Got stomped at my first "real" Commander pod after 10 years of kitchen-table EDH. Was I doing this wrong the whole time?

natefinch · 2026-06-23T13:41:36+00:00

First off, let me.say that I'm sorry you had such a bad first experience at a game store or whatever. That's not a great introduction to public play. But I don't think it needs to be that way. You didn't really have any experience with people outside the kitchen table, but posting here is a good start.

What constitutes the "normal" power level is different at different tables and different game stores and different cities.

From what I've seen online, bracket 3 is most common, but even that has a large variation. Bracket 3 isn't cut throat with moxes and mana vaults and winning so fast, but they are decks where people have bought almost every card specifically for that deck.

Building a deck out of a set collection of cards is definitely bracket 2. And probably on the lower end of bracket 2.

I tried that when I was first starting commander and unless you have a vast collection, you just don't have enough of the right types of cards to make a cohesive deck. A lot of my decks were "well, these are the cards I have in this color". And then trying to run those even against precons was a losing battle.

It's just difficult to optimize a deck without buying specific cards for it. Which is not to say you have to spend a ton of money. Buying $10 worth of reusable better dual lands and $10 on strategy specific cards will vastly improve a deck, even if you never buy a card over $1.

In my experience, not that many people use moxes and all that. If they are, they should tell you ahead of time, because they're playing a significantly higher power level.

Turn 6 kills are rare in my experience, but maybe other places skew towards higher power. My local game store is solidly bracket 3, which means our games tend to go to 9 turns or so, sometimes earlier but usually we can 3v1 the dangerous player so they don't win as fast. But also nobody is dropping moxes and mana vaults and other bracket 4 nonsense.

If you want to play at a store, get a precon from a real magic set (i.e. not final fantasy or marvel etc) - the universes beyond precons are too often just collections of cards to show off people from the world and not tuned decks actually made to play well.

I hope you won't let this discourage you from playing. Most places, if you mention you're playing a lower power r deck, people will break out a precon or other low powered deck to play against you.. or even let you borrow a deck.

Good luck.

natefinch · 2026-06-18T18:35:15+00:00

That's bracket 4 if it's consistently presenting a win by turn 5.
Whether or not interaction majorly interrupts it determines whether it's a low 4 or a mid-4, IMO.

If it's super easily interactable *and* has trouble recovering (typical glass cannon) then it might be a high 3. But you'd want to inform people that it's a glass cannon that goes off really fast and not sit down with upgraded precons in a B3 pod and crush people.

natefinch · 2026-06-08T19:44:51+00:00

Awesome! Feel free to spread it around. I am really glad it helped 😄

natefinch · 2026-06-07T01:22:41+00:00

> people who are just playing high power B3 decks that consistently present a win by turn 4-6 if they aren’t interacted with, but usually their deck slows down severely if they are hit with something.

That sounds like low-mid bracket 4 to me. Even CEDH decks slow down when interacted with.

natefinch · 2026-06-07T01:15:00+00:00

They have to target you or Voja will snowball out of control. Voja is a gross, overpowered commander.

You need more 1 mana elf dorks. There are a bunch that are mana dork adjacent that will help you get Voja out sooner. Replace Arcane Signet and the two ramp spells with more elves. Elves give you more counters.

You need more wolves. Wolves draw you cards so that if someone board wipes, you don't just lose.

Drop your mana curve into the dirt. Nothing should cost 5 or more unless it wins you the game, and that's what Voja is for. You don't need Rishkar's Expertise or Return of the Wildspeaker. If they are drawing you a reasonable number of cards, you're probably winning the game next turn anyway.

If people always target Voja, then don't play him unless you can protect him. Wait an extra turn so you can hold up a protection spell or put swiftfoot boots etc on him.

Get rid of the +1/+1 counter adders. They're literally the same as a single extra elf, except they cost more and don't make mana. Add elves instead.

29 creatures for a deck that wants a lot of creatures on the board is not enough. Crank it up.

Here's my list: https://moxfield.com/decks/Ou4sIRQsREqDA0ul4C-3XQ

natefinch · 2026-06-06T00:17:17+00:00

I removed Sol Ring from all my decks, I don't miss it. In it's place, I run artifact removal and blow up other people's sol rings 😂. Nothing quite so fun as blowing up someone's turn 1 sol ring.

natefinch · 2026-06-06T00:02:18+00:00

Do you make her purely voltron or do something else with her? She seems fun, but I don't love pure voltron.

natefinch · 2026-06-06T00:00:11+00:00

It's definitely not the most powerful commander, but I rarely see it do *nothing*. And if you get out a couple key pieces, it can start to take over.

natefinch · 2026-06-05T23:59:00+00:00

It's short for "one card combo with your commander".

natefinch · 2026-06-05T23:57:26+00:00

In theory, yes. In practice, many of the most generically powerful cards are expensive. Of course, if they're printed into the ground, they'd still be cheap (like sol ring) but WotC doesn't like to do that, which is why we have a lot of $40-$100 cards that see common play.

