EDH



The Walking Atlas



Deckbuilding Atlas



Commander Deckbuilding, Pt. 1





Hello everyone. From time to time here on Walking Atlas, I’ll put out an article. Oftentimes, they are primers for EDH, geared towards a specific Commander. But sometimes, people aren’t concerned with how you build for a specific Commander: “Atlas,” they say, “how does one build an EDH deck in general? How do you know what any given deck needs?” I’m going to take today’s article to answer that question, using what I choose to call The Walking Atlas Deckbuilding Atlas, because it sounds flashy and because I have an ego. Whenever I build a deck, these are the aspects that I know I must represent for my deck to function properly. Here are the categories we will come to address:

Lands Card Draw and Card Filtering Tutors Recursion Ramp and Fixing Protection and Disruption Removal and Tempo Win Conditions and Combo Pieces Utility

There’s a lot of meaty content here, so the chances are high that this will be a multi-parter. Before we get to the main event, though, I should mention that not every deck will need to devote slots to each of these categories, because some Commanders already bring them to the table. Ephara, God of the Polis and a handful of creatures will draw you a card per turn, decreasing the need for dedicated card draw in the other 99. Voltron or aggro decks– Uril the Mistalker and Omnath, Locus of Mana come to mind– tend to use their Commanders as win conditions, negating or reducing the need for win conditions in the other 99 cards. There are examples of Commanders that fit into all of these categories.

Enough prefacing: let’s get theorizing!





Part I: Lands







The eternal question.

The land base of a deck can be deceptively complex. With more color intensive decks– I’m thinking three or more– a weak foundation will completely kneecap your ability to play Magic, while a strong foundation is invisible: it will work, and you won’t question it.

Most Commander decks run between 37 and 40 lands; if your mana curve is higher, err on the side of 40. For those of us in monocolor, we can, if we are so inclined, run nothing but basics without much worry. However, lands can also provide other bits of utility (Rogue’s Passage, for example), so it’s worth looking into utility lands when we don’t need to load our lands with color-fixing. For your convenience, and for posterity, I will add a number of Gatherer searches to an appendix at the end of this document, which you can use to locate helpful lands in certain colors.

Fixing in a two-color deck is easy enough, and I think you could still get away with using mostly basics, but you can increase your flexibility by adding dual lands. On the budget side of things, you have the lifelands from Khans of Tarkir set, the Guildgates from Return to Ravnica block, the bouncelands from original Ravnica block, and more. If your pockets are a little deeper, there are options like scrylands, shocklands, and checklands. Generally, the rarer two-color lands will either provide a condition to enter the battlefield untapped, or else have a small bonus (such as scrying 1). Also, as the graphic above outlines, you can unashamedly use Command Tower in any deck with two or more colors: there is absolutely no downside beyond it not being a basic land.







“Remember: ‘tis better to have slow color-fixing than no color-fixing at all.”

Thornwood Falls art by Eytan Zana

Three-color decks start to get a little trickier. You can still run about half basics– perhaps more, if you have ramp spells to get them– but suddenly, instead of having a single dual land in your colors, you have three dual lands, each of which supply two of your colors. I tend towards two or three cycles (six to nine) of two-color lands in my three-color decks; if possible, I make one cycle shocklands, and the other cycle checklands, since the latter play nicely with both the former and with basic lands. Shocklands are especially helpful if we have cards that search for a specific land type, since a card that looks for a Forest can get us a Forest Mountain and fix our colors.

There are lands that tap for any color of mana, and they range from “dirt cheap” to “playable in all competitive formats and costed to match.” Regardless of how much loose change you have, go for Command Tower, Rupture Spire, and Transguild Promenade. Those last two are quite slow, but remember: 'tis better to have slow color-fixing than no color-fixing at all.

Also, Khans of Tarkir has brought us another gift: every three-color combination now has access to a land that enters the battlefield tapped and taps for one of its three colors. Check out the appendix of Gatherer links for those tri-lands.

A four- or five-color mana base creates significantly more headaches than any of the previous color combinations, and you are almost guaranteed to need fixing beyond the scope of your lands. Run as many gold lands as possible, but also find mana rocks that tap for mana of any color, or use green spells to fetch basic lands. We’ll cover this topic in greater detail later, when we hit the “Ramp and Fixing” section.





