When a Deck Lives (and When it Dies)

(A minimalist philosophy on deck-keeping)

Disclaimer: This article applies philosophical mumbo-jumbo to my preferred way of keeping decks around. There is no right way, and whatever way you like is right for you… but I appreciate it if you take the 7m 42s it takes to read this article to understand my point of view! Ultimately, this is taking a game that people play for fun way too seriously… but that’s sort of what you asked for if you are reading articles about EDH, isn’t it? Look yourself in the mirror and tell yourself otherwise, I dare you.

Edit from the future: The Commander’s Sphere made a really good video on this topic.

This is not something I’ve been asked about a lot, but it’s something I wanted to write about more exhaustively… since I always end up mentioning it in Reddit posts about the 32 deck challenge.

But basically, I want to talk about my deck-building process a bit - or, more accurately, my deck-keeping habits.

All that lives, moves…

I once heard a philosophy about life that goes something like this: “In Buddhism, perfection is death: life is characterized by growth and change, and being perfect means you cannot grow anymore, you have nowhere to go, nothing better to change to… you are dead.”

Is this something that a Buddhist monk ever said? Maybe, who knows… I’m not here to teach you how to find inner peace. But I find that idea to be somewhat central to how I think about life (and also deck building). Change is not a part of life, change IS life. From the myriad chemical reactions in our bodies to the shifting of perspectives and mindsets caused by the way new experiences and lessons change us, things that are alive tend to continue to change. Stagnation is like death. This shows up in our physiology too; atrophy is the wasting of your body when you fail to use it.

So too does my interest in a deck deteriorate when the deck isn’t kept alive through changes, upgrades, tinkering, and an amount of play. Perhaps that’s why I’m often hesitant to hold onto decks that don’t change. I enjoy the thought and process of moving pieces around, trying new things, looking at cards from a new set, and thinking “does this change X? Can I do Y better with this?” The moment I stop asking those questions is the moment my interest in a deck drops significantly. I consider myself an innovator, not a honer so having nothing new to try out feels like a loss. Perhaps it’s a bit too weird and philosophical to apply something like this to something that is fundamentally a hobby people use to eat up free time and hang out with friends… but I wouldn’t be the first to apply such strange theories to a game.

The Story of Robert Dunbar

Robert Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British anthropologist who spent a good portion of his life studying primate behavior. Though he is currently still the head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford, he is best known for proposing something called the Dunbar’s Number in 1990 (It’s named after him - not the other way around).

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Supposedly, this number is between 100 and 250, with the commonly used value of 150 being frequently cited. In other words, the average human can only maintain stable social relationships with about 150 other people. Though what constitutes a “stable social relationship” may cause some amount of debate, what’s clear is that our neocortex does limit the amount of socialization we can do, and the number of things we can keep in our heads.

Decks aren’t people, that much is certain… but many people like to treat decks as special in some ways. For this reason, I suggest that there’s a sort of Dunbar’s Number to the number of decks that you can actively play and maintain. One way to think about this effect is that when a new set comes out and you look through all the cards, how many decks can you actively consider the cards for? Not just “Oh this would be good in a Purphoros deck.” That’s not actively considering the card for and knowing how the card relates to the other cards. More along the lines of “Maybe I could put this in my Purpheros deck if I took X out of it, but then maybe I’d want to run Y instead of Z because it synergizes with it.”

At least for me, I’ve found the number of decks I can keep for active consideration relatively slim… but I’m sure the exact number changes based on things like how much time you have to think about magic, how many times a week you get to play magic, etc.

Minimalism and a life worth living (or a game worth playing).

Alright so now I’ve established a little bit about my deckbuilding habits. I keep only a few decks around and have a minimalist approach - fewer decks can accomplish more. Minimalism in real life is not that far off. Less is more. Using the simplest and fewest elements to the maximum effect will go farther than cluttering your life with distractions and other moving pieces… and will allow you to better focus on what matters.

Materialistically speaking, Minimalism is about owning only what adds value and meaning to your life - anything else you own is extra weight, extra clutter. Mentally, it’s about the same, removing clutter from all aspects of your life to, again, have fewer distractions and focus on what’s important, and get more out of it… including getting more out of your day to day life because:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

– Annie Dillard

And in the same way, how you spend your games is how you spend your EDH career. Are you constantly tilted? Are you playing so many different things in one session that you can’t really focus on any of them to gain the skills you need to play them? To get the enjoyment and value that comes out of being attached to them and giving them TLC? Are you hoarding so many decks that you don’t get to play them enough, spend too much money on them, or that they are relegated to collecting dust?

It’s here that I like to talk about the sunk-cost fallacy:

Sunk-Cost Fallacy:

(also known as: argument from inertia, concorde fallacy, finish the job fallacy)

Description: Reasoning that further investment is warranted on the fact that the resources already invested will be lost otherwise, not taking into consideration the overall losses involved in the further investment.

