Your Favorite Commander is Boring 

I'm in the camp of where I don't care if people play the really good commanders. My only problem is if they start making a fuss about their commander getting targeted. Like who in their right mind is going to look at you cast Gishath, and just not deal with it? "Oh I require set up and mana" my brother in christ, you and me both know you just need to hit to get your dinosaurs to get your deck going.

As much as the new Obeka is super interesting to me, I just KNOW every deck that people build with her is going to be taking 20 minute turns while they resolve 6 triggers per upkeep, 3 times per turn.

It doesn't bother me at all. I play some popular commanders and I play some not so popular commanders. One person's "boring" is another person's "fun and exciting". So no I don't sigh when I see a super popular commander on the other side of the table and I don't find it boring and start railing at the sky about the good old days. I will say I don't get to play as much as I used to so I'm just happy when anybody wants to play, no matter who they have in the command zone.

This is all true but you fail to consider that when I resolve a Honden of Seeing Winds to draw 11 the happy chemicals in my brain enter overdrive

To a degree, I like seeing commanders with "Expectations". I'm newer to the game, so if I see a deck I know well/vaguely know its gameplan, I can focus on finding the "winning plays" for OTHER more fringe decks at the table. Lets me focus on learning more "new" stuff. Then again, I have shown up to an LGS and, totally by chance, ALL THREE OTHER PLAYERS PULLED OUT AN ATRAXA DECK and looked at ME expectantly while laughing about it. THAT was a wild yet awkward moment. (And 2 were infect so it was a very quick game.)

I’m starting to get the feeling somebody here really likes Sunforger lol

It feels like this argument is a bit all over the place. You talk about generic value commanders and then in the next breath you talk about commanders that “build themselves” because they have a very specific niche. These are completely different. It feels like you are just saying “be hipster and don’t play the stuff that you see all over the place”. That’s a perfectly fine argument, but I feel like its mixed in with a potpourri of other arguments

One could argue that any commander that _does a thing_ builds itself. Kalamax wants exactly three things, being tapped, casting instances, and getting extra copies of said instances. There is not a whole lot of leeway in what goes into a Kalamax deck. Kenrith on the other hand, can go in a whole slew of directions. Want to build a degenerative infinite combo factory? Go for it. Want to play group hug? Absolutely down for it. 5 color reanimator deck? Kenny's got you covered. Generically good commanders offer flexibility on what sort of archetypes they can cover.

Quintorius is "Budget Friendly" until you have to spend $183.99 on a copy of Elephant Graveyard just to Regenerate Target Elephant. How else am I meant to protect my Boy

While you bring up valid points, I believe they are being made from a selfish point of view. "I'm tired of seeing X commander because I know what they are going to do. They are to common and every build is the same." Its understandable to be frustrated at seeing common decks and "staples", but you're not the one running them. You're not the one playing them because you find it fun. I understand the frustration of seeing commander being streamlined due to WotC is focusing on it as a format and over make products for it. But that's not what I feel is being argued here. Gishath got a good friend of mine into Magic when Ixalan came out cause "dinosaur stompy is fun". Atrexa broke me out of my "I only do beat down" deck design when she first came out, and ultimately lead me to explore wincons outside of damage. If you're enjoyment comes from using unique commanders and cards, more power to you. But others find enjoyment through other means, which is equally as valid as yours.

No matter the commander you are fighting my 99.

To answer your final question; the only issue I have with people playing powerful popular commanders is the frustration they have when said commander is targeted. If you do not have a way to protect your commander that your deck relies one to operate, then maybe we need to scrap it down and rebuild it.

