I love this vid. Windgrace was actually the very first commander deck I built from the precon. And it's still with me up to today. sure I have 2 other decks for him but still. I just love the guy.
This journey was amazing, thank you for sharing! As they say, a commander deck is never finished. I reflected on the journey of my simic deck which bounced around from the myriad of powerful engines from Tatyova which I changed for not being the power level I liked, to Prime Speaker Zegana. I wanted my commander to give me card advantage (I have an aversion to playing a bunch of draw spells and running a commander that draws card gives me an excuse to cut more vegetables). I LOVED the spirit of Zegana as it being this fantastic payoff for playing fun creatures, and I really enjoy +1/+1 counter synergies. However, I found she was too slow, telegraphed, and linear. I recently made the switch from Zegana to Volo, Itinerant Scholar with Master Chef and I loved that shift. I got to keep the counters synergy and run a bunch of creatures. I always loved the menagerie style of deck building, but OG Volo wasn't the payoff I was looking for. I did enjoy the restriction of limiting the variety of archetypes to include, and the book the new Volo adds creates such a fun dorky play experience for all players as I get to roleplay a British explorer documenting the discoveries of nature. Your anecdotes about deck weaknesses really resonated with me. What I learned from my deckbuilding journey was that I really enjoy a self-imposed restriction. Another favorite deck of mine is a blinking Elemental Horde of Notions deck that has the restriction of a Jegantha partner. Now to do everything in my power to avoid turning my dorky legendary good stuff deck into a Jodah deck that will get smacked off the table before I play it.
Welp, this is the most relatable thing I've seen in a minute. I have been on the same journey just with Tatyova mixed in. Titania is my favorite card of all time, such an interesing design.
Thanks for sharing this story, Joey. My most notable deckbuilding journey was going from an Omnath, Locus of Rage deck to my Horde of Notions deck. When I was first getting into Commander, I discovered Omnath and a bunch of red/green elementals I thought were very cool. The deck wasn't bad but I had some trouble finding enough elementals to run. Then some more experienced players pointed out that because I was building Omnath as more elemental tribal than landfall I was losing out on a lot of potential with the deck. So then I shifted it more towards that landfall angle. It was fine but not for me. I wanted to play with elementals for all their varied abilities, and I wasn't really interested in landfall all that much. The other issue was that while Omnath is a fun card, he also made the deck into 'stompy creatures' deck with the 5/5s he was generating, and I had other decks that played in the 'big creatures' space already. I don't remember when I discovered Horde of Notions, but what really got me interested in putting it in the command zone, came with the release of Ikoria and the companion Umori, The Collector. Since many elementals, particularly the evoke ones had etb abilities that could essentially let them fill a 'spells' role in the deck, I thought 'why not just go all in on elementals in lieu of any other kind of spell?' And now I have a deck that I really enjoy.
I am on a similar boat with my Vadrik deck, which currently is a Veyran deck, which then will turn into Anhelo, and from there to Kalamax. The izzet spellslinger core pieces and the landbase allows for the rest to be replaced. I carry the additional pieces all together, in case I wanna switch between the different play strats. Thinking about doing something similar with my Tivit deck, and potentially using it as a Raffine reanimator deck after changing 40% of it. Next on the chopping block are Killian, who is going to turn into Sigarda Host of Herons. Then it's Yawgmoth. It used to be a Tergrid deck that won games but I didn't play many games with her after a while. Now, Yawgmoth feels the same way which is why it will first turn into Braids, Arisen Nightmare and then K'rrik, Shadowborne Apostles. Lastly, Koma, who will turn into Kumena Merfolk.
Gosh Joey, you really opened my eyes here. I came into the world of Magic, specifically EDH, around Ravnica Allegiance set. My first deck was Edgar Markov because Vampires. Edgar was great and still is a great commander but it wasn't what I wanted. A few months or so after Throne of Eldraine came out and believe it or not, I went for Korvold. I immediately thought wow, what a great card to just put counters on for sacrificing things; completely ignoring the fact of how many cards I could and have drawn from Korvold himself. I've gone through many deckbuilding challenges and growth as a player. I know I want to have fun with my friends and it was a slow thing to learn. I still do have Korvold but Edgar turned into Isshin since your fabulous self made an UTA video on him. I couldn't resist. Anyway, thank you for being open about your process as an EDH player and deck builder. You've inspired me so much since I've started watching EDHRECast content.
Thanks for sharing this! It reminds me a bit of a heroes journey tale haha, you start a certain way, wanted to shore up weaknesses, discovered power, lost who you were for a bit but came back and came back stronger, wiser and more empathetic!😁
I wanted to build a Dragons Approach deck in EDH, and started with Magda, as I figured the artifact and dragons approach would feed into the same end goal: make dragons. Found out that Magda was way too powerful with Clock of Omens, and found myself searching for the infinite combo and not the dragons, with dragons approach taking the sidelines. Then I swapped to a grixis spellslinger deck with Kess at the helm, but even with her ability it just seemed so so slow. Then I transitioned to a Kykar Jeskai deck with only like 5 or 6 dragons in the deck with cool ways of layering instants and sorceries to create a value engine - but no combos. This deck is so much fun to pilot and I'm glad I had to jump through hoops to get here. Maybe I'll even get to play it against you in Salt Lake at the Magic Summit!
I've been playing commander since 2013, and I have only ever shifted commanders twice. The first time was with my original commander Crosis the Purger. It was focused on forcing my opponents to discard. As I slowly started to shift the deck to wheeling effects to better bring the pain. I realized Nekusar would be a better commander, so I made the shift. I nvr really regretted that change. The deck just became so much more fun for me. Crosis always felt like he did nothing, but Nekusar, he just enhanced my game plan! The second time was much more recent. My dragon commander of choice was Lathliss Dragon Queen. She was slow to get going, but once she did the deck was a ton of fun. When Myrim Sentinel Wyrm was recently revealed in Baulder's Gate I was faced with a decision. Myrim seemed like a no brainer upgrade to Lathliss. The addition of green solving my ramp problems, giving me access to more playable removal, and the fact Myrim made non-legendary copies of my dragons on ETB rather than simple tokens was insane. This commander would work with all the combos, and interactions I had grown to love with added benefits. After a few weeks of thinking about it I reluctantly made the change. Theoretically the deck should have played the same way as Lathliss, but that wasn't the case. I wasn't having as much fun. At first I didn't really get why, but eventually I realized it had to do with Myrim, and not how the deck was built. Myrim's ability was so much more powerful than Lathliss' ability that it made me reluctant to cast any dragons whatsoever without having Myrim out. It's that tunnel vision that Myrim created for me that made me regret the transition!
Each deck was cedh as stax and casual edh as cheat big dumb artifact creatures in. Each can do it in different ways, daretti wound up being the most enjoyable for me.
Similar journey here, I went Windgrace to Gitrog (I had the same hesitance), to Meren to Mazirek. By the time Korvold came out I also told myself that just swapping sac commanders all the time to the new one had become a bit silly and to be honest Korvold is just way too OP, no fun just like Proshh. I learned from this to play different ways and explore different colours and now I lean heavily into blue which is actually more fun to me.
A great video as always Joey!! I think my weirdest and proudest deck building experience was Zada, Hedron Grinder. She was the first deck I actually built from scratch rather than a precon. I began by following a lot of advice I saw online, but over time and play, I realized i had so much fun with cards like Otherworldly Outburst and Make Mischief that the deck shifted in time to become a weird mono red aristocrat spellslinger that was able to have big explosive turns and enabled odd play patterns. It always feels good to pay one mana and draw 25 cards, couple that with slinging monsters that then break apart into a pair of satyrs, a devil, and an eldritch horror and you've got quite a story to bring to your tables
My first EDH deck was Gahiji, Honored One, trying to do a "forced combat" theme with cards like Hunted Troll and Death by Dragons. I eventually changed to Xenagod because the original deck was slow and ineffective, having never won, or barely playing more than a few spells. It was mostly a pile of Naya cards and although there's something to be said about playing the cards you like, it grates on you when those cards gives you a 0% win rate. This was basically when Commander was first recognized as a format and, although I didn't know what I was doing, the fantasy of being the *master tactician* and controlling the combat step never left. Then Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, came out along with the new Goad mechanic. Xenagod had taken all the "good" cards from my Gahiji deck, but Marisi became the home of all the "give your opponent creatures" cards, now properly supported by a Goad commander who can truly control combat at the table. However, the deck still wasn't clicking; Gahiji wanted a go-wide strategy as much as an "opponents attacking each other" strategy; I still had all these go-wide payoff cards like Titanic Ultimatum and Crescendo of War. Marisi wanted me to replace those with an "evasive creature" strategy. The deck had a better than 0% win rate wich was nice, but I always felt like it was playing against itself, with a mismatch of what the commander wanted to do and what I wanted to do. This leads to Kitt Kanto. She controls combat in a targeted way, is enabled by going wide, basically the best of both worlds. I haven't play tested much yet, but I feel like this is the commander that'll finally give the experience I'm looking for.
I'm glad you shared this deckbuilding journey. It resonates a lot with my experience with Commander, which started with a Korvold deck out of all things! So I feel like I ended up falling on some of the same pitfalls you mentioned, only looking at raw power more than anything. I´ve branched out a lot during these years in terms of commanders and strategies and I'm now at a point where I'm starting to value way more things like whacky themes, politics or unique gameplay patterns. That Korvold deck is now a Henzie deck, by the way. Not a big step down in power, but I make sure I blitz out the most dumb funny big creature that makes me happy, even if it's very suboptimal to do =)
This is a really cool video. Thanks for sharing. I've had a very similar journey with Omnath Locus of Rage -> Lord Windgrace -> Omnath Locus of Rage -> Mina and Denn -> Slogurk -> and finally Titania. I've even been considering returning to Omnath Locus of Rage. I just can't quit that angry green jellybean and his direct damage. I have also had some interesting deck building journey's with my Glissa the Traitor and Lozhan Dragon's Legacy lists.
Ah Joey the heart you have put into this one is amazing. Thank you for sharing, I love your content I really really do but this one is on another level.
Thanks so much for making this video! My recent deck building/updating has made me analyze what parts of EDH I enjoy most and what effects I want in my decks. The first commander deck I built was a Niv-Mizzet, Parun spellslinger based on the Prismari Performance precon. I’ve kept updating the deck and made it a lot more competitive I think, but that’s also come at the sacrifice of fun and janky old interactions and scrambling to find one more draw off Niv.
I can really relate with your story. I also built a Titania deck when she was released. Then, years later, I converted most of that deck into a Prossh (for Jund color purposes, no real alternative at that time), with Omnath, Mina&Denn, Gitrog, our girl Titania etc. And finally I destroyed this deck (and not yet recreated it) as in the end, only the mechanic and interaction of Titania was interesting to me.
Great lessons in here, Joey. It’s really important to prioritize what you love about a commander and/or a play style as opposed to focusing on power. And equally important to prioritize fun for the whole table.
I did the same thing recently turning my own Meren deck into Henzie. Meren just became an oppressive hard to deal with commander that is very resilient while Henzie gives you card advantage and instant value with attacks while leaving you wide open. Some times it’s nice to have a weakness with a deck to make games more dynamic
Er ma gerd, I'm actually in the same predicament right now with my Titania deck! I've had my mind made up to change it to Soul of Windgrace since I've had past experience with Lord Windgrace, but I've had this voice in my head telling me I won't enjoy it as much as Titania. Thanks for this video! I think I'll hold off for now and keep living on the edge with Titania 🤙🏼
I had a similar journey. Started with the Frog, then switched to Windgrace just to try it out. I didn't like that he could be attacked (though maybe I didn't understand that aspect when i built the deck) and I felt like red didn't bring enough to the table. Just made me realize how much I love Gitrog and so i switched back. Slowly Gitrog has become more and more tuned to the cEDH version, but I maintain a "sideboard" that I can swap with the combo elements, fast mana, and tutors so I can play at more casual tables. Great to hear a story like mine from a content creator I respect. All hail the hypnotoad!
I love looking at your old lists. I got into EDH in fall of 2015, and these lists do remind me of that time. How different that format was! And before anyone comes along: No, I didn't say it was better. I'm happy that the curves are lower now, the packages are more efficient now, and the win cons are stronger now. Still. Those were fun times.
