A disclaimer: I use a loose definition of midrange here that may be different from yours. Support me: / salubrioussnail Join my community: / discord www.salubrioussnail.com
That isn't high level theory. That is just normal deck building. The thing is, EDH is pitched more as a casual "Role Play" shared gaming experience more than the most efficient way of winning. The "point" of EDH was to build deck as though you are that character and what spells they would cast.
@Leonidous What? Your original comment? My source is literally Sheldon's articles on EDH (Rest in Peace). It's not my fault you are ignorant of the history of the format.
This is how a lot of cEDH decks work, it seems, I just never thought about it like this. I really like this approach, but I'm having trouble changing my worldview of the format to fit it. I think I'll have to sit on this and slowly understand it more
It's actually even more simple. In cEDH a commander is either a combo piece or a draw engine, since every deck already covers the need for mana with stuff like Mana Crypt and Sol Ring. If the format had worse mana, people might run commanders that dealt with that, but atm there is no need.
@@franslair2199 That's just not right. There are a lot of combo decks, yes, but aggro has a place in the meta and stax is just control. And what makes control or combo bad? cEDH isn't played with the social rules of casual commander that ensures everyone gets to play their gameplan, it's played to be competitive (like is in the very name). If you don't want to be competitive, that's fine, everyone has preferences, but don't label it objectively bad over your subjective dislike of the way the format works
@@sorin_markov light-paws is considered unplayable dogshit because she only kills a player by turn 2, and only one at a time. Codie is considered mediocre at best because he generally wins by turn 3. cedh is a bad format just like vintage is a bad format. There are good competitive formats in magic like pioneer. Even pauper is a good format despite having access to some of the strongest cards ever printed.
@@franslair2199 Light-paws is bad because of the lack of meaningful interaction in mono-white. Codie is bad because you can't cast permanents. cEDH games don't all end in 3 turns. In fact, most don't. Again, if you don't like higher-power formats, that's your opinion and you're perfectly entitled to it and to not play high power, but lots of people find vintage and cEDH fun
This Is like the basis to build 1v1 competitive commanders(30-25 hp), and it's very rare to see an EDH player to have this good mentality. Well done, really.
I love the Diversified Value approach. It’s one of the reasons I continue to champion Karametra for Casual and High Power Enchantress Lists. She gives you lasting power even against Farewell and Cyclonic Rift. Subvert expectations for your opponents threat assessment and grind through the midrange with ease.
See, this is kind of what happened with my goblin deck in a homebrew format. My commander was Krenko, but spamming goblins wasnt enough to be a truly nasty deck. So, I grabbed Iroas, and added him to make my goblins able to swing without fear of dying, while also being a massive chunky boi. Then I was able to add a bunch of white synergy to make my armies bigger all at once and add passive keywords. It came together beautifully and is now one of my most efficient decks, being able to swing fast, and keep up the pace with passive field-wide buffs for long term
I've never actually thought about deckbuilding in this way, and it's giving me thoughts. After playing EDH for about 7 years now, I often reevaluate what this game means to me, how I enjoy it, and how to make it feel fresh. I'm going to keep this in mind going forward.
I love the idea of having a commander that does something completely different from the rest of the deck. I usually build my decks around my commander so heavily that I have to really work to keep them around. Not having to worry about that as much would be great.
I have a deck that sort of falls under this umbrella term as well. It's a Chainer Nightmare Adept build that plays very minimal discard, reanimation, or mill synergies, and instead my commander is used as a wierd Fervor/Tortured Existence type card to facilitate a deck with twenty-ish clunky 4+ mana attackers. As long as I have mana, I'll have acess to Chainer, and as long as I have Chainer I don't need to worry about card draw when I can just rebuy Inferno Titan or Junji every turn by discarding exess lands. Allbeit, I'm still playing Living Death because sometimes you just gotta do it, but apart from that the deck reads a lot differently from other lists.
@@jemm113 Don't get any notions that this deck is actually good at what it does though, cause as it turns out playing midrange like this is really hard when half the playing field is more degenerate than you and the other half is just more efficient. Like this deck will very rarely win a race against a dedicated combo deck like selvala, urza, or vito, and will even more infrequently win a punch out against synergy based creature piles like animar, chulane, or generic elf tribal #614
Thank you for the video, I think this just helped me push through a deckbuilding block! It's been ages I wanted to rework my Kresh the Bloodbraided deck but just couldn't find what to do about it. Now I'm able to look at it from a different angle, so cheers for that!
I really like that Liesa deck, I basically did the same thing with Dragonlord Ojutai. I love Azorius but there weren’t any commanders that jumped out to me and there weren’t any great wincons aside from boring combos like IsoRev. So I made a hatebears deck with lots of removal, board wipes and counterspells because my commander would be both my draw engine and my wincon so I wouldn’t need to waste slots on that. (Although I probably proceeded to ruin it by running too many Voltron cards that might just be win more, but man giving Ojutai double strike and vigilance is sweet)
Great tips! I do like to think of unconventional builds, but haven't thought of it from this angle, although I suppose some of my decks accidentally accomplish this. It really does make the game more fun to see decks that aren't cookie cutter builds
I just built a budget golgari power matter's deck. I found a couple glaring issues with the deck, with one of them being the commander, Yargle and Multani, was a huge removal magnet. The deck itself lacked defense against multiple attackers, needed haste, and the first 4-5 turns I was ramping and was a punching bag. I hope this video saves this deck. I only play once a week or once evert two weeks, so once I build it and test it. I will let you know if it slaps. Thanks!
One of my decks fits this really well: my Hajar-banding deck. The deck is a pile of legendary keyword soup creatures, land-tutors that fetch the lands that give bands with other legends. Those creatures want to beat down. Hajar just covers up the glaring weakness to boardwipes. (He can beat down and join bands too, but that is secondary.)
You can also use that logic for other games, for exemple in slay the spire you have an artifact called bottled flame that lets you pick an attack that'll be drawn from your deck at the start of each game. You could pick something that helps you develop your strategy like say you got a deck with rampage that wants to play the card a lot because it scales for each time you play it, having it in opening hand is great to start scaling immediately. Or you could pick something like immolate that's a great multi target attack thus guaranteeing you'll get it in your hands for the few fights that require killing a lot of small ennemies quickly. Both can make a lot of sense but patching your weakness allows to build an otherwise extremely focused deck that could have needed some extra redundancy otherwise.
I have a similar golgari midrange deck that instead uses Erinis, Gloom Stalker as commander with Scion of Halaster. Commander and background provides ramp, mill and card selection to turbo into big greedy critters. Love your videos!
my favourite deck so far kind of does this, Maeve insidious singer. it’s a control deck with board wipes that are just bounces a health volume of counter spells and some mana generation as well as some mild synergy with maeve but can function independently (and will breaker + training grounds). control usually gets bonked by aggro at least a little so maeve goads everything that threatens me
Very smart deckbuilding, i have a damia deck focused on milling, reanimating and ramping into battlecruiser cards, the commander has no synergy with the deck itself but covers the issue of lategame card draw allowing me to pack more punch in the 99. Great video, need more outside the box thinking like this in a format dominated by build-arounds, premade decks and edhrec baby food.
I vibe with your style so much. Sort of how i play too. Mid range might be my go to style. Ive built mid range decks in many forms straying off the beaten path of many popular strategies, just to show off my own flavor of deck building. They may not always be the best decks but they definitely garner a reaction of amusement when i explain my strategy to others.
