Commander Primer #2: Deck Shape

Last week I went over where to start building your Commander deck, so lets continue shall we.

This week I'm going to go over the shape of your deck: how many cards of each type you have in your deck and for what function.

I am trying not to go too in-depth into card quality here, but I have to in a couple of places to get my point across.

Lands: 34-40+

The manabase is normally the bit you put together last - after all, you won't know what lands you'll need until after you have seen the rest of the cards together and calculated the colour ratios - but quantity-wise it's what you should have in mind when you start building your deck, because it gives you the hard limit of how big the rest of your deck should be.

The count is affected by how often you want to be playing a land from hand, how many different colours you need to hit, and whether you need to have a land in hand to do something with. Generally, the more colours you run, the more lands you want, because you need to hit more colours quicker. At the same time (as with every other constructed format), you want to take your mana curve into account: lower curves can get away with fewer lands because you won't need to play many, but higher curves rely more on ramping up to the big spells quicker rather than just running more lands.

My rule of thumbs is roughly:

• One/Two Colour deck: 36 lands
• Three Colour deck: 38 lands
• Four/Five Colour deck: 40 lands
• Low curve: reduce count by a couple (Elves decks can get away with 32 at a push)
• High curve: the above numbers should be fine, ramp spells affect this more than lands themselves
• Land Theme: If you have a deck helmed by The Gitrog Monster, Borborygmos Enraged, or any other deck with lots of land-related triggers, you definitely want to go over 40.

Within your manabase you should aim the following splits:

Basic Lands: 40%+

I'm giving a percentage rather than an absolute number because obviously it scales. It also depends on how many colours you are running: the fewer colours, the fewer non-basic lands you will have access to.

Basic land count is also affected by ramping if you are in green (or have one of the few colourless cards that fetch basics). The more ramping, the more basics so you actually hit something off your spell.

As with lands in general for your deck, put your basic lands in your land section last but keep them in mind when counting out all the other lands you'll be packing.

Multicoloured Lands: 2-4 per colour combination, plus a couple of extras

The downside to multicoloured lands is that almost all of them enter the battlefield tapped. If you are running lots of cards with double or triple symbols of a colour (Progenitus is the worst offender) then you want to aim higher here since it give you more flexibility in your available colours, but if you have cards with only single colour symbols

Again another scalable facet this fills up a lot of your manabase the more colours you're running, so if you're pushed for space consider running towards the lower end.

The "couple of extras" are for the lands that produce mana of multiple colours. The tri-coloured lands from Khans/Alara block for three-coloured decks are a good staple, and of course there is the good old Command Tower.

Fetch Lands: 1+, but it's complicated

Here's where the headaches start, and I have to go into Card Quality a little bit.

If you're in a mono-coloured deck then the only Fetch really worth noting is Myriad Landscape (which is technically a Ramp spell anyway).

If you're in a multicoloured deck then you at least want to run Evolving Wilds and Terramorphic Expanse to fetch up your basics. The tri-coloured Panorama fetch lands from Alara block are worth it in 3/4/5 colour decks too.

After that fetches depend on what you have and what you can afford. If you have the budget for shock lands, buddy lands, and dual lands (aka the non-basic lands with basic land types) and you can also afford the Khans/Worldwake fetch land cycle, then add a fetch land in for every colour pair... though if you are in a 4 or 5 colour deck that can quickly eat up 6 or 10 slots which is actually too many.

The other thing to take into consideration is whether you want shuffle effects in your deck. If you have ways of manipulating your deck order - Sensei's Divining Top is the main contender for this - then putting more fetch lands in as a way of ensuring you can shuffle away unwanted cards increases the number of fetches you want to run.

Utility: 4-10

Utility is a bit of a catch-all term here, but essentially it's for lands that do something that fall into later categories:

• "Ramp" lands, like Krosan Verge
• "Removal" lands, like Maze of Ith
• "Funky" lands, like Reliquary Tower
• "Draw" lands, like Mikokoro, Center of the Sea

There are loads of options here and I'll go into the good/bad ones when I cover card quality.