I love this video and I can relate to this. My first EDH deck is actually Angry Omnath, and he’s still alive, but the original deck contents are scattered between my two other land decks: Beledros and Slogurk. I tried turning Omnath into an Elemental Tribal deck, but like you said it lost the soul of what I want the deck to do. I love Omnaths churn elementals and burn elementals style of strategy; it’s what got me into EDH and soon I’ll find the pieces to rebuild him better than ever without losing his soul. A+ video
Titania is by far the most interesting mono green commander. If I wasn't a sucker for tribal synergies (I need Risen Reef in that deck!) I would build her ASAP
Nice journey you shared! I got one too when i first plunged into edh world using my friend's deck Ghalta as my firstmost commander. I had so much fun casting a monstrosity so huge that i could trample out any situation i was in. The thing i love it the most is how cheap and fast it could be casted. Even commander tax is not a problem. I was captivated and try to build my own. I tried other deck because i dont want to make something i already played. I thought it was not worth it due to my limited budget. So i came upon my real first commander Otrimi. I had so much fun with him. He hit very fast and hard to block. He did good in 1v1 but in multiplayer, i always lose. His commander tax started out of control on his 2nd cast onward, and i can't aggro anymore. Then i saw someone sold his Xenagod deck and i thought it was good for me. Hard hitting commander that was hard to remove. After few tries, yes he was good. But turned out that i didn't really like him. He went online only from Turn 4-5 and easily got countered. The strategy was summon high impact creature to give iy haste and power like Godo and Moraug. But the deck was not as resilient as i thought. Xenagod was not removed, but my other creature was. I had high risk high return play and i dont like it. I briefly regret my decision to bought him. Them i imagine again more suitable strategy for me. Then i return to Ghalta. Recreate my Xenagod deck for Ghalta and it proved good! I love the playstyle and more resilient than i first thought. I just summoned creatures and quickly put threat on board. I used it many times that my friend frowned when i cast Ghalta. Because my deck could one hit someone if not taken care early. It didnt give me wins, but i still happy with it. Currently my Ghalta deck is disassembled to make room for other green deck. From this experience, i discovered my love for red green color and it stick to me till now.
I just wanted to say you really opened my eyes. When I had gotten into Magic, I had been bullied and if that was the thing that would allow me to get out and be able to get things out of the way. I just wanted to say that this was one of the best times ever, and I love EDH. Thank you so much.
Cool journey, Joey. I'm finding myself going through these 'oh this is better, let's build it' with all the sets of late. I think having a group that is faster, comboey, and a bit moe tuned makes my mind go right to optimization, or winning, rather. So your journey with yoiur same deck is what im feeling with my whole roster, at large. Make something, change it to something new, realize i don't actually enjoy it, repeat. It was great hearing you dial it back when you went back to titania, etc.
I literally did the same journey! I love titania but instead went into angry omnath then into vaevictis asmadi, the dire and which lead to me building my gitrog cedh.
I started Commander much later, but had a similar journey. I got the Windgrace precon, but didn't have a lot of land deck cards yet. I changed to angry jelly bean Omnath landfall, then locus of the roil landfall, now I changed it to a wonky combo deck. I've had so much fun playing it now then I ever did before.
I took the same journey that you did up until you were talking about Korvold. Instead, I had already (at least I think I did ... can't remember exact set release dates) switched to Golos when M20 came out. Everything was perfect, I found the commander I didn't even know I was looking for. I was able to play maze's end, dark depths, field of the dead, bojuka bog, all my fetches, plus all the omnaths, gitrog, tatyova, and lord windgrace all in the same deck. That was the most fun deck I've ever had, then the ban happened and I haven't figured out what to do since. I've been playing EDH for nearly 25 years now and that was the first ban that really soured my mtg experience. I've proxied almost all of the reasonable 5c commanders since and they just don't feel right. I'm going to try the new Soul of Windgrace and see how that goes. Maybe the answer is to just return to Titania where the deck began.
Mine was sort of the same process. LOVE Titania!❤ Went from Titania > Yarok > Gitrog > Korvold > Omnath, Locus of Creation > back to Titania. The other decks provided a lot of insight and were really fun to play. It just seemed when I added a color, it seemed to “dilute” the essence of the deck. Found the same issue with tribal elves as well.
I feel like I'm still on this journey. I first started with a Zada, Hedron Grinder deck, and loved the cantrip replication but wanted some additional resiliency. I added a color and went to a Feather deck, that focused less on traditional Voltron and more along token generation and spell replication with Zada and Mirrorwing. After a time I changed the deck to Kykar, with even more focus on token generation, but now I was having problems mana fixing all the individual cantrips and finding Zada for a finisher. Now I'm prototyping a 5 color Tazri deck with Zada and Orvar as hidden commanders, and I wonder if maybe I should just run it back to Zada for that clear, focused strategy. Zada to Feather to Kykar to Tazri, and now maybe back to Zada where it all began.
I've only done this sort of thing once. My second deck was Teysa Karlov and I got incredibly bored with her after a little while. She got tabled as I built other things. When Commanders Quarters released their budget Alesha I dug up Teysa and swapped her to Alesha. The deck was so much more fun. A year or so after that Extus got spoiled. For Mardu Aristocrats he was better in every way. I got Commander synergy from Sign in Blood, not Reconnaissance. It turns out Extus was exactly what I wanted. It's easily my most played deck and I love it. But I have taken out all of the tutors and combos and play a "fair" 2.4cmc, blisteringly fast aristocrats deck these days.
I've had a similar experience with my artifact deck. When I first learn how to play Magic colourless artifacts really drew me in. When I bought a booster box of Mystery Booster after learning about commander, I pulled a Sen Triplets. I thought they were really cool due to being them selves an artifact, and giving me access to some of my favourite colours. So I built a really bad Sen Triplets artifact deck. But I soon realised that nobody liked playing against that deck. I had always loved the idea of playing a colourless deck, so I build a Hope of Ghirapur deck. It basically just had a bunch of mana rocks and equipment so that my thopter commander could kill everybody. But I always ran into the problem of that deck not really having much staying power and card advantage. At this time I was starting to get more into obscure commanders and deck building, so I built a Tiana, Ship's Caretaker deck, to play this sort of control/voltron sort of deck with lots of pacifism effects. I liked both of these decks, but both still had their shortcomings. So I actually split Hope of Ghirapur into two decks. The artifact portions of the deck landed themselves into my Sharuum the Hegemon deck, which used my old Esper mana base from Sen Triplets. The voltron equipment sort of parts of Hope Of Ghirapur and my Tiana deck ended up in my Wyleth deck. This was right after Wyleth came out, I felt that his insane card advantage was something I was really missing. I had these decks each for more than a year I think. But after a while, both also had their problems. Sharuum was the deck I was always tinkering with. As it was 3 colours and Sharuum's ability was generically good to artifacts, I would just play whatever Esper artifacts I wanted to. But at some point I learned how to do Sharuum's combos, and they were the most fun thing to me. To have a grand machine where all pieces had to be moving perfectly to work, where the commander was the central piece. It was a blast. Though after time the deck started to lose its identity. I didn't go full into the combos, but they would come up often enough to where my playgroup was aware of how powerful the deck was. On the other hand, I was still playing all my favourite big mana rocks and other artifacts that were still there from when the deck was Sen Triplets. Once I digitally recorded all of my decks, I realised how throughly confused my Sharuum deck was. But at this time, I had started brewing and building many more decks, and had become good at finding a focus for my decks. It pained me to admit to myself, but Sharuum wasn't a deck that I felt represented me anymore. It had been my longest standing deck. I took it apart. I also took Wyleth apart. I don't know, something about him just got boring after a while. At least with Sharuum, I would see different cards and probably win unexpectedly and still have a good game. But Wyleth was extremely consistent. He had good mana, a really focused wincon, and impressive card advantage. But nothing about him surprised me anymore. Once the novelty of a high-advantage voltron deck wore off, he just became stale. The cards I used in my Wyleth deck are currently unused. I really want to try building Boros again in the future, but no Boros commanders are really doing it for me currently. The cards from Sharuum have found themselves in my New Tameshi deck. I wasn't sure what route at first I wanted to go with Tameshi. And since I was so nostalgic to my Sharuum deck, I spent ages trying to get the exact gameplay Ideas for that deck to feel as "me" as possible. I settled on artifact creature aggro. although, this deck does have a quite high density of enchantments, much like my old Tiana deck. I've only really just finished conceptualising my vision for this deck, so I haven't had much play experience with it. I'm looking forward to seeing if I find that I'll really enjoy it. At this stage I am basically restarting my archive of commander decks. All of my current decks are less than a few months old now, and I, and a mad deck-builder, am always looking for weird decks to rock up to game night with. I'm currently wielding: Tameshi, Reality Architect Wyll, Blade of Frontiers + Passionate Archaeologist Jacob Hauken, Inspector Esix, Fractal Bloom Kodama of the East Tree + Ravos, Soultender Jetmir, Nexus of Revels (Mainly my GF's deck) Sheoldred, The Apocalypse If you've read this far, thanks! If you are still at all interested, you can see my ideas and lists on Moxfield: www.moxfield.com/users/Library_Speaks_Volumes
I had a somewhat similar journey. Where my first deck was Karador, and I got hooked on dredging, KotR, and other cool land shenanigans, Eldritch moon came out, and I immediately went full gitgrog. I kinda got tired of winning, and everyone played kinda resignedly, so when red came out with cavalier of flames, I knew that switching to windgrace would be everything I wanted. Now I get to play all the cool red cards like Cav of flame, Omnath, Anger, and KESSIG WOLFRUN.
my deck building journey has spanned my whole time playing since starting in 2020, my first deck was eldrazi because I didnt know what color to approach or how to approach them so decided to do away with colors all together, at first it was eldrazi tribal playing basically all the ones that had some form of utility but at some point I was introduced to my very first infinite combo with top + forge + helm of awakening and tried to build around getting to that combo + infinite mana and for awhile I was really fascinated with infinite combos or explosive interactions alongside with trying out different tribes like dragons, vampires, and slivers all of which I found infinite combos within which made me more interested. I think people started recognizing my pattern before I did that at the core all my decks were the same thing; play draw stuff + mana stuff to go infinite in multiple ways and win. None of these decks REALLY had their own identity and I started to look into other ideas or commanders with unique abilities such as Obeka, Aegar, and Tovolar, the latter 2 I dont play anymore and Obeka took several revisions across months to actually find a version that actually works and doesnt feel like a cheap gimmick. Over time I found my true niche is within Reanimator, at first I tried dimir reanimator with Tormod + Rameriez partners but it was a really 50/50 deck if it would work at all and when it did work it was from a gravecrawler infinite and otherwise did very little else. I learned a lot over 2 years I would discover simic is broken and Aesi isnt meant for casual play, any strategy even energy can work in commander though some ideas work less well than others and it's important to recognize when something just doesnt work well enough, some decks are too good for casual play but not good enough to fight the whole table yet not good enough for cedh and a deck being stuck in that awkward area can be tough to work around, recognizing when your deck is cedh or a very high 8 / 9 is also super important, it's fine to love those sorts of decks but to know when to keep them off the table or when to bring them out. Going back to reanimator though, that was definitely the niche I needed to find, it's definitely the way I enjoy playing and I still find neat ways to implement explosive combos or infinites from time to time and other times I just enjoy games where my deck has strong enough value to win without combos but just great synergy and interactions like my Old Rutstein deck, I couldnt find a golgari commander I liked but I wanted to make golgari so I picked Old Rutstein since he gives me a tiny bit of value every turn but I dont need to build around him, this has become my favorite deck because I can truly build it however I want because the 99 is more valuable than the commander in this scenario. I do still try other ideas from time to time like I recently built a Roon blink deck and a Koma deck that plays all ramp spells and removal since Koma makes my creatures for me, instead of a creature lineup I play polymorph and a handful of really explosive creatures like blightsteel and craterhoof, it's a really fun idea in theory but the OP of Koma and Simic in general tends to overshadow the creative approach I made when building it. At the time of writing this I have 15 decks put together having made 33 decks in the last 2 years and it's really neat to look back and see how my deck building and playstyle have grown and evolved over time and how I continue trying to find neat ways to implement reanimator themes and combos into the decks I build
The big thing I have taken from this was learning about the type of player you want to be through the types of deck that you build and play. It becomes more obvious if it’s decks that one has changed rather than just different decks.
This reminds me of the journey I went on with my Pir and Toothy deck. I originally started with Toothy in my Locus God deck 4 years ago when I didn't know about the partner mechanic (I was new to the Commander format and hadn't played Magic for almost 20 years). I looked it up and became excited to make a Pir and Toothy deck. I liked it a lot at first but then Volrath came out and I thought that made more sense to make since I'd then have access to black. I kept Volrath for about half a year until I decide to go back to Pir and Toothy. Then earlier this year I decided to try something new and made Chulane the commander of the deck which gave me access to the white counter cards and I liked it a lot too...but something still didn't feel right with it and I think it was having the 3 colors instead of 2. I was having less fun because I always needed a certain color more than others in different games and that caused me unnecessary frustration. I recently decided to go back to just Pir and Toothy and couldn't be happier with that decision. Plus they have the new Secret Lair cards of Pir and Toothy coming out which are adorable and I definitely ordered them. I'm happy I went back to Pir and Toothy because that was my first deck I built by myself without the help from friends. Feels good to have my partner commanders back in the command zone where they belong.
