Cade breaks down some of his Commander decks

Ho there!

I got this great new job at Goblin Games a few months ago, had it for a few weeks, then the world closed down, and I haven’t played much Magic since. I’ve only playtested my decks a few times, and those sad, single-player games were pretty early into quarantine. I’ve watched some YouTube to entertain myself and kept thinking about new decks and synergies I want to integrate somewhere, but I recently started sorting cards by how they interacted with each other, and it’s made me reconsider how I include cards in my Commander decks. This article is intended for people who’ve played Commander before and have some Magic experience, but the general strategy should be useful across formats.

I usually organize cards by their effects, but I started seeing piles of different sizes as I broke my decks into the engines that I try to assemble during games. I’m going to look at three of my decks and discuss them at different levels—what fuels what, how cards interact to form deck structures, and what you can do two power the entire thing up or down. I’ll look at three of my decks to do that. My Zada, Hedron Grinder deck can absolutely put your life total to dead, but it loses almost every time to my deck (I call it Wheels) that tries to do things like Wheel of Fortune + Notion Thief, and every deck I own consistently loses to the one Commanded by Najeela, the Blade-Blossom, which is my favorite, and the one I’ve spent the most time and trade-value building.

I typically begin the deck-building process with a few ideas about cards I want to put together, then I spend an hour on the internet, building ideas, drafting a deck on tappedout.net and seeing what cards still seem amazing after I have too many cards to play, then I eventually whittle everything down into a really powerful deck I can’t afford, so I pick out what I have and what I’m going to buy, keeping the structure of the deck but changing the way that I support the essential strategies.

I don’t own a Timetwister, but Day’s Undoing is almost the same card if you’re trying to get advantage out of Smothering Tithe and your deck is full of instants. The translation between optimal and affordable is what I always try to focus on, and the key to that is understanding the relationships between the cards in your deck. I’ll be breaking my decks down into their parts, then talking about how to understand what cards in the decks determine the overall power level. I find that thinking about my decks this way lets me think about what cards I need to replace if I want to get more competitive, but I also know what cards to take out if I want to play at a lower power level.

Zada

Commander: Zada, Hedron Grinder

My deck: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/kaleidoscope-cantrips/

cEDH Decklist: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/zada-hedron-grinder-storm-3/

I wanted to play all five Nephilim once I knew they existed, and I wish they were legendary, like a lot of people. Ink-Treader Nephilim looks super fun, and I think it would make a better Commander than Zada, Hedron Grinder in that it gives access to more than one color. Zada seemed really cool, though, so I decided to build a deck around her.

If I didn’t have a really bad Wall tribal deck built, then this would be my least powerful. I used to play Brago, King Eternal as my commander in a deck built around gaining repeated advantage from enter-the-battlefield effects (like destroying lands with Reality Acid), but I stopped playing him because I hated relying on my Commander, because my opponents knew how important he was to my strategy, so dealing with him dealt with most of my ability to win (outside some unlikely combo shenanigans).

The deck is pretty fun to play. If I can get Zada, protect her, and some tokens down, then I’m probably going to do alright that game, but the deck recovers pretty poorly from board wipes. I think Zada is one of those Commanders that hasn’t yet gotten all the cards that should go in her deck, or the community hasn’t figured out a way to make her extremely competitive. That’s alright, though, because sometimes I like to play games and lose after swinging with an army of goblins.

The cards in Zada are probably the easiest to organize into sections. Cards like Krenko, Mob Boss and Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin exist to create tokens, which make the combat tricks in the deck more powerful, but the real power comes from cards like Expedite or Warlord’s Fury.With Zada and a few tokens down, a one-mana spell can easily draw five or more cards, and I can pretty consistently draw around ten cards at once from a spell like these if I’m in the midgame and still have a chance of winning. The deck doesn’t do anything that doesn’t support the main plan—notice I’m not running Blood Moon, though I probably should, nor the quick Storm-style cards that the cEDH community likes. This deck is less powerful than a cEDH deck, but it does fine against most casual to mediumly-powerful decks. Everything is about getting creatures (and Zada) onto the battlefield, then using every card I have to draw cards and accumulate mana, making my creatures more powerful with every spell, so I have an army to attack with by the time I run out of things to cast.

The deck hates to see our opponents resolve a board wipe, but mono-red decks don’t have many options. Burnout, Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast can stop something like Cyclonic Rift, but Wrath of God makes me weep every time it resolves. Cards like Deafening Silence also wreck my plans, because every turn that you don’t have Zada and creature on the battlefield should be dedicated to getting them established, but then the tactic becomes to target Zada with everything that you can, empowering everything by making her stronger.

Wheels

Commander: Kenrith, the Returned King

My deck: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/stealin-wheels/

cEDH Decklist: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/opus-thief/

I don’t remember when I first heard this strategy called Wheels (after Wheel of Fortune, Wheel of Fate, and Magus of the Wheel), but it’s my favorite name for it. The cEDH calls the deck of the same strategy Opus Thief, and many people have called it lots of other things.

One of the things I really wanted to do when I built the deck was include Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded, because he’s pretty bad in most constructed formats. If you’re too new to Magic to remember the massive disappointment after his release—when he was spoiled, everyone thought he was absolutely overpowered, but the “at random” in his only positive loyalty ability puts him out of playability for most people once they actually playtest. I get value out of him here, so it seems alright—I’m not the first to figure out how to make Tibalt work, but I’m happy that I did.

I started Magic playing games that lasted hours, and I win much faster now, but I like to play in that midrange way. Sometimes cards are really good and probably worth an inclusion despite them being meta-dependent. The people who taught me Commander play casually, and I’m always very sad when I play a Mystic Remora against them, because they favor creatures. Compost is also a very good card sometimes, and black is extremely common throughout the format, but behold: sometimes. Is a card good enough if it does nothing sometimes?