Ramp: 5-10

For the purpose of this section I am defining Ramp as "gets you more mana than you would ordinarily". A fetch land - Evolving Wilds for example - is not ramp.

Ramp comes in three flavours: puts more lands into play, mana-rocks/mana-dorks, and produces more mana than you would normally (or "special").

Putting more lands into play is normally in the remit of green -  Farseek etc - and is in my mind the most preferably method. Lands are a bit harder to remove than mana  (since it thins your deck a bit, plus it provides a shuffle effect).

Mana dorks - the colloquial term for a creature that produces mana - are also almost entirely in the remit of green. I personally don't like playing mana dorks because creatures are the easiest card type to remove and you are very susceptible to losing all of your ramping effort. In my mind the best place for mana dorks is a deck that takes advantage of the creature itself and not just the ramping effect... so basically Elves tribal.

Mana rocks are available across the board. If you run more than one colour I suggest edging away from rocks that produce a single colour of mana and more towards rocks that produce multiple colours (Dimir Signet) or of the colour of your choice (Darksteel Ingot).

As for the "special" section, producing more mana than you would normally comes in the form of lands (Cabal Coffers) or some non-land permanents (Mana Flare). All of these types of effects are ripe targets for removal (if they only affect you) or liable to blow up in your face (if they affect everyone equally) so run these with some caution.

Generally I choose ramp spells in green decks, rocks in non-green decks, and the special group depending on how big the deck wants to ramp suddenly in one turn.

Tutor: 2-6

Tutoring can get controversial in some playgroups, and I will save the tutor effect article for another point in time.

Suffice to say, the ability to fetch a useful card at any point in time is required, and every deck should have a couple of tutors for emergency situations. That said, only black really has access to generic tutors. For everything else I suggest making sure that you have at least 6-8 targets before you consider running the tutor. This is a personal preference, but it stops you running a tutor to fetch a single card and then having that tutor useless when the relevant target is already in your hand or in play.

Card Draw: 6-10

Card draw is pretty essential in Commander. Games run long, spells fly, and you will constantly need to restock your hand.

6-10 is the recommended suggestion for cards where the primary function is to draw you cards. Lots of cards have "draw a card" on there as a side effect; those should be viewed as a useful upside rather than counting towards your Card Draw count.

Counter Spells: 0-8

Counter Spells are a bit funny in Commander: there is always going to be one big spell that you don't want to resolve (normally a spell that starts a combo-victory win), but at the same time there are very few things that can't be dealt with equally well with a removal spell of sorts.

The other issue with counter spells is that everyone likes doing something. Playing a creature and having it die to a removal spell feels better than casting a creature and having it countered, even though a lot of the time it ends up the same way: one creature and one spell in the graveyard. On the flip side, lots of creatures have an enter the battlefield effect that you don't want to happen and countering is the only way to prevent it.

In short: it's a bit complicated, and only you and your playgroup can help decide the actual correct number.

And if you aren't in blue, ignore the above words. In a card quality article I will explain why none of the non-blue counter spells are worth running.

Spot Removal: 5-10

Spot Removal covers Creatures, Artifacts, Enchantments, and Planeswalkers. Other things have their own section lower down because they need commenting on.

The purpose of spot removal in Commander is to take out the one thing that is driving everyone insane. The list of good/bad spot removal spells is ridiculously long and can take up two or three blogposts, but suffice to say here is a short summary:

• Make sure you have some variety in effects if possible: Bounce, Destroy, Shrink (-X/-X), Shuffle into Library, and Exile and the 5 main effects, in that order of usefulness (that is an entire article in itself). Make sure you have some variety if possible.
• While creatures are the main threat don't forget the non-creature removal too.
• If you are struggling for removal of a certain type in your colours, don't ignore colourless removal. The strength of colourless cards has improved dramatically in recent years.
• Counterspells count as Spot Removal, sort of. If you are running counterspells, include them in this count.

