The NEW Commander Deck Building Template | The Command Zone 379 | Magic: the Gathering EDH Podcast

greetings humans you have entered the command zone your destination for all aspects of elder dragon highlander enjoy your stay what's up everybody welcome to the command zone podcast i'm one of your host jimmy wong how's it it's josh lee kwai whoo it's time it's time there's a lot of pages in front of us so the commander deck building template is our most popular episode ever jimmy uh but it's nearly four years old wow yeah time flies we were still recording this show in your apartment at the time yep which is kind of crazy uh so obviously commander has evolved a ton in that time and we figured it's it's about time we did an update to the template yep so this is the new hotness the new template the new template but some things remain the same for instance if you're gonna buy any cards when you get to building that deck you should go to cardkeen.com command zone they're our affiliate and you can benefit the show as well as getting the cards that you're already going to get especially after this episode when you know exactly how to build your next deck it's at cardkingdom.com command zone just type that in and you're all set and then when you get those cards from cardkingdom.com command zone you're going to want to keep them in really good shape in pristine condition you want them to be near mint so that they are as valuable as when you first got them and the best way to protect all your game pieces is with ultra pro products that's the stuff jimmy and i trust our own collections too they've got the pro glossy clip sleeves awesome play mats great deck boxes if you want to protect your game pieces and we know you do ultra pro is the way to go and the final way to support the show is directly at patreon.com we love our patrons they get to see our best content game nights and extra turns a day early they also get to interact with us on discord ask us questions and we shout one lucky patron now every single episode so this episode is dedicated to mick bergeron mick you rock that's a cool name all right let's get right into the main topic here so deck building in commander it can be pretty daunting right jimmy it's by far the thing we talk about the most because you have to do it to be able to play the game for the most part yeah but if you haven't played a lot of commander and honestly if you even if you played a lot of commander it can just be really overwhelming to try and build the deck yeah um just there's so many choices because commander has options from the entire history of magic all 20 000 plus cards so it's harder to build a deck in commander than any other format so this episode is going to be aimed at giving people a rough template a good jumping off point when you're starting to build a deck and i think people they see our stats breakdowns and stuff on our other episodes and they're always wondering you know what other type of numbers should they be aiming for in your average deck you know we're always breaking down decks and going like this is the numbers they have and then people think well what number should i have when i'm building this deck we're not giving them a concrete place to land so this is going to be the episode that does that for the most part because things will change drastically from deck to deck as we always see but there is a reason behind those numbers that we give in the stats breakdown and this episode will get into that as well yeah that's an important disclaimer we're going to give some numbers estimates approximations but specific individual decks that you're building may have far more of certain things than others you know based on their needs and the big thing is just when you're sort of straying from this template that we're talking about or going to talk about um it's fine to be like well you said have 10 of this but i want 30 of it right as long as you have a reason for doing it i think if if you somewhere someone were to ask you a question like well why do you have so much of that uh and you don't really know why then maybe the template can help you corral and get back down to a good optimized focus stack nice yeah so let's begin where we always begin with the stats that was a pretty good one yeah that was good well we had to right if it wasn't i may have asked to redo it it wasn't good enough for this episode so many people are going to watch this though and we had to get it right yeah yeah yeah so we're starting with the stats the stuff every deck needs um mana ramp we talk about this every single episode it's slightly different than what we've said in the past i've put 10 to 12.

it's increased increased slightly we used to always say 10 this is the difference from four years ago in the template now i'd say somewhere between 10 to 12. hasn't changed a lot but if anything i want a little more ramp in my decks these days than i used to i also would say a lot of colors outside of green have gotten a lot more viable and ram actually is more important because if it's an artifact it could get removed so you actually need a little bit of insurance there yeah and the fact that so much more ramp has been made in the last few years and so much so many more decks are including it you sort of need to ramp just a little bit more to be able to keep up you don't want to find yourself on turn five and six and everybody has eight or nine mana but you've still only got five or six good point the second category is card draw this one hasn't really changed since the last time we did the template you want 10 pieces of card draw in every commander deck basically yeah 10 forms of it and of course we're gonna go into exactly what these mean a little bit later uh but yeah card draw has to be by far i think the thing that is overlooked the most especially when it came to me building new decks yeah you know jimmy and i we have to build a lot of new decks and then play them in front of people on game nights and things like that and so we've become very good at it and i don't know about you jimmy but one of the things i've learned is you just never go below that 10 card draw number that is the most important thing that's going to guarantee that my deck is actually going to do something not necessarily that it will win but that i will i will be involved in the game and have enough options that i will be a factor yeah and in the game when you're waiting extra long for your turn to come around being stuck with nothing to do is real it just feels that much worse for each player that passes turn uh and then the next two categories have to do kind of with interaction and being able to sort of take care of the things your opponents are doing single target removal is a category and this is a big change from our old templates 10 to 12 single target removal spells in your deck is what we're uh recommending now this number used to be five yeah and i think something that we didn't you know really account for back then is the fact that being able to interact is going to get more and more important as the game goes on uh we sort of were in a different heyday for the four years ago when i was talking about insurrection every episode a car that cost nine mana you never see anymore you never see it anymore because a lot more things are low to the ground more powerful cards get printed every year magic exists and when someone's casting the great hinge for two green man on turn four you might want to be able to remove it yeah i i like that as an explanation the format has sped up it it's gotten faster and and not just the fact that it's gotten faster but there are sort of more you have to remove this threats that can come out earlier than they used to and so having removal in your hand cheap efficient removal and being able to deal with those really scary things when they come out right away because there are just more things now than ever yeah that hey listen if they untap with that good chance they either win on the spot or create such an insurmountable advantage that they're virtually guaranteed to win from here yeah even just one turn rotation can sometimes be the difference between you winning that game and losing it so yeah more varied to single target removal it you can't just be 10 to 12 pieces of get rid of creatures we're talking artifacts enchantments lands all sorts of things need removal now so having that flexibility is why that number is higher all right now board wipes this number has come down a little from what we used to recommend i put three to four hmm and i want to edge towards three i build decks now that sometimes only have two pieces or two wraths in the entire deck i built decks with zero not recommended by the way i think you still want the ability to just reset the board because there are you know certain commander games just the dynamic there are so many more players you get off to a slow start everybody kind of gets up to a decent start and there are some games where the only possible way you could ever have a chance to get back into it is to just reset the board yeah so i always like to have at least one or two options in my decks but i think you know we used to want five of these and part of this is related to why we want more single target removal now i think board wipes are naturally just slower than single target removal the format has sped up and so you just don't have time now to necessarily deploy the single the board with the board wipes before like whatever advantage they were going to get just overwhelms you it's better to just be holding up one or two mana have a removal spot the right time stop stop yourself from losing then to like wait until you turn your obstacle back around you know is your board wipe six mana like can you even cast it yet right yeah yeah and is that the only thing you're gonna do that turn to um i think another big thing too is a lot of times if you look at the board state it's never you know when it is the case that every creature needs to go then great you have the hit all for that but if it's like that enchantment there that artifact there and that land there all three of those are the things that are killing me your boardwalk looks a lot worse because it could reset things but maybe that just is better for the player that already has the value engine built so as we've seen singletar removal being able to remove key pieces that make a thing as a whole function actually seems to be better and more necessary to keep yourself in the game all right so we don't have time to go super in depth on the definitions for each category but we figure some brief explanations are probably in order so let's talk about what qualifies as mana ramp just you know because i think some people get confused it's surprising sometimes but some people get confused as to what is mana ramp and what it is not yeah so think about a ramp first off do you know what a ramp is josh is that the thing you jump off of on your skateboarder you know if you're not pulling my dynamite it's on youtube it's really true but if there wasn't a ramp would you be able to jump as far it'd be hard you'd have to try a lot harder i don't know how you do it really you need some amount of velocity yeah yeah you have to go faster which i guess is ramping itself uh so mana ramp is basically that in a nutshell it's something that gets you ahead of the amount of man you would normally have so if you're hitting a ramp you're going to go higher than you normally would have so normally turn one play one land turn two play two lands if you're ramping by the play one more land play one more lane sorry sorry i'm trying to pull a crank blank shadow over here with my hands if you are playing one land per turn on turn two you have two lands however if you played a card that gets you mana with those lands then you're gonna have access to more mana so if you play soaring on turn one by turn two when you play your second land you're gonna have access to four mana while your opponents are gonna have access to two so that's what ramp is in the nutshell yeah it's basically have you played some effects or done some stuff that allows you to have more mana than if you just played one land per turn yep right that's it that's all that ramp really is people get confused with cards like pilgrim's eye or land tax these are both fine cards but they take a land and they or more than one land in land taxes case and they put those lands into your hand ah and so that doesn't allow you to put extra mana onto the table that just helps you hit your land drop and hitting land drops is great but a rampant growth you know it occurs to me that ramp might be named after rampant growth wait a second i thought it was a skateboard ramp i've been tricked i don't know i don't know where the term ramp comes from but rampant growth or burnished heart or something like that these cards put extra lands directly into play they don't take your land drop per turn so they make it so that like you said jimmy if you play a rampant growth on turn two on turn three you untap you play your land and now you have four mana available to you you have ramped because you have one extra mana you've got four mana available on turn three and burnish heart is the same idea but it's a card that can be played in any deck uh and there's of course other cards that allow