Jokes on you, i use Grist to make bugs

I feel so called out right now as I have a Gishath and a The Ur-Dragon Deck. They are my two most favourite decks and the decks where some of my most valued cards go into. I understand that Gishath and Ur-Dragon are some of the biggest examples of a "boring" commander, and I understand that going into it and building the deck. I understand that some games I will do nothing where I either die before I cast my Commander or I get out my Commander and snowball the rest of the table. But the reason why I play them is not because they are popular but because dinosaurs and dragons were a big part of my childhood. That part resonates with me, and seeing the cool art and striking designs resonates with me. I love the idea of a giant dinosaur calling forth an army of dinosaurs upon damage. I love the randomness of it and seeing how many times I can get the trigger of and what I hit. I see every game of Gishath as a sort of mini game that can make each game exciting as of itself. I love the Ur-Dragon as the thought of flooding the board with big beautiful fire-breathing beasts and swinging in for big numbers. While this video has great points, I don’t think it is so black and white. People play Commanders for different reasons, and I think that is a good thing and why Commander as a format is so great. Why some people can play these Commanders for being good, I believe there are others who play these Commanders for reasons that aren't so obvious. Sorry for the wall of text. It's like 2.30am for me right now and felt like putting my opinion in.

I'm gonna be honest, Atraxa is a really bad example for what you're describing. Without a board that can take advantage of her trigger, she's a 4/4 with keyword soup. While slightly broad, proliferate slots her into leading a few specific deck archetypes rather than goodstuff piles, which increases diversity in terms of one Atraxa deck versus another. She can lead either +1/+1 counters or superfriends, without outright telling the pilot to do so in her rules text. Compare this to the infamous similarity between Go-Shintai decks, a textbook case of the commander telling you exactly how to build it. The more modern "setup and payoff" commanders like Korvold, Chulane, and Prosper are significantly more egregious due to how little they ask of their pilot and how wide of a net they cast in terms of things they synergize with.

Currently building one of every commander. There are some commanders no one has ever played that are actually pretty interesting.

I feel like every time someone argues a popular commander or "builds itself" commander is boring, i feel like the immediate question is whether the deck is boring to play with, boring to build, or boring to play against, or if the complaint is just the commander is popular. I feel like if we're arguing the commander is boring to play with, then I feel these sort of videos work. If the argument is it's boring to build, then I also think there's merit there, though I think there's a bit of expectations on what the watcher of the video actually finds enjoyable out of the build process (sometimes I want yo find interesting cards that fits the theme, sometimes I find an interesting commander that I want to build around. Not everyone wants to dig around looking for a commander just to find something different). If the argument is a commander is boring to play against, then I feel like suggesting a different commander is questionable most of the time (are we sure the problem isn't lack of interaction?) And if we say "it's too popular, it too well known how to deal with it", then I feel we're underestimating the other rarer commanders too much and we're making questionable personal arguments to people who disagree with the idea wholesale For the record, i played with a proxy friendly group a while back, and I don't feel we ever was bored of just generally "build themselves" commanders. Often, it was either the commanders that were crazy strong or the decks that struggled to do anything after being stopped once. My main struggle with building Go-Shintai wasn't that it built itself, but that it just didn't have enough room to be consistent if you built the generic shrine deck, compared to another deck that built itself like Ur-Dragon or Isshin (or my old Wulfgar deck). And Go-Shintai just doesn't give enough room to do anything else

This video didn't age well. "Wizards are starting to fix [the boring commander problem]". Wizards: Makes a set with 47 commanders, more than half of which primarily or exclusively draw you cards.

The problem with build around commanders is similar to some of your initial examples; if they die too much then you just lose. A lot of people try to build decks that don’t necessarily need their commander to function.

You got quintorius very wrong, he can also target planeswalkers, battles, artifacts or enchantments.

Don't worry i won't build a wilhelt zombie deck......instead I'll make a Atraxa zombie deck. 😁

For a long time I intended to build Atraxa "all kinds of counters" but never got around to it. Now a bunch of the cards are going into Me, the Immortal instead.

Animar is my favorite, and my oldest commander deck. I love him, and I love the deck, but I REALLY love budget commander. We have a budget league restricting every card to under $1. It's a ton of fun.