Might have to try looking through this lens as well! I currently have a pet deck built around the synergy of Nissa of Shadowed Boughs (landfall = loyalty counters, but lacks great use for her loyalty) and Kasmina, Enigma Sage (somewhat weaker abilities but lets other planeswalkers use her ultimate to freecast color-matching instants and sorceries straight from the deck). It's super fun to just landfall Nissa to 8+, drop Kasmina, and immediately cast something like Emergent Ultimatum from the deck, even more fun if you get to resolve a Reshape the Earth and stick another +10 loyalty on Nissa in the process to do it again next turn. There isn't really a good "landfall and planeswalkers and big flashy sorceries" commander in those colors though, at least not one that feels especially good to play. But I've never really considered it in the perspective of, what _can't_ the deck do, that a solid commander could cover. Maybe just a nice resilient beatstick is what the deck needs to cover for the fact that the rest of its strategy is simply keeping a couple 'walkers alive and ramping.
I sort of brew Temur Omnath like this, specifically avoiding popular (according to EDHREC) card advantage slots like Tatyova, Benthic Druid in favour of additional ramp pieces. In return, the ramp pieces double as landfall triggers in the late-game, and Omnath's card advantage turns into removal if it itself gets removed. Really love thinking about deck synergy in this way more explicitly though, and definitely gonna start applying it elsewhere (I only just sort of stumbled on it with Temur Omnath cos I just really liked the card art and wanted to figure out how to make a deck work for it).
Awesome approach! This is how my Radha, Heir to Keld beats face - It's a top deck/cascade beatdown fest and she cuts all of those whiffs out of the relevant trigger by starting my curve at 4
I have a combo deck set up like this, Jan Jansen as commander, an infinite non-token/treasures deck build. It works sometimes, but the deck is fun to play.
I have a Lae'zel+Master Chef deck that is designed sort of like this. The +1/+1 counters are used to supplement creature-based ramp, draw, and removal so that they can provide a decent board presence on top of generating value with etbs. Turning Elvish Visionary into a 2 mana 3/3 that draws a card is some nutso value. I run a few obligatory +1/+1 support cards like hardened scales, but I'm not going 100% in on that archetype.
That's funny, the Liesa deck you came to is the same one I did a couple years ago. Mine didn't have enough pieces to keep it consistent though. But thanks for the video, i think it helps identify this direction that I've been trying to go in lately and often did before without giving it a name. Like my scarab god that I've had basically since I've been playing edh is a mill deck that uses him for a consistent piece of grave hate.
Liesa is fun! I took the opposite approach with mine, though. Liesa's biggest strength is getting opponents to low life totals and locking them out of options, so I built the 99 to pressure life totals as quickly as possible. Rarely does a game last long with her in the command zone.
I like that approach too. I was definitely weighing speed vs stax while building the deck and ended up leaning toward stax, but I might retool it at some point to see how it does when pushed in a faster direction.
The lesson I ended up learning is that Liesa is fucked up enough that it doesn't take a lot to push her over the edge. A light voltron theme plus a light aggro theme plus a light stax theme plus a few asymmetrical board sweepers lets her be the star of the show in so many ways at once.
I took her apart, my deckbuilding sucked back then, plus something got messed up and I accidentally only ran 33 lands, making the deck incredibly unreliable. Also, it was the typical life gain theme, which I gotta say, is a total snooze fest gameplay wise. But this approach seems very nice, I love me Aggro, and just building her that way seems right up my alley, and is something that would have never occured to me
this is more or less the mindset i''ve gone with for an esper superfriends deck under nevinyarral urborg tyrant. he's basically a disk that can combo for infinite zombies sometimes so i'm sure i can just run the rest of the deck with no removal since i have an effective one-sided boardwipe in the command zone
Another potential benefit is being able to run specific tech that would normally hurt your gameplan. My Arena Brawl deck using Uro let's me generate a lot of land ramp, so I have less need for Mana Rocks. I can then run specific board Enchantment/Artifact Wipes since my deck is otherwise weak to that matchup without them. Cards like Fade to History then become life saving tools against unfavored matchups or situations that would otherwise call for more than 1 card to handle in the later stages of the game.
Glad someone else builds decks where the commander plays in a wholly opposite direction to the 99! It sounds weird at first, but while trying to build “99 first, choose commander second” I found fun hijinks while being fairly resilient so that someone aggressively removing my commander or 99 wasn’t much a downer on my fun.
I'll definitely keep this in mind when I build my Thalia and Gitrog list. I wanna do +1/+1 counters and she gives me ramp, card draw and hatebear all in one
I run Liesa as a more controlling life taxing deck, with more board wipes than I run anywhere else, and a few convenient pieces like Blackblade Reforged and Astarion’s Thirst that pump her up and supplement my life gain in the process. I aim for casting fewer spells than my opponents need to, with the many board wipes and ability to keep recasting Liesa at 5 a great punishment for anyone who gets too much on the field. Last time I pulled the deck out, I dropped Bloodchief Ascension on turn 1 and it stayed out long enough to be on the board when I Fumigated over a dozen of my opponents’ creatures. I was ahead from there, but Liesa’s life taxing kept people from storming out late game (especially the Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck), and her big old 5 power in the air getting kill shots. I’ve been impressed how much removing her becomes a losing proposition, especially for the player right after me in the turn order who loses a card and some life while their opponents just get a free turn to spam spells out. My most traditionally midrange deck is Rienne, Angel of Rebirth. All the creatures are multicolored, so I play the most aggressive Naya multicolored pieces I can, and all the effects that pump creatures for their colors. Rienne further pumps the team and breaks through in the air as needed, but mostly she works as board wipe protection and allows me to freely trade creatures that I otherwise wouldn’t, knowing they’re likely to come back. There are a couple of sackable creatures she can abuse (Saffi, Dauntless Escort, and Hajar to protect the board, Qasali Pridemage for removal), but they’re tangential. The other Liesa who gives that recursion effect to all your creatures while exiling your opponents’ dead ones is a strictly stronger card, but consistently leads people to sac strategies. I love having Rienne, it’s a little low power but fun to play, and I edit it pretty regularly as new cool multicolored creatures are printed for it. It looks like my most recent additions are Kogla and Yidaro, Ghalta and Mavren, and Ruby, Daring Tracker (who replaced my last single colored mana dork by being much more fun and versatile). I’d been considering building Glissa but wasn’t sure how to do it, this is a cool idea!
I think this idea is why my Yoshimaru/kediss deck is doing well at my LGS lately. I built a rograkh and arden, but turned it into legends matter, and used kediss to fill the hole of how i kill everyone quickly.
Yea i would agree, i like building like this mainly because, anytime i build a deck around a commander i usually gets removed real quickly. So now i tend to build commanders that help my deck or have a lot of utility that i can get out of it
I have one high synergy deck which is dragons with Ganax and Acolyte of Bahamut. Then a zombie deck with Sivris and Feywild Visitor. The deck doesn’t need the commander to function, but it is good value that fits the strategy.
