How much Commander have you played, dear reader? How many decks do you have and how entrenched in this wonderful format are you?

If you're like most Commander players who go online to seek out articles about this wide ranging and glorious format, your answer is probably "a lot". Me too! One of the things that drove me to start up an EDH league and to start writing about Commander is a desire to experience all that this format has to offer. Commander is a very, very deep well, with an incredibly variety of decks, power levels, and ways to have fun.

Today I'd like to share a "top 10" list with you. I've put together a list of 10 Decks every Commander player should play. Before you tell me I'm crazy, I should clarify that these are types of decks, not specific decks. If you truly want to experience all that Commander has to offer, these are all types of decks you should experience at one point or another - even if you end up confirming that you might not like some of them.

Honorable Mention: Precon

The one deck most of us have all played is a precon or precon-level deck, which is why this is an honorable mention. If you've never enjoyed the long, drawn-out battlefield logjams that can come from playing precons against each other, you're missing out. Lots of experienced players look back at their early days of playing EDH and are glad to have moved into higher powered play, but if the decks are matched up well against each other, you can still have a lot of in playing lower powered EDH.

Precon level games are longer so you have more time to build up your board and more time to get up to all kinds of nonsense. You can play a much wider variety of cards because there isn't as much of an emphasis on efficiency. You can build really janky decks and have them not automatically feel unplayable. Want a place to play weird old cards that don't make the cut in your "better" decks? Precon level might be the power level you're looking for.

If you've never known the joy of playing an objectively terrible card and using it to win or at least influence the outcome of a game of Commander, you're missing out.

1. Hug

Hug is a strategy where you play cards that help your tablemates. You might help them draw more cards, play more lands, put permanents onto the battlefield, and so on. You might also play "table police" and work to keep the game going by snuffing out any serious threats that would end the match early. That's Hug in a nutshell.

Have you ever played a deck that either wasn't trying to win or was trying to help everyone else until just you and one other opponent was left alive? Have you struggled to convince a tablemate that your offer of help was in good faith? Can you find the line between giving your tablemates what they want and giving them too much?

Every hug player and every hug deck is different. Some do try to win. Some genuinely just want to see their friends have the opportunity to play their decks "on steroids", able to do whatever the deck can do - only faster and better. If you've never tried a "hug" deck, where you spend a lot of your resources and energy trying to help your tablemates, you really should. It will force you to engage with opponents in a very different way than most normal EDH decks and it might even make you a better Magic player.

2. Voltron

Voltron decks load up their commander with equipment, auras and other buffs and then try to kill each tablemate with 21 commander damage. It's simple, straightforward, and both very powerful and quite vulnerable at the same time.

If you've played enough Commander you've probably had someone's fate in your hands, but Voltron decks are unique in the way you go about winning games. You nearly always find yourself having to pick who to kill first, and if you're trying to win you end up focusing hard on that one player until they're dead. It can be brutal, and you can have people end up feeling "picked on" but that's how Voltron decks work. You usually have a single, very powerful and well protected threat and you clear the table opponent by opponent.

You may be vulnerable to "force sacrifice" effects and you may be screwed if someone is able to steal or lock down your commander somehow. You may also build your deck to be able to chain together extra turns or combats so you don't give your opponents a chance to draw or play out answers. It's a thrill to have the biggest, baddest threat at the table and to know you can take out anyone you like, but you'll have plenty of bad games where your lack of subtlety becomes a problem. Everyone knows what you're going to do, and nobody will want to let you do it, so if your commander damage gameplan has worked a few times you might find your friends will band together to make things harder for you.

One of the reasons it's a great idea to play all of these types of decks is that you'll have a better understanding of how to stop them. That Uril, the Miststalker, Bruna, Light of Alabaster or Narset, Enlightened Master deck might not seem as scary once you've been behind the wheel of a really good Voltron deck and have seen what its weaknesses are.

3. Go Wide / Tokens

If a Voltron deck is a "go tall" strategy, the inverse would be a "go wide" strategy. This doesn't have to mean using creature tokens, but many of the most effective go-wide decks end up flooding the battlefield with tokens.

Building a huge army might seem like the most obvious way to play Magic, but you'd be surprised how many players get drawn into niche strategies and never actually play this type of deck. When you have enough creatures that you get to choose which ones to send into the fray and which ones to keep back as blockers, you might be playing a "go wide" deck.

