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Favorite Creature Type/Tribe:

Flavor-wise? I’m a fan of the changelings from Lorwyn-block.

Playability-wise? I love merfolk.

Not enough people I follow are doing these, because this was yesterday’s and I had to dig to find it to reblog.

My favorite tribe is easily Angels. Akroma, Angel of Wrath was one of the first rares I ever laid eyes on, and I wanted to build a deck with her immediately. After Angels, it’s probably Zombies, Merfolk, Bear, and Kor.

Happy New Year! You know what I hope Wizards has on their New Year Resolutions? Creating 4-color legends (of course, if this is on their list, they’d create them this year but it’d be a bit before we’d see them).

My take on what 4-color legends could look like. The big question is how do 4-colors exist together without just being the absence of a 5th? For instance, you can focus on the middle allied colors and what the outside colors add to the allied colors’ goals, what the two enemy color pairs do when they come together, or what I did: I focused on the two separate allied colors and what their different abilities could do when combined onto one card.

Since people prefer seeing the cards than text, and they look silly without art, enjoy the art I found through Gatherer for these cards; the creature types actually somewhat match the card I created (there isn’t a Mutant Horror yet, so I had to settle with the picture of a Horror). I admit, they do look a lot better with art there.

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates the holiday. For today, I’ve been considering what would make for a truly memorable experience: Kind of like “What dead famous person would you like to meet?” this is my list of a 5-person game of Commander I’d love to experience. It seemed fitting for today, since it is pretty much a wish, just a wish for an event rather than, say, something tangible like the Political Puppets precon (wink wink, nudge nudge). Anyway, on to the list:

1. Me (obviously I’d want to be actually playing in the game)
2. Sheldon Mennery (the “godfather of EDH” and a writer at SCG)
3. Adam Styborski (a writer for Wizards and Gathering Magic)
4. Sean McKoewn (the writer of the Dear Azami deck doctor articles at SCG)
5. Andy a.k.a. GHoooSTS (the head honcho of the CommanderCast podcast).

From reading the articles of each of the first three guys and listening to Andy on CommanderCast, I’ve found that not only do they seem like cool guys, but they also treat Commander in the same way I do. None of them advocate winning at all costs, but instead want everyone to have some fun. Magic, at its best, is a game where I have fun even if I lose. Which is good if that happens, because I lose a lot, especially in multiplayer were there’s less of a chance of the opposite happening. Since these guys support that kind of play, I know it’d be a great experience.

What would your list look like?

Getting into Commander can be really difficult for newer players who aren’t used to limiting themselves to colors based on color identity, choosing a legendary creature to perhaps build the deck around, and building around the additional 40 cards and the singleton rule. I’ve read lots of places in forums where these players ask for analyses of the number of lands to run. Here I would like to go a step further and provide the a skeleton for the numbers of cards of different types that should be in a deck.

The Commander precons help some with this initial difficulty, but they are not perfect in their design. As anyone who has played those decks unchanged with players piloting their personal builds, the decks are fun but sometimes lacking in some areas. They were designed as stepping stones, and as products for Commander sealed experiences. A skeleton for identifying the minimum needs of a deck would be useful even in individualizing the preconstructed products.

The list will not be comprehensive, and will not be specific in which cards to use in those categories. And of course these numbers are not set in stone, but a basis to begin with. Individual desires on how they want their deck to run and what one faces in a playgroup certainly have effects on the numbers in the list below.

Here is what I suggest:

1 Commander

36 lands (at least 1 basic for each color in the deck),

8 removal spells for creatures and/or planeswalkers,

5 mass removal spells,

5 removal spells for artifacts and enchantments,

5 multiple-use card draw spells,

5 land search spells or mana-producing permanents,

5 spells that destroy nonbasic lands,

5 spells that hate on graveyard effects, which leaves

23 other spells

As I said, there will certainly be arguments against this list. Plenty of players do not recognize the power of pinpoint removal spells, instead feeling Commander players should only run mass removal spells. And the numbers must be tweaked some for the situation; for instance, if you use one-shot card draw spells instead of permanents, you will need more to get the same result. Your deck might be mana-hungry and need way more lands; quite understandable. I merely put what I have found to be the minimum required for 3-color decks. And there is some overlap; some cards are lands and land search, or mass removal that also takes out artifacts and enchantments. Baring a very skewed metagame, the categories above are the bare necessities.

Other categories might be useful: Graveyard recursion and/or cards that shuffle your graveyard into your library, Counterspells, “you have no maximum hand size” effects, tutors, and planeswalkers. I find that these final categories are again important on a case-for-case basis; not every deck needs to reuse its spells or be able to search up its answers, which is why these didn’t make the list but can slide in through the other spells category.

One thing I like about this list is the 23 spaces in the “other spells” category, which allow a player, should they choose, to dedicate a chunk of their deck to their commander, or another theme. If a player did not choose to do so, those 23 spaces could go to increasing the numbers of the other categories, for additional categories mentioned here, or simply for “good stuff” cards that may not fit within the categories of this list. I run three decks that are heavy on theme, but still found room in each for a few “good stuff” cards that I just always wanted to run; those types of cards are great for this format, and if they don’t fit in the other categories, this catch-all is left for them.

If you have any suggestions, make them as needed, provided you remember that this is intended just as a starting point. If you like this idea, disseminate it to newer players you know who have not gotten into the habit of assembling their own decks yet. And in that function, I hope it serves newer players well.