Mass Removal: 4-8

Mass Removal - or wraths - are the emergency reset button. Commander games go big, and at some point in the near future you will be staring down a veritable army.

Wraths require you to have a sweetspot which is affected by how many creatures you yourself are running. Too many wraths and your side of the board will also stagnate. Too few wraths and you can get overpowered.

Do not forget that if you can, run a wrath that gets rid of something other than creatures. Austere Command is a prime example, not just because it removes multiple card types but also because it gives you the choice.

Land Destruction: 1-it's complicated

Land Destruction is a very touchy subject that also requires its own article at some point, so here is my quick rule for the moment:

• One or two cards that can remove a single and very frustrating land (the aforementioned Cabal Coffers is normally a prime target) is a good idea in any deck. Make sure these cards do something other than just destroy a land - at the very least, something like Ghost Quarter which also produces mana.
• Only run Land Wraths - Armageddon at its kin -if you are prepared to deal with the consequences. I'll cover this in my later article.

Graveyard Removal: 1-3

This is quite meta-driven, but reanimation and recursion effects are quite prevalent in Commander. Having the ability to exile cards from graveyards is a necessity but going overboard can be fruitless: it is quite possible for most decks to play without recurring anything from the graveyard at all, so removing the graveyard has likely done nothing to disrupt any of their plans.

Obviously if an opponent is playing a deck themed around the graveyard then you should remove with extreme prejudice.

Recursion: 1-4

Recursion comes in three flavours: return the the battlefield, return to hand, and shuffle back into your library. Different colours will do it differently, and having a bit of a mix of effects if possible is a reasonable strategy.

Focusing hard on recursion - especially in a reanimation deck - can be a good strategy because you have a much better selection of targets than just playing from the top of your deck. At the same time, having no recursion at all also works; you can play without worrying about your graveyard being removed, and it makes your opponent's graveyard removal pointless.

I have found that Recursion/Graveyard Removal can turn your metagame into a bit of a cold-war scenario, so be careful.

Everything Else: ???

The "Everything Else" section is a big fuzzy blur of all the other things you want to put in that fits in with what your deck is trying to do, rather than having a specific and generic functional use. This list is far too long but if you're holding a card that doesn't easily fit into one of the above sections then it goes here.

This section doesn't have a count because, since it's based on what you're trying to do, I can't tell you what you need. It is very subjective, but make sure you having something in here.

But how do I actually win?

So all of the above sections are the framework to get your deck running but it doesn't actually really do anything yet. It has lands, ramp, draw, and lots of different types of removal, but nowhere have I mentioned a card that actually develops your board presence.

So the purpose of this is - which I will go into in the card quality articles - is that the above are lists of effects, not card types themselves. A lot of effects come attached to creatures, artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalkers. The utility land section overlaps with most of the other sections, killing two birds with one stone. Also, a lot of cards can perform multiple effects, overlapping several groups and reducing your counts of those cards in those various sections.

In conclusion, however, you should now be able to look at all of the cards you've put in your deck and work out whether it has the right balance of effects. Whether those cards are actually good or not is a very different question

Card of the Day - 18/12/16

Necrogenesis is one of my favourite graveyard removal spells, but it has to fit in the right deck, and graveyard removal in and of itself is such a situational requirement that...

Okay, I'm clearly waffling here. Necrogenesis is fantastic in Commander and Cube, but not anywhere else really, because those are the only formats where you can guarantee needing graveyard removal but be okay with just removing a single card at a time. Let's face it; in Modern or Legacy the graveyard decks tend to be a bit more combo-y, so if you're playing black you're going to run Leyline of the Void instead.

In Commander there are some better, cheaper effects, but none of them has the upside of getting you a 1/1 Saproling. Graveyard removal is a necessity though, so if you're in green and black you can't go much worse than this.

