Lessons From A Commander Player: Refining

 Hello everyone! Today we will be discussing revising, and testing decks. These things are very important to be a good player. 

Refining a deck

For some people refining a deck is simple, and to other people, it’s not simple at all. Most decks have cards known as “Filler cards” these cards are just in the deck until you can get better cards to replace them. The easiest way to refine a deck is to find cards that don’t fit exactly the deck's purpose and replace those cards with cards that do fit the deck. For example, replace a vanilla creature like colossapede with a creature like Grunn, The lonely king.

Go through all the cards in the deck and take out all the cards you have as options. From there, decide which you can keep, and which should be replaced. During this process, it is important that you also look at what the deck's focus is, for example, I have a graveyard deck so I know that my deck would be more creature heavy than everything else. However, if you are playing a deck that counters everything then you would want more instants and sorceries with creatures being a lesser role of the deck.

Testing the New and Improved deck

Testing a deck is quite simple. Find a group of players that wish to play. After you find some people to play against it would be a good thing to tell them that you are testing a deck. 

Test the deck a good 8-10 times, if there’s a big problem within the deck then it will show up during most of these games. 

The problems you encounter should then be recorded. Then you can review the issues you ran into and try to adjust and optimize the deck. For example, you might find your deck's land balance is incorrect and you didn't have enough lands, you can fix this issue by either adding more lands/mana sources or adding in things that can fetch you lands and help you ramp up. 

(Remember decks will always have problems, we can only do our best to keep those problems in check.) 

Each deck will test at its own pace and have its own problems. Some problems will occur more than others of course. The smaller problems are manageable, but the bigger problems can bring your deck down into the ground.

Keeping Track

Most people will see this as useless or not needed, however, I find this a helpful way to keep track of my decks and each of their purposes, weaknesses, strength, etc. 

There are many ways to keep track, but the way I like to keep track is by having a binder in my room that consists of a notebook and a pencil. I have the notebook in two sections labeled modern and EDH. This is where I put each version of my deck and all the notes on my deck. 

A player that I’ve grown to call a friend gave me the advice to test play my deck ten times and if I run into a problem consistently then write that down on that deck's profile. (I do this for all my decks, yes, it is time-consuming, but it is worth it. It also helps if some ask what the deck does or for the decklist you can easily show it to them. I love my binder and I bring it to my lgs whenever I go.)

 I also record information about my opponents' decks, what cards to look out for, what colors it is, what the deck is based around, and information like also just random notes.