Stop Falling for these Commander Deckbuilding Traps | 767

Josh Lee Kwai (0:00)

Upgrade your gaming with Alienware. They packed a 15.3 inch 165 hertz display into a durable 15 inch laptop and powered it with up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 laptop GPUs. It's everything you need combined into one iconic machine. Visit alienware.com/15today. Greetings, humans. You have entered the Command Zone, your destination for all aspects of Elder Dragon Highlander.

Rachel Weeks (0:30)

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Command Zone Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Weeks.

Josh Lee Kwai (0:34)

How's it? It's Josh Lee Kwai.

Rachel Weeks (0:36)

And today we are talking about the deepest, the darkest deck building traps you can fall into while building your decks or changing your decks.

Josh Lee Kwai (0:45)

Yeah, just of any part of the deck building journey.

Rachel Weeks (0:48)

We've got a lot of different things to get to, so we're going to jump right into it. And the first one that we're going to talk about is playing too many redundant effects.

I think we always think about redundancy as good. It adds consistency. It adds synergy to your deck. But there are cards that you can have too many of in your deck.

Josh Lee Kwai (1:09)

Absolutely. You can over-index on things.

Rachel Weeks (1:11)

Yeah, especially if those effects don't stack, right? So if we're talking about the Crucible of Worlds effects, it doesn't make a difference whether you have one in play or multiple in play. You probably want one of those effects in your hand, but you don't want two.

Josh Lee Kwai (1:26)

Yeah, because the second one doesn't really do anything. I mean, I still obviously a little bit better than Ramanap Excavator, but like, man, when you have the I still out and you draw the Ramanap Excavator, you're like, what?

Rachel Weeks (1:38)

It's a dead card.

Josh Lee Kwai (1:39)

Yeah, basically like kill the card in your hand. I mean, it's back up in case they kill the I still, which they're going to want to. But like, yeah, that's a great example of an effect that you would want exactly one of.

Rachel Weeks (1:49)

Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai (1:49)

If you have six of them in your deck, that's probably too many. You're just too likely to draw, you know, multiple, yeah.

Rachel Weeks (1:55)

Yeah. I mean, I think this is also true for stuff like fogs. Like fogs, you really only want to cast once in a game. You probably don't want two fogs in your hand. Protection, one I've run into with my decks is evasion pieces. Like once your commander is unblockable, a second unblockable effect doesn't do anything.

Josh Lee Kwai (2:12)

Haste enablers the same way.

Rachel Weeks (2:14)

Yeah.

Josh Lee Kwai (2:14)

Yep.

Rachel Weeks (2:15)

So these are kind of effects that you're like, yes, I want to draw and I want to draw consistently, but I definitely don't want two of it.

So I started looking at some numbers that you can put in your deck to make it more reliable that you draw one, but less reliable that you draw two. And I went with, assuming the game is eight turns long, which is about what we expect these days, and you've drawn about 25 cards over the course of those eight turns. So that's seven from your opening hand, eight at the beginning of each of your turns, and you've drawn like 10 extra cards. Seems reasonable.

Josh Lee Kwai (2:47)

I hope to draw more than that, but it seems reasonable.

Rachel Weeks (2:48)

Yeah, 10 is like two extra cards from turn, like for the last four turns. Yeah, turn four on. Then playing three of those effects will get you 58.7% to draw one.

Josh Lee Kwai (3:01)

So playing three of a redundant effect.

Rachel Weeks (3:02)

Right, so if you play three Crucible of Worlds, you're like 58% to draw one of them, and you're 15% to draw two. I think for a very important effect like Crucible, that's a little bit lower than what I would want, like 60%-ish chance to draw one.

So I looked at five, I was like playing five gets you a 77.5% to draw one. That's pretty good. That's like a much more consistent, and you're 37.3% to draw two. So on the lower side to actually have two in your hand, and that's what I was looking for in these numbers. And then playing seven gets you 87.9% to draw one, that's very high, which is good, but you're 56.8% to draw two at that point. So seven seems to be a good tipping point to be like, okay, I might be running too many of these effects and I don't stack.