2016 Started off with another Heat Index article and it occurs to me it’s been almost a year since I did one of those. 2016 gave me so many new commanders that I didn’t have to rely on more general fare to have something saucy to write about every week. I should do another one in 2017 just because we have a lot to navigate with Commander 2016.

If you’ll remember, February brought us a change in the rules of Commander which made it easier to cast their spells with your mana. Before, you couldn’t generate the Green mana to cast their Green spell with a Sen Triplets deck, even if you had a card like Chromatic Lantern. That all changed with a quick rules update and suddenly stealing their goods was even more appealing. This changed a lot of cards for the better and was generally a good change. It is fun to look back now on the cards I thought would be played more now that we have had almost a year to see how the changes affected the format. My financials calls vis-a-vis this change were generally very good. It’s a good thing a Chromatic Lantern reprint came in Commander 2016 or we could have seen that little lantern hit $20 before too long. I thoroughly enjoyed giving this a re-read.

In April, I went over a list of my favorite cards that punish our opponents for crossing us, rather than prevent them from doing things. I think this is essential reading if you want an understanding of why exactly we build 75% decks as well as how we go about it. I’m particularly proud of this article and how it contributes to the overall understanding of 75% theory. I made a lot of decklist articles in 2016 but this was one I was genuinely glad I wrote.

The very next week, I wrote another piece that I am very glad I wrote, detailing why it’s better to start with a deck you feel could be better and building up, rather than starting with a deck you think is competitive and then gutting it to make it somehow “worse” and therefore more casual or whatever you’re aiming for. We want to build up from the ground up and the old concept of the Aufbau Principle from my chemistry education came back to me and resulted in what I think is a nice and informative piece. I hope you agree.

In June we talked about a few of my favorite 75% cards that usually get overlooked because they are uncommon but aren’t marquee cards like Beast Within. This list is by no means exhaustive but I did use EDHREC.com quite a bit to see cards that were underused and which I think should see more play, especially in a 75% build. Got your own ideas? Let’s hear them!

I wrote more than one article where I tried to jam a ton of win conditions, didn’t I? This was inspired by a twitter follower, @Jacii,who had the same idea I did with clue tokens and Hellkite Tyrant. What a fun article this was to write!

This wasn’t necessarily the most transcendent article in terms of pure 75% EDH theory, but if you think I’m going to write an article where I remind everyone that Jean Claude Van Damme made a movie where Powers Boothe threatened to fill a little girl’s mouth with spiders and not bring it up in my 2016 retrospective, you don’t know me at all. Ishkanah, Grafwidow is savage and so is this list.

I attempted to build around a commander that, according to EDHREC, no one was building around. I could have made it a lot more powerful, probably, since the fact that I was restricted to a pretty durdly commander meant I could build within that narrow framework however I wanted and still be 75%. I like that I took on this challenge.

I softened my stance on Sensei’s Top a little bit in September, and that’s worth discussing, as is the commander who came along and made me rethink things. Top wasn’t the only cards I softened a hard line against in 2016. This ethos continues to grow and evolve.

This was the best article/deck name I came up with in 2016 and that, to me, is worth noting.

I got to preview a Commander 2016 card and I thought that was pretty neat. The deck I came up with gets better if you add another partner commander, but this was pretty good for a shot in the dark, trying to guess what the other partners would offer. For the record, if I made a partner deck with Ishai, Ojutai Dragonspeaker today, I would partner it with Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder. Get some.

2016 was a good year for 75% EDH. I was mentioned in a few articles, appeared on a few podcasts and became a father, which isn’t directly relevant to 75% deck-building though it DID teach me time management skills that would have made college so much easier had I known them back then. 2017 promises to give us saucy cards in Aether Revolt and Amonkhet as well as some unknown goodies in Commander 2017. Cards will be reprinted, new tech will supplement the old and cards that are bulk rares right now will be $5-$10 and you’ll wish you had a time machine. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be right here with you to navigate the future. I have a few exciting announcements related to my content generation slated for the coming weeks, so follow me on twitter if you don’t already so you don’t miss a thing. It’s been a great year and I feel like we grew a lot as a philosophy and a community. We’ll see you next week for the first of 2017 where I have a feeling I’ll really want to look at Scrap Trawler closely. Until next week! Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!