As for Cube... it's a sideboard card, but a very good one. I had a fantastic go of a friend's Pauper Cube where I ran this in my main deck just for advantage in the creature heavy format, only to face my friend in the final and ruin his attempts to play a persist/dredge/reanimate deck.

Board Games Review: The Scale of Influence

Before I start writing up some board game reviews I've been meaning to for a while, I wanted to introduce you to The Scale of Influence. I've developed it as a handy way to quickly describe how much randomness there is in a game, and how much you as a player have influence over what you do, and how much autonomy the game gives you outside of what it does against you.

This doesn't measure how difficult the game is, but more how much your skill counts versus how much the random element of the games does the work for (or against) you. A 10 on the scale can be a much simpler game than a 5, it's just that the 10 relies wholly on your skill and a 5 has a lot of random elements working alongside.

In the case of games that are player versus player, the scale measures how much you rely on your skill to defeat your opponents skill and how much you rely on a random element of the game jumping out to save you... though this of course only works where the two of you are playing by the exact same rules, so I'll do a bit of hand waving where one side of the game has different rules and mechanics to the other.

As an aside, it's also a scale of how easy it would be to program a random number generator to play it.

That said, this isn't a scale of how much I like a game. Admittedly the games at the bottom end of the scale bore the pants off me and need to be set on fire, but once you get to the middle and top ends of the games they are all fun for different reasons. Sometimes I like a game that is skill against skill. Sometimes I like a game where a bad die roll adds tension and makes you swear profusely.

Sometimes the right amount of randomness in a game makes it all the better.

Let me furnish you with some examples. I haven't listed every number because... well, I haven't yet played enough games to work out exactly how the scale works. But it's a start

0 - Snakes and Ladders

You roll the dice, move your piece that many squares, and go back and forth depending on whether you land on a snake or a ladder. There, I've just described the entire game and at no point did I use the word "choose", because that's the point of being a 0 on the scale: you make no choices whatsoever.

Except to play in the first place. Snakes and Ladders is not a game. If you are planning on preoccupying small children at least have the decency to give them a game that will make them think.

Perhaps the designer wanted to generate some random dice rolls and needed to find a way to con his kids into helping.

1 - Monopoly

I could pick one of many the selection of Toys R Us "family" games, but Monopoly wins the crown for also being the greatest cause of family feuds since the middle ages.

Roll the dice, move your piece, if you land on a empty lot you may choose to buy it (and if not put it up for auction). You also get to choose where and when you build houses and hotels.

Either way it's all a bit fruitless. You keep moving in the same circle letting the dice dictate where you land and what you do, and ultimately your skill in winning is not down to any shrewd investment but more to do with being fortunate to buy all of the oranges, all the reds, and Mayfair you lucky sod.

Also, if it was any further indictment, you buy Monopoly in almost any variant and it's still the same damn game.

2 - Talisman

The first time I played Talisman - a massive several-hour game at a friend's party - I fell in love with it and immediately went out and bought a copy. Two half-finished games later and I have now donated it to another friend after brushing half an inch of dust off of it.

Talisman is a fantasy themed board game: move around a map, fight trolls and orcs and dragons, pick up loot and spells to improve your character, level up, find the mythical Talisman and use it to enter the Crown of Command section of the map and win.

That doesn't sound too bad... except yet again everything involves rolling a die, or a random card from a deck. Movement around the map is dice based, with the slight improvement that at least you can choose which direction you're moving in. Which monster you fight comes from a deck of cards. Who wins comes down to dices rolls, with some influence from your character stats versus the monster's stats. Loot also comes from a random card from a deck... though if you're lucky you might find a shop and actually get to choose. Some squares can give you bonuses or punishments but these two are all random options.

In short, it looks like there is a lot of choice but there really isn't.

There are some choices that do redeem Talisman. There are a bunch of different characters to play as all with different abilities that you can use to your advantage. There is a long list of expansions that I haven't played but look interesting and appear to add new content. You also get to choose to fight other players if you land on their square and either try and kill them or steal their stuff. Not that I would ever do that of course...

