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Introduction
Welcome to the central hub of Re:Commanders, a suite of 8 decks I've established since 2015 to achieve what I personally felt would be a balanced combination of decks that I could "retire" from MTG with, after 11 years of playing the game itself, including 4 years in this wonderful format of EDH, one I've dubbed as "Dungeons and Dragons in Cardboard form" (or at least the closest thing to it I've ever felt).
As of when this series of threads was posted (2021), it's been 6 years since I embarked on that "retirement" project. In my active years in the game, especially during the 4 years I spent in the format before I started Re:Commanders, I was pretty active in the online discussion landscape (back then it was on MTGSalvation). Once I started embarking on this project, my participation in said landscape started dwindling. I was still around to see the formation of MTGNexus, but at that point I could be said to be barely active anymore, as my post count relative to my account age can testify.
Without further ado, I present the 8 decks of Re:Commanders (Click on each image to get to the deck's individual thread). Also, if you have the luxury of listening to music whilst reading this thread, enjoy the appointed official song of Re:Commanders: gravityWall
Why write Re:Commanders?
Honestly, I could've easily ridden off into the sunset and actually "retire", but I decided after years of having participated in both online forums (and actually the official Wizards one, but that one preceded EDH even) and that after 5 years I could consider Re:Commander a success at least in its purpose of stability to actually write a series of decks guides for them, as sort of a "repayment" to what the community as a whole helped me back then (and even now, on a smaller scale).
When I was much more active I did entertain the idea of writing guides for EDH decks, but during the four years in the format prior to Re:Commanders, I was pretty fickle, constantly building new decks, disassembling them, then either building other new ones or even rebuilding old ones after a while. Then I could also see pretty obviously there was no way for me to maintain guides at all, so I only entertained writing guides as a thought and nothing more.
Quirks of Re:Commanders Guides
There are "conditions" I set up when I wrote them though. Firstly while I enjoyed the style of primers and their writings and sought to emulate them to some degree, I do not intend them to be actual primers, as my intent to actually "retire" is still real and it is up to my whims to when I wish to update my decks (primers require pretty regular maintenance).
There will be no changelogs, I might just stealth edit the threads at times, I've reached the point of exhaustion with the pool of the game and its rate of growth I deem there's no real need to keep a log of progression, my decks may not be the top-tier / min-maxed, but after all these years I'm comfortable with their power levels that changes are done for minimal progression.
I'm also not including credit sections, because to be honest, I've also been partially detached from the community for the long to explicitly remember where all my ideas drew themselves from specifically. Likewise, if someone chooses to engage in discussion within my threads I definitely condone it, but there are no promises on whether I may reply or not. I may have sculpted my guides to be like primers, but as I say I don't intend on them being actually primers and I'm certainly not taking the active professor route (nor am I actually an expert in my own decks, given my own frequency of actual play in recent years), more of the grumpy-grandpa-retired-professor-who-gave-his-notes-once-and-occsaionally-pops-in.
Why does this thread exist?
The second major "condition" is I've consciously chosen to cut the length of my guides in terms of wording. I understand a lot of people in this forum actually enjoy the lengthy writings in primers but personally as I've started moving out of the forum medium, alongside into moving into other hobbies that don't even have a traditional forum presence that as a whole modern fandom generally prefer easier-to-digest content. When I write out essays of guides people tend to get lost (in other hobbies), but when I either convert my own content or even of other's into bite-size, I get tremendous feedback on how my simplification was some sort of miracle-medicine for their understanding.
This, unfortunately for (this) traditional forum(s) in particular, also holds true for MTG, as more of game's overall media moves towards formats that support bite-sized products. Even other flexible formats like videos tend to often get flak for lengthier ones that lost their viewers' attention or try to cover more than their viewers can digest. I myself also found it pretty beneficial and could see a lot of people also having adapted to the times.
