How do you feel about “narrow” commander designs?

[duducrash]

I was thinking about building a Laelia, the Blade Reforged deck. It feels potentially like a lot of fun. But while brainstorming it felt like every Laelia deck is mosty the same deck. And I feel like a lot of recent Legendary creatures are like this and am not sure if am a fan.

And you? How do you feel? You like open ended legendary creatures or this "specific" ones

[Treamayne]

I like finding a different way to use "Narrow" Generals.

Granted, I have never seen any version of a decklist for Laelia, the Blade Reforged; but, if I were to try building her, I would try to use the counters in ways other than attacking or as a Voltron WinCon (though that might be plan C or D). I would start by looking at Dragon Throne of Tarkir and other power-based buffs for a go wide army. I would also look at Burning Anger and other damage equal to power effects. For exile as card draw (a mechanic of which I'm not normally too fond) I would consider Valakut Exploration and other versions that return uncast cards to the graveyard (or otherwise makes use of them).

[DirkGently]

That can definitely turn me off of commanders. It's a big part of why I don't like tribal commanders in general. It's also a big knock for cards like Verrak, Warped Sengir. It can be hard to overcome.

Or it can motivate me to find a novel angle, like my Otrimi deck (make Otrimi into a land!), Galia as phoenix tribal instead of satyrs, Ayula with no bears, Gargos with no hydras...okay, maybe it's mostly taking tribal lords and staunchly refusing to build them as intended.

Sometimes it's kinda subtle, like my feather deck that focuses on heroic triggers and targeting non-feather creatures. But that deck is not super different from a "normal" feather deck, since some of the heroic creatures are no-brainers and the instants/sorceries are often either obvious or replaceable. But it's novel enough that I found it interesting to build and play. Sometimes it's more about tricking yourself into thinking you're doing something original, than about actually doing something unique.

Being a lesser-played, or brand new, commander can help too. Sure, my Chisei, Heart of Oceans deck isn't terribly original compared to other Chisei decks, but how many of those are there? And my Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice deck is bog standard, but I made it practically the day he was spoiled so I still got the joy of discovery out of it.

To circle back to Verrak, I doubt I'll find any life-payment cards that haven't been noticed by a million other people building him. But I can still try to find original ways to use that basic package, and the elements around it. I could also choose to focus heavily on a few particularly good synergy pieces and use a lot of tutors to ensure I get them, rather than play every decent life payment card.

So for Laelia, you're probably running a lot of impulse draw. But that's not a complete deck, so what is the rest of the deck doing? Voltron pieces? Control pieces? Something else entirely? You have more flexibility than you might think. You could even just use Laelia as a standalone value engine and build a deck that has little to do with impulse draw outside of the commander.

[TheAmericanSpirit]

It's a spectrum with a sweet spot for me. Go too far east, you get Hama Pashar, Ruin Seeker. Go too far west, you get Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. The best commanders are somewhere in the middle, more or less in one direction given the nature of the deck.

For example, I like Raffine, Scheming Seer. All she tells you to do is attack and loot. You can go about an aggro plan a few different ways, or you can focus on using it for a larger endgame like reanimator or Approach of the Second Sun. You're in a spacious cavern as opposed to a pidgeonhole or out in open space with no walls at all.

[hyalopterouslemur]

If it's narrow for your deck, it's fine, and I'm confident something like Hallar, the Firefletcher or Laelia, the Blade Reforged will eventually get enough support.

Narrow hate is a whole other animal.

[RxPhantom]

It's a spectrum with a sweet spot for me. Go too far east, you get Hama Pashar, Ruin Seeker. Go too far west, you get Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. The best commanders are somewhere in the middle, more or less in one direction given the nature of the deck.

Agree completely. I think the poster child for on-rails samey sameness is Feather, the Redeemed. They're all the same, and I have to imagine they're as boring to pilot as they are to play against. Those kinds of commanders are cool for first-timers, but I don't get how people maintain interest.

But that sweet spot, that middle ground where there's room to be creative, that's where I thrive as a deckbuilder.