My weirdest deckbuilding journey was probably my FIRST deckbuilding journey. Having just gotten into Magic (and Commander) in 2013, I immediately fell in love with Landfall as a mechanic and started putting together a list of the coolest cards in the archetype. Many of which just happened to already exist in the just-released Marath and Prossh decks. Lacking any other decent (and decently priced) alternative, Prossh helmed the deck. The Shattergang Brothers did get to step in for a while, but everyone in the play group hated having to constantly sacrifice things, and that's fair. I kept finding neat synergies to that I could improve on, though, and eventually the deck morphed into half-Landfall, half-sacrifice combo with Ob Nixilis, the Fallen there as a payoff for a Bloodghast + Perilous Forays + Lotus Cobra loop. It was a mess, and I did eventually disassemble the deck in 2016. I still love Landfall decks, though, and if I can find the time and focus I'm sure I'll end up with at least four of them in different color combinations. I already have a Naya deck thanks to Obuun, and would like to build a Soul of Windgrace (Jund), Yarok, the Desecrated (Sultai), and a more aggro-focused Radha, Heart of Keld (Gruul). Possibly even a mono-green Titania deck featuring all three of her incarnations.
this is by far the best deck building video !!!...I think that this is the main reason why the lgs environment is less appealing to others due to the fact that most decks just run the same most powerful cards and just try to make the others most misreable with their "lose your fiends" decks...this state of mind of yours when deck building seems to best and intended way to build for commander..I share your opinion on the subject and hope others do too and that we can bring back the fun in edh before caring about winning first
Loved your admiration of Magali's artwork. She's one of a select few artists in our fine game who can make me interested in playing a card merely by virtue of her artwork. Anyway, back to turning my Nekusar deck into a Queza build. Edit: Also super into your points on empathic play. Teaching new players recently has really reminded me of the value of letting others experience those big plays/cool synergies on their own terms.
Loved this video! I currently have been working on morphing my Ghave -> Yoshimaru/Reyhan and Kamahl/Prava! The thought behind it was that while Ghave is a fine token commander, what I really enjoyed about the deck was the tokens. From boiling that down, I discovered I really want to build Kamahl/Prava to be more "go-wide" and then split of parts from there for a different "go-tall" deck. I also have a Soul of Windgrace deck brewing with many of the elements you talked about XD. Baba Lasanga would actually be a great fit (considering Braids Arisen Nightmare shenanigans)!
As somone who's introduction to magic was the windgrace commander deck landfall has been my favorite theme in the game. I resonate a lot with the themes of this videos haha
My decks usually have a pretty short shelf life, but I guess I do have one journey that kind of fits this theme, although it was more about maindeck changes than commander swaps. In 2014, I built a dredge-based deck helmed by Karador. The premise was mainly just to dredge a lot and play out of my graveyard. The first version used too many cards that were what I would have used in Legacy, and didn't really scale well into EDH. This shifted into a more streamlined Karador deck that did a lot of what I'd originally wanted to do, quickly shifting into a deck that could play out of my graveyard consistently. By the end of 2014, I found that the payoffs were too slow and retooled the deck extensively yet again, this time removing most of the cool oddball stuff I thought would be fun (Ashen Ghoul, Liliana of the Veil, etc.) and focusing more on giant graveyard stuff like Nighthowler and Lord of Extinction. This third version of the deck gradually evolved and was my default EDH deck throughout 2015. In 2016, I added a newly released card to the maindeck and it sort of warped the whole list around itself: The Gitrog Monster. At first, this was very much a Karador list that just featured The Gitrog Monster. But the Monster was so good that each new change I made just kept leaning more into it. In 2017, Protean Hulk was unbanned, and the deck incorporated it. In 2018, it dawned on me that my dredge-themed Karador deck had shifted into a more streamlined reanimator deck, then into a a kind of graveyard-size-matters deck, then into a Gitrog deck, and finally into a Pattern-Rector deck. I optimized the Pattern-Rector version of the deck, then converted the whole package into a deck for the Canadian Highlander format. I thought this was the end of the line, but I wound up focusing on other decks in Canadian Highlander and reassembling the EDH deck. Dissatisfied with Karador and increasingly impressed with the Gitrog + Dakmor engine, I swapped commanders to The Gitrog Monster. By I'd adapted my Gitrog dredge deck to serve as a cEDH deck. It stayed that way into 2020, when I attempted to bring it back to a more casual power level, more focused around lands (no Dakmor Salvage) and Titania. This deck probably wouldn't have lasted even without the pandemic, but either way, it was short-lived. I reworked it again in 2021, this time as a $100 budget Gitrog deck. I quickly tired of maintaining a budget list, so the deck was shelved. And then this year, I contemplated a return to Karador. In the deckbuilding process, I did make a return to the Pattern-Rector archetype, but decided that Nethroi was a better commander for me than Karador. This time, there's no Gitrog package. Although The Gitrog Monster dominated this particular Ship of Theseus for most of its existence, I certainly don't consider it a false start or mistake. Rather, I learned that the particular gameplay of Pattern-Rector was something that I really wanted to have and wanted to bring to EDH. I'll probably build a Gitrog deck again some day, and I could quite possibly settle on a different commander for the Pattern-Rector deck (Nethroi is good, but you never know).
Definitely the most interesting commander deck transformation that occured for me, was moving from Lathrill into two separate decks (Skullbriar and Iname), then Skullbriar turning into Ezuri,, and finally Ezuri turning slowly into Titania (I am still in the process of transforming the deck.) During Kaldheim when Lathrill was revealed, I immediately started putting my bin of elves to good use, and I slowly started crafting a deck more high budgetted deck (for me at the time). But I, being me, have a strong aversion towards popular commanders, so when Lathrill exploded in popularity, I lost all interesting in playing the deck, because it wasnt that unique, it didnt have its own spin, and it was just a bunch of staples- which is fine, I just like having a level of uniqueness to my decks, so each game against new opponents, they see what my creativity can truly bring. Anyways, I didnt want to just dip out, because I spent a pretty penny on the land base, along with cards like hours of devastation, ad nauseum, and I just ADORE skirge familiar (and everything that three card combo stands for!), so I swapped the commander for Skullbriar, I kept the elf theme, but I replaced much of the sacrificing and Aristocrats theme with counters. All of the powerful black cards slowly sifted into a commander deck (A deck that I had no intention at the time to spend a lot of money on) was Iname, Death Aspect. And during this time CEDH really interested me, however I have a highschooler’s budget, so my solution to keeping a low mana cost for a Ad-Nauseum deck was to just remove as many cards as possible from the deck, and only have combo pieces. So, I added like 25 spirits, all of which was just fodder for my commander to remove, leaving me with a much higher chance of getting the singular combo-piece. Of course, I built that deck roughly 2 years ago, and its transformed focusing far more on a more casual agenda. Because after a while I just realized I didnt have the budget (and I dont like proxying) for CEDH. So, I thinned the count down to just 13 (The 13 best spirits imo), focusing far more on graveyard shenanigans. And I am still making minor edits to it till this day; trying to just decrease the overall mana cost of the deck. anyways, that was one side, the other side (the elf side) of the Lathrill deck encompassed into Skullbriar. And it was good, it did its job well. However, I just, it felt boring. It was always the same. It just ramped out, buffed the commander, swung a few times and I sacrificed Skullbriar to draw a bunch of cards. And it got boring. So, I decided to swift heavily to Simic after I cracked a misty rainforest in a MH2 pack. The new deck was the experience counter Ezuri, and its good. It’s too evil though, because it focused on elf-ball, I decided to give it a side plot of Permanents-only for Primal Surge, along with a bunch of infect to distract my opponents with. and it works well, at the time it was my most powerful deck because it could just insta-win. But after a while, and a lot of like “Dang this commander is just not *unique* enough” (because everyone has seen a elf-ball deck, everyone has seen a primal surge deck, everyone has seen a infect deck), this simic deck was just a bunch of powerful themed stitched together. Anyways, I eventually just stopped playing with the deck. Because it wasnt interesting, it was just boring value. It didnt even have the risk of life-loss value like skullbriar. There was no risk with the deck, there was no uniqueness, there was no *jank*. Which is why now, there has been a slow exodus of cards from my simic deck into a slowly forming Titania deck… My only issue is I feel like Titania is too powerful on its own, but I still want a mono-colored commander that likes land sacrificing. Also Copper Angel is a pet card of mine and i want to throw it in SOMETHING. thats my rant for the day; thanks for reading!
I feel this so hard. I built a Jarad EDH deck that was basically a combo deck, which I expanded into Leovold when he got released, then into Muldrotha Graveyard Ramp after Leo got banned (rightfully so), then I switched to Windgrace when that got released. And Windgrace himself has gone through many iterations. I've switched from ramp into big spells to manland aggro to...the normal Windgrace build you normally see. And I've been thinking of taking him back to manland aggro.
Saw the thumbnail and realized!”I have all those cards in a deck!! Can’t wait to see what you end up doing with it”. I ended up settling on a lord windgrace self land destruction (but ofc I can point it at opponents but only if I need to)
Started playing EDH in 2015 with Feldon artifacts/reanimator and loved getting massive value/damage out of unorthodox reanimation targets. I then changed it to Alesha because she helped me figure out some stuff gender-wise, but I couldn't find a build that felt as fun as Feldon. I tried out Olivia, Mobilized for War, which was super explosive with giant reanimated threats, but felt too linear. The parts from the previous decks made their ways into Slobad combo, Yahenni control, and Mono-W Anafenza blink. I eventually went back to Alesha with the release of Modern Horizons 2. Graceful Restoration helped me refocus it into what is now my all-time favorite deck, one now built around Reveillark and Restoration as much as it is around Alesha. And with several new ways to generate value (ex: Jaxis and Ardent Elementalist) and damage (ex: Embodiment of Agonies and Quintorius), it's finally recaptured what I loved about Feldon to begin with: repeatedly reanimating weird cards that do more work than people expect
I’ve made about 6 versions of shadowborn apostles now. Initially inspired by that old game knights video before realizing it wasn’t as fun. After many many iterations I’m currently at a rakdos partner companion list and it’s really fun. The deck helped me learn that you can still keep Things interesting even with extreme restrictions, and that just because one version of something is more visible or popular, doesn’t guarantee it’ll be enjoyed
I went on the same jurney with titania accepted I also tried playing with tatiova in the mix for 5-6 months and every time I go back to the titania build because as you said high risk high reward. I love the all in way she plays
A single minute into the video and I'm laughing at the similarities between Joey and I. I also started with Titania and progressed the same route he did although I skipped Windgrace and went back to Titania before jumping to Golos.
100% Agree. The Titania to Titania Pipeline is real evidently. It can't be coincidence. I went Titania -> Omnath -> Azusa -> Gitrog -> Windgrace -> Titania. Edits - I forgot Slogurk and Tatyova.
Oh man. This journey started as the Roon of the Hidden Realm Precon, which was my first commanded deck ever. First it was Roon, Then it was a really aggressive Derevi blink, flyers deck. That became 2 decks. Edric (which is still Edric) and Roon blink. That deck became a Brago deck which was quite oppressive. That deck eventually became unfun and I radically changed it into a 5 color Niv-Mizzet reborn all creatures blink deck. That deck was fun, but it stumbled a lot. When Omnath locus of Creation came out, I subtracted black from the to get Omnath in the command zone. After that we trimmed red to get where we are today. The present deck is a chulane deck that actually has Roon in the command zone and chulane in the 99.
Casting a X=10 commune with lava in a omnath locust of rage deck is my favorite thing to do. Playing lands from exile, hand, top of library and the graveyard
I had a similar situation happen to me with a casual historic deck I tried to make back when Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths came out. See, I love "Nethroi, Apex of Death" and I was certain that he would be a great key piece to a graveyard-based deck which would mill itself then slam Nethroi for a big attack to win games. However, nothing I did really worked as well as I wanted it to. I built the deck and pulled it apart several times, trying to add in other graveyard lovers like "Fiend Artisan" and "Death's Oasis". I even tried adding blue so I could use "Titan's Nest" and "Brokkos, Apex of Forever", but to no avail. It wasn't till Innistrad: Crimson Vow came out with some new golgari cards that I solved the equation. See I wanted to make a "Meren of Clan Nel Toth" deck, which obviously uses cards like "Demon's Disciple" and "Plaguecrafter". I then realized how well those cards work for fueling Nethroi. Combined with something like "Tergrid, God of Fright" and self-millers like "Glowspore Shaman" and "Stitcher's Supplier" meant that 2.5 ish years later I finally assembled a deck that captured the essence of what I was trying to achieve. Hey Joey Just wanna say I love the videos! Always a great mood-lifter and a great inspiration! Keep it up and I look forward to the upcoming vids!
I love adding a bunch of board wipes into Omnath Locus of Rage, swing in with the team then wipe on the second main phase. You can do a ton of damage in one turn.
I didnt switch commanders, but fell love with deck and began constantly upgrading. I started with a budget version of Ayula, Queen Among Bears. I loved the puns and the challenge of making such a limiting tribal deck. Then i went heavy into the protection route, then made the deck more universal. Followed by adding more changelings/shapeshifters (thats when a good chuck got printed). I then took out some of the changelings worrying about having to many not true bears. That lands where i am at now, going with +1/+1 counters while maintaining the lethal commander damage queen pressure, but expand into a better multiplayer game. Im currently trying to figure out which way i should do card draw wise, tossed between three cards riskar's expertise, return of the wildspeaker, and greater good. So im ever evoling with my favorite deck.