I totally understand your point, but I love my Korvold deck (even though it still is on playtesting) because my first deck was Vaevictis Asmadi, The Dire. It was basically a juund sacrifice deck that made a chaos warp to each player whenever he attacked. I loved the chaos it made in the table, but it lacked a lot of power. Korvold basically fits as the new commander for the deck, and I love so much that I can still play Vaevictis as my alternate commander, and he's there as my pet card because of how much I love him and the memories of my first games. I know Korvold is really powerful and very common in many tables, but I built him different and more focused on aristocrats than on treasures, which is the most-common theme. I think building famous (or infamous) commanders in a different way might be very fun! And I really don't mind a lot playing with famous commanders as long as the table hits the same power level. But you know, every deck is a 7 so...

I’m really tired of “whenever you do X you get X” commanders or commanders that both are an enabler and a payoff like korvold.

I'll defend the modern commanders "and then Atraxa does the thing for free" Yeah I don't see the problem with this. Not every card needs to be a greedy furnace that takes multiple value piece workers shoveling in "whenever you do X"s to scale the card's effect. A turn 1 bird just works. Phyrexian arena just works. Most of the cards in my deck just work. Some of my cards scale, but most of them have a set power level and that's okay. When someone builds an Atraxa deck, they can't just go "now how do I trigger the thing as much as possible?", they have to actually build around the ability of the card instead of scaling the card. In Atraxa's case, you have to get enough permanents with counters in play for the single proliferate to matter, instead of just triggering a hypothetical trigger-to-proliferate commander 20 times to win. I also don't agree that commanders that do the thing they ask for don't require any synergy from you. Korvold still scales with sac synergy, the goal of a Korvald deck is still to set up sac synergy. Korvold sacrificing something doesn't change that. Sans synergy, Korvold's built in sac outlet ability turns him from a card neutral flyer to a card neutral big flyer. Still stronger than if he didn't have it but the play pattern is similar enough. It also, again, incentivizes building around the actual ability instead of just scaling it, since it makes building around Korvold's power increase less risky. Prosper is a commander where you even more so want to build around the ability instead of scaling it. Without his built in impusle, Prosper decks would have to fit like 20 ways to impulse which sucks cause who wants to impulse sorcery into an impulse sorcery. It's much more fun to build around his output treaures than the input. Also experiment kraj is totally guilty of "doing the thing it asks for" You pretty much said it yourself, but the real problem is that the above commanders are really powerful, not just that they self-enable

I used to agree that a deck that builds itself, because it's a popular commander/has a powerful heavily supported theme, is boring but this was coming from someone who enjoyed janky decks that do something unique and "fun". THAT was what I found enjoyable and interesting about commander but that doesn't mean every other player builds their decks like this because commander is a GAME for FUN and it's a matter of perspective. I hate blue combo decks, I think they are boring, I would never build one, but if someone plays one I won't hate them because they are playing a game and having fun and that's what they find interesting. When I deck build I scryfall the stupidest cards that aren't good and that's great, but Timmy goes to edhrec and gets the best dragons for his Ur dragon deck as he wants to play the game explosively while thinking less about deck building and that's great too.

Teneb may be boring to you but he’s been with me since he came out. He’s my favorite.

My favorite deck is a 4th crusade themed Baird Argivian Recruiter deck, the highlight is a "quest for the holy relic" and no legal targets for it.

All those commanders are fun at the right table. Power can be fun, you have to build it right, instead of just jamming boring staples in. Just because someone doesn't know how to build powerfully but without just jamming all staples doesnt mean it is boring. I get so sick of people complaining that shrines got an actually good commander, what a terrible crime shrine players got a relevant and good commander.

Generic strong commanders that build themselves, while not to my taste, seem good for new commander players. It allows them to start building on their own, and also keep up with the more experienced players.

