Readers!

By now, you are, of course, quite familiar with the Command Sphere podcast hosted by two brilliant Magic minds as well as incomparable comedians. If you're not, I envy you getting to experience the cast for the first time - it's superlative. If you're not looking to spend 50 to 60 minutes in one spot listening to two funny people wax philosophical because you have an active lifestyle, you're in luck, because if you give them 11 minutes, they just might be able to convince you to do something you considered anathema to your way of life. This audio essay makes the case for tearing apart all of your decks. I'm not here to debate the finer points of the essay, and it actually doesn't impact the thesis of this article whether you find the essay persuasive or not. For the record, I wasn't entirely persuaded by the essay so I'm not just going to rehash Dan's opinion. However, what the essay made me think about has me hooked and I want to spend some time working out how to approach the growing pile of stale decks in my collection. I don't want to spend a lot of time this year tearing my decks apart, but I do want to spend some time changing how some of them function and to me, what could be more 75% than that?

As a side resolution - it's probably been a full calendar year since I even mentioned 75% deck-building in this article. The tenets of the deck-building ethos are so ingrained in how I build that I gradually just sank into a state where I felt like any deck I made was a 75% deck because that's just the way I build decks. The thing is, I shouldn't write this series like I expect everyone to remember every point I've made. Even I don't remember every point I've made. I don't expect you to read everything I've ever written, either. I'm going to be more conscious about justifying my decisions from a 75% perspective - we are trying to make a deck that you won't have to avoid playing when you want to play it because it's not playing the same kind of game as the rest of the table. We want to be ready for most any non-cEDH pod; and, to the extent that's possible, I'm going to be more conscious of justifying it with respect to the deck-building philosophy. It's not good enough to say that a deck is 75% because I said it is and I'm sorry for acting like it was.

Last week, I wrote my 2022 year in review article and if I could sum up how my thoughts on the format evolved throughout 2022, I can't think of a better example than taking one of my 4 Omnath decks (when will it be 5?) and modifying it. Omnath is my favorite Legendary creature in Magic lore and the fact that each Omnath can play very differently is amazing. Notice I said "Can" and not "will" because I didn't differentiate very much between my Locus of the Roil and Locus of Creation decks. They're both basically landfall. With the modifications I made last week to the deck on paper and later... in... paper (that's so confusing. I made changes in Google docs and later in physical cards) I have a brand new deck. It shouldn't play THAT differently but it does and I'm having a ton of fun just goldfishing with it. I considered cutting Phylath until I drew a Mystic Reflection. Making 2 tokens with a Phylath is sort of underwhelming - making 3 more copies of Lotus Cobra is not! It's fairly easy to disrupt and people will know exactly what you're doing when you Foretell the 1 card with Foretell in the deck, but if people don't know what you're playing, you might surprise some people.

In a lot of ways, my Omnath deck from last week doesn't just represent a way to spice up a deck I'd gotten bored with and was embarrassed to play in my weekly webcam game because people had seen it a bunch. In a lot of ways, what I did to that deck last week is a new approach to 75% deck-building - you have a new, unknown 75% deck even for groups you play with regularly. One huge drawback of 75% philosophy was that I didn't think it would be applicable to groups you play with regularly. You don't need any subterfuge to sneakily win out of nowhere if your group knows what you're playing. You don't need to worry about apologizing and telling people it's not THAT Oloro deck even though it absolutely is and they know it. You don't need to worry about the deck being too weak or powerful. 75% just wasn't designed with a regular group in mind because I've never had a regular group. I don't want a regular group - I want to play games with strangers at Magic Fest, with the content creators I've developed personal friendships with, with the people I work with because I managed to carve out a career in a children's card game. But the thing is, there were decks I kept in my bag because people I play with even a few times a year have seen some of the decks.

