The EDH Deck Building Process #3 - Getting Started

TappedOut Commander Series

Suns_Champion

9 April 2020

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The EDH Deck Building Process #3 - Getting Started

Hello friends! It is I, Suns_Champion! Someone informed me that I am apparently no longer dead, but considering how bad my namesake is now, I think I would rather stay dead!

Welcome back to my ongoing series: The EDH Deck Building Process, where I introduce you to the creative process of brewing and take your deckbuilding to a new level!

In my first article, I talked about deck building philosophy and how it applies to the brewing process. In my second article, I talked about the inspiration for a deck and where to find it.

Getting Started - Deck Idea

Today’s article will outline how to get started with your build. We’re going to continue under the assumption that we have some idea, some vision of what we want the deck to be and do. You have a commander you wish to build, a combo to build around, or a theme, mechanic, or tribe to focus on, or perhaps it’s more abstract like a song or a book-themed deck. Very likely, it might be a brand new Ikoria or Commander 2020 legend! Whatever the case, hold on to that idea!

For myself, I’m going to pick a commander and build a deck using my normal process, so that everyone can follow along. We’ll see if it works! The commander I’ve picked is actually two-in-one: Gisa and Geralf.

“Wait a minute!” I hear you object, “That isn’t Boros!”

Alas, it is not Boros. I’ve decided to pick something completely outside Boros to put myself outside of my comfort zone. I’m hoping this will help me give better advice for those in a similar situation, and broaden my deckbuilding abilities and expirience.

So what inspired this deck? Why pick them? Well, the answer is the card Ashes of the Fallen, a card I’ve worked with before with Haakon, Stromgald Scourge in my Elenda, the Dusk Rose deck. The interaction turns all the creatures in my graveyard into Knights, so that I can cast them from my graveyard with Haakon’s ability. I wanted to do something similar, just not with Haakon, so I started looking for commanders that cared about tribes in graveyards. After some Google-searching, I found Gisa and Geralf, who fit perfectly.

In my previous article I talked about how I saw the deckbuilding process as a creative process. I’ve seen the “creative process” defined as the act of making new connections between old ideas. Following that definition, for this deck I’m connecting two old ideas, Gisa and Geralf and Ashes of the Fallen, and making something totally new and creative out of them.

Here’s a troubling question though, Gisa and Geralf care about zombies. Why not just play zombies? Why do I need Ashes of the Fallen?

Here’s where my deckbuilding philosophy comes into play. In my first article I said: “I like to take popular commanders and do something very different with them.” Well in this case I’m taking a fairly well-known and “solved” commander and doing something very different with them. I’m going to make a zombie tribal deck with 0 zombie creatures in the deck. That will be the premise, the vision, of the deck. See how my deckbuilding philosophy is affecting my deck? I know it’s crazy, I know it’s unnecessary, but this is where I find joy in deckbuilding. Leave me alone!

So, I’ve been inspired, I have an idea of what the deck wants to do, and my deckbuilding philosophy has been satisfied and has outlined the choices I’ll be making for the deck. Hopefully you’re in the same position as I am, ready to start brewing! This is really where the brewing process kicks off!

So what now?

Some Base Knowledge

Some assumptions, before we get started.

I’m going to assume that we’re not building from our collections. I for one don’t have a collection with multiples of every single playable card in EDH plus obscure jank cards like Ashes of the Fallen. Thus we’re going to use online resources to find cards for our deck, rather than sifting through stacks of real cards. If you have a collection that you want to exclusively pull cards from, good for you! Go for it! If you have a collection but not all the cards seem to fit, you can supplement your collection with the searching and building I present in this series.

The second assumption will be a somewhat limited budget. I’m going to aim for a $300-ish deck, no cards over $25 (remember when I said I was bad at building on a budget?). Budget really comes in later when making cuts and swaps, but it’s good to have an understanding of your budget before going in, so you can disregard certain cards before you put them in the deck, saving you time when you’re making cuts later. I’m going to be a little vague with budgeting for now, because it’s such a personal thing that I can’t really help with. Your budget is your budget, modify my advice to fit it!

Next, some base knowledge about EDH Deckbuilding, so we’re all on the same page.

A key concept to know is that in EDH, you need certain things. You need lands, card draw, ramp, and removal, or your deck isn’t going to function or play well at all. There are certain numbers, ratios, formulas, and templates going around about this subject. Now, this series is less about “how to make a good deck” and more about the process, but I’m going to briefly talk about this subject so we can get organized later. Because to help you level up your deckbuilding, I think we need to have a base level of knowledge established.

Disclaimer: these are all guidelines, or estimations of what you might want. Not exact numbers.

Let’s start with lands. Out of 100 cards in your EDH deck, around 36ish should be lands. They idea is to be able to draw enough lands throughout the game for consistand land drops. Knowing this number, 36, will be important later. Next, card draw, ramp spells, and removal (targeted and board wipes). There are many formulas, but they all usually land around 8-12 of each, and again that number will change with the deck. The last category to fill in the 99 cards is “strategy,” or the idea and theme cards we already have. You’ll want anywhere from 15 to 45ish cards that help your strategy, but we’ll worry about that in a later article.

