Building a (c)EDH Deck

Hi, this is Sam's Table. I am Sam Black, and today I want to talk about my recommendations for building commanderdex or CEDHDX. More specifically CEDHDX, but you can apply a lot of the same things to building commanderdex, just with a little bit less focus on maximum efficiency and stuff, depending on your goals for your commander deck. So, let's get into it. The first thing is your vision for the deck. What is your deck doing? What's your commander? Why is it your commander? The next thing is, why does this deck exist? And the clearest question, like sub-question there is, what are its unique strengths? What is it doing better than any other deck? If you don't have an answer to that, it's not a CEDH deck. The one thing, like the worst thing that you can do in deck selection for any kind of competitive magic tournament, is to choose a deck that's a bad version of a different deck. So, your vision for a deck that you're going to build has to be predicated on some kind of theory about what it does better than every other deck. And maybe that's being well-rounded, like maybe you can think of another deck that does a thing that you have in mind better than you do, but you think that it has some weaknesses that you're shoring up. That's no case base to be in, but you still, you know, you need to know, why am I doing this? What are the strengths that I'm like trying to build around? What are we doing here? So, having a basic plan is going to let you get started. Once you have that, the next step is brainstorming. I like to use Moxfield for this, and I like to just add everything that I want to think about to a Moxfield deck list and go from there. It's important, I think, if you don't know every card, and I say this is someone, you know, there are like a little bit more than 30,000 cards that are legal in Commander. I probably know somewhere over 25,000 of them, and I still use a lot of searches when I'm building decks to, you know, make sure I haven't forgotten about any cards or find all the cards that do something that I might not know about. You're using, when you want to search with specific search terms, you know, you can do basic searches, like look for the top white cards recommended by EDH Rack or whatever, but I think that it's really helpful to know the Skrythal syntax. The great thing about Moxfield and the Skrythal syntax is in the search bar in Moxfield, you can just type the Skrythal syntax directly, and it'll live, update a search for those things. So if there's a card and you can describe exactly what it does, or you are looking for cards that, you know, a number of different cards that do the thing, and you don't know the name, you can just enter the search terms to find the card that way, and then you can either just choose it from a drop down menu in the deck builder, or you can type in all your search terms and then hit search, and it takes you to a different page that is that search, and lets you just click on each card to add them to your deck. So I find that feature really valuable, and the most important Skrythal syntax terms for me are O-Colon, which is Oracle text of this card contains the following word. O-Colon quote, then type whatever you want, and close quote, because, and that will let you find search for more than one consecutive word. It's, by default, only going to look for whatever comes right after the colon, there's no space for anything. So if you say, like, flying, you do O-Colon flying, but if you want, whenever an opponent casts, you would need to put all that in quotes, otherwise it'll just do whenever, and then the rest of it will be nonsense to the search engine. T-Colon is finding a particular card type, and that'll search for, like, these letters existing anywhere in the type line. So if you just do T-Colon ARTI, it'll find everything that's an artifact, you don't need to type the whole word if you don't want, and you can include creature types and stuff like that in the type search, which, again, it can just be T-Colon. ID-Colon is color identity, so that's any cards that fall within a color identity. If you're doing this within a commander deck in Moxfield, it will automatically only be looking for things that can be played by your commander, so you usually don't need to use this, but, you know, if you're like building, wandering, menstrual, and you, you know, don't want it, and you're like playing it as a less than five color deck, you might want to restrict this, although you probably wouldn't want to use ID for that, because you might want to play like a card that has a white color identity, but it doesn't require white mana or something. So useful to know, but while you're doing searches in Moxfield rather than inscribe fall, it's not necessarily that important. And then MV is mana value, you can do colon to find, you know, things that cost like two converted mana value, like their total casting cost is two. I like to use less than, so if you say like less than four, it'll find all the things that cost less than four mana. You can also do order colon. The one that I prefer is order colon MV. Then if you search and you go to a separate page that shows all the results, it'll show the cheapest ones first. So use those searches to help identify cards that you might want in your brainstorming, put them all in your deck list, don't worry about how many cards it is. Then I like to arrange the cards by functionality. In Moxfield, there's a really good system for doing this. I like to use tags. And then once you've done that, you can go to group. And then there's a drop down menu. I think a defaults to type. I like to choose type and tag. And then all the cards that I've tagged will be grouped by that tag, anything that I haven't tagged will be grouped by card type. And the reason that I like to do this is that when I'm tuning, my process is to identify the weakest cards in each of these groups. And then those are my flex slots. If I'm playing, you know, 10 different tutors and two of them are just less efficient