How to Bulid a Commander Deck - Case Study

Making a commander deck is a labour of love and tons of research. However, if you’re just getting into EDH, it’s going to be very useful for you to have some guidelines and first steps laid out to go on this exciting journey.

Today, I will use my own experience as an example to show you how I approach deck building in Commander, using one of my decks as an example.

Finding the theme

First, we need an overall macro bird-eye view of what the deck is supposed to be. This can come from a variety of places. You might choose a theme you’ve always wanted to build like Spells, Tokens, or Reanimation; you can start with a commander you like and use that as a springboard, or have a handful of cards (or just a single card!) you’d like to build your deck around. The starting point varies, but at the end of the day, all these three components will cross-connect, since you will have a commander, leading a deck of a certain theme, with specific cards that synergise with it.

Let’s here explore how I began my search. It started with a theme. I love Izzet decks, I love spells, I love interaction. However, I didn’t want my deck to be some surface-level spells deck that makes a token or deals 1 damage to each opponent whenever I cast something. I wanted something more unique that would not only play out meaningfully differently from other spell decks, but also poses some deck-building challenge. This was my starting point.

With that, I scoured through Izzet commanders, but couldn’t find anything that would get me hooked. However, my friend has a Stella precon deck which featured a secondary commander - Eris. What if we made this secondary general the main course, I thought. And main course make I did.

How to go about finding inspiration practically

You might have figured out some entry ideas like the commander itself or a theme, but how should I explore that further, practically speaking? Here, I can recommend a couple of ways of going about it.

First and most obvious is EDHREC.com. This is easily the best commander resource, where you can look at various themes, cards played in those themes, commanders, sample decklists, and so much more.

The second is scryfall.com. This is useful for when you want to look for specific cards that meet some criteria. You can mark filters like the colour identity of your commander, card type (like artefact), and maybe some words that you’d like to appear in its text, such as ‘enters’ - because you’re building an artifact enter-the-battlefield deck.

The last one is other people’s content. I tend to go through other creators’ videos and articles to see what others have done. And while I don’t tend to copy-paste, I find some ideas I like and splice them together into something I can call mine.

I did do all three of the above for Eris - looking through other people’s lists and what their take on the deck might be.

How should the deck play out?

While the theme or the commander will roughly dictate how you are going to build the deck and play your games out, there is more underneath. To give you some examples:

You will want a deck around activated abilities in Red-Green colours. That much is obvious. However, there are questions like:

• Do you want to discount cheap abilities to be even cheaper?
• Do you want to discount expensive abilities?
• Do you want to use a lot of different abilities in a turn or one more expensive ability?
• Do you want to make a lot of active effort to make Agatha bigger?
• If you’re making Agatha bigger, do you want to explore that by making her engage in combat, or is she purely to stay in base and discount abilities?
• Is it going to be a fair deck, or do you want to include a combo? Only one combo or numerous?

Let’s take then my Eris as an example. This is a commander that is cheaper with different costs in the graveyard and makes Dragons when I multi-spell. What questions would I have wanted to answer?

• Do I want to lean into a token subtheme?
• Do I want to explore Dragon-specific synergies?
• Do I want to explore Elemental-specific synergies?
• Do I want to focus on big spells? Do I cheat them out somehow?
• Do I want to play relatively cheap spells and focus on multi-spelling?
• Is it enough to have spells costing 1-4 to play Eris or do I want to spread out the costs even more?
• Do I want to enable the cheaper cost of Eris by naturally playing the game or do I want to actively enable her for instance by self-milling?
• Do I want to win the game with a couple of Dragon combats? Chain multiple turns? Play expensive 'get extra combat' effects?
• Do I want to make a Dragon as often as possible or once per rotation is okay?

This and many more questions lie underneath which makes it even more unique that your particular build has a very specific set of answers.

What also needs to be addressed is the Bracket the deck is going to be in - I talk about Brackets in depth here. Depending on the Bracket, the answers to the above might sometimes be predetermined. In my case, I opted for Bracket 3, where the deck does get more focused, but plays 0 Game Changers and doesn't intend to close the game as soon as possible.

Making a draft list and fine-tuning

Rome wasn't built in a day and neither will your deck. There will rarely be the final product upon theorycrafting. You should intentionally build something that you can call Version 1 which you will iterate upon based on how it plays out in practice, whether the answers to the big questions have changed, and also how your deck fits your playgroup pod. It might turn out that while everything works as intended, maybe the deck is too fast or slow for your pod. Maybe it's too linear or too reactive. Maybe it turns out it's super hard to be interacted with or it's way to glass cannony for the pod. All of these aspects have to be validated in real games of Commander. I do suggest pen and paper to note down some specific observations when playing such as whether a certain card turns out to be a dud or too good, or some more overarching comments.

Only then can you fine-tune the list to slowly approach the final form

My decklist - Bracket 3 Izzet Eris

Now, let me show you my decklist and delve into how I approached the questions posed above.

I'll sort the list by mana costs, since it's an important part of the deck.

How did I decide to answer all those possible questions? It is all very personal, but I opted for the following approach:

• Diversify the costs as much as possible to ensure the cheap cost of Eris even after numerous removal spells
• Have a higher density of 1 and 2 mana spells so that it's easier to multi-spell alongside those more expensive spells
• Use 'fake' expensive spells that I can either discount or put into the graveyard directly
• Have very cheap discard and mill effects to be able to play Eris and another card to trigger it immediately around turn four
• Keep the deck pretty interactive
• Largely ignore the tokens, Elementals, and Dragons themese barring a couple of specifically good cards like Draconic Intervention or Sunderflock
• Have a couple of ways to cheat out a flurry of big spells to have a combo-esque one-turn kill
• Win the game through combat
• Use zero game changers

Conclusion

As you can see, building an EDH deck can be a very rewarding and exciting adventure if you delve deeper than just the surface level. You can truly make the deck your own if you're willing to put in the time!

Good luck!