By the time you read this, there will be fewer than 48 hours left in 2021 if you go by the standard Gregorian calendar. This is a weird time of year where it feels like it's too late to start anything when you can just give yourself a break and start it next year. A lot of introspection happens, too, and I'm by no means immune to that concept. Is it a bit of a cliche to write a wrap-up article the last week of December? I mean, maybe, but I know people read them so I'm going to keep writing them. This will be my 7th "State of the ethos" address and while I'm surprised I'm still writing about this deck-building approach, I'm even MORE surprised that I'm still learning new things about it. 412 weekly decklists later and I'm still just as charmed and confused about how my own brain works as I was day 1. But enough about the last decade, let's focus on the last year. What did we learn about 75% building this year?

I didn't really have any epiphanies too early in the year, but in this article on January 14th, I talked about how Doubling Season was better if you build around it. It was almost a precursor to an idea that would take up a lot of the time I spend ruminating about the format. I'll get into it later, but I bet you already know what it is...

Remember when I thought Tergrid would be fine in the 99 but not in the command zone? Turns out this is not the 75% card I thought it was, because instead of people saying "Well, he only get something good if I have something good die" they all said "In response to Pox, I scoop." To be fair, the deck I tried it in was Nath of the Gilt Leaf which is one of the most brutal Mind Slash decks I've ever conceived of.

My love affair with Draugr Necromancer started with the Valki deck I made in February. Draugr was a bit of a "fixed" Tergrid and while Dauthi Voidwalker came around later and made everyone but me forget old Draugy, I didn't forget, and I've been sleeving Snow-Covered Swamps whenever my deck has access to Black mana since. Draugr Necromancer is a very, VERY 75% card and I've changed my mana bases just for its sake (Though I won't pretend I don't sling the odd Glacial Crevasses or Sunstone these days - I play them more than ever). I talked a bit more about those cards in March.

My Cosima deck is trash, but Cosima in the 99 is the TRUTH and I'm so happy I gave the card a shot.

This was the last time I did or will again put Rampaging Baloths into a decklist. The card is bad, you should come to terms with that in your own way.

Extus ended up being the home for the Rakdos Goblins deck I've been trying to build for years. The ability to create a bunch of tokens to use to pay for Awaken the Blood Avatar and White's ability to get back used Artifacts all came together very nicely and I still play this deck on webcam when I want to make a big splash. I didn't learn a general lesson about 75% here, but I found a home for a shell I've been trying to perfect for like 5 years and I'm marking the occasion with a mention here.

The rhetoric got a little bit spicier mid-year, though. I have gradually become of the opinion that people aren't running nearly enough lands in Commander and it's time they stopped it. Looking at one of the many Simic "Lands matter but not strictly landfall, either" commanders that came out this year, Kianne/Imbraham this time, I finally came to terms with the fact that I should take more time to craft the mana bases of my decklists but also that most people don't run enough lands, especially in land-hungry decks. I would have some more Landfall-related epiphanies this year. But first...

Perhaps my largest epiphany of the year on a personal level, though perhaps not on a 75% level, was my realization of what not wanting to build a Sythis deck meant. I ruminated on the deck and what made it seem less exciting to me than Estrid and figured out a lot about how I build. I think about Enchantments more than I think about any other type of permanent but it took them creating a commander that seemed custom-made for me that I HATED and didn't want to build a deck with (Sythis may be in quite a few of my 99s, though...) for me the think about why I like everything I like. This wasn't my last Enchantment epiphany of the year, either.

Everything clicked for me when it came time to write about Gretchen Titchwillow. This article is very, very dense because I both explored the concept of building around Burgeoning rather than Exploration, which got me like 90% of the way to the real breakthrough from 2021, and it also gave me room to talk about how your landbase matters more than I gave it credit for before. This one is a must-read, in my opinion.

EDHREC did another salt survey, so I went through to see if there was anything we could learn about how to build from the cards that showed up.

Finally, in October, I gathered all of my thoughts about Enchantments from the whole year. The way thinking about the difference between Burgeoning and Exploration fundamentally changed the way I build decks. The way I couldn't get Ghen or Sythis to work right because they were missing a card to build around. I realized my decks worked best when I built around an Enchantment or package of Enchantments. The idea of the "Thesis Enchantment" was born and I basically spent the rest of the year trying to refine it.

This was a minor footnote on a pretty major year of discoveries, but I really struggled to start with an Enchantment and work backward to find a commander. I'm sure for some format staples it works, but for Enchantments it was trickier than I had imagined. A very narrow Enchantment can find the right commander, but that isn't that useful. Finding an Enchantment that could go in dozens of decks isn't useful, either. Learning that trying to apply some of the Thesis Enchantment logic "backward" doesn't work is actually pretty instructive, and I think the article turned out great.

On a very minor note, I got over my aversion to using tribal decks as a 75% building crutch, because it turns out never building tribal is a crutch, too!

It was a big year for 75% building! I learned a lot about Lands and Enchantments despite writing and thinking about those two particular card types more than I think about anything else. It's gratifying to keep learning so much about this deck-building ethos, and it's even better that I feel like I'm free to make mistakes. You've been the most supportive readers I could ask for and I'm looking forward to the middle of February next year where we'll be officially on our 8th year of writing this column. Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next year!