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Commander Caveats For A Casual Evening

You probably know Glenn Jones as SCG’s Event Coverage Coordinator, but he likes to spend his free time playing casual Magic formats—including Commander, Cube, Winston Draft, Type 4, and many, many more.

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Hello everybody!

If you don’t know me, then that’s changing right now—if you already do, then tough this paragraph out. I’m the Event Coverage Coordinator for StarCityGames.com, a position that has me watching a lot of competitive Magic…but I like to spend my free time on something different.

I’m going to use this column to focus on one of Magic’s most fun formats, Commander, but that’s not all I’m bringing to the [kitchen] table. I love a wide variety of other non-sanctioned, so-called “casual” formats—Cube, Winston Draft, Type 4, and many, many more—and I’m going to set aside some space in each column to introduce another sweet new way to play with Magic cards!

I find casual Magic formats like Commander fun specifically because they play with the rules of the game in small ways, altering the power level of cards without changing what they actually do. Take Spin into Myth, for example. This card is basically unplayable in any sanctioned Constructed format, but it’s a very valuable tool in Commander games thanks to its interaction with the namesake legendary creatures.

The rules are different, so some cards improve…and others get worse. This might seem like an obvious concept for me to waste the next couple thousand words on, but the implications can be very interesting. I learned a lot from playing “fun” formats that I’d have taken much longer to figure out through tournament playtesting, assuming I ever figured it out at all!

I could go through a number of cards, listing why they’re better or worse than you might expect, but that’s about as useful as me doing your homework all week long when you’ve got an exam on Friday. You’ll have to study anyway!

… Or find a better way to cheat.

It’s not a perfect metaphor.

Cards that only affect commanders, like Spin into Myth, are easy to single out, as that’s one key rules change that makes Commander different from “normal” Magic formats. There are lots of other differences, however, ranging from fundamental changes to subtle shifts that are easy to miss. In order to figure out which cards you should be playing, you need to first learn how to adapt your understanding of Magic to include a capacity to evaluate how a card might perform differently in Commander than it would in a conventional game.

This knowledge will have payoffs in other areas of your game, too. Once you know how to identify when and why “what’s good” changes in a given game of Magic, it’ll make you a better Constructed deckbuilder across formats while also improving your Limited skills in a vacuum.

This week, let’s examine a basic form of interaction that fundamentally changes in a Commander game: removal.

Killing All the Things

There are two things you have to know in order to figure out if a removal spell is good.

  • What do you need to destroy?
  • How do you need to destroy it?

Groundbreaking stuff.

Magic players have a tendency to follow what has been proven to be good and stay inside the box. This results from most players having a relatively narrow field of vision—they know something’s important because someone told them it was or because it’s the first thing they saw, not because a comprehensive analysis of the game told them so. It happens in Constructed and Limited, at FNM and at the top tables of a Pro Tour.

Take Wrath of God. Wrath is a strong removal spell for the vast majority of creatures legal in any format at any given time. It has seen a ton of top-level play in its Constructed history, showing up in Standard, Extended, Modern, and even Legacy from time to time.

Is it a good card?

…

That doesn’t matter.

Because Wrath’s strength relies on what you need your cards to do, and I haven’t given you enough information to make that call, you can’t evaluate its efficacy in a relevant way. What if no one’s playing creatures? What if most good creatures have haste? What if every creature in the format is indestructible?

What if everyone has at least one recurring threat and tons of mana and card advantage?

These are all obviously extremes, but they aren’t so different from the same metagame forces than govern tournament playability. Those forces are obviously present in Commander, but the battlefield is significantly different. The commanders themselves significantly affect the issue.

Whether a card is “good” or not doesn’t mean you should or shouldn’t play it. Should Wrath of God go in every white Commander deck? Definitely not. I don’t mean to imply Wrath of God is too weak for the format—I only mean to say different decks need their spells to do different things, and not every deck needs what Wrath of God does.

One of my early Commander decks was a very defensive, creature-light deck using Mangara of Corondor. I used Mangara to present a constant removal spell for just about anything, most often non-creature permanents because of his versatility. Alongside Mangara, cards like Kor Haven and Elspeth, Knight-Errant kept me relatively protected from the occasional attack. Wrath of God was an easy include for this deck, as were several similar cards, because getting past my modest defenses would require a player or two to commit more than one or two creatures to the board—the sweeper would reset the situation and give me more time to keep grinding advantage. It killed almost everything that might threaten me, with a modest casting cost to make it affordable when I wanted to use it.

I haven’t updated this deck in quite some time, but here’s my last known list for Mangara of Corondor, circa December 2010:

Mangara of Corondor
Glenn Jones
Test deck on 12-05-2010
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (12)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (40)

Spells (46)

Magic Card Back


However, consider Rhys the Redeemed. A sample list from Eldritch Song of Commanders Gathering from July 2011—thanks Google!