As I said, I understand the core current viewership of these forums still prefer lengthy detailed guides, but I'm not really doing this to cater to that, it's more of an experimental run to see if shorter guides can still work out here (not that I'll lengthen it if it doesn't work out anyway). As I said, the trends have changed and honestly the dwindling population in forums (which I'm self-admittedly part of) is evident of that. However, fact remains forums are still a good place to put a solid guide (as modern social media would essentially wash the entire thing away in a while because it's that fast it may be bite-sized but it overfeeds the quantity of those bites), so I'm here with a paradoxical experiment.
Perhaps one day fandoms will partially trend back to forums for stability (and I'll actually get results), but even then I believe the preference for streamlined content will not immediately twist back with the trend, perhaps even my form of bite-sized forum guides might be the way forward. But I'm still just doing this on a whim of fun and not of any real ambition in that direction.
Here's the ironic part, you've read through four paragraphs to get here, and for those who knew me in some forum capacity know I have a tendency to overwrite a lot of text to the point I walk circles around the main point (even if those walks do help supplement the point), so here's why this thread exists: so that all that excess ranting I felt excessive when I reviewed my threads had somewhere to go and consolidate. It felt stupid talking about the shared history of my decks' formation felt it was a few degrees away from the exact same text of another thread, and they all turned out to be 2 pages long in each thread, defeating my own intent/conditions. I could not let it go, and hence I determined I really needed this central hub.
It just doesn't stop, does it?
Note that I said 5 years of stability convinced me to start writing guides, but it's been 6 years since I've embarked on Re:Commanders at the point of publishing? Yes, the writing for Re:Commanders itself took about a year and a half before I even considered publishing it here. The first drafts of each deck guide themselves took quite the time (although to be fair the same factors of an ongoing pandemic that opened up the opportunity to write them also made it that I could not be writing them at a consistent pace, there were periods of a month or two I literally never touched the word documents), then upon first review I found them contradicting my shortened intentions and I needed to create this central hub to re-consolidate everything (which takes more time again by itself). At the same time the decks themselves also underwent some minor changes, so I needed re-tweak each thread once again in a second wave nearly to the level of a re-write in some sections, but thankfully not as slowly as the initial first wave of writing.
There you have it finally, this thread exists as the black hole to swallow the excessive blabbering I like to naturally lean to but wanted to actively avoid in my deck threads. It's also supposed to do multiple other things, including presenting my overall MTG history and the overall history of the formation of Re:Commanders, but my blabbering right now means you might have already gotten tired just from reading even before I even got started with that.
General Personal MTG History
I've started playing MTG in 2004, simply by walking into a Champions of Kamigawa Prerelease event (back then in my area and many more to my knowledge, Prereleases were not LGS-sized, they were like mini-Grand Prix events held at convention areas or similar spaces). For the first few years I was largely a casual player only playing Prerelease events, then I started also playing other FNM-level Limited events as I started moving into the LGS scene (although I was still pretty much a casual).
Years later (2009), my only "serious" constructed stint was Alara-Zendikar Standard (where I played Jund), but my highest/only achievement is being in the Top 8 of the Worldwake Game Day at a LGS (and probably did win some regular FNMs, but who remembers?) I knew I wouldn't get actually serious as I didn't like the rotational nature of Standard, so I always knew I was only in it for that season. It was mostly to see how it felt to be a serious player for a while.
Nearing the end of that stint (basically around the later 6 months of 2010) it did start feeling empty for a while, as Legacy wasn't really a thing locally then (and I wasn't in a position to get in either, having started the game during the Modern-frame era and wasn't willing to splurge out for a relatively less-played format compared to standard back then) and Modern wasn't even an actual thing. Extended (an official 7-year rotating format that existed before, for those who never heard of it) wasn't appealing for the same reasons Standard was, although I did keep a mind to keep my enemy fetchlands in case I changed my mind (and that paid off obviously).
That was when I heard of EDH, which my earliest impression was basically "Legacy but singleton with much more variance so you don't need/have to splurge on pre-modern cards" and honestly that was appealing. But at that point, my own experience was Limited and 60-card and the complexity of the deck building felt daunting. Fortunately, it was also that time WotC caught on to the format and announced the first precons, and I made my decision to wait for those decks to start the format, and when they came out in the middle of 2011, I started my EDH journey with my Mirror Mastery precon.
