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