A couple of weeks ago, I introduced a project I’m calling the Highlander Collective. While basically all of the comments about it are related to a contest I’m running (we’ll get to the winner in a little bit), I wanted to take a few minutes to actually talk about what I’m doing.

I have only so much time for Magic, and a good portion of that time is devoted to Commander. It’s the format where I have the most fun and I can basically do what I want. If this were a perfect world, I would create decks for each Commander and play them. Of course, time goes on; four times a year, Wizards prints new cards, and I would have to reedit each deck each time.

So, I’ve decided that I’m only going to stick to around nineteen Commanders. That might seem like a lot, and I’m sure it is. But I wanted to have different deck styles and different color combinations to play around with. The nineteen decks won’t be the cutoff line but more of a guideline, as I don’t want to go too much more than that. The Commanders will be rotating in and out; I compare them to a Superhero team like The Avengers or Justice League. To paraphrase Starship Troopers: I need a Commander. You’re it, until you’re dead or I find someone better.

This experiment is more than just a posting of my deck lists. With each new set comes new cards that could be inserted into the decks. Sometimes you’re given a whole crop of awesome new stuff; with others, there might be only one card that you add. Each set now has a couple of Commanders, and one of those might be interesting to build around. It could be that one card comes around and warps how you build decks:

You can just let it sit on the battlefield letting you draw cards until it dies, or you can abuse it:

After playing around with your new cards, you decide to take your deck in that direction, completely overhauling your deck. Soon, your deck doesn’t look like the one you designed, and you’re on a completely different path. Don’t worry; it’s happened to everyone.

You sometimes see pros and players who write about the competitive scene use this idea plenty of times. When comparing how metagames have changed over time, they say X card is no longer useful, so why not switch over to Y card? Either a new card has come into existence to change decks, or a series of cards that no one used are now being played. To the best of my knowledge, there’s been no look back at what has been added to and taken away from decks over their evolution. Flores does this sometimes, but not to this extent. This is what I want to change.

Casual is much harder to keep track of. Because almost every card is legal and every place you play is different, what might work for one deck might not work for everyone else’s (hence, the metagame). I haven’t seen a ton of cards like Insurrection, so I don’t need to worry about that card coming out of nowhere; on the flip side, I know people who ban that card in their area. These decks that are included in the Highlander Collective fit for me, my area, and certainly my play style. If you want to use these as a baseline for your own deck, do.

However, I don’t want you to copy down these deck lists card for card and show up in your playgroup with an exact copy. Make the deck your own. This can be a good jumping-off point to help get you started on an idea, and I know that not everyone will agree with all of the card choices that I make, and that’s the idea: Infuse it with your own ideas.

Even though I’m taking a more “professional” route with this concept in a very casual format, don’t think that I’m just going to fill up the decks with expensive cards and have them be all the same with only a few variations between the decks. That’s what I don’t like about MTGO—if I have one card, I can put it in all my decks. That takes the fun out of deck-building. I’m just looking to get better as a deck-builder with this process.

But enough talking; back to the good part.

If you don’t remember, here’s the list of Commanders I’m going to be using for the Highlander Collective:

And here are the categories that you’ll see at the beginning of the profiles. They’re broken down into three sections: Biographical, Structural, and Inner Workings:

Biographical

Name – Nickname of the deck, if I have one. I love to name my decks; my favorite name was “Everyone Knows You Never Go Full Bant” when I took a deck to States.

Commander – Who the Commander is. They’re kinda a big deal when it comes to this format.

Colors – The colors of the deck. You know, to get everyone on the same page.

Type of Deck – Aggro, control, or combo. General composition of the deck.

Theme – What I’m looking to do with the deck. Win with the Commander, if it’s a tribal deck, or other paths of exploration.

Date Created – The date it debuted in the Highlander Collective. I’ve played with the decks before, but its “official” date will be its published date.