I had a somewhat similar experience with a deck. It started as a pestillence themed Kazarov, Sengir Pureblood deck. It was a little clunky with many pieces and a 7 mana voltron commander, but I enjoyed the theme and a subset of "donation" cards I ran such as Varchild. This led me to split it into two decks, a pestilence Kresh the Bloodbraided deck that got extra utility and combo potential from the green enrage dinos and a Thantis the Warweaver group hug/slug deck. Unfortunately the kresh deck was still really clunky and people REALLY hated forced combat so I dropped both decks for a few years. Then recently with Capena came the Kitt Kanto precon and I shifted into that. I got to run all the fun donation cards in gruul I liked, but with the better pillowfort and combat wincons from white compared to black and all the more modern goad cards. It has some of the same inherent pushback from playgroups as thantis, but it's a little more proactive and working a little better because of it.
Just to share some similar history that could be helpful for somebody: I start in 2018 building an Ur-dragon deck because I love dragons! so I put all the dragons I loved by that time, the 3 color dragons, the old kamigawa dragons, and tarkir dragons...The time passed by while new and more powerful dragons were released...My deck was updated little by little untill it became a high efficiency player-killer, with a lot of haste, double power and double strike dragons. I realized that the deck was not as fun for other neither for me as it was at the beggining, it had lost it's soul and purpose. I realized that what I was looking for the deck was: thematic building, meaningful creatures at an emotional level, cohesive art; over efficiency or power. So I decide to gather all the 3 color dragons, all the 2 color dragons , all red and all white I like and build a modular deck. Now I just change the dragons between games to any of this modules (3, 2, red or white drsgon module) to play a thematic, cohesive and superfun dragon deck!!!
My current gruul omnath deck went on a journey as well. It started as a Zozu the punisher from the prof deck and people just hated me out of games. I turned it into Torbran "dwarf tribal" and surprise all dwarves blow up lands. I realized after a while what I really wanted was a group slug deck and I switched it to a Kloyths deck and added classic stax pieces like trinisphere, smoke, and choke. I really needed a way to finish out games and omnath just made sense, i could still have the game slug away until i had enough lands, and then enough 5/5s to win.
I just built a baba lysaga deck because of your videos, Joey, and I really enjoy it. I had almost all the pieces and hadn't really enjoyed a landfall strategy before, even though in theory it's all pieces I like. I tried a Tatyova Benthic druid deck, but it was honestly too good. Getting the automatic draw and life gain from lands just made it too easy to go hog. I had the whole table gunning for me and board wiping multiple times and they couldn't stop me because I had so many cards and so much land. I took that deck apart after that one night because it didn't feel like a challenge. It almost felt like I was cheating, or everyone else was playing with one hand tied behind their back. Baba Lysaga though, feels a lot more like a puzzle to solve. What do I play and what do I sacrifice? How do I maximize what I get from the cards in the deck? In Tatyova, I could throw in basically any green good stuff cards, and it was fine. In Baba Lysaga I have to think a lot more, and that's fun.
Great stuff, Elementals are my favorite tribe and about four years ago I built my first 5c elemental deck trying to go all out, it was not great lol, It has since went down too Grul, up to Temur, then to 4c, now back to 5c ( Esika/Bridge ) 😂. I totally get the feeling, I have poured my heart and soul into this one deck…
Found this quite interesting. I never do this, I tend to start from scratch. I like Spellslinging decks, but I didn't evolve Mizzix into Kalamax. I'd just stopped playing the one, and then restarted with another. I'm working on two others, Elminster and Anhelo, and both are not the same.
I've been going through a very similar situation since 2017-2018. My first ever deck was Gishath, and I still love that deck, but after a while I wanted to branch out and try a stompy deck that wasn't tied to just one creature type. I actually cut a color and went Gruul with Ruric Thar, and it was a blast. As it turned out, I'm incredibly indecisive, so I had changed the deck so many times basically any time I saw a shiny new gruul commander that piqued my interest. Ruric, Nikya, Grand Warlord Radha, Xenagos, Raggadragga, Tovolar, Etali, Karlach/Outlander, Wulfgar, Minsc&Boo, Anzrag, Neyith, Agatha, Klauth, Halana and alena...twice... Yeah, it was a mess. The worst part was that every time I swapped the deck, there were a ton of changes I needed to make to prop up the specific commander. The one I settled on for the longest was Xenagos, and I still love that version of the deck the most I think, but it had gotten a little too optimized and cutthroat for my liking. While that's mostly my own fault, there have been so many brutally efficient creatures that can basically just end the game with one or two xenagos triggers that I felt like he was a bit too much as a build around for my favorite casual games. It felt like the "Soul" of the deck, for lack of a better word seemed to be slipping away from me. I know I loved big dumb creatures and aggro-ing out the table, but I wasn't really finding a commander that spoke to me, or narrowing down which one spoke to me the most. Recently, however, I asked myself a very serious question. "Why not run all of them?" So my Gruul deck was born lol. The deck right now is focused on Power Matters, and is full of big threats and ways to increase/double power, and a ton of my old commanders still fit in pretty well to that particular strategy. The only change was that I'm no longer hyper-focusing on one specific commander. The deck will still do its thing regardless of who's in the command zone, so it puts less pressure on me to optimize or build around a specific commander. Now I can swap out the commander on a whim, to slightly change the play pattern, but still keeping the "Soul" of the deck alive. It really opened up my eyes to the fact that I loved making ridiculously large creatures, and I still love big stompy, but I didn't want to hone in on one specific legend. It also gave me a lot of insight into the power level that I like to play at, and helped me tweak the power level of the deck to make me more comfortable playing it. It also opened my eyes to the advantages of playing a deck that is less reliant on the commander. Regardless of who's in the command zone, the deck is still gonna stomp all over everyone. On top of all that, it lets me play all of the fun and cool Gruul commanders without having to pigeonhole myself into just one!
I had gruul rocks and golems (Toggo and Ich-Tekik) which was amusing but the slowly building up golem tokens was too slow, then I made "Is it rocks" with Toggo and Esior which was a rock-token (as opposed to all artifact tokens) deck with Mechanized Production and a couple of Rise and Shine effects and things like Ghirapur Aether Grid. Turns out that was really unfocused so I updated that to a more control oriented build (I pulled a mana drain from double masters >.>) that just focused on Mechanized Production as the primary wincon. The control part worked, but after going through more than half the deck without finding Mechanized Production, my friends were not amused. So now I'm waiting for cards for a Toggo and Silas Renn version of the deck to come...it has some tutors now. We'll see how it goes. I did play around with the idea of Toggo and Glacian "is this powerstone?" deck but the playgroup suggested that might be too slow so..we'll see. The video definitely made me pause and think "am I giving up too much to have a more streamlined/higher win chance deck?" I have kept true to using rocks and mechanized production as the primary wincon but I have also go from a $50 deck to a $250 deck over time. More than that..maybe a bit of the fun of squeezing every little bit of magic out of Toggo's rocks have been lost?
Funny that you mentioned Omnath but I’m having a similar feeling about my own GR Omnath build right now. I haven’t played it in a while because it’s more high powered than my other decks, but it’s also a very binary experience: either I am ramping and building my engine, or I am ramping and my engine is running. I wouldn’t be surprised if I decide to take it apart soon in favor of a different landfall deck, perhaps the Temur Omnath so that I can play some of my blue landfall cards. But right now having the win condition in the command zone just isn’t scratching that itch for me.
Hey Joey, I can definitely relate to this - I've had tons of decks go through plenty of iterations before landing on what I actually wanted (which isn't always the best/strongest commander). Titania is one commander I've been wanting to build because of the inherent weakness of it, and the potential for blowouts, as well as the absolute explosive possibility of sacrificing all of your lands. Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for any other commanders that have a similar play pattern, or play a little different than the usual value engines that make the top 100 on EDHREC?
I went on similar but backwards journey. Started with Lord Windgrace when he came out, changed to Phylath, World Shaper hoping to power it down, had the opposite effect XD moved on to Titania, now it’s high risk high reward and I love it. I never feel like I’m dominating a game but I always feel like I’m in it and can win with good sequencing. Just an hour ago I threw down an Overlaid Terrain for 14 elemental tokens, played two lands for turn, tapped them for four and used Sylvan Reclamation to get all the lands back 😂 this of course earned me a lethal comet storm to the face, but still 😂
This hit really close to home because of how often I've flop between Sidisi, Muldrotha, Hogaak, and Tasigur. Hell, I'm still on the fence with Muldrotha and Sidisi right now
I accidentally changed my Group Hug decks into a Stax Light deck. Long story short, I built K&T when their pre-con came out. It was almost a pure Group Hug deck and the only way to win was to draw everyone out. Inevitably, the "I don't like Group Hug decks because it makes the best deck win faster" guy showed up and beat me down. This made me add more removal, pillow fort, board wipes, etc. This kept happening so I added mill effects to actively try to win. In the last evolution of the deck, I figured out that the way to make people draw a lot but not speed them up was to add Rule of Law/Damping Sphere effects. I also had 6-8 Counterspell effects in the deck. Thats when I realized I wasnt having fun and neither was anyone else. Side note: If you're that guy who thinks the next level move is to plow over the Group Hug deck, you're part of the problem. By saying "it only makes the best deck win faster," your assuming that deck will win anyway, so why even play?
I have only been conflicted about a deck rework once and it was very recently. I had a Yidris deck that I felt was really unique. Chock full of all the permanents I loved that said "whenever you cast an instant or sorcery..." and even though black and green were only splashed, I LOVED those cards. Professor Onyx, Sedgemoor Witch, and Witherbloom Apprentice. Those three were the only non izzet cards other than the commander, but I loved them. But I also want to build every "harmonicon" commander because I have a thing for triggered abilities, so I finally switched from Yidris to Veyran. It had been bugging me for almost a year since she was released so I thought it would be an easy swap since I only had to give up 3 cards. But man do I feel like I lost something special and I have not played the deck much recently since I made the switch. Coming up with a new build for Yidris (traps) made me feel a little better, but I feel like my spell triggers deck lost some of its soul
My lands deck is still currently problematic. It was an Omnath deck; Locus of Rage, then Locus of the Roil, then Locus of Creation. Then when Golos came out, I updated to five colour as I really wanted to put Gitrog and Windgrace into the deck. I really love how the deck plays now in five colours, but with Golos banned there isn't another five colour commander that cares about lands. That ban really stung for a deck that didn't use Golos in any broken way.
What a great journey of self awareness and growth. I think the only thing that you really didn’t dive into Joey was the growth YOU experienced. You grew from a ‘selfish player’ to a great leader in EDH and learned what you wanted out of a deck. Something that myself and many other players are still figuring out.
@@KigerrVariety He mentioned how he was as a player at the time and mentioned growth but I felt like he didn't dive into it or give himself enough credit.
My current weirdest deckbuilding journey has been with Edgar Markov. My first commander deck was Edgar Markov. He was powerful but I was more attracted to Orzhov as a color combination so I removed Edgar and Red from the deck and went with Kambal Vampires. Kambal was drawing too much aggro so I switched to Obzedat, Ghost Council. Eventually I realized it had a powerful token theme, so later when Krav and Regna came out I immediately switched to them. Eventually I started cutting the vampires who didn't make tokens, and then all of the vampires so it became a pure token deck. A few years later I missed playing Edgar so I rebuilt and revamped the deck (pun intended) and kept Krav and Regna as a separate deck. Now I have another Orzhov in Lurrus and am trying to make that deck work, with as many CMC 2 or less cards as I can.
My first EDH deck was Thraximundar. It went through so many changes that it could fill another episode instead of a YT comment. Basically started as Zombie tribal/edict/Grixis good stuff and is now all about theft. I actually may change the deck to using Marchesa now, but I'll need to test that out before I commit.
This was a cool "How a deck becomes a Soul of Windgrace deck" prequel
One of my favorite things about commander is you can build 10 decks in 10 minutes (with edhrec perhaps) or spend 10 years building one deck
The real land fall was the friends we made along the way...
As an English professor (no, not THAT English professor), I appreciate Joey's diction, inflection, and all-around well-spoken-ness.
I love this vid.
Windgrace was actually the very first commander deck I built from the precon. And it's still with me up to today.
sure I have 2 other decks for him but still. I just love the guy.
This journey was amazing, thank you for sharing! As they say, a commander deck is never finished. I reflected on the journey of my simic deck which bounced around from the myriad of powerful engines from Tatyova which I changed for not being the power level I liked, to Prime Speaker Zegana. I wanted my commander to give me card advantage (I have an aversion to playing a bunch of draw spells and running a commander that draws card gives me an excuse to cut more vegetables). I LOVED the spirit of Zegana as it being this fantastic payoff for playing fun creatures, and I really enjoy +1/+1 counter synergies. However, I found she was too slow, telegraphed, and linear.