There are lots of things to learn by playing this very basic type of deck. You'll either need to go so wide that you can attack around your tablemates' blockers or you'll need to figure out some sort of evasion. You also need to decide if you need to play ways to pump them up, or if you're OK with a ridiculous amount of 1/1s or 2/2s. Often, the best answer is both because you never know when you'll be able to draw into your Beastmaster Ascension or Coat of Arms to make an alpha strike.

4. Big Mana

Big mana decks are decks that are geared around generating as much mana as possible as quickly as possible. Ramping is always a good idea, but when each land hitting the battlefield gives you some extra bonus, it's hard not to want to just keep ramping and ramping. Outside of green you might find yourself looking at mana doublers rather than just playing out more mana sources, but the principle is the same. Make big mana. Spend big mana. Win big.

Green is probably the most common color for big mana / landfall strategies. If you've never resolved a Reshape the Earth or a big Splendid Reclamation with an Amulet of Vigor on the field so all those lands untap, I can't recommend it enough. If you're able to land a Cabal Coffers or Cabal Stronghold, play High Tide or Bubbling Muck, or somehow get a Gaea's Cradle into play, you're in for a treat.

Most games of Commander are won by the player who both makes the most mana and has good places to use the mana that they generate, so you'll want to play outlets that can be used to advance your board or your gameplan with all that mana. Whether you turn it into card draw or just bodies on the field, you should be positioning yourself to eventually go for the win.

If you've never played a "big mana" deck, you really should try it out. It's a giddy, wonderful feeling to be squeezing more out of your boardstate than anyone else at the table. Just don't expect your mana advantage to not draw any attention. You might just get murdered for your trouble, but in Commander that's always a risk.

5. Graveyard

If you've ever heard the phrase "your graveyard is an extension of your hand" you might have played a graveyard / recursion deck. These decks are designed to play ways to bring cards back from the graveyard, giving them access to more of their cards than a "normal" deck.

One might argue that most decks have ways to bring creatures back from the dead and cards back from the yard. A little recursion is a sensible thing to run, but dedicated graveyard decks will take this tactic to another level. Setting up a Spore Frog loop or simply milling half your deck and casting a card like Living Death to bring a ton of corpses back to life is a wonderful experience.

Leaning on any strategy will involve risks. I've dumped 60 cards into my graveyard and had someone drop a Bojuka Bog and exile all of those cards. I was on Muldrotha, the Gravetide and they were on Edgar Markov. I warned them beforehand and rewarded them with a Spore Frog on every one of their combats, effectively taking them out of the game as well. They were right to choose me, but it led to both of us having no shot of doing much in the game.

If you haven't experienced the fun of casting Traumatize and milling half of your own deck, or using a Mirror-Mad Phantasm to put a random number of cards into your graveyard, I can tell you that it's a lot of fun. It's less fun if someone plays graveyard hate and foils your plans, but using your graveyard as an extension of your hand can give you options you don't normally have when you're just drawing cards and playing them out of your hand.

6. Superfriends

A "superfriends" deck is simply a deck built around playing a lot of planeswalkers. A planeswalker deck brings with it a really unique gameplay experience. You'll find yourself with a lot of tablemates trying to attack your planeswalkers to keep your deck from spiraling out of control. They might tire of that and leave you alone if you're not too scary, but they might also just remove your planeswalkers by removing you.

The biggest thing to learn from playing a superfriends deck is managing your triggers. Every planeswalker can have a loyalty ability activated on each of your turns, but once you have enough of them it can get confusing. You may want to order those activations in a specific way and you really don't want to forget any. If you're playing additional cards with activated abilities or you have ways to proliferate your counters, that's even more to keep track of.

Managing a ton of triggers is an acquired taste - it's definitely not for everyone. I didn't enjoy the experience, but I know a lot of players love spinning out walker after walker and daring the rest of the table to find a way to keep them all in check.

7. Poison

Infect and the new Toxic mechanic give players poison counters. If a player gets 10 poison counters they lose the game. Building and playing a deck built around trying to dole out 30 poison counters might sound easy, but you'd be surprised.

Losing to infect is not a fun way to lose, but the same could be said for lots of other ways to lose the game. The reason you should build and play an infect deck is simple. It's an interesting approach to trying to win the game, and it's much, much less effective than you might think. In my experience, when you start giving out poison counters and sometimes when you just reveal that you're on an infect deck, the entire table will gang up on you. That makes it hard to win games.

