Commander 101: How to Pick your General

The commander format is popular among casual and competitive players alike, but it can be difficult to build a deck that suits your style and is also fun to play with and play against. Picking your general can be the easiest or the hardest part of building any deck and it depends heavily on top-down or bottom-up design of your deck. Today I’ll go over the difference, how to incorporate them into your deck building, and finally how to use that to pick your general.

First off, what does top-down and bottom-up mean? Top-down refers to the flavor and then building around that idea. You start with a really narrow idea and open up as you build. An example of a top-down designed card is Phylactery Lich. Liches, both in the Magic universe and outside of it, keep their souls in a bottle called a phylactery. As long as the bottle remains unbroken and intact, the soul can’t be killed. The card pictured below, Phylactery Lich, represents this flavor beautifully. The intact soul is represented by the creature having indestructible and the phylactery that its soul is kept in is the artifact with the phylactery counter on it. Once that artifact or counter goes away, the jar is broken and the lich is sacrificed.

On the other end of the spectrum is bottom-up design. These are generic ideas that fit well anywhere, then the flavor is added to them. An example of this is Harnessed Lightning. This is just a generic red burn-based removal spell that is included in nearly every set, except is was given a flavorful twist for Kaladesh block. Instead of being like Bathe in Dragonfire, printed in Fate Reforged as the generic red removal spell with dragon flavor, Harnessed Lightning is the same idea except it scales based on how much energy you have.

Now that we’ve gone over the difference between top-down and bottom-up, let’s talk about how you can use this in your deck building. These differ greatly, as one starts with flavor and the other starts with an idea and builds on that. With a top-down deck, you start with a card or combo you want to build around then move on to your support pieces. The best example of this I can think of immediately is the pre-rotation standard Blood for Bones deck. You start with Blood for Bones on the top and you work your way down. Next, you’d add reanimation targets like Agent of Treachery and Cavalier of Night, then finally add your support pieces like Stitcher’s Supplier and Tomebound Lich.

For bottom-up design, it’s the opposite. Take merfolk for example. You start with your base idea of merfolk, then build up. Beginning with your lords like Marrow Reejery and Lord of Atlantis, then your support creatures with Cursecatcher and Silvergill Adept, and finally random removal spells in Vapor Snag and Dismember.

So how do we incorporate this into commander? Well, we can either start with the deck and build to a general that would fit that theme or start with the general and build around that. Think about what colors you like to play and what you want to do in those colors. For me, I’m a control player and I like doing janky, durdly things with blue. Naturally, I gravitate towards spell-based control decks or blue-heavy combo decks. My most recent commander project was Oloro, Ageless Ascetic good stuff. I took all the best cards in the Esper colors and jammed them in a deck, then I put Oloro in the command zone because he fits the feel of Esper good stuff pretty well. This is an example of bottom-up deck building. I started with the idea of playing the best cards in a given color combination, then found a commander for it.

Commander is a fun format that everyone can enjoy, and I plan to do more articles like this one in the future to help people understand commander and what makes it so much different from the rest. If you need further help picking your commander, leave your comments below or message me on twitter @TwoBlueUntapped. Before I go, don’t forget to follow us on twitter @MTGOracle. That’s it from me today. This is Blue, signing out!