[duducrash]

It's a spectrum with a sweet spot for me. Go too far east, you get Hama Pashar, Ruin Seeker. Go too far west, you get Korvold, Fae-Cursed King. The best commanders are somewhere in the middle, more or less in one direction given the nature of the deck.

Agree completely. I think the poster child for on-rails samey sameness is Feather, the Redeemed. They're all the same, and I have to imagine they're as boring to pilot as they are to play against. Those kinds of commanders are cool for first-timers, but I don't get how people maintain interest.

But that sweet spot, that middle ground where there's room to be creative, that's where I thrive as a deckbuilder.

Decks with podlines are usually pretty boring yes. I played so many games against a Prime Speaker Vannifar and all of those games ran exactly the same.

[Legend]

I was thinking about building a Laelia, the Blade Reforged deck. It feels potentially like a lot of fun. But while brainstorming it felt like every Laelia deck is mosty the same deck. And I feel like a lot of recent Legendary creatures are like this and am not sure if am a fan.

And you? How do you feel? You like open ended legendary creatures or this "specific" ones

I prefer open-ended legends. But I'm okay with the specific ones, too, in that they make great on-ramps for new players and can provide a straightforward play experience for those who want that. Laelia seems about as open-ended as a mono(red) commander can be and still have something to offer. In the raw, she's just card advantage that encourages more of the same kind of card advantage (impulsing, obviously). How that plays out will depend on the 99.

So for Laelia, you're probably running a lot of impulse draw. But that's not a complete deck, so what is the rest of the deck doing?

Ruination.

[Mookie]

Recently, I've been approaching my deckbuilding from a Timmy-first perspective. A lot of my decks start from a concept - I want to build a deck that will have a specific play pattern or give me a specific experience. My Kess, Dissident Mage deck is all about toying with my opponents of the course of a long, grindy game... but Animar, Soul of Elements is pure adrenaline as I spew out my hand as fast as possible. My Sharuum the Hegemon deck is about building needlessly complicated artifact engines, while Thada Adel, Acquisitor is all about GIANT ROBOTS. etc, etc.

As a result, I generally approach commanders by considering how they will feel to play - does the experience sound interesting? Is it an experience I can't already cover with my existing decks? And, perhaps most importantly, how much replayability does it have? There are some decks out there that I'd be interested in piloting once or twice (Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle eggs, Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern, Averna, the Chaos Bloom cascade.dec), but I also feel like they would get old pretty fast (or, alternatively, my opponents would quickly refuse to play against them). On the flip side, I also care about how much space there is to explore when deckbuilding. There are some decks I avoid building because they feel 'solved'. I like being being able to put my own spin on things, and the idea that my deck would be the same as every other build for that commander is something I find unappealing.

...anyway, the commanders I generally prefer tend to be somewhat middle-of-the-road with regards to how they can be built. I like it when my commanders provide some direction, since that usually means they can provide a more unique gameplay experience (opposed to devolving into 'generic goodstuff'). On the flip side, I don't want too much direction, or else the deckbuilding component becomes too linear.

(also: please ignore the fact that I haven't actually built a new deck in several years T_T)

[DirkGently]

Ruination.

table_flip.gif

[Toshi]

Decks with podlines are usually pretty boring yes. I played so many games against a Prime Speaker Vannifar and all of those games ran exactly the same.

My god, this!
Oswald Fiddlebender and Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice have been additions to my playgroups' deck pool lately and they have both become stale within 2-3 games.
I really don't mind facing Arcum Dagsson, Godo, Bandit Warlord and the likes in high powered pods, as games end fast. But don't have me sitting there for 2 hours, watching you sift through your uNiQuE Captain Sisay deck for the same 1-2 cards over and over.

[onering]

Define narrow. Some commanders have a wide range of possible ways to build them but tend to play out the same anyway because there's a clearly best way to build them and it's repetitive. Feather could theoretically be built as a Heroic deck or a combat trick deck, but it only ever gets built as cantrip tribal into combo. On the other hand, something like Gallia the Party Girl seems pretty narrow at first blush, but can be built in a few ways ranging from satyr tribal to best stuff aggro to gruul graveyard. The frog rider guy from Kamigawa 2 can go straight into enchantments that cantrip, to a more general enchantress, to frog tribal, or even a lower key ninja tribal.

