Who doesn’t love drawing cards? Drawing cards feels amazing. It scratches that itch for dopamine. It lets you see more of your deck. It draws you into that card you’ve been wanting to play.
Drawing cards, it turns out, solves a lot of problems when it comes to smooth and engaging gameplay. So much so, in fact, that a wide swathe of modern Commanders have card draw stapled onto them, as a reward for simply playing your deck and enacting your gameplan.
Whether you’re running one of these “bowling with the guardrails” Commanders or not, you need to jam plenty of card draw in your deck. Why? Well, because it solves basically any problem your deck might be having.
CARD DRAW HELPS WITH HITTING YOUR LAND DROPS
The “correct” quantity of lands to run in a Commander deck is going to be debated until the end of time. While the technically and math based correct answer is to run as many as 41-42 (which you can go argue with Frank Karsten about), the most common consensus is to run 36, and then either add or subtract a couple of lands depending on your curve, your colors, and the speed of your gameplan.
The most common mistake I see is green decks running 36 or fewer lands, and still expecting to hit their land drops. When you’re running spells that extract lands from your deck – like Three Visits, or Cultivate – you’re reducing the likelihood that you’ll then draw into more lands as the game progresses. If you’re hoping to use green ramp spells and run 34 or fewer lands, you’re going to be in for a bad time.
Ramping alone won’t ensure you’re ahead or at parity on mana as the game progresses, and it’s invariably going to be the decks that draw enough cards that keep hitting their land drops.
Take Land Tax as an example. This thing rarely stays “online” all game, and in fact, the average game I play with it ends up with me ahead or at parity on lands by drawing 6 lands out of my deck with it and just playing them. As early as turn 4-5, people start to miss land drops. Land Tax goes offline even quicker if I drop a Knight of the White Orchid or other catchup effect, and it’s always bothersome to have white’s catchup ramp turned off so quickly due to opponents missing land drops (as an aside, this is why we run lands like Lotus Field, Boros Garrison and Roadside Reliquary in white decks).
If you want to hit your land drops, just make sure you run plenty of card draw. It’ll do more for you than jamming all the variants of Kodama’s Reach and skimping on land counts. Just run 37-39 lands, and run enough card draw, and you’ll not end up doing the “Jimmy Wong”.
HAVING ENOUGH REMOVAL
A common occurrence at Commander tables is nobody having an answer for the threats. While I could go off on one about mulliganing and deckbuilding, instead I’ll keep things within the scope of this article: you aren’t going to draw your removal if you don’t draw any cards, are you?
Think about adding more card draw as analogous to adding more wildcards. While tutors are the true wildcards (because Demonic Tutor can be literally anything you like for two mana), in a casual format that eschews tutors to embrace variance, you’re going to be putting card draw into those shoes. More card draw is more chances at drawing what you want to draw, so in the case of removal, that means chances to draw the interaction you need.
If you combine what you’ve learned about running modal cards with adding more card draw, you’ll begin to feel unstoppable.
My Syr Gwyn deck takes this to the logical endpoint, jamming modal spells into a Sunforger suite that can tutor them out if needed. The deck also has plenty of card draw, though, so hitting Anguished Unmaking, Generous Gift or Stroke of Midnight tends to solve most problems.
And yes, I am excited to add in Inevitable Defeat from Tarkir: Dragonstorm. What a beautifully flexible card.
WRATHS BEING “DEAD” CARDS IN YOUR HAND
One of the most tiresome arguments I hear against running more wraths is that they end up as dead cards in your hand in the late game because you “can’t cast them”. I’ve got news for you champ – a bunch of cards you draw in the late game are “dead cards”. Your ramp doesn’t do much at that stage, and neither do low drop creatures that don’t actively contribute to your win condition. Neither do excess lands, and neither do pieces of win conditions if what you actually need is a board wipe.
The same is true at the start of a game; drawing a six or seven drop early is unwanted, but it doesn’t stop us from running a few in our decks. If this argument seems familiar to you, it’s because it’s the Temple of the False God argument. It’s better to be lucky than good – just run it, and the tiny, tiny percentage of games you get screwed on it are merely confirmation bias. Your deck screws you in many ways, be it flood, screw, or drawing your cards in the wrong order. Shoring up your better games is going to help you more than trying to iron out every single wrinkle.
All of that aside, wraths being a “dead card” in your hand can be circumvented by simply drawing more cards. It’s the same as trying to draw past a clump of land. Just draw more cards.
GETTING TO YOUR WIN CONDITIONS
In order to win a game of Commander, you gotta hit your win conditions. This is much easier if your Commander is part of that win – whether as a combo piece, or as an anthem or overrun effect – and if you’re running tutors. If you’re not, then you gotta both draw the right cards in the right order, and navigate to the mid to late game unscathed enough to deploy your winning synergies.
There are two main ways to increase your chances of hitting your win conditions. The first is to simply run more of them, and run redundancy. If you’re on Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood, you’re also running Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose and Bloodthirsty Conqueror. If you’ve got Sun Titan and Fiend Hunter, you’re also on Karmic Guide and maybe Moorland Rescuer. If you’re making big mana to burn opponents out, you’ll be on Torment of Hailfire and Exsanguinate. You get my point.
The issue with this first approach is that you can only shove so many win conditions into your deck before you start to dilute the quantities of other essential parts of deckbuilding. You’ll have to take slots from ramp, from blockers, from removal… hell, maybe even from card draw.
And therein lies the second way to help you get to your win conditions: card draw. Just add more of it. More card draw means more chances to draw into what you need, it means more chances to see the various pieces you need to assemble, and it means you can cast tutors aside for the boring and linear gameplay that they provide. You can then draw more cards and win the game. Have your cake. EAT IT.
FEELING LIKE YOUR DECK DIDN’T DO ANYTHING
I don’t mind losing a game of Commander, especially when I get to see an opponent’s cool brew pop off. I don’t mind losing because statistically, I should be losing. More than anything else, though, I don’t mind losing when I get to partake in a great back and forth where I contributed to the overall “narrative” of a game.
That’s the thing with Commander – above all else, it’s a social format. Winning and losing isn’t the zero-sum game that it is in other 1v1 formats. You can still have a great time in Commander even if you don’t win. The unique multiplayer aspect of the format means that three or more people have to lose, but on the other side of that coin, that means more people have a chance to vie for the trophy.
I’m happiest losing games of Commander when I feel like my deck “did something”. What that is varies across decks, but by and large, “doing something” can be achieved by – you guessed it – drawing cards. If you draw more cards, you have more options. If you have have more options, there’s a higher chance you can make a relevant play. If you make relevant plays… well, you end up being part of the tapestry of the game, part of the cool story, part of the fun.
There’s nothing worse than playing draw-pass Magic while your friends are drawing cards and dropping two spells or more a turn. So get with the program, and start drawing more cards.
END STEP
Chances are, if you have an issue with your deck, then you can solve it by drawing more cards. The other neat thing about drawing more cards is that it allows you to see more of your deck. This way, you can quicker evaluate what’s working and what isn’t, and quicker figure out what your deck needs to accomplish its goals – and the cards you never seem to want to cast that can be cut to make space.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.