Here are some examples and in-depth explanations of deckbuilding formulas:

The Command Zone #151 Deck Templates

The 8x8 “rule”

Now, without having to get into much detail, this is the general idea or the big picture: have a lot of ramp, draw, and removal in your deck. For me, depending on the deck, I like 36 lands, 10 ramp, 10 draw, 5 board-wipes, and 5 targeted removal to start. Save those numbers for a minute, we’re going to come back to them.

We have an idea for the deck, and generally understand what else is needed for a good EDH deck. So what’s the first step?

Step 1: Write it down.

Seriously, write it down. I’ve forgotten scores of deck ideas because I didn’t write them down. Use the notes app on your phone, a google doc on your computer, or some good old fashioned paper and pencil. Write down your idea, and whatever cards come to mind.

Step 2. Decide where you’re going to build your deck.

On the topic of using paper and pencil, it might surprise you to learn you can go through the whole deckbuilding process using just paper and pencil and your collection! I don’t necessarily recommend it, however, especially if you are like me and don’t have a huge collection of playable EDH cards. I prefer to use a deckbuilding website, so I can see the cards I don’t have.

Why should you use a deckbuilding site? Behold, the return of the bullet-point list:

• It’s online, where you also will be searching for cards.
• Easy and fast organization, no shuffling required.
• Ability to save your work online.
• Visual display of cards you don’t own yet.
• Price estimations.
• Information and data about a deck or selection of cards (such as curve, color ratios, etc).
• Community forums to ask for help, and receive feedback (and those sweet, sweet upvotes).

Can any of this be accomplished on mobile? I think so, but I’ve found that most deckbuilding sites are built for desktop, and that is where I recommend you build from.

Step 3. Create a deck online.

I prefer to use our beloved TappedOut for deckbuilding. There are many other deckbuilding sites, like Archidekt, Deckstats, or MTG Goldfish. Find one you like the best and go with that, though my only caveat to that would be: find one that lets you set up and sort your deck by Custom Categories, which I’ll explain in a moment. For this series, I will be using TappedOut to deckbuild, and also be revealing a lot of ins and outs of the deckbuilder itself, so if you’d like to get a guide on that, set yourself up with TappedOut.

Time to create a deck. First, on your deckbuilding site of choice, or on a good old piece of paper, write down what you have for the deck so far. Here’s what my deck will look like within TappedOut’s deckbuilder page:

1x Gisa and Geralf *CMDR*   
1x Ashes of the Fallen

(I added TappedOut’s commander tag, different sites might look different)

So far all I have is the commander and a single idea card. You might have the same or a little more. That’s okay, We’ll be adding some cards very soon!

Step 4. Get organized.

To start on a journey, we must know where we are going. So let’s understand our end goal: 100 cards. An EDH deck has 100 cards. As Master Yoda said, “Always 100 cards there are. No more, no less.” Okay maybe he didn’t say that, and maybe he didn’t know about the Companion mechanic, but I said it, so that should be good enough!

Now, you might be able to quickly find exactly 100 cards and call it good, but that’s not how it works for me, anyway. You see, for any given commander deck, you have thousands upon thousands of cards to choose from. Magic has well over 20,000 cards. Quick maths tells me that’s a lot more than 100. Which means I’ll probably have over 100 good card options I’ll have to choose from, which means after I’ve gathered all those good options, I’ll have to cut cards out to get back to 100 total.

If you’ve never had the experience of cutting cards, you might be thinking, “what’s so bad about that?” Well, in my observation, and in the opinion of most EDH deckbuilders, the process of cutting cards ranges from being a “major pain in the butt” to being “the bane of a deckbuilder’s existence,” especially for newer players.

Not to worry, in addition to a later article about cutting cards, I’m here with some advice on how to avoid an overflow of cards in the first place. The simple answer is to at least vaguely follow a deckbuilding formula of some sort when you start building, keeping the goal of 100 cards in mind, and one last organizational tool...

Here’s where your initial deck idea, deckbuilding formulas, building your deck online, and organization all comes together: Custom Categories.

Custom Categories.

Custom Categories is what TappedOut calls the organization of a decklist, and it’s highly connected to the deckbuilding templates I talked about earlier. First I’m going to remind you about the five basic Custom Categories: Lands, Draw, Ramp, Removal, and Strategy.

“Strategy” is what I just placed in the deck. Our commander, which usually gets a special place or tag, and the idea/theme cards, in my case Ashes of the Fallen. That’s one Custom Category taken care of (I don’t count the commander as a category, it is its own special thing).

