MTG Commander: How to build a Commander deck for Magic: The Gathering
A subcategory that may be included here meta mtg is mana acceleration with cards that do cost mana themselves but yield an amount of mana as their effect. You’ll spend all of your time with any deck messing around with the cards in it or adding in new ones from new sets that release. Sometimes a friend will have a card that you didn’t even realise existed, and suddenly you’re searching for a card that might be older than you, just to try and improve your deck. A sweet spot for most Commander decks is to run at least creatures with an average being 25. That means about a fifth to a quarter of your deck should be creatures to defend your battlefield. Obviously it can vary greatly depending on the player and the commander, but I’m trying to get a general feel for this so I have a baseline for fine-tuning my decks.
How to build a Commander deck in Magic: The Gathering
In the Commander format, decks are usually referred to by their Commander, since that’s usually enough to determine a deck’s color and archetype. For example, you might have a “The Most Dangerous Gamer deck” or a “Tom Bombadil deck”. Some example deck names are “mono-blue Eye of the Storm combo”, “extended green/blue aggro-control deck”, and “Rakdos vampires”. Utility cards are cards that may serve more than one function in a deck. A utility category may be named if categories such as Protection or Card Advantage do not include enough cards to warrant a distinction in any one given deck. The third large portion of a deck is usually used to either shield oneself from attempts by the opponent to halt the game plan or cards that do so to the opponent.
How to build a Commander deck in MTG
Not only do you get many different decks due to the different win conditions – you also can substitute card types you would normally use with others. Different colours will have different removal, so Black and White are going to be able to use cards that destroy and exile. Blue will have to counter spells or put creatures back in their owner’s hands. Red will be able to use spells that deal damage to destroy things, and Green is stuff with cards that let your creatures fight other creatures. There are cards that break these rules but, generally speaking, this is what you’ll be working with in each colour. Of those, you’ll want roughly ten bits of removal and interaction in your deck.
How to calculate the number of lands?
This Lathril, Blade of the Elves elfball Commander deck contains 39 creatures. Lands and maybe mana rocks are the only things you can generalize. The rest of the deck’s composition varies too wildly for an accurate rule or guideline. Un-sets featured the Attraction deck and the Contraption deck. Trading card games have gone digital and are more accessible than ever before. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Of course, this also depends on the utility of each creature you include. Finding creatures that fill one or more categories in the deck-building process can heavily influence how many creatures you run overall. For example, you usually need to dedicate some amount of deck space to removal, but if many of your creatures destroy permanents on ETB, you can skimp on targeted removal and go higher on your creature count. Incorporating creatures with multiple utilities makes for a more balanced deck. You will want to incorporate the best angels that give you protection, life gain, and combat advantage.
Repeatable card draw is particularly valuable, helping you build momentum, and start to run away with the game. In the earlier years of the Pro Tour, decks often had esoteric and opaque naming schemes, but this was later discarded as the viewer’s experience was worsened. Additionally, as mechanical or strategic theming became the stronger deckbuilding norm and online decklist proliferation more widespread, weird deck names became less prevalent as players would often not keep the nickname when porting decks.
That means you can throw in a couple of big old cards into the mix, Commander is where those seven-mana do-nothing enchantment cards that get printed come into their own. If you’re not sure what they are, take a look at Mind’s Dilation. This seven-mana enchantment makes it so whenever an opponent casts their first spell of the turn they have to exile the top card of your deck. Then – and this is where it gets good – you can cast that spell if it’s a nonland card. These decks don’t have a lot of room to fiddle around with generically good creatures; each creature in the deck needs to adhere to the gameplan of casting spells.
If you end up enjoying this process, it’ll never end, and that’s a lot of fun. Commander is the MTG format that allows the most creativity, and it’s the bastion of deck brewers, casuals and competitive players alike. It’s good fun because anything is possible, and you’ll end up doing things that are completely impossible in any other format. Keep that in mind when you’re building a Commander deck and you’ll not only have fun, you’ll constantly get better at building the decks, and then you’ll start winning more too.
To again name an example, if you look at Splinter Twin deck lists, you will commonly find 4 copies of Splinter Twin, which is an Enchantment/Aura card. Not just including this card in a deck, but deciding to build entirely around it is what makes the deck strong and playable, but all of this is entirely independent of the card type – what matters is the card function. Almost always, your commander is going to be a big part of your game plan, whether it’s a win condition, or just grease for the wheels. But, while commanders tend to serve as central pillars for decks, two decks built around the same commander can be completely different, based on the choices made when brewing them. Also, competitive decks are even less likely to follow this than beginner/casual play.
If you’re looking for more content like this, keep up on the latest posts by following the Draftsim Facebook page. Enchantments like Assemble the Legion and Bitterblossom that give you creature tokens on your upkeep are examples of non-creature token generators that give you repeated value. For each one of these types of cards in your build, you can consider docking down a creature from your deck where appropriate. Such spells like Sensei’s Divining Top, Esper Sentinel, and everyone’s favorite Rhystic Study will give you enough card advantage to keep your control deck engine going. You’ll want as many of the chosen creature types as possible if you decide to run a typal deck. Depending on the creature type, you could run at least 30 to 40 or more creatures in the build.
A deck is the collection of cards that a player plays with; it becomes that player’s library. Master Pokémon TCG Pocket with staple cards like Poke Ball, Misty, and Sabrina. Even if you already know how to play Commander, you might be new and unsure as to how to make your own mark on the format. Here’s what you need to know to build your own Commander deck. Aggro decks should run about for the best results, though those creatures need to be potent aggressive threats. For example, an elf ball deck should have about 35 to 39 creatures to generate go-wide synergy with elves and ramp substantially with staples like Circle of Dreams Druid and Jaheira, Friend of the Forest.
The equation starts at 20% of the format minimum deck size and adds 5% lands for each 0.7 inscrease in the average Mana Value. In this answer, the mentioned formats from my introductionary paragraph are the only ones I even considered – there are other formats played competitively, but not to an extend that makes their mention particularily worthwhile or representitive. Whichever numbers you might come up, once you enter Vintage Two-Headed Giant Commander (a format entirely covered by the official rules, mind you, yet not particularily tournament-viable), you will realize they won’t work out even by a long shot. The specifics of the cards in your deck is up to you, but if you’re struggling for inspiration then sites such as EDHREC can help massively thanks to the huge amount of data they collate and the rule of the masses.