One of the best aspects of Commander is the limitless potential for deck building. This can also make building a deck from scratch daunting, there are so many possibilities! How do you pick your Commander? How do you decide what your deck's strategy is? What cards should you include? How do you build a deck that's more casual or more competitive? In this article we'll cover an approach to deck building that makes the process easy, with some tidbits that seasoned deck builders will find useful too.
Choosing Your Path
Before we get to the architecture, we need to start a bit broad. Now there's no right or wrong way to build a Commander deck, and with time, you'll find your own style. We have to start somewhere though, so two approaches we can use are either top down or bottom up design. Top down design would be picking your Commander and building your deck to that Commander's particular strategy. There are a wide variety of strategies here ranging from narrow to broad, or in some cases, no strategy at all. Top down isn't always strategy alone though, you could build around a particular Commander based on their color identity, back story, creature type or even the art. Ultimately, you’ll want to pick something you enjoy, and that definition is up to you.
On the other hand, bottom up design is more about what you want the deck to do, and in some cases this can mean leaving your choice of Commander to the very end, or having a set of Commanders you randomly pick from for each game. Maybe you've played another trading card game and want to mimic a strategy, or maybe there's some specific mechanic you enjoy, or even a playstyle you like (although I wouldn't recommend Lantern Control for casual games). The common thread between these two approaches is knowing what you enjoy, so giving that some thought should be your first step.
If you're not sure what you want to do, a great place to start can be themes and archetypes. Themes usually relate to what your cards do, whereas archetypes are more akin to playstyle. Some popular themes and archetypes according to EDHREC are artifacts, aristocrats, and lifegain. In fact, there are over 96 different themes on EDHREC without including tribal decks, which have their own page. In terms of archetypes that are unique to Commander, there are a few that really shine in this multiplayer format. Group hug and group slug focus on benefitting or punishing the table equally, chaos decks can lead to really crazy stories (but it's typically not well received, so be sure to discuss with the other players before playing chaos) and politics decks can offer a unique playstyle which will never play the same twice. You can also mix and match themes and archetypes to create very unique decks.
Tools + Resources
To assist in the deck building process, some phenomenal resources exist. One of them being EDHREC which is the largest Commander data source currently available. This site curates deck lists from AetherHub, Archidekt, Deckstats, Moxfield, MTGGoldfish, and Scryfall to pull together a variety of stats and information about decks players are creating. Another popular site for deck building is TappedOut, which has a deep catalog of resources contained within. Each of these tools has their own strengths and I’d recommend you try each to find the one you like the most. In my experience, I’ve found Archidekt and Moxfield to be best, offering quality of life features for both casual and competitive Commander respectively, and I used to swear by TappedOut. Beyond deck building sites, you’ll also want a site to help you find cards. Of course, you could use Wizard’s Gatherer, but if you want to get really efficient at finding the perfect card(s), Scryfall is astronomically better. The real strength for Scryfall is in its advanced search, where you can set multiple criteria very easily. If you happen to be technically inclined, there’s also a syntax guide to make complex queries extremely quick. There are hundreds of other options out in the wild as well, like dedicated Discord channels, content creators (who are most active on Twitter), the Commander Rules Committee website (which includes the banned list) and local gaming communities like Chimera (you should join us in the #Commander channel).
Deck Contents + Categories
Now for the fun part, putting the deck together. There are many schools of thought on this, and one of the leading (if not the biggest) content creators has covered this topic twice. If you’re not yet familiar, you should check out The Command Zone on YouTube, they have a large backlog of videos all focusing on Commander. They recently put out an episode updating their Commander deck template which outlines their thoughts on what a rough template for your deck should be to function properly. I think the targets they provide are a bit light, but we’ll get to that shortly. In terms of contents, the template is broken down into ramp, card draw, targeted removal, board wipes and lands. We’ll cover each one in a bit more depth, but below are the targets Josh and Jimmy provide. For those curious, the initial template had less ramp (10), less targeted removal (5), and slightly more board wipes (5).
So why are these targets too low? Well, with 10 targets in a 99 card deck, that translates to having one of those cards in our opening hand about half of the time. Rather than bore you with the math, I’d recommend checking out some of Frank Karsten’s thoughts on the subject of how many colored mana sources you need on Channel Fireball. The short of it though, is that to calculate the probability you’ll draw any card in a deck, you need to use a hypergeometric distribution which can be done with a specific calculator. Following this line of thought, if we move our target up to 14 then we have a much healthier probability of roughly two thirds. If it’s an effect you really need then you can move this target up further, but you may need to make some harder trade-offs. With that in mind, the targets I think you should work towards are below.
