Top Lessons Learned About Deckbuilding
Experience is the Best Teacher
I have built a LOT of decks. I have 137 decks on one Moxfield account, 19 on another, 30 or so on an Archidekt account, 18 on my desk, 46 decks active and usable, and I've written about more than 50 between Herald and EDHREC. Not all of these decks have been all-stars, though. In fact, quite a lot of them have been absolute duds, for one reason or another. Some have even been both, in different incarnations, local metagames, and ratios.
In building this many decks, I've learned some important lessons that have helped to organize my card pool, streamline my deckbuilding process, and inform the tests I use to evaluate decks. One of the most important aspects of my deckbuilding and refining process which I recommend to anyone who likes to brew is to include brewing in the Rule Zero process.
For example, every Wednesday, I invite members of my Skull Symbol Discord Server to test their Works in Progress in games that are agnostic of power level. Instead, our pre- and post-game Rule Zero conversations focus on what we want to learn and what we ended up learning. As a teacher, tutor, and college professor, I love weaving learning and collaboration into games: while we are trying to beat each other we're also learning together.
Popular Does Not Mean Good
The inspiration for the article came from a recent mistake on my last article, The Mindskinner Deck tech last week. The article includes an Equipment that doubles damage. The Mindskinner turns its damage into mill, which would seem to work well with the Equipment, milling all opponents for double the damage. In fact, this apparent synergy is in 15% of Mindskinner decks, according to EDHREC data. Despite being popular, apparently synergistic, and on the EDHREC page, however, the Equipment doesn't work with the commander.
How can this be?
Rules-wise, the dissonance comes from both effects being replacement effects. Mindskinner replaces the damage with mill and Inquisitor's Flail replaces the damage with twice the damage. The defending player determines the replacement, so they will likely choose the mill instead of the double damage. What's more concerning is how a bombo (bad combo) like this made it to the EDHREC page. The answer to that is that EDHREC gathers data from deckbuilding sites and puts the cards that appear in the most lists on the page.
Here's where the lesson comes in: just because something is popular doesn't mean it's good. This was an extreme example, but a more acute example would be Swords to Plowshares in a Rem Karolus, Stalwart Slayer burn deck. Swords is an incredible card. It's a signature removal spell, especially in a deck built around Sunforger. But burn decks struggle to deal 40 damage to each player, and, when the opponent barely survives your Price of Progress, you're going to wish you hadn't given them that life buffer.
Cards Can Read and Play Differently
One of my favorite lessons to recount is how my Breena, the Demagogue deck imploded. The deck looked beautiful on paper. Breena is a political commander that draws opponents cards and grows my creatures when my opponents attack each other. I love creating Nekusar, the Mindrazer-esque decks using Sign in Blood effects and Underworld Dreams effects, but with less-threatening commanders, so I filled my Breena deck with Sign in Bloods and draw punishers.
Can you spot the mistake?
If not, don't beat yourself up. I didn't see it until I brought the deck to a Work in Progress Wednesday stream and was asked an armor-piercing question: "So the solution is just to attack you, right?"
Here's the breakdown. Breena rewards players for attacking each other and leaving me alone by drawing them cards. My draw punishers punish players for drawing cards. By transitive property, I punish opponents for attacking each other and leaving me alone. Therefore, the optimal play is to attack me and to forego drawing the poisoned extra cards. I didn't misread the card: it does make opponents draw cards for me to punish.
I didn't build my deck poorly: punishing the draws is a potent strategy. My mistake was that I didn't see the flow of events from my opponents' collective perspective: if the cards were gifts and the gifts were poisoned, why do we want the gifts?
Fun to Play Doesn't Mean Fun to Play Against
Most brewers encounter a "white whale" color or color combination, that mixture of shades and hues that proves to be their antithesis. Golgari was the earthbending to my Aang, the Force to my Han Solo, the...League Championship to my Ash Ketchum. Most commanders seemed to be related to creatures or slow, grindy incremental advantage, leading to midrange strategies that don't mesh well with my penchant for combo decks.
It took some time, but I finally seemed to crack the code: Golgari was the colors of the Seasons Past deck that broke out at Pro Tour Magic Origins, and the core of Rampant Growth effects, Tutors like Demonic Tutor, Seasons Past, and X spells like Profane Command all happen to be Sorceries. So, why not use Umori, the Collector as a Commander instead of a Companion? That way, I could name Sorcery and not have the build restriction!
So what happens when you take ramp and a strong recursive engine, and then add mass removal like Damnation?
Now, the board gets wiped on my turn, every turn, once I get to a certain amount of mana. Unless you have haste or some kind of resiliency, playing creatures becomes useless. And guess what most commanders are? You know it: creatures. My first time playing the deck, I inadvertently stumbled into a soft lock without having found a winning X spell, and the table scooped. I told them that I didn't have to choose that line, but they didn't want to continue the game by being patronized, knowing full well that the game was over. I've tried rebuilding it with zero spot removal, but I'm still a little gunshy about sending the deck into pods because of how miserable it can be to play against.
Include a Clock You Can Control
Building around synergy is a solid way to go. It leads to decks that are greater than the sum of their parts, and it brings out a major aspect of the spirit of brewing in Commander: bringing life to cards whose heyday has passed or never existed.
One deck whose synergy I loved was my Kambal, Consul of Allocation group-hug-ish deck. The deck was primarily designed around the synergy between Sign in Blood effects, shared draw effects, like Truce, and a commander that punishes opponents for casting spells. The concept was to load opponents with cards and punish them for trying to empty their hands.
Where could this go wrong?
Well, one problem was that some of the white card draw, like the aforementioned Truce, which is one of my favorite cards, works against the Sign in Bloods and Kambal drain, giving the opponent a life buffer. This is a symptom of a bigger problem: because the deck's only guaranteed damage was via Sign in Blood effects, the deck struggled to actually win games.
It is true that Commander is a social format and winning isn't the most important thing, but being unable to control the deck's clock made it that my commander encouraged players to not play spells after a certain point, unless they were highly impactful. It also meant that, like with Breena, players were incentivized to take me out first. Then, they could reap the rewards of my gifted cards without having to worry about the drain or my life total.
Simplicity is Key
Most of my decks do a few things, and do them well. If I can find cards, like Unstable Obelisk, that can serve multiple roles, I can count them for the role I'm building around while sneaking in a role that I don't want to dedicate deck slots to. That way, the ramp deck can run removal without having to spend a card slot on a card that doesn't ramp.
While it was one of my more entertaining decks for a while, my first version of Klothys, God of Destiny was an example of a deck that tried to do too much. I tried to fit mana multipliers, like Heartbeat of Spring, damage multipliers, like Furnace of Rath, enchantress effects like Eidolon of Blossoms to draw off of the former two, and Fireball effects. The deck tried to do too many things, and the pieces just didn't fit together unless I lucked into the right ratios.
An example of what this looks like when executed properly is my Reveka, Wizard Savant pingers deck. It consists of pingers, untappers, and looters. If I have untappers and looters, I can use them together to dig until I find a clock. If I have untappers and pingers, I have a solid clock. If I have pingers and looters, I can present a clock while digging for the untappers to present a bigger threat. While a mass removal spell, like Cowardice, would be strong, it doesn't work well with the untappers or looters. Lesson learned, and this deck is now one of my favorites!
What are the biggest deckbuilding mistakes you've made?
And what have you learned from them?
