Building Jund: An alternate methodology for building commander.

= Building Jund: An alternate methodology for building commander.

As you may know I play commander, and I try to build decks that are fun for me, interesting, but not overpowered, non-oppressive, nor exceptionally greedy in terms of how much they want to control the game or eat up other player's time.

For a few months now, the Jund shard (black, green, red) has been on tap as my next build, and I've slowly been accumulating cards for it as I usually do for these projects. Jund was the only 3-allied colored shard I did not have a commander deck for, and I decided I wanted to fix that.

For a while I was accumulating powerful hate cards, cards like Hydra Omnivore, Stalking Vengeance, and Archfiend of Depravity to aggressively burn, kill, and otherwise make my opponent's life difficult. As it turns out, I ended up going in a slightly different direction, due in no small part to a new approach to the deck-building process that I tried, and I actually found it quicker and easier to arrive at a final list based on this process than what I usually do.

For the record, most of my commander builds so far have looked quite similar to the Zur the Enchanter build I wrote about quite some time ago [here] http://butlerwpn.blogspot.com/2011/03/its-all-in-cards.html

This new method, I'll call the Skeleton Method, and it works like this:

Step 1: Set aside a build box, fill it with cards. This step is virtually the same as the first step in the old framework. Before we can sit down and physically build the deck, we need to set aside a pool of 'possibles'. This pool should be significantly large, 200+ cards – so that we have ample effects/ choices to choose from.

Step 2: Sort/review pool. By sitting down and sorting the cards by color (for example) we can take a mental inventory of what we've accumulated, what sorts of effects we have to play with, and what kinds of synergies we can take advantage of. It also allows us to cut the duplicate cards, as well as add things that are obviously missing (board wipes, anti-artifact cards, a few ways to deal with troublesome commanders, etc).

Step 3: Build a Skeleton. A skeleton, as I call it, is sort of like a blueprint for your deck. It is not a rigid deck list, where you need exactly cards x,y, and z. But it does give you a framework of what cards to pick. In essence when you build a skeleton, you pre-assign card slots in your deck to a specific function.

My Jund Skeleton looked like this:

1 = Commander: Sek'Kuar, Deathkeeper ended up in the command zone for this Jund build. Partially because he was the only appropriately colored legend I had on tap that wasn't a dragon. As it turns out this shaped the rest of my skeleton.
1 = Alternate Commanders:  For Jund I had knew I eventually wanted a copy of Kresh the Bloodbraided - who also cares about creatures dying.
4 = Rocks. Yep I set aside 4 card slots to be consumed by mana producing artifacts. More than any other deck that I have built to date (except esper artifacts). The advantage of Rocks should be obvious since it theoretically allows you to play your 7 mana bomb on turn 5.
4 = Ramp. So in addition to the rocks above, I also wanted 4 cards to go find land in my deck and put it either on the table or in my hand. These two functions are very close, but necessary to play the big explosive cards that I love so much.
4 = Creature wipes. I always play a certain number of cards capable of sweeping the board of creatures. Since this deck has some recursion, cares about creatures dying, and also isn't ALL creatures, I opted for 4.
5 = Draw engine. Every deck needs to draw cards, and this deck is no exception. While 5 cards may not seem like much, I want each card to represent a draw engine that is going to draw me extra cards consistently as the game goes on.
5 = Sacrifice Outlets. This deck is going to care about creatures dying. Thus I will need some ways to get rid of my own creatures on my own terms.
6 = Graveyard recursion. So because a decent chunk of the deck revolves around stuff going to the grave, it's probably a smart move to run several cards that can bring creatures back out of the graveyard, primarily so they can die again.
6 = Dies triggers. What better way to take advantage of stuff getting killed than a few cards with abilities that care when things go to the graveyard.
6 = Kill stuff dead. Other people are going to have stuff that needs dead. So we allocate 6 card slots to cards that can kill creatures.
7 = Art/ench hate. This is something that should be in every deck. However, I usually only end up playing a few of these cards. For this deck I really wanted to go deep on this category of cards to muck up other players plans for generating value or being able to combo off. This was originally 10 cards deep, but we cut 3 to provide a bit more space for 'engine' cards that were going to make the deck tick.
3 = Plan Trample. My general game plan with this deck is to field anywhere from a handfull to a small horde of creatures and get in there with an alpha trample attack (plan b turned out to be burn). Normally I don't note a category unless it has at least 4 cards in it, but including this win condition was vital to enable the deck to close out games.
10 = Flex spots. Hey even the best skeleton has a few holes in it. So make sure you always set aside several card slots for those holes. This can represent effects that are actually useful for you but aren't covered in the main skeleton. Powerful cards in your color palate that don't fit your theme. Or just, you know, that one 'cute' card that you need to run for fun.
18 = Non-basic lands. For the most part in a 3-color deck I use most of my non basic land slots as color-fixing. However, I did manage to squeeze in 5 utility lands (some tap for colored mana, but most are colorless).
20 = Basic lands. While it might be tempting to dig deeper into the non-basic land pool, I personally have learned to respect basics, and pretty much always run at least 18 of them.
100 = Total. Just in case you hadn't noticed, the total number of card slots in our skeleton is 100 cards, because that's the size of the deck we need to build.

