It’s no good having more mana, if edh deck you run out of things to do with it. Card draw allows you to “reload”, replenishing your resources, and increasing your options. Repeatable card draw is particularly valuable, helping you build momentum, and start to run away with the game.
This is your clipboard, where EDHREC tracks any cards you want it to. If you have a specific theme in mind, you can check the “Themes” dropdown for inspiration. You can check themes split by companions, effects, and tribes. The top five themes and tribes are listed in the dropdown, but you can go to “Themes” for lots more obscure ones if you feel more adventurous. Nothing is worse than a value pile that can never win games, at least as an adult with a busy schedule.
Lifegain on its own isn’t enough to win you a game of Commander, however, so look for cards that turn a high life total or lots of lifegain triggers into more tangible value. As I’ve mentioned many times before and will again, building a deck has many nuances depending on your commander and how you want to play the game. Once you’ve got your first draft of the deck, I suggest you lay it out in stacks organized by mana value.
This is where deck-builders will have the most fun. Once you’ve got your theme, you need to flush out the deck itself. As a general rule of thumb, you want somewhere between 33 and 42 lands in a Commander deck. Naturally, you want as many special lands as you can find. Lands that generate more than one colour of mana or that have special abilities are always a great shout.
Recursion, Tutors and More
One great reason to use Archidekt is that it can help you figure this out. Point-removal spells like Swords to Plowshares and wraths, also known as board wipes (named for Wrath of God) are what I’d consider to be offensive interaction. You can also decide between burst effects (a lot of cards at once) like Return of the Wildspeaker or a slower “value over time” card like Phyrexian Arena. Again, you can check out your commander’s page to look for common card velocity effects. These tend to be instants, sorceries, or enchantments, but not always.
EDHREC is a wonderful source of information about EDH in general, and a valuable resource for deckbuilding. It brings a mass of card stats and recommendations to you based on other players’ feedback and what they play. It can also help with searching for partner commanders, and those that allow the use of a background. EDHREC stands for “Elder Dragon Highlander RECommendations.” EDH was the original name for Commander before Wizards confirmed it as an official format in 2011. Starting to play Magic can be a bit of an undertaking. It’s extremely fun (millions play it, after all), but the mountain called “deckbuilding” can be daunting, especially once you consider format-specific rules.
Pet Cards
Some tutors may be expensive, but you can use pseudo-tutors like transmute cards as an easy replacement. You usually want about 10 of these, but search for up to 15 options. Mill isn’t very common to see at a 4-player table where deck sizes are at least 100 cards, but there are some commander’s deck that relies on milling as a win condition. This can go both ways as you can either opt to mill your opponents or self-mill to create massive card advantage. You can build ramp decks in various ways, like relying on mana rocks or ramp spells. But however you do it, the main goal for ramp is to cast big spells to put you in the front seat of every other deck.
Let me know in the comments or over on the official Draftsim Discord. This is a reference to the ’80s animated television series where five giant cats team up to form a super robot known as “Voltron” to defeat villains. Voltron decks follow the same analogy where you usually want to suit up your commander to become an almost unstoppable threat that can finish the game on its own. These decks rarely run other creatures outside of their commander since they focus on protecting them at all costs. That said, maybe you’re like me and you’re excited about the format but don’t quite know where to start because you have so many doubts about deckbuilding and deck ratios.
Token decks hone in on creating a wide board state of small tokens and then augmenting those cheap, disposable bodies with powerful anthem effects that buff all of their creatures. So what other ways could your Elves deck win the game? You can see what cards that most Elf decks play by going to the typal page for Elves on EDHREC. We see a couple of “lords” (creatures that enhance other creatures of a certain type) like Leaf-Crowned Visionary or more effects that can pump all your creatures, like Overrun. Step two is determining what color(s) the deck is going to be. I find 2-3 colors to be the best but other people may find different numbers of colors more to their liking.
Rules To Consider
Some of these cards can double as your removal, ramp, or draw, or strategy cards. Having creatures prevents you from taking opportunistic early combat damage, and helps you recover quickly after a board wipe. Creatures with ETB effects are more valuable when you can blink or reanimate them. Case in point, one of the guys in my playgroup played the same deck every week for a year and a half before starting his second deck. He was running synergies and combos that even I didn’t see coming, and we’d think we had cut him down to size and he would win out of nowhere.
If you are mana screwed every time, it isn’t just bad luck! It isn’t about just adding cards when a shiny new set comes out- it’s about really knowing what your deck is good at, what it needs, and what you enjoy. Removal – It’s super important to have enough removal to make it effective. Having one kill spell in your deck is basically the same as having zero, if you can’t consistenly enough hit some sort of removal then it’s no good. Similarly with ramp, you having a mix of both efficient removal (1-2 mana if possible) and more flexible removal (for example the ability to destroy/exile any nonland permanent) is good. You don’t want to always pay 5 mana for a kill spell, but you also don’t want to lock yourself into very niche removal.
If you have a limit to spend around $100 on a deck, this will help you narrow your choices and keep your budget in mind. If you’re super into control and want to become a master at playing the archetype, check out Corey Burkhart’s in-depth course over on Spikes Academy. Because of this you need to know what kind of deck you want to build.