you to play more than one land to turn so that in a way lets you ramp but it doesn't take the land out of your deck like ramping growth and burnished chart does okay let's talk about card draw because funnily enough this one also gets confusing a little bit yeah it's true it's more complicated than it seems i mean obviously i think people say like oh you look at ristic study or guardian project those draw you cards that's card draw obviously that's really all that those cards do but then we can talk about looting rummaging conditional draw restrictive draw stuff like icon of ancestry or harold's horn or even a impulsive draw jessica's will is that card draw yeah we did an entire episode about card draw it's number 343 so we're not going to go into super detail here loosely i would define card draw as something that says it gives you access in some way to cast more cards from your deck or your graveyard and additionally we would usually want that card drop to allow us to hit land drops to really count yeah and that is something i think gets overlooked a lot which is you even though you could be playing tons of ramp and we've seen this even on game nights where someone plays lands for the first four turns and plays a ton of ramp but then stops playing lands they actually end up falling behind so card draw is really important for both refilling your hand with more spells to cast but also to always make sure you have a land in hand to play every single turn and keep up with everyone else yeah ironically we are suggesting 10 to 12 mana ramp cards and 10 card draw cards in a deck but i would say that card draws actually more important than mana ramp you don't need uh too much of it but if you don't have any of it you're likely to just have a lot of mana but nothing to do with it yeah right and and also hitting land drops is just so so important because that is sort of similar to ramp right it doesn't matter like if i play a soul ring on turn one that feels really really awesome but if i turn three i'm not hitting land drops well i'm not going to maintain that advantage on my opponents so just hitting your land drop every turn will often keep you in a game whereas if you didn't do that you would start to fall behind yeah and if you look at both of the extremes right you'll understand which is more important let's say you don't have any mana ramp but only card draw can you play the game yes cause you'll draw a bunch of cards play land let's say you have no card draw but tons of mana rap can you play the game no because eventually you'll stop yeah you say oh here's more ramp like yeah you're cool i have 50 mana what are you gonna do with it i don't have anything else yeah yeah so all right what qualifies as single target removal i think this is a little more straightforward but when we talk about it we're saying this really means ways to interact with your opponent's plans so it's not straight up just removal although path to exile or reclamation sage those definitely count right they come you play them you destroy something that's that destroyed a single target that right moved a single target but i think we can also extend this so that it includes things like counter spells that's still single target now the spell has to be at a certain time on the stack and you have to have your mana untapped and whatever but a counter spell definitely targets a spell and gets rid of it so that that counts even things like graveyard hate i could see counting as single target removal for a sure definitely yeah that's a way to interact with your opponent's plans they go to reanimate something from their graveyard yo what are you targeting haha i'm getting rid of it yeah and single target removal can also be something that protects your plan so a counter spell in that case actually functions as both it gets rid of a card but it also may stop someone from stopping what you're trying to do yep and then what qualifies as a board wipe this one i think is the easiest to understand the bunch but there are some nuances here it doesn't actually mean it has to wipe everything off the board to count as a board wipe we would count wrath of god but that only gets rid of creatures right uh would you still count vandal blast 100 get rid of all artifacts right bane of progress gets rid of artifacts and enchantments but not creatures uh things like navinereal's disk gets rid of most things but not planeswalkers anything that says all on it is probably going to count as a board wipe even if it's a little bit limited even calming verse which uh the part i like some enchantments yeah gets rid of all enchantments or your opponent's control if you do it right and yeah i would still count that in the board wipe category in most of my decks yeah and like red for instance doesn't have the kinds of boar wipes other creatures other colors do but it has damage baseboard wipes so it doesn't it may not say you know get rid of each creature or the storage creature but they deal x damage to each creature and that can oftentimes be enough aboard white yeah i would still totally count cards like that as board wipes all right so let's look at the stats again i was going to do it that's like the quick stats yeah the second time we look at it we don't do it um okay so that's around 35-ish cards in our deck right 10 to 12 man ramp 10 card draw 10 to 12 single target removal and then two to four board wipes three to four board wipes right um which leaves us with around 64 cards to go again we're averaging because some of these uh are 10 to 12 or whatever you know our commander counts as a card obviously and our lands we can't forget the lands we talked so much about them yep so we gotta count lands in here most commander decks want somewhere between 35 to 38 lands i will say that i think when we did this um template before we said 38 definitively and well you can tell me if you're doing this jimmy but i have started to reduce the land count slightly in my decks because give me an m give me a d give me an f in the c there's new types of cards that help you reduce some more there's mdfcs there's also we're playing a lot more low cmc or low mana value right ramp and extra ramp in the deck so if there's two more ramp cards in the deck all of a sudden maybe you can have two less lands or so in the deck um that's not a hard and fast rule yeah but it is going i think it's trending just slightly down don't don't run 30 lands in your decks probably but you know 36.

i've never gone below 35 and even those in the decks right like i've gone to 34 because of mdfcs but in general you still need to draw your lens and play them every single turn now if your deck is all card draw and you've got tons of ways to draw cards then maybe you can skim a little bit on there but again this is one of the riskiest gambles you can take and trust me i've done it too many times to know that it's not worth it yeah i have a couple of decks that are down around 33 to 31 lands but you're right they have a ton of like canterbury stuff a lot of a lot of deck velocity so i'm not worried that i'm gonna get to my lands right so that means if we add all this up with the lands and all the stats we're down to somewhere around 30 cards that are really like the meat of our deck right uh it's actually going to be more than that and i know 30 sounds low but because some of our ramp draw removal wraths are going to be overlapping synergistic pieces with the rest of our deck um this number is going to feel a little bit skewed but i also like it that it's kind of low because building a commander deck's hard and if you had to come up with 90 cards to put in there it would be even harder so 30 is kind of nice it's like oh i'm playing around you know obviously i got to pick my card draw removal all that stuff so i'm still playing around 60 cards but the meat of my deck the really important part is like 30 or so cards yeah and we'll talk about this later as well but biting off more than you can chew is also just a classic problem that even i still make in you know having done this for five six years straight now so being able to restrict yourself i think actually breeds a lot more creativity not to mention like we said there's gonna be a lot of overlap with the other parts of your deck and that's sort of the beauty of commander deck building for sure all right so in order to figure out what the 30 cards that we're talking about should be we have to ask ourselves some questions right like what are the 30 cards going to be yeah i don't even think we're ready to ask or to answer that question until we ask these other two questions then the first question is what will be the plan slash goal of my deck yep and the other question is how will it win or end the game so again not every deck is going to try and win i know there are like jank or like story themed decks that are trying to sort of do they're playing a different game they're not trying to obtain victory and yeah they're a decks that might make everyone equal like and the game has a tie too so there's lots of bizarre fun ways to in the game as well yeah and i think like obviously those are not going to fit into our templates so we're just talking about most decks uh most players are trying to build a deck that generally is going to try and win in some way heavy win condition yep yeah so the answer to these questions what's the plan or goal of my deck how will it win um are usually not always but usually heavily heavily influenced by which commander you play yes so this is the general guiding beacon if you if you learned one thing from this episode that your commander will almost always dictate the direction of your deck yeah not always but almost but very often right very often let's use the most recent episode of game nights uh sort of as an example here just to sort of walk through what i like to think of these as like movie log lines oh you know the decks so when you sort of you know explain what your deck does in one sentence you know it's kind of like a log line of a movie so the yarn deck was make a ton of mana and then use mana sinks or big spells to convert that into victory right the magnet deck that i played is in a world where you've got a lot of dwarves to tap use those treasures you create to sneak out giant dragons and cool artifacts yep the coma deck that jacob played it's something like play my commander protect it until the board is covered with serpents so the serpents obviously are the way that he's going to win in the game and then turger uh not triggered sorry target is is not a card that we actually played on game nights but it's from call time make my part everyone's talking about because very powerful yeah and please don't play it against me uh trigger is all about making my opponents discard and sacrifice stuff and then i'm going to ko everyone using target's ability with their own stuff yeah turkish that's one of the reasons so powerful right because the second part is actually tied to the first part when i make them discard and sacrifice stuff i get that stuff and then i'm gonna kill them with that stuff yeah which is why again you want to build around your commander usually is because it kind of has the whole package usually or helps at least push you in a certain direction you can also kind of generalize your plan and what it is based on the archetype that you're playing so like token decks a lot of times their plan is some version of get a lot of creatures onto the board and then pump all my creatures and attack yep and then voltron decks which aren't as in favor anymore but still very much possibility as we saw with tolsky is make one creature really really big with all sorts of equipment armor whatever it is make it unblockable or hard to block and then ko someone in as few hits as possible yep uh combo decks which are probably the most powerful decks in the commander format their log lines generally are find specific cards in my deck and then deploy slash protect them as quickly as possible yeah and i think the most important thing is here you want to have a plan and this is i think where your deck building style actually has helped inform a lot of people because you know you don't build that token token deck or voltron deck you actually build decks sometimes around ideas or themes but it still needs to have a plan right yeah i think even if your deck's not going to be optimizer is not built around the commander you still want the plan so my tim deck is kind of my big i also have a five color nexus or deck right the tim deck here's the log line set up an untapping engine and then win by using tapping abilities over and over and that has nothing to do with the commander because there isn't a commander that really cares about that in the colors i wanted anyway but it's still a plan right it's just because i came up with something outside of what a commander does doesn't mean that my deck doesn't need a plan it's still it still needs it yeah yep uh i i named it a new archetype oh what what is it it's the boa constrictor archetype oh was this informed by the coma commander well i don't know ironically if coma is actually a boa constrictor archetype well he's sort of it is coiling yeah he's sort of he sort of is i was thinking of what to call these decks because there's a whole bunch of them that just kind of went through attrition yeah