This saves you the price of a used car payment each time you build a deck. Including a competitive construct such as a wishboard would force all players to include one, even if they didn’t have plans to use it (as they might gain control of a spell or permanent with this type of effect). It also violates the exactly-100-cards premise of Commander, and encourages players to run narrow, powerful answers to popular strategies that might not be worth running in the main deck. Oathbreak is a Commander format with a very unusual proposal. In addition to allowing only planeswalkers as commanders, each deck has a Signature Spell, which matches the color identity of the Oathbreaker (the Commander). Both cards reside in the command zone, and you can play Signature Spell from there if your Oathbreaker is in play.
Draftsim, lucky enough, has evaluated all of the precons from 2017 onward for your choosing pleasure (plus a couple extras). The Starter Commander Deck Bundle is an excellent way to break into the format for a group of friends on a budget. For about $100, you get five unique decks to play around with and learn the format with. Each Starter Commander deck takes on a different two-color combination. You’ll get to try out every classic synergy from Azorius fliers to Selesnya tokens. Commander tables are filled with great cards, and your opponents have more than you do, so the Grand Larceny deck takes cards from your opponent and lets you use them.
Recent posts from Commander RC
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. 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. Building a Commander deck isn’t a static thing; it flows.
Encourage them to have social contract conversations to make better matches, but don’t force it. Initially there may be a lot of watching of games and people figuring out where they belong, but that will eventually turn players who don’t know each other into trusted groups. It was quite common for one of these formats to announce the change of a rule – like banning a card, for example – and many people interpret it as if it were valid for another format. There is also an official banlist for Commander, and a deck should not include any cards on the banlist without prior consent of other players combos edh of a particular instance of a Commander game.
However, you must be able to sufficiently shuffle your deck in a reasonable amount of time. This is where your commander resides during the game when they are not in play. At the start of the game, each player puts their commander face up into the command zone. A commander can be cast from the command zone for its normal costs, plus an additional two mana for each previous time it’s been cast from the command zone this game.
A bit longer explanation is – no, unless you’re playing Battle of Wits in your deck, or have Yorion, Sky Nomad as your companion. But if you had the Tome of Knowledge then the limit was increased by one at all levels. This means you could run two copies of a card in decks sized from 1 to 20, while decks at 60 cards or more could run unlimited copies of any given card.
This is mostly done because the game renders the visual of the deck in-game to a size dependent on the number of cards in it. You can even build a second deck with the cards you have left over to really bamboozle your opponents when you sideboard out one deck for another if you’re lucky with your pulls. Prerelease is a Sealed format event, so it has a 40-card minimum. You can have more, but I recommend sticking as close to 40 cards as possible while aiming for a ratio of 24 playable cards to 16 lands, adjusting for your curve as you see fit. Battle of Wits checks your deck size when you cast it, so you’ll probably have to put around 230 to 240 cards in your deck for it to work.
There are cards that break these rules but, generally speaking, this is what you’ll be working with in each colour. Once you’ve got your theme, you need to flush out the deck itself. As a general rule of thumb, you want somewhere between 33 and 42 lands in a Commander deck. Naturally, you want as many special lands as you can find.
Is There Really No Maximum Deck Size in MTG?
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. Also, the more cards in the deck, the lower the power level will be. That means you can throw in a couple of big old cards into the mix, Commander is where those seven-mana do-nothing enchantment cards that get printed come into their own. If you’re not sure what they are, take a look at Mind’s Dilation. This seven-mana enchantment makes it so whenever an opponent casts their first spell of the turn they have to exile the top card of your deck.
I should note, however, that there are exceptions to the rule. Yorion, Sky Nomad forces players to build at an 80-card minimum when it’s set as their companion. But cards like Battle of Wits reward you for having an absurd deck size in the hundreds. If your gameplan revolves around strategies like that then you absolutely should play more than the minimum required deck size. To make a long story short, you want to play at the minimum deck size and should treat it like a strict rule to follow if you want your deck to be consistent. But if you want to have fun and play something wacky then feel absolutely free to go above and beyond.
Murders at Karlov Manor Commander Decklists
So your deck is effectively 99 cards (98 with partner commanders) since your commander sits in the command zone during the whole game. I wouldn’t recommend including more than 60 cards in your deck. Generally speaking, sticking to the minimum deck size is the way to go. In addition to the normal Magic loss conditions, if a player is dealt 21 points of combat damage from a single commander throughout the game, that player loses the game. This combat damage total is kept track of separately for each player’s commander and does not reduce if a player gains life.
Let’s say you know you love dragons but you’re not sure which commander would best suit that love. Well then, you’ve got your theme, so you just need to find a commander. Likewise, sometimes you’ll see a legendary creature you adore but be unsure how to build around them, in that case, you need to find a theme. A Commander deck is 100 cards and you can’t have more than one of any card that isn’t a basic land. That means it’s a little bit harder to try and optimise than most formats, but that’s also a big part of its charm. Your commander counts as one of those 100 cards, and they start the game in the Command Zone rather than in the deck.