I recently made the switch from Zegana to Volo, Itinerant Scholar with Master Chef and I loved that shift. I got to keep the counters synergy and run a bunch of creatures. I always loved the menagerie style of deck building, but OG Volo wasn't the payoff I was looking for. I did enjoy the restriction of limiting the variety of archetypes to include, and the book the new Volo adds creates such a fun dorky play experience for all players as I get to roleplay a British explorer documenting the discoveries of nature.
Your anecdotes about deck weaknesses really resonated with me. What I learned from my deckbuilding journey was that I really enjoy a self-imposed restriction. Another favorite deck of mine is a blinking Elemental Horde of Notions deck that has the restriction of a Jegantha partner. Now to do everything in my power to avoid turning my dorky legendary good stuff deck into a Jodah deck that will get smacked off the table before I play it.
My friends tell me that what I like is to play with one hand tied to my back xD I see Im not alone on the self impossed restrictions hehe
Welp, this is the most relatable thing I've seen in a minute. I have been on the same journey just with Tatyova mixed in. Titania is my favorite card of all time, such an interesing design.
Thanks for sharing this story, Joey.
My most notable deckbuilding journey was going from an Omnath, Locus of Rage deck to my Horde of Notions deck. When I was first getting into Commander, I discovered Omnath and a bunch of red/green elementals I thought were very cool. The deck wasn't bad but I had some trouble finding enough elementals to run. Then some more experienced players pointed out that because I was building Omnath as more elemental tribal than landfall I was losing out on a lot of potential with the deck. So then I shifted it more towards that landfall angle. It was fine but not for me. I wanted to play with elementals for all their varied abilities, and I wasn't really interested in landfall all that much. The other issue was that while Omnath is a fun card, he also made the deck into 'stompy creatures' deck with the 5/5s he was generating, and I had other decks that played in the 'big creatures' space already.
I don't remember when I discovered Horde of Notions, but what really got me interested in putting it in the command zone, came with the release of Ikoria and the companion Umori, The Collector. Since many elementals, particularly the evoke ones had etb abilities that could essentially let them fill a 'spells' role in the deck, I thought 'why not just go all in on elementals in lieu of any other kind of spell?' And now I have a deck that I really enjoy.
I am on a similar boat with my Vadrik deck, which currently is a Veyran deck, which then will turn into Anhelo, and from there to Kalamax. The izzet spellslinger core pieces and the landbase allows for the rest to be replaced. I carry the additional pieces all together, in case I wanna switch between the different play strats. Thinking about doing something similar with my Tivit deck, and potentially using it as a Raffine reanimator deck after changing 40% of it. Next on the chopping block are Killian, who is going to turn into Sigarda Host of Herons. Then it's Yawgmoth. It used to be a Tergrid deck that won games but I didn't play many games with her after a while. Now, Yawgmoth feels the same way which is why it will first turn into Braids, Arisen Nightmare and then K'rrik, Shadowborne Apostles. Lastly, Koma, who will turn into Kumena Merfolk.
I really like this content where you just discuss a personal journey with deck building.
Gosh Joey, you really opened my eyes here. I came into the world of Magic, specifically EDH, around Ravnica Allegiance set. My first deck was Edgar Markov because Vampires. Edgar was great and still is a great commander but it wasn't what I wanted. A few months or so after Throne of Eldraine came out and believe it or not, I went for Korvold. I immediately thought wow, what a great card to just put counters on for sacrificing things; completely ignoring the fact of how many cards I could and have drawn from Korvold himself. I've gone through many deckbuilding challenges and growth as a player. I know I want to have fun with my friends and it was a slow thing to learn. I still do have Korvold but Edgar turned into Isshin since your fabulous self made an UTA video on him. I couldn't resist. Anyway, thank you for being open about your process as an EDH player and deck builder. You've inspired me so much since I've started watching EDHRECast content.
Thanks for sharing this! It reminds me a bit of a heroes journey tale haha, you start a certain way, wanted to shore up weaknesses, discovered power, lost who you were for a bit but came back and came back stronger, wiser and more empathetic!😁
I enjoy the unique videos like this. Thanks for sharing young Joseph!
Joey you are so good at these personal essay-style videos. Great work.
I wanted to build a Dragons Approach deck in EDH, and started with Magda, as I figured the artifact and dragons approach would feed into the same end goal: make dragons. Found out that Magda was way too powerful with Clock of Omens, and found myself searching for the infinite combo and not the dragons, with dragons approach taking the sidelines. Then I swapped to a grixis spellslinger deck with Kess at the helm, but even with her ability it just seemed so so slow. Then I transitioned to a Kykar Jeskai deck with only like 5 or 6 dragons in the deck with cool ways of layering instants and sorceries to create a value engine - but no combos. This deck is so much fun to pilot and I'm glad I had to jump through hoops to get here. Maybe I'll even get to play it against you in Salt Lake at the Magic Summit!
I've been playing commander since 2013, and I have only ever shifted commanders twice.
The first time was with my original commander Crosis the Purger. It was focused on forcing my opponents to discard. As I slowly started to shift the deck to wheeling effects to better bring the pain.
I realized Nekusar would be a better commander, so I made the shift. I nvr really regretted that change. The deck just became so much more fun for me. Crosis always felt like he did nothing, but Nekusar, he just enhanced my game plan!
The second time was much more recent. My dragon commander of choice was Lathliss Dragon Queen. She was slow to get going, but once she did the deck was a ton of fun.
When Myrim Sentinel Wyrm was recently revealed in Baulder's Gate I was faced with a decision. Myrim seemed like a no brainer upgrade to Lathliss. The addition of green solving my ramp problems, giving me access to more playable removal, and the fact Myrim made non-legendary copies of my dragons on ETB rather than simple tokens was insane. This commander would work with all the combos, and interactions I had grown to love with added benefits.
After a few weeks of thinking about it I reluctantly made the change.
Theoretically the deck should have played the same way as Lathliss, but that wasn't the case. I wasn't having as much fun. At first I didn't really get why, but eventually I realized it had to do with Myrim, and not how the deck was built. Myrim's ability was so much more powerful than Lathliss' ability that it made me reluctant to cast any dragons whatsoever without having Myrim out. It's that tunnel vision that Myrim created for me that made me regret the transition!
Really enjoyed this video & hope to see more like it in future. From both the EDHREC crew & other content creators too.
I absolutely love this episode.
I had a similar journey with daretti into urza into ozgir back to daretti.
Each deck was cedh as stax and casual edh as cheat big dumb artifact creatures in.
Each can do it in different ways, daretti wound up being the most enjoyable for me.
Similar journey here, I went Windgrace to Gitrog (I had the same hesitance), to Meren to Mazirek. By the time Korvold came out I also told myself that just swapping sac commanders all the time to the new one had become a bit silly and to be honest Korvold is just way too OP, no fun just like Proshh. I learned from this to play different ways and explore different colours and now I lean heavily into blue which is actually more fun to me.
I could listen to Joey's non-judgemental, non-condescending explanations all day.
A great video as always Joey!!
I think my weirdest and proudest deck building experience was Zada, Hedron Grinder. She was the first deck I actually built from scratch rather than a precon. I began by following a lot of advice I saw online, but over time and play, I realized i had so much fun with cards like Otherworldly Outburst and Make Mischief that the deck shifted in time to become a weird mono red aristocrat spellslinger that was able to have big explosive turns and enabled odd play patterns. It always feels good to pay one mana and draw 25 cards, couple that with slinging monsters that then break apart into a pair of satyrs, a devil, and an eldritch horror and you've got quite a story to bring to your tables
It's super cool to hear all of the thought and care you put into the decks and this video
My first EDH deck was Gahiji, Honored One, trying to do a "forced combat" theme with cards like Hunted Troll and Death by Dragons. I eventually changed to Xenagod because the original deck was slow and ineffective, having never won, or barely playing more than a few spells. It was mostly a pile of Naya cards and although there's something to be said about playing the cards you like, it grates on you when those cards gives you a 0% win rate. This was basically when Commander was first recognized as a format and, although I didn't know what I was doing, the fantasy of being the *master tactician* and controlling the combat step never left.
Then Marisi, Breaker of the Coil, came out along with the new Goad mechanic. Xenagod had taken all the "good" cards from my Gahiji deck, but Marisi became the home of all the "give your opponent creatures" cards, now properly supported by a Goad commander who can truly control combat at the table. However, the deck still wasn't clicking; Gahiji wanted a go-wide strategy as much as an "opponents attacking each other" strategy; I still had all these go-wide payoff cards like Titanic Ultimatum and Crescendo of War. Marisi wanted me to replace those with an "evasive creature" strategy. The deck had a better than 0% win rate wich was nice, but I always felt like it was playing against itself, with a mismatch of what the commander wanted to do and what I wanted to do.
This leads to Kitt Kanto. She controls combat in a targeted way, is enabled by going wide, basically the best of both worlds. I haven't play tested much yet, but I feel like this is the commander that'll finally give the experience I'm looking for.
I'm glad you shared this deckbuilding journey. It resonates a lot with my experience with Commander, which started with a Korvold deck out of all things! So I feel like I ended up falling on some of the same pitfalls you mentioned, only looking at raw power more than anything. I´ve branched out a lot during these years in terms of commanders and strategies and I'm now at a point where I'm starting to value way more things like whacky themes, politics or unique gameplay patterns. That Korvold deck is now a Henzie deck, by the way. Not a big step down in power, but I make sure I blitz out the most dumb funny big creature that makes me happy, even if it's very suboptimal to do =)
This is a really cool video. Thanks for sharing. I've had a very similar journey with Omnath Locus of Rage -> Lord Windgrace -> Omnath Locus of Rage -> Mina and Denn -> Slogurk -> and finally Titania. I've even been considering returning to Omnath Locus of Rage. I just can't quit that angry green jellybean and his direct damage. I have also had some interesting deck building journey's with my Glissa the Traitor and Lozhan Dragon's Legacy lists.
Ah Joey the heart you have put into this one is amazing. Thank you for sharing, I love your content I really really do but this one is on another level.
Thanks so much for making this video! My recent deck building/updating has made me analyze what parts of EDH I enjoy most and what effects I want in my decks. The first commander deck I built was a Niv-Mizzet, Parun spellslinger based on the Prismari Performance precon. I’ve kept updating the deck and made it a lot more competitive I think, but that’s also come at the sacrifice of fun and janky old interactions and scrambling to find one more draw off Niv.
I can really relate with your story. I also built a Titania deck when she was released. Then, years later, I converted most of that deck into a Prossh (for Jund color purposes, no real alternative at that time), with Omnath, Mina&Denn, Gitrog, our girl Titania etc. And finally I destroyed this deck (and not yet recreated it) as in the end, only the mechanic and interaction of Titania was interesting to me.
Great lessons in here, Joey. It’s really important to prioritize what you love about a commander and/or a play style as opposed to focusing on power. And equally important to prioritize fun for the whole table.
love that tounge pop, u r so unapologetic yourself
This was a really enjoyable journey, thank you for sharing it! I really enjoy this kind of content
I did the same thing recently turning my own Meren deck into Henzie. Meren just became an oppressive hard to deal with commander that is very resilient while Henzie gives you card advantage and instant value with attacks while leaving you wide open. Some times it’s nice to have a weakness with a deck to make games more dynamic
Er ma gerd, I'm actually in the same predicament right now with my Titania deck! I've had my mind made up to change it to Soul of Windgrace since I've had past experience with Lord Windgrace, but I've had this voice in my head telling me I won't enjoy it as much as Titania. Thanks for this video! I think I'll hold off for now and keep living on the edge with Titania 🤙🏼
I had a similar journey. Started with the Frog, then switched to Windgrace just to try it out. I didn't like that he could be attacked (though maybe I didn't understand that aspect when i built the deck) and I felt like red didn't bring enough to the table. Just made me realize how much I love Gitrog and so i switched back. Slowly Gitrog has become more and more tuned to the cEDH version, but I maintain a "sideboard" that I can swap with the combo elements, fast mana, and tutors so I can play at more casual tables. Great to hear a story like mine from a content creator I respect. All hail the hypnotoad!
Thanks for this Joey! I have done a similar journey. I finally settled on archelos "bad" lands. (For now)
I love looking at your old lists. I got into EDH in fall of 2015, and these lists do remind me of that time. How different that format was! And before anyone comes along: No, I didn't say it was better. I'm happy that the curves are lower now, the packages are more efficient now, and the win cons are stronger now. Still. Those were fun times.
I like this new type of videos
Amazing idea for a video, and it was done to perfection. Alot of us can learn from your journey with this deck.
I love this video and I can relate to this. My first EDH deck is actually Angry Omnath, and he’s still alive, but the original deck contents are scattered between my two other land decks: Beledros and Slogurk.
I tried turning Omnath into an Elemental Tribal deck, but like you said it lost the soul of what I want the deck to do. I love Omnaths churn elementals and burn elementals style of strategy; it’s what got me into EDH and soon I’ll find the pieces to rebuild him better than ever without losing his soul.
A+ video
Titania is by far the most interesting mono green commander. If I wasn't a sucker for tribal synergies (I need Risen Reef in that deck!) I would build her ASAP
God I love you Joey! Everyone should aspire to be a magic player like you! I know I do!