than the other tutors, right? Like it's like, I have vampiric tutor in my deck and I have grim tutor in my deck. I'm always going to cut the grim tutor before I cut the vampiric tutor. So I'm going to identify, okay, what are my weakest tutors? Alright, what are my weakest, like, non-land map sources? What are my weakest, I don't know, threatening creatures, my least efficient combo pieces, all that kind of stuff. Whatever categories I've made, at least impactful draw engines, I'm going to break all those cards into those different categories. I'm going to kind of stack rank cards in my head within those categories, or at least the ones that aren't just like, I'm obviously like, I'm not going to cut rest, rest taking, I'm not going to cut Mr. Kumara, I don't need to worry about which one of those cards is stronger, they're both just in the deck. I only need to rank the bottom end of each of those categories. And then I can cut down to 100 by just shaving out the kind of like power level outliers in the bad way, the weakest cards, and then it's going to get hard probably at some point. And I'll just move some cards somewhat arbitrarily from the bottom of each of those categories to considering, there's a move to considering option in Moxfield when you're clicking on the cards or whatever. I like to keep a really big considering list. And when I have my deck physically assembled, I generally keep kind of like a maybe board of cards that I can swap into my deck to quickly iterate on me. So basically what you're going to find is you might not know like, how many hard drives do I need, how many interactors spells do I need, how many tutors do I need. And so you'll cut the weakest end of each of these, but then when you're playing, you might say like, oh, I need more interaction. So I'm going to take like the best interactor spell that I cut and I'm going to add it and I'm going to cut like whatever category of card, I feel like I've had more than I need of. So that's my approach to the tuning phase. And I think that it's really important to kind of like be nimble here. Like when I cut a card, I don't just like erase it from existence. I keep it in mind so that I can come back to it to it. One of the big things that I think about with tuning is mana usage. How does my deck use mana? When and how is it casting the spells that I put in it? So this is a really good way to evaluate the cards that are sometimes used in your colors, but not always used in your colors, right? Like you don't need to think a ton about precise mana usage when, you know, like should I play demonic tutor? Yes, do I need to figure out exactly where that to mana is coming from? Yeah, not really. But I think like a good example of this came when I was erring on Lothal. And so like in white black, there are a bunch of cards that are like reasonably good at slowing the game down by making the operations of your opponent a little bit more difficult. Creatures like Dranath Magistrate, Workishbow Masters, Opposition Agent, and Dauthy Void Walker. All of these cards are cards that are like, if I'm building a deck that's white or black, I could play these. It'll be some of those decks, not all of those decks. So like how do you decide if your deck wants each of those cards in particular? And with Lothal, my plan was the first time that I have two mana, I'm going to cast Lothal. And Dranath Magistrate and Dauthy Void Walker are cards that cost two mana at sorcery speed that you really want to get down as early as possible. Like you need Dranath Magistrate to come down before your opponents play their commanders to get the most value out of it. Dauthy Void Walker, you really want it to stop being something sick. You want it to build up as many cards to be able to cast as you can. And so given that I'm always going to want to play Lothal before I play those cards, I'm not going to have a window to play them when they're at their best. And so those cards are relatively bad fit for Lothal compared to how they would be in a deck like Timna Crom where your commanders cost more than two mana. And so you might be actively looking for creatures that cost two to develop before you have enough mana to play Timna. On the other hand, Workishbow Master's and Opposition Agent have Flash, which means that they play really well with Lothal's treasure generating ability, which is going to give you mana to access to mana on other people's turns. And I'm also going to make it really easy to hold them up for the ideal moment. And so in Lothal is clear to me that I didn't want Dranath or Dauthy and I did want Opposition Agent and Workishbow Master for that reason. By contrast in a deck like Yoriko, Yoriko is really really good at filling your hand. You have all these effects that are just putting more cards in your hand. And so you have a lot of cards to use, but you're not very good at generating extra mana, like you're playing Blue and Black, which isn't a great start. And you can get the ability to generate more mana by playing a bunch of artifacts that tap for mana, but if you're doing that, like you don't really want to do that because you want to be spending your mana on ninjas to build your card draw engine rather than casting felwashedones and stuff. So you're going to, because you have all these cards to work with, you're going to be spending your mana. And Yoriko is going to generally want you to spend your mana on your turn often in combat. And then also post combat to develop your board, get more ninjas, get more creatures and play to be drawing more cards. And that means that you're really unlikely to have mana up on your opponent's turn, which means that Opposition Agent is a bad fit and you should be prioritizing free interaction when thinking about which cards to play that are going to hinder your opponent's gameplay on it. Because, you know, you can afford to play, you know, weird pitch spells, like commandeer and misdirection because you have some, you have, your bottleneck is mana, your bottleneck isn't cards, because your