I was trying to build a grixis "low power" matters deck using Ludevic and Nadier. I looked on EDHrec and I realized I was looking at 66% of decks being bald-tribal.
Funnily enough, this seems to be how the EDHrec staff use the site. They make it abundantly clear that EDHrec is just a data aggregation site, and that if you're using it to make the exact same deck as everyone else, you're probably missing the point of their creation.
@@MasterDecoy1W this is incredibly true. if people overwhelmingly use a tool as it was not intended, then the intended purpose of the tool is irrelevant. you dont see people complaining about chewing gum not being used as contractor putty, it just became candy/toothcare overtime and we accepted its use as such.
@@rosemarysamick9005 i 100% agree, but i still think there can be value in knowing the original intent of a tool, you /could/ still use chewing gum as putty, even if most people don't
My friends look to this an a few other sites when brewing decks. They see how I brew and are both in awe and deeply terrified. I exclusively brew with whatever cards I have on hand and do all my ratios on paper. No uploading nor checking against other deck lists. Then play it to observe the holes then look up cards that could fill those holes and if they are in budget I snag them or go back into my bulk piles looking for a different direction. They call it caveman brewing. I didn't think much of it until I started seeing your videos. I won't change my ways but it's cool to see a better break down of some steps in a staircase I don't use.
I’m not doing it on paper, but I’ll usually just go through cards from other decks I’ve made and also cards that I remember, and I’ll look for cards on Skyfall by using my Skyfall searching skills. Then, after the deck is like 90% done, I’ll go look on EDHrec to see what I missed. Often times all have gotten nearly everything in the “high synergy” “top cards” sections. This is due to me, knowing how to actually use the scall search to look for what I want. But yeah, props to you for doing it like that and actually making good decks
I do mostly the same as you, except I'll check online before I actually widdle it down to my final list, just to check if there is anything I forgot I owned etc, I try to fill all slots with cards I already own and only buy cards if they are sub 2 bucks or really really required for the deck.
The inclusion of Roaming Throne at the end reminded me of how it is one of the top "New Cards" for Go-Shintai of Life's Origin, despite the fact that it doesn't actually work to double the triggers of your shrines because you can't choose shrine with it.
That's one of the rules quirks I will never really get over. I've 'learned' that several times now and every time, said to myself that this will be the last time I'll get caught off guard by it. And yet 9 times out of 10 some one will mention it and it still causes me mental pain.
There's nothing worse than having to explain that "Shrine" isn't a creature type to a Go-Shintai player. A player at my LGS was using Path of Ancestry, and I felt terrible for explaining he didn't actually get to scry.
Thankfully I was aware of the shrine issue from the get-go. And funnily enough it was because I learned about the food situation with gingerbrute! Since food was new and it was rather unorthodox to do the typing like they did it taught me an important lesson early on about type-based subtypes.
@@schmian95 When I built my Sisay and Shrines deck I ran into so many of these small issues That was for example the first time I learned how tutoring Prismatic Bridge actually worked, aka, it didn't, Sisay can only tutor front face and Lifes origin literally just can't if its in the graveyard. Plus Shrines are not creature types so they are not interactable with Changelings or cards like Roaming Throne, and it was a huge pain listing through what I could do and what I couldn't do with these small ruling things. Even more hilariously this also makes all Go Shintai cards creatures with no creature type, meaning that they are the only creature cards without a creature type in modern days beyond Nameless Race. Tbf, if they are playing kitchen table, likely no one will correct them ever on how cards like Roaming Throne just doesn't work with shrines, sometimes I feel like that is for the better. Similarly to how Changeling as an ability doesn't allow you to pair Morophon up with Doctor's Companions despite the fact that by reading the cards there seems to be nothing stopping you from doing it.