Nice journey you shared! I got one too when i first plunged into edh world using my friend's deck Ghalta as my firstmost commander. I had so much fun casting a monstrosity so huge that i could trample out any situation i was in. The thing i love it the most is how cheap and fast it could be casted. Even commander tax is not a problem. I was captivated and try to build my own. I tried other deck because i dont want to make something i already played. I thought it was not worth it due to my limited budget. So i came upon my real first commander Otrimi. I had so much fun with him. He hit very fast and hard to block. He did good in 1v1 but in multiplayer, i always lose. His commander tax started out of control on his 2nd cast onward, and i can't aggro anymore. Then i saw someone sold his Xenagod deck and i thought it was good for me. Hard hitting commander that was hard to remove. After few tries, yes he was good. But turned out that i didn't really like him. He went online only from Turn 4-5 and easily got countered. The strategy was summon high impact creature to give iy haste and power like Godo and Moraug. But the deck was not as resilient as i thought. Xenagod was not removed, but my other creature was. I had high risk high return play and i dont like it. I briefly regret my decision to bought him. Them i imagine again more suitable strategy for me. Then i return to Ghalta. Recreate my Xenagod deck for Ghalta and it proved good! I love the playstyle and more resilient than i first thought. I just summoned creatures and quickly put threat on board. I used it many times that my friend frowned when i cast Ghalta. Because my deck could one hit someone if not taken care early. It didnt give me wins, but i still happy with it. Currently my Ghalta deck is disassembled to make room for other green deck. From this experience, i discovered my love for red green color and it stick to me till now.
This was AWESOME!
I have a plan for all 4 of these decks and various versions of them - this was VERY helpfull!
I just wanted to say you really opened my eyes. When I had gotten into Magic, I had been bullied and if that was the thing that would allow me to get out and be able to get things out of the way. I just wanted to say that this was one of the best times ever, and I love EDH. Thank you so much.
Cool journey, Joey.
I'm finding myself going through these 'oh this is better, let's build it' with all the sets of late. I think having a group that is faster, comboey, and a bit moe tuned makes my mind go right to optimization, or winning, rather.
So your journey with yoiur same deck is what im feeling with my whole roster, at large. Make something, change it to something new, realize i don't actually enjoy it, repeat.
It was great hearing you dial it back when you went back to titania, etc.
I literally did the same journey! I love titania but instead went into angry omnath then into vaevictis asmadi, the dire and which lead to me building my gitrog cedh.
I started Commander much later, but had a similar journey. I got the Windgrace precon, but didn't have a lot of land deck cards yet. I changed to angry jelly bean Omnath landfall, then locus of the roil landfall, now I changed it to a wonky combo deck. I've had so much fun playing it now then I ever did before.
I, too, have had a Gromnath deck, turned into Lord Windgrace, turned into Titania deck haha. I like the restriction mono green has given!
I took the same journey that you did up until you were talking about Korvold. Instead, I had already (at least I think I did ... can't remember exact set release dates) switched to Golos when M20 came out. Everything was perfect, I found the commander I didn't even know I was looking for. I was able to play maze's end, dark depths, field of the dead, bojuka bog, all my fetches, plus all the omnaths, gitrog, tatyova, and lord windgrace all in the same deck. That was the most fun deck I've ever had, then the ban happened and I haven't figured out what to do since. I've been playing EDH for nearly 25 years now and that was the first ban that really soured my mtg experience. I've proxied almost all of the reasonable 5c commanders since and they just don't feel right. I'm going to try the new Soul of Windgrace and see how that goes. Maybe the answer is to just return to Titania where the deck began.
Mine was sort of the same process. LOVE Titania!❤ Went from Titania > Yarok > Gitrog > Korvold > Omnath, Locus of Creation > back to Titania. The other decks provided a lot of insight and were really fun to play. It just seemed when I added a color, it seemed to “dilute” the essence of the deck. Found the same issue with tribal elves as well.
I feel like I'm still on this journey. I first started with a Zada, Hedron Grinder deck, and loved the cantrip replication but wanted some additional resiliency. I added a color and went to a Feather deck, that focused less on traditional Voltron and more along token generation and spell replication with Zada and Mirrorwing. After a time I changed the deck to Kykar, with even more focus on token generation, but now I was having problems mana fixing all the individual cantrips and finding Zada for a finisher. Now I'm prototyping a 5 color Tazri deck with Zada and Orvar as hidden commanders, and I wonder if maybe I should just run it back to Zada for that clear, focused strategy. Zada to Feather to Kykar to Tazri, and now maybe back to Zada where it all began.
My first EDH deck started as Mono Red, then it turned to Naya, then Esper, then ended up ordering Blue with UW splash.
I've only done this sort of thing once. My second deck was Teysa Karlov and I got incredibly bored with her after a little while. She got tabled as I built other things. When Commanders Quarters released their budget Alesha I dug up Teysa and swapped her to Alesha. The deck was so much more fun. A year or so after that Extus got spoiled. For Mardu Aristocrats he was better in every way. I got Commander synergy from Sign in Blood, not Reconnaissance. It turns out Extus was exactly what I wanted. It's easily my most played deck and I love it. But I have taken out all of the tutors and combos and play a "fair" 2.4cmc, blisteringly fast aristocrats deck these days.
I've had a similar experience with my artifact deck. When I first learn how to play Magic colourless artifacts really drew me in. When I bought a booster box of Mystery Booster after learning about commander, I pulled a Sen Triplets. I thought they were really cool due to being them selves an artifact, and giving me access to some of my favourite colours. So I built a really bad Sen Triplets artifact deck. But I soon realised that nobody liked playing against that deck. I had always loved the idea of playing a colourless deck, so I build a Hope of Ghirapur deck. It basically just had a bunch of mana rocks and equipment so that my thopter commander could kill everybody. But I always ran into the problem of that deck not really having much staying power and card advantage. At this time I was starting to get more into obscure commanders and deck building, so I built a Tiana, Ship's Caretaker deck, to play this sort of control/voltron sort of deck with lots of pacifism effects. I liked both of these decks, but both still had their shortcomings.
So I actually split Hope of Ghirapur into two decks. The artifact portions of the deck landed themselves into my Sharuum the Hegemon deck, which used my old Esper mana base from Sen Triplets. The voltron equipment sort of parts of Hope Of Ghirapur and my Tiana deck ended up in my Wyleth deck. This was right after Wyleth came out, I felt that his insane card advantage was something I was really missing.
I had these decks each for more than a year I think. But after a while, both also had their problems. Sharuum was the deck I was always tinkering with. As it was 3 colours and Sharuum's ability was generically good to artifacts, I would just play whatever Esper artifacts I wanted to. But at some point I learned how to do Sharuum's combos, and they were the most fun thing to me. To have a grand machine where all pieces had to be moving perfectly to work, where the commander was the central piece. It was a blast. Though after time the deck started to lose its identity. I didn't go full into the combos, but they would come up often enough to where my playgroup was aware of how powerful the deck was. On the other hand, I was still playing all my favourite big mana rocks and other artifacts that were still there from when the deck was Sen Triplets. Once I digitally recorded all of my decks, I realised how throughly confused my Sharuum deck was. But at this time, I had started brewing and building many more decks, and had become good at finding a focus for my decks. It pained me to admit to myself, but Sharuum wasn't a deck that I felt represented me anymore. It had been my longest standing deck. I took it apart.
I also took Wyleth apart. I don't know, something about him just got boring after a while. At least with Sharuum, I would see different cards and probably win unexpectedly and still have a good game. But Wyleth was extremely consistent. He had good mana, a really focused wincon, and impressive card advantage. But nothing about him surprised me anymore. Once the novelty of a high-advantage voltron deck wore off, he just became stale. The cards I used in my Wyleth deck are currently unused. I really want to try building Boros again in the future, but no Boros commanders are really doing it for me currently.
The cards from Sharuum have found themselves in my New Tameshi deck. I wasn't sure what route at first I wanted to go with Tameshi. And since I was so nostalgic to my Sharuum deck, I spent ages trying to get the exact gameplay Ideas for that deck to feel as "me" as possible. I settled on artifact creature aggro. although, this deck does have a quite high density of enchantments, much like my old Tiana deck. I've only really just finished conceptualising my vision for this deck, so I haven't had much play experience with it. I'm looking forward to seeing if I find that I'll really enjoy it. At this stage I am basically restarting my archive of commander decks. All of my current decks are less than a few months old now, and I, and a mad deck-builder, am always looking for weird decks to rock up to game night with.
I'm currently wielding:
Tameshi, Reality Architect
Wyll, Blade of Frontiers + Passionate Archaeologist
Jacob Hauken, Inspector
Esix, Fractal Bloom
Kodama of the East Tree + Ravos, Soultender
Jetmir, Nexus of Revels (Mainly my GF's deck)
Sheoldred, The Apocalypse
If you've read this far, thanks! If you are still at all interested, you can see my ideas and lists on Moxfield: www.moxfield.com/users/Library_Speaks_Volumes
Omnath has punched many people in the face.
I had a somewhat similar journey. Where my first deck was Karador, and I got hooked on dredging, KotR, and other cool land shenanigans, Eldritch moon came out, and I immediately went full gitgrog. I kinda got tired of winning, and everyone played kinda resignedly, so when red came out with cavalier of flames, I knew that switching to windgrace would be everything I wanted.
Now I get to play all the cool red cards like Cav of flame, Omnath, Anger, and KESSIG WOLFRUN.
my deck building journey has spanned my whole time playing since starting in 2020, my first deck was eldrazi because I didnt know what color to approach or how to approach them so decided to do away with colors all together, at first it was eldrazi tribal playing basically all the ones that had some form of utility but at some point I was introduced to my very first infinite combo with top + forge + helm of awakening and tried to build around getting to that combo + infinite mana and for awhile I was really fascinated with infinite combos or explosive interactions alongside with trying out different tribes like dragons, vampires, and slivers all of which I found infinite combos within which made me more interested. I think people started recognizing my pattern before I did that at the core all my decks were the same thing; play draw stuff + mana stuff to go infinite in multiple ways and win. None of these decks REALLY had their own identity and I started to look into other ideas or commanders with unique abilities such as Obeka, Aegar, and Tovolar, the latter 2 I dont play anymore and Obeka took several revisions across months to actually find a version that actually works and doesnt feel like a cheap gimmick. Over time I found my true niche is within Reanimator, at first I tried dimir reanimator with Tormod + Rameriez partners but it was a really 50/50 deck if it would work at all and when it did work it was from a gravecrawler infinite and otherwise did very little else. I learned a lot over 2 years I would discover simic is broken and Aesi isnt meant for casual play, any strategy even energy can work in commander though some ideas work less well than others and it's important to recognize when something just doesnt work well enough, some decks are too good for casual play but not good enough to fight the whole table yet not good enough for cedh and a deck being stuck in that awkward area can be tough to work around, recognizing when your deck is cedh or a very high 8 / 9 is also super important, it's fine to love those sorts of decks but to know when to keep them off the table or when to bring them out. Going back to reanimator though, that was definitely the niche I needed to find, it's definitely the way I enjoy playing and I still find neat ways to implement explosive combos or infinites from time to time and other times I just enjoy games where my deck has strong enough value to win without combos but just great synergy and interactions like my Old Rutstein deck, I couldnt find a golgari commander I liked but I wanted to make golgari so I picked Old Rutstein since he gives me a tiny bit of value every turn but I dont need to build around him, this has become my favorite deck because I can truly build it however I want because the 99 is more valuable than the commander in this scenario. I do still try other ideas from time to time like I recently built a Roon blink deck and a Koma deck that plays all ramp spells and removal since Koma makes my creatures for me, instead of a creature lineup I play polymorph and a handful of really explosive creatures like blightsteel and craterhoof, it's a really fun idea in theory but the OP of Koma and Simic in general tends to overshadow the creative approach I made when building it. At the time of writing this I have 15 decks put together having made 33 decks in the last 2 years and it's really neat to look back and see how my deck building and playstyle have grown and evolved over time and how I continue trying to find neat ways to implement reanimator themes and combos into the decks I build
The big thing I have taken from this was learning about the type of player you want to be through the types of deck that you build and play.
It becomes more obvious if it’s decks that one has changed rather than just different decks.
This reminds me of the journey I went on with my Pir and Toothy deck.
I originally started with Toothy in my Locus God deck 4 years ago when I didn't know about the partner mechanic (I was new to the Commander format and hadn't played Magic for almost 20 years). I looked it up and became excited to make a Pir and Toothy deck. I liked it a lot at first but then Volrath came out and I thought that made more sense to make since I'd then have access to black. I kept Volrath for about half a year until I decide to go back to Pir and Toothy. Then earlier this year I decided to try something new and made Chulane the commander of the deck which gave me access to the white counter cards and I liked it a lot too...but something still didn't feel right with it and I think it was having the 3 colors instead of 2. I was having less fun because I always needed a certain color more than others in different games and that caused me unnecessary frustration.
I recently decided to go back to just Pir and Toothy and couldn't be happier with that decision. Plus they have the new Secret Lair cards of Pir and Toothy coming out which are adorable and I definitely ordered them.