The Beginnings of Re:Commanders (& Budget Disclaimer)
In mid-2015, when the Tarkir block had wrapped up, I started feeling the fatigue of constantly building, disassembling, and then rebuilding EDH decks, which was what I was basically doing for the 4 years since I've started playing the format. It was then I decided that with my 11 years of experience across different formats, including 4 within this format that I could reasonably establish a suite of decks with archetypes I know I enjoy and maintain those decks moving forward without the need to ever build new ones again.
I also took this as an opportunity to streamline my bloating 11-year collection (Magic player is a cardboard hoarder, surprise!). I've always seen the higher-end players blinging their decks and couldn't justify it myself for rotating formats, but I could justify it for this "retirement" plan of decks. I would generally lose a bit out on direct/indirect trades especially when I had to deal with player-shop trades, but I had the quantity, so as long as I was patient and observed the secondary market sort of like an "investor" (but on a personal level and still as a hobby, so I didn't need to min-max-penny-pinch), I could still essentially convert my quantity of cards to valuable bling while incurring minimal costs. And that's what I did and honestly am still doing to this day (this is how slow and patient it has to be).
I take this chance to disclaim that my decklists contain a lot of powerful options that certainly aren't budget at any given time a reader is reading them, it's not like I set the deck up and bought them all in a single day, I was already sitting on a pretty bloated collection (alongside with a basic skeletal structure of my decks) when I started out on Re:Commanders and years of partially calculated opportune trades transformed a bulk of my collected chaff into even more bling-power to what it is today (and it isn't even complete by any means).
The purpose of my guides is to establish an understanding of what role a card plays in the deck and while I might be using the upper-end of what's available for that role, anyone who understands that role should be able to look for their own substitute for that role from their own budget/collection. The game just keeps growing and the market changing, I can't account for every card/change, so I do not intend to provide "budget" options in my guides. I consider the success of my guides is to establish the understanding the role of a card within the deck, in which afterwards they need to find their own alternatives in this ever-growing/changing game.
Looking Back
Hold on a minute, I mentioned starting out EDH in 2011 and Re:Commanders in 2015, but what about the 4 years of building & playing in between? Truth be told, this thread isn't going to be going to be going in detail about that. Many of the Re:Commander decks are successors of some kind (direct, indirect or spiritual) to the many decks I've build and disassembled during that 4-year period and it's much better to discuss those links in their respective threads (and I've got to leave something for the deck's history section, because their history within the context of the Re:Commanders section is covered here due to their interconnections).
However, to give a clearer picture of what state I was in around the time I started planning for Re:Commanders, here's a list of brief list decks I've built across that period with their general archetype in parenthesis. I did not build two decks of the same color identity at any given same time, so multiple Commanders in the same identity meant I moved from one Commander to another (sometimes directly, sometimes after dissembling the previous deck and waiting a while), with no specific timeframes here (covered in the respective threads).
: Animar, Soul of Elements (Battlecruiser)
: Thraximundar, Lord of Tresserhorn (Tribal)
: Teneb, the Harvester, Karador Ghost Chieftain (Reanimator)
: Kresh the Bloodbraided (Punisher)
: Sen Triplets (Control)
: Narset, Enlightened Master (Control/Combo)
: Zurgo Helmsmasher, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death (Aggro/Voltron)
I've also played the 2014 precons unmodified with friends, as that was the only year I bought all the precons (under the justification that mono-colored cards can easily fit in multicolored, but not vice-versa).
The Color Conundrum
Looking at my deck-building history list, it is plain as day I only had played with 3-colored decks (the precon experience being mostly self-contained) up to that point. In fact my lack of experience with non tri-colored decks after playing with the precons was a major reason I started contemplating about having to establish a suite of decks that takes into account a balance of the number of "number-of-colors" decks I had. I always knew two-colored decks and even mono-colored decks weren't terrible, it was just I was so used to the flexibility of three I never really could bring myself to build a two-colored deck when building spontaneously.
