What do I cut? A walk through guide to help make those tough decisions.
One of the hardest parts of Commander is when new and exciting cards come out during spoiler season. It can be incredibly frustrating to know what to cut out of your deck in order to find a place for the new card. For me personally, I just had to go through this when I acquired a White Plum Adventurer for my Brago deck. These are the steps I take when deciding what to cut from my Commander deck.
Brago is my higher-power casual Commander deck. It is not running stax pieces, but it aims to win quickly or gain control of the board. The deck normally aims to win through a combo. White Plum Adventurer was selected for this particular version of the deck for three reasons:
1) The initial initiative of grabbing a basic land is a nice feature since the deck sometimes can be starved for lands at 33.
2) The versatility of the routes you can solve problems mid-game.
3) The Trap! Room provides a win condition loop in Strionic Resonator lines without needing to cast any more spells.
Now that I have identified the card that I will add, I look at my deck for bad cards. These would be cards that are either mana inefficient, nonbos in the deck, or cards that are not going to help you get towards your endgame.
In this case, Brago does not have any “bad” cards in it. Through years of playing and playtesting the deck, we have trimmed out the fat. So the next step is to look for strict downgrades. An example of this is Concentrate vs a Rhystic Study. Concentrate is a draw-three card spell for four mana, while Rhystic Study only costs 3 mana and will stay around to let you draw cards. So by adding Rhystic in place of Concentrate, it would be a strict upgrade and there isn’t a worry about affecting ratios or dealing with an opportunity cost. In this case, White Plum Adventurer is such a unique card that there really isn’t anything like it already in the deck to replace it, so we then move to the next step where we look at the “good” cards to cut to make room for great cards.
Good cards are cards in your deck that serve a purpose but are not completely essential to your deck. These are the hardest to cut because they make sense to the deck’s plan. There is a reasonable argument for all of these cards to be in your deck. When going through good cards, looking farther out becomes more important. How many card draw spells are you running? How many ramp spells? Removal? Board wipes? When we’re cutting a card from one of these categories, we want to ensure that we don’t become deficient in that category as a result. I also look into my mana curve to see if I need to bring the curve down and if so, what spells above the curve can I justify removing.
Brago is my higher-power casual Commander deck. It is not running stax pieces, but it aims to win quickly or gain control of the board. The deck normally aims to win through a combo. White Plum Adventurer was selected for this particular version of the deck for three reasons:
1) The initial initiative of grabbing a basic land is a nice feature since the deck sometimes can be starved for lands at 33.
2) The versatility of the routes you can solve problems mid-game.
3) The Trap! Room provides a win condition loop in Strionic Resonator lines without needing to cast any more spells.
Now that I have identified the card that I will add, I look at my deck for bad cards. These would be cards that are either mana inefficient, nonbos in the deck, or cards that are not going to help you get towards your endgame.
In this case, Brago does not have any “bad” cards in it. Through years of playing and playtesting the deck, we have trimmed out the fat. So the next step is to look for strict downgrades. An example of this is Concentrate vs a Rhystic Study. Concentrate is a draw-three card spell for four mana, while Rhystic Study only costs 3 mana and will stay around to let you draw cards. So by adding Rhystic in place of Concentrate, it would be a strict upgrade and there isn’t a worry about affecting ratios or dealing with an opportunity cost. In this case, White Plum Adventurer is such a unique card that there really isn’t anything like it already in the deck to replace it, so we then move to the next step where we look at the “good” cards to cut to make room for great cards.
Good cards are cards in your deck that serve a purpose but are not completely essential to your deck. These are the hardest to cut because they make sense to the deck’s plan. There is a reasonable argument for all of these cards to be in your deck. When going through good cards, looking farther out becomes more important. How many card draw spells are you running? How many ramp spells? Removal? Board wipes? When we’re cutting a card from one of these categories, we want to ensure that we don’t become deficient in that category as a result. I also look into my mana curve to see if I need to bring the curve down and if so, what spells above the curve can I justify removing.
By going through this process, I eventually decided on removing Reflector Mage. I do love Reflector Mage as the "Enter the Battlefield" effect can put your opponent’s creatures back into their hands and prevent them from recasting them for one turn. However, the deck is heavy on control with 19 pieces of interaction, including spells that can spot-remove with effects like exile instead of back to hand to deal with the problem for good. As far as the curve goes, both creatures are three-mana value, but Reflector Mage requires white and blue while White Plum Adventurer only requires white. Finally, in win condition loops, White Plum Adventurer is significantly more equipped to help actually move the game towards victory.
That’s all I have for this week! If you have a topic idea for the blog or our podcast, "The Thought Vessel Show," send us an email at thoughtvesselshow@gmail.com. Until then, happy optimizing!
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