I'm happy I went back to Pir and Toothy because that was my first deck I built by myself without the help from friends. Feels good to have my partner commanders back in the command zone where they belong.
My weirdest deckbuilding journey was probably my FIRST deckbuilding journey.
Having just gotten into Magic (and Commander) in 2013, I immediately fell in love with Landfall as a mechanic and started putting together a list of the coolest cards in the archetype. Many of which just happened to already exist in the just-released Marath and Prossh decks. Lacking any other decent (and decently priced) alternative, Prossh helmed the deck.
The Shattergang Brothers did get to step in for a while, but everyone in the play group hated having to constantly sacrifice things, and that's fair.
I kept finding neat synergies to that I could improve on, though, and eventually the deck morphed into half-Landfall, half-sacrifice combo with Ob Nixilis, the Fallen there as a payoff for a Bloodghast + Perilous Forays + Lotus Cobra loop. It was a mess, and I did eventually disassemble the deck in 2016.
I still love Landfall decks, though, and if I can find the time and focus I'm sure I'll end up with at least four of them in different color combinations. I already have a Naya deck thanks to Obuun, and would like to build a Soul of Windgrace (Jund), Yarok, the Desecrated (Sultai), and a more aggro-focused Radha, Heart of Keld (Gruul). Possibly even a mono-green Titania deck featuring all three of her incarnations.
this is by far the best deck building video !!!...I think that this is the main reason why the lgs environment is less appealing to others due to the fact that most decks just run the same most powerful cards and just try to make the others most misreable with their "lose your fiends" decks...this state of mind of yours when deck building seems to best and intended way to build for commander..I share your opinion on the subject and hope others do too and that we can bring back the fun in edh before caring about winning first
Loved your admiration of Magali's artwork. She's one of a select few artists in our fine game who can make me interested in playing a card merely by virtue of her artwork.
Anyway, back to turning my Nekusar deck into a Queza build.
Edit: Also super into your points on empathic play. Teaching new players recently has really reminded me of the value of letting others experience those big plays/cool synergies on their own terms.
Loved this video! I currently have been working on morphing my Ghave -> Yoshimaru/Reyhan and Kamahl/Prava! The thought behind it was that while Ghave is a fine token commander, what I really enjoyed about the deck was the tokens. From boiling that down, I discovered I really want to build Kamahl/Prava to be more "go-wide" and then split of parts from there for a different "go-tall" deck. I also have a Soul of Windgrace deck brewing with many of the elements you talked about XD. Baba Lasanga would actually be a great fit (considering Braids Arisen Nightmare shenanigans)!
As somone who's introduction to magic was the windgrace commander deck landfall has been my favorite theme in the game. I resonate a lot with the themes of this videos haha
My decks usually have a pretty short shelf life, but I guess I do have one journey that kind of fits this theme, although it was more about maindeck changes than commander swaps. In 2014, I built a dredge-based deck helmed by Karador. The premise was mainly just to dredge a lot and play out of my graveyard. The first version used too many cards that were what I would have used in Legacy, and didn't really scale well into EDH. This shifted into a more streamlined Karador deck that did a lot of what I'd originally wanted to do, quickly shifting into a deck that could play out of my graveyard consistently. By the end of 2014, I found that the payoffs were too slow and retooled the deck extensively yet again, this time removing most of the cool oddball stuff I thought would be fun (Ashen Ghoul, Liliana of the Veil, etc.) and focusing more on giant graveyard stuff like Nighthowler and Lord of Extinction. This third version of the deck gradually evolved and was my default EDH deck throughout 2015.
In 2016, I added a newly released card to the maindeck and it sort of warped the whole list around itself: The Gitrog Monster. At first, this was very much a Karador list that just featured The Gitrog Monster. But the Monster was so good that each new change I made just kept leaning more into it.
In 2017, Protean Hulk was unbanned, and the deck incorporated it. In 2018, it dawned on me that my dredge-themed Karador deck had shifted into a more streamlined reanimator deck, then into a a kind of graveyard-size-matters deck, then into a Gitrog deck, and finally into a Pattern-Rector deck. I optimized the Pattern-Rector version of the deck, then converted the whole package into a deck for the Canadian Highlander format. I thought this was the end of the line, but I wound up focusing on other decks in Canadian Highlander and reassembling the EDH deck. Dissatisfied with Karador and increasingly impressed with the Gitrog + Dakmor engine, I swapped commanders to The Gitrog Monster.
By I'd adapted my Gitrog dredge deck to serve as a cEDH deck. It stayed that way into 2020, when I attempted to bring it back to a more casual power level, more focused around lands (no Dakmor Salvage) and Titania. This deck probably wouldn't have lasted even without the pandemic, but either way, it was short-lived. I reworked it again in 2021, this time as a $100 budget Gitrog deck. I quickly tired of maintaining a budget list, so the deck was shelved. And then this year, I contemplated a return to Karador. In the deckbuilding process, I did make a return to the Pattern-Rector archetype, but decided that Nethroi was a better commander for me than Karador. This time, there's no Gitrog package. Although The Gitrog Monster dominated this particular Ship of Theseus for most of its existence, I certainly don't consider it a false start or mistake. Rather, I learned that the particular gameplay of Pattern-Rector was something that I really wanted to have and wanted to bring to EDH. I'll probably build a Gitrog deck again some day, and I could quite possibly settle on a different commander for the Pattern-Rector deck (Nethroi is good, but you never know).
Definitely the most interesting commander deck transformation that occured for me, was moving from Lathrill into two separate decks (Skullbriar and Iname), then Skullbriar turning into Ezuri,, and finally Ezuri turning slowly into Titania (I am still in the process of transforming the deck.)
During Kaldheim when Lathrill was revealed, I immediately started putting my bin of elves to good use, and I slowly started crafting a deck more high budgetted deck (for me at the time). But I, being me, have a strong aversion towards popular commanders, so when Lathrill exploded in popularity, I lost all interesting in playing the deck, because it wasnt that unique, it didnt have its own spin, and it was just a bunch of staples- which is fine, I just like having a level of uniqueness to my decks, so each game against new opponents, they see what my creativity can truly bring.
Anyways, I didnt want to just dip out, because I spent a pretty penny on the land base, along with cards like hours of devastation, ad nauseum, and I just ADORE skirge familiar (and everything that three card combo stands for!), so I swapped the commander for Skullbriar, I kept the elf theme, but I replaced much of the sacrificing and Aristocrats theme with counters.
All of the powerful black cards slowly sifted into a commander deck (A deck that I had no intention at the time to spend a lot of money on) was Iname, Death Aspect. And during this time CEDH really interested me, however I have a highschooler’s budget, so my solution to keeping a low mana cost for a Ad-Nauseum deck was to just remove as many cards as possible from the deck, and only have combo pieces. So, I added like 25 spirits, all of which was just fodder for my commander to remove, leaving me with a much higher chance of getting the singular combo-piece. Of course, I built that deck roughly 2 years ago, and its transformed focusing far more on a more casual agenda. Because after a while I just realized I didnt have the budget (and I dont like proxying) for CEDH. So, I thinned the count down to just 13 (The 13 best spirits imo), focusing far more on graveyard shenanigans. And I am still making minor edits to it till this day; trying to just decrease the overall mana cost of the deck.
anyways, that was one side, the other side (the elf side) of the Lathrill deck encompassed into Skullbriar. And it was good, it did its job well. However, I just, it felt boring. It was always the same. It just ramped out, buffed the commander, swung a few times and I sacrificed Skullbriar to draw a bunch of cards. And it got boring.
So, I decided to swift heavily to Simic after I cracked a misty rainforest in a MH2 pack.
The new deck was the experience counter Ezuri, and its good. It’s too evil though, because it focused on elf-ball, I decided to give it a side plot of Permanents-only for Primal Surge, along with a bunch of infect to distract my opponents with.
and it works well, at the time it was my most powerful deck because it could just insta-win.
But after a while, and a lot of like “Dang this commander is just not *unique* enough” (because everyone has seen a elf-ball deck, everyone has seen a primal surge deck, everyone has seen a infect deck), this simic deck was just a bunch of powerful themed stitched together. Anyways, I eventually just stopped playing with the deck. Because it wasnt interesting, it was just boring value. It didnt even have the risk of life-loss value like skullbriar. There was no risk with the deck, there was no uniqueness, there was no *jank*.
Which is why now, there has been a slow exodus of cards from my simic deck into a slowly forming Titania deck…
My only issue is I feel like Titania is too powerful on its own, but I still want a mono-colored commander that likes land sacrificing.
Also Copper Angel is a pet card of mine and i want to throw it in SOMETHING.
thats my rant for the day; thanks for reading!
I feel this so hard. I built a Jarad EDH deck that was basically a combo deck, which I expanded into Leovold when he got released, then into Muldrotha Graveyard Ramp after Leo got banned (rightfully so), then I switched to Windgrace when that got released.
And Windgrace himself has gone through many iterations. I've switched from ramp into big spells to manland aggro to...the normal Windgrace build you normally see. And I've been thinking of taking him back to manland aggro.
Saw the thumbnail and realized!”I have all those cards in a deck!! Can’t wait to see what you end up doing with it”. I ended up settling on a lord windgrace self land destruction (but ofc I can point it at opponents but only if I need to)
Started playing EDH in 2015 with Feldon artifacts/reanimator and loved getting massive value/damage out of unorthodox reanimation targets. I then changed it to Alesha because she helped me figure out some stuff gender-wise, but I couldn't find a build that felt as fun as Feldon. I tried out Olivia, Mobilized for War, which was super explosive with giant reanimated threats, but felt too linear. The parts from the previous decks made their ways into Slobad combo, Yahenni control, and Mono-W Anafenza blink.
I eventually went back to Alesha with the release of Modern Horizons 2. Graceful Restoration helped me refocus it into what is now my all-time favorite deck, one now built around Reveillark and Restoration as much as it is around Alesha. And with several new ways to generate value (ex: Jaxis and Ardent Elementalist) and damage (ex: Embodiment of Agonies and Quintorius), it's finally recaptured what I loved about Feldon to begin with: repeatedly reanimating weird cards that do more work than people expect
I’ve made about 6 versions of shadowborn apostles now. Initially inspired by that old game knights video before realizing it wasn’t as fun. After many many iterations I’m currently at a rakdos partner companion list and it’s really fun. The deck helped me learn that you can still keep
Things interesting even with extreme restrictions, and that just because one version of something is more visible or popular, doesn’t guarantee it’ll be enjoyed
I went on the same jurney with titania accepted I also tried playing with tatiova in the mix for 5-6 months and every time I go back to the titania build because as you said high risk high reward. I love the all in way she plays
A single minute into the video and I'm laughing at the similarities between Joey and I. I also started with Titania and progressed the same route he did although I skipped Windgrace and went back to Titania before jumping to Golos.
100% Agree. The Titania to Titania Pipeline is real evidently. It can't be coincidence. I went Titania -> Omnath -> Azusa -> Gitrog -> Windgrace -> Titania. Edits - I forgot Slogurk and Tatyova.
Oh man. This journey started as the Roon of the Hidden Realm Precon, which was my first commanded deck ever. First it was Roon, Then it was a really aggressive Derevi blink, flyers deck. That became 2 decks. Edric (which is still Edric) and Roon blink. That deck became a Brago deck which was quite oppressive. That deck eventually became unfun and I radically changed it into a 5 color Niv-Mizzet reborn all creatures blink deck. That deck was fun, but it stumbled a lot. When Omnath locus of Creation came out, I subtracted black from the to get Omnath in the command zone. After that we trimmed red to get where we are today. The present deck is a chulane deck that actually has Roon in the command zone and chulane in the 99.
Casting a X=10 commune with lava in a omnath locust of rage deck is my favorite thing to do. Playing lands from exile, hand, top of library and the graveyard
I did this before with my angel tribal deck, it went from Gisela to Lyra to kaalia then back to Gisela
I had a similar situation happen to me with a casual historic deck I tried to make back when Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths came out. See, I love "Nethroi, Apex of Death" and I was certain that he would be a great key piece to a graveyard-based deck which would mill itself then slam Nethroi for a big attack to win games. However, nothing I did really worked as well as I wanted it to. I built the deck and pulled it apart several times, trying to add in other graveyard lovers like "Fiend Artisan" and "Death's Oasis". I even tried adding blue so I could use "Titan's Nest" and "Brokkos, Apex of Forever", but to no avail. It wasn't till Innistrad: Crimson Vow came out with some new golgari cards that I solved the equation. See I wanted to make a "Meren of Clan Nel Toth" deck, which obviously uses cards like "Demon's Disciple" and "Plaguecrafter". I then realized how well those cards work for fueling Nethroi. Combined with something like "Tergrid, God of Fright" and self-millers like "Glowspore Shaman" and "Stitcher's Supplier" meant that 2.5 ish years later I finally assembled a deck that captured the essence of what I was trying to achieve.
Hey Joey Just wanna say I love the videos! Always a great mood-lifter and a great inspiration! Keep it up and I look forward to the upcoming vids!
