September 29th, 2024

Your First Magic: The Gathering Commander Deck

Have you ever had a moment where you find a commander and you think it’s cool but you’re not sure if there will be enough cards available to make the deck run smoothly, or you weren’t sure if it will feel good to play so you’ve not wanted to waste time brewing up a 100-card deck? Well, in this guide, I’m going to show you how you can dramatically reduce the time it takes to test out a deck idea or even just a commander.

What Makes a Good Beginner Commander?

When picking your first commander, it’s important to choose something that both appeals to you, and that pushes you into the pit of success. Here are some criteria for what we consider a good starting point.

Costs less than 4 mana - Lower-cost commanders can be cast earlier and more frequently, allowing you to utilize their abilities more often throughout the game.

They’re also less punishing if they’re destroyed, as you can recast them more easily. Getting you back in the action!
Multi-colored - Logic might state that having just one color to worry about is easier, but in most cases, it’s actually the opposite. Having your commander identity be a mix of colors gives you more options and flexibility in your deck-building. This means that you can include more cards that you like and that work well together.

I would recommend staying with 2 color commanders for your first deck. This gives you a good balance of options and simplicity. 3 color commanders can be a bit more complex and require more attention to mana fixing. I still think they can be ok though and I’ve included a few in the list below.
Draws you cards - Card draw keeps your hand full of options and helps maintain momentum. Commanders that can draw you cards are great for beginners because they help you recover from setbacks and stay in the game.

This is not a hard and fast rule, but it’s a good guideline to follow. Card draw is one of the most powerful effects in Magic: The Gathering, so having a commander that can do it is a huge advantage.
Gives innate deck-building guidance - Commanders with specific themes or mechanics make it easier to choose the right cards.

A commander that rewards you for playing a certain way or encourages a specific strategy can help you focus your deck building. This makes it easier to know what cards to include and what to leave out.

For example: Wyleth, Soul of Steel rewards you for playing Auras and Equipment, so you know you should include those in your deck. Whereas Thrasios, Triton Hero, while a powerful commander, doesn’t give you much guidance on what to include in your deck.
Has a clear way to win or progress the game - Having a commander that allows you to play the game is good. But, having a commander that also helps you understand how to win the game is even better.

In my recommendations, I’ve included both commanders that do and don’t have a clear way to win. Those that do have a clear way to win have earned themselves a higher placement though.

Top Recommended Commanders for Beginners

Highly recommended

These commanders are extremely straightforward and forgiving, making them perfect for your first deck.

Wyleth, Soul of Steel - A Voltron-style commander who encourages you to equip him with Auras and Equipment and swing in for a win via commander damage! He draws you cards whenever he attacks, keeping your hand full and strategy simple: gear up and swing.
Commissar Severina Raine - Focuses on creating token creatures and draining your opponents’ life. Her abilities provide clear direction: amass an army and overwhelm your foes.
Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca - A merfolk tribal commander who rewards you for playing merfolk and attacking. He offers multiple abilities that enhance your creatures and draw cards.
Samut, Vizier of Naktamun - Encourages you to play creatures with haste and attack aggressively. Her abilities make combat exciting and straightforward.
Jor Kadeen, First Goldwarden - Rewards you for playing and equipping creatures. His ability boosts your team, promoting an aggressive play style.
Finneas, Ace Archer - Focuses on creating tokens (like rabbits) and attacking. His simple game plan of “going wide” is a recipe for success and a proven strategy.

Basim, Ibn Ishaq - Focuses on cumulative commander damage. Encourages you to attack repeatedly with your commander to win.

Note that historic spells are any card that has the type: legendary, artifact, or saga.
Akiri, Fearless Voyager - Rewards you for equipping creatures and attacking. She also protects your equipped creatures, adding a layer of strategy.

As a suggestion, there are equipment cards that come in already attached to a creature. They’re a great pick for Akiri! Here are a few examples: Hexplate Wallbreaker, Mandibular Kite.
Merry, Esquire of Rohan - Benefits from being equipped and attacking with legendary creatures. Encourages you to play legendary creatures and attack.
Baylen, the Haymaker - Focuses on creating tokens and powering them up for massive attacks. It’s also nice that he provides you with quite a few options on how you use those tokens.
Rigo, Streetwise Mentor - A commander that offers protection for himself with his shield counter. He encourages you to flood the board with 1/1 creatures and repeatedly attack.
Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar - Encourages you to play and buff creatures, then attack. Offers an aggressive strategy with room for growth.