Once again, the snail is dropping knowledge bombs on us mere mortals. I often thought about something similar to what you were talking about in this video, how a lot of commanders have a ton of Cedh cards in the edhrec page. I often got frustrated because I don't brew Cedh very often, so it felt like I couldn't get any ideas from those pages since it was full of Cedh-only cards. But the indicator cards concept is genius, and will definitely help out many peoples deck building in the future (mine as well). Thank you for always putting out high quality content for us to enjoy!
The EDHRECast guys call out the advanced filters feature so often for this exact reason. Whenever I'm building a new deck, and I feel too lazy to look at scryfall for similar effects (or get tired of messing up the exact oracle text wording for an effect I'm looking for) I'll go to EHDREC and see what people are using with the same commander, using the same one or two pet cards I really want to use. It's also very useful for excluding CEDH decks (or specifically including them) as you mentioned.
Ah, a fellow Skeleton ship enjoyer 🤟 my take on Skelly is tap-untap deck with stuff like Prodigal sorcerer, galecaster colossus, vorpal sword and so on. I also got an artist proof Skeleton ship drawn by the artist, safe to say that its my favorite deck
Archelos is one of those commanders with a very unique ability that also does not proscribe what kind of deck to make from it. I tried a couple decks eith him before landing on something that worked. I do think tap-lands-matter is probably the most obvious, though I hadn't thought about maze's end. I was just using Thawing Glaciers to get basically every land in my deck out while triggering landfall. I love the discussion about how to look at edhrec and how to ignore styles of decks for the commander that you aren't doing.
Indeed. "stuff comes in untapped" has a lot of, ahem, untapped potential for abuse, and fits itself to a ton of different decks; landfall being the easiest because there are simply far more lands that come in tapped than anything else, but it does great with lots of other things too. And at the same time, Archelos could easily turn into a brutal offensive weapon by making everything come in _tapped_ instead, which I rarely see but it's also a super wide net of deck types that Archelos _could_ helm. Definitely a fun commander to build, and also a great example of one that makes EDHrec-style data very challenging to parse unless you yourself can spot the dozens of different "indicator cards" present (Springleaf Drum for an example of "actually I want that other line of text").
I once made a program that looked for the largest group of cards that each were linked to each other on EDHRec containing my commander of choice: Neheb the Eternal. It was a nice exercise in data scraping and graph theory. If you did it with every card having to have a two way connection you got your standard burn deck. One way connections got you minotaur tribal.
that is graph theory (how things are connected), not group theory (symmetries) What do you mean by 1 and 2 way connections in this case? (I don't really get what you mean for a card to be connected to another card, or why burn would be more densely connected than Minotaur tribal.)
I'm super happy you talked about Archelos! As an avid turtle enjoyer that edhrec page is hella confusing, but the commander is a ton of fun to build. I actually built him as a vehicle/untap synergy/gate deck and found your decklist after building it, which had some really good cards I hadn't considered. Didn't wanna go full control though cause my playgroup doesn't like that sorta thing (and vehicles are funny), but your decklist was awesome.
I had this kind of experience when I was building Nicol Bolas the Ravager. There were cards with Nicol Bolas in them or in their lore, Dragon Deck cards, discard deck cards, and super friends cards (which was what I was doing). The entire EDHrec page for this commander is basically card soup. It looks so weird until you do some problem solving.
I tend to be drawn towards commanders that can be built in a lot of different ways, which usually results in very disjointed edhrec pages. filtering the way you do in this video is a neccessity to get any useful information on those commanders. it's difficult to figure out how to set up useful filters, but the way i go about it is usually trying to identify one or two "key cards" for strategies i don't want to play, and filter those out (like you do in this video), and picking one key card for the strategy i do want to play, and filtering for decks that include that. suddenly you'll find much more useful recommendations.
It's me. I want Doubling Cube. I am a fervent Doubling Cube enjoyer and I run it in my Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain deck to help prolong a spree of playing shit in order to start blasting my opponents into tiny fragments.
