort of play for a longer you realize that life is kind of a resource and when you win if you're at two life or you're at 200 life doesn't really matter as much and like means yeah and life gain tends to become less uh attractive to you unless you're in specific strategies yeah or you're abusing it with black and taking your life super low and then gaining it all the way back life gain is another one that can go in a lot of different buckets um it's often control in that you are trying to drag the game out longer generally because that's what gaining a lot of life will do yeah it can also be aggro though because a lot of these life gains decks care about you know how many creatures you've played how many creatures are attacking that's the way that you're gaining the life right and and also if you're in an aggro battle where you're like swinging at them to try and kill them it's much harder for them to beat you with fi you know fire meets fire if you're gaining life simultaneously you're doing that they kind of have to sit back on their heels and be like well they're too high life totals so i can't try and race them yeah the race is not possible and then there's also combo kills where you bring your life really low and then you use a crazy ability to switch your life total with someone else and then you hit them with a creature or something so life game definitely pretty flexible in that way yep and then is one of the most popular archetypes out there as well probably right after aristocrats i would say in my experience is the lands matter or landfall decks these are decks that care about specifically lands entering the battlefield or how many lands you have you need to play lands and magic no matter what color you're in and so getting paid off for that having cards that care about that that give you rewards for just doing the thing you're always already gonna do is inherently very powerful yeah green is by far the most lands matter type color followed by black because there's a lot of greater recursion as well as red and blue there's just lots of different ways to make lands matters decks because it cares about things entering the battlefield and pretty much every color has cards that care about that um but i'd say lands mario decks are probably mostly in the combo area they are i'm going to play this commander do this ability bring these two lanes back it's going to cause five things to happen all these creatures get bigger or make all these tokens and then i'm gonna swing out or sacrifice them for value so the lands because you you're guaranteed to play one if you have one every turn uh and they're really hard to interact with in the commander as well so combos seems to be pretty good because their pieces can't get disrupted as easily yeah it's also pretty controlling because again they're going to drag the game along their incremental value type decks we're just like as long as the game goes on i'm going to continue to get value out of just playing lance where's he yeah when you play your lands it's just land nothing happens but when i play mine sometimes i get a token sometimes i take control of your creature sometimes i draw draw cards yeah uh the next really popular deck type and it's gone only more popular because more cards have been printed to fit in it is the wheel deck so wheel decks are all about the idea of casting a spell that makes everyone discard their hand and then draw an arbitrary number of cards usually up to seven or up to whatever the player with the most cards had when they discarded it blue and red right you could also say this sort of like spells matters decks blue and red are all about the card they have the cards that do this windfall wheel of fortune they're able to make all the players discard their hands but you're doing great because you have spells that can be cast from the graveyard or you have a commander that lets you cast those spells from the graveyard so i'd say these are much more comboy and controlly type uh strategies i mean it's kind of like if the lands deck is paying you off for the the thing every deck's gonna do which is play lands the wheel deck is paying you off for the other thing every deck's gonna do which is draw cards right and they're trying to accelerate that by making everybody draw more cards or themselves or whatever so they have all the cards that say when you draw a card or when your opponent draw a card do some other thing damage them gain value blah blah blah yeah um yeah so combo wheel decks often win through like two cards played in succession that just do a huge thing cause everybody to just wheel their hand twice but because they have you know other effects whole breach or whatever oh yeah out they say oh but at the end of all that i'm the only one that has cards in my hand whoops yeah or i just made 10 insect tokens in there or 100 yeah yeah get wrecked um the other the next archetype is big mana these are decks that usually are heavy green or five color and they're just trying to get out the hugest things yeah the biggest scariest things you're playing a five color commander like jodo which allows you to pay just white blue black red green to cast any spell um or you're just playing green and ramping out with everything you can to get 10 mana on turn four you know yeah big mana decks are very timmy but also tend to win through combo they tend to play two spells that are gonna combo in some way that cost a