First was the total number of decks I wanted to "retire" with. It wasn't actually eight initially. It was seven, mostly because I could remember from the Harry Potter series that "Seven is a strong Magical number", but because I also felt it was the loose-guess of a reasonable number to manage the number of archetypes I knew I enjoyed and would continue to do so while also filling in archetypes I didn't enjoy as much but didn't dislike, so that there was also variety.
I knew they all couldn't be three-colored decks, and after some quick pondering I found out that planned combinations of three three-colored decks could account for 8 color-pairings being represented (it's not possible to cover 9 color pairings with it, you can try for yourself) with one overlap. This meant there would be two color-pairings unaccounted for, and that's when it fit perfectly into my plan that running 3 three-colored decks and 2 two-colored decks would cover all color pairings (almost) perfectly (one overlap was acceptable).
The second major discovery was the combination of 3 three-colored decks and 2 two-colored decks would also represent each individual color 3 times… with the exception of 2 colors, which are represented twice (results vary on which initial combination of tri-colored decks you used). This meant an addition of two mono-colored decks of those two colors would mean each color is represented exactly three times in the suite.
It was then I was fully convinced this plan would go forward perfectly. 3 tri-colored decks, 2 two-colored decks and 2 mono-colored decks was a nice balance and the result of each individual color represented thrice and each color pairing represented once (with only one represented twice) for a total of 7 decks was the formula I was looking for. Not mathematically perfect and I had to make minor concessions, but it came together vastly better than I would have imagined.
The Re:Commanders Color Balance Formula
But the real issue only began after figuring that formula out, what three-colored decks I wanted the most and how I could plan to mix the archetypes into decks with less colors than I was used to in my 4 years prior. I did not give any examples for my formula above (because I know I'll go off-tangent), so I'm going to use the actual historical process as it, you are free to experiment on your own.
You could technically start off with a mono-colored or two-colored deck first (especially if you already have a favorite deck you know you want in), but generally it's much easier to start planning the tri-colored decks first so the process of elimination is easier to visualize. Any tri-colored deck essentially represents 3 color pairings within itself. For me, Animar was my flagship I was never going to let go, so I started off like this.
Pairings represented: , ,
Color representation chart:
My strongest contenders for the second tri-colored deck were either Abzan (reanimation) or Grixis (zombies). To simplify matters I'm not going down the alternative path with examples. In the end Abzan won out and the data now looks like this:
Pairings represented: , , , , ,
Color representation chart:
At this point the restrictions became obvious. I was only allowed one overlap and there was only one enemy pairing left (). Whichever choice I made for the third tri-color deck must be of a combination that consists of two of the four missing pairings I lacked (, , , ) and would overlap one pairing (which I have to provide a concession), this meant my only options were Esper (overlapping ), Grixis (overlapping ), Jeskai (overlapping ) and Mardu (overlapping ).
Any choice would result in 2 two-color pairings left, and those would immediately serve as the two-colored decks of the suite. For simplicity's sake again, I would proceed with my actual choice of Mardu.
Pairings represented: , , , x2, , , ,
Color representation chart:
My missing pairings were Azorius and Dimir, so that automatically fills into the Color representation chart (the pairings representation being completed, I will stop listing):
That leaves and as my mono-colored decks. Fun fact: because of my decision of my first two tri-colored decks having used up all color pairings with in them and locking the choice for the third deck to be unable to overlap a pairing with in it, I basically doomed myself to a deck regardless.
Other Ways to Approach the Formula
There's a myriad of ways to approach the formula even when only starting out with two tri-colored decks. I went with a path of two Wedges that didn't overlap pairings and ended up with these restrictions (and if you started out with two Shards that didn't overlap the restrictions are similar). It's possible to go with two Shards or Wedges that share an overlap, or a Shard and a Wedge without overlap, or also a Shard and a Wedge with an overlap and you'll end up with a slightly different set of restrictions. But ultimately as long as you keep by these restrictions, the overall formula ends up the same, 3 tri-colored decks, 2 two-colored decks and 2 mono-colored decks representing all color pairings at least once and all individual colors thrice.