Deckbuilding Guide

You’ve now selected a commander and are ready to build your deck. In order to set you up for success, I’ve put together a simple guide/framework for you to work within so that you can make lots of fun and impactful decisions about how to build your deck, while not getting overwhelmed.

What makes a good deck?

A well built deck is one that offers you a many opportunities to make decisions that impact the game and that allows you to play the game the way you want to play it. To that end, a good deck ought to fulfill the following quotas:

Land (40) - I recommend 40 lands as an absolute baseline for a commander deck if you’re a beginner. This is because lands are the most important cards in your deck. They’re what allow you to play the game and make meaningful decisions. If you had a choice between having too many lands or too few, you’d always want to have too many.

For the purposes of deck tweaking in the future, having more than enough lands also allows you to cut lands for other cards that you might want to try out. This is a much more pleasant experience than having to cut cards you like to make room for more lands.
Ramp (9) - Cards that help you get more mana so you can play more spells, more often.
Card draw (9) - Cards that help you draw more cards so you have more options to choose from.
Spot removal (9) - Cards that help you deal with an opponent’s threats.
Board wipes (2) - Cards that act as a reset button for when things get out of hand.
Graveyard hate (2) - Cards that help you deal with one of Magic’s most common strategies: using the graveyard as a resource. If you don’t have any of these, you might find yourself losing to a deck that uses the graveyard with little to no ways to interact with it. We’re maximizing our opportunities to make choices so that you can have more fun!
Land destruction (2) - This is a controversial category, but I think it’s important to have at least a few ways of dealing with lands. This is because there are many lands that can be very powerful and can win the game on their own. Having some ways to deal with them can be very important for your ability to have fun.

I’d recommend looking into cards like: Demolition field, and Ghost quarter as they are next to free to just throw into your deck list and can be very impactful.
Sudden “I Win” Card (1) - Every deck needs a fun, flashy way of winning the game. This could be a huge, unstoppable creature or a game-ending spell. It’s the card in your deck that you’re most excited to play.

Building the core of your deck

List of online tools for building your deck

Archidekt - To build out your deck
Scryfall - To find your cards
EDHREC - To find inspiration for cards you might want to look for
Commander Spellbook - Combo finder - To find out if your deck has any sneaky combos that you weren’t aware of.

You’ll notice that the numbers above add up to 74 cards. This leaves you with 25 cards to build your “core” deck with. These are the cards that you’ll use to build your deck’s identity and strategy. They should be cards that you enjoy playing and that work well with your commander.

I would recommend starting here. Your commander + 25 cards that work well with your commander. This will give you a solid foundation to build off of and inform the rest of your deck-building decisions.

For example, if you’re playing Wyleth, Soul of Steel, you would find yourself 25 aura’s and equipment cards that would work well with him. You might also include some cards that help you protect him as he’s so important to your strategy.

Filling out the rest

Now that you’ve chosen a set of core cards that you think are super cool and work well with your commander, you should now start filling up the cards in the above categories. I would stick to these very closely. They’re, I believe, a great guideline for what you need in your deck to make sure you’re having fun.

Go through them 1 at a time. You’re looking for cards that fit in the category, but also work well with your commander. For example, if you’re playing Wyleth and you’re trying to fill out your ramp list, you might want to include Sword of the Animist.

If you don’t want to go through an example with me, you can jump to the next section where I’ll give you a few extra tools to help you with your post deck-building experience.

Example: Wyleth, Soul of Steel

Let’s walk through building a deck with Wyleth, Soul of Steel as our commander. We’ll start with the core of the deck and then fill in the rest. I’d recommend opening the finished deck list on my Archidekt.