commander gives you some extra cards. So you really want to think about like how Yorideck is using cards differently than other decks are to figure out if they're relatively good or relatively bad fits with what Yorideck is doing. Once you've done all that, you have a deck. The thing to do is iterate. Play games and see how your cards perform and change cards really frequently. I change cards more often than anyone else I play with by a lot. You just play the cards, see how they perform. Any time a card just kind of like rots in your hand or like a spot where you might have wanted to use it comes up and it doesn't accomplish everything you hoped it would think about it. It was it a card that you identified as kind of like a borderline card, like was it the worst card in its category? Do you really need that? Do you want to like go back to drawing board and see if you can find something that does its role better? Do you think maybe you don't actually want a card in that role and you want to swap it for maybe a card in a different category that you swapped out or is there a different card that you thought was even worse than that? If I have a card that doesn't live up to my expectations and another card that's very similar to it or worse than it, then I can know to cut this other card without ever even drawing it or casting it because I can imagine how it would work compared to how this other card that I just drew worked and being able to learn by analogy like that can make your process more efficient. That's where having this good understanding of how you think your cards line up compared to each other and what role they're playing and stuff, having that is going to help you iterate. Then when I do cut something, I talked about how this maybe board on me, move the card to the maybe board unless my experience with it was so bad that I'm clearly never going to want this. Then I keep that card with the deck and when I find something else that isn't working for me, tag that out, look through the other cards that I have on hand to make a quick swap, get some more reps with something that I might not be sure about and then if I try something, if I try putting something back, taking it out, putting it back, taking it out, and every time I take it, every time I put it in, it underperforms. At some point, I'm going to stop putting it in and if I take it hard out and I miss it, oh, I thought that I wouldn't want this because when I drew it, it was kind of awkward, but then in another game, I went to tutor and I wanted it but it wasn't there, maybe I'll put it back and then if I end up cutting it again, I'm going to pay attention to how often did I actively miss this card or how often were there spots where maybe I didn't have a tutor and I wasn't looking for it, but thinking about how a game played, it would have been a really good card to draw. So, basically what I'm saying is it's not bad to cut a card and then add it back. In fact, it's good to do that. When in doubt, make changes. Try to play your deck as in as many different versions as you can because that's going to give you the most information. I think that in general, people get way too attached to lists and to wanting to get a big data set or sample size before making changes and it's just not realistic to say like, "Oh, I need a statistically significant sample size to make this change." That's just, you're playing a hundred card deck in a four-player game. Statistics are just not going to affect your end here. It's all vibes. You draw the card. You see if it feels right. If it doesn't, try something else. See if it feels better. If you weren't sure about that decision, come back to it later, but it's going to be easier to figure out, "Is this the best thing that I could have here if you have experience with other cards to compare it against?" I think that when you are playing someone else's deck, when you're copying a list and you're trying to iterate from there, it can make sense to give the cards that are in that list a little bit more of a chance. Maybe the person who built the deck had some vision for them. You're not seeing just yet and maybe if you play with it a little bit more, you will see it and the card will perform for you. So I can see why you'd want to give it a little bit more of a chance. But when it's your own deck and you know exactly what you're trying to do with it, if a card is not meeting your vision, move on. You really, really want to be nimble with this process. That to me is kind of like, I build a lot of decks. I have a lot of practice doing that. So I have a pretty good working memory of all the cards that I want to consider. So it's pretty easy for me to, oh, I'm building a blue deck. Which counter spells do I want to play? Well, I can very quickly recall, okay, if the counter spells I like most are fear discardianship, force of will, mental misstep, mindbreak trap, fluster storm, and then I need to consider like do, oh, packed negation. And then I need to consider like, do I want force negation? Do I want subtlety? Do I want to spell? Do I want swan song? And I can think about what are my, what's my deck trying to do with these counter spells? Am I, you know, going to be more limited by mana or more limited by cards? If I'm going to be more limited by mana, then I'm more likely to want force negation, misdirection, commandeer, if I'm going to be more limited by, if I'm going to be limited by mana, I want those. If I'm going to be limited by cards, then I'm going to be thinking about, you know, your dispel, swan song, like serenade, those kind of cards, maybe even, managing. And I don't need to do like a search for, like, EDH rack most played counter spells to know what my options are there. And all that helps, but that's all stuff that you can learn practice, where I think my biggest advantage comes from is really in this iterating step. A lot of that is just that I play a lot of games, but also I'm really good at quickly seeing in a, like, draw a card once or twice, see how it lines up with