This was hugely helpful. I'm not necessarily new to Magic (versed on steps & phases, and keywords about 8 years ago), but I'm still rather amateur||novice in deckbuilding. I had recently pieced together a horse themed Morophon deck. The entire time I was comparing inclusion % and synergies, I had exact thoughts of "Which decks are using this?," "Are these two cards in the same deck," ...etc. But i left it at that because I was just trying to get a foundation together. I hadn't considered using the filter feature, because I'm also new to navigating EDHRec. (I've really only ever typed a name or chose color combos, then scanned the whole page of the suggestions. I'm glad you had done the heavy lifting and breaking down the thoughts that I also had experienced.
I was fiddling around with building an Ayula, Queen Among Bears deck, and when looking at EDHRec to get inspiration on some good fitting cards I might have missed, sure enough, there were a bunch of suggested cards that do not have any particular synergy at all, but which prominently feature a bear in the artwork. Just... beautiful. Go get 'em, my bear brethren!!
The filter feature is superb. If I don't know where to start on a brew, I'll check an EDHrec page for As Commander, find 2-5 cards somewhere below High Synergy that appeal to me, and then refilter by those few "indicator cards," simply based on their appeal to me as a brewer.
I think the Malcom / Francisco decks were partially inspired by this video (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nvj8rYk2iYY.html), where play to win makes a CEDH deck out of the two commanders. It has the walking ballista / Agatha's soul cauldron too
Would love to see a video where you explain in more detail how you use EDH and how you make a good deck with it. The part where you talked about how many of each type of card you want in a deck would be nice to know.
I have been called out by the Zaxara example. I use Scryfall almost exclusively and I've found that I can fall into a similar hole if I'm not breaking out my commander and gameplans out into these different tracks. In fact I did fall deep into that hole with Zaxara that in the last two days that I realized just how much I was trying to do with the deck. I split up the cards, and now Zaxara leads a token-based spellslinger deck (in Sultai??), and Ukkima and Cazur have come into to lead a creatures matters mutate deck with some copying effects. Making the split released so much tension in my brain, and thanks to you, I'm excited to have a new way to use EDHrec that can help me avoid these holes in the first place.
I would love a video about how to use scryfall/ressources out of edcrec when brewing decks, im playing for 2 years now and would love some advise to build interesting decks/your thoughtprocess when building
I havent checked out your other videos on the subject so please forgive me if I'm rehashing an idea you've already gone over. You should check out the edhrec page for Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker. A friend was brewing this commander (I'd say recently but its likely been years ago at this point) and we noticed an oddity with the data. There were a number of effects "played" in a surprisingly high number of lists that based on an accurate understanding of the game rules don't work the way we assume people would be using them. Our conclusion was that at some point after the data began aggregating, a person incorrectly identified the use case for these cards and included them in their brew and as more people visited the page followed in suite. Obviously we're making an assumption about how those cards ended up there in the first place, but I think this version of the narrative is a funny little bug in the system.
my favorite example of this is when i was building a deck with a horrendously bad commander, that being Joven. It was so fun how some people tried to salvage his ability with some sort of mld route while other people just committed to playing dogshit from homelands and forcing others to play their own cards lol
I am a bioinformatics student and your analysis of edhrec is bizarrely similar to how we analyse microbiome/other ecological communuty data. You could probably load up the first 500 decks on edhrec for a given commander and cluster them by similarity using bioinformatics tools.
Dude, I very much enjoy your videos! If I could make one recommendation, it would be to cut down on the flash-bangs. Excessive white backgrounds are murderering my eyes 😂
I plan to try experimenting with some off-white backgrounds in some videos coming up. I like white because it's aesthetically very crisp and makes it easy to drop in various assets that also have white backgrounds, but I know it can be a bit harsh at night.
EDHrec’s database ins a strange beast. When I was building my Shorikai combo deck, it was as if everyone else building the deck just input the prebuilt deck or wanted to build heavy stax.
