Readers!

I thought it might be interesting to do the article a little bit different this week. Instead of showing you the finished product, I wanted to focus on my method for developing the deck, in case you're into that sort of thing. I have been talking more and more about what inspires me to choose a given commander on a given week and people have been responding well. With that in mind, this week I'm going to take a relatively straightforward deck and make it a bit more interesting by showing you exactly how I would tackle building it. If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day, etc. Rather than relying on my deck lists, I'm hoping you can divine a bit of my method and apply it to any commander to build 75% decks yourself. It takes a bit of practice, and the deck list you see in an article is never the final version; but, it's a good starting point. I feel I can arm you with at least that. Let's explore the method to the madness, shall we?

Since I'm talking about inspiration, the inspiration for this week was coming across a commander I really want to build but which is already being built in a largely 75% way. I want to look at what in the stock list is worth keeping, what I'd adjust to build a 75% deck, and what you can adjust further depending on how you want the final list to look. I like this commander a lot, but I'm also going to have to work kind of hard to make the build my own, which I'm happy to do. I'm sure you're already very aware of the commander in question because you read the article description and your peripheral vision probably works, so without further ado...

The Commander

As an uncommon, it seems like the power level of the deck is going to be fairly low off the bat, and perhaps this is a bad version of better +1/+1 commanders like Pir and Toothy or Vorel of the Hull Clade. That being said, I think Eutropia giving a creature that doesn't normally have evasion a better chance of connecting means you can focus on getting through with Ophidian-type creatures rather than just being a generic counters deck. I know I'm going to look for a unique approach to the deck if I can find one, and it may involve trying to hit them with Thada Adel, Acquisitor early and often, it may involve equipment to give creatures double strike or infect, and it may involve trying to loop enchantments to get a creature very big for a 1-hit KO.

At this point in the process, I've generated a list of a few cards that may end up being build paths of their own or may be ways to connect with a 75% principle.

• Thada Adel, Acquisitor
• Cold-Eyed Selkie
• Herald of Secret Streams
• Rishkar, Peema Renegade/Jianng Yanggu
• Champion of Lambholt

Looking at this list, the flying granted by Eutropia is not going to be all that relevant unless we want to try some shenanigans with Gravitational Shift, something I'm not ruling out. If these ideas seem worse than my usual ideas, it's because I'm telling you everything I consider, not just the good ideas (I think) that end up making the final cut. I did a google search for "Creatures with flying" because I couldn't think of the name of Gravitational Shift and came across the card "Mystic Decree."

The way the layers work on this card, creatures that have flying lose it when this card is played but if you grant flying to a creature, Decree is applied first and the trigger second so you can give a creature flying with Eutropia and have the only flier in play. Is this better than having a buff Champion of Lambholt? Not necessarily, but it's an old card, it stops them from getting you with Islandwalk creatures and it stops... your own Thada Adel? Just like that, Mystic Decree is in the rejected ideas pile.

EDHREC confirms the stock build is pretty similar to that of other +1/+1 counters decks but it gives me a few unique cards that I'm going to want to try to slot in, such as One With Nature. Since I'm still excited about actually hitting them with creatures and the evasion I get from cards like Champion of Lambholt and Herald of Secret Streams, at this point in the process I make a list of creatures like Ophidian I may want to hit them with. EDHREC lets me click on Champion of Lambholt and see cards that are played in decks with it, such as Chasm Skulker or Plaxcaster Frogling, so I can get new ideas for cards that pair well with that particular aspect of the deck that aren't necessarily showing up in stock Eutropia lists. Edric, Spymaster of Trest decks showed me cards like Nature's Will and Coastal Piracy. I click on decks that focus on the "Hitting them" aspect rather than the +/1+1 counters aspect and find new cards that aren't showing up in Eutropia decks but which will be good in my deck. Thada Adel, Acquisitor (if I didn't already love this card, I would have found it this way and been excited). Cephalid Constable. Knowledge Exploitation. Hitting them with creatures is a pretty "fair" way to play Magic, so if there are decks that are doing it successfully, I want to see if there's anything I can learn from them.