I made a Go-shintai deck, but I only run 2 shrines in it. The main idea of the deck is to use cards like "presence of the master," "cephalid shrine" and the black 2 mana one I can't remember the name of together with "Multani's Presence" to draw cards and get enchantment into the graveyard, until I find my zombie making enchantments so it goes from a self countering enchantment deck to a zombie tribal deck where i "resurrect" the enchantments too

How can Wizards fix it!? They’ve printed these top tier Insanely powerful and easy to build Commanders. In order to get players to choose other ones, they would have to print even Better Commanders. 😂

At the end of the day, I don’t care what my opponent is playing, so long as they’re willing to play commander. I only have two rules. No land destruction please. And no theft decks. Only because last time I played against a theft deck, he tried to pocket whatever he took afterwards and was a real dick about it. I got the cards back, but I don’t ever want to play against a theft deck because of that.

Among friends we established certain rules for commander; do not use meta decks, in the store where I am going to play they put a rule for commander; the deck has to be tribal; at least 25 creatures of the same type, that makes it difficult to use the meta decks.

I think this is why proxying should be considered more often. When you put money into mtg of course you want your moneys worth, you don’t wanna spend hundred on a deck that sucks. But if you proxy, you can play literally whatever you want. And if money isn’t much of a factor, it is always important to encourage playing whatever looks fun to you.

Over-equipped commanders are problematic from a meta perspective, and now they're a dime a dozen, which only seems to make everything worse. Frankly the only one I'm OK with giving a pass to is Gishath. I don't play Naya (bad at it), but dinosaurs are just cool.

I'm currently trying to put together a very low-power build for an Ertha Jo deck once OTJ hits. Finding weird, neat interactions has been a ton of fun! Controlling 2 players with Mindslaver? Milling a ton with Keening Stone/Sands of Delirium? Burning a bunch with doubled Voldaren Thrillseeker effects? It's been a blast trying to put an idea together~

This is exactly why I like building monsters out of underrated commanders like circu and isperia. They never see me coming.

I'm gonna have to disagree. Popular commanders are popular because they're easy to build around since they have a linear focus. I would even argue Atraxa is a poor example because proliferate can go in so many directions. If there's a pod of Atraxa players one can do planeswalkers, one can do energy counters, one can do +1/+1, and one can do infect. Honestly if Atraxa was printed now it would probably have another line of abilities that supports the proliferate. I do miss old legendaries though. You had to go out of your way to find what cards worked with it and be a bit creative. New legendaries are more powerful due to powercreep and have more cards supporting it, but that's what happens when wizards releases a new set every month.

I think people overstate the tribal necessities of Leori. The planeswalkers you want to put in a Leori deck are already mostly Jaces and Chandras and Teferis I've built two decks for her and one has the rule I can't put more than three of a planeswalker in it just to prove that she's not a planeswalker specific commander.

I understand Atraxa may be cringe, but I did pull her, grand cenobite and elesh norn in my first ever three packs. Therefore I will run them and be lame!

I know damn well my favorite commander (Isshin) is boring. But I'm poor so it's the only deck I own and it's fun to say "trigger trigger"

I think it's not that a commander is boring it's just that a commander becomes expected. You know Go-shintai is gonna deal 40-80 damage on turn 7 if left alone with that stupid red shrine they always seem to grab. You know Edgar Markov is going to make a million vampires. You know the Ur dragon is going for that turn 7 flying dragon kill. SO yes, you hold up removal or whatever, and that's understandably not fun for everyone. As a player you're allowed to see you will only shuffle up and play with other player who are interested in a dynamic game. Less games with 1-3 card insta wins or on sight kill commander. I think it pertains to the types of win conditions your group likes to run. If it's your local LGS, maybe sometimes it's better to go home and play Helldivers. Especially if they also just so happen to smell like The Ur Dragon.