Outside of that, starting out with a two-color deck would mean none of the tri-colored decks can involve the color pairing already taken, as the overlap must be between two tri-colored decks, and not between a tri-colored deck and a two-colored deck (as three tri-colored decks will always overlap).
Starting out with a mono-colored deck would present too many strategies for me to reliably discuss, so the only simplest one I can offer is to reverse engineer my results and go with two Shards or Wedges that use up all the color pairings that involve your mono-color of choice so you're essentially locked for the mono-color you want to use.
The Archetype Divisions
I skipped the actual decision-making process in order to simplify presentation of the formula mathematically (so I wouldn't side-track explaining every color-combination decision due to its archetype in the middle of explaining how the color-balancing formula plays out), but in reality I had to think about this section in tandem with the color-balancing in order to get to where I am.
The shortlist of decks I've built in the years prior to Re:Commanders also pretty much cover the archetypes I was interested in (and enjoy enough to know I want a deck of that type). The process of elimination was fairly simple and I feel the details would be better suited in the individual threads so you could see why the decks are the successors they are, but I would leave a brief summary here of the general order of decisions.
Animar was the flagship and secured a tri-colored position for Battlecruiser as my starting point.
The debate over the second tri-colored spot was between my Reanimator and Zombies. The deciding factor was that I was more favorable of the possibility of my Zombie deck potentially going down a color to fill a two-colored deck slot than my Reanimator doing so, hence I let Reanimator take the second slot.
I've played all 4 tri-colored combinations I've locked myself into (pretty convenient, but sometimes life does line things up nicely for you). I had the opportunity to still put my Zombies in, but considering my remaining other choices were basically my aggro and control/combo decks and I was less confident about the idea of having both of them downgrade a color, it basically ensured my Zombie deck would be one of my two-colored decks, being . This in turn further locked down my options to either Jeskai (Control/Combo) or Mardu (Aggro) as Esper would not provide an opening I now preferred.
After some pondering I decided my Aggro strategy needed the support of more colors more than my Control/Combo did (I'm good at neither, to be honest) and so I consolidated my choices to Mardu (Aggro) as my third tri-colored deck and having to focus my control into the remaining pairing of Azorius.
This left with me with and as my mono-color decks, and with no real archetypes to succeed either. Fortunately around the time I was deciding to "downgrade" my Zombies I toyed with the idea of building a deck around my technical first Legendary creature I owned, which was the Champions of Kamigawa Prerelease Ryusei, the Falling Star to fill the mono-colored problem, but I didn't really emphasize on it. When the pieces fell into place with my Mardu/Azorius decision, it definitely didn't long to jump on this idea. The deck loosely spiritually succeeds my Kresh punisher attempt due to its double-edged nature, but otherwise is pretty much its own thing.
I knew I was doomed to have a deck from the moment I made the Abzan decision, and its story is a pretty interesting one and separate enough from the whole Re:Commander creation process (outside of being locked-in from almost the start) that I think it's better told in its own thread.
The Eighth Deck
Wait, the formula makes sense and all that, but Re:Commanders consists of eight decks, not seven. The loose-guess-estimate led me to the nice formula, but about a month after loosely establishing the seven decks, I felt that a theme I dropped from the deck deserved a chance and that eight decks made for a much better divisible number. I obviously didn't want to drop the formula I spent months planning and finally getting together, so the restriction was simple – it either has to be colorless or five-colored. As it was a pretty separate process with history to only one other deck in the suite, I've also left its history within its own thread.
As a side note, when I started planning for Re:Commanders, 4-colored decks weren't existent yet, but I did briefly think forward about the future possibility. My conclusion was that it was not worth it because it was close enough to 5-colored decks that I would just build a 5-colored deck and the statistical work of calculating color balance with (then-future-potential) 4-colored decks wasn't worth the work (and if I wanted representation of all tri-colored combinations the number of decks I needed across the board would exceed what I would've liked and at that point might as well just go down a full 32 all-combination suite instead, which I explicitly didn't want for myself, blinging 7/8 decks is as tedious as it already is). That was also a minor factor why I was also pretty enthusiastic about making the eighth deck as five-colored, as it could cover the 4-colored as a whole if they came out (which they did, but they couldn't fit the theme, but I felt that nothing was lost as the eighth deck already picked up a leftover theme I wanted pretty successfully already).
