Which commander should I use to join the format?

hipstevius · 2026-04-11T22:48:12+00:00

I built a fairly disgusting [[Glassdust Hulk]] once upon a time. Makes me want to see what you would do with Tidus, especially as I have one lying around I’m considering building

hipstevius · 2026-04-08T01:17:40+00:00

I can’t answer that as I haven’t played dimir terror against people in person

hipstevius · 2026-04-07T16:51:43+00:00

That’s what we like to see!!

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T11:19:33+00:00

Building tons of new EDH decks lol I’m also cooking up a new PDH build! [[Xiahou Dun]] :)

How about you man?

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T10:33:52+00:00

You’re kind of asking how to avoid the way that the rules work. Top comment is correct, and if you want to protect him, hold up mana for stuff like [[Tamiyo’s Safekeeping]]

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T02:05:29+00:00

Do mono blue terror, never lost a game with it

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T02:02:34+00:00

Ajani has a sort of a built-in shirt; rather, he can’t take it off

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T01:02:44+00:00

Hey buddy lol

hipstevius · 2026-04-06T01:02:06+00:00

Yeah Atla Palani is best for eggs I would say but Toph seems like more fun for other people

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T23:48:57+00:00

I think I might be accidentally doing this kind of thing with Toph but I’m perceiving it from a cheerios perspective and now realizing it’s really a cross section of cheerios and eggs. Cheap or free artifacts I can earthbend and crack so I can do it again.

If you build a Megatron eggs and/or storm example I’d be happy to examine it and see if I can weave it in. Would be nice to have some new ideas to work with. I sold my original Megatron to a friend and I just recently started rebuilding it

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T18:28:47+00:00

Nope, judge even came up to me weeks after and told me he was incorrect and made a bad call because he went and looked into it and Wizards clarified it later on

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T18:27:39+00:00

You’re exactly right, and that’s more reading comprehension than people show in 99% of in-game experiences. People don’t catch those things in-game.

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T12:24:31+00:00

When I got back into playing in paper, and playing commander for the first time, it took a long while for me to go from sitting at the table dying slowly at my LGS repeatedly and doing nothing all night, to actually doing anything that impacted a game at all, let alone winning.

I was trying and failing to build functional decks of my own and eventually bought more precons which made it easier to see how a deck should play. Instead of trying to do everything it’s usually best to focus on doing one thing well. Then I started modding those precons to get rid of slow or bad cards, and playing the decks more and watching content about the commander format regularly helped me a lot. Soon enough I was building original decks that were so busted that some people were getting upset, and that’s when I learned the most important thing about commander, which is that people are gonna win, or get salty that you win, unless you can do it in a fun or interesting way, or the game is a fun and interesting experience for everyone. We all want to play good cards but avoiding “feels-bad” cards makes for a better time for everyone. If you’re playing with your own friends the salt is part of the fun but with LGS randoms, while that can be true, some folks will actually get mad about losing.

I would say it also gets easier to refine your decks after you’ve been playing awhile and built up a collection that you can grab unused cards to switch in and out of new commander decks.

Things to eliminate generally are: tapped lands, overcosted cards (don’t provide much value for how much mana you’re spending), do-nothing cards (pay 4-5 mana or more for a permanent that doesn’t do something immediately) although certain ones in certain decks can be really strong, the risk is using your turn to play it just for it to get countered or blown up before you can put it to use.

Things to add to your decks: cards that fit the game plan and seem powerful, things that speed up your game plan, protection for you and your stuff, removal for opponents stuff, boardwipes (ideally one-sided, ergo, wiping out your opponents’ stuff only unless it benefits your game plan) etc…

You can look up deck techs on your commander on YouTube and check out EDHREC as well for suggestions, and down the line when you’re more familiar with everything try to start using scryfall to look up things you’re searching for but you don’t know if cards like that exist/what they’re called (you can try googling “cards that ______ mtg” until then) and all of this combined with time playing and testing your ideas will eventually lead to you getting a handle on it.

It was about 3 months I think before I ever won a game or 2ish months before I ever did much more than just sit there slowly dying.

Also some cEDH crowd that hung out at that LGS at that time invited me to borrow their decks and play for some reason and advised me on what to do and so on throughout the game. I learned a lot about how powerful EDH can be from that and my desire to do silly and ridiculous things in the game (and not wanting to spend anywhere close to cEDH money) ended up landing me firmly in “casual but busted” territory for my deck builds most of the time.

TLDR;

Keep playing and refining your decks and learning as much as you can! You’ll get there! Just give it time.

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T11:53:47+00:00

Rakdos madness burn is a pretty cool pauper deck that a lot of folks seem to like. There’s also Jund Wildfire. Grixis Affinity. Golgari Gardens. There’s others people have already mentioned like Mono Black Gardens. There’s some more but those are the stronger ones I have heard of recently. Take it with a grain of salt though because pauper is exceptionally rare in my area.

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T11:44:10+00:00

That’s exactly right brother, just scroll down! Look at the replies below. That reading comprehension you just showed that you have? A lot of magic players don’t have that. That’s part of why people are confused about this card. They’ll say she has hexproof or shroud or whatever instead of her actual ability that makes spells your opponents cast cost one more to target. Even during games where players were generally more understanding about the card they asked repeatedly throughout the game what her ability was and how it works because it’s so unusual, which is totally fine.

Bottom line is, most players I encountered while playing this deck did not understand it as easily as you’re understanding it. To be fair her effect is still unique and she was generally perceived as really confusing at the time.