I’m out of town visiting my girlfriend. Exams are next week (as of this post’s publishing, my last just finished), so I really should be studying, but I just finished a long second day of grading yesterday’s quizzes for the undergraduate class for which I’m the teaching assistant, so I don’t feel much like doing more work. I hope I will have enough time after the lab dinner tomorrow to study for both of them. This might be wrong, but I admit this semester has beaten me down enough that I don’t know if I can bring myself to study more than just tomorrow night and Monday prior to the exams. Instead, I’d like to cover some of the more interesting cards I’ve designed using Magic Set Editor since the last Build-A-Card post.

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While recently I announced that I was no longer going to be writing consistently, occasionally I’ve had posts I just had to disseminate. This is one of those. I’ve dropped the name Glissa, the Traitor as my third, and perhaps final, Commander build, and this past week I had it at a full playable 100-cards. I won’t say “finished” because Commander decks rarely are truly finished, and sure enough only a day after I had sent the order out for the second half of the deck I decided to switch out  Moriok Rigger for a Terastodon, as I wanted another huge creature and the elephant is decent removal as well.

Here is the list with Terastodon in:

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Recently I asked how many Commander decks people had. I got 8 responses, and along with my own numbers and my friend’s at CastFromExile, that’s 10. Not exactly a decent sample size, but it’ll have to do. I’d like to look at the numbers:

Me: 3 (just finished Glissa and played it for the first time Thursday!), though 4 if I won the lottery because I could justify another. So, well, 3.

castfromexile: 4

aspookyskeleton: “I have two! And another one’s near completion.” So, 3.

mikerickson: “One: Rafiq of the Many. I’m looking to build one around Brion Stoutarm though.” I’ll count that as 2 then.

saangel: “I have a Teneb deck.” I’ll count that as 1.

confessionsofapuzzledwizard:”5+.” Not sure how much the + would be, so I’ll just count it as 5.

captainchemistry: “3 as of now but I have 2 in the works. And I might split one of them to make 2.” Let’s count that as 6.

Hazy Reverie: “Four right now. Two Commander decks—the wizards official ones—and two of my own. I went with Thraximundar and Sen Triplets for the other two.” 4 total.

Magic Junkie: “I generally have 4 playable decks. One control, one aggro, one fun deck and one to make people hate their lives. I also have a fifth in the works for an experiment.” 5.

WizardsvsRobots: “I may or may not have 9. But they oftentimes find themselves falling apart after repeated failure, usually only to be replaced by new ones.” I’ll consider this response under the “may” option, which makes it at 9.

Here’s what we have then:

3, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5, 6, 4, 5, and 9 decks, or, in ascending order:

1, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6, and 9.

In our tiny little sample, then, it seems that the average number of decks is slightly higher than 4 (4.2, to be exact), with the median number of decks at 4.

Outside of this sample, I know of several individuals from listening to podcasts and the guy at my local shop that has 1 monoGreen, 1 5-color, and 1 deck for each 2- and 3-color combination that there are people out there with 20+ decks. This would certainly affect the average, perhaps overly so. In statistics, then, the median would likely be used instead of the average. Plenty of 1s and 2s would balance out the median near where it is for this sample better than they would balance out the average when several 20+s values are entered. Thus I wouldn’t expect the median value to stray to far from the lower numbers like what was found here, and the median would likely be a better measure of central tendency than the average with such a data set.

Or, in laymen’s terms, 4 seems to be pretty reasonable among the 10 of us. If you have around 4 and were worrying you had too many, don’t fret, and if you have 3 and were wondering about a 4th, as long as you have the money, go for it! If you have 20, though, maybe we should have a talk. Seriously, how do you have time for so many?! (Really, I’d like to know. And if you don’t have time for all of them, maybe you really should consider selling them. Anyone try selling an entire deck list instead of singles?)

Last time I ran Rafiq at the card shop, I was able to cast Wild Pair for the first time. Then I cast Novablast Wurm, and came to two realizations: Casting a creature with a creature pump in play alters what I look for with Wild Pair’s trigger, and I didn’t have a creature whose summed power and toughness was 16. Or even 14, for that matter. This whiff got a comment from someone that “Yeah, Wild Pair requires some building-around.” Thanks, “buddy,” but I knew that. I only put it in the deck after I did the numbers, and saw that at least 20 creatures would benefit from it. It just also requires a good memory, too, which I don’t have. I knew I had creatures with totals of 4, 6, 8, and 10, but I forgot if I had more than 1 creature with any of the other sums.

And, since those creature pumps can alter what I’m looking up, it’s good to have something handy to let me know if I should even bother searching. After all, if I cast Rhox and Reya is in my graveyard, hand, or exiled, then I need to know that Wild Pair is only going to waste time and shuffle my library. Or that Noble Hierarch cast with Wilt-Leaf Liege in play means I can search up Hanna, which I’d easily forget, although I could remember that casting the Hierarch without the Liege in play would yield nothing from Wild Pair. While I can remember the more common results, I definitely need this checklist for the less common ones.

So, thanks to Magic Set Editor, I now have this handy-dandy token, which might not be tournament legal since it’s notes from before a game used during a game, my Commander games aren’t sanctioned tournaments, so I’m allowed this cheatsheet.

I would love to see something like this in Dark Ascension. Partially because I loved the book and film, but mostly because I really enjoy enchantment-based recursion.

Why the sacrifice part? Well, have you seen the movie? Spoiler: The zombies aren’t the nicest people in the world. And then the exiling because the book and movie didn’t give me the impression that after they “died” again they could be buried and brought back again, but even if they could it’s nice to stop this from being too insane.

I love Rooftop Storm (& Cloudstone Curio with it!), but watching Evan Erwin talk about it made me think of this lady from one of the most annoying commercials ever. She still makes me laugh from bemusement, although I’m glad I don’t have to see it on TV anymore.