I like to do a similar thing and build with a commander that provides mid to late game card advantage like tasigur, that way my main deck can focus on ramp and midrange-y cards.
a word of advice with tasigur specifically is, while he isn't necessarily high-level cedh worthy, he is still definitely like, really powerful if you have the budget to build him as so, so a rule 0/just general convo with your playgroup before playing him is just to remind them that if you are playing at the mid-level range, it isn't built balls-to-the-wall crazy, because i've had it happen many times where i have mid level decks that just happen to have crazy commanders and i just get targeted every game because of it. i can't count the amount of times i've played like, raffine, which is definitely cedh viable, but been shot down immediately while i'm sitting here like "i don't even own a mana drain dude :("
my deck building process resolves around a win con and building a deck around it. when sword of hearth and home released i really liked the idea of a combat flicker build so took some time and found that it combos with combat celebrant and other similar extra combat creatures. the problem though was i needed haste for it to work. so i needed a haste source, prolly white for more flicker cards, and something aggressive and creature based to get as much punch out of the sword as possible. it didn't take too long since scryfall advanced searches are dope af, but found Samut voice of dissent to literally be everything i was looking for, and even more, because of the double strike, my opponents couldn't even get the chance to kill combat celebrant with damage because it gets flickered when Samut hits with first strike. she also brings haste for the field which works with a ton of awesome creatures, and even mana dorks like selvala pop off when tapping pays for their casting costs. the only problem i ran into was that there wasn't enough creatures at the time to actually support basically haste tribal, using it to maximize flickering tap creatures, and casting ephemerate on combat celebrant for 1 mana extra combat effects. so i took the deck apart for some 4 color background shenanegains. however, kept my eyes open each set till it looked like i could slam it again. and yep it did eventually happen. there was a few good options here and there but when seasoned dungeoneer was spoiled I had to put the deck together because he actually fit the deck sooooo damn well, and now with the new etali, dockside, trumpeting carnosaur, and monogreen ojer, and a bunch of other dope cards the deck is just focused and dope. also got a new samut secret lair that dropped too so eating good for fires samut
I just realized that this is how my reanimator deck is built. The commander is Blex, Vexing Pest, but it casts the backside, Search for Blex. This spell is equal parts self-mill and card draw, and the deck has roughly zero ways to draw cards and three cards that self-mill. This lets the deck be packed with reanimation spells (11) and targets (12) to find with Search. The ideal curve is ramp on turn 1 and/or 2 -> Search for Blex on 3 to put a reanimation target in the graveyard and keep any reanimation spells. And, just like that, there is a big scary on my field on turn 4 :D
Midrange has always been less about synergy of cards and more about synergy of plan. Thoughtseize and Bloodtithe Harvester don't share synergistic traits on paper, but it turns out that a reasonably efficient threat is really good when you've made sure it won't be answered. There is synergy, it's just in how it all fits together. You've demonstrated that principle really well here.
This is exactly how I've approached building my new Child of Alara deck. The shell is the Persist Combo in all five colors, so I can select the mana-cheapest cards for each category and effectively have multiple "playsets" of everything as though it were a Constructed deck, thereby mitigating the need for lots of card draw engines. On top of that it powers hate synergies like Grave Pact and Aura Shards, plus enough slots for 13 Ramp and 7 Tutors. Because I took an all-colors approach with the widest card selection possible, I've been able to whittle the deck down to a very low curve, the three most expensive cards being only 5 mana. The one thing it's lacking, though, is control over threats like Rest in Peace and Grafdigger's Cage. Enter Child of Alara... If the board becomes too spooky, then I can just cast my commander for 5 mana and feed him to one of my 16 free sac outlets, reset everything. That way I don't have to dedicate a good chunk of my deck to Control, and can focus instead on synergy and win-cons.
this video has inspired me to make a WB Scam/Reanimator deck with Kambal as my commander. I've been wanting to make a Kambal deck for a long time because the guy is really good at pulling you ahead from a losing position because people don't notice the small chip damage and then all of a sudden you've gone from 14 life to 40 again. But the problem is, he doesn't really cement a deck on his own besides maybe a lifegain matters deck, which im not a big fan of since there's better WB payoffs for a lifegain deck. but if i was in WB already and needed to think about "hmm, what kind of deck loses a lot of life and resources and could use a little safety cap in the corner to protect your life total?" MY IMMEDIATE thought goes to Reanimator since i watch a lot of Legacy content. and if I'm in WB, this makes me think of Modern Scam with cards like Ephemerate. So instead of being a generic WB lifegain deck, why not build a WB Scaminator deck that evokes threats and then flickers them for extra value, and uses my commander more as just a safety valve for when my opponent's are too aggressive.
I threw liesa in my ratadrabik token doubler deck. I set up a loop where I create a preventative number of zombie 2/2 copies of liesa so that nobody can play spells. Even if they boardwipe, the liesa triggers resolve first, exiling the boardwipe when the player dies before they can even resolve it.
my Awakening the blood avatar deck got way better when i removed (almost) all the sac oulets from main deck, since the sorcery is already the only one i need. the i could focus to strike a balance of only sacs payoffs and token generation. The same was true in my Leori deck, which allowed me to remove almost all the 'good blockers for pw protection' creatures, and then run more planeswalker and voltron equipments to make him a even better defender and attacker.
That liesa example is so good! Build a deck that forces a particular response, helmed by a commander that answers said response! I love it! Reminds me of the fools gurad, in a way.
I don't know, man. It is exactly what would I expect from midrange, it seems pretty bland to me. I once built a liesa deck, and the first thing people asked me at the table was if it was a hatebear deck, because they were thinking of building one. I think this is just the expected direction. "My commander draw cards, so I need to put less card draw in the deck" is a thing I did for aggro, I don't think it has to do with any archetype.
as someone who has built a liesa deck, yeah. mine was kinda half and half hatebears and aristocrats, but honestly with her you're limited to pretty much just those two options. she is fun if you can do something OTHER than that, but considering it's orzhov, that's kinda hard, i've been working on solving that by completely tearing it apart and starting from square one, but i haven't gotten there quite yet
Love this video, but I wanted to ask, how could I implement this and other deckbuilding ideas into the construction of my own custom cards? I'm so entrenched in the Ideology of commander value decks that I've made most of my custom commander cards in that way, but I really want to branch out
I think people intuitively build decks like this already without understanding the tought process behind it. Every EDH deck that is built with any sort of brainwork is basically a midrange deck, since the core concept of a midrange deck is to pick the best indivitual card instead of being linear with an approach. Usually people express these ideas as "Why would I play X when my commander already does that", but this was a good explanation of the idea.
midrange to me is a very fun mix, since I generally shun aggro and love to play the slowest most asshole-ish control type decks, midrange is a nice mix of getting to play more aggressive while still leaving a bit of a top-end that makes me not want to stop playing because I played 4 lands and my deck is done. I will say, I should do this more. I have a few decks where the commander is nice but not really needed, and then my jodah deck... but for the others ive struggled to find a real use for them since making them (in a list, not physically putting all the cards into sleeves, I dont have that many spare copies (or any) of some of the more expensive cards...)
I see my friends biulding decks like this all the time, or just gimmick decks that actually function sometimes and are fun to play against, but i really dont understand how to begin building these decks (or decks in general), im relativly new to magic but i know enough stuff that i coul theoretically build a decent deck but im just really stuck on where and how to begin lmao
This was sort of my approach to my Klothys build. I play a creature lite control deck jammed full of earthquakes. I needed a commander that 1) won't die to my burn and 2) gains me back life over the course of the game so l can end games on a win instead of a draw
Duskana, the Rage Mother does exactly what your Liesa deck does, but think it does it much better while offering more upside. The deck runs every hatebear under the sun that is exactly 2/2. These usually shut down the game. When you run out of cards, and you will, you cast Duskana to refill your hand and upgrade your hatebears into a game-ending force
When you go into detail it's more clear, but I wouldn't say the deck does the opposite of what the Commander do. I'd say it's more about "What role does my Commander fill, so I don't need to put those cards in my deck?" If my Commander ramps, I don't need to draw ramp cards. If my Commander draws cards, I don't need effects to draw. If my Commander is a beater, I don't need beaters in the deck. Since I know I'll always have and replay this certain piece, I just assume I'll have a card that does what my Commander does "in hand".