and their plan is like set up some kind of engine and then win by just out valuing my opponents over you know a certain amount of time right and like aristocrats decks blink decks enchantress decks artifacts matter decks lands matter decks like there are a ton of these type of decks i i'd actually say this is probably the most common quote unquote archetype yep yeah now we call aristocrats the archetype of that deck but these decks all have a thing in common which is they're just trying to set up a combination of cards either in hand or in play that refuel it's they set up a machine right it's it's self-running they don't need to draw any more cards or whatever once it's set up it'll do its thing and it'll refuel itself yeah and in that process it creates some amount of advantage or value and they're just going to continue to wind that crank until everybody's boa constricted to death i cross my analogies but you get me right well yeah and it's important to make sure you don't we don't confuse with combo decks because you might think oh they're creating a combo on the board which they are doing but combo decks typically mean when this combo is assembled it's over everyone's ko that made infinite this or whatever it is if you're looking for bow constrictor think about josh's euro deck or my kumena deck that i played they're both green blue and they're very good at exactly this building an engine and then out valuing your opponents and constricting the field around them so that they can't escape or do anything to get out of it you can always counter it or whatever it is you can find a way to stop them and win through your own plan all right important you want your dex plan to be explainable i think in like one sentence yeah likely if you're finding it difficult to explain what your dex plan is then it's probably too complicated and it probably means your deck is going to be unfocused yeah and again like we said that is the death knell for so many decks and it also really doesn't help when you're trying to figure out if your deck works or not yeah because you feel like i have 20 things going and i think one and a half worked in this game what about the other 17 and a half right so having a focus is really important like we said what's the main goal of the deck and how is it gonna win yep if you're trying to do too many things you'll often end up doing none of those things and then you won't even know even pieces of it you know what pieces of it worked i think it's much better like you said to try and focus on like one or maybe two things and then when you're playing the deck and testing it out you can really identify did that work or not yeah you've you've removed variables was it perfection is the enemy of good yeah uh all right so obviously we can't go through every deck every commander every archetype but regardless of what your plan is once you've defined it clearly and you know what your log line is it's going to help you really better understand what types of card cards your deck wants so up next we're going to talk about how to pick the right cards now that you have those questions answered and we're going to talk about you know the best ways to identify them and then how to know what cards are good and what aren't under those rules but we're going to take a quick break first and hear a message from our sponsors hey josh what you working on uh just tweaking my rune deck it's been feeling a little clunky you know as commander players we put a lot of effort into our decks but we don't always spend enough time working on our own well-being yeah and let's be honest that's often a lot harder than just switching out a few cards which is why we want to tell you about better help it's an easy affordable service that can help you get access to professional counseling if something is getting in the way of your happiness or making it harder for you to reach your goals there's no shame in looking for help whatever you might be dealing with better help will assess your 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the second commander deck billing template the new the new the improved the approved the 2021 version it's shinier than the last one uh but actually has changed quite a bit so we've talked about the strategy and goals of your deck and how to set them and define them with what josh is calling the log line the the thorough summary in one sentence and now it's time to figure out exactly what cards we do want to put in we had like we said earlier around 30 cards to slot in here but even then we've got numbers as well they're going to shift and alter inside this 30 as well as the ones that overlap with our other categories so we're going to break it down to a few categories here yeah you got to know like what cards but not just what cards like how many of those types of cards do i want like i know that like my deck really wants you know a two mana two two with lifelink for whatever reason well do i want 50 of those do i want 10 of those do i only want two of those so it's good to put your cards into categories uh so that you can start figuring this out and there are three main categories that we're going to talk about here the first category is what we call stand alone yep so these are cards that are effective by themselves or in concert with your commander yeah the main thing is that they don't actually need other things to function it's not like a part of a combo piece like blasting station it's like cool it's a good card but it really requires two other things to make it go off and do the really powerful things these cards are great by themselves but they will get better with synergy obviously they just don't need anything else on the battlefield necessarily to start functioning um and you know and i like that you wrote that with the exception of your commander because that is a card that you always have access to so it's okay to consider that i think in conjunction with standalone cards in terms of its effectiveness yeah for sure any other card in your deck if you're saying well this card is good with some other card in my deck well how do you know that you're going to have both of those cards at the same time whereas your commander you always have it in your command zone so i think it's fair to assess every card in your deck in conjunction with the commander because it's not like well how do i know i'm going to have access to my commander you will probably yeah there's a good chance anyway but yeah stand-alone cards are going to make up you know the bulk of your deck because or the bulk of your meet these 30 cards we're talking about because it's very important that your cards you know what they do and you you know what to expect most of the time that you play them you don't want to have to be all your cards really don't do anything unless some other card that's also in your deck uh is also in your hand or on the board yep so let's talk about a couple of examples um one that we mentioned earlier rustic study just functions on its own all you need are players to play the game uh and another amazing enchantment smothering tithe which is a card that basically anytime someone draws a card you pretty much you're going to get some mana ramp and some treasure tokens out of it yeah they can pay amanda to stop you but you almost always get the treasures yeah uh yeah so smothering tithe is just a good card it's awesome by itself obviously you can make it better with synergies you know if you have enchantress or artifact synergies that can be really even better with smothering tithe or if you're a wheel deck or something like that but at the same time you don't have to have those things going on for smothering tithes to be good yeah it's standalone it's always going to be good when you play it it's always going to do its thing yeah a word that people often use for cards like this is evergreen or it's just it is a staple for that reason isn't you can put it into a lot of things and it works uh this next card is a great example of that it is also evergreen in more ways than one it's eternal witness this is just a creature that earns the battlefield and gets you a card back from your graveyard and there's no game i think that you play that you one you wouldn't say like hey i definitely could have used an e-witness at one point to get something back obviously though if you are playing it in josh's rune deck you can blink it or you can find a way to recur it or let's say you're in a human deck and it comes on the battlefield and actually you know it adds tokens and stuff yeah the tribe matters yeah tribes matter but it's still pretty darn good on its own then as a result you'll see that's one of the most played cards in the format yeah same thing with smothering tithe it's just like yeah you could make it better with synergies but also if you don't have any of those synergies it's probably gonna be good you're gonna want a card out of your graveyard to get back to your hand so you can replay it because if you already played it and it's in your graveyard it was probably good you probably want it back you know i would say that creatures specifically are all a little bit stand-alone cards because if they have an effect or something that's great but they're also creatures so they can attack and block so in some ways there's more onus on you know enchantments uh artifacts to do something else because or to be standalone because like listen it's not great in command or a two one or whatever but at the same time like they can't do some stuff on their own attack hit get some damage and block prevent you know prevent me from dying or something maybe if the creature's big enough so uh creatures have a little bit more chance to be standalone maybe than other uh other card types and you'll hear people say oh that's a do-nothing enchantment or a do-nothing artifact but i don't think you can actually say that you can't say for the most part it's a do-nothing creature right yeah it can always at least chump block something right i mean in commander we need our creatures to be efficient so i think you could call something do nothing if it was just like a two mana two two like probably not big enough impact but at the same time like technically it can do more than an enchantment could that did the same thing right because that's not gonna attack or block so right just something to think about uh speaking of do nothing the next category is called enhancers and these are cards that either amplify or are amplified by your commander or your standalone cards yeah so these cards if they hit the board they are what we would say just a second ago that's a do nothing artifact or whatever if it doesn't have a way for it to be used it's almost like you're putting a part of a puzzle or a part of a machine on the board but in order to make it spin you got to put the other cog wheel on it and that's going gonna make it rotate at that extra fast speed because it's built for that one thing or whatever that strategy is yeah whereas standalone cards they don't need any help to be effective and do things enhancers do need help to be effective and do things yeah so they uh increase the effectiveness of your other cards very often this isn't just to say also that like all enhancers are you know straight up stone enough do nothing cards some of them can do things but you just wouldn't actually count that as very worthy or viable right yeah so like a full it's not the full maximum use of why the card's in the deck typically yeah so you could have a creature that's like a tutu or whatever and has an ability that causes it to be an enhancer because the fact that it's a tutu it just isn't enough of effectiveness that you would put in the deck otherwise well let's say actually a great example is it's eternal witness again yeah it hits the board but it gets something back but it's an enhancer if you're a flicker deck right okay so speaking of that let's talk about some enhancers panhard monocon a great enhancer it basically doubles up your enter the battlefield offense panoramicon if i pay the four mana and cast it nothing happens no lifetime has changed the only thing that really happens is that maybe your opponents look at you and go oh that's kind of dangerous yeah i'm worried about whatever you do next but the thing you just did itself is not it didn't do anything and these are def textbook definition of enhancer because every single play you make after that hopefully if panoramicon's in your deck is going to be amplified you play eternal witness after you play panarmonicon you don't get one thing back from your graveyard you get two things back yeah you know you play mole drifter right after you play panharmonicon you don't get two cards you get four cards so it amplifies everything that comes after it but the panharmaticon itself is just an enhancer it does not do anything on its own yeah another example i put down is one that i used to put in every deck because i was like this is great it makes all of my things do something and it's cryptolith right and you don't realize that sometimes cryptolithorite on an empty board where you have nothing else down is just purely an enhancer that does nothing otherwise you need to have pieces on the board in order to actually have it fully use its ability and help you out yeah crypto authority doesn't do anything