[Dunharrow]

hrmm
open ended is nice, but only if they are not too open ended. Golos is the worst kind of design. I think we all agree on that.
At first glance, Laelia is actually a great design. It is quite open ended. You get to figure out what exile effects you want to play with. I think the issue is that in monored you will end up with 75% of the deck being the same every time. There are not enough directions to take it.

Being an aggro commander makes it seem ever more narrow.

[illakunsaa]

hrmm
open ended is nice, but only if they are not too open ended. Golos is the worst kind of design. I think we all agree on that.
At first glance, Laelia is actually a great design. It is quite open ended. You get to figure out what exile effects you want to play with. I think the issue is that in monored you will end up with 75% of the deck being the same every time. There are not enough directions to take it.

Being an aggro commander makes it seem ever more narrow.

I think Golos good design because it is so open ended. You can do a lot of things with Golos anywhere from extra turns to sorrows path. Compare this to something like Xenagos which is just big beater.deck.

The issue is with color identity. Narrow commanders easily become "type in keyword in scryll, filter by edhrec" -deck because the card pool become non existent with fewer colors.

[DirkGently]

I think Golos good design because it is so open ended. You can do a lot of things with Golos anywhere from extra turns to sorrows path. Compare this to something like Xenagos which is just big beater.deck.

The issue is with color identity. Narrow commanders easily become "type in keyword in scryll, filter by edhrec" -deck because the card pool become non existent with fewer colors.

Depending on your build philosophies, golos can be less open-ended than you'd think. Free spelling always annoys me because the obvious value is to play the biggest, dumbest, splashiest things around. Same reason I think Narset's design sucks. Make it limited by cmc or something, otherwise it's just always expropriate ftw.

Of course, Golos is strong enough that you can build it without optimizing and he'll still be very good, i.e. my sorrow's path build you mentioned. His land fetching ability is awesome, it's such a bummer that most people just fetch a random triome or whatever and focus entirely on the free spelling. If his ability was wubrg: draw 3 or something, he'd be so much more fair and legitimately open-ended (and wouldn't have gotten banned).

[toctheyounger]

I'll play against anything. What I build I like pretty open ended though. If the deck is solved I'm out. If it has one build path I'm out. For example the most recent commander to catch my eye is Tameshi, Reality Architect. At any level you choose to build him theres a variety of options to focus on. Before this one it was Slogurk, the Overslime and prior to that Tayam, Luminous Enigma.

Of course open ended can mean spreading too thin or building something that lacks focus, but I tend to build for a midrange strategy naturally so I'm sort of ok with being able to pivot a little.

[pokken]

I think it's fine to have some decks like this; I tend to think of those opponents as NPCs though

(my aggro NPC deck is Maelstrom Wanderer and to a lesser excent Haldan, Avid Arcanist and Pako, Arcane Retriever)

[toctheyounger]

I think it's fine to have some decks like this; I tend to think of those opponents as NPCs though

(my aggro NPC deck is Maelstrom Wanderer and to a lesser excent Haldan, Avid Arcanist and Pako, Arcane Retriever)

Delina, Wild Mage. Ima roll so many dice at you it won't matter what you do.

[5colorsrainbow]

I think having a somewhat narrow commander is nice to give some direction to the deck but I do like their to be some openness to them.

That said I think another aspect to this is how open the archetype they are. Using tribal decks as an example, an elf deck has a much bigger pool of cards and themes then ninjas.

I did remember they said in general the rise of more narrow commanders is 1) narrow legends let them be more powerful 2) they have been tryin to make legends for themes in sets so there is a commander for that theme.

