Advanced Deck-building: Fast Brewing
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.
The Framework
To fast brew, you need to first understand how it works. The goal here is to build a miniaturized version of your deck and then play it within some constraints, noting what it’s doing. To do this, we’re first going to put some restrictions on our deck-building.
Deck-building Restrictions
To fast brew, we restrict your card selection to 25 cards and a commander. Any good commander deck will likely have anywhere from 25-30 cards that are doing the lion’s share of the deck’s work. So this is a great way to concentrate your focus on the deck’s primary theme(s). To put it simply, the primary theme(s) is the core action the deck is trying to take I.e. draw lots of cards, put +1/+1 counters on creatures, generate lots of creatures etc.
If you are just starting out with magic or brewing commander decks I’d recommend reading my Beginner’s Guide to Your First Magic: The Gathering - Commander Deck before reading further. This guide, Advanced Deck-building: Fast Brewing, compliments the beginner’s guide’s section: Building the core of your deck.
We also want to make sure we’re only putting in cards that are truly core to the game plan. This means we don’t want to run Ramp, Removal, or any other secondary or tertiary card category in our 25. A great example here would be if we were running a commander like Samut, Vizier of Naktamun . At first glance the card Goblin Ruinblaster seems like a great pick because he is a creature with Haste, meaning he can attack on the turn he entered the battlefield. That’s what Samut wants you to do! But, as its primary role in the deck can be categorised as either Removal or Land Destruction, we should skip over it here and pick something else. We’re really looking for cards that progress the game to an end. In Samut’s case, we want creatures like Legion Loyalist, which buffs up our board and pushes the game to an end via creature damage.
Play-testing
So once we have a 25-card deck and a commander, how do we test it? We’re going to give ourselves a set amount of mana and then probe the game at 3 key points: The Setup, The Mid-game, and The End-game. First, we’re going to draw 7 cards and not mulligan. Then we’re going to go to The Setup.
The Setup
The purpose of this part of the play test is to show you what your deck can do during the early stages of a game. Using your deck building app of choice, mine is Archidekt, or a real set of 25 cards, simulate the first 3 turns of the game. To do this, shuffle up and:
- Draw a card, pretend you have 1 mana to spend and play through a turn.
- Draw a card, pretend you have 2 mana to spend and play through a turn.
- Draw a card, pretend you have 3 mana to spend and play through a turn.
Note that it is likely you won’t have tertiary effects here I.e. ramp, removal, land destruction (unless that is the goal of your deck), so if your deck is fundamentally a slower one, you might not do much here. This is totally fine, and you shouldn’t change your deck just to make this stage better. It’s just to see whether you’re doing anything early and if you’re going to be okay with that.
The Mid-game
You’re then going to have 2 turns, the first at 5 mana, then the next at 7. These are to simulate the middle portion of the game. This is where you’re deploying either a lot of stuff or your big heavy hitters. The questions to ask here is:“How much damage in creatures do I have on board?”, “Did I do something cool?”, “Did I achieve a part of my goal”, or “Did the deck just noodle around?”. This is the most important part of these tests. Don’t take them too seriously as you can very likely just have a bad hand. That’s okay.
The End-game
This is the grand finale. In this final stage, you’re going to give yourself pseudo-infinite mana and draw 4 cards. This is going to simulate a long-form game and show you what your deck can achieve across a whole game. I would caution against just dumping your whole hand as that’s not proving anything. The goal here is to see: “What cool things can I do now?”, “What are some awesome synergies I have?”, and “How do I end the game?”.
This is not as important as the previous step, but if you find that the deck just cannot generate power, never has anything cool or flashy to do, then this is a sign that you might be missing some top-end power, or just don’t have anything fun. Which is not good!
If you’re already happy at this point, you can stop reading here as the rest of the guide is an example of how the fast-brewing framework works. Happy brewing!