lot of mana but they they they combo together to sort of yeah instead of just be like hey those are huge creatures no their abilities interact in a way that kind of kills you right now yeah i can swing out with this giant crater of behemoth or whatever it is um or you know i play this in the car resurgent and now every creature i cast with all my man that draws me a car refills me up and puts me in a really superior position yep but they can big mana can also just kind of be timmy aggro i think yeah you know if you're craig and he tends to play more in the way of like i'm gonna ramp and then play huge things and not necessarily combo you out i'm just gonna try and hit you with the blight steel colossus one time yeah which will get the job done yeah definitely get the job done uh the next archetype is a really popular one it's plus one plus one counters or minus one minus one counters so the ability to sort of manipulate and put these little counters that buff up your creatures and then use those as fuel for something else so the main colors for this are green black and white um this is definitely a uh i love that whenever craig does it he's always just like yeah you're just going like he's sort of taking a lot of accounting yeah you're like putting dice up and down and it's fun if you're a combo player for sure it definitely has control elements because maybe you're using those tokens to stop someone from doing something or you're playing like a hapatra deck like josh did and you're using minus 1 minus 1 tokens to kill creatures and then give yourself tokens definitely a lot of interaction and a lot of moving things around and creating little value engines big damage deck is the next archetype they've been playing around with this a lot more with cards like fire emancipation and tour brand ways to sort of add multipliers to the normal amount of damage that things are doing red of course the big color and this black is usually sort of the next one up um these are usually more aggro type decks but they can be comboy they're usually going to do incremental damage in big increments big chunks and but sometimes they're just like play this card play that other card that is 90 damage to everything you know that's the type of thing that a big damage deck can do all as well yeah or they swing twice and all of a sudden your life total goes from 40 to 13 or something yeah or you just didn't see it coming they give double strike to the thing because of the damage multipliers you're dead when you thought you were safe yep they flash out something that doubles damage rough the next archetype is equipment so equipment lives solidly in the worlds of white and red or boros this is definitely aggro uh really at its core it's about playing creatures suiting them up to be even scarier or you know suiting up a bunch of creatures or suiting up one creature that generates you value because it's got all this stuff stacked onto it um it's trying to swing maybe the creature is unblockable as double strike whatever it is when it hits you you're gonna have a bad time because it's huge yeah and usually they're trying to hit you sort of fast before you have a lot of resources available to you and blockers and all that stuff yeah the next one is enchantments you'll often hear people call it enchantress because the enchantress cards are a type of card that draw you cards every time you play an enchantment and they tend to go on all these decks green and white are the strongest enchantment colors blue has recently sort of been thrown in there because of astrid and some other things yeah um enchantments are i'd say controlly and comboy they're usually not aggro they want the game to go long because their incremental value is going to happen because of all the enchantments because enchantments are kind of the cards in magic that kind of trigger off of other cards the most yeah so a lot of your payoffs are in enchantment so it'll be like get this these two or three enchantments set up and now every time i do something four other things happen and if i can just do that for the rest of this game there's no way you can beat me yeah and and there are very few cards that players play that say destroy all enchantments whereas there are a lot that say destroy our creatures so you're also really protecting yourself with this strategy generally now if you're an based or a deck i could see that being the voltron aggro version right yeah yeah you don't see that that often yeah and that's sort of similar to equipment right you're just buffing up creatures and trying to hit people for a lot of damage uh the next one is tokens uh one of my personal favorite uh definitely in the realms of green and white and then red and black and pretty much every every color can make tokens but green is definitely the one that abuses them the most um with white with anthem effects to make them all bigger as well the idea behind this is pretty easy you're po you're pooping out lots of little things and then you're using ways to abuse them either they can tap for mana now or you're putting a plus and plus encounter every single time a new creature enters the battlefield and they become massive and now they can swing in for a huge force um or you play a single artifact that makes them all fly with double strike you're trying to kill people with just lots of little things and going wide yeah this is a dessert strategy right you get as many