I like receiving e-mails from readers, you guys—talk about gratifying. I receive decklists, questions, and requests for advice; it’s all good! The community taking a proactive stance on this particular kind of deck-building is awesome. The best part about hearing your feedback in the form of e-mails, tweets, and comments on this article and on reddit is that I get a glimpse at some 75% deck-building problems from another perspective, and that helps this project of ours immensely. This week was no different.

A reader named Matthew hit me up via e-mail this week and told me he’s been having some trouble with his 75% artifacts deck.

The underlining mine, not Matthew’s.

He posted his decklist, and we’ll get to it in a minute. Matthew took the idea I came up with in an article from last October, embarrassingly written mere weeks before cards like Scrap Mastery and Daretti, Scrap Savant were spoiled. I don’t regret writing that article; that concept was a personal favorite. I just wish I had waited for the full red-deck spoiler. It’s pretty clear Matthew read my article and liked the deck as much as I did. With the benefit of a full spoiler, Matthew decided to jam the full complement of commanders from the Built from Scratch precon, also adding Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer and Kurkesh. Instead of figuring out which commander to use based on the commanders his opponents were using, Matthew had the idea that you could decide which commander to use in a random manner. I think that’s a great idea!

In theory!

Unfortunately for me, I found out about his great idea in the same paragraph where I found out that he is struggling.

I think it’s sadly ironic that, in his quest to make the most dynamic deck possible, coming up with a generalized list that could use any one of five potential random commanders is facing linearity issues. There are ninety-nine cards in the deck, and all he wants to do is draw Wurmcoil Engine. That’s no fun. So what happened? Let’s look at Matthew’s list.

Scrap Mastery Redux ? Commander | Matthew T

• Commanders (5)
• 1 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
• 1 Daretti, Scrap Savant
• 1 Bosh, Iron Golem
• 1 Feldon of the Third Path
• 1 Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer

• Land (38)
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Phyrexia's Core
• 1 Flamekin Village
• 1 Strip Mine
• 1 Darksteel Citadel
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 29 Mountain

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Pentavus
• 1 Platinum Emperion
• 1 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Kuldotha Phoenix
• 1 Bottle Gnomes
• 1 Scarecrone
• 1 Shimmer Myr
• 1 Dualcaster Mage
• 1 Soul of New Phyrexia
• 1 Scuttling Doom Engine
• 1 Karn, Silver Golem
• 1 Precursor Golem
• 1 Darksteel Juggernaut
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Hellkite Igniter
• 1 Moltensteel Dragon
• 1 Hellkite Tyrant
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Epochrasite
• 1 Myr Retriever
• 1 Goblin Welder
• 1 Platinum Angel
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Pilgrim's Eye
• 1 Burnished Hart
• 1 Hoard-Smelter Dragon
• 1 Oxidda Scrapmelter
• 1 Steel Hellkite

• Spells (28)
• 1 Vandalblast
• 1 Nevinyrral's Disk
• 1 Darksteel Forge
• 1 Gilded Lotus
• 1 Scrap Mastery
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Spine of Ish Sah
• 1 Blasphemous Act
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Koth of the Hammer
• 1 Outpost Siege
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Unstable Obelisk
• 1 Chaos Warp
• 1 Trash for Treasure
• 1 Unwinding Clock
• 1 Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded
• 1 Strionic Resonator
• 1 Liquimetal Coating
• 1 Pristine Talisman
• 1 Commander's Sphere
• 1 Wayfarer's Bauble
• 1 Mycosynth Wellspring
• 1 Armillary Sphere
• 1 Ichor Wellspring
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Akroma's Memorial

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What’s wrong with his list? It’s actually not super-dissimilar to the list I wrote about in the Tuning on the Fly article I referenced earlier. If I could write that article for the first time today, the list wouldn’t look all that different.

Tuning on the Fly 2.0 ? Commander | Jason Alt

• Commanders (3)
• 1 Bosh, Iron Golem
• 1 Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient
• 1 Feldon of the Third Path

• Lands (40)
• 28 Mountain
• 1 Buried Ruin
• 1 Darksteel Citadel
• 1 Forgotten Cave
• 1 Gargoyle Castle
• 1 Great Furnace
• 1 Mikokoro, Center of the Sea
• 1 Phyrexia's Core
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Spinerock Knoll
• 1 Stalking Stones
• 1 Temple of the False God
• 1 Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle

• Creatures (22)
• 1 Anger
• 1 Arcbound Reclaimer
• 1 Darksteel Colossus
• 1 Duplicant
• 1 Goblin Welder
• 1 Hellkite Tyrant
• 1 Junk Diver
• 1 Kuldotha Forgemaster
• 1 Lodestone Myr
• 1 Myr Battlesphere
• 1 Myr Retriever
• 1 Palladium Myr
• 1 Phyrexian Colossus
• 1 Platinum Angel
• 1 Platinum Emperion
• 1 Scuttling Doom Engine
• 1 Shimmer Myr
• 1 Solemn Simulacrum
• 1 Steel Hellkite
• 1 Steel Overseer
• 1 Thopter Assembly
• 1 Wurmcoil Engine

