I Can Fix Them: A Love Letter to Everyone Who’s Spent Too Long Trying to Make a Bad Commander Work

*There are better commanders. I want to establish that immediately.

Welcome back, lovely readers. I’ve missed you. But I’ve been busy trying to make a deck around Henrika Domnathi. Turns out that’s pretty #%@&ing difficult. There are commanders that cost less mana. Commanders that draw more cards. Commanders with clearer win conditions, better colors, larger bodies, more keywords, and significantly fewer occasions where you have to explain to your opponents that actually, “once you see the deck work, you’ll understand why I’m playing this”.

There are commanders with thousands of decklists. There are commanders with entire Discord servers dedicated to optimizing them. There are commanders where, if you type their name into a search engine, you don’t have to add the words “Commander deck” afterward because everyone already knows why you’re looking.

And then there is your commander. Your beautiful, terrible commander. The one with 83 decks on EDHREC. A handful of those having been built by you in one of your many…many attempts at getting it to work. 

And somehow, despite all available evidence, you have looked at this legendary creature and said:

“I can fix them.”

“No, Seriously, I Have a Plan”

This is how every D-list commander begins; with (maybe misplaced) optimism.

You see something. Not something obvious. If it were obvious, someone else would already be doing it. No, you see potential. Maybe it’s a weird triggered ability. Maybe the stats are wrong, but the effect is interesting. Maybe there is a line of text that has caused you to open 14 different browser tabs and whisper, “Wait a minute.” This is the moment. This is where the obsession begins. So, you build the first draft.

It doesn’t work.

That’s okay. Obviously, it wasn’t going to work the first time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the world’s first functional deck built around a legendary creature that requires three different permanents to be on the battlefield before it does anything.

You make changes. The deck gets better..ish. BUT WAIT- then you discover a card from 2001 that has never been reprinted. Now suddenly we’re cooking. The card costs $0.19. Shipping costs $4.99. You buy it anyway.

The deck still doesn’t work. But now it doesn’t work in a much more interesting way I guess we can call that progress.

The Difference Between Delusion and Vision

Now look, I think there’s an important distinction here. There is a particular kind of Commander player who finds an unpopular commander and immediately decides that everyone else is wrong. We’ve all met them. We’ve all heard the sales pitches:

This commander isn’t bad. Everyone is just sleeping on it. It’s actually secretly Tier 1. You just need to understand the build.

I admire this person. I do.

But my loves this is not the person I’m talking about.

I’m talking about the other one.

The one who knows that their commander is the shelter dog equivalent of commander decks. The one who has looked directly at the commander and understood, on a fundamental level, that there are at least seventeen better options for what they’re trying to do, that this one is bad, and that if they choose to adopt it they’re signing up for some really really hard times. And they built it anyway. That’s not delusion. That’s love, or maybe it’s stubbornness (although in Commander, these are often functionally identical).

The Life-Support System

I think part of the fun for some of the weirdos out there like myself is that, at some point, building around a bad commander becomes less about making the commander good and more about constructing an increasingly elaborate life-support system. The commander needs ramp. Obviously. Then it needs protection because it dies to everything. Then it needs card draw because the commander doesn’t provide any. Then it needs tutors because you need to find the three specific cards that actually make the deck function. Then you need graveyard recursion because one of those pieces got removed. Then you need a backup plan. Then you need a backup backup plan.

By the time you’re done, you have constructed an extraordinarily sophisticated machine designed to make a mediocre legendary creature look briefly competent. And you know what? When it works? When all the pieces line up?

When the stars align and your opponents have inexplicably decided not to kill the card that is obviously going to cause a problem?

There is no feeling like it. Usually because it’s never happened. But when it does, you didn’t just win.

You proved something. Nobody knows what. But something.

The Joy of Being Wrong for a Long Time

At the root of it all, I think we underestimate how much joy there is in committing to something that isn’t optimal. Magic is a game that gives us an incredible amount of information. There are rankings. Decklists. Win rates. Usage statistics. Discords. Videos. Videos. Entire databases dedicated to telling us which cards are good and which cards are not.

You can know, with relative certainty, that another commander would do what you’re trying to do better. And then you can ignore that information. This is powerful, because Commander isn’t just about finding the best answer. It’s about finding your answer.

Maybe your commander reminds you of a character you like. Maybe you opened it in your first pack. Maybe you built it as a joke and then accidentally became emotionally invested.

Maybe you just like the art.

None of these are strategically compelling reasons to build a deck, but all of them are good reasons. And once you’ve spent enough time with that commander, the weaknesses become part of the experience.

Anyone can build around the obvious choice.

They Don’t Need Fixing

You see, my dearest reader, I’m afraid I have a secret.

You can’t fix them. Not really.

The commander is still going to be too expensive. The ability is still going to be awkward. The colors are still going to be wrong. Your opponents are still going to ask what it does, and you’re still going to have to explain the part where, technically, the entire deck is built around making that one line of text matter.

So, what if fixing it was never the point? 

Maybe the point was that you spent time with it. You learned its weird interactions. You found cards nobody else would play. You rebuilt the deck after every set release because surely this time Wizards had accidentally printed the exact card you needed.

And sometimes, against all odds, they do. A new card gets spoiled. You read it. Your eyes widen. You sit up.

“Oh.”

Nobody else at the table understands why you’re excited. The card isn’t going into any of their decks. It isn’t a staple. It won’t show up in the top ten cards from the set. But for you?

For you, it’s Christmas morning. Because finally, after maybe YEARS, they printed another life-support machine. And your terrible little commander is going to love it.

No, you can’t fix them. But want to hear another secret? I don’t think that’s why you stayed. I think you just like them this way.