I can relate so much with my favorite commander soul of windgrace. EDHrec puts him under a lands matter deck, where you do a lot of discard shenanigans, but I personally think that he’s so much cooler as a landfall Voltron Commander. With Skyclave pickaxe effects and the retreat enchantments and mouragg you can do some crazy stuff
There is a tool on the site to filter decks based on inclusion of one card or the other. For example when I was building a Volo, Guide to Monsters deck, the EDH Rec video specifically shows how both Scute Swarm and Hornet Queen show up equally despite both being insects. Including both insects in the deck would be a non-synergy based on Volo’s conditions so they shouldn’t both be in a deck. The tool allows you to show how decks that run Scute Swarm do not run Hornet Queen, and vice versa. Volo was uniquely apt at showing how and why these overlaps happen. It comes down to the deck builder to determine which cards may satisfy similar or same roles within the 99 and filter to see if it’s a “add both” situation or an “add one or the other” situation.
I know the EDHREC podcast constantly mentions the filters because they admit that their site has this issue. The way you're using it is the way they want people to use it.
A struggle I've noticed with EDHRec is what I call 'the precon problem'. If what you want to do is upgrade a precon, or even just use a commander that happens to be in a precon--which I think is a fairly common use case, people looking at an off-the-shelf deck and going 'what do I do with this now'--then a huge swathe of recommendations will be from that precon. But it's up to you to figure out if that's because that card genuinely does work very well with it, or if it's because that card happens to come with it and so you have a lot of people just not bothering to exclude it. A lot of people are using Run Away Together in Tegwyll decks, but is that because there's actual synergy there, or just because you can buy them both in the one product?
The OG Obeka ‘theft’ theme page is a complete mix of people using threaten effects, despite the fact they simply don’t work that way with the game’s rules
My skeleton ship deck oddly focuses on theft, stealing creatures and forcing them to join my ghostly crew, whilst also being twiddle tribal with loads of tap and untap shenanigans. It is no longer a meme. I am targeted like the glorious archenemy skeleton ship deserves to be.
my current favourite deck is a cloudhoof kirin self-mill abomination with lab maniac and thoracle as win conditions, and looking on edhrec, it's kinda surprising how few people have gone with that strategy. there's a lot of mill synergy, sure, but none of the usual self-mill cards show up as high as i was expecting
Do you use any communities to review decks? I've made a vadrik Astral archmage deck where I capped the power level so that it's not infinit/burn focused, but rather more token spam with a few powerful sorceries... I'm just trying to figure out where to change it more to fine tune it.
I personally use EDHREC mostly because it updates with new cards as they're being released and because it can help showing really obscure cards that have synergies you wouldn't have found with something like Scryfall. Plus as a fellow meme deck enjoyer I'm still trying to find a way to make skeletons work without it being complete trash. As an aggregate site it's always important to actually read the card because a lot of people make mistakes while building. For example on almost every colorless commander there's a significant % of decks running Arcane Signet. Arcane Signet literally does nothing in a colorless deck because colorless is not a color. There's also stuff like 34% of decks running The Master Multiplied in Sedris the Traitor King decks even though The Master's effect only applies to tokens so anything unearthed by Sedris will still be exiled.
Skeleton Ship was my first commander. Mix of Skeletons with regenerate and -1/-1 counters, boats, whelming wave, and other nautical stuff. It also later ran stuff like Illusionist's Bracer's to get double the activated ability trigger. While yes that would work nice with the commander itself, the secret commander at least for me, was Giant Oyster, as you could trap a bunch of tapped creatures with it if you copied its activated ability. And in the process, slowly put -1/-1 counters on those same now trapped creatures. The deck didn't really have a goal to win the game. It only sought to elongate the game by wanting to contest the nonland boardstate. It did eventually gain one, first Labatory Maniac, then that was later replaced with Thassa's Oracle for the nautical theme. But I didn't really run a way to capitlaize on the Oracle to make it an instant win. So I instead just used it as a mini-tutor and nothing more. I know I been going on for awhile, rambling, but the main point I am trying to make is: Its fun to optimize a theme than it is optimize the mechanical. Its like trying to make a flavorful precon.