Do you find that, even with First strike/dt, the draw coming from combat damage on Glissa can be slowed down often if the table knows you're wanting to dig deeper to find large threats? Game memory is a whole other topic but curious on your thoughts here.
Definitely! Usually there will be somebody I can draw a couple cards off of early but yeah sometimes it dries up as people get tokens and etc and the deck has to play with what it's got. Glizzy is still a great blocker so it's not the end of the world, tho the rough games are the ones where I can't find draw from my deck by the time a board stagnation happens. That's been pretty uncommon though, no more than 1 in 10 games.
@@salubrioussnail thanks for the response, that makes complete sense. And luckily on average of decks, board states etc, you won’t really have that many continuous bad games
4 minutes in, that's what i built too for that commander. A bunch of taxing pieces that tell the opponents they either can't do stuff or have to do stuff with a penalty. She even helps with that, and she's often the only creature around with a plethra of board wipes.
I tried doing this with Alela, artful provocateur. Ended up trying to do too many things at once. Maybe will take a step back and reevaluate after watching
I feel like Tryn//Silvar plays well with this theory. Tryn, Champion of freedom is all about go wide human tokens, while Silvar, devourer is an aristocrats voltron beater. If they try to counter going wide, they get beat down with silvar, if they try to counter silvar, they just get overrun by humans. In my deck, silvar is essentially my only way of closing out any games.
Here's a slightly out of date version of Liesa: archidekt.com/decks/4290428/hate_beats edit: here's glizzy, I just added it to archidekt: archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser
that Liesa deck is actually a legit deck that can win games even at high power pods when built right imagine all the hatebears while you have a Serra Angel AND Kambal in the command zone
Yeah that deck was my attempt at making a deck that can hold its own in a higher power game without breaking the bank. Did I built it right? Uncertain, but it has definitely performed pretty decently so far.
@@salubrioussnail well a deck list would help and sometimes you need to tune your hate bears to the pod in some sense but also remember to include some sort of value engine as some stax player forget that it is possible to out draw and out value the stax and claw out a win anyways play it more often with more varieties and see where it leads you
@@wbw911 This was the initial list I built on a $100 budget: archidekt.com/decks/4290428/hate_beats Since building it, I've traded for a couple other creatures that generate cards or other value when my opponents do things (I call them "great bears", as opposed to hate bears) since those are very good but also typically more expensive than a lot of other types of cards. I should definitely experiment around with it though and see what changing up the draw profile does, or trying out a more aggressive or less aggressive creature base.
@@salubrioussnail at first glance looks good for its budget if your pod could take it, aim to close the game faster XD treat stax pieces as counterspells on permanents
It can be done all sorts of ways, but if you haven’t built like this before I’d say start with the commander, and the most common build for this will usually be a commander that draws paired with a deck that runs less draw. Commander as a wincon in an otherwise grindy deck also works, commander as a 2 drop in a deck with otherwise 3+ cost cards works, and a commander as a removal or stax option in a deck that otherwise runs not much interaction works as well, if you want a few more ideas.
@@iv9753 any deck that’s not trying to be anything else will usually be midrangy. I’d identify control decks by their desire to get the game state to a point of stability, combo decks by their constant focus on achieving their combo, and aggro decks based on their dominant focus in making life totals go down. If a deck isn’t laser focused on one of these three goals, it’s probably somewhere in the midrange dimension. Generally midrange decks are mostly creature-based, and look to compete for board presence in the midgame, with the end goal generally being winning through attacks. There can certainly be combinations though-I’d consider my Liesa deck to be halfway between midrange and aggro, and Glissa is a midrange deck with a slight lean toward control.
I think this kind of deck building might lead to a lot of good stuff value commanders. The more generically good your commander is the better this Strat will work.
Oh, absolutely. There's a reason why I specified this being a strategy for midrange decks, because this definitely doesn't work for the large number of commanders that enhance existing synergies rather than performing a more generic role.
This idea had time to develop in my brain a bit. I actually discovered I do this in my mono colored decks quite often and it works absurdly well. This is a really easy way to build decks in my experience because the commander can easily swap out depending on mood, power lvl, etc. great vid btw.
This is kind of what I do with my Olivia Voldaren. She isn't really a good vampire lord anyway, so what I have is a great Rakdos mana sink. One that can usually beat most other commanders after everyone's hands have been nuked So she goes in a rakdos deck full of ways to nuke everyone's hand. The deck is also super ultra greedy with mana, with 50 lands and 10 rocks. Whenever I draw mana and no gas, I always have my commander to sink that mana in and take everyone else's commander's
I'm kind of annoyed because I heard aboot Battlecruiser as a deck type and sought to build one, Golgari is my favourite colour pair, and when looking for a commander I thought (I should just get something reliable to help keep me alive until I can battlecruise people) Long story short, I ALSO built a Glissa Battlecruiser deck a few months ago
That’s funny, it’s a smart plan tho! Most people don’t think to pick a commander for the sake of it being a quality blocker, one of those cases where making a deck choice for a really boring reason is actually cool and unusual.
I think he just Men in Blacked us at the end of the intro. He raises his arm and everything goes white? I should get one of those. Make it a bit easier to win cEDH games, I bet
It’s good. Instead of going “yeah, my commander does X, I’ll make the deck do X too,” you think “My commander does X, so my deck can focus on other things, assuming X is going to be solved for it.”
great video, I am not a native english speaker, so probably it will difficult to understand… I was thinking about create a sram deck using hatebears but protecting them with auras that give them indestructible and protection from a color… u will draw an stop combos or slowing down the table…
That definitely seems like it could be interesting. I will say that while hatebears aren’t necessarily bad with draw (save for spirit of the labyrinth and the like), the playstyle tends to be lower to the ground and more “fair magic” than other sorts of decks, since the most heavy-duty hatebears tend to be the ones that prevent players from casting multiple spells per turn. That said, I could see a deck that plays into that fact, running a lot more instant speed value stuff while relegating your turns to commander + a smaller lineup of bears.
Never thought of deck building like this as I typically create ultra-synergistic engine style stuff, so cool to see a different approach
I feel this
So far you've managed to completely hit the nail on the head with the high level theory in edh. Can't wait to see what you put out next!
That isn't high level theory. That is just normal deck building. The thing is, EDH is pitched more as a casual "Role Play" shared gaming experience more than the most efficient way of winning.
The "point" of EDH was to build deck as though you are that character and what spells they would cast.
@@paulgaither source: made it up
@Leonidous What? Your original comment? My source is literally Sheldon's articles on EDH (Rest in Peace). It's not my fault you are ignorant of the history of the format.
Don't you mean he hit the "snail" on the head?
I'll show myself out.
This is how a lot of cEDH decks work, it seems, I just never thought about it like this. I really like this approach, but I'm having trouble changing my worldview of the format to fit it. I think I'll have to sit on this and slowly understand it more
It's actually even more simple. In cEDH a commander is either a combo piece or a draw engine, since every deck already covers the need for mana with stuff like Mana Crypt and Sol Ring. If the format had worse mana, people might run commanders that dealt with that, but atm there is no need.
Literally every worthwhile cedh deck is either a combo deck that relies on your commander or some kind of stax. Awful format to be honest.