The Re:Commanders Vision
So now you've gotten the general geist of how I've formed essentially all of my decks. Due to the nature of them being formed (almost) together, they also generally follow a set of rules that define a Re:Commanders deck. I could argue that they're all "75%" decks to some degree.
High-Powered Cards - Due to my meta being high-powered with cEDH players sprinkled in and myself having a pretty wide collection of cards (that I also consciously trade-on-opportunity), Re:Commanders deck often contain a lot of high-powered, cEDH-worthy cards that can be easily deemed unaffordable to the random viewer seeing the guide at any given time. I do not see a need to de-power myself just to write a guide (obviously), nor do I feel the need to feature budget options as those changes with the times, as my focus on presenting the guide is to establish an understanding of what role does a card play in the deck, and the discerning player with the understanding should be able to find their own substitutes for that role within their own budget/collection/time. I merely used my own high-powered example because I have it, nothing more.
Thematic First - They can't be cEDH decks because they aren't completely "just built to win", they're first built thematically, and then built with two distinct functions – first, a way to win within context of the theme, then secondly all decks usually have an infinite outlet (or at least a substantially huge wincon) or combo or some sort because I believe that a deck should always have a way to close the game when the primary plan/theme fails. Even a bland infinite combo used as a last resort is a better game-closer than you durdling an entire game playing Kingmaker/trying to lose last. As much as possible I try to also make sure the infinite combo is on-theme, or at least share some synergy with the deck. On top of that, some of the decks also feature multiple (sub)themes (sort of like a precon), a result of my archetype division/mixing process, which does somewhat lower power-levels, even if I try to find synergies and have my high-power card try to prop up.
Personal Quirks - I have some small aesthetic quirks, the most common easy example being I don't play off-color fetchlands and I don't play ABUR duals because they can't be foiled. A lot of these small factors go a ways to lower the power level of my decks in small doses. I also try to diversify card options across decks, so while there are staples I play across all decks (mostly colorless artifacts and lands), I try to keep a variety of colored cards (and for those I don't I even try to get different art/frames to compensate) across my decks. If some colored staple feels missing, that's likely because it's housed in another deck in the suite I felt was just better for it (or I just lack it in my collection, I don't have everything, after all).
Tutors - I don't shy away from tutors (although they're the most subjected to the diversity rule). This combined with the combo aspect does really ramp it up to feel close to cEDH levels (and almost certainly pubstomping in the wrong cases), but ultimately I built the deck for me, myself as the pilot. The Commander RC has a policy of "build casually, play competitively", but due to my wide-range meta (that can contain anywhere from new players to cEDH players depending on time), I adopted a custom formula – "Build enough to face competitive opponents but without abandoning the theme, then play accordingly to the table in question". My decks are designed that they should have at least the chance to tutor-into-combo to at least have a realistic chance at cEDH tables (multiplayer though, it's substantially harder in 1v1), but in casual games can have a thematic game-plan (that turns the tutors into just consistency-draw and the combo to a last resort, hence my closer-policy). The tutors are to smooth the theme progression the same way the RC views that many typical broken combo cards can be played fairly.
In a Nutshell
This is my vision on how a singular deck can be flexible both-ways (hence "75%") without having to simply have multiple decks specifically catered for each kind of table (despite actually having multiple decks). I'm aware some people feel like it's an insult to not "play at maximum" at a table, but I just don't see that way, I have a thematic way to (attempt to) win that's not too far above the casual table and my combos are now my last resort game-closers, something I see purely-casual tables lack and end up being a game of too-much-politics-and-kingmaking compared to Magic played when thematic plans fall apart, while tutors are the epitome of flexibility that can be either used to smooth the theme or assemble the combo depending on the table in question.