Fun fact: Pretty sure I know why Macar shows up, I remember reading an article from awhile ago about doing Archelos as a vehicle commander equal part cause vehicles were mostly in boros at the time and because a slow turtle riding a speeding car is amusing. Archelos in this deck be used to crew your cars or if youre not looking to attack can use the crew effect to have him tapped for your opponents. King Macar as an inspire creatues makes for a good pilot and I seem to recall it running other inspire and the lorwyn merfolk that do stuff when they untap
One of my favorites, is that Minamo, School at Water's Edge is in 12% of Rubinia decks, but if you read her rulings on gatherer, it literally doesn't work
My Archelos deck is sultai Among Us Group hug; featuring mostly clones and with an express interest in accelerating my opponents so they get more interesting and weirder cards for me to copy. How many Archelos decks run Hunted Wumpus and Weird Harvest?
Another issue with edhrec can be the precon effect, where using any commander that came in a precon over values cards that came with it due to avaliablity when there are often much better options.
How can a new player know how much of a card type one needs? As my second deck I built a Don Andres pirate/steal deck, but at some points it feels very disjointed. Can someone recommend a source that gives you an approximate idea of the overall structure ?
When I was putting together my Malcom/ Francisco I also noticed the insane amount of cedh decks. I wanted a pirate theme deck with boats and pirate theme cards so edhrec page didn't help me much.
@@UnormalismI play Miirym, Sentinel Wrym not because it's an incredibly powerful card, but because she lets me cast two big dragons for the price of one.
I honestly don't use EDHRec mainly b/c the deckbuilding journey is half the point for me and I feel like EDHRec shortcuts it. If I played competitively it'd be a different story, but having a deck perform suboptimally as you find better pieces for it is fine in casual. In particular you can get interesting results from swap-outs over time to solve individual problems that might not show up at all if you build all at once. Well, that and I'm a cheapass and EDHRec tends to recommend expensive stuff. Or is that stuff gets expensive because EDHRec recommends it? Either way, this methodology was really interesting even if it's not something I'll personally be making use of much. RE: Archelos and King Macar, this is an effect I've seen while building that I'll refer to as "second-order synergy". First-order synergy is stuff that works well with the commander; second-order synergy is stuff that works well with first-order synergy stuff. In this case, tap/untap effects work well with Archelos, and so because you have a bunch of them you can bring in Macar to take advantage. I've tended to find this happening a lot with untappers specifically; they encourage you to slap in Ravnica bouncelands for the chance at bonus ramp. In theory you could get to third-order and even beyond, but this is more rare; the only example I can think of top of head is "Yeva wants a bunch of green creatures" (first-order) --> "With a bunch of green creatures you want payoffs for casting them" (second-order; usually draw payoffs since this gives you more creatures to cast) --> "With payoffs for casting green creatures, you specifically want green creatures that get cast multiple times" (third-order; foretold soldier lol) Love your use of comments as a resource btw (entirely unbiased)
First time I noticed this was when looking at Azorius Bruna decks and thinking why are people including cards that benefit from casting Auras, that deck doesn't want to cast them.
This phenomenon could not have been more apparent than when I was trying to build The Rani, a relatively new commander. On one hand you got cards like Vashta Narada, an evasive resilient creature to hold her Aura. On the other, you get Braids, which assumes you're putting it on your *opponents'* creatures, then sacrificing it once the game becomes 1v1. But because of this split, you only get a superficial read on both strategies. Where's Neurok Invisomancer? Where's Fatal Grudge, Role Reversal?
