Archetypes and Themes
Token decks seek to use the larger scale of a game of Commander in order to create overwhelming armies of tokens, further perpetuated through the use of cards such as Anointed Precession and Doubling Season. One of the major card types in Magic, Enchantments most often come in the form of those that provide a static effect, or auras, those that augment another permanent. As there are a massive sum of enchantments that have been printed in Magic’s history, it should be no surprise that there are decks that can take advantage of their synergies. More than that, she can’t be countered and allows her wielder to take an extra turn after she’s summoned to ensure at least one strike.
Likewise, a Control deck wouldn’t be caught dead running vanilla creatures, but there are some that are worth running in hyper-aggressive decks. Knowing your deck’s goals and the best tools for accomplishing those goals will make card evaluation and deckbuilding a hell of a lot easier. Making up a massive portion of Commander decks, Graveyard decks come in a wide variety of forms, but all aim to use their graveyard as a source of value. This allows a player’s graveyard to effectively function as a secondary hand, giving them more cards to access within their turn than they would have otherwise.
All the Commander EDH Deck Archetypes and Themes
This is fittingly the color pair of the Shire folk due to their meager stature and their fondness for food. While food tokens are typically useful in more controlling strategies as they provide a source of lifegain, the Halflings from Middle-earth gain power and toughness bonuses from having food available on your side of the battlefield. Some of the best commons and uncommons you can find in this pair consist of Frodo Baggins, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Eastfarthing Farmer, Bill the Pony, and Butterbur, Bree Innkeeper. Both of these spells give you a victory outlet for casting instants and sorceries that might otherwise simply fizzle out into nothing productive. You’ve also got some nice, evasive creatures in cards like Nimrodel Watcher and fliers found in blue that can carry your damage the extra distance.
Green / Blue: “Enters the Battlefield” Value ( Frogs )
While this deck has never attained the popularity of its Madness-based cousin, it has still placed well in tournaments. The first is that Expend will only trigger once per turn; if you have a creature with Expend 4 and trigger it by spending your 4th mana in a turn, you won’t trigger it again when you spend your 8th. The second is that Expend can also trigger on your opponent’s turn if you have instants or spells with flash, making it a good way to startle an overzealous foe. Scrying at instant speed can mtg card be particularly good as activating your elven scry triggers on the opponent’s turn can catch them unawares and turn your scry spells into pseudo-combat tricks.
The most important thing to consider with a ramp deck is your ramp curve. Most ramp spells jump you ahead by a single mana, and you want to maximize the extra mana every turn possible. For example, a deck with an odd ramp curve would start with a ramp spell on turn 1 like Llanowar Elves, which gives you three mana on turn 2, which goes into a 3-mana ramp spell like Cultivate. That jumps you to five mana on turn 3, the perfect amount to drop a threat like Nissa, Who Shakes the World. Google seems to just give very expensive decklists and way too many results to get your head around.
Combo decks are a bit of an exception to this rule because they’re often hyper-specific, but most of the decks on our spectrum play out similarly. This is part of why it’s so important to understand the basic deck archetypes. You can take what you learned playing Standard mono-red and apply many of the same core practices and heuristics to playing Kuldotha red in Pauper or burn in Modern. Even the aggressive and controlling ones will be closer to the middle of the spectrum because of how unfocused the decks are. We also don’t see too many hybrid archetypes like aggro-control and combo-control, but they can exist. There are several differences you’ll find when drafting these decks as opposed to building them in Constructed.
How Do Archetypes Differ by Format?
On the one hand, all those mana rocks allow for some really explosive starts, but on the other hand, artifact destruction is really, really common, and there aren’t that many good enablers for this theme. One method Control decks can use to grind out card advantage is assembling engines that reuse the same creatures over and over. One False Prophet might be annoying, for example, but if you’re able to bring it back every turn with Dawn of the Dead or whatever, then it becomes impossible for Aggro to win unless they can disrupt your engine. Group Slug, on the other hand, is about symmetrical discard, damage, sacrifice, etc. While Chaos is about making the game as chaotic as possible, Group Slug is about making the game as miserable as possible (although in practice, Chaos games also tend to be pretty miserable).
If you pick a creature and just take every card that mentions that type – well, I’m sure your deck will be okay. But if you want greatness, you’ll need to look beyond the creature types and recognize the archetype your deck wants to emphasize. Note that although there are strong typal themes in BLB, it is not expected that a player simply draft all of one creature type before calling it a day. Each of the ten major animal types have a mechanical theme, and that’s what you’ll really want to focus on. Run a ton of mana rocks, artifact creatures, and the few cards that encourage you to play lots of artifacts.
If the Aggro deck can disrupt Control’s ability to answer its threats, then victory becomes inevitable, and there are few disruption effects that are more solid than mass land destruction. Goodstuff decks don’t build for synergy, they just jam a bunch of individually powerful cards together and call it a day. Constructing a Goodstuff deck usually consists of picking three colors, looking through lists of Commander staples for the best cards in those colors, and then sleeving them up. Having some form of reach is extremely important for a competitive aggro deck.
It enters the battlefield as a copy of any artifact or creature on any player’s battlefield, meaning that its versatility and adaptability make it dangerous in many different game modes. Angels in Magic the Gathering are known for two things as a powerful creature type, those being their connection to the color white and their high mana cost to cast. Avacyn, Angel of Hope lands on the battlefield with flying, vigilance, and indestructible, which on its own is rather impressive. She also makes all other permanent’s her owner controls also have indestructible.
These are combo decks with an engine but function at vastly different speeds. It’s all literally legal in Legacy, but not nearly fast enough to be effective. The biggest difference between formats is how quickly archetypes need to win based on the tools available.
Your cards should all work together towards a goal and further your deck’s plan. Orzhov is all about life gain, which not only helps you outlast your opponent but also activates several synergies. Fiendish Panda, for example, as well as Ajani’s Pridemate, grows enormously with each instance of life gain and does not leave you empty-handed after an enemy removal spell. Cat Collector makes board instead, while Marauding Blight-Priest and Midnight Snack take care of turning your life gain into life loss for the opponent.
No limited format would be complete without a proper sacrifice archetype, and Golgari is here once again to make the masochistic dreams of players who prefer to kill their own creatures come true. This is also the color pair that cares the most about returning cards from your graveyard to your hand which fits perfectly with sacrifice effect. Some great cards for this archetype are the signposts OId Man Willow and Rise of the Witch-King, as well as Voracious Fell Beast, Nasty End, Revive the Shire, and Mushroom Watchdogs.