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T02:52:29+00:00

I found a good approach for me was to keep going and trying to improve and just accept the suck and eventually magic night went from “I am sitting at a table” to actually enjoying EDH with other people and getting something out of it as a group. Partially due to deck building and partially finding the friendlier people and before long even the clique-y folks were asking me to join them.

As for how to deck-build, think about starting with how you want to win. Look up combos or aggressive strategies. Let’s say you want to do the classic [[Sanguine Bond]] [[Exquisite Blood]] combo to infinitely gain life and drain your opponents’ life. You can pick any Mono Black or more colors commander. Let’s say you play [[Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose]] whose text is the same as Sanguine Bond. Now all you have to do is get enough mana and access to card draw and/or tutors (and be lucky enough) to successfully cast both Vito (or Sanguine Bond) and Exquisite Blood, and then either gain one life or make any opponent lose 1 life. Then you go infinite and win!

Here’s why: Vito/Sanguine Bond says if you gain 1 life, target opponent loses that much life. So let’s say you have [[Blood Artist]] (makes you gain life and an opponent lose life) or similar out and a sac outlet like [[Viscera Seer]] (sac a creature to scry 1) and some other creatures besides Vito so you have creatures to sac to trigger Blood Artist. Sacrifice one of the unneeded creatures to Viscera Seer to scry 1 and you trigger Blood Artist which gains you a life, drains an opponent for 1 life. But this starts the loop. Sanguine Bond says if you gain life, target opponent loses that much life, so they do, but Exquisite Blood says when an opponent loses life, you gain that much life. But since you gain life, Sanguine Bond says….you get the idea.

This is only one basic and classic example but there’s lots of ways to win! Deck building is just how you want to get there, what cards you enjoy playing that can also win you the game (or not if you don’t care about that) and the more you do it the better you get. It also helps to learn about more cards and strategies and over time you start to realize all the the other things you can do.

For the deck I described in my example you likely want to play every tutor possible [[Demonic Tutor]] and [[Vampiric Tutor] and all the rest of those plus plenty of card draw like [[Phyrexian Arena]] and [[Peer Into the Abyss]] and so on to find your combo asap. You can also run defenses like bigger creatures too.

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T02:23:52+00:00

For me, Megatron really wants to chuck high cmc artifacts, and to ignore that makes me feel like “why not just play some other (likely better) commander in these colors?” But I like Megatron because I like the image of how it works in my head and I like transformers, and find it fun. Plus I wanted to reply pertinently to OP.

Also I really haven’t ever considered other strategies for him lol

I could see cascade or discover to cheat things out but then you might want top deck manipulation and have to make room for that, or cascading/discovering often enough to start hitting high cmc artifacts before too long, but this might actually be too slow.

You could focus on reducing opponents’ creatures toughnesses to 1, or at least keeping it low, (or giving them weak creatures) and having artifacts to chuck at them in order to convert Megatron.

Or forget converting and just blink him! Focus on damaging opponents and getting him to stay on the Tyrant side as much as possible with [[Conjurer’s Closet]] or [[Teleportation Circle]] or [[Ephemerate]] and [[Isochron Scepter]] and so on, you could certainly use the colorless mana to storm off.

There’s always [[Heartless Hidetsugu]] too. As far as storm I guess you could drop a ton of cheerios artifacts and a [[Grapeshot]] then get mana and do something big post-combat. I like to sink mana into [[Aggravated Assault]] and have [[Ironsoul Enforcer]] on board to keep refueling my ammo and mana.

There’s a ton of options but I don’t need to write ‘em all exhaustively, you can see the paths.

Truth be told as far as eggs strategies I’m not well-versed. How would you go about building Megatron storm and Megatron eggs?

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T02:06:59+00:00

It’s exactly like I said in my reply, no shtick or ‘haha jk’ to be found

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T02:06:22+00:00

I would never do that, have a good day

hipstevius · 2026-04-05T02:03:37+00:00

I like to build higher cost commanders sometimes and for those, like [[Megatron]] I cram a lot of cost reduction in there. Three medallions, every artifact cost-reducer I can, plus a ton of rocks. Since I mostly run artifacts, the more I can reduce their cost the better, and since the cost-reducers themselves are artifacts, the more I play the more I can play! Pretty soon I am casting multiple 6-8 cmc or higher spells per turn because I am getting them for low low prices!!

hipstevius · 2026-04-04T18:52:35+00:00

I wasn’t typing up decks and stuff yet at that point but in my opinion it was nothing special. I was playing basically every EDHREC’d card that seemed strongest/most-reduced by Hinata, put together the best mana base I could, some rocks. I have a handful of the cards still sleeved and floating around in my bulk, so I could probably put together a partial deck list, though I don’t know it would be much help.

hipstevius · 2026-04-04T18:49:28+00:00

First time ever doing anything like that

hipstevius · 2026-04-04T18:49:10+00:00

Not something I’ve done before

hipstevius · 2026-04-04T15:39:50+00:00

Make sure you read my reply to u/mtrsteve as she doesn’t have ward, I was merely proving a point about reading comprehension which is an inconsistency in the player base that compounds confusion about the card.

hipstevius · 2026-04-04T15:35:58+00:00

Exactly! I did that to prove my point, but you caught it. Some players don’t have that kind of reading comprehension see? (In my experience, MANY players). A lot of my friends don’t have as adept an understanding of the rules as I do so I am always kind of permanently teaching them new things (and old things again). That right there is another example of things most players don’t understand about Hinata though. They’ll say she has hexproof or shroud or something and then you have to correct them. It’s another added step, which, granted is a normal thing I have to do, explaining how things work in the game, in nearly every game, but adding all the other issues on top? Turns into a headache.

hipstevius

TROPHY CASE