my hand, see how it lines up in the game, and conclude pretty quickly if it's pulling its weight or doing that I want it to do or not, and then making changes. Also, this iteration, my first step in this iterative process isn't to iterate in games. It's to just look at opening hands. Usually I do that in Moxfield. If you, you know, scroll down below the deck, there's an option to just like see hands and you can draw cards and see more hands. And I don't even, I don't go into the full, like, gameplay pop out window, I just look at a hand, maybe draw a card or two, do it again, and just see, like, how clunky are these hands? Which cards are, which cards look bad in these hands? I can make, I can do, like, a reasonable amount of tuning without ever playing a game just based on, you know, my early draws, because you're opening hand matters so much in game commander, right? Like, if you aren't doing anything that matters to another player in the first three turns, I think you can pretty safely assume you've lost that game. You need to, you know, by turn three, either have the ability to interact with something or gum up the works in some way or present a win. And if you're not doing that, you're really at the mercy of the rest of the table. And some portion of the time that will work out, there are parasitic decks that are counting on their opponents to keep each other in check. But at least for me, I don't think that I'm going to, you know, get the win rates that I'm looking for if, you know, three turns passed without me taking a game action that matters to the rest of the table. That's just, like, not a realistic way to approach a game of CDH. So since I feel like I really need to be able to do something that matters very early, I can look at how realistic is it that my deck can do that just based on an opening hand. So you can do a lot of, like, iterating in terms of just, like, making sure your mana smooth, making sure your curve makes sense, stuff like that, before you even play games. And then once you've done that, you get into games. And again, a card gets one, maybe two chances if it underperforms in the first go or two. I'll just tag it out for something else and maybe come back to it if I see some reason to come back to it later. I really want to reiterate a thing that I mentioned earlier, which is, um, casting cost is so important. Like, when you are first grabbing cards that work well with a new commander, like, oh, this commander cares about food. So I'll just, like, look for the food synergy cards. You're going to be playing some fringe cards, right? Cards that, like, work with what you're trying to do, aren't necessarily, like, widely played in other decks. And it's pretty easy to see a reason to try a card that, you know, costs three or four mana. And in general, those cards aren't going to perform very well. Like, all of my tuning of basically every deck is just how much can I shave mana value off the total cost of this deck? Where is it? How can I cut my most expensive cards for cheaper cards that get the job done? When the game is so short and when, you know, you have as many cards as you end up seeing in most commander decks, it just really, really matters. You know, like, when I first started playing commander, I played lightning bolt in my red decks as a way to deal with creatures. At some point, I cut it and played gut shots instead and never looked back. You can't kill all the same creatures. And, you know, if you identify, oh, my deck really needs to specifically kill, like, opposition agent in Granith Magistrate or whatever, then, like, sure, you can play lightning bolt. But the difference between one mana and zero mana is so big. And there, there are just, you know, a lot of spots like that where when I'm deciding between two cards, almost always, I just tune my deck more and more toward, yeah, I want the cheapest cards. Again, there are some exceptions, but like, when in doubt, you're going to be bringing that cost down when you're tuning stuff. And that's it. That's what I have to say about how I, you know, what my process is, what I think you need to know to start building your own decks, which is a really daunting process. You know, I don't feel like there's something that I can say in a half hour and an hour, in two hours, that's going to let someone who doesn't have experience building competitive decks to just like, say, oh, this is the process. I just do that. And now now I can build a competitive deck. But if you have some ideas you want to explore, this is the process that I use. It's the best process I know for how to tell someone how to approach it. And I know, you know, I've gotten a lot of questions about like, how do you do this? So that's, this is my first stab on this. So I do think that this is a really big and really important question that I think a lot of people are really looking for better answers to. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is a topic that I revisit. And I'm very interested in questions about, you know, what else you want to know or things that you think that I might be able to cover on the topic of like how to physically approach building a deck. So comments, all that, hit me. I will try to do my best to, you know, expand what I have to say about this stuff. And this week, I am traveling to Niagara Falls, a city that I've never been to for friends of the falls, a big CDH tournament. I'm looking forward to both the tournament and seeing a lot of water, I guess. That sounds like it might be pretty cool. I can mention the center as I understand it is like roughly right across the street from falls. I have no excuse not to see it, especially since I'll be driving there. So the table will be empty this weekend. It's Thanksgiving. I will be going to my sister's house for Thanksgiving. So it's not going to be a totally lonely driving holiday for me. But nothing to cook to speak of. If anyone hears this before I've left frenzy and you see me there, say hi and I will be back as always next week. Bye for now.