• Artifacts (31)
• 1 Basalt Monolith
• 1 Brittle Effigy
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Clock of Omens
• 1 Darksteel Forge
• 1 Darksteel Ingot
• 1 Dreamstone Hedron
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Extraplanar Lens
• 1 Gauntlet of Power
• 1 Illusionist's Bracers
• 1 Lightning Greaves
• 1 Lux Cannon
• 1 Memory Jar
• 1 Mind's Eye
• 1 Mind Stone
• 1 Mycosynth Lattice
• 1 Myr Turbine
• 1 Nim Deathmantle
• 1 Phyrexian Processor
• 1 Planar Portal
• 1 Ring of Three Wishes
• 1 Rings of Brighthearth
• 1 Sculpting Steel
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Spine of Ish Sah
• 1 Thran Dynamo
• 1 Tower of Fortunes
• 1 Trading Post
• 1 Unwinding Clock
• 1 Voltaic Key

• Sorceries (3)
• 1 All Is Dust
• 1 Scrap Mastery
• 1 Trash for Treasure

• Italian Planeswalkers (1)
• 1 Daretti, Scrap Savant

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I would not have changed a ton, but Daretti needs to be all up in the deck—no Mindslaver though.

This is why I think it’s important to test out decklists! My 75% articles present to you rough drafts—a blueprint generated based on adherence to the guidelines we come up with together. You’ll tune it up as you play as long as you remember to make it stronger, not weaker. I’m glad Matthew tried out a list that was pretty similar to the one I came up with (though his is closer to the precon, a list I did not have access to at the time). I’m not so glad that, when he tried it out, he didn’t like how it played. I’m not so glad about that one bit. Can we identify the problem?

Is there a line we need to walk? Maybe it’s not a fine line, but still probably a line. I think Matthew may be encountering problems because he went a little too loose. You can run a deck that is too tight—trying to win the same way every single game—Narset, Enlightened Master/Relentless Assault, Riku of Two Reflections/Time Stretch, Tooth and Nail/Kiki combo, basically every deck with Laboratory Maniac, and so on. The rest of the deck doesn’t matter much, and it’s usually control cards, tutors, dig cards, and mana. That’s a legitimate way to play, but it’s not 75%. I think you can absolutely go too far the other way (looser), and Matthew may have done that. I’m not sure, but he may have.

Where’s the line between too tight and too loose? I wish there were a way to codify it, but there really isn’t. I’m not even 100% sure (or even 75% sure) that my three commanders suggested in the original piece aren’t too loose and disparate. What I suggested to Matthew in my e-mail replies, and what I want to suggest here, is to focus. I think having three commanders that all work pretty well with the deck worked conceptually because that is how Wizards sells the product. They include cards that at least aren’t totally dead with any of the three commanders included in the product, so Matthew’s starting point of the three packaged commanders and a portion of the cards from that deck was a good one. By wanting to do too many things, I believe he may have lost focus a bit, and with the loss of focus, he lost a sense of cohesiveness. I imagine your odds of having dead cards increases exponentially with each unique commander above one. If the abilities are similar enough that your entire deck works the exact same way no matter which commander you use, they’re too similar to bother not just picking one. So there is a happy medium (and isn’t this series all about happy media?) in there somewhere. So what’s my suggestion?

Focus on doing something. Bosh and Feldon and Daretti are the least disparate. All of them reward you for having or putting cards in the graveyard, and if you draw one of them while the other is your commander, they’ll work together nicely. You can take out stuff like Lux Cannon (I said can, but come on. Why would you want to cut Lux Cannon?) without Kurkesh, for example and jam a card that works with any of your commanders. Or, if you’re still miserable, build around one of them and jam the other two in the deck. If you build a 75% deck and it sucks and you’re miserable and you feel that you’re not impacting the board, you haven’t actually built a 75% deck. What do we do when we come to that conclusion? We make our deck better, and we’ll tighten it up by focusing on a line or a few lines of play (this is not the same as focusing on one win condition, which is anathema to 75%) and running cards that help us achieve that goal. If you can accomplish that with three commanders, superb! If not, cut to one. Make a deck that’s fun to play—ultimately, that is all we really care about at the end of the day: fun.

Keep the e-mails coming. If you built one of the decks I suggested, let me know how it plays. Have a request for a deck for me to try next? Hit me with it. As always, thanks so much for your support and for continuing to read this silly column. As always, I’ll be back next week. Until then!