I’d say that one thing that keeps people away from minimalism (myself included) is the sunk cost fallacy. You already bought this item, so you have to keep it around or the cost is lost. You already bought this deck, spent a bunch of time and energy on it, if you don’t keep the deck around then you lose out on that time and energy. But that’s fundamentally flawed thinking - life isn’t about accumulated possessions, it’s about accumulated experiences. Learning the lesson of what you need or don’t need, what you want or don’t want, what works for you or what doesn’t… is more important than having an object.

Further, holding onto this gameplay that isn’t working can be a source of new problems. Just like a desk trinket you didn’t need can clutter your desk or even get in the way, holding onto a deck can have some issues. Let’s say you spend 200$ on a deck only to not like it. You have two options: You can scrap the deck and do something new, or you can stay the course, potentially wasting more money upgrading the deck… and games playing the deck when you could spend those games playing something you find more fun.

The Practicality of a 32 deck challenge

As you may know from last week’s article, I have built nearly 200 commanders and have played every color combination (except Naya - I did play a Naya precon once, but I never built a Naya deck myself). There’s a lot of good and fun experience that comes from building a lot of different stuff… but what comes from keeping 32 decks around? Like, physically, in person?

Let’s start by talking about how often you get to play the decks. For me, a month is a long time, so let’s assume we want to play a deck at least once a month. Since a month has just about 30 days. Simple math can conclude we’d have to play at least one game a night (on average) and then a few extras to make up the extra 2 or so. I don’t know about you, but I don’t necessarily get to play Commander that often… also, sometimes I want to play a deck multiple times in a row.

Ok, so what if we loosen our standards? I want to play a deck at least once a year. With 32 decks, and 365 days a year… well, we’d have to play a game once every 11 days. The good news, if you’re satisfied playing a deck once a year, is that’s not difficult to achieve.

Let’s put this in reverse. If your commander group meets once a week and plays 2 games on average… then you can play about 104 games in a year. With 32 decks, assuming you play each deck an even number of times, you’d play each deck just about 3 times. 3 times a year! Wild!

I can’t speak for my friend in the æther, but for me when I spend 200$ or more on a new deck, 3 times a year (or even 6 times a year) feels like a terrible ROI (return on investment).

The Burial

So what do I do when a deck dies? To start with, I only keep around 4-6 decks “active” at a given time. If a deck feels dead to me, it might sit in that active category until I decide what to do with it. While it’s still active, I may evaluate if I can keep it “alive” with a revamp, or if it’s time to let it go. Letting it go presents me with a choice:

• Retire it, and let it gather dust

  • This is what I do with decks I have a love for, but that have glaring problems - like my Kozilek deck, which is strong and I love Eldrazi, but it’s a bit too straightforward.

  • At the time of writing, I have 6 retired decks.

• Dismember it so its pieces can better serve Phyrexia elsewhere.

  • Take it apart, sort the pieces back into my collection, etc.

  • The best part about this is that you still have the parts around, so you don’t actually “lose” any money. You can always rebuild it later and… throughout my time playing this game I’ve found that the longer you hold onto parts the more they suddenly go up in value.

Burn some incense if you like. Maybe some sage to keep the demons away. But that’s it. Either I retire or re-use.

So what decks do I keep now?

Since I keep a few decks, it might interest you to see what decks I have at the time of writing (in the future, you can see what few decks I currently still have by checking my public decks on moxfield). I have five “active” decks divided into two categories. When I label a deck as active (and complete its primer) is when it will be listed as “public” on my Moxfield.

“Core” decks. These are the decks I am really focused on and am enjoying:

• Tatsunari “Ninjutsu”

• Toshiro “Bushido”

• Selvala turbofog lifegain - I really like the sub-themes but giving opponents value is scary and I don’t have a lot of good wincons

“Peripheral” decks, which are still active but which I hope to dismantle/rework soon:

• Lier “cold control” (get it? Like “cruel control”) - I hope to continue to have a cold control deck in the future, and I’d love to focus more on summoning Marit Lage, I just am not sure this is how I want it to be built

• Stitcher Geralf - a classic old and fun deck that has glaring issues but that I always end up going back to. Maybe this is a candidate for retirement rather than dismemberment.

Alright… next we have the retired decks.

• Thraxiumundar reanimator - fun but straightforward and its power level is weirdly high or low at a whim, making it hard to match with a group

• Sai thopters - consistent but often too straightforward

• Kozilek, Great Distortion - cool and fun, but also straightforward

• 50$ budget Alibou - was 50$ when I built it

• 50$ budget Gloom Summoner - was 50$ when I built it

• 50$ budget Octavia - was 50$ when I built it

• 2x Brothers Yamazaki lists - for two-headed giant play with each other only

There it is all the decks I have put together (retired and active). And the summary of why I keep only a few decks around. Let me know: Do you have a ton of decks? Do you keep a few? How often do you actually get to play your decks?