Every format has staples. Commander is no different.
A couple weeks ago, I met a few new commander players and wanted to put a deck together that wasn't going to get me shunned until the end of time. Most of my decks are tuned to the cutthroat "tournament" scene at my FLGS. As I looked through my lists, I realized that none of that was going to be fun to bring to a new group of players.
What to do?
First, I went back to my roots. The three-color dragon legends are almost always a good jumping off point to build a new deck. They are large and have cool abilities that lend themselves to themes and ideas. And building for three colors automatically adds some randomness and inconsistency that makes for a more varied (but not always more fun) game. I looked through my legends and decided to built for Intet, the Dreamer.
Okay, great. But I wanted to build this deck quickly and I wasn't going to get a chance to playtest. Now, what?
I thought about it for a while and further realized that my cube was a perfect source to build from. I decided to brew the entire deck from the cards in my existing cube. The cube was already sleeved, so that saved even more time.
My cube includes lots of cards that I like from the history of Magic. I collected those cards over all those years because I liked them in the first place. It's not surprising that they found a home in my cube. Plus, I played multiplayer singleton formats (like 75-card and 100-card "highlander") before it was a thing. Turns out the cards that are good in slower formats like that work great in Commander. And those cards can work great in cube if you build it around slower cards.
Some folks out there are finding great success with building a Commander Cube. That sounds awesome in every respect. I would go that direction, but I don't foresee having the hours it would take to draft in that format, additional time to build, and then time to actually play a few games of commander with the sweet, drafted decks.
But! We can approximate something like this by having a big cube of commander cards already sleeved up. Pulling cards from the cube lets us build lots of decks in short order. How do we select cards for the cube? It can't hurt to start with the staples. Here's why.
I'm going to agree with some of you out there that seeing the same cards every game is boring. But, consider this. Let's pick something like ramp as an example. In commander, your deck either needs to speed itself up or slow everyone else down. If you try to play it straight, you are going to end up squeezed by one of those two strategies.
If you go the route of speeding yourself up, you are "ramping." Almost every commander deck is going to do this to some degree, even if they are trying to slow everyone else down. Green is notable for ramping because it's something the color actually wants to do. For the most part, the other colors have to borrow from artifacts or special lands to ramp.
Okay, back to the staples of the format. If you are running green and you want to ramp, you should consider the Cultivate and Kodama's Reach one-two-punch.
Not only are these spells splashable, they ramp, color-fix, and give you card advantage. These spells are forgiving to cast, only requiring a single green mana. They curve nicely at three mana. They let you choose the (basic) lands you need to fix your colors. They ramp by putting one of those lands into play. And they give you two cards for one by putting the other (basic) land into your hand. It's a helluva deal.
I can hear it now, though. "That's boring! Everyone runs those spells. I'm tired of seeing the same spells in every deck. You suck! How did you get in here. Who are you?" Calm down, turbo. Suppose you didn't run those particular ramp spells, but you still wanted to ramp in green. Now what?
Fine, at three mana in green, you could run Far Wanderings and Journey of Discovery. Are they better? No, but if you don't want to run the staples, there's always going to be a next best spell.
That's the secret of Magic.
It's not about how powerful an individual spell is. It's about how much MORE powerful an individual spell is compared to every other spell that does something similar. Great cards are ones that make the players consider lots of different things to decide which spell is best in a given deck or situation. Variation around a central theme without any one spell being clearly better than another makes for good design.
At two mana in green, you could run Nature's Lore and Farseek. They come out sooner, but do less.
At four mana in green, you could run Skyshroud Claim and Hunting Wilds. They come out later, but do slightly more, especially if you are running true dual lands or shock lands.
With creatures in green, you could run Sakura-Tribe Elder and Wood Elves. Some builders prefer the ramp to come with bodies attached.
My point is that you can choose whatever green ramp spells strike your fancy to include in your commander cube, and therefore to include in your rapid deckbuilding pool. Whatever you decide to include is going to end up being your "best" card in that limited pool of cards. In the case of Cultivate and Kodama's reach, they are relatively easy to find, fairly inexpensive, and have a high degree of flexibility to fit in lots of different decks you might build. In other words, if you go that route your bases are covered.
So, if you're looking for a quick way to build lots of different commander decks to fit any occasion, start looking at the cards in your collection that work in lots of different situations and cube them up. Don't be afraid of using staples. Draft your next deck from the cube!
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