How to Find the Perfect Card for Any Deck #mtg

I also find that playing my deck against various people results in people saying 'oh, are you playing X or Y in that deck, it would be great in it!' which is often helpful.

You do an excellent job of showing people how to best use the resources available for what they want to do.

Scryfall is a savior for janky decks. I'm building a Isperia deck where I want people to attack me, and scryfall has helped so much finding stuff that forces players to attack me or synergies with it

I like to refer to removal, ramp, and card draw as the fruit and veggies of a commander deck. Might not be as fun, but you won't grow big and strong without them.

This is how I decided on making a jeskai flicker deck.

Good episode. I was wondering if Convoke would show up, but completely forgot about Complete the Circuit. That's a dope play.

The One Piece… IS REAL!!!

amazing content as usual, thank you so much. i'm 37, never stopped playing since i was 15. and i learn a lot from your videos.

Great tips! I'd love to see what you have to say about a commander as interesting and unique as Sekki, Seasons' Guide. Cuz everyone under the sun reads it and then builds +1/+1 counters, failing to realize that if you buff its toughness by even 1, it's now completely immune to all damaging effects and generates 1/1 spirits equal to however much damage it takes at any time, NOT just how many counters get removed from it. I've had a fun time experimenting with it haha

I love this method! I might have to do something similar for a deckidea i had earlier

Yeah my issue with this way of brewing is I end up with all these ideas and have a hard time choosing which one to stick with lol but when I do I try and make it as simple and functional as possible, ramp, removal, card draw

This is very similar to my own approach. I like to start with the "vegetables" of my deck. That means I make sure I have enough Ramp, Card-Draw and Removal. Than I add the cards I definetly want to play for my strategy. Afterwards I make Scryfall-Searches for other cards that match my strategy. For example I recently built a Tesak, Judith's Hellhound Deck. After I got the essential parts down, I searched for red dogs on Scryfall and picked the ones that were the most interesting ones. Afterwards I went to EDH-Rec to search for good Red cards and red Tribal cards. Once I had my draft finished, with around 80 non-land cards, I removed cards one by one, while making sure to not remove any Ramp, Card-Draw and Removal cards.

Fantastic video, and I absolutely love the deck list! Theorycrafting a deck and searching through the thousands of available cards for that one gem is a big part of the fun imo, scryfall especially is a treasure trove. EDHRec is nice for the most obvious synergies, but - as many people have pointed out - it recursively feeds itself into a common list of suggestions that are way too generic and often don't synergize very well. The other day I was looking for upgrades to my Strefan vampire deck and stumbled apon Lim-Dul's Hex for instance. Only 29 of 5.5K decks appear to play it, so the card is not even suggested if you look Strefan up. The same goes for Mardu Shadowspear, which is in just 18 decks! The best part? If you check the handful of decks that contain that little gem you found, you'll likely find even more obscure gems that failed to be suggested by EDHRec, as those decks were made by players that look for niche cards too :)

The throne idea is great but I would change commander to Archelos which I think opens up so many avenues

This is kinda what I did with my most recent brew. I wanted to brew around Lurrus as a companion and saw ny Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim. So I filtered on Scryfall on clerics in Orzhov colors small enough for Lurrus, noticed synergy with both aristocrats and lifegain, and from there combined Scryfall searching and some Edhrec to put together an initial brew to start experimenting with. The result was a much more put together aristocrat deck than my previous one.

Some of my all time favorite commander decks have come finding a cool card and looking up on EDHRec for what commanders use that card. For example, I saw Doors of Durin somewhere, and was like, that sounds cool, I wonder what deck that would work in. I looked it up on EDHRec and found Samut, Vizier of Naktamun. And whoo boy, that deck is fun! And it's unique and not expensive to build.

Thanks for posting the list so I can net deck it

great approach with even a greater example

I think this is absolutely a great way to use these resources. However, out of the box thinking is very challenging for some. They're not wired that way. They might build the deck with everything that makes tapped creatures and use a 5 color commander like Kenrith, because he's popular and can helm the deck of their dreams. But you focused it down to just creating tapped zombies and thought of the perfect commander. You also had the knowledge of using vehicles to force taps and things like Convoke (conspire is great too btw) and recognized that if everything is tapped, you need to pillow fort to protect, because otherwise, someone swings in and kills you before you can take them out. Others might get here from trial and error, but many people with less than a year of experience will have a very difficult time doing what you did. Even with a few years it might be tough without that natural spark of curiosity and out of the box thinking. I really wish magic would slow down, because it's making it even more overwhelming to enter without using one of the make precons to build off of. This then takes you back to trial and error to see how the deck performs and then take out things that don't work and put in things it needs.

This is awesome. This is basically how I build my decks, I just don’t use scryfall. I also think that there are two was to build a good deck and you should probably be using both strats. The first as you describe, picking an identity first. The second is to just build a generic deck then as you play find the ways you win and rebuild around those. This is especially true with decks that have side combos. If you win 10% of your games with a combo early and 90% late game with value, cut the combo. If it’s flipped (and you like the combo) cut the crap and build that combo deck