(Frantic Search | Art by Mitchell Malloy)

How To Build A Commander Deck

Hello there, and welcome to the world of Commander, Magic: The Gathering's most popular format! My name is Brian, and I am your usual host of Brew For Your Buck here on EDHREC, where we brew Commander decks with a focus on saving money. Today I'm here to put my deckbuilding methods to a different use, by providing some guidelines for building a Commander deck that is both fun and functional.

There are many ways to build Commander decks and there are exceptions to most schools of thought. Like the Pirate's Code from Pirates of the Caribbean, this is more like a set of guidelines than actual rules. But guidelines are important for getting started in deckbuilding (or piracy) so today we'll focus on how to get started by:

1. Reviewing the essential categories of card and approximately how many cards of each category to include in your deck.
2. How to make sure your deck plays out the way you want it to once all your cards are included.

Let's go!

Card Categories

When you start building a deck, I suggest opening up your commander's page here on EDHREC, and firing up the Archidekt deckbuilding tool before anything else. Both have a ton of great features that help simplify deck building, and I'll be referencing them below and in future articles.

Here's a helpful link to the Digital Deckbuilding series, which includes a how-to guide for Archidekt. It's free to make an account, and you can customize your categories to match the ones below to help you follow along as we go through the process.

Win Conditions (A.K.A Wincons)

First and foremost, we need to address the most important question you should ask yourself when deckbuilding: How do I win? It's an open-ended question, but if you can't answer it everything else in the deck won't matter.

One of my biggest deckbuilding level-ups was when I started by adding my wincons first instead of last, then built the rest of the deck towards them.

It's important to include enough cards that can end the game, or at least push your deck's primary strategy forward so that you'll reliably have access to these cards. For example, a common win condition in an Elf deck is Craterhoof Behemoth. If it's your only wincon, you might go an entire game without seeing it.

So what other ways could your Elves deck win the game? You can see what cards that most Elf decks play by going to the typal page for Elves on EDHREC. We see a couple of "lords" (creatures that enhance other creatures of a certain type) like Leaf-Crowned Visionary or more effects that can pump all your creatures, like Overrun.

These both help your large board of Elves reliably attack for lethal damage and win you the game.

Another way to use EDHREC to help you find your wincons is to go to your commander's page. In the "Top Cards" and "High Synergy" sections, you can see the cards that most people are including in their version of that commander's deck, and often these are wincons or other high value cards that will work well with your strategy.

If you're like me, and you like using combos to win the game, another tool to check out is Commander Spellbook. Simply type in your commander and you can see popular combos that work with your deck, like the famous combo with Phyrexian Altar and Gravecrawler:

However your deck is planning to win, you'll want at least seven cards that provide the answer to that critical question. Once you've decided on your wincons, everything else should build towards playing those cards.

Mana Acceleration (A.K.A Ramp)

The mana resource system is one of the greatest things about Magic as a whole. Making a land drop every turn is step one, but in Commander, "ramping" is the name of the game. The more mana you have, the more you can do with the rest of your cards. And if you have more mana than your opponents, then the bigger edge you'll have over them.

Fortunately, there are many ways to ramp in almost every type of deck. Creatures that make mana (mana dorks), artifacts that make mana (mana rocks), Rampant Growth-type effects, "rituals" like Dark Ritual, cards that make Treasure tokens; the list goes on and on.

With all those options, it's important to choose the right ramp for your deck. A Landfall deck will definitely want to use Rampant Growth, but an Artifact deck would benefit more from Mind Stone.

Each color combination and commander page on EDHREC has a handy "mana artifacts" section that can help get you started. I would try to include about eight to twelve cards that fall into the ramp category.

Card Velocity (A.K.A Card Draw)

Now that you have all this mana, you'll want to spend it! The best way to do that is increasing the number of cards you can play in a game. Some would call this "card advantage" or just straight up "card draw" but I think the concept is a lot more nuanced than that. I like the term "velocity" because it evokes a feeling of speeding through your deck, and there are different ways to do that.

