Commander with Nick Wolf The Logistics of Commander Decks WRITTEN BY Nicholas Wolf

Hello there people of the Pucaworld. I hope your week has been going well, and you haven't bankrupted yourself buying up pack after pack and box after box of Eternal Masters. We're crunched for time here in my subarctic doomsday bunker so we're going to hit up some EMA comments in rapid fire, bullet point discussion:

Mystical Tutor Toxic Deluge Prices are plummeting for a lot of the Commander staples they reprinted - you can get afor 601 PucaPoints, and afor 820 at the time of this typing. Modern Masters versions one and two promised to help lower the price of the cards printed within, and while those sets did a little to help relieve the cost of entry to Modern, EMA seems to be doing a much better job of lowering the prices of cards that we Commander players care about.

Wasteland Drafting afeels great from a financial perspective, but when you try to jam it into a four color deck like I did it leaves a bit to be desired.

I'm going to go on record and say that I think PucaTrade is the best place to acquire singles from EMA . The mark-ups that seem to pervade local game shops are absurd, and the constant desire of some shop owners to gouge their customer base is tiring. EMA packs MSRP at $9.99, but I've seen them sold at shops anywhere from $15.99 to $20.99. Now, the usual response to that from players is often "Well, if they're charging that much, then don't buy them!" And I agree with that. You shouldn't buy a pack of EMA for double the MSRP, that's just foolish. However, people are buying them at that inflated price, because the store wouldn't charge so much if no one was paying that price. It's frustrating, and it's made me limit how much enjoyment I'll get out of what has turned out to be a very fun Limited experience. $80 for a sealed event is just insane. Hit me up on Twitter (@Nicholas_Etc) and tell me what your LGS was charging for packs, drafts, or sealed. I'm genuinely curious.

Okay, done with Eternal Masters. What's next? Let's talk about logistics. I've been playing Commander for quite some time now and have been writing about 100 card decks here on PucaTrade for many moons. I don't own every card ever made, and I'm constantly seeking out and adding cards to my collection, shifting cards from deck to deck, and rebuilding or tearing apart lists. This gets time-consuming and tedious sometimes, and I'm always on the lookout for ideas to mitigate that tedium and push the process toward more efficient directions. Typing up a new list almost every week for over a year has been a pretty good way of remembering which cards should go where, but unless someone invents a robotic card sorter (and seriously, if anyone out there wants to do that, I'll give you so much money if you make a Kickstarter) we still have to sit there in our designated Magic card area and put cards in sleeves. So what are some ways we can make the process a bit less painful?

SLEEVES, SO MANY SLEEVES

If you're an active Magic player and you care about the condition of your cards, chances are high you've bought a large amount of sleeves over the years. And if you're anything like me, you haven't really given much thought as to the color of the sleeves you're buying at any given time. Maybe you need some sleeves for a draft, so you buy some red ones, and maybe you need to sleeve up a new Commander deck, so you grab some blue ones. Well, stop it. Think about it. Maybe instead of slowly accumulating a heaping pile of sleeves every color of the rainbow you should stick to one color and one finish. Now, after you buy some here and buy some there you've got hundreds of uniform sleeves that could conceivably be switched in and out of several decks for ease in new deck construction. If you're always making and unmaking Commander, then the act of desleeving 100 cards just to put a bunch of them into slightly different colored sleeves gets pointless after a while.

FOCUS

In my experience in the Commander community, players can be put into two groups: the rotators and the broadsiders. I made up those terms just now, but they're as good as any I think. The first group, the rotators, tend to only have three or four Commander decks built and ready to go at any given time. I am a rotator. Currently my decks are Feldon of the Third Path, Grimgrin, Corpse-Born zombie tribal, and Temur Cluepocalypse with Surrak Dragonclaw currently manning the helm, all of which I've written about in some form or another right here on this very blog.

They're all sleeved in the same matte black Dragonshield sleeves and hang out in an old four slot box I had kicking around, and the fourth slot of the box contains all the clue tokens I could get my hands on (upwards of 80 at this point). Since my play sessions with friends span about two to three hours, I tend to play each deck once, then we're done. I don't see much of a need to lug around a dozen decks if I'm only going to have time to play two or three any given night. Of course, this is in direct opposition of the other category of Commander players, the broadsiders. Broadsiders are the ones that have fifteen decks all in separate boxes that they carry around in a big duffel bag. The philosophy behind a broadsider's actions is simple: they like options. When a broadsider sits down to a game of Commander they don't want to feel pigeon-holed, especially if you have a player in your group that has a deck that might hose a few you've got with you. Broadsiders tend to be the players that have access to the greatest volume of Commander staples, since often it's pointless to have a dozen decks if half of them are draft extras you had lying around. But some broadsiders prefer quantity over quality so much that they build underpowered decks simply because they don't have that twelfth Sol Ring available.





BOX IT UP

To relate this to my earlier point about sleeves, clearly, I think being a rotator is the way to go. Many of you have a box, like I do, of cards you've deemed "good in Commander." Most of you probably have thousands of cards, and only a small percentage of your collection as a whole is worth considering "playable." If you're a booster box addict you've probably got countless commons collecting dust, and the best way to avoid having to search through the same stacks of cards over and over again for that Ghirapur AEther Grid is to simply pull everything remotely interesting aside as soon as you get it and put it in the "Good Stuff Box."

Often it's just a box of staples like Damnation, Rhystic Study and Swords to Plowshares, as well as all the fetches and duals and shocks you happen to have and certain cards that power archetypes, like Darkest Hour or Doubling Season. Now, if you presleeve all these cards in the same uniform sleeves suddenly instead of having a box of random good stuff, you have several Commander decks pretty much built (and probably a pretty good cube if the mood strikes). Suddenly only having two or three decks built isn't so bad, since at any point you could dig into your box, swap a bunch of cards around, and voila, new deck. This strategy is something I'd recommend be undertaken over time and not all at once, since the sheer volume of your collection is probably daunting. Instead, every time you decide to retire a Commander deck, instead of taking it apart and desleeving all the cards and tossing them back into binders or boxes, buy a pack of your favorite sleeves, sleeve them back up, and put them in the Good Stuff Box. Slowly buy more of the same sleeves, sleeve up cards you're not planning to use at that moment, and toss them in the Good Stuff Box. Even if you're an avid trader, you'll find that potential trade partners (for the most part) love going through sleeved cards in boxes as much as they do binders.

Additionally, I recommend keeping a binder with every legendary creature you have in your possession, since that leads to more ease in deckbuilding with commanders right there, easily viewed. This system has worked wonders for me, and if you're out there wishing there was an easy way to go through your cards, I've yet to find anything better. I'd love to hear how you guys handle your Commander decks and collections, so send me a Puca message or hit me up on Twitter.

LOOKING FORWARD

I'm not going to leave you this week without discussing a bit of random Commander. I've got three underplayed (by me) legends that have been begging for decks for quite some time, and I think next week I'm going to force myself to finally choose one to get the full on deck treatment. But I can't choose alone. I'm afraid of commitment. I need your help. On my Twitter, I'll have a poll, and I need you guys to vote in it. The winning legendary creature will be featured in its own deck next week, but no matter which one we choose there is going to be a twist. Here are your options:

Be sure to go to my Twitter and vote, since I'm incapable of making decisions for myself. See you next week, boys and girls.

Nicholas Wolf is a writer who lives in Flint, Michigan. He's been playing Magic: The Gathering since Tempest and still doesn't consider Urza's Saga to be broken at all. He prefers building decks that have either have 40 cards (Limited), 100 cards (Commander), or 50 cards (Tiny Leaders).

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