In all honesty, the main reason I dislike Talisman is that if takes such a long time to play it. If any of you are interested in trying it, there is an iOS/Android version that is quite good... mainly because you can have a very short game of just you against one AI which gives you the maximum amount of Talisman fun without the nightmare of finding a table large enough to play at.

5 - Eldritch Horror

I'll lead with the fact that I really like Eldritch Horror. It's a very good game. Except for the moments where the game manages to kill you and there isn't really anything you can do about it. I'll get on to that.

You and your team play various investigators and other Cthulhu protagonist style characters on a quest to save the world from one of the many ancient tentacle beings with almost unpronounceable names.

Cthulhu and his ilk are invading the world and it's up to you to stop them. Each villain comes with their own character sheet, favourite monsters, and objectives for you to complete. Complete the objectives and you win. Fail the objectives and... well, you don't actually lose straight away, but rather you get into a last-ditch effort to win against much greater odds in a different way.

Similarly there is variety for you to choose from for your characters. Each has different abilities, equipments, skills, and stats. Some feel very unique, thought a few are a bit interchangeable, though an equal number are absolute power houses that make the game quite a bit easier for the other players. If you are so minded you can craft a wonderfully synergistic team, but a lot of fun does come from picking one at random (see, random can be good!).

Half of the game exists on a map of the world, where you each take it in turns to move around and set yourselves up in a named location on the map. There might be a clue to investigate. There might be a monster to fight. There might be a portal to realms unknown. You might just be in a city and get to go shopping.

Once you've chosen your location - and fought the monsters first if there are any - you get a random card and follow the events accordingly. This is where your character's stats come in, and you get to do some dice rolling. If you win you get a victory condition - find a clue, close a portal, improve a skill and so on. If you fail you can sometimes just get nothing, but more likely you get driven mad and lose your sanity.

The other half of the game is the villain fighting back. Mythos cards cause random events to occur, opening portals, summoning monsters, and generally making everything a bit darker and a bit worse. This is the bit where the game can randomly kill you: sometimes the order of the events, the wrong monster spawning in the wrong place, the wrong event, and all of sudden you're on the back foot and struggling to win, and then everything goes black and it's game over. This is the really frustrating part, because you can lose through no fault of your own despite having played the best you can and won every dice roll along the way anyway.

Ultimately a game with a random element can make you lose through no fault of your own. The main problem I have with Eldritch Horror is that it's a hard game to begin with, so as soon as things start to go even wronger you do genuinely feel quite hopeless.

7 (ish)- Magic the Gathering

To save my sanity (especially after I lost most of it to Cthulhu up above), I'm leaving this to a completely separate article that I will link in here once I've written it.

Suffice to say, Magic is a game of immense skill but the sheer selection of cards, possible combinations, tournament legality rules, and of course the fact that it's a randomly shuffled deck, it's quite complicated to explain exactly where it fits on my scale.

Plus it isn't technically a board game, but shush.

9 - Letters from Whitechapel

This is one of my favourite games of all time, but I had to hold back from making it a 10 for the simple reason that there is one (but only one) random element that does affect gameplay.

Letters from Whitechapel is an asymmetrical game. One player is Jack the Ripper, out on the streets of Whitechapel, running around with wild abandon and murdering prostitutes (known in the game as The Wretched). The other players - 1 to 5 - control 5 pieces representing members of the various police forces chasing after Jack before too many lives are lost.

The game is split into four rounds or nights. Jack begins the night by murdering a Wretched. He then has to flee to his safehouse within a number of turns. The police have until he reaches his safehouse to catch him. If Jack remains uncaught by the end of the fourth and final night then he wins. If the police successfully arrest Jack, or Jack fails to reach his hideout before dawn breaks, then he is thrown in the slammer and the police win.

