Welcome back to the Budget Commander Boot Camp, Results the First!

Mark Wischkaemper and I decided to do a series of articles showing how a Commander deck can be used as an introduction to the game of Magic generically as well as the format specifically. The goal of this Boot Camp challenge was to have each of us build cheap decks and optionboards with the ability to play in real life with folks to bring them over to the Commander Side of life while giving them a deck of their own to enjoy, play with, and build up.

This article assumes some familiarity with the project, although I will go over many of the basic concepts again. Check out the series here!

As a reminder, these were the rules:

Our four decks were Zombie CHOMP! built around Gisa and Geralf, Blink built around Obzedat, Ghost Council, built around Surrak Dragonclaw, and Johan’s Vigil around Johan and vigilance creatures, including exert. All are fun creature-focused forays into Commander land.

Now initially I wanted to run this with one of my brothers-in-law. I have four younger sisters, many of whom are married. One is married to a 25 year old who once mentioned to me that he played Magic for a short period of time back in High School. I thought he would make the perfect choice for this introduction back to the game via Commander, but him and my sister are out in Louisville working at gyms and running America Ninja Warrior training regimens, so they aren’t anywhere near me. Alas, that is not to be.

Here is are some wedding photos I took of them. Enjoy.

The first is a kiss of the couple, and the other is the wedding party, including two of my sisters.

What does that mean for the format?

With any popular game that’s been around this long, there are always people who have played and then left. Not me, but I’m sure they are out there. I just needed to find one.

Or perhaps a newish person looking to potentially commit?

There are a lot more players today than there were a few years ago and you can often find folks who either don’t play a lot but have heard of Commander, or those who are interested in playing. Finding real life games isn’t as hard as it used to be, and you don’t have to post in the Wizards of the Coast forums to do so anymore (which is good, because those have been gone for years). You can find people to play with at the local card store, on social media, and a lot more.

So getting your game on is easier than ever before.

And finding some folks to participate in a project like this is hardly more difficult.

So, it’s no surprise that I found two such people. Meet Steve and Frank (not their real names) a couple in WV (yes, WV has gay people too, although in this case, one is not fully out with his family yet, hence the changed names). Anyways, Steve and Frank played back when they were in High School briefly, as a sort of next-game up after playing Digimon. Then they graduated and more important things came up in life. Now they are in the place to give it another spin. They are gamers and the core ideas are easy enough to grasp.

We sat down and played for a Saturday afternoon, and invested about 5 hours total in the project. Steve was given one of my decks full time with the optionboard, but I’m not sure Frank is going to be committed to the game or the format moving forward.

Due to their understanding of games generally, (including CCGs, one heavily plays Hearthstone, for instance) and MTG specifically, their learning curve was pretty solid. So I felt we advanced pretty quickly and they grasp core and deeper level synergies quickly. Both played after the introduction of the Planeswalker type, so that was not much of an issue either from the optionboard

So what did I take away from the real life experience?

Lessons:

• Shying away from instants, enchantments and artifacts at first doesn’t seem to matter after a while. Sorceries, lands and creatures are enough to play the game. You’ll get used to it. And you’ll play to it as well, not worrying about getting things countered or responded to in any major ways, and you get better at reading tricks on the board too, because there is less clutter. No one wants to be surprised by some nonbasic land or artifact that had a pertinent ability they forgot about.
• I found that details of the game which matched the flavor were usually picked up earlier. The Commander concept of the Command Zone and having your leader, with the subsequent rules on color identity and such made sense when explained as part of the flavor of the game. Where mechanics and nuances didn’t always match flavor well, they were harder to retain.
• I found that they quickly wanted to add in the optionboard stuff, but not always at the same level. Take Zombie CHOMP for example. One of its instants was Cruel Revival. Duh. It’s not doing anything that the other sorceries in the deck aren’t doing either. So you can add it in pretty quickly, after just a game or two and let them play with it while other stuff comes along more slowly. But more complex things we slow rolled, such as Planeswalkers (Game 5) and more complex mechanics.
• I did run a lot of cards that worked on the theme and were always cheap, but not precisely to the first decklist, based on availability of cards in my collection. For example, my initial decklist of Johan’s Vigil that abused exert ran some deathtouch creatures to encourage foes not to block the onrushing horde. Well, I didn’t have an extra copy of Skullwinder sitting around. Sorry. But I have like a bajillion copies of Eternal Witness I collected because it was reprinted a ton. Now, building a deck from scratch, I’d run Skullwinder in a budget-minded project like this, but the card you actually own will always be cheaper than the one you don’t. So, I ran the Witness instead. No major material changes were made, and I certainly wouldn’t run Death Baron or Lord of the Undead in my real-life Zombie CHOMP deck as they are clearly too expensive to run for a budget project like this.
• Now don’t forget that the idea of this project was to actually give away the deck and optionboard, so your person can own it and have a copy they are invested in. So, I didn’t want to put in that many expensive cards anyway. I am devoid of a Zombie CHOMP deck now . . .  :)
• Some cards really came later in the project and were the cumulative cap of learning the deck. Take the Johan deck’s Total War in its optionboard as a good example. It was the final addition, as it was tough to play around at first, but became one of the deck’s most powerful weapons when it arrived.
• The non-Johan decks were pretty easy to build and play. I ran my real life Surrak Dragonclaw deck as one of the ones, (Check it out here) and then built a modified variant of Mark’s Orzhov Blink deck as well. I think mine made a handful of changes and ran stuff like Nekrataal, Puppeteer Clique, and especially Phyrexian Delver (to use for all of the life gain that shell has), such so it had a few more answers and problems from different angles. All budget stuff that was on theme, and I think I swapped out 7 or 8 cards from the decklist with my own collection.
• With a bulk rare leader, Johan required a little financial commitment as I didn’t want to potentially give away my high-quality copy from Legends when I could grab a beat up one from Chronicles. I also had to order a few cards like Total War while I was at it. I never wound up giving it away or anything.

In fact, after playing, the Johan deck is my favorite of the four, as it has a cool set of synergy. As a reminder, the deck uses Johan to keep your stuff untapped when it attacks, and then adds in a bunch of exert creatures, cards like Pristine Angel, cards with attack triggers such as Soltari Champion, Hellrider, Adriana, Captain of the Guard, Firemane Avenger, and Rubblebelt Raiders. Then layer in tricks like Sunblast Angel and World at War and Relentless Assault for more attack triggers! It was fun and synergetic. The additions from the optionboard included stuff to keep your attacking team from dying (Dolmen Gate, Iroas, God of Victory) as well as powerful synergies (Bow of Nylea to give your whole attacking team deathtouch, Moonsilver Spear, Sword of the Animist, Gleam of Battle for more attack triggers!) And then some jank like Total War to break the table open.

And that’s my experience with the format after some play. It worked, but not always to the degree expected and sometimes better and faster than I expected, although that could have been my small sample size. I’ll be interested to see what Mark’s experience looks like, and how it may demonstrate similarities or differences from my own.

I hope that you enjoyed our little take on using Commander as a tool to welcome people to the game and give them a touch of awesome game-play at the same time! Have you done the same? How did it work?

And as always, thanks for reading!