Basically your issue is with power creep of just big generic value generation on cards, and not the commanders themselves. No one ever seems to want to acknowledge the fact that MTG is going through insane amounts of unchecked power creep, but will very frequently point out the symptoms of it as though they are wholly unrelated. The number of must have $40 cards being printed is insane right now.

One of the issues I've had with Wizards expanding on a concept like shrines or adding new abilities is that they typically do it once then abandon it for a while before it gets something new. If they're gonna add new shrine-based cards or just new abilities in general, they should make it for more than one set even if it's just sprinkled in after the big one that had it. That way it adds more flexibility and choices so it's not always the exact same thing.

And Melek, Izzet Paragon is objectively the most fun an interesting commander so anyone not playing him is boring by comparison

I used to run Gishath for dinosaurs but inevitably when they didn't print any more enrage dinos I split my deck into two, one is Wayta and the other Pantlaza. Pantlaza is also a pretty boring commander but she's much cheaper and enters the battlefield earlier than Gishath, and also gets you bunch of free dinosaurs just like Gishath. I do run both an old and new copy of Gishath in the 99 of both however. Enrage tribal dinos is very interesting because it's functionally Naya Control, which is not a color combo you expect you go against, until suddenly I have Trapjaw Tyrant and Pyrohemia on the board.

I definitely prefer legendary designs that have wiggle room, it lets you put more personality into your decks and make them feel like yours verses an EDH netdeck. I built wayta as a Boros Reckoner/Brash taunter deck, verses dinos. Add cards like Martyrdom and it’s basically uno reverse card tribal. So much fun, and it feels like my deck. Whereas my group has a Gishath and a Pantlaza, and they feel the exact same in practice even though one is a blink deck.

No one can stop me from playing Edgar! 😤😤😤

12:44 no i will sigh because eminence was a mistake and it almost ruined commander.

Can confirm go-shibtai is on of the most boring geberic snoozfest decks ive ever seen

My pet deck is the OG Chromium and whenever I go to a new game store I always bring it people always get their cracks in about him costing 8 mana and it’s not the most winning deck in the world but in the 100 or so games I’ve played since last year I’ve not seen anyone else do Esper Voltron so I’m always happy to show him off

I would like to cite my favorite MTG tuber (Salubrious Snail) as a point in favor of cards such as Atraxa. Basically, instead of building your entire deck around your commander, you can focus more around the 99. I recently built a Toski stompy deck with this idea in mind. The deck doesn't focus on Toski at all, but Toski is the draw engine which pulls the deck together. I can afford to put practically zero draw in the deck, which allows me to splurge on high cost creatures, ramp, and interaction. I can also afford to cut down on protection for my commander because he's indestructible from the get-go. On the other hand with my decks that rely more heavily on the commander I end up having to dedicate far more deck space to protection, draw, ramp, and whatever else I'm not using my commander for, which ends up making the deck feel less cohesive. I have massive spikes where I spontaneously win the game with my Zada deck, but the deck is an absolute mess which completely ceases to function when she's not on the board. She can kill a player (potentially the whole board) on turn 5 with stupid consistency, but if you counterspell her I’m dead in the water. Basically I think it's far too blanket of a statement to call these cards "boring," because it entirely depends on what you're looking for in a deck. Atraxa can be built in a bunch of different ways specifically because she's versatile and can fit so many different roles. Even Goshintai can be interesting in the sense that by breaking the mold with it you're _really_ breaking the mold. These decks only build themselves if you _let_ them. The issue isn't with the commander, it's with how people tend to build them.

This makes a lot of sense to me, my whole group has those snowball decks.

My favorite commander is Mogus, God of Slaughter. Even strangers love it. Not because he is difficult. He is just unique for that group.

yes my go-shintai was made really easy ,i build the deck as a joke from lol shrines and it became one of if not my best deck. my other top deck being Golgari lifegain with Ikra and Reyhan at the helm.

Your favorite commander is good. My favorite commander is a mono-blue 4-mana flying 4/4 with downside. We are not the same.