Core, 25 cards

To complete this task, I’ll primarily be using Scryfall to search for cards that work well with Wyleth. I’ll be looking for cards that fulfill this query ci:boros legal:commander type:equipment usd<2. I won’t explain how to use scryfall in this article but this query is asking for any card that’s in the commander identity of Red and White, is legal in commander, is an equipment, and costs less than 2 dollars (I thought it best to keep to a budget).

Here’s a list of 5 cards that I found that should work well for Wyleth if I choose to build around him being my only creature:

Colossus Hammer - We’ve got to get our commander big and strong.
Hyena Umbra - He’s our only threat so we’ve got to protect him.
Loxodon Warhammer - We’ve only really got the one creature, so we might need to gain some life.
Swiftfoot Boots - Haste seems like a good thing to have available if he were to die. Hexproof helps us protect him too!
Hexplate Wallbreaker - What’s better than one combat? Two combats!

Land, 40 cards

Now we’ve got our core cards that we’ve chosen to build around Wyleth, we need to start filling out the rest of the deck. The next part of the puzzle is our lands. I’ve chosen to suggest a solid 40 lands for all beginner deck brewers to start with. I would simply look at your colors at this point and do an even split between the one/two/three colors you’ve chosen.

For Wyleth, that means that I’ve chosen to do a simple split of 20 plains and 20 mountains. Now, if you’ve looked at the decklist in Archidekt you may have noticed that there is another land in there called Command Tower. This is a card that comes in untapped and creates both of our colors. In this case, I simply removed a mountain and swapped the command tower in.

Ramp, 9 cards

So now we’ve built out our core cards, we need to start filling out the cards in the template. Your goal here is to find as many cards as you can that fulfill the goal of the category, while also working well with your commander. In this case, because we’re building a deck around Wyleth, we’re going to want to find cards that both get us more mana and power up our commander.

Here’s a few of the cards that fit the bill:

Beamtown Beatstick - This card gets us some treasure which can accelerate our mana while also strapping Wyleth up with some evasion and power.
Diamond Pick Axe - This is the same as the Beatstick above.
Explorer’s Scope - This card could get us some extra lands in the early game!

You’ll notice that I only list 3 cards here. This isn’t because I’m keeping the list short, it’s because there were no other options that I could find that worked. So, I’ll have to fill out the rest of the category with other cards that accelerate my mana, but don’t directly help my commander.

Sol Ring - Classic ramp card that’s in every commander deck.
Arcane Signet

Card draw, 9 cards

Now that we’ve got our ramp sorted, we need to start looking for cards that help us draw more cards. This is important because it helps us keep our hand full of options and allows us to keep playing the game. No cards, no Magic!

Here’s a few cards that I found that should work well for Wyleth:

Sram, Senior Edificer - This card is great because it draws us cards whenever we play an equipment.
Mask of Memory - A great card for us as it rewards us for aggressively swinging Wyleth at our opponents. It also helps us filter our draws.

There are a few more cards like: Akiri, Fearless Voyager, Puresteel Paladin, and Rogue’s Gloves. But, I’ll stop going through every card from here on and just list the cards that I think are the best examples of how I’d recommend filling out the category.

Spot removal, 9 cards

Now that we’ve got our ramp and card draw sorted, we need to start looking for cards that help us deal with our opponents’ threats. This is important because it helps us keep our opponents from winning the game.

This category is an example of where you might not get many options that work well with your commander. You might have to include cards that don’t directly help your commander, but are still important to have in your deck. In this case, our only option was to include a copy of Argentum Armor. The rest we filled out with some more general removal spells like Swords to Plowshares, and Path to Exile. You should never feel bad about including these cards as regardless of their ability to synergies with your commander, they’re always going to be useful.

Board wipes, 2 cards

Now that we’ve got our spot removal sorted, we need to think about what we do when our game hasn’t gone too well, or, our opponents have gotten a bit out of hand. This is where board wipes come in. Again, try to pick a pair that synergies well with your game plan.

In this case I’ve gone with:

Divine Reckoning - This card is great because it allows us to keep our commander while also dealing with our opponents’ threats.
Slash the Ranks - This card is great for the same reasons as Divine Reckoning.