At this point, I pull up the article "8 Simple Rules for Playing in My Commander Group" because I listed the founding principles of the ethos there and I never remember to write them down anywhere else. I want to make sure I'm building with them in mind, so refreshing my memory helps. I never want to "weaken" an existing deck so I'm careful to avoid starting with a stock list and paring down, preferring to build from 0 up to 99. I tend to eschew tutors that are second copies of an important card because that makes me make the deck more and more linear every time I refine it and I don't want to be a "tutor for Simic Ascendancy and win" deck, that sounds bad AND boring. I'm not going to be able to punish my opponents for doing much other than threatening to get them for a lot of damage on a swing-back if they attack me, and I don't feel the need to impose any limitations since I'm playing a very fair strategy in that I have to attack. The last rule is one I almost always violate when I build for this series, and I'll explain why.

The rule "Do what you need to do to protect the execution of your strategy" began as a way to explain how I viewed countermagic. I preferred cards like Hindering Light to cards like Forbid (Forbid might not be bad in this deck if I run Ophidians, I should make a note of that) and explained that in an early article where a Talrand player said he frustrated his girlfriend to the verge of tears when he countered all of her spells and I talked about how I used countermagic to go off rather than to prevent them from going off. This last rule applies to removal and other interactive spells, too since you can't win if you lost. I tend to leave cards like Beast Within and Swan Song out of the lists in my articles because I know they're the first cards people will add when they get a few practice games and it becomes obvious what to take out. However, it's also nice to remind people that they'll want to run a certain amount of interaction. To that end, I'm committing to including what I think is necessary when I build the decks in the article. Cards like Beast Within are convenient cuts if you're trying to find a slot to show off a bit of tech in a stylized article like this one, but since I'm going through my entire process, it was worth noting that part of what I do now is keep an eye on not cutting too many cards that help a deck function.

We're ready to start building the deck! What I like to do is use archidekt's sandbox mode to build the deck so I can get an accurate count of how many cards are in the deck (I have an OK track record of giving you exactly 99 cards in the decks I submit but pobody's nerfect) and look at things like average CMC. You can do a text import if you have a list you're working with or you can manually add (or subtract) cards and build the deck. Archidekt is a great site and it's been very helpful to me as a builder.

Another thing I tend to gloss over is lands because I feel like people will always add their own pet utility lands when they build. One issue is that I sometimes need to run very specific lands, like Sheltered Thicket in a deck with Valakut. I've been explaining why I add lands like that in the wrap-up paragraphs, so if the lands REALLY matter, I'll mention it. I'll start with about 38 lands and adjust based on the specific needs of the deck. You can copy the stock list mana base and modify it as needed and that's what I tend to do.

The hard part of this method is that you have the details covered but not the broad strokes. I know which 75% principles I want to follow, how I want to make my deck unique and which interactions I want to focus on, but I'll still need to think about how to build the backbone of the deck. Everyone has their own method for making sure they address the needs of the deck and it's here that a stock list or 10 to look at comes in handy. It's not cheating to get a sense of the ratio of enchantments to creatures other people are running and as long as we're contributing our own original ideas, we're building a unique deck. Everyone is going to use Wild Growth in a deck like this so let's give ourselves a break and let staples be staples. A stock skeleton looks a bit like you didn't do anything but when you start plugging your own unique cards, the deck really starts to take shape and you start to notice the subtle ways your ideas synergize with the cards that demand to go into the deck. This is the most gratifying part of the process. It's also where I've lost a few decks because the idea never quite materialized like I wanted it to - that's another consequence of only reporting my successes. If you're building 75% and the deck never quite feels like it's taking shape, that's OK. You can scale back your divergence from the norm or abandon the idea - 75% is hard to build. You're trying to thread a needle between players who enjoy winning and players who enjoy playing and not every idea leaves you with a coherent deck. However, that's not happening here - I love how this turned out!