[materpillar]

I don't tend to mind "narrow" designs. I really enjoy my Gishath, Sun's Avatar deck. That boy has just about as narrow of a design as you could ask for. I'd designed the deck as "dinosaurs and only things that survive Planar Cleansing." Then, I packed the deck with only dinosaurs and Planar Cleansing effects. The deck plays more of a long game of baiting opponents into overcommitting, then complete board house followed by Gishath, Sun's Avatar. It's pretty much the same plan every time, but sometimes you just want to hum the Jurassic park tune while smashing someone with some 12/12s.

I think narrowness is only a problem when people succumb to optimization fever. You can do really janky really random interesting stuff with just about anything. If you're trying to optimize the powerlevel of your deck and general that's when your card choices really become narrow.

[Rumpy5897]

I tend to gravitate toward legends with a transformative effect on the game. Feather turns various sub-chaff tier instants into repeated activated ability draw, which is awesome as hell in my opinion. However, there is a tradeoff between how transformative you are and how narrow your resulting card pool is. With Feather, you hit up Scryfall, search up one-cost instants that can target a creature and various things that care about you spamming those. The deck does kind of build itself for the most part.

The more open-ended legends do not appeal to me as much, as often the natural answer to how to construct them best is closer to goodstuff. Thing is, you don't necessarily have to. You can go for something driven by the 99 rather than the command zone, and then appoint a head honcho to augment some element of the deck's performance. I've seen Brago golem tribal.

Laelia is definitely closer to the open-ended side of things as a command zone Outpost Siege. Maybe you can aggressively chain impulse draw, make use of the resulting tall somehow. But you'll also be just fine treating the legend as card advantage and doing whatever else.

Obviously it's entirely subjective which legends click with people, perhaps even more so for the narrower ones. Ruxa and Saryth are an interesting comparison - rather similar ground covered, yet I did not care about the former at all while committing to building the latter by the time I was done reading the text box.

[Ertai Planeswalker]

I prefer either commanders that combine 2 different strategies in one deck so you can play those strategies a little bit different then the stock lists, or commanders that can be used in another way then the most obvious one. I prefer some sense of direction, but I still want to be able to personalize it on a strategical level.

[Sinis]

And you? How do you feel? You like open ended legendary creatures or this "specific" ones

I typically don't like narrow generals. Many of them feel too 'on the nose' for things (like Go-Shintai of Life's Origin). Just... too specific? There's exactly one deck you can build with them.

That said, I am totally willing to play some of them, like Sefris, or cards like Safana that reference The Initiative. I suppose it depends on the mechanic; for Safana, Calimport Cutthroat, there are only so many cards that reference The Initiative, and then the rest of the cards are up to you.

For something like Laelia, the Blade Reforged, you can still make it your own, but... if you feel you can't, maybe something more generic?

[kirkusjones]

I like commanders that suggest a theme, but allow flexibility within it. Oskar, Rubbish Reclaimer wants to discard stuff and cheat timing restrictions, but you can play control, reanimator, storm or UB goodstuff within that. Yurlok of Scorch Thrash looks like mana burn tribal at first, but he's also a ritual in the command zone, which is why I run him at the helm of my random stack of fat deck. Grismold is probably the most narrow of the commanders I play, but there's still plenty of flexibility there.

A writer I really like talks about using restrictions and rules in the planning process. They help set parameters, but then you find so much room and nuance inside the box you've created for yourself. Deck building with a narrow commander isn't as flexible, but it's interesting to see how much you can innovate under specific conditions.

[ISBPathfinder]

Personally I like my commander to have a direction and build concept but I also like it when I can show up and everyone at the table can't guess every card in my deck. There have been some commanders where everyone who builds it that knows how to deckbuild will end up with 60-80% of the same shell and those decks I tend to not want to make unless the commander is exceptionally cool.

I do think that they need to exist its just something I tend to shy away from unless the concept is really cool. I am not opposed to decks where optimal lists end up looking similar I just don't like when they are so narrow that everyone is using the same small pool of cards. Like, the UB commander ninjutsu commander felt this way to me and I bailed the hell out. Then I saw everyone build it and yea, its like kind of the same damn deck every time.