You'll take Pantlaza from cold dead hands!

Killing their commander three times vs stealing their commander once- I don't mind the Ur-Dragon all that much unless Hellkite Courser is involved. I hate how that card was designed only for one possible deck

I agree that building around a weird uncommon commander is probably the most fun, and that's the reason I believe the format is so great. But the reason why I also run The Ur-Dragon on dragon tribal is simply the cool factor of having the actual progenitor of dragons at the helm. Flavor wise, it just makes too much sense. Another option would be Tiamat, but at that point, you're now building around 5 pieces you want to use to win rather than just big dragons. I know this doesn't take gameplay into consideration since you could just as easily just go wide with Miirym or Lathliss as your commander, but I think it's the reason why so many people just play Ur-Dragon. Besides Emminence just pulling enough weight without having to cast it at all.

My favorite commander is Jeleva, Nephalia’s Scourge exclusively because her ability makes it so almost every game can play differently (access to the X cards off of EVERYONE’S decks, not just mine).

I like building a deck before giving it a commander. I've done it with Gonti and Ruhan. Gonti fits in flavor but not necessarily mechanically with their deck. Ruhan is just there for his colors.

I love playing weird dudes. My favorite deck is a zombie tribal with Mouth of Sauron as the commander and a mix the amass lords that give zombie tokens keywords and the amass lords that give orcs keywords. There are also several mill zombies that help assist his etb and clones/blinks for more triggers. Then evasion for the giant Zombie Orc army

It always depends on the powerlevel. If you're playing against a high table that isn't cedh still, trying to make king macar work without building a monoblack cedh deck that happens to have king macar as commander is very difficult. Sometimes i want a deck that works efficiently, sometimes i want a junky, "difficult to execute but if you do it's cool" deck. An example is my king macar deck or my "surge to victory-combo" saruman the white hand deck, but they could never play against highly efficient decks

The problem with Go-Shintai is that there are not enough options. We'd not have 80% conformity if there was variety in what we could play. The same is true of energy decks, and until recently, saga decks. There just wasn't many commanders or a wide enough pool to avoid playing the same thing.

I've been trying to move away from popular commanders. I just hate sitting down to play and having people know what roughly 80% of my deck is going to be.

I have atraxa I don't play her. My only blue mana source is arcane signet. Lol She is just there to scare people. The deck is abzan kathril deck. Lol

While of my commander decks include four of the top six most popular, I have built each of them in a way that isn't popular. Miirym is "only clones", Ur-Dragon is "tribal tribal", Isshin is "you sure you want to attack me?", and Atraxa is Myojin tribal. The rest of my decks use much less popular commanders

I told a guy i dont mind stax in casual but he should understand if people groan/complain about it. He said, "maybe yall should play a different game cause this is a viable strategy in magic." I said, "thats not the point, i play against stax in cedh all the time i even have one of my own, my problem isnt with stax its with people's casual stax decks. In Cedh stax decks usually have a game plan and they dont take much longer to win than other decks. In casual most stax players focus too hard on locking down the table and rely too heavily on thier commander to win and often it causes games to go from a 30-60 minute game to an 3+ hour endeavor cause they cant figure out how to win after everyone is shut out." He left after i said that.

Nah, I'ma build a 5 color Kenrith with each of the top 29 other most played commanders.

Love your guts to attack everyone. Keep it up! Personally, I like playing against atraxa because you never know what direction they take it.

As a raffine player the threat assessment argument couldnt be more true. Nobody touches it unless i start to go off and usually by then i dont need raffine anymore

Loving this comment section. Whine more Atraxa players

I definitely had this issue with my Dimir Champion of Stray Souls deck. The commander was Zellix with Agent of the Iron Throne, so I was tempted to lean closer to more generic mill or aristocrat pieces. This weakened the original identity of the deck. Now I lean heavier into the sacrifice to reanimate cards. It may not be as strong as a more straightforward build, but has regained it's identity.