Now you may be thinking, wait a minute, now there are only 16 card slots left in my deck, how am I supposed to express anything with 16 cards! This is one place where you can flex those creative muscles, finding cards that fill multiple roles. Modal cards like the “command” cycles and charms are often all stars, offering removal, draw/card advantage and on occasion ramp (like the new Prismari Command). That will definitely open up a few spots, but to go one step further, you’ll want to find cards that meet these needs while also working toward your deck’s goal(s). After some searching, you’ll be surprised to find how many “on theme” cards you can find. These “on theme” cards will work towards increasing your deck’s synergy, which just means the cards you have will do more when used together with other cards that are working towards the same goal.
Ramp + Draw
Rather than go into the weeds for each of the categories mentioned previously, we’ll keep it high level and focus on why you should try to meet these targets. If you’re coming from other constructed formats, you may be familiar with having more resources means winning more games. The same is true for Commander, often the player who has access to the most mana (through ramp) or more card advantage (through draw) or both together, will usually win. One unique aspect is the inclusion of win cons, specific cards that will end the game. Since Commander is singleton, the win cons you use may need to be more varied than those you’d use in other constructed formats. In terms of ramp, these effects will often give you access to more mana on the current turn and in future turns, either through putting additional lands in play (Three Visits or Cultivate) or playing mana rocks (artifacts that generate mana like Sol Ring or Worn Powerstone). In higher power level games, you’ll also see ramp in much faster versions - rituals and loops that generate large amounts of mana out of nowhere (cards like Dark Ritual and multiple uses of Dockside Extortionist). Having access to more mana will also let you play more cards, which will give you the ability to progress your plan and respond to your opponents’ efforts to do the same.
Having access to mana is great, but overall, pretty useless without cards to use that mana on, which is why card draw is equally (if not more) important than ramp. Card draw takes several forms, but what you should be aiming for is draw effects that will net you more cards than you had prior. This will help you generate card advantage (having more cards than your opponents), which is a smidge harder in Commander with two additional opponents relative to other constructed formats. Some softer forms of card draw are looting (drawing then discarding: Faithless Looting), rummaging (discarding then drawing: Rummaging Goblin), and scrying (looking at the top card of your deck and leaving it on top or putting on the bottom: Temple of Epiphany). While not as good as straight card draw like Harmonize, these effects are good considerations, and can sometimes align really well with your game plan. For example, using rummaging and looting effects in a reanimator themed deck can help ensure you have some juicy targets to resurrect.
Single Targeted Removal + Board Wipes
Interaction in single target removal and board wipes are key components to include so you’ll be able to either protect yourself or remove problems created by your opponents. Doing this efficiently is an important consideration, as you’ll want to use the majority of your mana to move your game plan forward, but sometimes things get too far out of control and clearing the board can be the right thing to do. For targeted removal, instant speed with no to few restrictions are best while also balancing mana value. Cards like Counterspell and Heroic Intervention can be considered single target removal, they just remove your opponents spells in the stack, instead of removing permanents in play.
When considering board wipes, the key considerations you’ll want to think of are the amount, the flexibility and how you’ll benefit from its resolution. The number you run is to taste, but a general rule of thumb is that using more board wipes will mean games take longer. Most board wipes will hit creatures, but there are some that hit only artifacts, only enchantments, or offer some flexibility in terms of modality. Lastly, the board wipes you use should hit your opponents harder than they hit you. This can be through one sided-effects like Winds of Abandon, or cards that give you a benefit such as Decree of Pain, but best of all is when you create that discrepancy through card selection - skipping on artifact ramp and running Vandalblast can rocket you ahead of the table. Of course, as with your draw and ramp, you’ll want to keep an eye out for removal spells and board wipes that align with your primary strategy.
Adjusting Power Level
Before we get to the most technical piece of deckbuilding, let’s take a quick minute to speak about how we can adjust our deck components to modulate its power level. Commander is the most fun when everyone involved is aligned on what type of game is going to happen, and discussing this should be the first thing you do before playing with a group. I won’t go into detail here, but you can read my thoughts on the topic here. Using a numeric scale to rate a deck is a common practice, but has some pitfalls. Rather, a better way to conceptualize your decks power level is in terms of redundancy, speed and potency. Naturally, having higher redundancy, speed and potency will translate to a more powerful deck. So to power your deck down, you can consciously limit your deck - removing interaction, increasing the mana cost of your ramp (for example swapping a Mana Crypt for a Hedron Archive) or removing it, and increasing how easy your game plan is to interrupt (which will reduce its potency). Reducing potency may not be the easiest to do, but some considerations would be changing enchantments to creatures that do the same thing, or increasing the number of pieces in your value engine or infinite combo (a combo that needs six cards to function is easier to disrupt compared to another that only needs two cards). If you’ve made these changes and you’re still feeling like your deck hasn’t been powered down enough, some other options include introducing a new restriction (like a theme such as people sitting in chairs) or removing some particularly salt inducing cards (these are often stax effects like Winter Orb and mass land destruction effects like Armageddon).