I love adding a bunch of board wipes into Omnath Locus of Rage, swing in with the team then wipe on the second main phase. You can do a ton of damage in one turn.
I didnt switch commanders, but fell love with deck and began constantly upgrading. I started with a budget version of Ayula, Queen Among Bears. I loved the puns and the challenge of making such a limiting tribal deck. Then i went heavy into the protection route, then made the deck more universal. Followed by adding more changelings/shapeshifters (thats when a good chuck got printed). I then took out some of the changelings worrying about having to many not true bears. That lands where i am at now, going with +1/+1 counters while maintaining the lethal commander damage queen pressure, but expand into a better multiplayer game. Im currently trying to figure out which way i should do card draw wise, tossed between three cards riskar's expertise, return of the wildspeaker, and greater good. So im ever evoling with my favorite deck.
I had a somewhat similar experience with a deck. It started as a pestillence themed Kazarov, Sengir Pureblood deck. It was a little clunky with many pieces and a 7 mana voltron commander, but I enjoyed the theme and a subset of "donation" cards I ran such as Varchild.
This led me to split it into two decks, a pestilence Kresh the Bloodbraided deck that got extra utility and combo potential from the green enrage dinos and a Thantis the Warweaver group hug/slug deck. Unfortunately the kresh deck was still really clunky and people REALLY hated forced combat so I dropped both decks for a few years.
Then recently with Capena came the Kitt Kanto precon and I shifted into that. I got to run all the fun donation cards in gruul I liked, but with the better pillowfort and combat wincons from white compared to black and all the more modern goad cards. It has some of the same inherent pushback from playgroups as thantis, but it's a little more proactive and working a little better because of it.
Just to share some similar history that could be helpful for somebody:
I start in 2018 building an Ur-dragon deck because I love dragons! so I put all the dragons I loved by that time, the 3 color dragons, the old kamigawa dragons, and tarkir dragons...The time passed by while new and more powerful dragons were released...My deck was updated little by little untill it became a high efficiency player-killer, with a lot of haste, double power and double strike dragons. I realized that the deck was not as fun for other neither for me as it was at the beggining, it had lost it's soul and purpose. I realized that what I was looking for the deck was: thematic building, meaningful creatures at an emotional level, cohesive art; over efficiency or power.
So I decide to gather all the 3 color dragons, all the 2 color dragons , all red and all white I like and build a modular deck. Now I just change the dragons between games to any of this modules (3, 2, red or white drsgon module) to play a thematic, cohesive and superfun dragon deck!!!
I'm literally working on Gitrog -> Soul of Windgrace right now.... where's the camera?
My current gruul omnath deck went on a journey as well. It started as a Zozu the punisher from the prof deck and people just hated me out of games. I turned it into Torbran "dwarf tribal" and surprise all dwarves blow up lands. I realized after a while what I really wanted was a group slug deck and I switched it to a Kloyths deck and added classic stax pieces like trinisphere, smoke, and choke. I really needed a way to finish out games and omnath just made sense, i could still have the game slug away until i had enough lands, and then enough 5/5s to win.
Haha thanks for tips, I'm going through that process right now!
I just built a baba lysaga deck because of your videos, Joey, and I really enjoy it. I had almost all the pieces and hadn't really enjoyed a landfall strategy before, even though in theory it's all pieces I like.
I tried a Tatyova Benthic druid deck, but it was honestly too good. Getting the automatic draw and life gain from lands just made it too easy to go hog. I had the whole table gunning for me and board wiping multiple times and they couldn't stop me because I had so many cards and so much land. I took that deck apart after that one night because it didn't feel like a challenge. It almost felt like I was cheating, or everyone else was playing with one hand tied behind their back.
Baba Lysaga though, feels a lot more like a puzzle to solve. What do I play and what do I sacrifice? How do I maximize what I get from the cards in the deck?
In Tatyova, I could throw in basically any green good stuff cards, and it was fine. In Baba Lysaga I have to think a lot more, and that's fun.
Great stuff, Elementals are my favorite tribe and about four years ago I built my first 5c elemental deck trying to go all out, it was not great lol, It has since went down too Grul, up to Temur, then to 4c, now back to 5c ( Esika/Bridge ) 😂.
I totally get the feeling, I have poured my heart and soul into this one deck…
I've heard versions of this before and I love getting the full dive
Found this quite interesting. I never do this, I tend to start from scratch. I like Spellslinging decks, but I didn't evolve Mizzix into Kalamax. I'd just stopped playing the one, and then restarted with another. I'm working on two others, Elminster and Anhelo, and both are not the same.
I've been going through a very similar situation since 2017-2018. My first ever deck was Gishath, and I still love that deck, but after a while I wanted to branch out and try a stompy deck that wasn't tied to just one creature type. I actually cut a color and went Gruul with Ruric Thar, and it was a blast. As it turned out, I'm incredibly indecisive, so I had changed the deck so many times basically any time I saw a shiny new gruul commander that piqued my interest. Ruric, Nikya, Grand Warlord Radha, Xenagos, Raggadragga, Tovolar, Etali, Karlach/Outlander, Wulfgar, Minsc&Boo, Anzrag, Neyith, Agatha, Klauth, Halana and alena...twice...
Yeah, it was a mess. The worst part was that every time I swapped the deck, there were a ton of changes I needed to make to prop up the specific commander. The one I settled on for the longest was Xenagos, and I still love that version of the deck the most I think, but it had gotten a little too optimized and cutthroat for my liking. While that's mostly my own fault, there have been so many brutally efficient creatures that can basically just end the game with one or two xenagos triggers that I felt like he was a bit too much as a build around for my favorite casual games.
It felt like the "Soul" of the deck, for lack of a better word seemed to be slipping away from me. I know I loved big dumb creatures and aggro-ing out the table, but I wasn't really finding a commander that spoke to me, or narrowing down which one spoke to me the most. Recently, however, I asked myself a very serious question. "Why not run all of them?" So my Gruul deck was born lol. The deck right now is focused on Power Matters, and is full of big threats and ways to increase/double power, and a ton of my old commanders still fit in pretty well to that particular strategy. The only change was that I'm no longer hyper-focusing on one specific commander. The deck will still do its thing regardless of who's in the command zone, so it puts less pressure on me to optimize or build around a specific commander. Now I can swap out the commander on a whim, to slightly change the play pattern, but still keeping the "Soul" of the deck alive.
It really opened up my eyes to the fact that I loved making ridiculously large creatures, and I still love big stompy, but I didn't want to hone in on one specific legend. It also gave me a lot of insight into the power level that I like to play at, and helped me tweak the power level of the deck to make me more comfortable playing it. It also opened my eyes to the advantages of playing a deck that is less reliant on the commander. Regardless of who's in the command zone, the deck is still gonna stomp all over everyone. On top of all that, it lets me play all of the fun and cool Gruul commanders without having to pigeonhole myself into just one!
I had gruul rocks and golems (Toggo and Ich-Tekik) which was amusing but the slowly building up golem tokens was too slow, then I made "Is it rocks" with Toggo and Esior which was a rock-token (as opposed to all artifact tokens) deck with Mechanized Production and a couple of Rise and Shine effects and things like Ghirapur Aether Grid. Turns out that was really unfocused so I updated that to a more control oriented build (I pulled a mana drain from double masters >.>) that just focused on Mechanized Production as the primary wincon. The control part worked, but after going through more than half the deck without finding Mechanized Production, my friends were not amused.
So now I'm waiting for cards for a Toggo and Silas Renn version of the deck to come...it has some tutors now. We'll see how it goes.
I did play around with the idea of Toggo and Glacian "is this powerstone?" deck but the playgroup suggested that might be too slow so..we'll see. The video definitely made me pause and think "am I giving up too much to have a more streamlined/higher win chance deck?" I have kept true to using rocks and mechanized production as the primary wincon but I have also go from a $50 deck to a $250 deck over time. More than that..maybe a bit of the fun of squeezing every little bit of magic out of Toggo's rocks have been lost?
Funny that you mentioned Omnath but I’m having a similar feeling about my own GR Omnath build right now. I haven’t played it in a while because it’s more high powered than my other decks, but it’s also a very binary experience: either I am ramping and building my engine, or I am ramping and my engine is running. I wouldn’t be surprised if I decide to take it apart soon in favor of a different landfall deck, perhaps the Temur Omnath so that I can play some of my blue landfall cards. But right now having the win condition in the command zone just isn’t scratching that itch for me.
Hey Joey, I can definitely relate to this - I've had tons of decks go through plenty of iterations before landing on what I actually wanted (which isn't always the best/strongest commander). Titania is one commander I've been wanting to build because of the inherent weakness of it, and the potential for blowouts, as well as the absolute explosive possibility of sacrificing all of your lands. Do you (or anyone else) have any recommendations for any other commanders that have a similar play pattern, or play a little different than the usual value engines that make the top 100 on EDHREC?
yes! now I'm building a land/mountain sacrifice/discard theme deck with torbran at the head, you can try to do it!! high risk, high reward
I went on similar but backwards journey. Started with Lord Windgrace when he came out, changed to Phylath, World Shaper hoping to power it down, had the opposite effect XD moved on to Titania, now it’s high risk high reward and I love it. I never feel like I’m dominating a game but I always feel like I’m in it and can win with good sequencing. Just an hour ago I threw down an Overlaid Terrain for 14 elemental tokens, played two lands for turn, tapped them for four and used Sylvan Reclamation to get all the lands back 😂 this of course earned me a lethal comet storm to the face, but still 😂
This hit really close to home because of how often I've flop between Sidisi, Muldrotha, Hogaak, and Tasigur.
Hell, I'm still on the fence with Muldrotha and Sidisi right now
I accidentally changed my Group Hug decks into a Stax Light deck.
Long story short, I built K&T when their pre-con came out. It was almost a pure Group Hug deck and the only way to win was to draw everyone out. Inevitably, the "I don't like Group Hug decks because it makes the best deck win faster" guy showed up and beat me down. This made me add more removal, pillow fort, board wipes, etc. This kept happening so I added mill effects to actively try to win.
In the last evolution of the deck, I figured out that the way to make people draw a lot but not speed them up was to add Rule of Law/Damping Sphere effects. I also had 6-8 Counterspell effects in the deck. Thats when I realized I wasnt having fun and neither was anyone else.
Side note: If you're that guy who thinks the next level move is to plow over the Group Hug deck, you're part of the problem. By saying "it only makes the best deck win faster," your assuming that deck will win anyway, so why even play?
I have only been conflicted about a deck rework once and it was very recently. I had a Yidris deck that I felt was really unique. Chock full of all the permanents I loved that said "whenever you cast an instant or sorcery..." and even though black and green were only splashed, I LOVED those cards. Professor Onyx, Sedgemoor Witch, and Witherbloom Apprentice. Those three were the only non izzet cards other than the commander, but I loved them. But I also want to build every "harmonicon" commander because I have a thing for triggered abilities, so I finally switched from Yidris to Veyran. It had been bugging me for almost a year since she was released so I thought it would be an easy swap since I only had to give up 3 cards. But man do I feel like I lost something special and I have not played the deck much recently since I made the switch. Coming up with a new build for Yidris (traps) made me feel a little better, but I feel like my spell triggers deck lost some of its soul
My lands deck is still currently problematic. It was an Omnath deck; Locus of Rage, then Locus of the Roil, then Locus of Creation. Then when Golos came out, I updated to five colour as I really wanted to put Gitrog and Windgrace into the deck. I really love how the deck plays now in five colours, but with Golos banned there isn't another five colour commander that cares about lands. That ban really stung for a deck that didn't use Golos in any broken way.
Id be interested in seeing you do a deck tour that shows off your current edh load out.
What a great journey of self awareness and growth. I think the only thing that you really didn’t dive into Joey was the growth YOU experienced. You grew from a ‘selfish player’ to a great leader in EDH and learned what you wanted out of a deck. Something that myself and many other players are still figuring out.
He dived into that around the 9 minute mark
@@KigerrVariety He mentioned how he was as a player at the time and mentioned growth but I felt like he didn't dive into it or give himself enough credit.
My current weirdest deckbuilding journey has been with Edgar Markov. My first commander deck was Edgar Markov. He was powerful but I was more attracted to Orzhov as a color combination so I removed Edgar and Red from the deck and went with Kambal Vampires. Kambal was drawing too much aggro so I switched to Obzedat, Ghost Council. Eventually I realized it had a powerful token theme, so later when Krav and Regna came out I immediately switched to them. Eventually I started cutting the vampires who didn't make tokens, and then all of the vampires so it became a pure token deck. A few years later I missed playing Edgar so I rebuilt and revamped the deck (pun intended) and kept Krav and Regna as a separate deck. Now I have another Orzhov in Lurrus and am trying to make that deck work, with as many CMC 2 or less cards as I can.
My first EDH deck was Thraximundar. It went through so many changes that it could fill another episode instead of a YT comment. Basically started as Zombie tribal/edict/Grixis good stuff and is now all about theft. I actually may change the deck to using Marchesa now, but I'll need to test that out before I commit.