Greta, Sweettooth Scourge
It’s all well and good to give you a guide, but let’s see it in action. In this case, we’re going to use the commander Greta, Sweettooth Scourge. This commander offers us a few ways to build but is still mostly within the barriers of what I’d call a beginner-friendly commander. In this case, we’re going to just hydrate the deck with 25 cards that do 1 of 2 things: make food or make/interact with counters. Here’s a link to the deck-list in Archidekt that I’ve built by using this Scryfall search query:
legal:commander ci:golgari (o:food or (o:counter and o:"+1")) usd<3
To briefly explain the query, I’m searching for commander legal cards that are in the commander identity of Golgari(green and black) that either have the word “food” in the Oracle text or both “counter” and “+1” in the Oracle text. Finally, I’d rather only look at cheap-ish cards.
- Drana, Liberator of Malakir
- Forgotten Ancient
- Gilded Goose
- Hardened Scales
- Killer Service
- Loyal Guardian
- Night of the Sweets' Revenge
- Nuka-Cola Vending Machine
- Old Flitterfang
- Ozolith, the Shattered Spire
- Peregrin Took
- Pippin, Warden of Isengard
- Power Fist
- Pridemalkin
- Provisions Merchant
- Rapacious Guest
- Rishkar, Peema Renegade
- Savvy Hunter
- Vinereap Mentor
- 1 Syr Ginger, the Meal Ender
- 1 Tireless Provisioner
- 1 Tough Cookie
- 1 Tuskguard Captain
- 1 Vinereap Mentor
- Voracious Fell Beast
- Welcome to Sweettooth
Each of these cards offers us some way of interacting with or creating food and interacting with or creating +1/+1 counters. With this, we can run the deck through our framework. You’ll note that there is the odd card here and there which is a little more expensive; this is because I couldn’t overlook how awesome they would be in the deck. I.e. Nuka-Cola Vending Machine.
Figure: Full deck-list in Archidekt
Step 1: The Setup
Now that we’ve got the bones of the deck fleshed out, let’s start play-testing! To reiterate, first we’ll draw seven.
Figure: Opening seven
Here we can see a Tough Cookie, Provisions Merchant, Old Flitterfang, a Gilded Goose, Drana, Liberator of Malaria, a Voracious Fell Beast, and a Nuka-Cola Vending Machine. We can immediately see that we’ve got cards to play during our setup step as we’ve got a 1 cost creature in Gilded Goose, a 2 cost creature-artifact in Tough Cookie, and then a smattering of things to do with our 3 mana turn, including our commander.
Let’s draw and play out the turns and see what happens!
Figure: Setup complete
So, how’d we do? We can see that on turn 1 we played the Gilded Goose, getting much-needed food for our commander’s ability, and a piece of ramp if we need it. Then, we play Hardened Scales that we drew as it has now set up the counterpart of the deck. Finally, we play it simple and drop our commander down.
So let’s ask some questions:
- Did we play cards? Yes! We played a card on every turn and each of them was quite powerful for our plan of making food and getting counters!
- Do we feel like we’re going to have things to do in the mid-game? Yes! WE can see that we have more and more food generators in hand. And, some power generators in Pridemalkin, Drana, Liberator of Malakir, and Tough Cookie. Finally, we have a solid emergency button in Voracious Fell Beast which can net us some more food in an emergency or just act as a huge evasive beater!
Seems we’re doing well! Let’s go to the mid-game!
Step 2: The Mid-game
Now we’ve seen our early game is pretty good! Let’s see how that mid-game plays. Our goal here is to see if the deck can deploy some reasonable threats and take some actions that progress our game plan to its conclusion. Remember, unlike the setup, we don’t go up just 1 mana this time. We’re going to do 2 turns with 5 and then 7 mana.
Figure: The Mid-game complete (Note- I forgot to add the two counters onto Drana from her attack. Oops.)