If a game of Commander lasts ten turns, and you have no way to increase your card velocity, you'll only end up seeing 17 (opening hand of seven plus drawing one card each turn) of the cards in your 99 card deck!

Trading one card for two or more (Sign in Blood) is a classic example of velocity, but like we said with ramp, it's dependent on your deck and commander.

A commander like Muldrotha, the Gravetide might want more ways to mill cards than to draw them. If Prosper, Tome-Bound is leading your deck, you'd probably want more impulse-based "card draw".

You can also decide between burst effects (a lot of cards at once) like Return of the Wildspeaker or a slower "value over time" card like Phyrexian Arena. Again, you can check out your commander's page to look for common card velocity effects. These tend to be instants, sorceries, or enchantments, but not always.

If you want more clarity, try looking at similar lists on Archidekt as well. No matter how you do it, you'll want eight to ten cards that increase your deck's card velocity.

Interaction

As much as we'd like to power through our deck right to our wincons and declare victory, our opponents will be trying to do the same. We'll need to include some ways to stop them.

In general, I see interaction fall into two sub-categories: offensive and defensive. Offensive interaction is important for stopping our opponents.

Point-removal spells like Swords to Plowshares and wraths, also known as board wipes (named for Wrath of God) are what I'd consider to be offensive interaction.

Cards that protect you or your game pieces like Heroic Intervention and Ghostly Prison are defensive interaction. Counterspells can switch between offensive and defensive depending on your situation, making them a unique and powerful option for interacting with your opponents.

Quantity, type, efficiency, and flexibility of interaction are all important topics that we'll explore further in a future article, but for now, I'd look to include eight to ten pieces of interaction, with at least two of them being wraths, and three to four each of offensive and defensive removal.

Lands

Our last major category comes down to the building blocks of any Magic deck - the lands. We will definitely touch on building a mana base in a future article, but there are some basics (pun intended) that you should always be thinking about: How many lands you need to cast your spells and the balance of colors in your deck.

I would recommend starting with somewhere between 36-38 lands in all your decks, then adjust from there as you need to. If you have an expensive commander, let's say mana value five or greater, you should be leaning a bit more heavy on the lands.

You also want to ensure you have the right number of color sources to cast your spells. Atraxa, Praetors' Voice might be your four-drop commander, but without a lot of different sources of her colors, turn four is a pipe dream. One great reason to use Archidekt is that it can help you figure this out.

Check out the cost/production section which will show you how many sources you have for each color, compared to how many times that color comes up in the cost of your included cards.

Once you're done with that, head back over to your commander's page and take a look at the utility lands section, where you can see what other lands (color producing or not) work well with your commander.

Recursion, Tutors and More

In my opinion the above categories are the most important to be thinking about while building a deck, but there's three more types of cards I wanted to discuss.

First, we have recursion. We can't stop everything that our opponents do to remove our threats so these types of cards allow you to re-use them.

Regrowth is a good example of recursion - it can get any card back from your graveyard. If you're looking to recur permanents, cards that bring them back to the battlefield like Sevinne's Reclamation or Reanimate are great spells that would fall into this category too.

I'd look to include a couple of recursion spells in most decks, but it's not always necessary.

Tutors are the next, and can often be a point of frustration among playgroups. Commander is a singleton format after all, and a card like Demonic Tutor breaks that idea. However, it's important to note that if your winning lines involve an exact card, finding it will be the difference between winning or losing the game.

I'd start out with one or two tutors that can get your wincons, but if you start working your way up the power scale, having more will be necessary for keeping up with your pod. Using our Elf example from before, Fierce Empath is an effective way to find Craterhoof Behemoth.

"Hate" cards are another type of card that combat a specific archetype. Artifact decks are a popular strategy that can really be hurt by something like Manglehorn. I usually play decks that focus on the graveyard (another popular strategy), so Rest in Peace gives me nightmares.

Including a hate card or two, especially if you play against the same strategy a lot, might be worth running in your list. Just make sure the card isn't completely dead if you're not facing that archetype. Soul-Guide Lantern is a suberb example of a graveyard-hate card that you can use to draw a card if it's not useful that particular game.