Version – What version of the deck I’m on. Decks will usually be 1.X, where X is the number of times I’ve updated it. However, if I change the style/direction of the deck, or I’ve noticed a huge dynamic shift, we could go to other versions. That’s a huge part of this whole project.

Last Updated – Date of last update plus the last set it was updated with. Obviously, with so many decks, not every one will be updated within days of the release, and don’t be surprised to see that some of these aren’t updated with great frequency.

Structure

Land Ratio – What the lands-to-spells ratio is, including Commander (to make it easier). If the deck has 40 lands, it will read “40:60, 40% lands”.

Card Type Breakdown – Breakdown of card types and the current percentage of spells they occupy. If I have thirty creatures in my sixty spells, it will read “50% creatures”.

Color Breakdown – Breakdown of the colors in this deck. Will list the different color combinations—Black/Red is different than Blue/Black/Red. Again, a percentage of the spells, not the overall deck.

CMC Breakdown – How many cards in the different “numbered drops.”

Inner Workings

Role of Commander – If He/She/It is there to just supply me the colors, my main win condition, or just an enabler.

Path to Winning 1 – My preferred way of winning.

Path to Winning 2 – My second preferred way of winning.

Info About the Deck – Some background information about this deck. What the idea was behind creating it, history of the deck, etc.

Combos – Main combos within the deck, not all of them. Can be thought of as synergy.

Whew. We good?

Is this too much for a casual format? It might be. But at least it gives us a place to start when examining our decks.

That’s right, I said our decks.

If you want to participate in this project on your own, I highly encourage you to. This is what I’m doing to my decks, so you don’t have to do the same thing if you don’t want to. Make up your own rules, add categories that I haven’t even thought of yet. One idea I tossed around was to use this as a catalog so I know where my foiled, signed, and foreign cards were; another was to identify removal, draw, and situational cards. What I am avoiding is making this a primer for other players. If you want to write a primer about how a certain Commander “should” be played and built for, that’s fine. That’s not what the goal of the Highlander Collective is going to be about.

Of course, all the profile information changes when I change the information around. Luckily, there are spoiler tags in forums that I can use to store older information. If people want to use this template to get help with their decks, this will make it much easier to sort out all of that information than just a list. Not everything has been perfected yet, but I think that this is a great first start to something interesting.

And now I want to announce the winner, the person who chose the Commander deck I will loan out to people interested in the format. There were plenty of great responses, but there could be only one winner. Drew Dumas, come on down!

Here’s his winning entry:

The way you wrote about your aspirations for this mystery deck, it seemed to me you weren’t so much trying to make a beginner deck for Magic rookies as much as a flavor deck to capture the essence of EDH. Yes, it needs to not be too complex, as a commander deck with 20 combos where you need to know every card in your deck to answer every situation would obviously not be what you’re looking for, but it doesn’t have to be linear. We’re not looking for training wheel decks, these people know how to play, just not this format.

With that in mind, it seems to me a three-color “good stuff” deck is what you’re looking for. Three colors allows for a lot of variety and interactions, but isn’t as complex as a five color. And good stuff rather than tribal or combo, because then it doesn’t matter what draw the new player gets, or what his top decks are, they’re going to have business to play, and ways to impact the game. EDH is a social game. A deck has to allow for a certain amount of give and take, and when you make a deck without strict combos, it’s less devastating when the combo gets hosed. Plus, three color fun decks tend not to be overly complicated.

And so, I make what seems to me to be a no-brainer of a nomination for a General. Nicol Bolas. As far as EDH flavor, you can’t get more homemade. it’s ELDER DRAGON Highlander, for goodness’ sake. How can you NOT give a new EDH player and Elder Dragon and cut them loose? Take them to where it all began.