Part II: Card Draw and Card Filtering







An in-depth guide

I have a confession to make: I’m a blue player. Yes, yes, I know, it must come as a frightful surprise to you, given the color scheme of this website. But while blue is the best color for unconditional, unadulterated card draw, I posit that every EDH deck– especially the non-blue ones– need to draw cards, or we’ll simply run out of steam. By dedicating some slots in our decks to draw (repeatable draw, if possible), we can ensure that the threats keep coming, or that we find a key piece of removal when we need it most.

Blue mages can afford to be picky when it comes to card draw spells. There are countless instants and sorceries that do nothing more than draw cards: some popular examples include Blue Sun’s Zenith, Fact or Fiction, Brainstorm, Ponder, and Opportunity. Personally, I would not include a piece of single-use card draw that does not allow me to draw fewer than, or at least look fewer than, three cards deep.

In blue, there are a plethora of creatures that allow for card draw as well. Sphinx of Uthuun is a flying 5/6 Fact or Fiction; Sphinx of Magosi can draw while posing a scalable threat; and Azami, Lady of Scrolls can draw one card per turn off of herself, plus significantly more off of other Wizards you control.







Brainstorm art by Chris Rahn

Black is fairly capable of drawing cards, but generally, it comes at a cost, and that cost is often a small hit to your life total. Phyrexian Arena demonstrates a classic black effect: lose one life, draw one card. It comes in many forms, like on Bloodgift Demon, which proves useful in a singleton format like EDH.

The death of creatures is an event that black can exchange for card advantage. Sometimes, it’s proactive, like on Disciple of Bolas: sacrifice one of your creatures to draw. Other effects care generally about your creatures or other creatures dying, such as Harvester of Souls or Dark Prophecy.

Green tends to draw its cards through creatures. Interestingly, this occasionally means sacrificing creatures (see Momentous Fall, Life’s Legacy), but while black looks at its creatures as fodder for its rise to power, green sees them more as a contribution to the pack, a part of the natural order of life and death.

Usually, though, death is not involved in green card draw. Mirroring Harvester of Souls is Soul of the Harvest, who draws off of nontoken creatures entering your battlefield. Meanwhile, Garruk’s Packleader and Drumhunter both demonstrate how green can derive card draw from having big creatures.







Momentous Fall art by Tomasz Jedruszek

That brings us to white and red, which are unfortunately the two most problematic colors to draw cards in. White is only marginally better at it than red, thanks to effects like Mentor of the Meek. Red sometimes gets spells that let it draw cards, but they usually are small and involve discarding, like Tormenting Voice, or only allow temporary access to cards, most recently featured through Act on Impulse.

But fear not, lovers of white and / or red: we have colorless options! When you look at Magic’s color pie, there are certain effects that are restricted to certain colors, but if you’re willing to pay a high enough mana cost, colorless spells can do almost anything. Seer’s Sundial can draw cards off of our land drops; Tower of Fortunes straight up gets us four cards, though it will probably take a whole turn’s worth of mana to do it; and Staff of Nin just hangs around and get us an additional card per turn.

A select few artifacts do an excellent job of controlling what’s up top of our library without actually drawing us cards. The most prominent, and expensive, examples are Sensei’s Divining Top and Scroll Rack, but cheaper (and regrettably less efficient) alternatives exist like Crystal Ball.

If you’re wanting for colorless card draw, look to the appendix for some sweet Gatherer links.





Part III: Tutors







Well, I guess it’s a start

Let’s get this out of the way: not everyone is a fan of tutors, since they have the effect of making a deck more consistent, which can be seen as “against the spirit of a singleton format”. I personally believe that tutors have a place in EDH, and I will proceed to explain my reasoning, but if you disagree strongly, feel free to skip this section (though I think I make a compelling argument).

Now, a bit of vocabulary: a “tutor” is any card that searches your library for another card. Tutoring for any card, regardless of its type, is firmly in black’s slice of the color pie. Blue can generally find instants, sorceries, and artifacts. White finds enchantments and equipment, green fetches creatures and lands like a boss, and red rarely searches a library for anything.