Rhys the Redeemed
Eldritch Song
Test deck on 07-17-2011
Commander
Magic Arena

Creatures (30)

Planeswalkers (2)

Lands (35)

Spells (32)

Magic Card Back


He’s white, so you can play Wrath of God alongside him…but should you? Most Rhys decks build token armies, enhancing them with various enchantments and artifacts. You don’t want all your creatures to die—Rhys himself is way stronger with all those tokens in play! In addition, because most Rhys decks create threatening board states, it’s often difficult to attack them profitably and dangerous to risk retaliation, which means the Rhys player doesn’t need to fear opposing creatures as much as a control deck might.

Wrath of God is very close to unplayable in most Rhys the Redeemed decks, and if you’ve got it sleeved up in your deckbox, take it out.

There are numerous better cards for the Rhys the Redeemed player—Hour of Reckoning almost has to be a total upgrade. Hour of Reckoning is more costly than Wrath, less powerful, and historically has seen less play than Wrath of God on every imaginable scale—but it serves the Rhys player better by only destroying what he might care about (his opponent’s creatures) when he’ll need to do it (after developing a board with offensive potential).

Wrath of God might, from a surface evaluation, appear to be a much more powerful card, but that’s not really that important. The card’s abstract efficiency in relation to its cost is irrelevant if it doesn’t do anything good!

Having illustrated the point, let’s try to come up with some general guidelines. In Commander, there are virtually no hard-and-fast rules. Most decks contain more than the one required non-land permanent—but not all—and many decks may not incorporate non-land permanents readily into their plans to win the game, making the fact that you can blow their stuff up not all that useful.

As these decks are generally obnoxious aberrations, let’s pretend they don’t exist.

Breaking a removal spell down to its core, its purpose is to destroy an opposing threat or remove an opposing defense. The best removal spells can do both. To figure out which ones you need, you have to know the threats and defenses your opponents will play and which ones are important to kill!

The most obvious thing you’re going to need an option to handle is creatures. Unchecked, they’ll attack you to death after all! How important is it to be able to kill a creature?

Well, that depends.

Choose Your Weapon!

Commander differs from conventional Magic in many ways. Two are the starting life total—you’ve got twice as much—and number of opponents (there are often more than one). What are some of the more obvious ramifications of those two basic facts? How do these facts determine which permanents we need to destroy and when we must destroy them?

I’m glad you asked.

It takes longer to kill someone.

I doubt I’m shocking anyone with the bold statement that it takes longer to deal 40 damage (or a specific kind of 21, as the case may be) than it takes to deal 20, but it does matter. A higher life total means you can sustain more attacks without dying, and that means you can dedicate significantly more turns to developing late game strength.

Not only are you tougher to kill, but your opponents have more targets for their attacks than just you. Assuming you’re capable of presenting minor defenses, your opponents will happily avoid fighting through them as long as easier prey exists. There’s an old joke about campers not needing to outrun an attacking bear—only the other campers—and there are considerable parallels in a game of Commander. It’s one reason why Maze of Ith remains such a powerhouse staple.

Attacking one player also opens you up both to counterattacks from that player and attacks of opportunity from others. Thus most players will only make attacks from a position of strength in order to protect themselves from the ire of others. The Mangara deck I mentioned above took this concept to the extreme and presented virtually zero offensive potential until the game was very near its conclusion.

You can win a game just as surely by killing the second-to-last player as by killing every player, after all. In fact, it might be an easier task to accomplish!

Because your opponents in all likelihood will [have read an incredibly engaging article by a dashing young author and] understand these concepts, they’ll build their decks with the late game in mind, just like you, eschewing early offensive plays for stronger stuff in the late game. That means it will take even longer for someone to die than the merits of the game dictate!

It’s a slothful mess…except for when it isn’t. There are some decks that can win faster than most creatures can race—obviously these decks need dedicated creature removal even less than most. These impulses are what create the Commander metagame, which is filled with plentiful sweepers and massively powerful control effects. And if everyone’s playing sweepers…

Pinpoint removal sucks.

Hyperbole ahoy!

While not all pinpoint removal is bad and most decks should contain some pieces, you don’t want to overdo it. Remember the basic theory of card advantage? When you trade one card for two of your opponent’s cards, you come out ahead. What do you think happens when two of your opponents each trade one card for the other?

That’s right—you (and the other players not involved) come out ahead.