"If a 75% deck only works as a 75% deck the first time you play it, is it really a 75% deck?" While I was pondering this question, a fantastic thought occurred to me - 75% decks were never meant to get stale. They were built a certain way, but a 75% deck is not a house of cards. It's a vibe. The reason I stopped spending time justifying my choices in my article is that I get the vibe by now. The is the 9th year I've written this column, that's 52 decks a year for 9 years. I am 75% and 75% is me to an extent, so why am I so worried that a 75% deck is like a Jenga tower? Is my ethos really that flimsy that every card choice is sacrosanct and carved into granite even though I tend to "yadda yadda yadda" the land section and cut Swords to Plowshares and Swiftfoot Boots so I can jam more pet cards in the deck? A 75% deck is a Magic: the Gathering deck that is built to make the game fun for the table, to win 1/4 of the time like you should statistically, and, most of all, built so that you never have to feel like you can't play a deck you want to play. I was avoiding playing decks I wanted to play because I like the commander and I wasn't playing them because I wanted to show people something new. The answer was so simple - a 75% deck can ALWAYS be something new!

I'm not going to spend 2023 making all of my old decks new again, not with tons of new sets being released every month. 10 EDH writers on this site can't keep up with the product releases (we tried for the first 3 months of 2022 and we all got incredibly burnt out and frustrated) and you don't want to see me legislate my Daretti deck from 2014 anyway. But if you have a pet deck you love and you don't want to make fundamental changes to it (not talking plugging in better versions of cards as they're printed) because you think it will be a different deck if you do, then you have a very clear answer to the Ship of Theseus problem (a fun logical paradox to ponder for a bit until Wandavision made it into a meme) and I think the point of the Ship of Theseus problem is that you don't need a clear answer. But what is a deck? If I say I have an Omnath, Locus of Creation deck, that's all you need to tell people. They have an assumption based on how most of the deck are built. Last week, I made a ton of changes to what I still call my "Omnath, Locus of Creation" deck even though it's way less landfall and way more cloning. The deck will be fun for me to play because it's new, people who have seen my Locus of Creation deck will see it play much differently and it will be fun for them and people who think they know what is coming, either from the name of the deck or the last time I played it, are going to get a rude awakening. Especially if I cast Rude Awakening.

The point of this piece wasn't to lecture about philosophy thought experiments I'm not qualified to talk about. The point of this piece was to point out that I have gotten lax and comfortable in my role as 75% person. Simply creating the decks rather than following my own guidelines became possible because I have internalized all of the guidelines, but not thinking when I brewed meant I wasn't thinking about 75% as much as I could be. I wasn't testing and re-testing my assumptions. I wasn't trying to make new guidelines, clarify old ones or discard things that don't apply to Commander in 2023. This year I'm going to challenge my assumptions more and make sure 75% deck-building still matters and is still applicable to the Commander landscape that looks much different than it did in 2014. I think adding a Clones package to a landfall deck is a fundamental change to the deck even if it synergizes well. Someone who has never seen the deck will think it's fun. Someone who has seen the deck will think it's a new deck. Are they right? How many cards do you change before it becomes a new deck? Asking all of those questions made me realize it doesn't matter. If your 75% decks feel stale and start to remain in your bag, then they're not 75% decks anymore because I wanted 75% decks to never feel like that. Maybe I wasn't joking when I said 75% is a vibe because I can tell you when a deck starts being 75% but only you know when it stops because it stops being 75% when you say it is. I never thought about that or what to do about it before, and I want to spend some time in 2023 working on it.

This got long and I also want to make sure to include a decklist so, very briefly, I want to discuss Estrid, the Masked. My Estrid deck is boring to me because I've played it so many times and is boring to everyone else because it's a Pillow Fort deck and I have won multiple times with Helix Pinnacle which makes me think that it's the only way the deck can win. Everything I see about Estrid online relies heavily on The Chain Veil to make mana and I don't want to do that. I don't want a combo deck or a boring Pillow Fort. I'm going to try and give Estrid a facelift until it's a deck I can take out of my bag.