Building and playing an infect deck will be a lesson in how strong poison counters really are. It's also a great experience in problem solving. How do you get your infect creatures through blockers? How do you get them to be a real, game-ending threat. How much do you balance combat and proliferate effects? Are there other ways to use poison to kill a table that aren't immediately obvious?

8. Control

Playing control well is something of an art form. You will find yourself constantly faced with decisions on what spells to counter, what permanents to remove and when and how to wipe the board. Constantly interacting will probably make you an archenemy, but playing answers too sparingly could easily lose you the game. The key is to find the right balance and to interact in the right times and in the right ways.

Learning to play control is worth doing if you want to become a better Magic player. You'll learn when to hold back and you'll learn when you simply have to respond to a growing threat before it gets too big. You'll pay more attention to when players have big hands and untapped mana, and you'll find ways to minimize the impact of the mass removal you sometimes have to deploy.

Too much interaction can feel oppressive, so you'll want to pay attention to your tablemates and balance out letting people have fun with keeping them in check. Stopping players from threatening to end the game will usually be met with gratitude from everyone else, but keeping anyone from doing anything even vaguely relevant might not go over well.

9. Combo

Combo can be a divisive topic when talking about ways to win games of Commander, especially at lower power levels. Some think it's just fine and players need to learn to interact with all kinds of decks and hold back removal for when it's really needed. Others feel that winning the game seemingly out of nowhere with a few cards that happen to interact in a really powerful way cheapens the win somehow, or simply isn't as fun to play against.

The reason I think combo is worth playing is that it introduces a unique aspect to the game. You might have your key combo pieces in hand and have to decide when to risk playing them out. Do you hold them back, or do you play them out as you see them and force yourself to protect them from removal?

Winning through combo at a table that isn't expecting it and isn't prepared to deal with it can be pretty underwhelming. Playing out a combo and protecting your wincon from multiple attempts to interact with it, fighting your way through and landing the win can feel fantastic.

10. cEDH

This might be the most divisive of all of these kinds of decks. I think of a cEDH deck as being a deck that can reliably win or lock the game before turn five. Some might disagree and say that cEDH is a mindset more than anything else, but I like clean definitions, so this turn 5 marker works for me.

The reason it's worth trying cEDH is that it will help you understand it better. There are lots of misconceptions about this "top end" of our format and it's hard to really grap how cEDH plays without actually playing it. Most cEDH groups are very proxy-friendly, but not everyone can find a welcoming cEDH meta that is looking for new players.

What I've found so far is that cEDH is a game where all of the back-and-forth that normally happens between turn 1 and turn 7 or 8 is crammed into just a few turns. There is a lot of interaction, and there are plenty of games that end up feeling like non-games because one player has the win in hand from the start and nobody else is able to stop them.

It can be incredibly exciting, but like anything else, it's not for everyone. I'm still trying to figure out if I like cEDH but I'm glad to be trying it. If you've never threatened a turn 2 win or stopped someone from winning in the first few turns, all I can tell you is that it can feel amazing.

Final Thoughts

If you've made it to the end, I'm betting you have ideas on what I left out and what shouldn't have been included. Do you think everyone should pay stax at least once? Are Enchantress and Artificer decks unique enough deck types that they should have been considered? What about mill or those odd "50%" decks that try to scale to the level of the decks you're playing against?

I'm still trying to really nail down the types of decks I love the most. As much as I love both combo and aggro strategies, my own answer might be hug. I've been thinking about rebuilding Kwain, Itinerant Meddler lately, as I do really enjoy helping to make sure none of my tablemates have a "non-game." My Kwain build was a hug deck that helped everyone but also tried to keep anyone (other than me) from just killing the table. If I was one of the last two players I had ways to try to close out the game, but it wasn't as focused on winning as most of my other decks. I've had a similar experience with my Beamtown Bullies list. Chiming in with "I'm here to help" and actually meaning it, rather than making a joke about how I just handed someone the game, is a nice feeling.

You might argue that you can "get" these deck types and their unique playstyles without actually playing them, but I'd suggest that there's no substitute for getting your hands dirty. Borrow one of these types of decks or proxy one if you don't have the collection or the interest in putting together a real list. Play it a few times and see if you learn something about its strengths and weaknesses. You might learn to love it, and you might learn how to beat it, but chances are good that you'll learn something from the experience.

That's all I've got for today. Thanks for reading and I'll see you next week!