creatures onto the board as possible and that you usually do that by playing singular cards that make multiple creatures yep uh the next one is planeswalker super friends deck so these are decks that care about the card type planeswalkers um not the cheapest of decks to build because planeswalkers tend to be a little bit more expensive and unlike a lot of these other decks planeswalker decks actually don't tend to have like a ton of planeswalkers in them like an enchantment deck probably has 30 plus enchantments in it yeah your super friends planeswalkers deck probably has 15 planeswalkers in it because they need so much support they're very powerful once they get going but you can't just play a planeswalker out onto an empty board because it will usually just die so you need to have a bunch of other support cards um but they're i'd say planeswalker decks are super friends tech are often multi-colored they're almost never singular colored the best color for them is i think by far green because it has a card called doubling season and they have garuk who is able to untap lands and just generally very powerful planeswalkers exist in green but five colors all of the colors have really great ones so yeah it's probably not mono green it probably just has green and a couple of other colors yeah so you can be super friends and you're in band or you can be super friends and you're in naya yeah uh yeah i find that planeswalker decks typically are more on the controller side too because if you play planeswalker and then the board wipe your planeswalker it sticks around got em they tend to be very controlling uh next up we have blink decks so blink decks are all about an ability that is sort of referenced to as flicker which is if you have a permanent on the battlefield and you are able to blink it it goes whoa out of existence and then back on the battlefield you can then use the card again because if it says when it enters the battlefield do x then great good job you get that value again so blink is very much in white blue and green uh there's a lot of creatures that have entered the battlefield abilities or cards that say exile this card and then return to the battlefield um and so blink is about generating tons of value doing sort of cool comboy things and setting up really impressive board states that just generate a ton of value yeah blinking is just a way to get sort of free things happening where you don't cost you cards right that's what you're trying to set up a way that like oh at the end of every turn this is going to happen it's just a machine that's running it doesn't cost me any cards out of my hand in fact it trusts me cards yeah and it draws me a card and destroys a thing or draws me a card and puts a land into play or whatever it does uh yeah so it's that incremental value thing the next one is graveyard strategies these are decks that literally want to dump as much of their library into their graveyard as possible because their graveyard they've set up their deck in a way that their graveyard does not mean a card is lost it means they have access to it yeah it's like an extension of their hand yeah so they've got all the cards that sort of say oh get stuff out of your graveyard and use it in these ways so they just want their graveyard to be full because it's almost like having their hand be full black is definitely the biggest graveyard color green uh also plays around the graveyard a lot white has a lot of recursion especially for sort of low cmc permanence these are the three colors that like the graveyard the most um this is also often a comboy type deck a lot of strategies because a lot of times like i just got to get enough stuff in my graveyard till i have these two cards or three cards in there and now i know i can get this this engine going or this combo going yeah now that i have these cards here i'm going to exile these if i have to pay for this one i'm going to use this card to dredge out more cards and just go in these little cycles uh the next is voltron which is a reason why we talked about a commander doing 21 damage in the beginning of this podcast because voltron is looking to kill you with one single creature typically the legendary creature commander and just beat you down with it get you hit you for 21 damage or maybe it's so big it doesn't even care it's just going to get you down to a lower life total another player will finish you off but voltron's all about strapping up one really big commander with some crazy cool stuff and this is pretty much available to all colors because you'll find the commander in pretty much every color and color combination that has a high power and toughness and can smack in for a lot of damage probably has some text that says you know when something happens it gets double strike or right it gets extra power somehow it's a reference to the 80s uh cartoon which was basically a bunch of small robot cats coming together to form one giant robot and uh those are your equipment and your enchantment auras and all that stuff yeah and definitely an aggro strategy it's going to want to get out there and punch people out before they really get going definitely the next one is another very popular one and very popular with new players and i would say this is one of my suggestions for one of the best places to start your deck building career is with tribal depth yeah tribal decks can be in all colors all strategies but they care about