Hi everyone! After a two month break, I’m (hopefully) back with some new things to talk about. I’ve been fairly busy and haven’t had a chance to play much Commander lately, but there’s a new deck I want to build, so I figured I’d write about the process! Also, I made a guest appearance on the latest CommanderCast Call-Inferno (http://www.commandercast.com/commandercast-s5e12-call-inferno-mk-4) and figured there was a decent chance I’d pick up a few readers from there, so I wanted something somewhat timely for them to see! If this is your first time here, welcome!

Moving on, the latest general I have my eye on is Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. Normally, when I pick out a general, it’s because they have an ability that really excites me, but in Thalia’s case it’s actually just because I like her background in the story, and I really like her art. I also have a soft spot in my heart for Mono-White – White cards consistently have my favorite art style and creatures, and Elspeth, Knight Errant and Wrath of God are two of my all-time favorites. When I returned to Magic during Shards block, one of the first decks I built was Mono White Control (and wow did you have all the tools you could want – Path to Exile, Wrath, Martial Coup, Elspeth, Story Circle, Mistveil Plains, and so many other sweet cards…). Unfortunately, there was this little deck called Faeries that just ate you alive, but it was still a blast to play. I’ve since added blue to my control decks, and been quite happy with the color combination, but I think it might be time for a return to the mono-Plains life.

Actually, my very first Commander deck was a short-lived Eight-and-a-Half-Tails control build, but people in my local group didn’t like that I played Armageddon, and there was already another mono-White player, so I ended up taking it apart for a (very bad) Kresh, the Bloodbraided deck. Kresh is not so good when someone else is playing Akroma, Angel of Wrath, let me tell you. I’ve learned a lot about Commander since then, and most of my decks have been very dramatically different from one another, and Thalia seems like she’ll be continuing that trend.

To me, there are two different directions I can take her – an aggressive White Weenie build, or a disruptive Stax version. She doesn’t really provide White Weenie with much benefit – unlike in two-player formats where your opponent has twenty life, and her tax ability can be the extra turn between winning before a Wrath and losing, when people have forty life, and you have to kill THREE of them, that situation isn’t going to come up. Instead, she’s actively hurting you by making you pay more for your Crusade effects. You have basically the same problem if you try to Voltron her up with equipment. I suppose I could go for a mono-creature, soldier-themed deck, but I enjoy actually winning games, so…Stax it is?

She has an interesting tension in that most Stax pieces are noncreature spells, which are exactly what she taxes, so I’m looking forward to figuring out how to build around that (rather than just, you know, playing all of my other lock pieces first, and then casting her).

If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

I’ve actually never played or built a Stax deck before, and most of my generals tend to be rather unfair – and Thalia seems extremely fair – so this should be a pretty interesting challenge – even my Grand Arbiter deck was a straight-up UW control build. Stax does have the unfortunate drawback of being relatively socially unacceptable, and I don’t own many of the cards, so building and tuning Thalia will be a work in progress over the next several weeks, but I hope you’ll stick around for the trip!

EDH night is Thursday, so expect an update later in the week! Thanks for reading!

(Actually, as much as I like Thalia’s ability, I find myself wishing she was more like Grand Arbiter Augustin IV…who in turn makes me remember how much I love Animar. I guess I just have an affinity for generals with colorless 1′s in their rules text!)

Something I noticed about a lot of Commander players is that they seem to think it’s really important to have answers to everything. Oblivion Stone and Disk are ‘must plays’ since they give every color access to wrath effects. Oftentimes you hear, “People don’t play enough graveyard hate” or “No one packs enough enchantment removal in their EDH decks.” Some pretty ridiculous things can happen in Commander, and it’s nice to have a few outs in case those things actually happen, right?

Now, I love playing control, and I think it’s pretty important to have a Blue player at your table that you don’t just auto-kill because he has Islands in his deck. Someone has to play the role of policeman at your table for when the Tooth and Nail is cast, and the blue mage is the one best equipped to deal with that situation. Unfortunately he can also just suddenly Time Walk his way to victory, which some people don’t like, but if you were going to die to that Tooth and Nail anyway, I don’t really see what the big deal is. Someone has to win eventually, after all. Keep in mind what the blue player’s endgame is, and try to keep him from getting to that point, but also keep him alive so that he can stop your opponents from doing anything too ridiculous.

That having been said, while it is good to have one person policing the table, I don’t think it is necessary – or even fun – for every person to take that role. I can appreciate a control mirror in Standard or Legacy, but Commander control standoffs aren’t really my cup of tea. They tend to devolve into the non-control players being unable to do anything important, while the control players glare at each other through an uneasy truce, trying to find a way to gain an edge, while not letting the other players back into the game. When everyone is playing control, it is even worse, since no one’s threats resolve or live a full turn, and the games become four hour slogs that are won by the guy who manages to keep his Academy Ruins from being killed.