Re:Commanders may be a suite of decks, but I didn't want a deck to be substantially weaker/stronger just to meet at an LGS table. All eight decks are designed in a way to form a "Constructed Cube" and can play against each other at roughly the same level, provided communication was done beforehand (internally it has to, because I own the whole cube). But individually when one deck brought to the LGS I believe the Re:Commanders "75%" formula is also the incentive for you to at least identify the table power-level through at least the minimal amount of communication and adapt accordingly, or if you don't communicate, play at a lower level first, observe the game and you can get your information whilst still playing a deck that can adapt to it.
Flavoring
I didn't mention this in the general personal history, but I was a pretty big Vorthos in my earlier, more-active years of Magic. I always have a soft spot for Kamigawa, being my first plane/story and was fascinated greatly by Eldrazi, all reflected in my deck choices/preferences (a deck led by my first Legendary card and loosely themed around the plane and my flagship Commander being one of the easiest ways to cast Eldrazi Titans for free).
But I recognized that it's likely a Commander deck cannot abide by pure Vorthos accuracy, especially when my meta is pretty quick on the arms-races with some cEDH players sprinkled in. So I do not abide by Magic flavor for my own decks ironically and each deck is loosely coated with flavor of other forms of entertainment I enjoy (so I can take the loose associations a bit better), which is my case, is mostly Anime/Manga. Yes, I don't actually take Western Fantasy as my default genre of entertainment, I still enjoy it of course, and MTG is actually a big driver in the genre for me as far as I'm concerned, but the bulk of my entertainment still comes from the East (and yes, mostly Japan).
Re:Commanders itself is no exception, it was loosely flavored after an Anime called Re:Creators. That show was about an event causing fictional characters to manifest in the real world and the inevitable conflict in both between the creations and also between them and their creators (would you create a Crapsack World if you knew you're actually causing something you created to suffer?) I liked the idea that multiple creations from different works could act as a parallel to multiple EDH decks led by multiple Legendary Creatures that by right, shouldn't come into contact with each other to begin with.
And so that's what I chose to coat this suite of decks with. The design aesthetics of the banners are also loosely based on the opening of the Anime (and its openings serve as the united theme song of all 8 decks together). I enjoy the flavor I cobbled together for myself no less than the ones the game itself provides and I also do hope you find some finesse in it as well.
For those who can view videos (disclaimer that it's safer to assume every link is NSFW than vice-versa so make sure you're in your safest environment before pressing any links), the Anime/my decks in a music-video nutshell:
Just in case someone points it out, yes, the Anime only came out in 2017 (with no original source material) and I started this suite in 2015 and I'll just state the obvious it didn't always had this name, I just loosely called it something like "Project EDH" for the first few years when I wasn't even sure it was going to work out anyway. The flavoring just arrived at an opportune time when I felt the project could be called a success and deserved the coating (and since then has stuck, considering I also have banners made for Commanders that have lost favor within the system).
Closing
And that brings us to the close of what is basically an introductory thread for Re:Commanders as a whole. The major reason this thread exists is because I would have felt the bulk of this introduction would have been necessary for each individual deck thread, but at the same time it would have been an overwhelming bulk of information that's redundant on a reading of a second deck thread because they all share so much in this particular point of origin and it isn't exactly a short paragraph of words with all its formulas and what-not. Hence my decision to create this thread and have every individual deck thread re-direct here instead for their history in relation to the suite as a whole.
Afterword
In addition to being the point of shared history, this thread moving forward will also serve as my own reviews for new cards/sets of MTG, as nowadays I only view cards through the lens of how they would fare in my decks, as I no longer play any other formats and am unlikely to greatly shift the balance I've established for this suite either.
To respect those who do not partake in spoilers, I've decided to only publish reviews earliest on the Pre-release weekend of a set. Yes, it's called Pre-release, but that's the point most people who shun spoilers would have encountered the new cards, with it being the premier Limited-format event for a set and especially with how much product push WotC has moved forward to Pre-release anyway. Pretty much anyone who skipped Prerelease for Release are most likely just waiting for the premier products and likely already gone through the full spoilers themselves already.
That being said, it's more probable I'm late or don't even show up for a set review as I've honestly been distancing myself from the game for about two years before the pandemic happened (so around 2018) and the pandemic just meant an extended break I didn't actually mind too much.