the creature type on each creature so below the art for the creature it will say you know creature slash elf zombie goblin dragon there are tons of different ones and then you play a bunch of cards that just care about how many else you have or how many dragons you can attack with or whenever you play a zombie this is going to happen that's what we call payoff cards right we've been if we refer to it for lands we've referred to it for wheel decks for 101 counters this is just that but for a specific tribe of creatures um and the reason i like this for newer players is that it's a little bit easier to narrow down and find their correct cards because it's a lot easier to just be like show me all the elves that i've ever existed in magic yep than it is to say show me all the cards that care about if i draw a card or my opponent draws a card in the history of magic that's just harder to to sort of parse yeah and the cool thing about tribal again is if you know if you're mono red goblins you're more aggro if you're model black zombies maybe you're more controller combo so it's really flexible and the nice thing is is that the cards that synergize with the cards are often the same creature type so a zombie lord that gives everything plus one plus one happens to be a zombie too so it interacts with these cards and so i think it's easier to just automatically build synergies in which is why again we recommend this definitely if you're just just venturing out and really love a specific creature type and these decks can be very very powerful oh yeah goblin zombie sliver these decks are all tribal decks and they all kick beat face yeah they will all mess you up uh the next is a new kind of tribal it's keyword tribal so we've seen that wizard has been giving a lot more attention to oh what if creature what if it mattered that your creature had death touch or what if it matter if your creature had menace or monache as we say on the podcast or flying so the colors of these types of decks will depend on the keywords uh but this really also can encompass all strategies um they're typically because it's keywords it'll help more on the attacking side because menace is hard to block or flying is hard to block but it's cool because there's a lot more support coming for this and it lets you i think really customize what you want to do it's like i love flying and i want this to be a flying travel deck but i want to only have it be birds or only have it be you know weird artifact creatures or whatever it is yeah this is a cool new thing they're doing a lot more of so i could see this being another thing like tribal that's a good place to start uh in the future flying specifically i think yeah already has a lot of support but maybe menace and death touch aren't quite there yet maybe wait a year or two we'll see uh and the last one is a really unique archetype that i think only exists in commander because of the multiplayer aspect of uh the format it's group hug yeah and this is usually in green and or blue white might be in there often it's five color but what it really wants to do is pretend like it's friends with everybody it's helping everybody give stuff to people oh i'm gonna let everybody draw cards or we're gonna help everybody get more man on the table but secretly it's gonna eventually take advantage of whatever it was that it was helping quote-unquote people with and make that flip that on them and be like ah just kidding now you're gonna take damage for every card you draw or now like you thought i was being nice but now i've set up a board state where no one can attack me or you'll be pure of heart and be like and now i'm gonna allow you to win because that's how i feel uh i think group hug has elements that could be also put into any of the archetypes we just talked about because there are cards that will be like tempting offer hey i'm going to go search for milan's are you going to go do it too or i'm going to pay certain man this you can also pay me into it so group hug is just really incentivizing group play finding ways to bring players together and maybe have them contribute to something or you know be restricted by something that affects the whole group yeah it is building your deck in a way that allows you to help other players get resources if they need to and then you know playing into the political aspect of commander where you really can try to extract like favors from them in exchange for you know hey i'll give you a couple of extra mana this turn in response will you just attack that player or destroy that thing or not attack me yeah not usually be like a couple more man i'll take it yeah yeah um of course we just mentioned a bunch of archetypes they're not all of them and not all decks are made equal um because some decks are just going to be more capable than other ones of achieving certain things and that's just how it is some decks are going to be more adaptable that can go into a control or an aggro or a combo shell some decks are going to be more restrictive so i think the main thing to know here is that most archetypes are going to be able to get to a 7 or an 8 out of the 10 power scale 10 being like super top tier competitive and we found that for the most part that's where the average of commander players lies seven and eight in terms of how powerful their decks are so really almost anything here is viable and there's always going to be ways to mitigate sort of