Don’t be the guy initiating multiple small-time trades and wasting your resources one at a time in the midgame. While you and your new archenemy are hemorrhaging cards, everyone else is building their board presence. Whichever one of you wins the Blood Feud on the side will be ill prepared to face the might of any remaining opponents, and they’re not likely to wait for you to catch up.

Spot removal for creatures is especially poor, because each of your opponents is playing at least one creature that can’t be answered by basic removal: their commander. Running Doom Blade in Commander is actually a lot like maindecking Demystify in Standard—it might not actually be wrong, but you better have a pretty good reason.

And yes, I did specifically pick Demystify because plenty of people have maindecked Shatter effects in recent Standard memory, but they have good reasons and you would have found the comparison much less apt because you’re used to seeing it already.

So there.

Pinpoint removal should offer you specific dimensions. Unique functionality (Spin into Myth, Krosan Grip), raw efficiency (Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile), and versatility (Vindicate, Beast Within) are elements to consider. I like to make sure decks with multiple Tutors include at least one efficient piece of spot removal for every kind of permanent, because the option is always great.

That leads nicely to my next point.

A spell’s power level and applications are more important than its efficiency.

Jumping backwards to our discussion about Wrath of God, I said that it was not a Commander staple and I hope that after reading that section you agree. So let’s talk about a similar card that is: Austere Command.

Austere Command is worse at everything it does than another card when examined for effect—but it’s powerful specifically because it does everything! It’s difficult to imagine many situations where you are both behind on the board and unable to cast Austere Command for significant gains. If you can’t cast it to make a profit, then odds are you’re doing pretty well in the game—and thus you don’t need the Command anyway.

Even decks built around a variety of permanent types can appreciate a versatile panacea.

Because the card’s flexibility lets you attack exactly the zones you’re behind in powerfully, it’s finding its way into the maindeck most of the time. If it cost seven or eight mana, it would see close to the same amount of play—what it does is so much more important than how well Austere Command does it.

Sheldon Menery has been known to describe Commander as a game of haymakers, and he’s not wrong. The cards that most commonly generate massive swings in advantage tend to cost a great deal or be otherwise inefficient, but that’s the kind of powerful spellcasting you need to win. No one’s grinding anyone to death with Delver of Secrets in Commander!

I’m not saying there isn’t necessarily a white deck that shouldn’t run Austere Command…but I’ve never seen or thought of one.

Non-creature permanents are more relevant.

This one ties right back to my previous point. With players running less spot removal and more sweepers, creatures will be dying every few cycles as each player takes a turn to kill them all. That means that the most effective way to develop the board is by gaining an advantage through more durable permanent types—artifacts, enchantments, and lands.

/aside

For the record, planeswalkers are pretty non-durable permanents due to how easy it is for multiple people to team up and break through your defenses. In fact, a planeswalker actually incentivizes people to attack you—not usually a good thing! That said, some of them are innocuous enough to survive or offer enough value to make them worthwhile.

I’m not saying don’t play them—I’m saying play them carefully.

/end aside

Most Commander decks pack plenty of artifacts and enchantments, and they provide powerful advantages. Sylvan Library and Phyrexian Arena are instant red flags in any game, and there are plenty of permanents that generate advantages you’ll want to control. Crucible of Worlds and Rings of Brighthearth are two pretty popular artifacts that can quickly push one player far ahead of the others with the right accomplices, for example.

Following the logic of “pinpoint removal sucks” and “power level over efficiency” will lead you to realize that sweeping the board of artifacts and enchantments from time to time can be a very good thing! Oblivion Stone is one of the few cards that should go in virtually every Commander deck for exactly this reason. These cards are excellent catchalls that handle a wide array of opposing options, and you’ll always want a few effects like these available.

Like Austere Command. What a coincidence!

There’s plenty more to say on the topic of structuring your removal in Commander—think of this as a fundamentals article to get you thinking about how you should pick the cards you play and why some of them might not be working as well as you thought they would.

Featured Format: Type 4

Type 4 is a format of many names—the most common ones I’ve heard are DC 10 and Big Stack, with each of these possessing variations in the rules. A number of writers on this site have mentioned it, and I know the format is often linked to Anthony Avitollo, Stephen Menendian, and Paul Mastriano, among others. I’m going to use this section to talk about Type 4, how I play it, and why it is awesome.

