Congrats everyone! We welcomed our 1,000th subscriber last week to MTGZone! A huge thank-you to everyone here for browsing and contributing—this is a wonderful place already and will only get better.
To celebrate this awesome milestone, we’re giving away 1 LTR collector booster and 2 LTR set boosters to one lucky community member!
To enter:
- Make sure you’re subscribed to /c/mtg.
- Add a comment to this post with 1 thing you’d like to share about the game. Anything! Favorite deck, an MTG story, a streamer you like, your pet card, suggestion for the site.
We’ll leave this up for 2 weeks and at noon eastern on August 7th we’ll pick a random member from the comments here. I’ll reach out via DM for an address and once confirmed will post here!
Some fun facts for reading this far:
- Our first post was on June 9th, a bit over 6 weeks ago. Since then we’ve had a total of 304 (mostly spoiler!) posts.
- You’ve upvoted these posts 2,439 times and downvoted them only 42 times.
- You’ve also made 1,098 comments, upvoting them 2,240 times and downvoting them only 9 times!
- We have 409 registered users at this instance now!
Thanks again to everyone, can’t wait to celebrate 5,000! As always please DM me or mike with any questions or suggestions or if you’re interested in getting involved, or find us at Mastodon.
Updates:
[12:00pm] It’s noon Eastern! I locked the thread and will get all of the unique usernames here to run the drawing!
[1:46pm] Apologies for the delay! We have a winner: @kaiyo@lemmy.world! I sent them a message now to verify and once I get a reply I’ll make the official announcement post with drawing video. Stay tuned!
@andrew
I immensely dislike WotC’s focus on commander over all other formats. EDH is not interesting to me anymore, every set has new staple or busted commander to chase.
Additionally the color pie is slowly being eroded for the sake of the only format with the “color identity” restriction. All the other formats now need to live in a world where any color can get any effect.
Fortunately limited is still good most of the time, except when they print sets that cost $75 to draft once.Agreed on all 3 points, particularly your first on their commander focus. I’ve never considered the color pie corruption via Commander too but that makes a ton of sense.
I think when they started printing directly to Commander—as opposed to letting cards printed for standard sets trickle down naturally to Commander–they introduced immense issues to both Commander and regular formats. It’s a format designed for 4 players and an eternal one that they need to now “rotate” with increasingly powerful cards. Not only does this corrupt the spirit of Commander (finding new uses for cards that never got played elsewhere), it cannot work with 2-player constructed formats and has caused a ton of issues there.
I just wish they’d go back to only designing cards for Standard and limited, and let the eternal formats (Commander included) get them naturally. Sadly it just is never going to happen, it’s too big a cash cow.
Sorry I didn’t mean to @ you, fedilab is weird with Lemmy.
This place is great, thanks for all the hard work out in to it!
In the 90s I used to play mtg as a kid and listen to the Mountains Goats on cassette, and now there’s a Mountain Goats secret lair. Full circle.
There’s just no game that satisfies the itch quite like mtg. Been playing for over 20 years and will still be playing in 20+ years.
Going through the 10 cent bin at a local comic book store to make decks with friends to play that day when you’re a poor high schooler… miss those days.
Here’s a fun fact - I still play Magic with friends that I played magic with back in 2002. 21 years and going strong, baby!
As an extremely casual commander player, I always feel like a noob even though technically I’ve been playing MTG for over half a decade at this point. My commander decks have all been precons and I’ve mostly just got cards through drafting with my friends, but this year I’ve been trying to build my own deck from scratch and it’s… exciting but frustrating.
Does anyone have any tips for taking a (commander) deck from the “theoretical pile of cards” stage to a functioning deck? By that I mean, I’ve done the preliminary research (scryfall searches, EDHREC most used cards for the commander, etc) to find possible cards, and I’ve read some high level theory stuff about deck building (ramping, threats, etc) to categorize my possible cards… But can’t really find any articles/videos showing workflows to actually build the deck.