@@franslair2199 That's just not right. There are a lot of combo decks, yes, but aggro has a place in the meta and stax is just control. And what makes control or combo bad? cEDH isn't played with the social rules of casual commander that ensures everyone gets to play their gameplan, it's played to be competitive (like is in the very name). If you don't want to be competitive, that's fine, everyone has preferences, but don't label it objectively bad over your subjective dislike of the way the format works
@@sorin_markov light-paws is considered unplayable dogshit because she only kills a player by turn 2, and only one at a time. Codie is considered mediocre at best because he generally wins by turn 3. cedh is a bad format just like vintage is a bad format. There are good competitive formats in magic like pioneer. Even pauper is a good format despite having access to some of the strongest cards ever printed.
@@franslair2199 Light-paws is bad because of the lack of meaningful interaction in mono-white. Codie is bad because you can't cast permanents. cEDH games don't all end in 3 turns. In fact, most don't. Again, if you don't like higher-power formats, that's your opinion and you're perfectly entitled to it and to not play high power, but lots of people find vintage and cEDH fun
This Is like the basis to build 1v1 competitive commanders(30-25 hp), and it's very rare to see an EDH player to have this good mentality. Well done, really.
cEDH players generally do this.
I love the Diversified Value approach. It’s one of the reasons I continue to champion Karametra for Casual and High Power Enchantress Lists. She gives you lasting power even against Farewell and Cyclonic Rift. Subvert expectations for your opponents threat assessment and grind through the midrange with ease.
See, this is kind of what happened with my goblin deck in a homebrew format. My commander was Krenko, but spamming goblins wasnt enough to be a truly nasty deck. So, I grabbed Iroas, and added him to make my goblins able to swing without fear of dying, while also being a massive chunky boi. Then I was able to add a bunch of white synergy to make my armies bigger all at once and add passive keywords. It came together beautifully and is now one of my most efficient decks, being able to swing fast, and keep up the pace with passive field-wide buffs for long term
I've never actually thought about deckbuilding in this way, and it's giving me thoughts. After playing EDH for about 7 years now, I often reevaluate what this game means to me, how I enjoy it, and how to make it feel fresh. I'm going to keep this in mind going forward.
I wasn't super interested in getting texts to build a mid-range EDH deck when I click on the video but now I want to really really try this strategy.
I love the idea of having a commander that does something completely different from the rest of the deck. I usually build my decks around my commander so heavily that I have to really work to keep them around. Not having to worry about that as much would be great.
I have a deck that sort of falls under this umbrella term as well. It's a Chainer Nightmare Adept build that plays very minimal discard, reanimation, or mill synergies, and instead my commander is used as a wierd Fervor/Tortured Existence type card to facilitate a deck with twenty-ish clunky 4+ mana attackers. As long as I have mana, I'll have acess to Chainer, and as long as I have Chainer I don't need to worry about card draw when I can just rebuy Inferno Titan or Junji every turn by discarding exess lands. Allbeit, I'm still playing Living Death because sometimes you just gotta do it, but apart from that the deck reads a lot differently from other lists.
I would love to see a decklist! Been looking at Chainer for a hot minute
@@jemm113 Don't get any notions that this deck is actually good at what it does though, cause as it turns out playing midrange like this is really hard when half the playing field is more degenerate than you and the other half is just more efficient. Like this deck will very rarely win a race against a dedicated combo deck like selvala, urza, or vito, and will even more infrequently win a punch out against synergy based creature piles like animar, chulane, or generic elf tribal #614
Hey! I also play a big creature, attack trigger based Chainer. It's a super casual list, but a lot of fun!
Thank you for the video, I think this just helped me push through a deckbuilding block!
It's been ages I wanted to rework my Kresh the Bloodbraided deck but just couldn't find what to do about it. Now I'm able to look at it from a different angle, so cheers for that!
That's a really cool approach to building a deck!
It should be obvious, but I surely didn't think about it this way before. So thank you!
I really like that Liesa deck, I basically did the same thing with Dragonlord Ojutai. I love Azorius but there weren’t any commanders that jumped out to me and there weren’t any great wincons aside from boring combos like IsoRev. So I made a hatebears deck with lots of removal, board wipes and counterspells because my commander would be both my draw engine and my wincon so I wouldn’t need to waste slots on that. (Although I probably proceeded to ruin it by running too many Voltron cards that might just be win more, but man giving Ojutai double strike and vigilance is sweet)
Great tips! I do like to think of unconventional builds, but haven't thought of it from this angle, although I suppose some of my decks accidentally accomplish this. It really does make the game more fun to see decks that aren't cookie cutter builds
I just built a budget golgari power matter's deck. I found a couple glaring issues with the deck, with one of them being the commander, Yargle and Multani, was a huge removal magnet. The deck itself lacked defense against multiple attackers, needed haste, and the first 4-5 turns I was ramping and was a punching bag. I hope this video saves this deck. I only play once a week or once evert two weeks, so once I build it and test it. I will let you know if it slaps. Thanks!
Great video, I love this approach. Inspired me to build a new deck, thanks!
One of my decks fits this really well: my Hajar-banding deck. The deck is a pile of legendary keyword soup creatures, land-tutors that fetch the lands that give bands with other legends. Those creatures want to beat down. Hajar just covers up the glaring weakness to boardwipes. (He can beat down and join bands too, but that is secondary.)
You can also use that logic for other games, for exemple in slay the spire you have an artifact called bottled flame that lets you pick an attack that'll be drawn from your deck at the start of each game. You could pick something that helps you develop your strategy like say you got a deck with rampage that wants to play the card a lot because it scales for each time you play it, having it in opening hand is great to start scaling immediately. Or you could pick something like immolate that's a great multi target attack thus guaranteeing you'll get it in your hands for the few fights that require killing a lot of small ennemies quickly.
Both can make a lot of sense but patching your weakness allows to build an otherwise extremely focused deck that could have needed some extra redundancy otherwise.
Nice, I love this way of looking at desk building
I have a similar golgari midrange deck that instead uses Erinis, Gloom Stalker as commander with Scion of Halaster. Commander and background provides ramp, mill and card selection to turbo into big greedy critters. Love your videos!
Liking your videos a lot, cannot wait to see more
my favourite deck so far kind of does this, Maeve insidious singer. it’s a control deck with board wipes that are just bounces a health volume of counter spells and some mana generation as well as some mild synergy with maeve but can function independently (and will breaker + training grounds). control usually gets bonked by aggro at least a little so maeve goads everything that threatens me
Very smart deckbuilding, i have a damia deck focused on milling, reanimating and ramping into battlecruiser cards, the commander has no synergy with the deck itself but covers the issue of lategame card draw allowing me to pack more punch in the 99. Great video, need more outside the box thinking like this in a format dominated by build-arounds, premade decks and edhrec baby food.
I was thinking about building a Damia deck of my own… Any suggestions?
I vibe with your style so much. Sort of how i play too. Mid range might be my go to style. Ive built mid range decks in many forms straying off the beaten path of many popular strategies, just to show off my own flavor of deck building. They may not always be the best decks but they definitely garner a reaction of amusement when i explain my strategy to others.
This is the type of content we need
Love your alters at the end!!
Might have to try looking through this lens as well!
I currently have a pet deck built around the synergy of Nissa of Shadowed Boughs (landfall = loyalty counters, but lacks great use for her loyalty) and Kasmina, Enigma Sage (somewhat weaker abilities but lets other planeswalkers use her ultimate to freecast color-matching instants and sorceries straight from the deck). It's super fun to just landfall Nissa to 8+, drop Kasmina, and immediately cast something like Emergent Ultimatum from the deck, even more fun if you get to resolve a Reshape the Earth and stick another +10 loyalty on Nissa in the process to do it again next turn.