it just allows your creatures to do something that they couldn't normally do right so the card itself i think that's a good way to figure out if something's an enhancer uh my favorite card a card we talk about all the time jimmy definitely an enhancer yep vidal can orie vidal qanori allows you to cast all your spells at flash speed which i love and i and i talk about it all the time but it doesn't that doesn't do anything that just enhances the quality of all your spells after that it's kind of very similar to panda harmonicon when you think about it it just gives an additional ability onto my bartex in my hand that they didn't have before whereas planner modicon basically says hey if you got an etb effect do it twice right yeah so it just amplifies later plays yeah one card that is always a headache around the table never lands is grave pact and or dictate of arabos but here's the thing you need things to happen for the effect to happen now these things do happen all the time any time a creature dies everyone needs to sacrifice a creature but that actually is getting into a deeper category which is like do you need a sack outlet and a grave pact in order to really have it going so great back to dictator of airbus by itself has a world affecting enchantment but doesn't do anything unless you start putting fuel into the tank yeah very very powerful anytime one of my creatures dies all my opponents have to sacrifice one of their creatures super powerful but that's just an effect this is like a new rule that's put onto your side of the board right it doesn't actually give you the ability to do anything you couldn't do before as far as like you can't sacrifice creatures now it doesn't help you destroy creatures in some way it just says if that happens then this other thing will happen so again an enhancer another one i really like and would go well with gr uh with dictator verbose and grave packs and to turn the witness yeah is his goal clamp which is an uh an equipment card that gives a creature plus one negative one and then if a creature dies you draw two cards this is almost always used as a card draw engine um but skull clamp is an enhancer right like you play skull clamp onto the board nothing happened you have to have some stuff going on you have to have creatures that you can attach it to for it to do anything and mostly you have to have creatures with one toughness to attach it to for to really do anything because i don't think you're playing skull clamps so that you can give plus one negative one to a tutu right yeah i mean a lot of good thread assessment in games is understanding when enhancers hit the board and whether and how much they're enhancing because sometimes you know someone's a big threat someone plays one of these cards and all of a sudden it's like well actually i'm not as worried because they need to do a few more things to really set that up to get it going whereas this problem is more imminent so understanding what enhancers are and how they work is actually really important to keeping your head wrapped around the game while you're playing too i would say most of the time though people uh thread assess wrongly in the opposite direction so a pan harmonica hits the board and they still laser focus on the thing they can see whereas man the panhard monocon like depending on what they drop that could be way worse than the thing i see right right now and it's just like the unknown sometimes is hard to quantify and hard to calculate so enhancers do nothing on their own but are often the most powerful cards in your deck we talk about skull clamp all the time as like the best card in the deck in the decks that it's in so just because we say oh that card doesn't quote unquote do anything does not mean that you you know it's bad or shouldn't be in your deck some of the most powerful cards in the format are enhancers yep yep all right let's talk about the last category here that we're the last bucket that we're sort of sorting our cards into we had standalone we had enhancers and now we're on enablers yeah and these cards are ones that cover a weak spot or a missing blind spot that your deck would naturally have or they get a little bit of help in bridging or filling the gap in your strategy overall yeah so board wipes and single target removal i think often fall into this category also protection type cards for your border for your commander or whatever because usually you in your log line is not like i'm going to destroy all my opponent's stuff sometimes protecting your commanders in your log line like como we saw for jacob's deck it was in there but not very often and and again there's going to be exceptions i can think of some off the top of my head here but not very often is a deck's goal to wipe the board yeah sometimes it is but not the roof yeah but navineral himself yeah yeah but that's not most decks and most decks are not saying oh i wanted single target remove everything that my opponents play again there are decks that want to do stuff like that or talran decks that want to counter everything but that's not the norm yeah um so yeah let's talk about enablers very common one lightning greaves swift foot boots cards we talk about very often on the show because they protect your commander and when your commander is the card that makes your deck work then you're gonna need a card that keeps it around lecture long or maybe it's a you know a bring it back from the graveyard to the battlefield type effect whatever it is those cards are meant to protect your commander and keep them around or maybe it's a crucial combo creature that you need on the board that no one can touch and lightning greaves gets a lot better if there's more than one target that you might want to put it on in your deck if there's some stuff that you'd really like to give haste to maybe some things that need to tap to do their thing now it gets a whole lot better you can you can make it better with synergy but it's really an enabler card um it's probably not in your deck for artifact synergies or whatever maybe those might be a thing that you would like but at the same time like a lot of people are just putting lightning graves in the deck and the only thing that's really there for protect my commander teferi's protection speaking of protection is another card that is very very good sees play in a ton of decks but is not usually doing anything that really lines up with the main strategy of what that deck is but at the same time it's a card that you really want to play because let's say you're going to need to commit a lot to the board for your strategy work your tokens your voltron your you know an elve ball deck or something like that to various protection makes you a lot safer from things like board wipes so that's filling in a weakness you're saying well my strategy what is the weakness well the weaknesses i have to commit to the board for this strategy to really pop off okay so this covers it because it means that as i commit to the board i'm not sticking my neck out too far i have a way to save myself if somebody goes boom board wipe yeah and then also in certain metas might be like my metal loves to board wipe teferi's protection is actually a weakness that a lot of my decks have that don't have regrowth effects this allows me to play a little more brazenly out into the open and then use this to sort of hold on because i need to win the game quickly and if everyone's board wiping all the time then interface protection enables me to do so in a better way yep you can also do mean things of course and use it offensively with like armageddon's and stuff but that's not what we're uh that's not what we're suggesting here you can do it yeah yeah okay you're right everyone can do whatever they want [Laughter] as we said single target removal is often in the enabler category counterspell i would definitely put here uh because it is both single chart removal and like you said earlier jimmy protection yes so it might be like oh another way to get around a board wipe besides serious protection is just to be like hey i counter spell your board wipe yep you know a way to get around your sword supply chair is on my you know really key piece i counterspelled that thing so but also it's a oh you just tormented hale fired for 20.

i'll counterspell that so i don't lose yep yeah yeah protecting that um i also put down in garrick's wake because a lot of decks do want to keep their side of the board and this is a board wipe that's on the pricier side but basically enables you to push forward with your board state and comfortably board wipe and still do the boardwife thing so this would be a card that potentially is like a crossover of synergy between boardwipes and token strategies yeah it's not the main strategy of your deck to board wipe everything but you want to commit to the board and when you do board wipe you don't want to destroy your own stuff so this enables your strategy your token strategy or whatever to still play a board wipe right whereas if you had wrath of god or something um well i don't really want to destroy all my tokens when i do that so i'm less likely to want to play that card yep yeah all right so the reason we've divided our cards into these categories standalone enabler enhancer is so that we can make sure that we sort of get the right amounts in each category so uh we're not going to split these evenly though it's not like okay we have 30 cards let's put 10 standalone 10 enabler 10 enhancers standalone is the category that's going to be the most robust like we talked about earlier because those cards function you know what to expect from them you don't have to have edit anything else necessarily go right during the game draw them in a certain order play them in a certain order you just stand alone cards you play them they do what they're meant to do and you actually don't want to have as many on the enhancer enabler side i know many of your listings might be like but those are what make my car my deck so sweet and that almost makes them tick but it's kind of the same thing when it goes back to the mana ram versus card draw one of them is going to be more important in this case standalone is more important because without the standalone cards your enhancers and enablers get a little bit worse even if it is only there for your commander you don't want to have to always draw cards that say well this card is only good if you have your commander out if your command has been removed two times that card in your hand just gets that much worse well i like what you said there too um it made me think like well what if most of the cards in my deck were panharmonicon right it's not actually good because what the heck is it amplifying right i need most of the cards in my deck to be cards or creatures that enter the battlefield and do something so that panharmonicon makes most of my plays after i play it better panoramicon doesn't help other pan harmonics so you don't want too many enhancers so let's go through just an arbitrary suggested numbers list here of how many of each of these categories you probably want it's a template so we're gonna give you some numbers this one's gonna skew more than the the other stats for card draw and ramp and everything like that especially in relation to whichever commander you have for your deck yeah so really pay attention to what your log line is and what you want because again this can change vastly but in general i'd say you want somewhere in the realm of 25 standalone cards 10 to 12 enhancers and seven or eight enablers but josh you said we only had 30 cards we add to the deck i count nearly 40 here yeah what's going on what gives all right so the reason the numbers are not adding up to 30 and if you just took this straight across with our stats from before you're like oh i can have a commander deck with 125 cards in it no you cannot no and and don't yeah so this is where we need to talk about a concept uh that we call overlap yup and this is when the car crosses over and can be counted in multiple categories and is probably the most common way to make your commander deck really hum this is really the key component to the art of deck building i think yeah yeah because magic has so many cards in its history and commander only allows you to have one of each type of card so you don't get to have that consistency of four ember cleaves or whatever it is to fill your strategy up so the overlap is really interesting because you could have a card you could have five cards in a single category and they all overlap in different ways but they all also share the single target removal category or whatever it is yeah so we kind of i like to think of this kind of similar to when you're building a mana base so let's imagine this scenario jimmy you have uh let's say it's a 60 card deck just to make these numbers or okay okay you have 10 forests in your deck you have 10 mountains in your deck but you also have the red green bounce land the red green shock land and the red green dual land how many of each source how many red sources and how many green sources do you have well you actually have 10 green sources in the land 10 on the right and then you have these lands that count as both so you have 13 of each source right right 13 of each source but how many total cards is that 10 10 and 3 23.