The reason I strongly advocate for tutors in EDH is because, when your deck is constructed to utilize them, they act as a Swiss army knife, fetching you the tool that is appropriate for the job at hand. To illustrate this point, let’s examine my monoblue Patron of the Moon combo deck.







Dizzy Spell art by Christopher Moeller

Looking at its spell effect alone, Dizzy Spellis a not a card I can, with a straight face, include in an EDH deck. But Dizzy Spell has Transmute, which means I can pay {1}{U}{U}, discard it, search my library for a card with the same converted mana cost (in this case, one), and put that card into my hand. Dizzy Spell has numerous valid targets: win conditions and combo pieces (Adventuring Gear, Amulet of Vigor, Training Grounds); ramp and land-securing (Expedition Map, High Tide); removal (Rapid Hybridization, Pongify); and recursion (Codex Shredder). That one dinky nearly-unplayable instant presents a huge host of options, and I don’t need to decide which one of those I need until its need becomes apparent. This is the true power of tutors.

As I said before, black can find any card in your library, which is cool not only for its flexibility, but because you don’t need to reveal the card. Demonic Tutor is widely regarded at the best tutor, sitting pretty at only two mana, but it can also cost a pretty penny to buy. Diabolic Tutor provides the same effect for two more mana and many fewer dollars. Diabolic Revelation and Increasing Ambition are notable for being monetarily cheap and able to retrieve multiple cards, so long as you have the mana for them.







Increasing Ambition art by Volkan Baga

Thanks to original Ravnica block, both blue and black have some limited-use tutors on cards with Transmute. Every Transmute card can be discarded for three mana (depending on the card, the cost will be {1}{U}{U}, {1}{B}{B}, or {1}{U}{B}), and turned into a card with equal CMC from your library. Transmute requires much more building-around than other categories of tutors, but it will work in the right situations. A list of Transmute tutors will be provided in the Appendix.

Green is unique with its frequent ability to tutor creatures straight onto the field, with spells like Green Sun’s Zenith and Chord of Calling. Combined with green’s varied collection of enter-the-battlefield effects, these tutors have the same toolbox-y potential that I illustrated with my Patron of the Moon example.

Green is also the only color capable of tutoring for nonbasic lands, excepting Tolaria West, a blue land that can Transmute into cards with CMC 0 (which includes lands). Back on the “colorless can do anything if it tries hard enough” idea that we discussed in the card draw section, Expedition Map is a simple artifact that gets a nonbasic land to your hand. I think these tutors shine brightest when you have useful utility lands. For example, in my Narset Voltron deck, Expedition Map gets Rogue’s Passage (for evasion), Slayers’ Stronghold (for vigilance and haste), or Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion (for massive damage).

Blue’s ability to find artifacts is, naturally, most poweful in artifact-centric decks, but given the prevelance of such staples as Swiftfoot Boots, Lightning Greaves, Darksteel Plate, and Sol Ring, the chances are high that many decks at least have valid targets to search for. And if you exclude Sol Ring from consideration, white’s equipment tutors provide just as much utility. However, spells that search for enchantments tend to be more specialized, as there are significantly more artifact staples than enchantment staples.





In Order to Understand Recursion…







. …you must first understand recursion.

Izzet Chronarch art by Steven Belledin

That’s all the time we have for this week, folks, but we’ll be coming back around to this topic. By my expert calculations, we’ve only gone through one-third of my Walking Atlas Deckbuilding Atlas for Commander. Join us next week when we address recursion, ramp, protection, and disruption.

If you can’t get enough Walking Atlas in your weekly Walking Atlas article, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@Walking_Atlas) or drop me a line on Reddit (/u/WalkingAtlas). I’m always happy to provide deckbuilding advice and / or witty banter.

Until next time, happy planeswalking, everyone.

Edit: It was brought to my attention that the original title of this article conflicts with an existing EDH segment. My apologies for the confusion; it has been retitled to avoid association.





Appendix: Gatherer Links





Colorless Lands





Monocolor Lands





Two-Color Lands





Three-Color Lands





Five-Color Lands





Card Draw and Card Filtering





Tutors and Recursion