the downsides of what the colors you're in and what you're restricted of doing so the color restrictions will in some part dictate your dex power but a lot of it again is up to you as the builder and up to you in terms of how powerful you actually want to make it and i would say don't you know if you're brand new don't stress about making the most competitive deck together either because it's not going to be as fun necessarily unless that's really your jam yeah i would encourage people to not worry too much about how powerful their deck's going to be when they're deciding what deck to build you know approaching it from the standpoint of like what deck should i build well what's the most powerful possible deck let's build that it's probably not the way to go at at first i would encourage people to be like what sounds like the most fun things to do that speak to who i am as a gamer and as a player and then build a deck based on that that's generally going to work out just fine because a deck's an investment right yeah and you want to invest in something that when you play it everyone's going to not going to go i don't ever want to play against that again that wasn't that fun it might be good to talk to your play group just to make sure that it falls in line especially when you're a new player with you know what the play group generally does or if you don't have a play group you know whatever happens um at your lgs or whatever uh i know a lot of people are playing on spell table now spell table does tend to be a little bit higher on the power scale i'd say in the in the eights and nines so maybe just like watching some streams and kind of getting a feel for like what is mostly played out there will kind of give you a ballpark or a target to aim for yeah and the discords that organize these games too will have a lower power realm like these are the battlecruiser decks just trying to cruise along and do big splashy things here are the competitive decks so you choose what group you're gonna play with all right jimmy so we've gone through the colors the player types the archetypes what now well at this point i think you should have a pretty solid answer for what you want to do in magic what strategies appeal to you what colors you may naturally be drawn to or challenged by and you might start beginning to piece together what your deck is going to be okay i definitely want to have white and red and now i'm just wanting to figure out the third color like you know i really like the aspects of what green is so i'm going to make it absolute white black and whatever you know whatever it is that's not white and red white red and green is naya so apologies um and you know you now just need to get out there and start looking at the different colors and archetypes and the different commanders that are available and i think in general you know especially if you're a new player the first thing to focus on is just do what you find is fun don't worry about so much if it's going to be too strong or too weak or you know just build for the sake of building and definitely take advice from people if they're willing to offer it don't be afraid to ask for it either and for our resource the thing that i almost when i want to build a deck almost always i just go to edhrec.com it's like my first place to go because you can sort by the colors you can sort by the themes just kind of like what we did in the episode here right you were like i want to build a token deck that has red and green in it well great you can go sort by token or go look by the colors or just google those words and you'll find lots of options if you google if you google token red green mtg one of the first things will be edh rec at the top click that one and it'll bring up all the gruel or red and green commanders that are in the token strategy and now you're just looking through those and being like you know abcdefg which one of those do i want to choose which one looks the coolest and then you click on one of those and it'll start giving you suggestions of cards and uh i think you know you could just look at the suggestion it gives you and build that deck but i think it'll be more fun to sort of pick and choose yourself and we all have restrictions about what cards we have in our collection and things like that that's going to be a big part of it uh but that's just a really good place to start i agree with jimmy i almost never build a deck where edhrec isn't open it's not the only tool i use but it's just a tool that i use a lot yeah and there's no shame in looking up what other people have done asking for help if you're on our discord being like hey i want to build this or this is what i'm sort of aiming towards any suggestions because again magic 22 000 cards no one's going to be angry at you for looking at a couple of things online to help you build your process no one can just build a deck out of thin air using their brains unless they're some sort of you know magical very magic loving person like magic gavin or someone could do that or a savant yeah in general like i barely remember what cards do i'm like there was that card and it did this thing and they're you know people in the office would be like you just did the set review for that set last week how would you forget what's it called again how much does it cost oh no that's in green i thought it was in red yes yeah yeah yeah i mean jimmy and i build at least 15 decks a year