Welcome to In General. On Sundays I, Grandpa Growth, write about more general topics. Not so much cards or decks, but formats, strategy, skill development, and psychology. Today we will be discussing five minor skill edges that are unique to, and can be developed by playing Commander.
I have written in the past about other formats and the virtues of playing multiple formats. There is much that you can learn by expanding your horizons and each format helps develop different skills that are useful in Magic at large. As always, I recommend learning as much as you can in order to grow as a player and person. Note, this will not be a full-scale examination of the Commander format as I have done in previous articles like this one on Booster Draft: Draft Punk. I will save that idea for a future rainy day, but instead I am focusing in on just a few important points that I haven't seen get any attention elsewhere.
1. Vintage-Size Card Pool
Commander has the largest card pool of any constructed Magic. Period. Depending on the community you are playing in, it will likely have the smallest banned list of any constructed format except Standard (which isn't much of a comparison). Fact is, if you want to quickly expand your knowledge of older sets and cards, there is no better format to play. You can literally see just about anything in Commander. From Alpha to Zendikar and everywhere in between. Being good in Commander requires a strong knowledge base which includes a working knowledge of the massive card pool. You certainly can't learn this invaluable skill from playing Core Set limited, that is for sure.
So what does this really get you? The element of surprise...or at the very least your opponents will not have it. You know the cards. You know the tricks. You won't be caught of guard by an obscure offering from an earlier time in Magic's history. How often do you have to stop and read your opponent's cards? If you didn't know it existed, then you didn't know what it did. If you didn't know what it did, how could you have been effectively playing around it?
2. The 'Gifts' Effect
On a somewhat related note, this point is also about knowing a larger percentage of Magic's total card history. Because Commander is a 'highlander' format, you can only play one copy of any card other than basic lands. That means we will have to include different cards that fill the same roles. We will build consistency through redundancy. Diversification instead of duplication. This is the Gifts Effect. Named after the card Gifts Ungiven, which ironically is 'banned' in Commander, by the EDHRC. Gift Ungiven forced players to build their decks with this principle in mind. In order to leverage the power of Gifts as a tutoring effect you needed to include several copies of cards that did similar things, but had different names. This strategy for deck building is crucial to Commander. You MUST use it in every deck.
What we learn from this is to create small mental libraries of common replacements for certain common cards. What are the best two-man removal spells? What are the best five mana Creatures? Knowing this information will not only help you build better decks in every format, but also help you play around a wider variety of cards. Instead of thinking, what if my opponent has removal? You can be much more specific. What if my opponent has Condemn instead of Path to Exile? Go for the Throat instead of Doomblade? The intricacies of these cards don't necessarily matter in every game, but represent significant drawbacks when they CAN'T do what they were supposed to.
3. Free Mulligan Decision
The Mulligan. Appoximately 50% of the time this will be your first decision of the game. The first moment where you have agency as a player. It can often be the most important decision you will make all game long. A bad mulligan decision can often be your last decision of the game as well, leading to an underwhelming performance and no-contest concession. Commander is already an incredibly skill testing format, but it has another unique feature that forces us to be better players: the free mulligan.
Some people have wrongly surmised that the free mulligan actually makes people WORSE at mulligan decisions. This is just silly. Simply incorrect. The more times you experience a given decision, the better you will become at making that choice in the future. That is the way humans learn. I have never, read that again, NEVER played against someone who was able to build a deck specifically to abuse the 'advantage' of a free mulligan. Commander trains players to think about mulligans the proper way: Is the average six card hand better than this seven card hand? The twist you learn from Commander is: is this seven card hand better or worse than the average seven card hand?
4. Building in Answers
For the most part, Commander is a wide open format. Most people aren't worried about building a hyper-competitive list to crush the tables. That leaves plenty of room for innovation and that means you will see some off-the-wall strategies and cards. For one, this means that we can let out our inner brewers. You could build a crazy deck, but you could really do that in any format. What is different about Commander is that there is no pressure stopping EVERYONE from doing it. If there are prizes on the line, most people will play whatever deck they think gives them the best shot at winning. This makes it much easier to guess what people are playing in Standard, for example. Making that same determination in Commander is slightly more complex.
Two decks, even if they are the same colors, even if they have the same commander, could be WILDLY different. You have to be prepared for anything. Commander is like the wild west. There is no one to protect you except yourself. You have to build your decks with this in mind. You need to include answers to everything. Every kind of card, every kind of strategy. Hate cards for every zone: removal for Creatures, Artifacts, Enchantments, Planeswalkers, AND Lands. Discard. Counterspells. Ways to disrupt graveyard interactions. Ways to disrupt tutors. Ways to overcome card advantage. Sometimes even color-specific hate cards. This may seem like a lot to think about, but if you want to be successful in Commander, you need to be prepared to combat your opponent on any field of their choosing.
5. Variance
Magic is a card game. Card games inherently have variance. The luck of the draw is a grim reality for Magic grinders. Never is this more true than in Commander. You could have a Standard deck, that plays four Counterspell. It would not be ideal for you to draw ALL of your countermagic in a single hand. You will likely need a better mix of spells in order to win. In Commander, you only have one of each card, but you sometimes have DOZENS of roughly equivalent cards. There is a real possibility of the top 30 cards of your deck all being Creatures. How do you deal with that?
Commander has taught me that the best way to overcome variance is to get your deck as consistent as possible. I have a rigid formula for my decks. They all begin with the same skeleton. Specific numbers of lands, removal, disruption, and threats that I have found gives me a very 'average' deck. With this default starting position I can tune my lists to what suits them best. I have also learned that you want to keep your deck as freshly shuffled as possible. It can be annoying to mix up a hundred card library every two minutes, but you can't break up that big pocket of lands unless you shuffle consistently and often. I trust my deckbuilding skills to give me a deck that can win with an average draw. Part of that strategy is making sure that I shuffle enough for my draws to stay close to that average power level. This is just one example, but the main takeaway here is that Commander forces you to play through high levels of variance, which can be strong mental edge that carries over to other formats.
That's all for this week Zoners. I will be keeping my eyes glued to the visual spoiler every day as new cards from Journey into Nyx are previewed. If you like the article, share your thoughts in the comments. What do you think is the biggest psychological/skill edge offered by Commander? Thanks for reading and I will see you guys next week.
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