The board itself is a beautifully detailed map of Whitechapel as it was in the 1800s. Jack moves from street to street, each with a numbered circle. He can use stagecoach tiles to take two turns in a row, or alleyway tiles to cut through the board itself and jump from one road to another. Conversely, the police move from street corner to street corner, each represented by a small square. Once the police have moved they get to look down each street and investigate whether Jack has been there, or make an arrest if they think they've found him.

That last bit might have sounded a bit confusing, so here's the key: Jack doesn't have a playing piece on the board. The player playing Jack has a small notepad in front of them that they use to mark the street numbers as and when they move. The police only know if Jack has been on a street by investigating it and have the Jack player announce that he has indeed been there (though fortunately Jack does not have to announce whether he is there right now). This does involve a bit of trust, but if you're going to cheat at this sort of board game then it isn't at all for you. Also, get out.

As the nights go on the police get a better idea of where Jack is heading to. Some of the police can start a night where they left off the previous night, letting the wily coppers form a blockade around the potential hideout and prevent Jack getting home. Jack can get past blockades with his alleys and stagecoaches, but they too dwindle as the nights go on making them a more and more precious resource.

The only random element is one that does, occasionally, get in the way: each night the policemen move in turn order depending on a random selection. The policemen can't move through each other, so sometimes this turn ordering means that a player can't move to where he needs to be and in the later nights this can make or break it for either side.

Skill does count for a lot; the most experienced player should generally play as Jack to make the game last any reasonable amount of time. That said, a small addition can make it a lot easier for the policemen: pen and paper to note down the streets Jack has been to.

10 - Chess

I don't think I need to any more words the end my article really. It's Chess. It has no random element whatsoever. It is 100% skill and everyone knows someone who is ridiculously good at it that you can't beat no matter how hard you try.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my list.

Commander Primer #1: Where to start?

So you'd like to play Commander, right?

Okay, let's back up a bit.

I'll assume you know how to play Magic. Maybe you've just been to a pre-release or two, built up a couple of decks of your favourite cards, and you have fun games in your kitchen with a couple of friends. Or, perhaps, you're a seasoned competitive player with that one highly tuned Modern deck that makes everyone swear at whenever you rock up at FNM.

Either way, this format is for you. If you're the former then Commander is a brilliant opportunity for you to discover as many new and exciting cards as possible, smash them all together into one epic deck, and turn your kitchen table into your own little circus... and if you're the latter, Commander is the perfect opportunity for you to cherry pick your favourite powerhouse cards from over the year, carefully tune it, and then make an entirely new group of people swear even more loudly.

Quickly as possible - because quite frankly the best place to read the rules is on the site of the creators of the format - Commander is a singleton format. Your deck contains 100 cards, can only have one copy of a card (except for basic lands - you can have multiples of those), and is spearheaded by your Commander, which is a legendary creature.

So you've read the rules (if you haven't, I'll wait a while, it's fine) and decided you want to build a deck. So here's the question:

Where to start?

From where I sit - upon my very uncomfortable and rather wobbly throne of 19 decks and counting - there are two ways to go about it: Top-Down, and Bottom-up.

I should point out that neither way is better than the other. They are just different, and produce different decks.

Top Down

The Top Down approach is where you begin with an idea or theme and then build the deck around that one cohesive idea. This makes a deck that while it may not necessarily be extremely strong is very flavourful and lots of fun... though if you are like me and like tweaking decks a lot, it eventually becomes extremely strong and very flavourful.

My first Top Down deck was Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund. Big stompy Jund dragons. It started out with a very simple thought: I want to build dragons.

It actually started with a much simpler thought: someone suggested Karrthus as my commander, I looked at him, and agreed very rapidly. This is what is known as a build-around-me Commander: the one card tells you exactly what the deck should contain and you just build it.

That said, the build process that followed was less simple. I pulled up a list of all the dragons in Magic and began cherry picking all of the good ones. This was back during Scars of Mirrodin era, so I had access to all the Jund dragons from Alara block, but none of the new ones from Khans of Tarkir block. Even so it was a lengthy list and took quite a long amount of time.