or so because of this show and game nights and we use you know online resources like ea trek all the time yeah i'll have like 10 tabs open a couple of tapped out lists uh list on mtg goldfish you'll list on uh some recommended cards in each rec and just sort of like mind meld and just feel it out you know yeah all right all right it's not the end i'll be all not every day deck that you're gonna make is gonna be your last deck so don't be so you know locked into like oh none of the decks you're going to make are going to be over your laptop that's true um players will often disassemble decks that don't work or rebuild them or be like you know what i like the blue black shell now i'm going to add a red to it change the commander and move some pieces around so don't be afraid you know you will have staples like command tower and soul ring in every deck and you'll know that those cards are always going to stay the same so keep this in mind when you're building and you know your decks are going to improve over time so you don't need to make a masterpiece out the gate yeah don't think of it as like i'm going to build this deck and it's gonna be perfect think of it as like a work in progress at all times yeah and i'm just gonna do version one of this thing and get out there and play it and playing it will teach me a lot about what i need to do to it and that'll help you inform your decisions and you know oftentimes like you build that deck if you haven't played it it's not even worth really tweaking it because you just don't have the information so sometimes if i've built a deck and i have a middle play i'll build a second deck rather than tweak the first deck until i've been able to play it a few times yeah and you can also use tools online to goldfish hands and just see okay what is a nice seven card hand look like oh okay maybe i do need to add more lands or maybe i need to do this or that um so yeah don't be afraid to retool reset or even reboot decks that you've already built this is a journey and every deck builder is different um so have fun with it yeah the first step on that journey is just trying it too i know a lot of people get really intimidated and they they just don't know how to jump into it just do it don't worry if it's successful or failure just try it because after you've done it the first time you'll be more confident the second time yep all right that's gonna do it for our introduction to deck building 2021 edition to the listeners what tips and tricks do you utilize out there when you're creating a new deck when you were creating your first stack yeah if you wanna if you're a veteran player or even if you're not if you're if you're newer and you want to reply in the comments i think that can help some people out you know there's a video we're making so we can point to it for a number of years as a starting point because we get asked all the time by new players sort of how to begin so if you have advice for newer players in this realm i'm sure they'd be happy to hear it or please recommend them to this video and if they're looking to buy cards please also recommend them to go to cardkingdom.com command zone that's our affiliate link if you're gonna be buying magic cards especially if you want to for instance just buy the whole deck in one go and have it shipped from one reliable place can't recommend carcam.com command zone more they have amazing customer service they're also really good at grading their cards so if they say something is near mint it is near mint they'll ship it out to you really fast great customer service i mean i've already said that but yeah use the use the affiliate link you're gonna buy magic cards anyway for yourself or for someone else at cardkingdom.com command zone call time pre-orders oh yeah it looks so sweet right on the horizon the art is sweet the showcases showcase viking frames they look so cool so if you want to get your hands on called heim you know that's the great thing about card kingdom as well i don't like to order online for the release weekend from a lot of different places because sometimes you do that and you don't get your booster box until like two weeks after the set's been out rough card kingdom gets you this stuff faster than anybody yep uh and then once you have that stuff we keep saying it but it is true ultra pro they are the best company with the best products to protect your game pieces they have the pro gloss eclipse sleeves you want to put your cards in good sleeves because you want them to stay in good condition maintain their value who knows you might want to trade them in buy list them to card kingdom someday to turn them into other cards that you want if you want to do that the cards got to be in good condition because that keeps them more in demand best way to keep them in good condition use eclipse sleeves from ultra pro use satin towers best deck box in the game yeah or mythic collection deck boxes from ultra pro they make those really cool new they have the hand stitching or whatever i don't know if it's by hand but they have that like nice really classy stitching on the mythic collection really cool stuff they have classy stuff they have great stuff they have sturdy stuff ultra pro and also get peace of mind when you're using ultra pro products you are supporting all of our content yeah especially if you're going to take that new deck you just built into your first tournament when it's safe