The last thing I'll say about card categories is that they don't have to be mutually exclusive, but you should assign each card a primary role. Let's use Binding the Old Gods as an example: You should consider it interaction first, since that's it's function as soon as it resolves.

But it can also be ramp since its second chapter will grab a land from your deck. Finding cards that can serve multiple different functions can really boost the effectiveness of your deck, and make more room for win conditions!

Mana Curve and Turn Mapping

Alright you've got your commander, win conditions, ramp, velocity, interaction, and lands. Now can we go play? Not quite yet.

Once you've got your first draft of the deck, I suggest you lay it out in stacks organized by mana value. This will show you your "mana curve". By the way, Archidekt has a feature that allows you to do just that! You may realize that you added a bunch of cool cards to the deck, but you didn't realize they were all 6+ mana to cast.

If the game lasts 10 turns, and half of your nonland cards cost that much mana, you certainly aren't casting many of them and they'll just rot in your hand. That's why it's important to focus on pushing your mana curve down, with your ramp and interaction ideally being two to four mana cards, so that you can accelerate to your finishers and efficiently answer opposing threats.

Let's use everyone's favorite Squirrel commander, Chatterfang, Squirrel General, from my Squirrels deck I featured in an article a while ago. Here's what the mana curve section from Archidekt looks like:

You can see we have a nice curve of spells, focused primarily on mana value two and three.

While what laying out your mana curve is a great starting point, I suggest one more thing before starting to play. The term I'm going to use is "turn mapping" where we lay things out not strictly by mana value, but by what turn we expect to play that card. Chatterfang's mana value is three, so most of the time (there are always edge cases) he will be your turn three play, assuming you're making your land drops every turn.

This is important for interaction as well. Heroic Intervention's mana value is two, but casting it on turn two probably doesn't do anything. Move this to the later turns in your map. Now you can see how your deck is really going to play.

You can use this to help determine your overall gameplan for the deck. Using our Chatterfang example, we can plan on playing him on turn three, or maybe we wait until turn four so we can ramp on turn three. Having a mix of spells that you can use to react to the boardstate is important for navigating each unique game.

Using Heroic Intervention again, maybe you want to make sure you have the mana available to play it on turn six, when your Squirrel token machine is humming right along. Another good plan is to have your card velocity ready to go in the later turns, since you've probably depleted the resources in your hand by then.

It's okay that Return of the Wildspeaker costs five mana because you'll get the most use out of it later in the game, with a large creature on the battlefield and only a few cards (if any) left in your hand.

As with anything in life, practice makes perfect, so I encourage you to get in some games and test your plans and assumptions. Can't get your seven mana commander out as fast as you'd like?

Add another land and a ramp spell. Shut off by Rest in Peace? I feel your pain! Maybe throw an extra Disenchant into your interaction suite. Now you've left the "building" phase and you're into the "tuning" phase.

Wrapping Up

I hope this has been a great resource for you. As I've mentioned many times before and will again, building a deck has many nuances depending on your commander and how you want to play the game.

Including the right number of cards from the different categories will be important to how your deck functions, and looking at your general game plan by mapping out your turns can help you envision your path to victory.

This has been a really basic guide for how to build a commander deck, but I'm not stopping here. Be on the lookout for future articles that will include topics like choosing the right commander for you, becoming a better deckbuilder, and how to tweak your mana base. If you're interested in building decks on a budget, you can always check out my other series, Brew For Your Buck, here on EDHREC.

Lastly, I am always looking for feedback on my content. What did you like and/or dislike about this guide? What other questions do you have about building Commander decks?

Is there a certain topic you'd like to see covered in a future article? Let me know down in the comments or you can DM me on Twitter @BrewForYourBuck. Otherwise, I hope to see you next time. Cheers!

Brian Cain

Brian played Magic intermittently between 2003 and 2017 when he fully embraced his love for Commander. Finding ways to maximize the value of each piece of cardboard in the deck is one of his favorite things to explore, especially if it involves putting lands in the graveyard! Outside of Magic, Brian works as a consultant in the marine industry, turning his passion for boats and ships into a career.