Flubs, the FoolFlubs, the Fool | Art by Adam Rex

Hello, and welcome to How To Be New, the series where I give advice to new players, from a new player. If you’re here because you’ve never played Magic before but you saw the new TifaTifa card and now find yourself in the middle of a 15-hour Magic researching fugue state, go get some sleep! For the rest of you, welcome in. Today we're talking about how to cut cards from your Commander deck when you have more than 100.

Ok, so, let me start with an anecdote. My friend, very graciously, gave me a copy of Flubs, the FoolFlubs, the Fool when he found out I was getting into Commander. He was right to do so. I fell in love instantly. All the fun of playing Magic without all the confusion of having to make decisions?? That sort of thing’s perfect for a guy like me.

So I went into my collection that weekend. I have a lot of random bulk from various other dalliances with Magic in my past, including a full collection of the Fallout precons, so I had a lot to work through. Obviously I wanted things that would support landfall, since Flubs let me play extra lands. I also decided I wanted to do +1/+1 counters, since I saw that recommended for Flubs decks somewhere online. And obviously I wanted some things to help play cards from exile, since that synergizes very well with Flubs’ card draw ability.

By the time I got all of my candidates together, I was at over 200 cards. Not including lands. In what was going to be a landfall deck.

At least a couple of these had to go.

But which ones? How could I bear to cut any of my new friends? I had read every single one of these cards and imagined the dream scenario in which they would single-handedly win me the game. Now how could I possibly be expected to relegate some, or even most of them, back into the disorganized maelstrom which roils inside the big white box next to my desk? It’s scary in there. It’s certainly not the kind of place for Lily Bowen, Raging GrandmaLily Bowen, Raging Grandma. As my elder, she deserves my respect.

I ran into this constantly when I was beginning my Commander journey. There’s just so many fun Magic cards which can support all kinds of different plans. But you need to sit down at the table with just 100 of them. Here’s how I learned to do that.

Step 1: Start With a Guide

There are so many excellent guides out there for how to set up your Commander deck. They’re fantastically helpful when determining how many lands to run, how much removal, how many mana artifacts, etc. So which one should you choose?

There’s an extremely easy answer: any of them. Absolutely any of them will be fine. These are great places to start when building your deck, but will absolutely differ from deck to deck and from player to player. So just find one to look at and start setting your deck up using those numbers. For this guide, we’ll be using this one that The Command Zone recently put together. Do I agree with every part of it? No. And that’s why it’s a perfect place to start.

Step 2: Add the Lands

This guide wants you to run 38 lands. I’ve heard many other players say that's a great target number. It will absolutely ensure that from your opening draw, you should have enough lands to not miss any land drops and be able to do all of the wonderful things you want your deck to do.

Step 3: Don’t Touch The Lands

Set those lands far away. Face down. Don’t look at them. Have your partner or roommate hide them from you if need be. Don’t touch those things. Consider them a foundational cornerstone of your deck. Put a post it note on your desk with “38” written on it so you don’t forget the number and move on to the rest of the guide. You’re going to want a good read on how the cards in your deck play together, and in order to do that, you’ll have to actually play them. So just go with a little more mana than you think you might need, at least for your first couple of games.

Step 4: Fill In the Rest of the Guide

Go through and, to the best of your collection's ability, follow the guide you’re using to the letter. Do exactly what it instructs you to do. As you’re going through, do you feel like 10 mana rocksmana rocks are too much for your three-cost commander? Are you building a group hug deck and feel like maybe 18 disruption cards will sort of counteract what you’re trying to do at the table? Good. Those are useful feelings to have. Keep those with you as you fill out the nonland cards in your deck to the specifications in your guide of choice.

Step 5: One In, One Out

Now that you’ve got a sense for your whole deck, start to make some of those changes you were leaning towards before. But do it on a one in, one out basis. You can cut one card to swap in one other card. When you start to do this in sweeping moves or go too fast you’ll start to lose count, and soon you’ll find yourself deep in the dregs of everyone’s least favorite deckbuilding activity: counting through a big stack of cards (and then having it come up different when you do it again). Slow and steady wins the race here.

Take into consideration what you want in your deck. Personally, the “Plan Cards,” as they’re listed here, are my favorite part of EDH deckbuilding, and I have a really hard time keeping those down to just 30. So I’ll usually cut some disruption, and possibly some ramp, to fit in some of those cards that bring me joy every time I draw them. And what’s more, at this point, I don't know what’s going to be good yet! So I’m going to include everything I might want to try out and deal with the consequences later.

Step 6: Cut a Couple Lands, as a Treat

Look, 38 lands sounds really great, but I almost always go a little lower. If you’re playing, for example, Boros () or like to live dangerously (Izzet, ), you can definitely cut a few. You’ve been very good so far, you deserve a little bit of self care. After all, if you draw dry in a game, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself!

Step 7: Play The Deck

The most important step in this process is actually going to the game store and trying the deck out! Getting it out on the table is the only way you’ll be able to evaluate which cards should stay or go. It’s sometimes useful even to goldfish it (this is stolen advice from Am I The Bolas, and it means dealing yourself a hand and playing by yourself on your own table, just to see how things might shake out in a real game), maybe even more than once.

One other thing I like to do is take a small sideboard with a few cards you wanted to include but didn’t make the cut. Swap them in between games for some cards which seemed underwhelming in the first game. Continue to tinker like this to your heart’s content and baby, you got a Commander deck going!

To close the loop, as we fast forward to about six months from the day where I had to cut about 150 cards for my 100 card Flubs deck, I’d wager that maybe seven or eight of those cards are still there. It’s now a deck I call “Doctor Flubsenstein’s Monster” which seeks to reunite Flubs with his creatorhis creator and win by playing through the rest of the deck. It no longer places +1/+1 counters. It deals some with playing cards from exile. Honestly, even most of the landfall triggers have fallen out. This deck isn't concerned with things like damage or combat. Now it’s a timeless tale about mankind’s yearning for the one thing that cannot be produced in a lab: love.

But you don’t get to tell a whimsical sci-fi tale of tragedy, yearning, and man’s reach exceeding his grasp if you don’t get those 100 cards to the table. So use a guide, try it out, and rework the deck if it isn’t working. Whenever the process gets tiring, start over with a different deck idea.

Congratulations, you’re now a Commander player.