I'll go over evaluating good and bad cards in another article, but suffice to say when I was finished I had a very dragonny 100 card deck that smashed into people's faces very quickly. I've stuck with Karrthus ever since I built him and, while the card pool has changed quite a bit over the years (Atarka, World Render, how I love thee) the deck remains the same at the core: still about Dragons.

Top Down doesn't necessarily have to start with a single card, I should point out. I've built decks around other themes - tokens, +1/+1 counters, sacrifice effects, and even Elves - where the pile of cards I wanted to put into the deck came first, and then I had to go searching for a suitable Commander in the right colours that also fit the theme.

Either way, with a Top Down approach, the theme is key, whether it be one card or many that is your starting point.

Bottom Up

The Bottom Up approach comes from the other angle: rather than starting with an idea and then building a pile of cards, you start with a pile of cards and then try and make them work together. This often makes a strong deck - after all, you're playing some cards that are very strong individually - with the flip of throwing flavour to the wind.

Incidentally, if you are a Cube player, this is a place you might want to start. Cubes tend to contain the best cards from over the years, so throwing together a Commander deck from a list of Cube-worthy staples is not a bad place to begin.

My first Bottom Up deck was, I'm ashamed to say, spearheaded by Grand Arbiter Augustin IV. This too was back in Scars of Mirrodin era, and I had been learning to play Standard with a Blue/White Control deck. If you have ever heard of "Caw Blade" I think you can see where this is going.

After winning a little in Standard (going 2-2 at FNM was my best at the time, I will admit) I decided that the cards were good, I liked playing them, and if I was going to play Commander I should play my favourite cards. Baneslayer Angel, Day of Judgment, Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Rite of Replication, Sword of Body and Mind... all strong effects, all standard playable. However once I piled up all my Standard cards I will still only about 25-deep, so I had to dig through the annals of history and find even more.

Pulling together a pile of strong cards tends to build itself a little more easily than going by theme, in that a pile of strong cards will not necessarily be of the same type or effect. A Top Down deck can easily end up being entirely creatures before you realise that a draw spell might be a good idea. This meant that my Augustin deck was quicker to assemble than Karrthus was, even though I didn't have a specific aim other than "that looks good, I'll play that".

Once the deck was ready I went hunting for a legendary. I should point out that Augustin worked with the deck, making it a Bottom Up deck that started edging towards a theme: I ran Propaganda, Ghostly Prison, Rhystic Study and several of those Augustin-style tax effects. I had a number of gold cards from Alara and Lorwyn blocks, making his cost reduction doubly effective.

This doesn't have to be the case. I know of someone who made a Red/White/Black deck with multiple tax/stasis/lockdown effects that ran Oros, the Avenger as its Commander purely because that was the only legend in those colours that he owned. I know of someone who built "5-Colour Good Stuff" - a common Bottom Up deck made by smashing all the good cards ever together - that ran Progenitus just because.

Regardless, Bottom Up is about putting all those good cards together that you've wanted to play together and running with it.

Next Week

So you've got a starting point, but what do you put in your deck? What shape should it be? How many lands? How many spells? There is no right or wrong answer but I'll guide you.

Yours,

Commander Vimes

Card of the Day - 12/12/16

I love a good reanimation spell, in the right deck. In EDH world this sits in my Tariel deck and happily brings back anything epic, but I've picked it highly in cube several times irrespective of whether I'm running any strong targets to bring back myself.

Okay, so it isn't as strong as Reanimate... but on the plus side you don't lose life, and it is still very cheap to cast. All reanimation spells that I can think of from more recent years (read: the length of Modern if not a bit longer) either cost 5 to cast, or have additional caveats such as specific converted mana costs or only reanimated until end of turn.

I won't insult your intelligence by listing good targets for it. It's Magic. If you can't think of a good creature you want to bring back from the dead, you didn't have a good creature in the first place. Or you're playing Mono-Red Burn and 2 mana is still too much for you.