so that's where our math seems like it's not adding up because you can count the red green lands on both sides in both categories how many green lands do i have 13 how many red glands i have 13. how many total cards is that 26. so if you think of the cards in your deck in a similar fashion a card can fill two different slots um and then you can sort of this this is how we get to that thing where what's the saying uh the whole is greater than the sum of its parts yep yeah so this is literally how that math works out and let's talk about some examples here um one i like is spore frog fog frog if you're in a muldrotha or a kenwrath deck so either of those is gonna want to use that spore frog over and over again the great thing about spore frog is you have to sacrifice it to get its ability right so it's putting itself in the graveyard it's a standalone card if you don't have your commander out or whatever you can play it sack it it will fog the board but in moldova or kanrith it's also an enabler because now i can do that over and over again and really get value out of it and do that whenever i want to yeah because kenrith a lot of people don't realize can actually bring stuff back from the graveyard there's so many things that card can do at instant speed and that's why camera the moderator are so good is because they open the door up for so many new kinds of interactions so the venn diagram of what overlaps with those strategies just gets bigger and bigger and that's why they're such prevalent uh commanders in the format too let's talk about something like vinser shaper savant this is two blue blue for a two-two flash and uh when it enters the battlefield you return target spell back to its owner's hand it gets around can't be countered which is interesting it bounces a spell that's on the stack that or it's it's spell or permanent i believe yeah yeah so you can all check while you look yeah so the thing about vincer in something like yarok is that it fills a ton of categories so vents are by itself no your rx out nothing else is going on does its thing play it it either bounces a spell on the stack or bounces a permanent correct yep but also it's an enabler for yaric it is a pinpoint removal spell in that right it's boom i get rid of your combo piece that you're about to go off with or whatever that's what you know our enablers do but it's also an enhancer in york and for a bunch of different reasons one is it's amplified by yaric but also in the arc deck what do you play a lot of permanents that have entered the battlefield effects what's good with that oh bouncing them back to my hand so i can replay them so you get twice the triggers every time you play this venter with the arc and that means that you can get rid of something and guess what you gotta do it again yep you bounce something else back also you know the cool little trick with your conventer is you get two triggers right mm-hmm one target's fencer one target's a thing and now you've got a venter back to your hand it's like cap size but for four mana yeah pretty good yeah pretty darn good but it's filling look at that filling three rolls three categories that card is so good in yorick yeah inventory shapers font is generally just a good card as well like just anytime you can see a card that's got more text on it and the text is all doing things by itself guess what that card's value climbs higher and higher because it's starting to fill more categories and spiritually if you see it it's like it's blanket in terms of what it works with just gets bigger and bigger yeah it's spider web of its vietnam diagram or whatever just covering everything yeah but you don't you don't have to just um have your overlap be with like the standalone enabler enhancer category you can actually have the overlap happen with the other categories mana ram yes uh card draw in this case lands and single chart removal as well for for a good old venture but yeah lands is great this one my favorite lanes in the game it's phyrexian tower because this overlaps with so much so to land you can tap for man but you can also sacrifice a creature and add to black mana and it's great in a deck like corvol because corvold cares about sacrificing things it also often is a lands deck so this is a land that is an enhancer and also potentially ramp because you can sacrifice a creature that enables your commander and gives you extra mana so it's doing all sorts of things at once usually when you're watching game nights and someone does something and everyone goes oh wow that's like an example of why vencer and phrexian tower and sport frog even have that extra ability because they're starting to fulfill multiple things and people's brains are just going to happen if anybody plays a card and you're like oh they could do this with this oh they could do that with it oh my god they can also do that with it then it's like oh crap that that guard has a lot of overlap yeah that's an all-star i wanted to pause here because frixion tower is an interesting case um i love what you said about it especially the part where you said it it might even be like a ramp card right and it's interesting because it only ramps you only gives you extra mana if you sacrifice a creature right it either taps for colorless or if you tap it and sacrifice creature you get two black man black black yeah yeah so you get an extra mana if you can sacrifice a creature and i wanted to talk about a concept that jimmy and i use a lot which is what i'm going to call partials and this is not counting cards necessarily as a whole piece of either mana ramp or card draw right so when we say oh you want 10 card draw calls or 10 mana ramp cards that doesn't necessarily mean literally one two three four five six seven eight nine ten i can point to all the cards and that's how much mana each of those man rounds me cards like for example might count as a portion of a ramp card so you go i got nine ram cards in my deck but i also have these five or six other cards that are mana ramp under the right circumstances so i'm gonna add them all together and that's two or three more ramp cards total even though i wouldn't count any of them singly as a full ramp card i'll count for excellent towers like a third of a ramp card or a half of a ramp card yeah and that's actually something that is applied to scry often where they'll say like scry1 that doesn't count as card drop but by the time by the time you're scry 3 scry4 that's about drawing a card it's not a it's not actually drawing a card but the value that you get should equate to around that so this is the idea of partials in that you can actually have even more sort of like split synergies um now obviously you can't do this for every slot you can't have like 50 partials to make five ram right like you still have to maybe you could because that'd be a lot it would be a lot it'd be interesting because then your deck just doesn't function at all that's right yeah i want to play that deck that would be pretty sweet yeah if you could um so then yeah partials you can add things up to be one and we even see that with like you know like mdfcs they kind of count as a spell and a land but you can't one for one them because you'll just be in trouble if you do that right all right so ideally i think you want your single target removal board wipes ramp and card draw to have overlap in the enhancer category specifically other categories if you can manage it and this is not too hard to figure out so like let's look at atraxa and abomination of land wire which was just played on extra turns by lady danger one is a proliferate cares about counters on stuff the other is an elf deck so you wouldn't want the same ramp in both of these decks right because you're not going to get the synergy you're not going to get enhanced by the same stuff so in atrexa i might want astral cornucopia because it puts counters on the rock and then attracts that every turn is going to increase the amount of counters and it'll eventually keep tapping for more and more mana whereas actual cornucopia seems pretty bad in the abomination of land war deck right right you could still play it it would still do the ramp thing but whether or not right the abomination of land war does not make astral cornucopia better right so i think the same mana cost if you're assuming you're going to play astral cornucopia for three is far haven elf which is two and a green and now this is an elf that comes into play and it puts a basic land into play tapped so you've ramped you've got an extra mana from here on out but they now you've got an elf on the battlefield so it's going to make a abomination of lanoir better it's going to synergize better with the rest of your pieces yep this is a way to say like oh what is enhanced or either enhances or is enhanced by my commander and my standalone cards i want to push my mana ramp towards that yep that makes a lot of sense uh the next example we have here is well the card actually i thought it was reconnaissance at first but no it's a new card it's reconnaissance mission and it's a card that goes very well in the layla deck layla is the blue black fairy that pumps out more fairy tokens when you cast in champions league champions so reconnaissance mission is an enchantment that any time a creature you control deals combat damage to a player you may draw a card perfect the card also cycles but that's aside the point so this is good with one one fires it's an enchantment that will make a flyer with a layla and also those flyers are going to be able to attack and then draw you more cards seems pretty great yep let's look at the zaksara deck now conversely that something similar to what jordan just played on the most recent episode of extra turns this is an ex-spell deck that makes anytime you cast a spell with x in its cost you get a hydra onto the battlefield a hydro token that's an xx yeah zero zero and then you put x plus and plus encounters on it so reconnaissance mission i mean you could play it in this deck you can have hydras and stuff you might be able to get them in but they don't have trample or anything yeah your commander has death touch harder to block sure yeah but i think a better choice would be what jimmy gadwick the wisened because gadwick is a card that you can cast and gives you a lot of man-up and it has x and it's cast as well it gives you a lot of card draw a card draw yeah yeah but the casting cost is x blue blue blue which matches very well with xr as well so this is these are just examples of how like hey in the car draw category from deck to deck pick the card draw that synergizes with your commander rather than yeah you can just play cultivate or ramp and growth in every deck and you'll be fine but in you know sometimes don't just be on rails and be like i'm just putting cultivate in every single deck and the abomination land war deck far heavy and elf is probably going to be a little bit better in the attraction deck after cornucopia might be better just because they they're enhanced whereas cult debate does its thing but it's not enhanced in any way that's why it's hard sometimes to build like the template of a deck because you could say like yeah play soul ring in every deck for sure but after a certain point you actually have to make very specific choices to really optimize it and also feel good about your deck especially if you're going for you know the far haven elf and the abomination land war it's also thematic everything else yeah you don't want every deck necessarily that you play well some people don't it's fine if you do yeah um to be the same though yeah you know i like this deck to feel a little bit different than this deck and there's one way to do it here's another thing so in the single target removal category um let's talk about muldrotha versus cass dissident mage yup muldorotha cares about things in the graveyard and so does cass but slightly different things right cass cares about instances of sorceries in there well jotha cares about permanence so in moldrotha if i want a kill spell shriekmom maybe is a good one because it's a creature that you evoke out for a cheaper cost and immediately sacrifice itself and puts it in the graveyard yep it kills a creature when it comes out though and now it's in the graveyard you can use it again with muldrotha but in cass street smile is not very good it's not going to do anything so you want an instant or sorcery and now terminate becomes maybe the card that you go to same mana cost as the evokas on shriek ma and now it sits in the graveyard and can be used by kes a second time yep and who's not to say that you might play a terminate type effect in muldrosa but if you had the choice in that moment you could tell right the instance b doesn't matter anymore oh wow i really want the one that i can use over and over again because that's what this deck is built to do right also terminator has red i think so you can't play that we'll drop the button the the point is very well well thought out okay yeah doom blade you know yeah yeah there you go all right let's talk about one more card and this is another cool one in specific decks uh and recently one of our preview cards uh yeah with the retro frame so solemn simulacrum and let's talk about it in like brea or an artifact matters deck yep artifact matters decks are often artifact-o-crats like we talk about they like to sacrifice their artifacts care about how many artifacts they have on battlefield they recur their artifacts back on the battlefield from the graveyard so solid simulacrum becomes ramp card draw and an enhancer in decks like brea brea wants to get the land into play draw the cards bring the thing back sacrifice it to her ability to do other things yeah solemn similaricum generally very good you're going to play it in the model white deck i'm on the red deck but when you're able to get extra synergies some similaricum is probably at this point better in red decks than white decks because there's a lot of artifact sacrificing synergies there as well so in general the card's great but gets so much better when you get a little extra synergy on top of it yeah like you get all that overlap it's like trading post if you're able to find a deck that synergizes with every single thing on trading post or staff of domination that's like pure synergy the ultimate and those cards have so many lines that you can usually find a lot of overlap yeah and even if it's like three out of the five things you're using on it that's still pretty darn good for one card right all right let's talk here let's wrap up this section by talking about tutors really really quickly so tutors actually represent any card in your deck that they could go find and so tutors actually have a ton of overlap index they're very very powerful now some people don't like them because uh it's not the experience of commander that they're looking for i totally understand but just for my i've built decks in fact i often build decks these days with no tutors on in them on purpose because i want the variants but i think if you're building a deck uh and you're not sure a tutor can be a good sort of catch-all for all the effects it could find because think of demonic tutor what is it well it's a card draw card a ramp card it's a board wipe it is a single target removal spell it's a standalone card it's the best card that gets the worst card in your deck yeah it goes finds whatever it is that you need in that moment and that is one of the reasons that tutors are so good yeah and that's why they're even better in the cast deck oh my god oh my goodness do it twice all right coming up next we're going to talk about how to cut cards how to get that number down to the legal amount for commander and we're going to talk about something i'm calling the magic number i don't like the game um like the magic the 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recon's offering 15 off all their products for our audience and here's what you gotta do to get it go to buyrecon.com that's it you'll get 15 off your entire recon order so feel free to grab a pair and a spare that's 15 off at buy raycon.com extra again buy raycon.com extra ah just like mother used to sing okay we've gone through quite a lot here we've talked about the statistics of the deck the different kinds of cards you're putting in across the board and now you're probably looking at a pile of cards that is 150 200 300 it's an oath of whatever deck and you can't play that because it's not legal and also way too many cards trust me you're never gonna actually pull off what you want with that many so now we're gonna talk about how you get rid of cards it is a heartbreaking process sometimes but it's very important and don't forget i think there's something people forget all the time you're not gonna just build one deck right if you're playing commander maybe you'll build another one and then you get to use the cards so don't feel bad if you have to cut cards but let's talk about a more clinical way of going about it so hopefully you can get down to that hundred and get playing sooner well also the deck you're about to build that is not the final version of that deck so don't worry yeah write some cards like you might add them back in later and cut some other cards that you thought were better than them because you found out that those cards didn't play that well so yeah i think uh paralysis by analysis is totally a thing just eventually you got to make choices so you can play the deck and when you play the deck you're gonna make some tweaks after that just know nothing's the final version necessarily yeah okay we suggest when you have a bit that big pile of cards that you kind of whittle it down to but it's still too many for a deck the first thing you want to do is sort of compare them in their categories that's standalone enabler enhancers that we talked about earlier keep in mind those fundamental questions we talked about earlier what is the plan or goal of my deck how does it win also don't go too crazy with themes and ideas like we're talking about you don't want to try and do like 50 different things you want to focus on like one or two main ideas or themes uh to make sure your deck's gonna be streamlined it's gonna be consistent and then when you test the deck you'll be able to tell do i like this theme because then you can switch it out more easily like you're just saying yeah that's a good point okay so let's talk about tribes and themes and the magic number is 30.