There isn't really a good "landfall and planeswalkers and big flashy sorceries" commander in those colors though, at least not one that feels especially good to play. But I've never really considered it in the perspective of, what _can't_ the deck do, that a solid commander could cover. Maybe just a nice resilient beatstick is what the deck needs to cover for the fact that the rest of its strategy is simply keeping a couple 'walkers alive and ramping.
Great way to build a deck I wouldn't have even thought about
I sort of brew Temur Omnath like this, specifically avoiding popular (according to EDHREC) card advantage slots like Tatyova, Benthic Druid in favour of additional ramp pieces. In return, the ramp pieces double as landfall triggers in the late-game, and Omnath's card advantage turns into removal if it itself gets removed.
Really love thinking about deck synergy in this way more explicitly though, and definitely gonna start applying it elsewhere (I only just sort of stumbled on it with Temur Omnath cos I just really liked the card art and wanted to figure out how to make a deck work for it).
Oh god the snail got a nice beard
I have never seen a player love a deck like you love your Glissa Midrange
Awesome approach! This is how my Radha, Heir to Keld beats face - It's a top deck/cascade beatdown fest and she cuts all of those whiffs out of the relevant trigger by starting my curve at 4
I have a combo deck set up like this, Jan Jansen as commander, an infinite non-token/treasures deck build.
It works sometimes, but the deck is fun to play.
I have a Lae'zel+Master Chef deck that is designed sort of like this. The +1/+1 counters are used to supplement creature-based ramp, draw, and removal so that they can provide a decent board presence on top of generating value with etbs. Turning Elvish Visionary into a 2 mana 3/3 that draws a card is some nutso value.
I run a few obligatory +1/+1 support cards like hardened scales, but I'm not going 100% in on that archetype.
Been loving your ideas on deck building and would be interested to see what you have built. Any chance you got the decklists public somewhere?
That's funny, the Liesa deck you came to is the same one I did a couple years ago. Mine didn't have enough pieces to keep it consistent though. But thanks for the video, i think it helps identify this direction that I've been trying to go in lately and often did before without giving it a name.
Like my scarab god that I've had basically since I've been playing edh is a mill deck that uses him for a consistent piece of grave hate.
Liesa is fun! I took the opposite approach with mine, though. Liesa's biggest strength is getting opponents to low life totals and locking them out of options, so I built the 99 to pressure life totals as quickly as possible. Rarely does a game last long with her in the command zone.
I like that approach too. I was definitely weighing speed vs stax while building the deck and ended up leaning toward stax, but I might retool it at some point to see how it does when pushed in a faster direction.
The lesson I ended up learning is that Liesa is fucked up enough that it doesn't take a lot to push her over the edge. A light voltron theme plus a light aggro theme plus a light stax theme plus a few asymmetrical board sweepers lets her be the star of the show in so many ways at once.
I took her apart, my deckbuilding sucked back then, plus something got messed up and I accidentally only ran 33 lands, making the deck incredibly unreliable. Also, it was the typical life gain theme, which I gotta say, is a total snooze fest gameplay wise. But this approach seems very nice, I love me Aggro, and just building her that way seems right up my alley, and is something that would have never occured to me
this is more or less the mindset i''ve gone with for an esper superfriends deck under nevinyarral urborg tyrant. he's basically a disk that can combo for infinite zombies sometimes so i'm sure i can just run the rest of the deck with no removal since i have an effective one-sided boardwipe in the command zone
Another potential benefit is being able to run specific tech that would normally hurt your gameplan. My Arena Brawl deck using Uro let's me generate a lot of land ramp, so I have less need for Mana Rocks. I can then run specific board Enchantment/Artifact Wipes since my deck is otherwise weak to that matchup without them. Cards like Fade to History then become life saving tools against unfavored matchups or situations that would otherwise call for more than 1 card to handle in the later stages of the game.
Glad someone else builds decks where the commander plays in a wholly opposite direction to the 99! It sounds weird at first, but while trying to build “99 first, choose commander second” I found fun hijinks while being fairly resilient so that someone aggressively removing my commander or 99 wasn’t much a downer on my fun.
I'll definitely keep this in mind when I build my Thalia and Gitrog list. I wanna do +1/+1 counters and she gives me ramp, card draw and hatebear all in one
I run Liesa as a more controlling life taxing deck, with more board wipes than I run anywhere else, and a few convenient pieces like Blackblade Reforged and Astarion’s Thirst that pump her up and supplement my life gain in the process. I aim for casting fewer spells than my opponents need to, with the many board wipes and ability to keep recasting Liesa at 5 a great punishment for anyone who gets too much on the field. Last time I pulled the deck out, I dropped Bloodchief Ascension on turn 1 and it stayed out long enough to be on the board when I Fumigated over a dozen of my opponents’ creatures. I was ahead from there, but Liesa’s life taxing kept people from storming out late game (especially the Rakdos, Lord of Riots deck), and her big old 5 power in the air getting kill shots. I’ve been impressed how much removing her becomes a losing proposition, especially for the player right after me in the turn order who loses a card and some life while their opponents just get a free turn to spam spells out.
My most traditionally midrange deck is Rienne, Angel of Rebirth. All the creatures are multicolored, so I play the most aggressive Naya multicolored pieces I can, and all the effects that pump creatures for their colors. Rienne further pumps the team and breaks through in the air as needed, but mostly she works as board wipe protection and allows me to freely trade creatures that I otherwise wouldn’t, knowing they’re likely to come back. There are a couple of sackable creatures she can abuse (Saffi, Dauntless Escort, and Hajar to protect the board, Qasali Pridemage for removal), but they’re tangential. The other Liesa who gives that recursion effect to all your creatures while exiling your opponents’ dead ones is a strictly stronger card, but consistently leads people to sac strategies. I love having Rienne, it’s a little low power but fun to play, and I edit it pretty regularly as new cool multicolored creatures are printed for it. It looks like my most recent additions are Kogla and Yidaro, Ghalta and Mavren, and Ruby, Daring Tracker (who replaced my last single colored mana dork by being much more fun and versatile).
I’d been considering building Glissa but wasn’t sure how to do it, this is a cool idea!
I think this idea is why my Yoshimaru/kediss deck is doing well at my LGS lately. I built a rograkh and arden, but turned it into legends matter, and used kediss to fill the hole of how i kill everyone quickly.
Yea i would agree, i like building like this mainly because, anytime i build a deck around a commander i usually gets removed real quickly. So now i tend to build commanders that help my deck or have a lot of utility that i can get out of it
I have one high synergy deck which is dragons with Ganax and Acolyte of Bahamut.
Then a zombie deck with Sivris and Feywild Visitor. The deck doesn’t need the commander to function, but it is good value that fits the strategy.