Playing Type 4 was among my Top 5 favorite things to do while I was in college—I’ll leave the remainder of that list to the imagination. I can credit many hysterical nights to the antics of my friends, whom I’ll prop at the end alongside the list they play with. The basic rules are simple:

  • It’s a multiplayer format. You can play free-for-all, which I prefer, but formats like Star, Emperor, Two-Headed Giant, etc. also all work. Two-man formats are fine too.
  • You have a pool of infinite mana that can be used to cast one spell each turn, but it can activate any of your abilities any number of times for any amount.
  • If you can cast a spell without using mana from the infinite pool—such as the alternate casting cost of Force of Will, removing a time counter due to suspend, resolving a Temporal Aperture activation, cascade, or tapping a land to cast Sensei’s Divining Top—then it does not count against the aforementioned restriction.
  • Your starting hand size is five cards; there is no maximum. You begin with 20 life.
  • You can draft it like a cube, make sealed decks, or just play quick games off one large deck. Deck size can be adjusted, but I like forty cards for the first two options.
  • Draft is by far the most fun.

I’m sure that “land” mention threw you, but there are some good ones. Prahv, Spire of Order is very strong, as are Academy Ruins and Volrath’s Stronghold. Maze of Ith is actually the same card!

The goal in Type 4 is to manipulate resources pretty differently from normal Magic. Card advantage is even more important because there are many opponents and many powerful plays available to everyone, while tempo is virtually irrelevant—everyone is doing incredibly powerful things right out of the gate, and it’s easy to catch up if you fall behind.

The real tricks come from timing your spells. That element is far more relevant than ever! Casting a spell will leave you open season for the remainder of the turn, most likely, so tread carefully. You’ll learn a lot about priority windows while playing Type 4, and it’s a completely different game from Magic in tactics because you can reasonably protect yourself just by retaining the option to cast a spell, thus threatening a counterspell. You can also leverage other player’s choices to resolve your best ones, especially with some political credit on your side.

Politics are important in Type 4. The player with Resounding Thunder, for example, often winds up with a lot of bargaining power when trying to convince players to do what they want—a nigh-uncounterable way to dish out nearly one-third of an opposing life total is a very potent bargaining chip!

Is the format degenerate? Sure. Glarecaster is part of several infinite combos that aren’t especially difficult to assemble, you can be Mindslaver-locked on turn 1, and it’s not uncommon to see multiple Eldrazi swinging for the fences from time to time.

That said, there are cards that are “too good” for the format or just not entertaining. For fun reasons we don’t play with many firebreathers, especially if they have any form of evasion. They’re not broken per se, but they’re just not entertaining enough to bother with. Any creature that immediately kills the opponent all on its own is right out. The “Gotcha!” cards from Unhinged were hilarious at first, but we quickly realized that Deal Damage was effectively a never-ending supply of Resounding Thunders that two people could use to kill everyone before settling matters between themselves, and Spell Counter wasn’t significantly more fun.

You can play with those cards if you want, but that’s not my thing—and I’m a Gotcha! fanboy, so that’s saying something. I’d also advise you to stay away from:

Frankly, the games just aren’t that fun with them. Quanar is completely ridiculous with almost any spell, Mistmeadow Witch dominates the board and can only be answered by a handful of cards, and Greater Morphling is very, very close to a creature that instantly kills a player upon resolving.

Here’s the Type 4 list that Brandon McDonald, my roommate at UF, remains caretaker of.

That’s right, a preposition before a period. What of it?

Behold!

Ack! They put Mistmeadow Witch back in! Must be getting crazy down in Gainesville…

The rules are tweaked for a few cards. For example, Emeria, the Sky Ruin always triggers. There might be a couple of other tricky ones I’m forgetting, so ask in the comments if you have any questions.

Brandon noted that they haven’t had time to update the list a ton since the release of Avacyn Restored, so you may want to comb that set and Planechase 2012 for potential additions (Maelstrom Wanderer in the house!). We worked on it a lot together “back in the day,” alongside Julian De Los Santos, Matt Gosche, Chris Williams, Chris Connell, Dylan Fay, Nick Werner, Dan Adams, Justin Whatley, Dan Deep, Adam Heinenmann, Dustin Onash, Archie Svetlov… and I’m sure many others over the years. Sorry if I didn’t name you, but you know how I am—so forgetful! Big thanks to all; looking forward to my next trip back.

I like playing the format with a really tight list so I’d probably cull this one significantly, but I trust these guys to evaluate the format quite well (Mistmeadow Witch aside *shiver*). Rebuilding this stack on my own is a big task I’m looking forward to undertaking sometime in the near future—if you’d like to own one as well, here’s a fine starting place!

If you’d like to read more on the topic of Type 4, give it a search in our article archives and you’ll get plenty of results! I’ve really only touched on the format here, and it’s worth significantly more attention.

I hope you guys enjoyed this first column, and I look forward to bringing you more. If this didn’t resonate with you—if it’s not “your kind of content”—then let me know. The Commander crowd is a diverse one, so I’ll try and bring a little something different each time.

Man, I hope I didn’t forget anything.

…

Oh well.

–Glenn Jones

@SecludedGlenn