Eutropia, Once-and-a-Half-Favored | Commander | Jason Alt

• Creatures (28)
• 1 Argothian Enchantress
• 1 Callaphe, Beloved of the Sea
• 1 Cephalid Constable
• 1 Champion of Lambholt
• 1 Cold-Eyed Selkie
• 1 Courser of Kruphix
• 1 Cytoplast Manipulator
• 1 Eidolon of Blossoms
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Flux Channeler
• 1 Gyre Sage
• 1 Herald of Secret Streams
• 1 Herald of the Pantheon
• 1 Incubation Druid
• 1 Kukemssa Pirates
• 1 Master Biomancer
• 1 Nylea's Colossus
• 1 Pir, Imaginative Rascal
• 1 Protean Thaumaturge
• 1 Renata, Called to the Hunt
• 1 Rishkar, Peema Renegade
• 1 Sage of Hours
• 1 Setessan Champion
• 1 Simic Manipulator
• 1 Thada Adel, Acquisitor
• 1 Thalakos Deceiver
• 1 Toothy, Imaginary Friend
• 1 Verduran Enchantress

• Instants (3)
• 1 Arcane Denial
• 1 Beast Within
• 1 Inspiring Call

• Sorceries (3)
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Incubation // Incongruity
• 1 Kodama's Reach

• Enchantments (28)
• 1 Ancestral Mask
• 1 Bear Umbra
• 1 Bident of Thassa
• 1 Bow of Nylea
• 1 Bred for the Hunt
• 1 Enchantress's Presence
• 1 Enigmatic Incarnation
• 1 Estrid's Invocation
• 1 Fertile Ground
• 1 Hadana's Climb
• 1 Hardened Scales
• 1 Hydra's Growth
• 1 Imprisoned in the Moon
• 1 Kenrith's Transformation
• 1 Lignify
• 1 Mirrormade
• 1 Nature's Will
• 1 Oath of the Ancient Wood
• 1 One with Nature
• 1 Ordeal of Nylea
• 1 Overgrowth
• 1 Rancor
• 1 Seal of Primordium
• 1 Season of Growth
• 1 Shielding Plax
• 1 Simic Ascendancy
• 1 Utopia Sprawl
• 1 Wild Growth

• Artifacts (1)
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (36)
• 10 Island
• 16 Forest
• 1 Breeding Pool
• 1 Command Tower
• 1 Hinterland Harbor
• 1 Lumbering Falls
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Simic Growth Chamber
• 1 Temple of Mystery
• 1 Thornwood Falls
• 1 Woodland Stream
• 1 Yavimaya Coast

Buy This Deck Export text format

This deck looks like a lot of fun. The existing infrastructure rewarded us four putting +1/+1 counters on things and playing enchantments and we took advantage of that. We will be hitting them with hard-to-block creatures that do things when we hit them and those creatures will slowly grow into beaters as we dump our hands. The mana-generating enchantments will make sure we can consistently grow our mana, and cards like Nature's Will and Bear Umbra reward us for hitting them by giving us mana to play the cards we just drew. If you want more of that, consider Sword of Feast and Famine.

We have quite a few ways to steal from them, including with cards I don't often use like Kukemssa Pirates and Thalakos Deceiver. With Herald of Secret Streams, Champion of Lambholt and the ability to grant flying, we should be able to hit them with these creatures more often than normal and grab cards from them. If you're worried we can't keep our hands full, Coastal Piracy and Edric can go in, so the deck will need tested. Cytoplast and Simic Manipulator will do work in the deck, but they're far from the only place to park counters. Playing a Wild Growth on a land and putting a counter on Gyre Sage early just feels good and throwing a counter on Cephalid Constable and doubling his power with Nylea's Colossus feels even better.

I hope this gave you some insight into my process. I like to look at a commander and imagine what it will help me do, think about how I might run afoul of our 75% principles and try to avoid that, put my own spin on the deck and present it as something you can test and calibrate to your liking. As long as the deck doesn't feel boring to you, you're on the right track.

That does it for me this week. Join me next week where I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about, namely how I'm going to try and put Cephalid Constable into everything I build. Until next time!