i'm just going to say the magic number right now i'm not going to hold any suspense here i was waiting for something like angelic to happen oh thirty that's magical okay okay i like thirty that's a good number um and this number is more about specifically if your deck wants a certain thing or really is trying to push a certain direction then 30 of that thing is how you're gonna make sure that you consistently get there every time yeah i was i did a lot of research on this looking at all of our decks from game nights looking at like just decks people post online and other decks from people that work here and things like that and it's pretty consistent if your deck cares about a thing you probably want around 30 of that thing so let's look at some examples if you have like a blink flicker deck like my rune deck it cares about enter the battlefield effects on specifically creatures yes about 30 is what you're gonna find most of the time uh tasa dex the new tasta that has the um death harmonicon on her she cares about death triggers on creatures she doubles them most of those decks are gonna have about 30 creatures with a death trigger on it makes sense makes sense uh brea one of my favorite decks ever loves artifacts wants to make them wants to sacrifice them once you use them for all sorts of things you're going to want at least 30 artifacts and in fact bray is one of those few decks where you can take that number way up because now you can have artifact lands you can have all sorts of different places token creators so you have lots of ways to get past that number with brea yeah it's it's interesting because i thought braille would be a lot higher in the artifact category so most of the decks i looked at in the 30 range i'm not saying everything's exactly on 30 right but yeah but around 30 33 maybe then you see one of 29 then you'd yeah well your commander makes two on entering the battlefield you can almost count that as one extra artifact card on the deck uh enchantress or enchantment matters decks a lot of them are right around 30 again uh this works with tribes i found too so zombie decks goblin decks elf tracks merfolk decks a lot of the decks you're going to face or see or that people build and find you know once they've tuned them to optimization they find that there are around 30 or so of that creature type in the deck which i thought was really interesting even my shadow born apostle deck you get asked this question a lot actually how many do you put in 29 wow shadowboard apostles in the deck i think there's something about the number 30.

it's about a third of your deck that just if your main theme is that that's about the ratio at which you are pretty guaranteed to get enough of it for the theme to play out right and and consistently so again because you don't know what your starting seven is going to be and you don't know what the rest of your deck is going to be as you draw through it and if you are eliminating that number to like 10 15 you are just aren't going to see those cards very often and you may have to aggressively mulligan to even get them in your opening hand so that's an important thing to remember too it's like yeah i have tons of card draw but if you don't have an opening hand that gives you a direction where to go that's going to hurt you as well and that's why you want to have this sort of critical 30 number in there so you have consistently know okay okay cool this is what i got in hand this is how i'm gonna pursue the strategy for this opening part of the game at least yeah remember this is the template so what we want to do is give you the best chance that the first version of your deck gives you the information you need to be able to tweak it further because you're never gonna start with the template and just be like yep built it it's done it's perfect version one so 30 i think is a good starting place now you might end up at 33 you might end up about 27 you know maybe even 37 or whatever but 30 will get you the knowledge you need in to be able to make the decision of what direction you need to go yeah it's a good point it's not like cooking or if you over salt something it's like well it's clearly over salted you know there's no way to take this all down yeah well let's talk about some exceptions then because this is a hard and fast sort of number that we were talking about but there are definitely some exceptions this first one especially i realized this very quickly with this deck of mine yeah when you're building super friends or planeswalker matter decks you do not want 30 planeswalkers you might think you do though because it's all about the super friends i'm gonna put as many in there as possible and then you start drawing them and go i wish that was a card dress spell i wish that was a man ram spell i wish it was just anything like a creature so that i wouldn't just be playing my planeswalker into an empty board right right they need planeswalkers need a lot of support and they tend to have a big impact all by themselves having two planeswalkers in play feels like the equivalent of having nine elves in play a lot of times you know so you usually want closer to 15 maybe 17 18 uh planeswalkers in a super friend stack you do not want 30.

yeah i've even seen play walker super friends decks go down to like 9 10 because they're just trying to get doubling season and the planeswalker out so there's more tutors the more char draw ways to just get that combo strategy going yep uh i found that instance and sorcery matters decks like cast dissident mage they tend to be a little bit higher i think it's because there's two categories instance and sorceries right and you're playing those regardless yeah and so those wanted to be around 40 instance and sorcerers combined lands matter decks for the sort of same reason is that you're already playing lands but when the lands contribute to your strategy as well then you're going to boost that number even higher so 40 45 lands for those corvol decks for those lord win grace decks because you need to have them yeah not just that you can't every turn you can't just play the last land out of your hand you want to play the last hand that one land out of your hand discard two others million things yeah cause they represent spells and synergy slots so they need to serve two purposes there all right the next way to evaluate cards for when you're cutting them is uh it was popularized by limited resources back in the brian wong days marshall sutcliffe brian wong yeah one of the lg maybe all-time important seminal moments in sort of magic strategy ever right like the quadrant theory just permeates uh all of magic strategy across formats and everything and it's no different commander it's very useful we have to recalibrate slightly for us but the quadrant theory is this idea that you evaluate cards that you're thinking of putting your deck on how they perform in four different stages of the game yep uh and so the four stages are one developing stages so typically the early game when you're starting to get settled ramping out preparing for the rest of the game the second stage is whenever you are behind and this happens much more often than not because you're in commander and there are three other players at the table typically uh the third stage to evaluate the car that is is when you're ahead which is of course much more rare because again there are three other opponents at the table and the final one is when i'm at parody and parody means when everyone is sort of staring each other down no one's attacking no one's doing much because they're waiting for someone else to get ahead or get below and then move from there but everyone's just sort of doing the old standoff it's when you looked around the table and if you said who's ahead it would be hard to really determine that you can't clearly be like oh well jimmy's ahead it's like it's pretty even yeah good depending on what they do there and they have a lot of untapped mana so i don't actually know it's a lot more unknown information so you're taking each card that you're thinking about putting into your deck and you're just asking yourself the question how good is this in the developing stage okay well how good is this card if i'm behind all right well how good is this card if i'm ahead all right well how about this card if the game's at parity you know one of the differences between commander and things like limited or standard when you're doing this quadrant theory is that we care more about the category of when i'm ahead because in commander you can be ahead but you can be ahead at the point where like you need to close the door because combined the other players will arch enemy you and they can overcome the amount you're ahead you have to be ahead by a lot more to win in commander than you do in standard and standard if i'm ahead of you by a little bit a lot of cards in my deck will increase my lead or maintain it like you know especially in like limited like let's say i'm ahead of you jimmy on board and i've got i've got a good attack and then i draw a 4-man of 3-3 well i was ahead then i played a 4-mana 3-3 what am i more ahead than i was yeah right whereas in commander you can be ahead and then not do much and very quickly it can be like oh they destroy your thing they destroy another thing now the third player plays a thing and you're not ahead anymore especially now that we have more single target removal running around right if you open yourself up to not being able to stop or recover from that then you're being ahead because again you just have the ire and the stare of all the other players at the table if they're threat assessing it is just that much harder to hold on to so as a result there are cards that people will refer to as win more cards and they say that with like a negative connotation because in most other formats you don't need a lot of cards that help you win more you're already winning yeah you're already winning yeah but in commander it is actually legitimate that we want some win more cards now you don't want a ton of those because usually win more cards are not very good when you're behind you're at parody but you do want some this is going to close the door on games that i'm ahead and i want to play those type of cards um i also want to say that it's not really a process of judging each card and saying well i need it to do good in all the categories right because i think it'd be easy to misconstrue what we're saying like my parents and me in school yeah you know no no no i'm sorry i can't play an instrument i'm not good at music what's the big deal i'm still going to pass high school i won't be a musician that's fine so think of a card that can be so good in one of the categories that it can actually be bad in the three others and you will still play it can you think of a card like that jimmy no we've mentioned it probably three times on the show already it's like the best card in the whole time one man the two random rockets of soaring you're always gonna play this card no matter what because look it's not amazing when you're ahead but that doesn't mean it's still it's it doesn't mean it's bad in that situation it's incredible in developing stages it's incredible when you're behind and it's even good at how you're behind it yeah how far behind you are but when you're ahead or when you're at parity it doesn't have as much of an effect but you're still going to benefit from that one extra mana so many times i've seen late game plays where someone is just able to play one more spell out of their hand because they have a soul ring and it generates more man than the cast to cost which is so important i just also think it's so good in developing stages right it's nuts that it it doesn't matter if it's a little bit worse or a lot worse later because the advantage it gives you when you do have it early is so big you're willing to take your lumps that sometimes you add you're out on turn 12.

