One thing I’ve learned to appreciate from building hundreds of Commander decks is just how much my deckbuilding has improved through building zany or ‘out there’ decks with limitations. While we’re all used to considering the banned list when selecting cards, going one step further with additional restrictions can force you to break habits and grow as a deckbuilder. Restrictions and limitations can be driven by your deck choice with things like themes, strategies, or playstyle you’re going for; but they can also be self-imposed due to external factors like budget or even just shying away from staples or favourite cards you always run. One of my favourite aspects of adding limitations is that it’s a great way to find hidden gems and may even lead to someone else at your table being really intrigued by your find! In this article we’ll cover some limitations you can consider adding along with some approaches for finding cards that work in your tighter definitions.
If you’re looking to tighten the bounds and add some spice to your Commander decks a very common approach is to limit your budget. There are a few ways you can do this, but often a total price limit that will either include or exclude basic lands and your Commander is common. Another fun variation is “gumball” where any individual card in your deck could conceivably come from a gumball machine, or rather, that the cost of each card is .25 cents or less. Your first thoughts may be that a budget build will mean that you can’t build a competitive deck, but that’s not 100% true! It just makes it harder. Here’s an example of an Urza, Lord High Artificer list to give you an idea of what a gumball deck could look like. Another budget variant is colloquially known as peasant, where cards in your 99 are limited to common and uncommon rarity, similar to Pauper. To go one step beyond peasant, you could go with Uncommon Commander, which also limits your Command zone to that rarity (don’t worry, Wizards has printed a lot of Legendary Creatures at this rarity as of late - a whopping 160). One thing you’ll want to be mindful of while building within a budget is what currency you want to use since most online tools use USD.
Naturally, building with a budget will restrict the amount of staples you’ll be able to use. It may make you take a second look at cards like Rampant Growth, Swords to Plowshares and even the signature Sol Ring. You can take the staples restriction approach further by using popularity to limit selection. A great resource for this is the top cards section of EDHREC, which ranks cards based on the number of decks they appear in. The ranking considers which decks the cards can appear in, so Counterspell being the fourth most played card doesn’t mean that there are more decks with Blue in their color identity. Of course this list captures a lot of functional cards like signets and a good chunk of draw and removal spells you’ve probably seen many times.If you want to take this to the next level, you can also sort this list by color, which would lead to broadening your horizons even further. You may also have some pet cards that you’ve come to love because of a variety of reasons, one of those for me is Gaze of Granite. According to EDHREC it’s the 17th most used multicolor Sorcery, which makes sense given how flexible and affordable it is. If I was trying to build without staples, I’d also exclude the cards that I know I use frequently.
While we could cover off on a multitude of other restrictions like theme or art, I’ll leave those to you to explore. The real key for levelling up your deckbuilding is working within the new restrictions you’ve added. The absolute best advice I can give here is to dig into the advanced search features of your favourite card query engine. If you haven’t used a card query engine yet, I can’t recommend Scryfall highly enough. The advanced search functionality lets you string together multiple criteria to really dig deep into the catalog of Magic cards. You can filter by price (to meet your gumball criteria) or build a search that pulls up specific card text like “onto the battlefield tapped”. When working with text based searches, there are a few formatting pieces you can include to tailor your search further, with one of the best ones being “ ”. Wrapping your text in double quotes will only return cards that have that exact text on the card. So if we were to search for “onto the battlefield tapped” with and without double quotes, we’d get vastly different results. The former will return any cards where all of the words are included anywhere in the text box (about 181 cards), whereas the latter will return cards where the defined words are together (around 149 cards). This approach can be really handy for finding replacements for staples if you’re trying to track down a specific function. Some other search criteria that can help are by limiting to your Commander’s color identity or restricting the search to include or exclude specific card types. With Scryfall there’s a handy ability to select “not” for card types and you can also change the sort order (I personally prefer sorting by CMC or restricting the CMC with criteria).
Scryfall is a fantastic tool that can help narrow down card selection, but it’s not the only one available. Another one that may be worth a look is MTGAssist. One of the key features of this tool is the ability to search for cards that are similar to another. The top of the results are the most similar, with results further down being less related. This is a great one for finding exact replacements for a specific card, but I will say that you may not find something as unique compared to an advanced search on Scryfall. If you are working with an art limitation, Scryfall Tagger is a community driven card tagging database, with most tags focused on what’s depicted in the art. If you’ve heard of the oft talked about “chair tribal” deck, this recent tool makes that search much less daunting. Recently, Scryfall pushed an update allowing you to use tags in query searches (using art:, atag:, arttag:, function:, otag:, or oracletag:) so you can find all the cards with Squirrel art for your Acornelia, Fashionable Filcher deck. To my knowledge there’s no tool out there yet that will let you search the Magic catalog excluding a list of cards, but it could be built leveraging the Scryfall data that is accessible to developers, and Wizards promotes using their card database as long as the property itself isn’t monetized.
I hope you found this article interesting and that you’ll consider adding some further limitations to your next build. If you want to share any thoughts, the best way to reach me is on Twitter, but you can also find me hanging out in the Chimera Discord. Chimera hosts Commander Night on Tuesdays, where we organize games via Discord and play Commander over SpellTable. Our community is growing and each week we have new players joining us. There are quite a few of us now and whether you like to play more cutthroat cEDH or relaxed games, there will be a pod for you. Don’t be shy if you’re new either, we’re happy to take it slow and help with any questions you may have. Hope to see you at our next Commander night and happy brewing!
Bryan Smith
#Urza-Lord-High-Artificer-mtg
#Sol-Ring-mtg
#Rampant-Growth-mtg
#Swords-to-Plowshares-mtg
#Counterspell-mtg
#Gaze-of-Granite-mtg
#Acornelia-Fashionable-Filcher-mtg
