Congrats everyone! We welcomed our 1,000th subscriber last week to MTGZone! A huge thank-you to everyone here for browsing and contributing—this is a wonderful place already and will only get better.
To celebrate this awesome milestone, we're giving away 1 LTR collector booster and 2 LTR set boosters to one lucky community member!
To enter:
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We'll leave this up for 2 weeks and at noon eastern on August 7th we'll pick a random member from the comments here. I'll reach out via DM for an address and once confirmed will post here!
Some fun facts for reading this far:
- Our first post was on June 9th, a bit over 6 weeks ago. Since then we've had a total of 304 (mostly spoiler!) posts.
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Thanks again to everyone, can't wait to celebrate 5,000! As always please DM me or mike with any questions or suggestions or if you're interested in getting involved, or find us at Mastodon.
Updates:
[12:00pm] It's noon Eastern! I locked the thread and will get all of the unique usernames here to run the drawing!
[1:46pm] Apologies for the delay! We have a winner: @[email protected]! I sent them a message now to verify and once I get a reply I'll make the official announcement post with drawing video. Stay tuned!
As an extremely casual commander player, I always feel like a noob even though technically I've been playing MTG for over half a decade at this point. My commander decks have all been precons and I've mostly just got cards through drafting with my friends, but this year I've been trying to build my own deck from scratch and it's... exciting but frustrating.
Does anyone have any tips for taking a (commander) deck from the "theoretical pile of cards" stage to a functioning deck? By that I mean, I've done the preliminary research (scryfall searches, EDHREC most used cards for the commander, etc) to find possible cards, and I've read some high level theory stuff about deck building (ramping, threats, etc) to categorize my possible cards... But can't really find any articles/videos showing workflows to actually build the deck.
Currently I'm trying to use tags on Moxfield but it's mostly a confusing mess as I try to trim down ~200 possibilities into a lean, functioning deck.
This doesn't directly answer your question on paring the big pool down, but I bookmarked this a while ago that had a pretty good overview of EDH deckbuilding basics that might help, including numbers on how many of each category to go with: https://www.archidekt.com/decks/1048638#EDH__Deck_Template_(read_description_at_bottom) (and original source). It links to a separate guide on lands too which is helpful.
In general I think it's really helpful to set a goal at the beginning. Are you building a deck to primarily have fun and/or explore a theme, do you want to try to be competitive, etc. I tend to choose the cards that I enjoy playing over those that might be "strictly better," for instance, particularly ones that I have nostalgia for. I also tend to build around themes/tribes a lot which naturally limits the pool.
I think your question would make a really good post of it's own, but my best suggestion would be to write down the mana curve you want first and build your deck to fit cards into that curve. Say you want 10 1cc spells, 20 2cc spells, 25 3cc spells, and 10 4+cc spells with 35 lands. There are so many possible cards you can include in your commander deck that I think it's better to choose them based on a structured mana curve you want. That way your deck won't fall apart while you play it, and you have a clear system for how to swap/upgrade/replace cards in your deck.
I agree with mike that this could be a whole post on its own, but something that’s helped me pare down the pile of potentials was the rough guidelines that both Prof (TCC) and Tomer (Goldfish) put out a couple of years ago, where they talk about how much ramp vs removal vs card draw you should aim for (I still try to run at least one “you win the game” card in every deck, in line with Tomer’s suggestion).
I still review my 99 with that in mind, even if I don’t always hit those exact numbers, and it’s helped make my decks play more smoothly whenever I run them, and is also really helpful when upgrading, since I know if I’m adding a new card draw engine, then my cuts should be from my existing card draw.
It’s probably helpful if I actually share the links:
TCC - How to Build Your 1st Commander Deck: https://youtu.be/1jO2fmsef0g
MTGGoldfish - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-power-of-a-deckbuilding-checklist-commander-quickie