Maybe this is fun for some people, but for me, Commander endgames tend to be very boring. Everyone is either out of cards and topdecking, or they have their various value engines online, there are tons of permanents and things to keep track of, but no one wants to make an aggressive move for fear of being dogpiled out of the game. At this point there is little interaction going on; everyone is goldfishing their deck, but no one is actually doing anything to win.

Getting back to my original point, how important is it *really* to have all of those answers in your deck? Rather than using your answers to police other people, why not be aggressive and use your answers to ensure that your threats stick around? After all, who cares if someone has an insane graveyard recursion endgame if you just kill him before he can get it online?

This is a pretty basic principle that has been around in Magic formats for years. Aggressive decks don’t play Wrath of God, they play Gaddock Teeg to make that wrath uncastable! You don’t have Wasteland to turn off a guy’s Cabal Coffers in the endgame, you have it to keep him from getting to four mana so that you can time walk him and (hopefully) kill him. Now, aggressive decks in Commander have their work cut out for them, with everyone having double life, there being more people to kill, and land destruction being frowned upon (things I’ve mentioned before), but it is still very possible to build proactive decks that can put your opponents on the back foot very quickly.

I know Commander players are obsessed with ‘value’, which leads them to playing things like Relic Crush over Naturalize, but you really need to consider what you’re trying to do with your deck. Yes, you get to kill two things, but you’re also spending 5 mana. I realize that Commander is the format of big spells, but 5 is enough that it probably prevents you from casting something else in the same turn. Maybe you’d be better off with Nature’s Claim and a threat instead?

But the most important thing to consider is, if something is a threat to you, it’s probably a threat to two other people at the table as well. This won’t always be the case, but it’s a pretty safe assumption. This means that even if you can’t deal with it, someone else can. Sure, sometimes no one has an answer, but if it isn’t something that automatically wins him the game, the three of you can just start attacking him instead. When he’s dead, the problem is solved! But if someone else *does* have the answer, this is actually the best case scenario for you, since the threat is gone, it didn’t cost you anything, and one answer is also gone!

My point is, rather than packing your deck full of answers to everything, and diluting its effectiveness, just rely on the other people at the table to take care of things, and keep your deck focused. You probably still want a few ‘answer’ type cards, like Oblivion Ring or Counterspell, but keep them inexpensive and try to use them as disruption to advance your own game plan if at all possible.

There are 482 Legendary creatures in Magic at the moment, according to Gatherer. Deciding which is right for you can be a daunting task. Many people choose their generals because they want to build around a theme, or their general has an ability that they find exciting. Of course, out of these 482 available legends, there are a lot of mediocre, weak, or straight-up terrible generals. Maybe they’re horribly overcosted, or have some ridiculous drawback, or both. There are a lot of bad cards that have been printed over Magic’s near 20 year history. The awesome thing about Magic is that even the terrible cards have been played by someone, somewhere. One of Mark Rosewater’s favorite lines is, “If you don’t understand why a card was printed, it probably wasn’t printed for you”. This is exemplified in Commander, where people can create some incredibly crazy concoctions that might not actually ever win, but they get to play with a deck of completely off-the-wall cards that  have some really neat interactions once everything gets going.

Me, I like winning more than making silly things happen, so my criteria for what makes a “good” general is going to be different from the guy with the Ramirez DePietro Pirate deck. I’m not going to go build an Ad Nauseum deck that can kill the table on turn two, the way Sean McKeown did in one of his articles, but I still want my decks to win more than they lose. One thing that is great about Commander, which you hear quite often, is that cards that were unplayable in any competitive environment can be total All-Stars in this format, or are amazing when paired with the right deck or general. Every Standard format has a few powerful cards that just never have the right supporting cast. Some of the most powerful Legends fall into this category, and I think it’s great that they finally get their chance to shine here, even if they do inevitably end up on many people’s “most hated generals” lists.

Many of Commander’s most exciting spells are simply too slow to be viable in competitive sixty card formats. Fortunately, because Commander isn’t a tournament format, you have a bit more wiggle room. Most groups aren’t trying to kill each other within the first four turns of the game, so you’ll have time to execute your deck’s plan, whatever it is. If we’re “guaranteed” enough time to get up and running, the next thing to do is figure out what it is you want to do, and why. While you can build decks that only use the general for colors, since the general is the defining characteristic of this format, why not take advantage of it? If you always have access to your deck’s centerpiece, your consistency skyrockets, despite being a singleton format. While I understand the desire to play “good stuff” decks that just happen to cast their general whenever it is convenient, and agree that it can be fun to just throw together every card that you always wanted to play, always having access to your general can be such a powerful thing, if you build your deck with that in mind.