Now I know you’re excited to start finding cards that go with your idea and strategy, I am too! Keep that excitement, but first let’s get down to business. Remember the formulas I talked about earlier? Remember how I started with 36ish lands? This is where those numbers come into play. Let’s go ahead and add in 36 placeholder lands to our deck. Now my decklist looks like this:

1x Gisa and Geralf *CMDR*
1x Ashes of the Fallen
18x Swamp
18x Island

Okay, that’s another category taken care of. Understand that those lands are stand-ins for now, we will remove some for different lands we find later. For now, they serve the purpose of preventing us from going over 100 cards without counting our lands. That’s why this is a very important step. We have prevented the scenario where we collect 100 (or more) awesome cards for our deck, then realize we don’t have any lands, and thus we need to make 36 cuts. It’s not a good situation to be in, I know from experience. So by organizing now, we’ve made the later process of making cuts much easier.

In a similar way, we should do this with the other three categories, Card Draw, Ramp, and Removal. There’s a few different ways you can do this. If you want to fast-pass this step and get to the card searching, you can simply plug in or write down 10x of a single representative card to serve in that slot. Our decklist in the deck-editor will look something like this:

1x Gisa and Geralf *CMDR*
1x Ashes of the Fallen
18x Swamp
18x Island
10x Arcane Signet
10x Divination 
10x Doom Blade

Now I’m using Doom Blade, Divination, and Arcane Signet as stand-ins for removal, draw, and ramp, respectively. If you know a bunch of EDH staples, you could fill slots with those instead, if you don’t, I will talk about “staple cards” in the next article. For now, notice this: We now have 68 slots “filled”, so we know we are looking for around 32 cards to fill in our strategy and whatever we want to do in the deck. This seems to make choosing cards an even more difficult task, considering the thousands of options we will have, but trust me, this will help us stay on track and help us keep the end goal in mind. 100 cards, friends.

So we have an idea of placeholders and their Custom Categories, now it’s time to use TappedOut’s coding to actually implement those. TappedOut uses the # (hashtag or pound symbol) to create categories on the decklist, like so:

10x Arcane Signet #Ramp
1x Ashes of the Fallen #Strategy
10x Divination #Draw
10x Doom Blade #Removal
1x Gisa and Geralf *CMDR*
18x Island #Land
18x Swamp #Land

Alternatively, you can set Custom Categories up like so:

1x Gisa and Geralf *CMDR*

# Draw
10x Divination

# Land
18x Island
18x Swamp

# Ramp
10x Arcane Signet

# Removal
10x Doom Blade

# Strategy
1x Ashes of the Fallen

You can check out TappedOut’s formatting help article for another explanation. Scroll down to “Custom Categories in Deck Lists.”

You can then save the deck, and look at the decklist. On TappedOut, the default sorting is card type, but you can also sort decklists by custom categories.

I have made a In-Progress decklist to demonstrate what a deck might look like at this point in the process. Again notice the commander tag, the placeholder cards, and the custom categories.

No Zombie Tribal

Commander / EDH* Suns_Champion

SCORE: 1 | 82 VIEWS

Figuring out how to add cards into custom categories is an important step of one’s deckbuilding journey in my opinion, so I’d suggest familiarizing yourself with how TappedOut (or your prefered deckbuilding site) does it. If you’re just using the internet to search for cards, and using paper and pencil to write and organize your deck, It’s way easier. You can just write/draw out these five custom categories on your piece of paper, in rows or columns, whatever makes sense to you.

Why is setting up custom categories so important? I’ll reiterate some points and add some more:

• It’s helpful for organization.
• It’s helpful for keeping the end goal of 100 cards in mind when searching for cards.
• It’s helpful for adding cards in general.
• It’s helpful for looking at other people’s decks for ideas.
• It’s helpful for making cuts.
• It’s helpful for getting good feedback and suggestions for your deck.

In my later articles, I’ll be mentioning Custom Categories often and explaining these points in detail, so I’d definitely suggest getting used to them now. I’ll also talk about other categories beyond the ones mentioned here, and talk about category overlap. I’ve found Custom Categories to be very helpful in my deckbuilding, and a major “level up” moment in my deckbuilding, so I hope you will too!

Recap:

• Using deckbuilding formulas is helpful in structuring your deck.
• Big Picture: Have a lot of Draw, Ramp, Removal, and Lands in your deck.
• When starting on a deck, write it down somewhere, decide where you’re going to build the deck, create a decklist online, and get organized.
• Using custom categories is very helpful for many reasons. Familiarize yourself with how TappedOut (or your chosen site) implements them, so you can take advantage of them.
• Set up the five basic custom categories for your decklist: Draw, Ramp, Removal, Lands, and Strategy.

Whew! We made it! With only three bullet-point lists! This one was long and might seem like the not-fun part of deck building, but if you slogged through it all I believe you’ll be better equipped for the rest of the deckbuilding process, especially adding and cutting cards. Plus, if you're like me, you might actually enjoy the process of tedious organization and navigating janky deckbuilder sites! As of right now, I think you’re ready to move on to the next step, searching for and choosing unique cards for your deck!

See you next time for: The EDH Deck Building Process #4 - Gathering Cards!

For the Legion!

Suns_Champion