And this is why one of my decks I enjoy the most are those that I went either fully into the theme, like dice rolling (Space Family Goblinsons) and use any card that rolls dice no matter how bad it is or using a commander that doesn't necessarily benefit the theme directly but still works well with it like going dinosaur tribal with Ognis, The Dragon's Lash. put in some haste enablers for your dinos and a few cards that give extra pay off for using treasure tokens and you got a fun dino deck that ramps itself not too quickly.

I've very frequently played with players who were new to the game and ended up building one of the top commanders as their first deck. I have to wonder what compelled them to pick that. I miss the days when a new player would buy a box of Ikoria and would end up building a Brokkos, Apex of Forever deck.

Wayta is so much fun, my favourite deck... and also pretty nice to build because while there are a ton of enrage creatures, you can't just put them all in.

When I was new, I went through a phase of 2014-2016 commanders that people had all stopped playing and I feel like I hit a lot of this idea you've presented, and it does make sense. I feel like Atraxa specifically is not that good though, always felt like my weirder commanders were better and less hated, which just means.. way better. Like when I had a Raff, Weatherlight Stalwart deck and an Atraxa deck at the same time, Raff is just a better commander and he isn't hated.

I don’t really get bothered when by people having popular commanders unless they rub it in your face. We get it, you got a good commander.

I just started MTG and i wanted to build a dragon deck and saw Ur dragon deck, i also buyed tiamat and since they are both big rainbow dragon commanders i guess i could tiamat ? Or is it of the same standard ?

I think a big problem is that these specific commanders don't bring anything else to the table other than being unique. Yeah you can play a unique setup, but if the next guy just has a edgar markov or a voja deck. Their commander is just gonna stomp you 9/10 times by generating too much value. :/

Obeka needs hardly any set up to do generically insane stuff, obeka treasure turbo is and will be a thing that can sweep over the mid level EDH game for sure.

I am still using Sisay for my shrines deck, the shrine engine is strong but monotonous, so I made it a lot spicier by running ultimatum and epic spells tribal on top, the deck forgoes a lot of enchantress type effects and instead focuses on maximizing Epic Spell potentials, Shrines happens to synergize super well with Epic spells, in fact, the deck is actually built around the Epic Spells to flip the table upside down at a moments notice, Shrines which brings each other out and are all legendary meaning it qualifies for a major load of Put effects that bypass Epic restrictions. This makes for a Shrines deck that can choose to play like a normal shrines deck, or suddenly starts to delete 10 cards from opponents deck every turn, while still outputing shrines to keep up some board relevance.

I play all my strategy games the same: Make something big and tough, and make a lot of them. So I went to Urza, Chief Artificer BUT I don't play to win, I play off of THEME. Robots, Thopters, and War Crimes are Urza's favorite things so my deck is filled with Robots, Thopters, and War Crimes!

I personally cannot use commanders that have a lot of decks to their names, mainly because building lesser known commanders leads to a more engagement experience. One of my favorite decks is actually Torgaar, Famine Incarnate. He's a beast of a card and the deck ends up very consistent. I can have a very early board presence with low cmc creatures that enter and mess with my opponents or give me card advantage and then cast Torgaar for cheap for a strong beater to pressure my opponents with. If I can't kill them fast enough, I am able to hold out with different board control cards and win the game with big finishers like Skull Storm or Torment of Hailfire.