So we know we have time to execute our plan, and we know we want our general to be a major part of it – now what? Most creatures fall into one of a few categories:

The most basic generals don’t have any abilities besides maybe a keyword like “flying”. They are relatively unexciting, although there are some slight tweaks to the theme that can make them more valuable. Dakkon Blackblade, for example, has a power/toughness equal to the number of lands you control. He doesn’t do anything super impressive, but he can be huge later in the game. His colors are traditionally very controlling, and once you’ve managed to get the game on lockdown, you can summon him up to finish your opponents in short order. With Dakkon, you always have access to a huge threat, so you don’t need to worry about having control of the game, but no way to actually win it. This doesn’t mean you should build your deck without threats, but Dakkon provides you with a useful option that most control decks don’t have. Generals like Dakkon, Multani, and Vorosh are decent “good stuff” generals – you can play all of your favorite cards, and don’t really need to worry about adhering to a theme, and will always have a powerful attacker to summon when necessary.

Next you get generals that do something when they enter the battlefield, like Godo, Bandit Warlord. These are nice, since you get your value up front, and most of them have a pretty impressive ability. In Godo’s case, you’re getting a 3/3, plus tutoring the best equipment out of your deck and putting it into play. Six mana for a guy plus a sword, and he gets to attack twice? Sounds pretty good! Sure, he has to die before you get to tutor again, but his ability does good work, and saves you a decent amount of mana.

Finally you have the generals with recurring abilities. These can be hit or miss, since you get some amazing ones, and a lot of really terrible ones. As a basic rule, I think generals with tap abilities are pretty suspect. If they require mana also, that’s even worse. I have a whole hand full of spells I want to cast! I don’t want to waste a turn casting a general, and then another half-turn’s worth of mana to use his ability! And that’s assuming he’s even lived a whole cycle around the table, which is an awful lot to be asking of a creature. And then, since he’s got a tap ability, you can’t even attack with him if you want to use his ability! An exception would be a general like Captain Sisay who has a powerful enough ability to make up for the drawback of needing to survive a turn to do anything for me. Some generals have repeatable effects; just pay the mana, and the effect happens. Karn, Silver Golem is a good example. If you have ten mana, you can turn ten artifacts into creatures! There’s no ‘once per turn’ limit, like with tap generals. And then there are the generals with static abilities. All they ask is that you spend the mana to cast them, and then they sit in play and constantly exert their positive effect for you. Azusa, Lost But Seeking lets you play three lands per turn, all for the low cost of three mana. While you probably need these generals to live a few turns to really get the benefits from their abilities, they can be worth it. And if they die, at least you got some use out of their ability, unlike the tap generals. In Azusa’s case, even if she doesn’t survive the turn, you still paid three mana for an Explosive Vegetation, which isn’t bad at all.

Which brings me to my next point. Creatures die a lot in Commander. Consider that carefully when picking your general. Yes, you can rebuy him for two more mana, but how long until he’s too expensive to justify recasting? Kaalia is great at four mana. At six, she’s still acceptable. At eight or ten you have to really start questioning if it wouldn’t just be better to cast the dragons right from your hand. And Kaalia is a cheap general that provides massive mana savings if she survives. What if we’re talking about a 7+ cost general, like Kalitas, Bloodchief of Ghet? Sure, his ability is nice. But if he’s died twice, do you really want to spend 11 mana, plus 3 more the next turn, just to kill one creature, and get a token copy? I’m not saying that expensive generals are bad, but keep in mind that you have to wait longer, and get less uses from them. Cheap generals come down early to help, and can be recast several times before becoming too expensive – in other words, if you’re building around a general, and want him or her in play as much as possible, a low cost general is probably the way to go. If you are considering an expensive general, make sure that there isn’t a cheaper one with a similar but slightly “weaker” effect.  Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief costs two less than Kalitas, is slightly smaller but flies, and while you might spend a bit more mana to kill a creature, and you don’t get the token, she’s able to kill things Kalitas can’t, and makes herself larger while doing so, which is very relevant if you’re trying to kill someone with general damage. Also, Kalitas has to tap for his ability, whereas Drana can kill multiple creatures in one turn if you have the mana, and still attack. They’re even both Vampires, if that’s important to you.

  vs.  

Obviously, what people want from their general is going to vary, but for me the key thing to remember is that you have three people you need to beat, not one. Each person is taking one turn, which means that you’re all on an even field…except that if two or three of them decide that you need to be dealt with, it is like your “opponent” is taking three turns to your one. Suddenly he has three times the answers to your threats, three times the attack steps, and three times the life. This means that you want a way to break parity. Since you always have access to your general, if it allows you to do so, you can consistently get ahead of the table, and if what you’re doing is powerful enough, you should be able to stay ahead of your opponents, hopefully even through their combined disruption. This means you don’t want your plan to collapse to a single Wrath. If your board is wiped, you want to be able to quickly rebuild again, not just be a sitting duck.

 

I realize this post probably had a lot of information that readers were already familiar with, but I wanted to give some background information before explaining tomorrow what it is I personally look for in a general. If you’re an EDH veteran and found this to be totally useless, sorry! If you’re relatively new to Commander, hopefully this was helpful!