Well, well, well… This has gone exceptionally well! On our first of the Mid-game turns, we drew a Loyal Guardian, and our plans were pretty well set. Get out as many creatures as we can so that we can get as much value off the Loyal Guardian and the Hardened Scales. So, first we played Drana, Liberator of Malakir, and the Tough Cookie. We then went to the last mid-game turn and played out our newly drawn Welcome to Sweettooth, netting us another two bodies onto the board and then dropping our massive Loyal Guardian. In the mid-game, we’ve managed to make our board quite large and deploy a large amount of threats with our +1/+1 counter synergies. We then swung out with everything we had, doing a total of 12 normal damage and 7 commander damage. We also gained access to an additional 26 power on the board with our new human tokens and all those +1/+1 counters! Wow, wow, wow!
Let’s ask ourselves some questions though:
- Did we make a meaningful difference to the game? Hell yes! We’ve deployed a lethal amount of damage to the board. If we weren’t the archenemy of the table, we’ve definitely been put into contention for that title now.
- Did we achieve what our deck wanted to do? Kind of. Overall, while we did achieve some great things. We also didn’t do anything with our commander and our food. We do have access to 6 life in our food and can use our commander’s ability to pump up our board even more. But, overall, that part of our game plan fell a little flat.
So with this spooky board, let’s head into the End-game!
Step 3: The End
OK, so here we go! Let’s see what our deck is capable of at the end of the game. We’re going to draw 4 cards to simulate that we’ve got access to some extra cards over the course of the game and we’re going to give ourselves almost infinite mana and see what we can do.
A note here: While we do have infinite mana, the goal isn’t to just play every card in our hand. It’s to play a “line”. I.e. a succession of cards that work together to achieve a consolidated goal. This might mean we only play 2-4 of the cards in our hand. You don’t want to overdo it here as any deck with infinite mana will always do something crazy. It’s about asking the question: “What can my deck do when I’m able to do a ‘cool thing’?”.
And for the grand finale, we ended up hitting for a total of 56 damage, 11 commander damage, and deployed an additional… too much to count… power to the board. What a ride! The line we chose was to throw the newly drawn Power Fist onto Drana as she is a first-striking flyer with a nasty on-hit ability. We then tried to get her as big as we could! To do this, we played out our Pridemalkin, letting us put a counter on her (and an additional one from our Hardened Scales), Rishkar to throw a counter on both her and the Gilded Goose, then finally, we ate 3 food (we got one additional one from our Welcome to Sweettooth) with our commander’s ability and added a total of 6 additional counters onto her. Then we just swung for the hills!
So we definitely “did something cool”. In this case, it was just making our big evasive flyer massive and pumping our whole board with Loyal Guardian, Hardened Scales, and a light dusting of counters from Rishkar, Preema Renegade.
Now to ask the penultimate questions:
- Did we do something cool? YES! I won’t even go into how much we did again as it was rather bonkers.
- What were the most valuable cards throughout the game? Definitely our Hardened Scales, Drana, and Loyal Guardian. They all did a huge amount of work, and the game would look very different if we didn’t have them.
- Did you have fun? Yes, sir! This was big, silly Magic. The best kind of Magic. I’m very happy with how the deck plays and think it’s worth continuing on into building into a fully fledged Commander deck!
Conclusion
This is Fast-brewing, it’s a way to feel out a deck idea and explore card options in a quick and efficient manner. These play sessions last all of a few minutes, and swapping cards in and out is super easy as there aren’t that many to contend with. You’ll find cards that just aren’t doing anything for you, and you’ll find cards that are just exceptional.
This is the power of the fast brew:
- Speed: There is no need to mulligan and you draw 7 impactful cards every hand.
- Frequency: You reap most of the benefits of a full commander game in all of 5 minutes, so you can play hundreds in an hour.
- Simplicity: You’re at most playing 5 turns in a relatively strict setting. The cards themselves are the focus not other players or interactions.
I hope you found this guide helpful, and I hope that you find some cool commanders and brew up some even cooler decks!