As always, I recommend that people build their deck first without any research. Once you have it down to 100 and goldfished a few time (goldfishing is playing the deck as if your opponents do nothing on their turns) then check edhrec and decklists to see what other people are using. I do not use Food chain in Prossh, since it is an infect deck. I do not use legendary slivers in my sliver deck because it is silver/mutate. I understand how cool Ghalta is with vehicles, but frankly most vehicles are too slow for the deck and it lets me run more artifact hate cards to slow my opponents down. I don’t run non-Arachnogenesis fog effects in my Thantis deck because it isn’t a turbofog deck, it is an attack big and hard deck. By goldfishing/playtesting my decks, I can look at a card that is really hot (like Skullport Nexus or Roaming Throne) and understand that while they would be good in some builds, they might be dead cards in mine. Brew well my friends.
just use them both. scryfall for the advanced search and specific cards, edhrec for recommendations and data, archidekt for the actual deck building. holy trinity
In the spinoff manga to Yugioh, Yugioh R which, follows Maximillion Pegasus' adopted child trying to bring him back from the dead, they discuss the idea that within a duellists deck (someone who plays children's card game) is their soul, that their deck contains their essence of being. While the manga meant that in a spiritual way, this video has kinda shown me that is true in a more evidentiary way. If you looked at my Lim - Dul zombie deck, you'd notice the number of printings of cards that specifically had flavour text involving the titular character or his former master Leshrac - leading you to believe my commander and lore was a strong motivator for building the deck. Looking at my foreign printing of Gissa Ghoulcaller, you'd also be able to deduce it was made before she was reprinted, and that I'm relatively poor. So in a more scientific way, a players deck does contain their soul. Now all you need to do is meld the Myers Briggs test to the deck archetypes and we're popping off
I looked up "Stunted Growth" because I'm an evil person, and I think it's even funnier when you pair it with eternal witness so you can put 6 cards back. So I look it up...... they're all birds. Wall to wall bird decks.
I rarely use EDHrec, and its more to finish a deck than to craft it. (i.e. I can't figure out the last 10 cards, or just a few more cards to figure into the deck)
Some commanders seem to be misunderstood and poorly built, then copied. So commanders like The Council of Four have the most popular archetype listed as wheel, despite not being a wheel commander. (If anyone is wondering why, The Council of Four's ability triggers on the second draw of each player's own turn. A simple ponder is better suited than a windfall, for example)
I think a video about how pre constructed commander decks and the amount we get has kinda ruined the individual of this format cuz whenever new decks get announced the secondary market goes crazy wit things that weren't in the deck thus making building that deck more expensive cuz u buy the deck and the cards that jump or u could just make ur own with stable card prices just a suggestion for u snail
Im was actually trying to make archelos right now. Ive had a maze's end prerelease card from the prerelease i did back then and never got it to work so im tryingbit again with him. Got the jdea of devoted druid and worldshaper to a tuallu get all the gates out. Devoted druid puts entire deck in the grave, flashback dread return on worldshaper then flashback cabal therapy to sac the worldshaper for free and get all those gates and mazes end out untapped and ready to use. Nothing on edh rec stood out to me for him too really with what i was trying to do. You really do have to think about what card on there really is trying to do for what kind of deck.
I recently built a Torbran deck for my wife and the amount of non interactive cards the site suggested was staggering. While for me it ain't a problem, for new players it is, they all get into into rec to way too soon build their stuff with the misconception the site is synergy. It is a popularity rank.
I just use it as way of seeing only cards that are in my colors, ignore the obvious and % of decks it's in and just read the cards that look interesting and then see if it goes with what I'm going for, I like my commander's to have vague synergy with the deck, I run a muldrotha deck that is less about degenerate locks (I do run mindslaver lock but that's as an alt wincon)with her ability mainly just being able to have all my lands for pumping one of 3 X spells, then I also have a Breya deck that is more of a tezzy tribal list after they changed the rulings on Planeswalkers using recasting of breya to pump for one of the tezzy's abilities to be huge