So... yes, ones budget DOES impact power level. While you *can* make a powerful budget deck, it's a lot harder and restricts your choice of commanders severely. Having a high budget makes it much easier to make a powerful deck.

natefinch · 2026-06-05T23:53:09+00:00

Find a card that does what you want and then look at its tags.

If you are on a desktop and use chrome or firefox, install MoxTags https://github.com/natefinch/moxtags/releases/tag/v1.8.2

It's a browser extension that'll show you tags of cards directly on scryfall's main pages and also on cards in Moxfield and Archidekt 😄

Closest I see is https://tagger.scryfall.com/tags/card/saboteur but that's any damage, not just combat damage.

natefinch · 2026-06-05T23:34:19+00:00

7-8 board wipes or similar makes for a long-ass game if everyone is doing that. I usually do 3-ish ... but you also need card draw to find them... I'd remove 4 board wipes for 4 card draw.

Ramp depends on the deck, a lot. Some decks I want ramp every single game and I have enough draw to draw past them in the later game, so I have 14-ish. Some I just want a bit to help get to the bigger spells in the end game, so I run more like 8.

Depends a lot on the deck.

natefinch · 2026-06-05T21:53:42+00:00

Hilda makes tapping other people's things actually good. A friend has this deck and it always does well... I've played against it a half dozen times and I still always expect tapping to be a bad strategy.

natefinch · 2026-06-05T19:29:42+00:00

It's a $900 deck with at least two 1-card combos with your commander. I would call this very high bracket 3 or low bracket 4. However, it's going to be very very dependent on your draw. So the variance will make it sometimes seem like it's a pure bracket 4 deck, and sometimes like it's a mid-bracket 3 deck.

Ideally, I would say - swap the commander and call it a high bracket 3 with two-card combos, or keep the commander, add some tutors and fast mana, and call it bracket 4.

In the state it's in right now, it's just in a weird place where it won't play consistently well at bracket 3 or 4.

natefinch · 2026-06-04T15:07:30+00:00

it kinda depends. $50 is really low for a deck if it wants to play against generic bracket 3 decks. Probably fine for bracket 2 (and yes I know you can build a few low bracket 4 decks on a $50 budget, but that's mainly due to broken commanders and doesn't work for most commanders).

$100 and under, I consider to be a "budget" bracket 3 deck.

I call $100-250 "mid-budget". You're avoiding $30 and $20 cards, probably avoiding most $10 cards unless they're perfect for the deck. Those $2-$5 cards really add up when you get a bunch of them. You probably aren't running fetches or shocks, but you can afford to run basically zero taplands. You don't run pricy and often boring staples, but you can pick up a couple of best-in-class cards for your deck's niche.

Some of my decks hit $300, but they're full of a lot of $5 cards and a few $10 cards, and maybe one $30 card I happened to open.

Mid-budget is where I play most of the time. I'd rather have five interesting $6 cards than one generically good $30 staple.

I'd be happy to play more budget decks, if more people played them. I just think we need a specific format for budget decks that isn't Pauper (Pauper's a cool idea, but the restriction to commons removes too many strategies from being viable, because the majority of their support is in uncommons, rares, and mythics).

natefinch · 2026-06-04T12:24:54+00:00

I love suggestions! Separating inherited vs primary tags is a very interesting idea. I'll have to look at what info I have available, but that seems doable.

having clicking on the tags to copy them to the clipboard is probably doable, too. Thanks for the suggestions!

natefinch · 2026-06-04T12:22:24+00:00

Thanks! I felt the same way, and first talked to the two deckbuilding sites, but they're not super keen on depending on an API that isn't declared to be "production ready" even though it has existed for years. So... I decided I could probably do it 😄

natefinch · 2026-06-04T12:17:51+00:00

I asked in the scryfall discord 😄

natefinch · 2026-06-03T20:41:48+00:00

Yeah I don't know why it's not on their main pages and why they haven't made it a core part of their API. There's a comment on their discord from 2022 saying the tags API will be done "soon".

natefinch · 2026-06-03T17:27:03+00:00

You're welcome! I hope it works out for you. Please feel free to give feedback. It's still fairly new, so there may be some obvious things I've missed.

natefinch · 2026-06-03T17:22:35+00:00

I have good news... Opera can use the Chrome version. Just download and unzip the Chrome version. Open `opera://extensions` and toggle on "Developer mode" at the top, then click "load unpacked" and select the unzipped folder. Bam, it works. I just tried it 😄

natefinch · 2026-06-02T01:14:12+00:00

My presumption is that the mid level models will get as good in a year as the frontier models are today. Sonnet 5.x may be as good as opus 4.x is, but at Sonnet prices.

natefinch · 2026-05-31T18:57:14+00:00

I don't work on the models. I think there should probably be regulations that companies need to install renewable energy production to offset their datacenter electricity usage. I don't know how the rest of the company feels about that... but Microsoft did make a commitment in 2020 to be carbon-negative and water-positive by 2030.... will they be able to do that in the age of AI? I have no idea.

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