I like to do a similar thing and build with a commander that provides mid to late game card advantage like tasigur, that way my main deck can focus on ramp and midrange-y cards.
a word of advice with tasigur specifically is, while he isn't necessarily high-level cedh worthy, he is still definitely like, really powerful if you have the budget to build him as so, so a rule 0/just general convo with your playgroup before playing him is just to remind them that if you are playing at the mid-level range, it isn't built balls-to-the-wall crazy, because i've had it happen many times where i have mid level decks that just happen to have crazy commanders and i just get targeted every game because of it. i can't count the amount of times i've played like, raffine, which is definitely cedh viable, but been shot down immediately while i'm sitting here like "i don't even own a mana drain dude :("
my deck building process resolves around a win con and building a deck around it. when sword of hearth and home released i really liked the idea of a combat flicker build so took some time and found that it combos with combat celebrant and other similar extra combat creatures. the problem though was i needed haste for it to work. so i needed a haste source, prolly white for more flicker cards, and something aggressive and creature based to get as much punch out of the sword as possible. it didn't take too long since scryfall advanced searches are dope af, but found Samut voice of dissent to literally be everything i was looking for, and even more, because of the double strike, my opponents couldn't even get the chance to kill combat celebrant with damage because it gets flickered when Samut hits with first strike. she also brings haste for the field which works with a ton of awesome creatures, and even mana dorks like selvala pop off when tapping pays for their casting costs. the only problem i ran into was that there wasn't enough creatures at the time to actually support basically haste tribal, using it to maximize flickering tap creatures, and casting ephemerate on combat celebrant for 1 mana extra combat effects. so i took the deck apart for some 4 color background shenanegains. however, kept my eyes open each set till it looked like i could slam it again. and yep it did eventually happen. there was a few good options here and there but when seasoned dungeoneer was spoiled I had to put the deck together because he actually fit the deck sooooo damn well, and now with the new etali, dockside, trumpeting carnosaur, and monogreen ojer, and a bunch of other dope cards the deck is just focused and dope. also got a new samut secret lair that dropped too so eating good for fires samut
this is super cool, i'll try it out
I just realized that this is how my reanimator deck is built. The commander is Blex, Vexing Pest, but it casts the backside, Search for Blex. This spell is equal parts self-mill and card draw, and the deck has roughly zero ways to draw cards and three cards that self-mill. This lets the deck be packed with reanimation spells (11) and targets (12) to find with Search. The ideal curve is ramp on turn 1 and/or 2 -> Search for Blex on 3 to put a reanimation target in the graveyard and keep any reanimation spells. And, just like that, there is a big scary on my field on turn 4 :D
Midrange has always been less about synergy of cards and more about synergy of plan. Thoughtseize and Bloodtithe Harvester don't share synergistic traits on paper, but it turns out that a reasonably efficient threat is really good when you've made sure it won't be answered. There is synergy, it's just in how it all fits together. You've demonstrated that principle really well here.
This is exactly how I've approached building my new Child of Alara deck. The shell is the Persist Combo in all five colors, so I can select the mana-cheapest cards for each category and effectively have multiple "playsets" of everything as though it were a Constructed deck, thereby mitigating the need for lots of card draw engines. On top of that it powers hate synergies like Grave Pact and Aura Shards, plus enough slots for 13 Ramp and 7 Tutors. Because I took an all-colors approach with the widest card selection possible, I've been able to whittle the deck down to a very low curve, the three most expensive cards being only 5 mana.
The one thing it's lacking, though, is control over threats like Rest in Peace and Grafdigger's Cage. Enter Child of Alara... If the board becomes too spooky, then I can just cast my commander for 5 mana and feed him to one of my 16 free sac outlets, reset everything. That way I don't have to dedicate a good chunk of my deck to Control, and can focus instead on synergy and win-cons.
I never thought I'd see my name used an example. LETS GO!!!!
Jetmir is another great hatebear commander, pretty much an overrun in the command zone
this video has inspired me to make a WB Scam/Reanimator deck with Kambal as my commander. I've been wanting to make a Kambal deck for a long time because the guy is really good at pulling you ahead from a losing position because people don't notice the small chip damage and then all of a sudden you've gone from 14 life to 40 again. But the problem is, he doesn't really cement a deck on his own besides maybe a lifegain matters deck, which im not a big fan of since there's better WB payoffs for a lifegain deck.
but if i was in WB already and needed to think about "hmm, what kind of deck loses a lot of life and resources and could use a little safety cap in the corner to protect your life total?" MY IMMEDIATE thought goes to Reanimator since i watch a lot of Legacy content. and if I'm in WB, this makes me think of Modern Scam with cards like Ephemerate. So instead of being a generic WB lifegain deck, why not build a WB Scaminator deck that evokes threats and then flickers them for extra value, and uses my commander more as just a safety valve for when my opponent's are too aggressive.
Another great video
I threw liesa in my ratadrabik token doubler deck. I set up a loop where I create a preventative number of zombie 2/2 copies of liesa so that nobody can play spells. Even if they boardwipe, the liesa triggers resolve first, exiling the boardwipe when the player dies before they can even resolve it.
my Awakening the blood avatar deck got way better when i removed (almost) all the sac oulets from main deck, since the sorcery is already the only one i need. the i could focus to strike a balance of only sacs payoffs and token generation.
The same was true in my Leori deck, which allowed me to remove almost all the 'good blockers for pw protection' creatures, and then run more planeswalker and voltron equipments to make him a even better defender and attacker.
That liesa example is so good! Build a deck that forces a particular response, helmed by a commander that answers said response! I love it! Reminds me of the fools gurad, in a way.
This seems like a really cool idea, it just takes so much more thought than "do the thing lmao"
I don't know, man. It is exactly what would I expect from midrange, it seems pretty bland to me. I once built a liesa deck, and the first thing people asked me at the table was if it was a hatebear deck, because they were thinking of building one. I think this is just the expected direction. "My commander draw cards, so I need to put less card draw in the deck" is a thing I did for aggro, I don't think it has to do with any archetype.
as someone who has built a liesa deck, yeah. mine was kinda half and half hatebears and aristocrats, but honestly with her you're limited to pretty much just those two options. she is fun if you can do something OTHER than that, but considering it's orzhov, that's kinda hard, i've been working on solving that by completely tearing it apart and starting from square one, but i haven't gotten there quite yet
Love this video, but I wanted to ask, how could I implement this and other deckbuilding ideas into the construction of my own custom cards? I'm so entrenched in the Ideology of commander value decks that I've made most of my custom commander cards in that way, but I really want to branch out
Make a Commander that you'd play in a 60 card format, and then try to build a deck around it.
I think people intuitively build decks like this already without understanding the tought process behind it.
Every EDH deck that is built with any sort of brainwork is basically a midrange deck, since the core concept of a midrange deck is to pick the best indivitual card instead of being linear with an approach.
Usually people express these ideas as "Why would I play X when my commander already does that", but this was a good explanation of the idea.
This made me think of Kardur Doomscourge hatebears and I kinda wanna build ine now
midrange to me is a very fun mix, since I generally shun aggro and love to play the slowest most asshole-ish control type decks, midrange is a nice mix of getting to play more aggressive while still leaving a bit of a top-end that makes me not want to stop playing because I played 4 lands and my deck is done.
I will say, I should do this more. I have a few decks where the commander is nice but not really needed, and then my jodah deck... but for the others ive struggled to find a real use for them since making them (in a list, not physically putting all the cards into sleeves, I dont have that many spare copies (or any) of some of the more expensive cards...)
Damn my man is HANDSOME
I’m happy to see I’m not the only monster that build hatebears with Liesa 😈
I see my friends biulding decks like this all the time, or just gimmick decks that actually function sometimes and are fun to play against, but i really dont understand how to begin building these decks (or decks in general), im relativly new to magic but i know enough stuff that i coul theoretically build a decent deck but im just really stuck on where and how to begin lmao
This was sort of my approach to my Klothys build. I play a creature lite control deck jammed full of earthquakes. I needed a commander that 1) won't die to my burn and 2) gains me back life over the course of the game so l can end games on a win instead of a draw
Duskana, the Rage Mother does exactly what your Liesa deck does, but think it does it much better while offering more upside. The deck runs every hatebear under the sun that is exactly 2/2. These usually shut down the game. When you run out of cards, and you will, you cast Duskana to refill your hand and upgrade your hatebears into a game-ending force
When you go into detail it's more clear, but I wouldn't say the deck does the opposite of what the Commander do. I'd say it's more about "What role does my Commander fill, so I don't need to put those cards in my deck?" If my Commander ramps, I don't need to draw ramp cards. If my Commander draws cards, I don't need effects to draw. If my Commander is a beater, I don't need beaters in the deck. Since I know I'll always have and replay this certain piece, I just assume I'll have a card that does what my Commander does "in hand".