Graveyard hate, 2 cards

These next two categories are a bit more niche, but they’re still important to have in your deck. Graveyard hate is important as it’s a super popular strategy, and, if no one has any way to deal with it. Anyone playing a graveyard strategy will basically, win the game. This is no fun for you as you really do want to have a back and forth game.

This is also a category where you might find that you’re not able to find cards that directly slot into your commander’s strategy. However, in this case, we’ve also decided to choose 1 card that overlaps with our land slots and gives us 1 more card in our “core” category. Pretty cool huh?

Scavenger Grounds - A quick and easy way to handle any and all graveyard strategies that are going on. Do be careful that you don’t accidentally exile your own graveyard if you’re looking to do some graveyard shenanigans yourself. Remove one Mountain.
Lion Sash - A super cool pickup for our deck, it gives us both a way to deal with some sneaky threats lurking in a players graveyard, and it also gives us a way to pump up our commander!

Land destruction, 2 cards

Ok. So. You’ll have to hear me out with this category as you might’ve heard people say that land destruction is a bit of a no-no in commander. While this isn’t entirely true, it’s wise to note here that I’m not advocating for you to include cards like Armageddon which just wholesale slow the game down and lead to a miserable experience. Instead, I’m advocating that you include at least 2 cards that can deal with some of the more powerful lands that are out there.

Ghost Quarter - A card that we can also slot into our 40 lands that we can use to handle 1 of our opponents’ pesky lands. Remove one Plains.
Demolition Field - Another card just like Ghost Quarter that we can use to handle our opponents’ lands. Remove one Mountain.

It’s important to note here that we again have a pair of cards which don’t directly help our commander. This means that we’re going to add 2 more cards into our “core” category! Letting us pick a few more cards that are just cool and fun to play with. In the attached Archidekt list, I’ve listed the 3 cards that I chose as extras under the “Extras” category.

Sudden “I Win” Card, 1 card

Now for the pice de resistance. The card that you’re the most excited to play. This is the card that makes you go “Woh!” when you draw it. For me, I chose to include Brilliant Restoration as I know the “Voltron” strategy can be a bit fragile and I wanted to include a card that would help me recover from a board wipe in a super flashy way!

Extras! 3 cards

Throughout this process, I’ve been adding cards to the deck and on some occasions, I’ve been able to find some cards that can fit into a few different categories. This means that I have a few extra slots that I can roll back into my “core” category! In this case I felt like I wanted some ways to protect Wyleth, and to throw in a couple of cool red and white legendary creatures that I found during my search.

Surge of Salvation - A powerful 1 mana instant that we can deploy when Wyleth is about to be removed.
Bruenor Battlehammer - This little dude seems super cool and makes Wyleth into an absolute monster!
Nahiri, Forged in Fury - She seems like a powerhouse to drop onto our board if we draw her and could very well have been put in the “Sudden I Win Category”.

What now?

Now you’ve got your deck built, you’re ready to start playing right? Well, yes. If you think you’re good to go then head to a site like MTGMate.com.au, punch in your deck list and start playing! But, if you’re a little worried about whether your deck is good or not, I’d recommend one simple thing. Goldfish your deck!

Goldfishing

Goldfishing is the act of taking a deck, and sitting a theoretical goldfish across from you and playing the game. This is a great way to see how your deck plays out without the pressure of having an opponent. It can also help you see if you’ve got the right amount of lands, ramp, card draw, etc.

Here’s my go-to strategy with Goldfishing:

Open the Play tester in Archidekt
Draw your opening hand and play the game as you would normally.
1. Is there enough lands? 3 or more is ideal
2. Are there cards you can play? Is everything too expensive?
3. Are you happy that you’ll be able to play your commander and “Do the thing” that you designed the deck around doing?
Play the game to turn 5 and ask yourself the question
1. Did I get to play the game?
2. Do I have some idea on what I’ll be doing for the rest of the game?

If you find that you’re never able to answer those questions positively, I’d go back to your core cards and maybe make some adjustments. If you’re finding that you’re always able to answer those questions positively, then congratulations! You’ve built a great deck!

Conclusion

You’ve now got your first commander deck! Well done! Take it to your local game store and get in some games! I hope you found this guide helpful!