You can make that argument about any commander. Mono-black Umezawa wants kill spells. Slimefoot wants saprolings. Leori wants you to play all the good planeswalkers in jeskai. Leori doesn’t do much to enforce a type, you’re misrepresenting things. The type you choose changes every turn. And no Planeswalker type has enough cards across jeskai to justify playing all three colors. I think Leori wants superfriends and a few clones. There’s a “best” way to build everything. At the end of the day, *you’re* the one who decides whether your mazzy deck is generic enchantress or goad politics. Korvold has depth. Cards to give him haste, card draw, protection from your pod’s meta kill spells, ramp, cards to keep him from getting blocked, and plenty of sacrifices available so he doesn’t burn through your entire land base. A lot of cards care about sacrificing creatures OR artifacts, do you go with one as a theme or incorporate both at the expense of doing neither perfectly? Really? Riku “play modes and get value” isn’t value but korvold is? Miss me with that salt.

My overall favorite was Rielle because you really should build around her discard mechanic, and I run cards I never would touch otherwise.

My favorite commander deck is Zirilan of the Claw, he's a 5 drop mono red commander themed around tutoring out dragons, but they exile at end of turn. I like making more copies, to make a very agressive but not very defensive dragons deck. Nothing really stays unless shenanigans like blink is involved. Its really fun to play. It can be hard to not use the same dragons as openers every time though.

Remember you can always beat boring value commanders with enough money.

I have build decks the incorporate Commander hate into them. I miss the days when you could force an opponent to shuffle their Commander into their deck.

Normally, If I build a deck I look at the top commanders on edhrec and purposefully avoid them. I don't want to use something other people are using. Everyone playing all the same stuff is boring.

I love finding popular commander because you can just use the knowledge on what that deck does to convince the board that they are the threat. Knowing at what turn they pop off, what are the must-remove cards, ect. Decks like Tiamat are only good if you keep finding new players to do the same boring combo over and over again. An experienced playgroup takes you out of the game before it gets to happen.

Honestly I just built commander decks I enjoy like my Slimefoot, Millicent, Osgir, Tovolar. And I’m finishing up building a Gishath deck because I just want to quote a bunch of Jurassic park lines and cheat out a crap tone of Dino’s agents my friends. An if anyone finds my decks “boring” I don’t care I’m having fun playing them.

When I first started playing I made Krenko and Lathrill because they were in the top most built. Once I played for a few months and saw their win rates were like 80% in my group I took them apart because not only did they do the same thing every game but nobody was having fun playing against them. My current favorite deck is Brago but not the Brago most people expect. I initially built a stax deck and played like 3 games before realizing how unfun it was preventing the table from playing so I broke it down and rebuilt it as a dungeon/initiative deck. Now I have fun flying through dungeons trying to out value the table and slowly drain them of their life points.

Ok, I'm more or less with you on most of these points, but I think there's another side of this that you're ignoring: not everyone chooses their commander first and builds around them. I had a Scion of the Ur-Dragon deck that I had been tweaking for 3 years before Ur-Dragon came out, but his ability was at most an afterthought, my deck was a legendary dragon tribal deck, and then they print Ur-Dragon who may as well have been made for my deck, I'd be an idiot not to switch out my commander, especially since his eminence ability does more for my deck than Scion ever did. Similarly, I've had shrines as a pet card I wanted to build a deck around for nearly a decade, but there were only five, and that's not shrine deck that's at best a shrine subtheme, then they printed the new ones and I was over the moon, but Neon Dynasty was coming up and I knew they had to print a new cycle. In comes Go-shintai, and now you're right, the deck builds itself, same with Urtet and Myr. I guess this is more of a Tribal specific problem, but I like Tribal decks, and I too am getting tired of WotC printing tribal commanders that are just too good, but it's hard not to play them when they're literally made for your deck, even if it makes you unoriginal.

I agree with branching out and playing unpopular commanders. My zombie commander is Varina, Lich Queen, I personally have never seen someone else use her before

to be fair I know you said it might be hypocritical but I have to say, Obeka and Riku both can def be decks that people can guess a high majority of the cards they have in the deck.

Thankfully my favorite Commander isn't even in the top 500 lmao, Yasova Dragonclaw's at #738 for the last 2 years

I’ve been convinced yet again to try building Quintorius into a deck I enjoy playing… 5 times the charm?