This build philosophy was exactly how i made my prosper tome bound the deck isnt even treasure based its artifact/ sacrifice based
Do you find that, even with First strike/dt, the draw coming from combat damage on Glissa can be slowed down often if the table knows you're wanting to dig deeper to find large threats?
Game memory is a whole other topic but curious on your thoughts here.
Definitely! Usually there will be somebody I can draw a couple cards off of early but yeah sometimes it dries up as people get tokens and etc and the deck has to play with what it's got. Glizzy is still a great blocker so it's not the end of the world, tho the rough games are the ones where I can't find draw from my deck by the time a board stagnation happens. That's been pretty uncommon though, no more than 1 in 10 games.
@@salubrioussnail thanks for the response, that makes complete sense. And luckily on average of decks, board states etc, you won’t really have that many continuous bad games
4 minutes in, that's what i built too for that commander. A bunch of taxing pieces that tell the opponents they either can't do stuff or have to do stuff with a penalty. She even helps with that, and she's often the only creature around with a plethra of board wipes.
Cool. Thx.
I tried doing this with Alela, artful provocateur. Ended up trying to do too many things at once. Maybe will take a step back and reevaluate after watching
I feel like Tryn//Silvar plays well with this theory. Tryn, Champion of freedom is all about go wide human tokens, while Silvar, devourer is an aristocrats voltron beater. If they try to counter going wide, they get beat down with silvar, if they try to counter silvar, they just get overrun by humans. In my deck, silvar is essentially my only way of closing out any games.
What is a mid range deck in commander?
Urza chief artificer deck with a lot of hate bears and rocks, removal and tutors!
Honestly I now realize that my titania deck has nothing to do with flipping the commander and just wants to pop off with landfall
can we see these decklists? im curious and like analyzing lists
Here's a slightly out of date version of Liesa:
archidekt.com/decks/4290428/hate_beats
edit: here's glizzy, I just added it to archidekt: archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser
that Liesa deck is actually a legit deck that can win games even at high power pods when built right
imagine all the hatebears while you have a Serra Angel AND Kambal in the command zone
Yeah that deck was my attempt at making a deck that can hold its own in a higher power game without breaking the bank. Did I built it right? Uncertain, but it has definitely performed pretty decently so far.
@@salubrioussnail well a deck list would help and sometimes you need to tune your hate bears to the pod in some sense
but also remember to include some sort of value engine as some stax player forget that it is possible to out draw and out value the stax and claw out a win
anyways play it more often with more varieties and see where it leads you
@@wbw911 This was the initial list I built on a $100 budget: archidekt.com/decks/4290428/hate_beats
Since building it, I've traded for a couple other creatures that generate cards or other value when my opponents do things (I call them "great bears", as opposed to hate bears) since those are very good but also typically more expensive than a lot of other types of cards. I should definitely experiment around with it though and see what changing up the draw profile does, or trying out a more aggressive or less aggressive creature base.
@@salubrioussnail at first glance looks good for its budget
if your pod could take it, aim to close the game faster XD treat stax pieces as counterspells on permanents
Do you have any advice for building a deck like this? Where to begin, ect?
It can be done all sorts of ways, but if you haven’t built like this before I’d say start with the commander, and the most common build for this will usually be a commander that draws paired with a deck that runs less draw. Commander as a wincon in an otherwise grindy deck also works, commander as a 2 drop in a deck with otherwise 3+ cost cards works, and a commander as a removal or stax option in a deck that otherwise runs not much interaction works as well, if you want a few more ideas.
@@salubrioussnail I don't think I've actually ever build a strictly midrangy deck before, any advice?
@@iv9753 any deck that’s not trying to be anything else will usually be midrangy. I’d identify control decks by their desire to get the game state to a point of stability, combo decks by their constant focus on achieving their combo, and aggro decks based on their dominant focus in making life totals go down. If a deck isn’t laser focused on one of these three goals, it’s probably somewhere in the midrange dimension. Generally midrange decks are mostly creature-based, and look to compete for board presence in the midgame, with the end goal generally being winning through attacks. There can certainly be combinations though-I’d consider my Liesa deck to be halfway between midrange and aggro, and Glissa is a midrange deck with a slight lean toward control.
Great video as always
I think this kind of deck building might lead to a lot of good stuff value commanders. The more generically good your commander is the better this Strat will work.
Oh, absolutely. There's a reason why I specified this being a strategy for midrange decks, because this definitely doesn't work for the large number of commanders that enhance existing synergies rather than performing a more generic role.
This idea had time to develop in my brain a bit. I actually discovered I do this in my mono colored decks quite often and it works absurdly well.
This is a really easy way to build decks in my experience because the commander can easily swap out depending on mood, power lvl, etc. great vid btw.
Can we get a list tho? :(
Can I get a decklist for the Glissa deck?
archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser
Alternative title: Why Tymna is OP
Frank decks took a hit after that Staff of Jake ban
I tried building Gihada your way. Im sad i couldnt find any mono white Demons.
This is kind of what I do with my Olivia Voldaren. She isn't really a good vampire lord anyway, so what I have is a great Rakdos mana sink. One that can usually beat most other commanders after everyone's hands have been nuked
So she goes in a rakdos deck full of ways to nuke everyone's hand. The deck is also super ultra greedy with mana, with 50 lands and 10 rocks. Whenever I draw mana and no gas, I always have my commander to sink that mana in and take everyone else's commander's
I'm kind of annoyed because I heard aboot Battlecruiser as a deck type and sought to build one, Golgari is my favourite colour pair, and when looking for a commander I thought (I should just get something reliable to help keep me alive until I can battlecruise people)
Long story short, I ALSO built a Glissa Battlecruiser deck a few months ago
That’s funny, it’s a smart plan tho! Most people don’t think to pick a commander for the sake of it being a quality blocker, one of those cases where making a deck choice for a really boring reason is actually cool and unusual.
Could I get that glissa deck particulars tho? I've been wanted to brew her.
archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser
😮
based
I played glissa sunslayer for a bit I didn't find it to be that good as a commander
I think he just Men in Blacked us at the end of the intro. He raises his arm and everything goes white? I should get one of those. Make it a bit easier to win cEDH games, I bet
It’s good. Instead of going “yeah, my commander does X, I’ll make the deck do X too,” you think “My commander does X, so my deck can focus on other things, assuming X is going to be solved for it.”
great video, I am not a native english speaker, so probably it will difficult to understand… I was thinking about create a sram deck using hatebears but protecting them with auras that give them indestructible and protection from a color… u will draw an stop combos or slowing down the table…
That definitely seems like it could be interesting. I will say that while hatebears aren’t necessarily bad with draw (save for spirit of the labyrinth and the like), the playstyle tends to be lower to the ground and more “fair magic” than other sorts of decks, since the most heavy-duty hatebears tend to be the ones that prevent players from casting multiple spells per turn. That said, I could see a deck that plays into that fact, running a lot more instant speed value stuff while relegating your turns to commander + a smaller lineup of bears.
Can you share your Glissa list?
archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser
So you built a blue deck with Orzhof colors
Link to the glissa decklist?
archidekt.com/decks/5035210/glissacruiser