Currently I’m trying to use tags on Moxfield but it’s mostly a confusing mess as I try to trim down ~200 possibilities into a lean, functioning deck.
I think your question would make a really good post of it’s own, but my best suggestion would be to write down the mana curve you want first and build your deck to fit cards into that curve. Say you want 10 1cc spells, 20 2cc spells, 25 3cc spells, and 10 4+cc spells with 35 lands. There are so many possible cards you can include in your commander deck that I think it’s better to choose them based on a structured mana curve you want. That way your deck won’t fall apart while you play it, and you have a clear system for how to swap/upgrade/replace cards in your deck.
This doesn’t directly answer your question on paring the big pool down, but I bookmarked this a while ago that had a pretty good overview of EDH deckbuilding basics that might help, including numbers on how many of each category to go with: https://www.archidekt.com/decks/1048638#EDH__Deck_Template_(read_description_at_bottom) (and original source). It links to a separate guide on lands too which is helpful.
In general I think it’s really helpful to set a goal at the beginning. Are you building a deck to primarily have fun and/or explore a theme, do you want to try to be competitive, etc. I tend to choose the cards that I enjoy playing over those that might be “strictly better,” for instance, particularly ones that I have nostalgia for. I also tend to build around themes/tribes a lot which naturally limits the pool.
I agree with mike that this could be a whole post on its own, but something that’s helped me pare down the pile of potentials was the rough guidelines that both Prof (TCC) and Tomer (Goldfish) put out a couple of years ago, where they talk about how much ramp vs removal vs card draw you should aim for (I still try to run at least one “you win the game” card in every deck, in line with Tomer’s suggestion).
I still review my 99 with that in mind, even if I don’t always hit those exact numbers, and it’s helped make my decks play more smoothly whenever I run them, and is also really helpful when upgrading, since I know if I’m adding a new card draw engine, then my cuts should be from my existing card draw.
It’s probably helpful if I actually share the links:
TCC - How to Build Your 1st Commander Deck: https://youtu.be/1jO2fmsef0g
MTGGoldfish - https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-power-of-a-deckbuilding-checklist-commander-quickie
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I’m new and I’ve got two decks already. I built a goblin dwarf equipment deck from scratch, and I bought a firkraag precon and I’m building treasures and more goad into it.
Hey thanks for doing this giveaway!
I played for years when I was a teenager and got back into MTG during the pandemic. Discovering commander was a complete game changer for me. I just love the way it’s played lol!
Thank you for this!!
I’ve only recently gotten into MTG but I jumped in hard and fast! Commander is the play style I enjoy the most and the community around it has been truly helpful and supportive when I’d ask for help in my LGS or on various forums! I say all of that to hopefully entice anyone new or curious of the game to jump in!! You won’t regret it!
Hot take: MTG needs more hippos.
Thank you!
Currently getting back into MTG. I’m working on an Atraxa Commander deck. Any tips for improvement would be greatly appreciated!!
Thanks for all the work you put in to keep this server running! Glad to see it growing and hope it grows even more.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast lately, so here’s a random fact from it: Faceless Butcher was original going to be released in a set before Torment, but when they got the art back for the card the character had a face and they had to change the name to something that made sense. They liked the name so much that they held onto it and during the making of Torment made sure to specially request art without a face.
Thanks for the giveaway! I really enjoy the cards from the LOTR set. My dad doesn’t know much about Magic, but is a big LOTR fan and has had a lot of fun looking at the cards for the art and flavor text.
I miss Cascade decks, lol.
(Thanks for doing the giveaway!)
I’ve been playing since I was 6. My dad had finally thought my brother and I were old enough to learn (he had been playing since the beginning). I’ve always enjoyed MTG casually. Never anything too competitive, but the one thing I always enjoy seeing is how creative everyone gets when making their decks, or win cons. It blows my mind and reminds me how great the game is.
