(Gishath, Sun's Avatar | Art by Sidharth Chaturvedi)

Friendly greetings and welcome back to Digital Deckbuilding; the series demonstrating online resources to improve the deckbuilding process. I'm John Sherwood, your designated cardboard paleontologist. In the fourth installment of Digital Deckbuilding, I give new life to a fossilized deck using various filters on EDHREC and Archidekt.

The recent release of The Lost Caverns of Ixalan inspired me to look back at older Ixalan commanders. Joey Schultz of EDHRECast gave me permission to utilize his Gishath, Sun's Avatar list from Upping the Average for this article. EDHREC data excludes decks older than two years, and this Gishath deck hasn't been updated in over three years. I'm excavating this prehistoric deck and updating it with newly discovered dinos.

Digging up Fossils - New Light on an Old Deck

To get started, I created a copy of Joey's deck on Archidekt using the Copy Deck button on the menu bar. Copying a deck is similar to creating one. The menu allows you to rename the copy, choose a destination folder and toggle the privacy settings.

Archidekt didn't support the companion mechanic at the time Joey made the original deck (it does now!), so I removed Kaheera, the Orphanguard from the commander category and set it as companion.

One of my goals for this deck is to make it less expensive, loosely following Joey's methodology for Upping the Average. After a quick glance at card prices, I settled on a plan open space in both the deck and the budget.

The original deck contains Pyrohemia, an excellent damage source for the deck's seven Dinosaurs with Enrage. Together these eight cards make some potent play patterns, but cutting them reduces the over all deck cost by $90 USD.

Cataloguing Finds - Filtering for Specific Cards

Paleontologists carefully examine and catalogue each layer of substrate and the bits they find. Advanced Filters empower deck builders to dig through EDHREC data in similar fashion. The first layer of the Advanced Filters is a quick sift of the topsoil; With or Without a particular card.

Advanced Filters on an EDHREC Commander Page

Gishath is the apex predator in nearly 16,000 decks. Advanced Filters are an excellent way to clear away the sediment of too much data. On Gishath's deck page, I selected Without, typed "Pyrohemia" in the text box, clicked the "+" button and finally the Filter button. This trimmed the data from 15,927 decks to 13516 decks. Next, I used a "With" filter for a potent new Dinosaur from Lost Caverns of Ixalan: Bonehoard Dracosaur.

This filter reduced the size of my dig site to 2,058 decks, and trimmed out all the decks that hadn't been updated since the release of LCI. Three Dinosaurs roared for my attention in this reduced data sample. Earthshaker Dreadmaw appears in 75% of these decks, indicating a strong approval rate for Colossal Dreadmaw with free card draw. Trumpeting Carnosaur is a better Colossal Dreadmaw, but only appears in 55% of these decks. Pantlaza, Sun-Favored is not a Colossal Dreadmaw, but it is a great inclusion in Gishath's 99.

Plaster the Bones - Reinforcing the Deck Plan

The second Advanced Filter option compares card type or deck price to a chosen number. Filtering this way helps to consolidate the data you see into decks with similar composition. For the Gishath deck in particular, it proved useful in two ways: looking at decks with high creature counts and with similar budgets.

Advanced Filters can sort data by card types or deck price.

The price of the original deck was about $211 USD, so I added an Advanced Filter to view decks with Price < $210. The combination of filters for Pyrohemia, Bonehoard Dracosaur, and deck price trimmed the data set to 125 decks. This focused filter supported my plan to lower the cost of the deck and revealed two newer dinosaurs from other recent sets. Topiary Stomper is Rampant Growth on a dinosaur-shaped stick. Yes please. Tyrranax Rex offers eight power ahead of curve for seven mana, assuming Gishath doesn't just cheat it into play. Also, Toxic 4 has the potential to eliminate an opponent with poison counters.

Lab Study - Archidekt Deck Filter

At this point I cut eight cards from the deck, but only added six. I took my findings back to the lab to figure out what the deck was missing. The Archidekt Deck Filter uses the same Scryfall syntax as Archidekt's other search functions. If you haven't read it already, this a great time for a detour to my first article to learn more about syntax searches. I frequently use the Deck Filter to see effects that appear in multiple card categories. For example: entering the syntax "o:draw" filters the deck page so that only cards with "draw" in the oracle text are visible.

The Deck Filter is found at the top of the Deck Page

Eight card draw effects is probably enough with a commander that cheats creatures into play from the Library. Plus the deck has other forms of card advantage, like impulse draw and Discover. I repeated the process with other common oracle text words to see ramp and interactive effects. The deck contained zero cards with hexproof or protection in the oracle text. Maybe if the Dinosaurs played more board protection, they wouldn't have gone extinct.

More Field Work - Additional Filters

My trip back to the lab yielded some helpful clues, so I geared up for another expedition to Gishath's deck page on EDHREC. This time I used Additional Filters to fill the last two spots in the 99 with protection effects. Gishath is a key piece of the game plan for this deck, so hexproof is an essential deterrent to targeted removal. Gishath already has haste, so hexproof all-stars Lightning Greaves and Swiftfoot Boots are partially redundant. Besides, dinosaurs don't wear shoes. I used Additional Filters, found at the top of the card display, to identify better options.

EDHREC Addtional Filters are located just above main display field.

Although EDHREC mostly displays cards by type, the Additional Filters present some alternatives. For example, the Additional Filter for "Tags" is crowdsourced via Scryfall Tagger. I picked the Protection tag and conveniently filtered the displayed cards down to fourteen applicable options. Ultimately, I chose Tyvar's Stand and Heroic Intervention for their versatility and ran back to Archidekt to clean up.

Dinosaur Taxonomy - Compare Decks

The Compare Decks function of Archidekt is possibly my favorite tool for upgrading decks. I'll do a deep dive into Compare Decks in a future article, but I'm using it briefly here to showcase the changes I made to this deck.

The Deck Comparison is an informative profile of two decks.

All told, the updated deck and the original are still very similar, as I only changed 11% of the cards. Most importantly, I accomplished my two main goals of updating the deck with new dinosaurs and making it more affordable. The price of the finished deck is about $160, a cost saving of $50 compared to the old version. On top of that, the new Dinosaurs give the deck a fresh take on a classic creature type.

Exit through the Gift Shop

I imagine that most paleontologists dream of seeing a specimen they excavated on display in a science museum. I'll settle for putting this Dinosaur deck out there for my fellow deck builders to enjoy. You can see the deck for yourself below, or via the link to Archidekt. Special thanks to Joey Schultz for allowing me to borrow his deck for this article. You can see more of his outstanding contributions to the Commander community on the EDHRECast. Explore the channel and subscribe to see more episodes of Upping the Average!

Tell us in the comments if you know any tricks for using filters on EDHREC and Archidekt, and exit the prehistoric creatures exhibit through the gift shop.

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