On to the meat of the card. It’s colors are B/U/R, a color combo you’re not making already. The colors allow for a high amount of interaction. Black gives them access to a large suite of graveyard and hand manipulation, which is an important source of card advantage. Plus, it’s easy to understand. You play creatures, sac or otherwise lose them to the grave, then bring them back. Same with hand manipulation. Look at player’s hands, choose the threat, get rid of it. Both concepts are easy to understand, and seriously important in EDH. Graveyard recursion especially. Black also combines with Red for spot removal, which is another major aspect of EDH. While you don’t want too much, removal is important. And removal is another familiar concept. Black also has some good sweeps as well as seriously fun cards you don’t get to see played anywhere else, like Living Death and Decree of Pain. How much fun is it to drop Decree on an opponent playing a token deck? Answer: So much! And it’s a distinctly EDH experience. Moving fully on to red, it contains some of the more fun cards you can drop, like Dragon Tyrant, and randomly wins with cards like Insurrection. Finally, there’s blue. Most players understand how important card draw is. In EDH games, that go for so many turns, it’s even more important. Letting your new player draw cards and have more lines of play will make their experience more fun than running out of gas and moving into a topdeck war. Plus, blue has some very cool creatures to throw out there, especially multicolored ones. All three colors also give access to some good EDH planeswalkers as well, in Sorin, Liliana, little Jace and Koth (3 of which are cheap, YAY). Black is also a fairly traditional tutor color, meaning you can toss a couple in so that your player will have the opportunity to try out a combo or two. Who knows, maybe they’ll see something you didn’t during construction?

The point there is that those colors open a lot of avenues of play that allow fun interactions and play along multiple axes and in different zones, but as long as you construct the deck without getting to complex, it shouldn’t be overwhelming. Good creatures, good spell, and utility should allow for a good experience.

Lastly, and most importantly, Nicol Bolas as a general (sorry, commander) is pretty awesome. Finally getting the mana to cast him feels like an accomplishment. And once the player gets him out, it’s not a mystery what you do with him. He’s a real, live threat. You beat face. He has a sweet ability when he connects, and 3 hits means game over, so the new player has a serious chance of figuring out how commander damage works. And lets be honest, there aren’t many more satisfying feelings than connecting with Bolas.

Obviously it’s all my opinion. But if you want to offer up a true EDH experience, and you want to make a deck that any Magic player can pilot with a reasonable chance of success, with fun interaction and consistent play and depth, I think a 3 color “good stuff” Nicol Bolas deck is the way to go.

I will be building a Nicol Bolas deck and adding it to my Highlander Collective. And what does Drew win? I’ll be sending him one of those new Commander deck boxes that can hold a hundred sleeved cards and a spot for the oversized cards, as well as one hundred new sleeves.

Oh, and a copy of the Nicol Bolas Commander deck I’m going to build.

That’s right, Drew is going to get a second copy of the deck that I’m going to build to teach people how to play Commander. While I can’t promise that there will be any dual lands or foils in there, it will be a complete Commander deck. Unfortunately, I can’t send him all of the updates that I’ll do with the deck, but it’s a place for him to start out if he wants to show other people how to play Commander.

Congratulations, Drew! Since I found out that you’ve got Twitter, I’ll be DMing you about your prize.

Before I go on too much longer, I’m going to point out the first entry into the Highlander Collective: Dania, Sage of Stone. It’s up on the GatheringMagic forums, where you can see it in action.

I’m also going to invite you to head over to Google+ and join me over there. If you haven’t heard, it’s like Facebook, but built by Google. One of the cooler things that they’ve implemented is that you have Circles for your friends. I can write and dictate messages that are only visible to people who are in that circle without filling up the streams of everyone else. Follow me on Google+ (even if you aren’t following me on Twitter, @MTGColorPie ), and we can have discussions about the Highlander Collective, or anything else Commander/Magic-related. http://gplus.to/MTGColorPie is where you want to head off to.

I also heard that if you +1 GatheringMagic on Google+, Trick might be giving away a prize. So there’s that.

Join me next week when I—well, come find me on Google+ and tell me what you want to cover.