you're going to want to keep it safe yeah satin tower or mythic collection for sure yeah okay moving on to the end step uh oh perfect great we totally had something josh take it away we talked about something cool outside the world of magic so this instep is in two parts because there's a cool tie-in to our content okay so there's a netflix series i started out as a youtube series it is called cobra kai ah yes so cobra kai it started out on youtube came right into netflix and then season three so there's two seasons i think on youtube yeah it was youtube red yep um netflix picked it up it did very very well they've the third season just came out like at the time you're watching this it came out on january first weeks ago yeah yeah and uh it basically is the continuing storyline from the karate kid movie from the 80s the original but the the characters have all grown up right not the will smith one although will smith i think is a producer on the show anyway uh yeah ralph macchio who's the original karate kid he's in his 40s now johnny lawrence who was the bully from the original karate kid is in his 40s now and they still have a rivalry and they're still doing karate stuff but now it follows a bunch of kids that they're sort of training and it's actually a really good show um and the really exciting part about this show is that one of the characters on the show the character of hawk who is the guy with the mohawk uh his the actor is named jacob bertrand and he actually contacted us a number of months ago because he's a magic player yeah and commander player too and he had gotten some of his cast mates into it as well super into commander yeah i think i had worn a cobra kai t-shirt oh on one of the episodes of the podcast or something and he literally messaged me on twitter and was like hey i noticed you wore a karbokai shirt i'm in cobra kai can i come on game nights and it took a while pandemic and everything like that um obviously we're obeying like covet testing procedures and things like that and he's local very importantly and he's local so there was no traveling involved and we had to you know wait in between productions and all kinds of stuff but for the caldheim episode of game nights which comes out on february 3rd we never announce this stuff this early but it's very exciting because jacob's like currently on netflix in a new series uh he's going to be on the show and so yeah in fact we probably will uh we'll we'll figure out some scene that we can show if you're watching the youtube video of you know one single shot from that game nice episode yeah yeah and the guy's no joke he plays a lot of magic he he watches a lot of game nights he was quoting different game nights episodes to us the entire time yeah true actor i loved it yeah and also like he knows his stuff so he didn't he did not come to mess around yeah it's it's a really great episode i can't wait for people to see it and the call time cards are also totally sweet and cobra kai really good really good series i haven't quite finished season three yet but it's have you watched it jimmy yeah i've seen the first season you would think it's like oh what a gimmick right really youtube red they're gonna pay for this and then you watch it you're like that was that was cute that was good i mean it's very high quality it just feels like an hbo show or something right yeah the writing is good too yeah the writing's really really good there's there's callbacks to the earlier movies but you don't have to have seen them so yeah cause i've watched it with my nieces and nephews who really enjoy the show they don't even know about the earlier movies at all funny they think the will smith one is like the they're like where's jayden where's jackie chan yeah so definitely check out cobra kai on uh netflix and that'll also prepare you for jacob's uh episode of game nights that's coming up yeah you can send them some love he's on twitter and instagram as well yeah we'll put his uh info up on screen here and in the show notes if you want to check it out uh big thanks to our editing graphics and logistics team it's craig blanchett manson lung ashland rose lady danger jake boss josh murphy alfred estaca patrick nan sam waldo arthur metacraft and jordan pridgeon and special thanks to jeffrey palmer who does the living card animations that begin each of our shows and does a lot of the uh window animations that sit behind us on set he did do this steam vents it's very cool yeah you can find jeffrey on twitter at living cards mtg yeah people actually randomly always ask me like where do you get those awesome screens from they're just tvs turned sideways but the magic is in the animations that sam waldow makes for us as well as jeffrey in the past yeah all right everybody thanks for watching good luck with your uh first commander deck or your second or third hopefully we could uh give you a little bit of help yep and uh be sure to send this to uh an episode to someone that may be looking into building community for the first time i think it's a great place to start out and thank you all again for watching we'll see you next time bye bye peace 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: 228,128

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, znr, cmr, new, brew, how, to, zendikar, kaldheim, khm, theros, ikoria, iko

Id: _W4a25ty1Ao

Length: 94min 57sec (5697 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 13 2021