"Your deck should work without your commander."

Good news, my deck doesn't even work with my commander, so I'm all good there.

Voltron players in shambles

I like to think of my commander as an enabler of the problem that is my deck

It's a case where you need to either "Don't put all your eggs in one basket," or "Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket." You either have to fully commit to commander protection, or you need to diversify.

This sort of feels like a litmus test for me. Even if your commander is out and its a key piece, there will just be some games where you'll have to deal with them not doing the thing, being removed and made expensive, etc. At some point it may become no longer worth it to even put it out again. Some of my best games have been with my commander on the bench because it felt so good to have the deck work in spite of that.

I think if your commander is really important and "monolithic" and you don't have the cards to reliably protect them in your deck or simply didn't draw any... and your meta has a good amount of interaction and/or boardwipes, then it might be wise to simply keep your commander in the command zone for longer than you're normally comfortable with. Even if you commander costs only 3 mana, maybe don't run him out until turn 6, even if you ramped. Have enough "generically good" cards in your deck to cast stuff, maybe have a couple of rattlesnake cards. E.g. ramp, draw, disruption and wait for a time, where maybe there is another big bad at the table. If you deploy your commander immediately after a board wipe, you're just going to be the next arch enemy.

I have never heard of "dies to removal" being used in a context outside of a kind of joking response to 'man this card is so good/busted/etc.,' so it's interesting to hear it being used in the context you bring up at the start of the video

Jimmy Neutron has some pretty good points tho...

I feel like this applies only if your main goal of the deck is to "win". Now i don't mean that you should never try to win a game of commander, all decks should be capable of at least that, but i mean that not every commander deck is made to look for a win, sometimes it's to do something janky and fun. but if you decide to go down that route you can't be too surprised if the win ratio of the deck is low. for me my philosophy is make a deck work without your commander, but work better with it.

"Have a backup plan in case of___"

Whenever I build a deck, I always consider "What's my back up plan?" A good example is my Olivia Crimson Bride deck. When I first built her, it was PAINFUL to have a 6 mana commander countered or removed. I thought about what I can do that can act as a back up plan, but also fit within the deck. Drana, the last bloodchief, Feldon, and especially Chainer NIghtmare Adept all act as possible backups while fitting within what the deck is trying to do in case Olivia just can't stick around. Personally for my decks, I don't want to build a deck where there's only one path to win, where all the decisions I make in playing end up in the same place every single time. A super good example of building this kind of flexibility is the new Omo. I absolutely love this commander. You can go landfall, lands matter, anthems/lords... I went with the more financially responsible anthem/lords version, but I've won with either my creatures powering through and being unblockable, but I've also won by turning my lands into creatures and gaining the anthems/lord effects from the everything counters and swinging through to win. (EDIT: reading the card explains… she distinctly says nonland creatures so this doesn’t work) I know I've done a good job when my friends are excited for me to win because I did something they didn't expect with a deck. Also, why the hell is Trade Routes not on Omo's edhrec AT ALL. That card is a beast when you've got land recursion or want to tap your Urza's tower for 5 mana (tap, pay one, bounce it back, play it again, tap), even in my more creature focussed version it does so much work. The worst kinds of commander games are the ones where you feel like you've had no impact at all on the game, where you've felt like you did nothing after the game is over.

Tried this philosophy, my decks were stronger but so much less fun. Building around your commander is what makes the format unique. I went back to building around commanders and never looked back.

It's funny, Galea, Kindler of Hope is my favorite/strongest deck that I use right now. I love the way the deck uses her, but she also relies on the deck too. The main point is that I generally want to have effects that reduce the casting cost of artifacts, a lot of top deck manipulation so that right before I play her, I can shuffle a bunch of equipment to the top of my library and then drop them onto her for free all at once. The deck is a Voltron deck, but it usually wins with a combo.

I agree that advocating for novelty over optimization is import. Playing powerful decks and commanders is fun but the MOST FUN I’ve had with Magic is playing suboptimal, unique cards that lead to the WOW moments we can only have in this format. Great discussion and loved the video!

I’ve been thinking about this maxim a lot as I’ve looked at brewing The Necrobloom. On the one hand, building around the landfall trigger feels like a more commander-independent path, but it makes the deck feel like a generic-landfall option. On the other hand, building towards the dredge mechanic would require Necrobloom on the field, create something more unusual but might push towards a combo-centric deck and power-level that I’m less engaged by. Thanks for distilling your thoughts on the topic.

Laughs in Sidar knights. He literally is the decks engine. And I just crammed a bunch of knights in it and card draw and said yeah.

My Archimandrite Artifacts deck is probably my most proud deck, because it mainly just ENABLES all the artificers and whatnot that happen to go into my artifact deck type play style or whatever, and seeing it in action without ever needing to cast my commander is such a good feeling

Enjoyed this video so much that I had to watch it again! It is also very timely as I am having issues with my Ulalek deck.

I have a good way of litmus testing a commander deck, shuffling in the commander and playing a game with it. I personally have a multiplayer fornat where you use a commander deck as a shared deck(kinda like forgetful fish or patry box) and thats opened my eyes to how my decks actually play, since i see 4 different draws of the deck.

Trinket Mage made an excellent video talking about the best way to build a commander deck is building them "bottom-up" as in starting with a coherent deck that works well within itself and then fitting the commander to it. I now build my decks in the same way only treating the commander as an extra card to the 99 I will simply always have access to. I think this will help with people building more unique decks (it's helped me make mine unique) and avoid the pitfalls of using EDHrec as a resource.