Now that you have all this mana, you’ll want to spend it! The best way to do that is increasing the number of cards you can play in a game. Some would call this “card advantage” or just straight up “card draw” but I think the concept is a lot more nuanced than that. I like the term “velocity” because it evokes a feeling of speeding through your deck, and there are different ways to do that.
In Oathbreaker, your commander must be a planeswalker, and you choose a signature instant or sorcery that can only be cast with your commander in play, and that spell always returns to the command zone. There’s no commander damage, your life starts at 20 and you have a 60-card deck, so there’s plenty of speed to this singleton format. Adding this to the fact that Commander is an eternal format with an incredible availability of powerful cards, the result is super efficient interactions, incredibly fast combos and scarily strong and expensive decks. The Commander Rules Committee’s lack of attention to this type of game inevitably makes the format permissive to plays that define a game in the first three or four turns, even in a multiplayer scenario. However, the very mentality proposed by the cEDH is capable of counteracting this status quo, as efficient combos demand equally efficient answers. When everyone is on the same power level and assumes the same competitive stance, the game becomes as interesting as any casual table, rather than a simple race to see who combos first…
And while each card you draw after that still raises the odds of seeing Ob next, they won’t raise the odds nearly as much as if your deck was built to 60 cards. For example, you can only have four copies of Ob Nixilis, the Adversary across both your deck and your sideboard. If you play all four copies in your main board, your opening hand has a 40% chance to have one copy of the card and a 60% chance to not have any of the four copies. Every card you draw after that increases the odds that the next card you draw is Ob Nixilis. It’s important to remember that the 100 cards also include the commander itself, which doesn’t go in your library.
Are silver/gold-bordered cards or physical proxies allowed in Commander?
The short answer is “No, unless everyone else in the game says otherwise.” Some people feel these cards would be interesting and should be legal, most people don’t. The Commander begins the game in the Command Zone, and may be cast at any legal time that its controller has sufficient mana. If at any point the Commander would be removed from the battlefield and placed into a different zone (e.g. graveyard, hand, library, or exile), its controller may instead redirect the Commander to the Command Zone.
The first thing you should do when making any Commander deck is to, well, pick a commander. It can even occasionally be a planeswalker, but only very specific ones, so it’s usually best to just stick to creatures. Actually, it doesn’t always edh deck have to be the commander – sometimes it can be a theme or a strategy.
Commander Cube
The social contract is a commonly-used nickname for a fundamental philosophy of Commander. It is the philosophy that each group is best at deciding what is most fun for them, and are encouraged to change the rules within their group to make that happen. These are the main variants of Commander known around the world, but the EDH universe is in constant motion and there is always someone innovating. Magic‘s replayability allows it to be not just a game, but a platform on which multiple games can be created. While essentially all of these aforementioned ways of playing strongly refer to Commander, each one adds something different and carries with it a manifestation of part of the immensity that the EDH community has become. Hopefully this cleared up some questions y’all had about deck size.
You can take that build-around uncommon and make it your commander, since nonlegendary uncommons are allowed in your command zone. There’s still lots of complexity and power at play, it leans less on individual card quality, and more on card synergies. Casual EDH, as the name suggests, is a much more laid-back and “for fun” format. Playing big ol’ eldrazi like Kozilek, the Great Distortion or group hug show-and-tell effects like Braids, Conjurer Adept is the name of the game. Eldrazi Unbound is colorless and headed by Zhulodok, Void Gorger with a strong emphasis on the cascade keyword ability.
A striking feature of Conquest is the low average budget of the decks compared to the cEDH, a distinction purposely brought about by the format’s creators through the banned list that excludes cards from the infamous Reserved List. My comrade Felipe Torres has already written an excellent article analyzing Conquest and its most notable points, which you can check out here. For the rest, it is still a marginal format, although still very new. All the rule changes add up to create relatively balanced, fun and board-focused games.
You’ll spend all of your time with any deck messing around with the cards in it or adding in new ones from new sets that release. Sometimes a friend will have a card that you didn’t even realise existed, and suddenly you’re searching for a card that might be older than you, just to try and improve your deck. Sometimes your initial estimations about the number of each you need can be off; sometimes you’ll have too many of one colour land and not enough of the other. These issues are ironed out by playing with the deck and tweaking it constantly. Now that you’ve got your interaction and a rough idea for your land base, you’re left with around half your deck left to fill out. Tiny leaders can be easy to get going since the card limitations present a narrower range of options and fewer cards needed to power a strategy.
Commander damage
You can find the rules for specific formats in the table below. No matter the outcome, Commander gives players the tools to express themselves through strategy, skill, and a whole lot of deck building fun. You can adjust this number as needed, but 40% should be what you run in any given scenario, regardless of the format. That’s 24 lands in Constructed formats, and in Limited formats that’s 16 lands if you’re adhering to the minimum.
Magic is a collectible card game and only official Magic the Gathering cards produced by Wizards of the Coast should be used in games. While occasional exceptions to this can be fun, when used regularly they often make games less interesting for most players, and are not allowed without prior approval. While tournaments were ruled at a 60-card minimum at this point, the rulebooks had yet to change.
At the same time, this generated a cacophony that caused some confusion in many groups, as we had several “Commanders” coexisting, each with their respective rules. These numbers change a little bit across the board whenever you run different play styles. But aggro runs a lower curve and doesn’t need as many lands, so they can afford to cut down to as low as 33% since they’ll usually never play anything that costs more than three or four mana. For a ratio on how many of each card type to include in a deck, you’re looking at about 36 playables like creatures and spells to 24 lands. Of those 36 playables you should split it down the middle between creatures and spells. In January of 1994 the Duelists’ Convocation International was formed, and along with it came sanctioned tournaments and some rule changes.
The most notable change (other than the banned and restricted list) was the official ruling that Constructed decks had to be 60 cards at minimum. 60 card decks are the minimum in most Constructed formats, but there is no upper bound. In typical Limited environments (Draft/Sealed) the minimum size is 40, with an upper limit determined only by the size of your cardpool (and even then you can add a LOT of basic lands on top). In Limited, since you’ll only have a handful of cards to begin with, your sideboard consists of all the cards that you didn’t put in your deck. So, if you’re playing Sealed and you opened 6 booster packs, all the cards that you didn’t select to go into your deck become your sideboard. While cards may be banned or allowed by specific playgroups or tournament organizers, in most games, MTGCommander.net’s banned list is used as it is considered the most well-known banned list for the format.