Manabase
The number of lands you should run is believe-it-or-not a hotly debated topic in the community, and this mostly pertains to more casual decks. Competitive or cEDH decks typically have low mana curves and a lot of fast mana, meaning fewer actual lands. On the casual side, there are two camps - “you should have 38+ lands” and “you should have less than 36”. The primary distinction between the two is whether you should be playing a land every turn or not, which I’m going to argue is more important for lower power games. As with competitive decks, the inclusion of fast mana sources like low mana value artifacts and rituals can offset your land count. In terms of that actual number though, it’s again up to preference. Whichever number you land on, the key piece is that you can produce enough colors to cast your spells, and that you have enough total mana to cast multiple spells per turn. So where do we start? Let’s once again turn to some work by Frank Karsten to assist us with crunching the numbers.
According to the math, a 99 card deck should have 40 lands, which aligns with the 38+ lands camp’s mantra. Two things you’ll want to consider to modify this number is the density of colors in your casting costs and your mana curve. The important part to pay attention to in casting costs, is the colored pips, with multiple pips of the same color being harder to cast. If you wanted to reliably cast a Goblin Chainwhirler on turn three, you’d want at least 37 sources that produce that color of mana according to Frank’s math. This is pretty easy to do in a mono red deck where you run 37 mountains, but it’s going to be much harder to pull off in a Jund Goblin deck. The other consideration is our mana curve, which is a visualization of our casting costs that will make a vertical bar graph (most deck building tools will calculate this for you). Coming from that mana curve, will also be an average mana value (historically average converted mana cost or CMC), which we can use to get an approximation of how many lands we should run. Using this average, we can refer to the relevant column of Frank’s table below from this article. The green highlight you see is Frank’s threshold for how many sources you should have to cast that spell on curve reliably. If you’re open to more variance in your games, you can use a lower threshold, but you’ll need to accept you may not be able to cast that Winding Constrictor on turn two.
Now if you’re making a monocolored deck, picking the lands you want is a bit easier. You can drop in basics and select some good utility lands like War Room and you’re good to go. Multicolored decks on the other hand need a bit more effort in land selection. Once you’ve got your target number of lands selected, you’ll want to determine your target number of sources for each color. Taking into consideration when you’ll need the mana of a certain color, you can use that as a guide for your sources target. The only target I strongly focus on for casual decks, are my turn one sources so I can cast my one drops on curve. This target is 21, meaning in an abzan deck I’d want 21 sources for white mana, green and black. Going back to the earlier mention on modality, we can think of lands tapping for multiple colors the same way. You can also consider your mana rocks here, but it’s important to remember the turn they become usable in an additive way. When we’re looking at which lands to include, another important facet is whether they enter untapped or not. At more competitive tables you’ll find no lands that enter tapped whereas they are more common at lower powered tables. I’m a fan of not needing to think about what mana I have available in my multicolored decks, so I’m content using the Kaldheim duals with fetches so I don’t need to worry about if I have enough colored sources in later turns (friendly reminder that enemy fetch lands are being reprinted in Modern Horizons 2 releasing in June!). If you’re looking for a quick way to find lands for your deck you can use manabasecrafter.com or use Scryfall to search for lands in your Commander’s color identity (t:land ci:WUBRG).
Wrapping Up
There we have it, a short-ish guide for building a Commander deck. While we could go into depth on each of the categories, this should give you a good place to start or inspire some new builds. I hope you enjoyed this one and if you’re interested in playing while we’re stuck in this lockdown, you should join us on Tuesdays in the Chimera Discord. We’re building the community up and every week a few new people join. We play Commander on Tuesday nights organizing games in the Discord and playing games over Spelltable. Was this guide helpful? Would you like to see a deep dive on each of the categories? Let me know on Twitter or you can find me organizing Commander games during the week in the #Commander channel of the Chimera Discord. Enjoy your brewing!