4. Fill in the Skeleton. Filling in the skeleton is the process of actually picking the cards to fill the slots that you have assigned. For example, I've allocated 5 slots to sacrifice outlets. I go through my build box of 200+ cards, and I pull all the sacrifice outlets I've set aside. This could be as few as 5 depending on how stringent I was when I was putting together the build box, but I'm usually pretty loose, so for me this is 15 to 20 cards. Then you have to pick out the 5 among that pile that seem the most interesting, fun, or synergistic with the rest of your deck. Yes, the rest of your deck doesn't exist yet, but because of the skeleton you have an idea of the sorts of effects that will appear, so you can often make very educated decisions about synergy. Do this process for each category/grouping of cards that you have defined. You can leave Basic Land alone for now (The exact distribution will be based on the final list). You can also only assign some (or none) of your flex slots.
    By far the most interesting part of the skeleton process is that if you find a card that does multiple things for your deck, and don't include as part of effect x, you will still consider it for effect y. Ultimately I tend to give these sorts of cards preference even if they aren't the most efficient or powerful, because their flexibility often makes up for it.

5. Revise. Even after you've picked all the cards to fill in your skeleton, that doesn't mean your deck is done. Revising your choices after all the cards are on the table is an important second or third pass on your deck. For Jund I passed through my deck twice. Once I was looking for non-creature cards to replace with creatures. Non-token creatures interacted with my commander and draw engine cards. So if I could run a creature that served a particular function, I did so. And this pass added 3-5 to the creature count of my deck, bringing the total to 35, which I felt was acceptable. My third pass was laying out all the cards by converted mana cost to determine if there were too many CMC 7+ cards, and if I could bring the deck any closer to a more acceptable 4-6 mana range. I changed 2 cards during that process. This is also the time to finalize your 'flex' slots, if you have any left.

6. Land. I still distribute basics in a commander deck using the same color-balance algorithm I used in the Zur build. Count colored mana symbols and note totals to determine the percent of your deck in each color, and add basics based on those percentages.

7. Test. I still perform a two-step testing stage. Step one is to solo/goldfish the deck to make sure that the effects that I put into the skeleton are showing up, and in the right distribution. I also use these solo tests to measure the deck's pacing. How many cards have I drawn by the end of turn 20? If it's 30 the deck is going to be slow (which is not a problem, but changes how I have to play it, or may make me change a few card choices). If it's 40 or better, the deck is either keeping good pace or is slow early with an explosive late game – which is usually where I like to be.
    The second stage of testing is in live games with opponents. Usually the deck plays out significantly different when other people are interacting with your well-laid plans. Did we have enough answers to other people's threats? Were any of our cards dead-draws against certain strategies? Did we manage to keep pace with the game, or at least keep up to our own designed tempo?
    After each round of testing, we often go back and change 2-5 cards in the deck to tweak it to our own personal taste.