like you said it's not the worst thing in the world in a lot of those cases but it's definitely not like game changing at that point but because i'm willing to be like yeah but with the variance when i do draw it early that's going to give me a huge advantage in those games i still want it in my deck yeah so don't get blindsided thinking like oh every card has to do well in all the stages just consider all the stages and how good they are in each stage because some cards can be like uh medium in all the stages that might not be a playable card as one that is like really awesome when i'm behind and like just okay when i'm ahead that might be a thing because you're like well i'm gonna be behind most of the time in commander there are three other players it's not like one-on-one so this card might be worth a little bit more to me yeah it's a really good point it's also just a great way to just do a blanket application to your cards and the ones that just don't shine in the in the categories or don't feel like they're impactful enough those should be easier cuts now that you have another way of looking at them again none of these are hard fast ways if it doesn't work here it doesn't work at all but they're all giving you clues as to what's good and what's not all right another way to figure out which cards you want in or which cards to cut is mana curve considerations and this is the segment that's probably changed the most over the last four years and actually it's still well now kind of more controversial as well because i think there's there's starting to be a couple of competing schools of thought here about this so as you start to whittle the cards down i would use like an online program we use tapped out but there's a whole bunch archidect and some other words some other ones that you can put the cards in and even if you have more than 100 cards it's fine you just click prototype or whatever and it'll kind of map out your cards on a curve and it'll show you like oh you've got eight one drops twelve two drops fifteen three drops and it'll kind of make this nice curve for you and that's what we call the mana curve and that's just how many cards you have at each cmc or i guess mana value is what we're calling it now oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah man we're changing it to mana value i'm sorry if we call it uh cmc for the rest of this episode we're still getting used to it um so yeah three years ago or four years ago whenever we did the template episode before we were saying that your curve should peak at the three and four slot yeah um and if you're like me the five slot and now i i'm looking at our decks jimmy you said that but i looked at our decks for game nights for the last like you know you can see the change over time yeah but the last year or so the decks the peak point is definitively the two cmc slot we've moved forward or left one entire slot so the one two and three cmc stuff combined is on average making up around two two-thirds 66 percent wow of our decks these days so we are really pushing down the curve and trying to have the bulk of cards in our deck below mana value cards i think it's really important to note too that we're not doing this to play like we're not saying that seven drops are bad in fact we talk about expropriate and other game-winning cards all the time and they're up on the higher slots but when you start to overload that side of the board in terms of like what is in your deck in terms of how much it costs for the man value then you actually get to cast it less and having the one to three cmc stuff making up the majority of your deck is actually where you want to be because that will allow you to when you draw those cards they're not dead in your hand you get to play your cards and it's just way more fun to play your cards and do stuff than it is to not do stuff yeah this is not a yeah people like to sort of equate this with like spikiness and things like this but it's just the evolution of the format a lot of decks you're gonna play against are just a little faster than they used to be and if you haven't sped up a little bit you know in order to equalize that advantage that they're getting or what they're doing then you're going to be at a disadvantage and so all we want to do now is just make sure that we're doing things a little earlier than we were doing them before it doesn't mean that like we're trying to end the game on turn five or whatever it's also just i think naturally more powerful to have a bunch of two and three drops than it is to have a bunch of five drops because if i have a two drop and a three drop i can play that on turn five with my five mana my five drop i can also play on turn five with my five mana the problem is my five drop cannot be played on turn two or turn three where the two and the three drop can so this is just good strategy this is just good tactics giving yourself flexibility with your cmc so pushing towards the low end of the cmc is generally good i guess what i'm saying here is that it might seem obvious but if you are considering multiple cards in similar categories standalone enabler enhancer single target remover whatever you've got a bunch there and you got to cut some of them in general one of the good ways to cut is to say i'm going to cut the higher cmc stuff i'm going to keep the lower cmc stuff the lower mana value stuff sorry yeah and like what you said too it's really important to know like let's say you draw you had two slots at six you're like i can't cut either they're both amazing you drop both of them into the same hand in the same game on turn six you only get to play one of them turn seven things may have changed where you don't get to play the other one so a lot of times like josh said if there were two three drops instead then you could have played one on turn three and you can play one on turn four and another spell and if you're looking at like what is the total amount of mana i've spent in a game and you're saying okay let's say i spent 50 mana in the game i only cast five spells that's not nearly as fun as 50 mana casting 12 15 spells or whatever that number may be you're just doing more you're creating more synergy you're creating more lines and more opportunities for you to have fun and hopefully win the game uh so about the high cmc stuff i just as i was going through this i looked into it these days jimmy our decks generally have four or fewer seven drops or above we have very very few slots in the deck that we are dedicating towards huge spells and yeah i'm very aware this when i deck build i know you are because i can just look at your deck where you're like looking at everything you're like i love all this stuff but i gotta only pick a couple of these really big spells because it's the worst thing in the world when i draw one or two of them in my opening hand and i'm just it's usefu it's like i'm mulligan it's useless to me for so long it makes your card draw that much worse too all right sweet scribe two draw two cards so get those out of here oh gosh oh no i'm never casting that thing or not for forever yeah yeah um it's funny because even with special synergy i was like i looked at your magna deck and i was like oh with magda like he's probably gonna have a number of huge things because he can cheat that stuff into play do you know how many seven drops you do because you're looking at a piece of paper i do yeah everybody out there guess how many seven plus drops jimmy had in the magda deck six he only had two more than his normal deck yeah and it's again the same thing right if you just start being like well clearly it's like no for me meg is about focusing on getting the dwarf synergy out so you can get those cards out quickly because if you put too many in your deck and you draw them into your opening hand and that means oh that seven drop dragon could have been a two-man a dwarf that that netted you man and got you closer to getting that dragon you gotta trend towards the side that helps you win the game and get your plan going more all right so mana curve is it's a whole episode we probably need to redo at some point so this is as deep as we're going to go on this episode but pay attention your mana curve put it into one of those those programs or whatever so you can look at it or lay it out on the table in front of you and that's one of the easiest ways because i think sometimes it's like oh i have only this for the creatures and you put your enchantments and stuff out you're like oh my goodness it's loaded on right here and like i can't having 26 man enchantments you don't want to be there oh one last thing on mana curve i do want to talk about here very briefly again keep in mind the mana value the cmc of your commander this is an important point when you're building your deck so this will help you determine two things what the cmc of your ramp wants to be right and where your curve can maybe be a bit less because you know in most games that you're going to want to play your commander on time for most decks not all but if your commander is 5 cmc or 4cmc then a lot of times your 4cmc or 5cmc slot for the rest of your cards should be a little bit less because i know what i want to do on turn four it's play my commander i don't need a bunch of four drops because i already have a better play 90 of the time right for that slot it also determines your ramp because let's say you have a 3cmc commander well you really want one cmc one man of value ramp if you can find it as much as possible and so in decks maybe an elvish mystic goes in there where it's not an elf deck or whatever maybe you know you play a birds of paradise and a wild growth and a utopia sprawl because you know you notice with my yarn deck that i played on game night and extra turns it's a three drop i really want to get it out on turn two so i was just searching for all the one man a ramp that i can find because two mana ramp doesn't help me i play two mana ramp then on turn three i've got four mana but yorn cost three and now i'm gonna play him for three and now i just have one mana that i'm not using yep but that's also why you put a lot of lower cost spells in there is because when you start to spill over just a little bit you have something to do with it yeah i don't i don't want to over um emphasize this i think it's it's a good tiebreaker though when you're deciding which card is to cut look at the cmc of your uh commander figure out what normal play sequencing in the game is going to be i'm usually going to want to be casting my commander here so maybe maybe i'll choose this card over that one because that's the same cc as that moment yeah and also let's say like look at decks with like higher cmc cards too because like a coma deck right has seven mana cmc to cast or command of value that might actually mean in some cases you can maybe put in one extra higher cmc spell because you are so focused on ramping that card out that that's a consistent thing is going to happen every game so it's like cool maybe you can run another five drop because that five will pair well with the three drop when you get to eight mana or whatever it is oh yeah that's interesting all right let's talk about to wrap up here or not really wrap up but to finish up here some common deck building pitfalls these are common mistakes we see um you know newer deck builders or even experienced ones making that sort of lead to you know less optimal decks yeah and unfun playing experiences yeah i don't want to say bad decks but honestly like to this day sometimes i still build decks and i look at it and this deck is bad just because you try too many things or whatever the the pitfalls are so it's no shame if your decks aren't uh firing on cylinders all the time maybe these little common pitfalls we're going to uh list here can help you figure out what's wrong with it and how to fix it or you know why that idea maybe just isn't ever going to be that great the first one uh see it all the time too little ramp or too little card draw yeah you never want to run out of gas in the game there have been too many times where i played and boom you're off to a fast start everything's running efficiently and because you didn't have car draw on your deck or you didn't have enough ways to find it you're just sort of stuck there top decking top decking top decking hoping that you don't die and that your board can hold out but every single turn when everyone's doing one thing to your zero three to zero then you're going to just you're gonna get crushed yeah if there's one takeaway here it's 10 to 12 ramps 10 card draw cards do just do that without fail in version ones of your deck those numbers can fluctuate based on you know after you've played it a few times you're noticing patterns and things like that but start with that every time and i promise that will just make your decks play pretty well and allow you to discover the other things about it because if you don't have enough card draw and you play your deck and you go oh the idea is not really working is it not working because the ratios are off on everything or just because you're not drawing enough cards that you're not finding the pieces in the right order whereas if you just had more card draw everything else would hum that's a possibility yeah um so yeah draw again is more important than ramp as especially to tell you you know when you're playing the deck the first few times if it's going to work or not yeah and like how can you ever test drive a car in different conditions unless you have gas right the other way the car just sits in the garage uh the second biggest pitfall we see is not enough answers yeah and this is something that i think we may maybe we're the reason that people didn't have enough answers for a bit because our single target removal is a little bit lower on the total scale i mean i think we were right back in the day four years ago i think you needed less and now you need more and we're trying to turn that around we've been mentioning it recently a lot more a lot more yeah and then the main thing is just that you cannot interact uh commander sometimes is a game that you just play solo solitaire on your own but when other players are actually out to try and stop you from doing that you need to be able to interact with them and stop them from doing their stuff as well because that's going to stop you from doing yours i think version ones of decks often have very little interaction because what do you do when you're building your deck you gold fish it you play it yourself well when you're gold fishing single target removal spells you can't goldfish that cause you don't know when anybody else has played you're only playing your own board so you tend to lean towards like oh i need this ramp and i need this thing and this is going to make me do this thing and you're you're really focused on your board and it's easy to just disregard like ah i don't need this i don't need these sorts of plowshares i already got path and you just end up with a little bit less single target removal in v1s of decks because that's not the thing that was important when you were gold fishing it and that's you use goldfishing to help you make those last few cuts right right yeah sticks stick to enough single target removal again around 10 to 12.

