Last time on Pretty Deece: It's time for a preview. Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow! By the way, yes, Commander ninjutsu works exactly the way you want it to work. To take advantage of this, Adam Styborski and DJ from Jumbo Commander teamed up to make this doozy of a deck. Alright, I’m gonna jump right in here and
assume you already know what Commander is. If you don’t know what Commander is, it’s
the casual/multiplayer format of choice for Magicians for the last, I don't know, decade or so? For a primer, you can check out the Adam Styborski
article in the description and then come back to this later. Cuz we’re moving on! You’ve probably heard someone talk about
Commander cards. “Don’t sell that seven-mana sorcery that
does nothing! That’s a Commander card. That’s gonna be big money someday.” Or you see a card that’s great in your Standard
deck and think about putting it in your Commander deck, and everyone tells you “no way, that’s
never gonna work in Commander, what are you doing?” No one ever gives you reasons behind what
they’re saying, and you don’t wanna look dumb so you nod along and move on. I get it. We’ve all been there. So today, we’re gonna explain what exactly
constitutes a Commander Card. This is an example of a Commander card. It had absolutely no impact on Standard the
entire time it was legal, because it is a big, dumb, seven-mana creature that destroys
anything except another creature and gives you a land. That’s not so great in a typical Constructed
format! Even in small formats like Standard, seven
mana is a considerable bar to clear—if you’re sinking that much mana into a card and it
doesn’t win the game on the spot you are in trouble. That is very much not how Commander works. Commander legality stretches all the way
back to Alpha; even with the singleton restriction, any format with this amount of cards is bound
to be nutty. But Commander is casual. You’re playing with your friends, there’s
nothing on the line, it’s not super cutthroat. The generally agreed-upon way to play is to
run a lot of mana sources and deliberately take lots of time setting up some of your
deck’s engines. Naturally over the course of a game another
player will set up their deck’s gameplan first or they're going to try and disrupt yours. This is where the politics of multiplayer
Magic come in. “Kill her Kaalia or it’s gonna attack
next turn.” “I won’t attack you with Kaalia, I’m
gonna attack him, because he’s gonna go off with Animar if I don’t.” This can go on for a while! The fun derived from this part of Commander
is, uh, up for debate, but I digress. Let’s come back to Sylvan Primordial. Sure, it was horrible in Standard by every metric, but it’s
pretty much a textbook example of what a good Commander card looks like. It does everything you want, especially in
a multiplayer game: it gives you lands, it disrupts all of your opponents equally, and
it’s a big ol’ clunky doofus. Sylvan Primordial is so good in Commander
that, uh… it’s banned! (The Commander banlist is kind of a mess. God, I keep getting off-topic.) So when someone refers to something as a Commander
card, what they’re saying is that the card is not very good in a competitive context,
but in the mana-hungry, slow simmer begrudgingly brought to a boil that is Commander, the card’s
got some applications. Bonus points if the card generates lots of
mana or affects multiple opponents. This is not a Commander card. I picked this card specifically because the
fine young idiot that animates all of these videos has it in his Commander deck. Lightning Strike, like Incinerate, Searing
Spear, and even Volcanic Hammer before it, has some real tournament pedigree. Lightning Strike brings home the bacon. So why isn’t it a Commander card? Once again, it’s time to bring back our
frame of reference for what a Commander card is. This thing is a 6/8. A 6/8 seems gigantic, but stats like that
aren’t the exception, they’re the rule. Against the cards you can expect your opponents
to bring to the table, Lightning Strike does nothing. Also, in Commander, players start at 40 life. So a Lightning Strike is only 7.5% of one
player’s life total, as opposed to a normal game of Magic, where three damage is 15% of
everyone’s starting life total. Lightning Strike is cheap and mana-efficient,
but when everyone starts at 40 life, the parameters of what makes a viable card differ wildly. The tl;dr here: The cards that are slower
and seem kinda mopey are capable of doing big things in Commander. Something that’s mana-efficient, sleek,
and agile might beat an opponent starting off at 20 life, but they leave a lot to be
desired against multiple opponents that start every game at 40. But there’s exceptions to every rule. You should let us know what cards are good
in both Competitive and Commander play in he comments. You can also like and subscribe to see more
of this stuff, and, hey, I write a newsletter for TCGplayer every week, so to get that little
hookup, check out the description. Thanks for watching, and I will see you next
time.