Cantrip, Won't trip | Commander | Jason Alt

• Commander (1)
• 1 Estrid, the Masked

• Creatures (21)
• 1 Archon of Sun's Grace
• 1 Argothian Enchantress
• 1 Destiny Spinner
• 1 Displacer Kitten
• 1 Eidolon of Blossoms
• 1 Esper Sentinel
• 1 Herald of the Pantheon
• 1 Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief
• 1 Lae'zel, Vlaakith's Champion
• 1 Mesa Enchantress
• 1 Moon-Blessed Cleric
• 1 Nylea's Colossus
• 1 Orvar, the All-Form
• 1 Protean Thaumaturge
• 1 Sanctum Weaver
• 1 Satyr Enchanter
• 1 Setessan Champion
• 1 Sythis, Harvest's Hand
• 1 Tameshi, Reality Architect
• 1 Tuvasa the Sunlit
• 1 Verduran Enchantress

• Instants (7)
• 1 Counterspell
• 1 Decisive Denial
• 1 Double Major
• 1 Dovin's Veto
• 1 Fated Infatuation
• 1 Second Harvest
• 1 Slip out the Back

• Sorceries (6)
• 1 Fractured Identity
• 1 Irenicus's Vile Duplication
• 1 Open the Armory
• 1 Rite of Replication
• 1 Spitting Image
• 1 Stolen Identity

• Enchantments (25)
• 1 Abundant Growth
• 1 All that Glitters
• 1 Anointed Procession
• 1 Aqueous Form
• 1 Blind Obedience
• 1 Corrupted Conscience
• 1 Curiosity
• 1 Darksteel Mutation
• 1 Enchantress's Presence
• 1 Estrid's Invocation
• 1 Fertile Ground
• 1 Followed Footsteps
• 1 Growing Ranks
• 1 Hydra's Growth
• 1 Karametra's Favor
• 1 Overgrowth
• 1 Parallel Lives
• 1 Sphere of Safety
• 1 Starfield of Nyx
• 1 Sterling Grove
• 1 Unbridled Growth
• 1 Utopia Sprawl
• 1 Verdant Embrace
• 1 Vesuvan Duplimancy
• 1 Wild Growth

• Artifacts (3)
• 1 Arcane Signet
• 1 Gerrard's Hourglass Pendant
• 1 Helm of the Host

• Lands (37)
• 5 Forest
• 6 Island
• 6 Plains
• 1 Barkchannel Pathway // Tidechannel Pathway
• 1 Bountiful Promenade
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Dreamroot Cascade
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 1 Hall of Heliod's Generosity
• 1 Hallowed Fountain
• 1 Hengegate Pathway // Mistgate Pathway
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Rejuvenating Springs
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Savannah
• 1 Sea of Clouds
• 1 Seaside Citadel
• 1 Sunpetal Grove
• 1 Temple Garden
• 1 Waterlogged Grove
• 1 Windswept Heath

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This is a rough list, and you might think it's boring that I did a Clone package AGAIN but if you look closer, I also made it a very sleek and aggressive build. Any creature I double can be a beater, especially with the Auras to make them big, but I also added Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief and Vesuvan Duplimancy and Orvar, the All-Form because I want to make lots of copies of Nylea's Colossus or another similar creature the same turn I attack with something like Tuvasa or another large creature I've made unblockable. Estrid can give me a lot of mana and also make my creatures harder to kill with Mask tokens, and I am no longer a combo deck so I don't have to run bad land auras like Wolfwillow Haven. I was so bored with Estrid and while I kept a lot of the deck intact, this is a brand new deck, and one I'm actually excited to sleeve up. It's still 75% but now it's new and the people who knew how to beat the last version will be stumped again. Also, I have basically conceded the fight on cards like Replenish. They're useless now. I am not relying on hitting any more than the seven cards you mill with Estrid with her Ultimate since every Wrath now exiles Enchantments. You're not going to have enough Enchantments in your graveyard to rebuild with Replenish, but if you have a fat hand full of cantrips, suddenly you can win from a board of basically Nylea's Colossus after a wrath. This deck is fun, explosive, it's new, and it's still my Estrid, the Masked deck, because I built it and the commander is Estrid, the Masked. Anything else is just counting boards on the deck of Theseus's ship.

Thanks for reading. Until next time!