uh so that you don't feel like you couldn't stop anything your opponents were doing yeah don't be a glass cannon too that or else that you also fold to something your parents do sometimes when like goldfish i'll just go turn four-board wipe and just wipe it all off it's like all right how do i react now does my deck have the capability to get out of this yeah you also want to be able to get rid i like that too because think of somebody played a propaganda or you know glacial chasm or something you know can your deck overcome the speed bumps because your opponents are not just going to be like sweet do whatever you want they're going to be like they're going to try and stop you too yep yep yep uh the third thing is one that we talked about quite a bit in this episode already it's one that i hark on a lot which is a lack of focus don't buy that more than you can chew don't you know don't like try and do everything because then you end up doing nothing you know having a clear vision of what your deck wants to do will help you focus you'll know when you're in the car i need to go down this road and this road to get there but when you have foggy glasses on or whatever i don't know what a glass of this thing when you can't oh there's simply a thing when you can't see what's going on because you're toiling with the knobs here you got to make sure it's the exact right temperature you got to turn the windshield wipers you're going to miss the exit and you're going to miss the exit because you just weren't able to clarify where it was you're too focused on doing other things you were tapping too many things that didn't actually impact the board at all or further your game state or or get a clear vision of what you want to do to win yeah i think this is one of the bigger ones for newer deck builders which is they have so many ideas and they want to do so many things it's like this deck i really i'm excited to do these five things and just change commander yeah they all seem awesome and it's like yeah they're all awesome you gotta choose though because you can't do five different things with deck you can really only do one maybe two and hey there's not gonna be the last commander deck you ever build so choose one or two make this deck that and then you can make another deck that's about these other cool things that you want to do but trying to do five things in one deck i'm gonna tell you that is a recipe for a bad deck yeah unless you are somehow the most perfect synergistic deck builder of all time in which case send them send me that deck list and we'll see dude i can't even figure out how to make like an equipment deck work because it needs equipment and creatures and that's just too much stuff yeah right oh no how do i balance this where are my artifact equipment creatures that can do both all right the last uh biggest pitfall we're going to talk about here is mana curve is too high yeah so long honor the days where you can just not do anything for the first three turns on commander and have nothing but five drops in your hand and still have a chance to win the game that's just not where the format is anymore yeah yeah so just overall mana curve even if you disagree with us and you want to play higher stuff that's fine if you want your curve to end on three and four or even you know or peak on three or four or even five just don't push your curve too far that right side where everything's you know four five six you got tons of six drops you know yeah trust me at least in early versions of the deck bring that mana curve down it's gonna be more fun you're gonna do more stuff even let's say you're in the league that is more casual or whatever it is and the literal universal rule was the command the curve starts at five you would still play as many five drops as you could right you're not going to stack 10 drops in your deck because of it because you still want to be able to do more than your opponents so that's just another part of the man curve being too high all right we made it that's gonna do it for our new deck building template thanks for sticking through it everybody i we hope it helped you out uh we're gonna go to our to the listeners section to the listeners what is your big deck building level up moment how have you noticed you build decks differently now than you used to yeah if you have any cool tips or tricks i always encourage people to go through the comments because i think we have a really wholesome comment section as a whole everyone's always giving good ideas or debating things or asking questions and getting answers not always the right answer is mind you but that's okay too it's good discussion down there it's good discussion yeah and you're there's always some nuggets in there as well so i'd love to see what people say because deck building has changed and will continue to change i think every single year we get something like commander legends the whole format kind of takes a little bit of a pivot in the shift in a different direction and typically for the better because it opens up more options yeah magic as a game has continued to evolve and will continue to evolve so the comment section is a way for us to keep updating and talking and making sure that we're you know streamlined i think this video will be good for a number of years but eventually it's going to get to the point we're probably going to have to do it again and uh the comments and other people saying like you know now i do this is a one of the ways that we kind of determine that it's time to do that um all right if you want to get a hold of any cool standalone enhancer enablers ma mana ramp card draw single target removal board wraps anything at all nice cardkingdom.com command zone is the place to go uh there's new sets coming out all the time you always want to pre-order stuff or order stuff if you're like me that you haven't got around to ordering from the previous set that came out or jumpstart cards if they ever redo that because you really want those don't miss out on time spot where we mastered our remastered old frames on those cars current cars really neat strix havens coming out they got cool like masterpiece style cars in there there's just so much cool stuff you know you're gonna buy magic cards anyway just use cardkingdom.com command zone when you order it and you'll be simultaneously getting the cards you want and helping out our channel helping out things like game nights and extra turns as well and let's say you already bought your cards you got them all home you're ready to suit them up well head on over to your local game store because we got to support them during this time and maybe they have tons of cool ultra pro product they've got play mats they've got sleeves deck deck dice and deck boxes everything you need to outfit your cards but more importantly keep them safe because you want to be able to play these cards for years and years to come and the fact that i still have cards in mint condition from when i was seven eight years old makes me really happy because it brings me back to that moment and the scuffs around it sure yeah that's a big part of loving your cards too but truly loving your cards and maybe even someday passing it on to someone else i love donating cards and decks craig has given me so many cards when i started playing and they're all in great condition it made me really appreciate the fact that he took time and care to take care of them because they meant something to him and then your cards mean something to you so out for them with ultra pro yeah ultra pro definitely the best stuff to protect your stuff and uh the ones that jimmy and i trust our own collections with okay i'm excited for this end step now it's time for the end step where we talk about something cool outside the world of magic it's happened jimmy i reached the end of the internet i i saw everything i watched all the stream shows on every streaming service you're probably there too because of the pandemic uh yeah i'm getting there i'm actually having caught up on one division oh i i think at this point i'm just gonna wait for it to end and then binge it all oh nice so i'm almost at the end there i'm looking over the edge water vision very good this is not the end step but i am caught up um so i started watching a show that i've already watched before oh i thought you hadn't watched it before you know but i think we have talked about this in the past yeah i've worn my battlestar galactic shirt on the show before i i've i watched through um you know when it was originally on in real time more or less but i just saw it pop up like as a recommended video or something and i was like battlestar galactica i haven't watched that in forever and i was like i'll give it a try okay you know i'm gonna watch the first episode and i was like man this show's good it's so good it's still good it's so good i remember watching it maybe five or six years ago and being like this is an old sci-fi show the graphic is gonna suck i'm not gonna and you're like oh my gosh so say we all it's so good it just still works yeah the acting is incredible oh my gosh katie sackhoff is amazing in there as well you watch the mandalorian she makes an awesome awesome appearance in that show as well so i i love balsa galactica well last season's not so much but it doesn't matter because even the there's a movie right that's like kind of the first episode it's like a longer yeah it's like a mini it's a mini series i think they call but it's really just too long episodes yeah yeah yeah yeah so there's that to start which is that's what i watched first and then i just was like well i'm watching the show now and i went into the first season and i'm like you know five or six episodes in and uh it gets so good so the show's yeah i think a little bit of the shine did get taken off of the show because the ending a lot of people were kind of a little bit lackluster about but i would say to people out there like don't let that deter you from watching it because the journey along you know all the episodes up till the last few is so worth it yeah that like just because the the last couple episodes maybe didn't like hit a grand slam home run they're still fine um it doesn't take away from how awesome so many of the episodes between the start and there are so battlestar galactica if you have not watched it if you watch our channel you like fantasy and sci-fi and stuff probably so i would say i would just highly recommend it as one of the probably one of the great tv shows of all time yeah again the acting superb is it our he's incredible too um you will be saying you will be wishing you were a part of that crew by the end of the show for sure yeah all right okay clean up step time our editing graphics and logistics team here at the command zone is craig blanchett arthur miller croft ashland rose lady danger out for the sucker josh murphy jake boss patrick none jordan bridge manson lung and sam waldo good job you did it all in one breath almost almost yeah i kind of cheated i took a breath after the second name and a big thanks to jeffrey palmer who does the living card animations that begin uh all of our podcast episodes he does a lot of the windows behind us although this this one was done by sam jeffrey also uh helping us out a little bit on animations on game nights as well so he's getting to work with us a little more again and you can find him on twitter at living cards mtg all right everyone make sure you share this episode if someone out there is trying to start building a deck and commander or maybe there's someone at your table that you think needs it but uh you know maybe you're the one that needs it you're just saying it's your friend but it's okay it's okay just share it with them i still need it yeah yeah i gotta remind myself all the time no no don't no no you can only have that many seven drops i will say this though having now done these things in this i have so much more fun playing commander gone are the days of jimmy mana screwed and jimmy not drawing enough cards because i just don't build decks like that anymore i gotta say because of game nights we have to play a we have to build decks all the time and play them you know without very many revisions without knowing how good they are quite often right we get a little bit of testing but not a lot and we're playing them in front of so many people that yeah we have to be you get one shot this is why we've honed our skills at this part of the process which is having a good v1 because you know we have to do it all the time so yeah hopefully it helps everybody else out there as well the first time you sit down with your deck you're not feeling like it's probably not going to work you're feeling like it's going to do some stuff for sure i mean i might have to tweak it but it's still going to be pretty good right from the go all right well hope you all draw lots of lands and lots of spells and we'll see you next time peace [Music] thank you for your attention for further inquiries send an email to commandcast rocketjump.com or ask us on twitter at jf1 and at josh lee kwai see you later alligator greetings humans