Competitive Commander communities typically rely on Angel’s Grace + Ad Nauseam as a way to draw the entire deck, but I don’t like needing two cards and six mana to try and do half of what’s necessary to win—they end up needing three cards to win and build a combo deck, but I prefer value engines to combo strategies. You’ll notice this throughout my decks.

This argument can be made back and forth, because if you know the decks and who you’re going to play against, then you can know Compost has value and play it without anxiety, but otherwise the potential exists that you’re wasting a slot in the deck. I take chances in every game, but I never want to bring a tool with me that can’t be used. Some people say that you can never be over-prepared, but this is Magic: the Gathering, and the Philosophy of Fire mandates that every card has a purpose: put the enemy to dead. If a card can theoretically not fulfill this purpose without my opponents even interacting with it, then I don’t play it. You won’t see Compost in the mainboard of my decks, but I have rarely played anyone with no noncreature spells, so I play Mystic Remora.

Meta calls like this are a part of deck building, like knowing Paradox Engine was taken from us a year ago (too soon, sweet prince), or that you can’t play that cool new otter you opened in Ikoria. If you put Swords to Plowshares or even Murder in a deck, then you’re making a meta call and taking a chance that you’ll want a piece of removal for a creature.

The only perhaps unexpected strategy in the deck is the reanimation suite. If the deck is doing what I want it to do, then the graveyard will be full of discarded cards anyway, so the few cards that bring creatures back from the graveyard are more for utility than particular synergies. The big reanimator targets are Worldgorger Dragon (which forms an infinite mana combination with Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, or Necromancy, so we can win through the Commander’s activated abilities), The Locust God, Dragon Mage, and Consecrated Sphinx, but the enchantments are still very good even if they only target Alms Collector or Notion Thief.

Najeela

Commander: Najeela, the Blade-Blossom

My deck: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/omniphony/

cEDH Decklist: https://www.moxfield.com/decks/jT8Y9X4tlUmeNZ2AjkD1Vg

I started Magic with a mono-white starter deck when my uncle taught me. He used a black deck and didn’t let me win a game for years—you might call me an underdog, but we both play blue the most now, so we’re both monsters. I started winning once I understood the rules enough to build decks that could beat him, and I had practice with my friends and siblings.

I always gravitated toward wanting to play the most powerful cards I owned, and Commander didn’t exist when I was a kid, so I played Modern once a week at my local gamestore, but I always lost. People played fair cards at my store, like Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle with Primeval Titan and Summer Bloom, or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and the Urzatron (Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Power Plant, and Urza’s Mine). Every deck I played only had one copy of any card, but eventually the store owner gave me some advice. I started really winning once I learned the fundamentals of deck-building—when I made the switch from casual to competitive.

I play Commander competitively because I want to have fun and win when I play, but I also enjoy the experience of trying to stop someone else, then failing because they can defend their plan with enough interaction. The game is what’s fun, and I want to play it powerfully.

My absolute favorite Commander deck is my favorite because I get to do everything—I can draw my deck and reshuffle it in infinite loops, I can make infinite mana, I can have infinite combat steps with Najeela and push forward with an army that grows infinitely. I built the deck to try and fill the battlefield with cards like Changeling Outcast and Slither Blade, which don’t do much by themselves, but the rest of the deck is full of cards like Tetsuko Umezawa, Derevi, Empyrial Tactician, Edric, Spymaster of Trest, Ohran Frostfrang, and Grenzo, Havoc Raiser, which all help me to accumulate advantage and swell my resources with each turn.

I play Najeela with a toolbox strategy, which means that I use cards like Birthing Pod and Neoform to find whatever might put me in a better place in the game—how can I go from where I am to somewhere better? I confess that I’ve memorized most of this deck by habit, and I always know what I need. I usually start by getting Bloom Tender, but every game is full of unique situations that I adapt to or lose. The actual tutors in the deck are (sadly) usually reserved for timely interaction or Command Tower, which I find is incredibly necessary. I play 21 lands, which is less than some people play in Standard, but it works for me.

I don’t play Najeela much, because I win most games and other people don’t like seeing me assemble my entire deck multiple times. I don’t really win the same way every time except by playing almost every non-land card in it. The deck can’t win without accumulating a mass of creatures on the battlefield, because every win condition relies on having creatures on the battlefield. Najeela herself is a creature factory, and I find that if I can put her out and attack with her and the warriors that she creates for two or three turns, then I’ll win the game.

The obvious weakness to my strategy—Cyclonic Rift and Supreme Verdict make me cry, right? Call me paranoid, but I play a lot of interaction, and I don’t waste it on things that don’t threaten me. I know that I’m going to be scary, so if my opponents aren’t winning the game, then I let them operate how they will, so I can have my Narset’s Reversal or Teferi’s Protection ready when I need it. Sometimes someone wipes the board, but almost everything but River’s Rebuke puts my opponents in just as bad a position as me, and the deck rebuilds quickly. If I can get creatures on the board, then I can scale what I have into more, but it all starts with the initial creature population.

This deck has a lot of activated abilities and hates cards like Cursed Totem, Damping Matrix, and Linvala, Keeper of Silence more than almost any permanent your opponents could play, but I almost never see those until people recognize me in the meta and adapt. Linvala, Keeper of Silence is particularly good against the deck—I can afford to run so few lands because my creatures can activate abilities and produce mana, but if they can’t then the deck is reliant on the lands that comprise less than a quarter of the entire deck.

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