In a top-down model, we have an overview of the system. But, we don’t have any detail for the individual parts. We start with a problem, then we break the problem into parts. Then we break the parts into smaller parts.

Here’s an example:

I like cheating big creatures into play. Using the graveyard is a great way to do that! I am going to build a reanimator deck.

This thought process is top-down. We start with a concept, but no strict way to do it. I could have also decided to play a ramp deck instead. Both ramp and reanimator could have solved my “problem” of cheating big monsters into play.

Concepts are easier to explain if we have a solid example! Let’s make a rough sketch of our deck:

1. A deck that can take advantage of the graveyard.
2. A 100 Euro budget, but has a pathway to become a more powerful deck as I upgrade it.
3. I want to cast big instant/sorcery spells and copy them.
4. My friends play precon/budget decks. I want it to be viable at these tables without being too strong.

We have a pretty bare-bones concept. But it gives us something to start with!

Try to follow along at home. Ask yourself, “What do I want this deck to do?” the process can vary based on the deck. Whether you have an idea locked in, or it’s still vague, hold onto it, and let it guide you.

Some of you might already have a Commander picked.  One of your concepts was, “This card MUST be my commander.” That’s great. For this example, though, I will assume I still do not know what Commander to choose!

Choosing a Commander can be challenging. To help narrow it down, we need to consider our rough sketch and see what cards fill that niche. This is where Scryfall can be a great help! There are over 2000 Commanders in the game. Let’s trim that down.

Graveyard and instant/sorcery spells are important to my idea. Let’s see what Scryfall has for us!

My initial search had around 30 results. A lot of the options have blue or red as central colors. Trimming our list down once more, I am left with 10 options! We can see while they all have the words “graveyard” and “instant”, few are using the grave with purpose!

At this point, we can go one by one and see who fits the deck’s vision. My shortlist is:

Myra the Magnificent

Kess, Dissident Mage

Sevinne, the Chronoclasm

Niv-Mizzet, Supreme

All these commanders are powerful in their own right.

• With that said, five-color Niv-Mizzet Supreme sounds difficult when I am on a budget. Especially when it comes to lands.
• Sevinne, the Chronoclasm has a cool ability, but they do not have a way to interact with the grave out of the box. Batteries are not included with this one.
• Myra the Magnificent is a unique option. The “attraction” mechanic requires playing lots of weaker cards. This deck might hit a glass ceiling. I don’t think it’s worth the price of admission.
• This leaves Kess, the Dissident Mage. They interact with the graveyard immediately. They see play in CEDH. This means power level is not a concern. It’s the perfect fit!

We have a commander to match our vision. Now the hard part. How do we decide on the other 99 cards?

You can follow along with me using the Kess, Dissident Mage deck I built HERE.

When building out an idea for a deck, I like to think about the themes and ideas that will make it possible. These smaller themes are “packages”. For a Commander deck, I start with 8 packages of 8 cards.

This means 64 cards + 1 Commander + 35 lands.

The impact of any one card in a commander deck is very hard to measure. It’s one card among 99. A needle in the haystack. Your odds of drawing it, playing it, and having an informed opinion of it are very slim. Evaluating the entire package is much easier.

Packages give your deck structure and can show when your deck has too much, or not enough, of something.

For example, instead of asking “Is Damnation good in my deck” you evaluate the “removal package” as a whole.

“Is my removal package good enough” is a more meaningful question. Damnation is an awesome card. But you don’t need it if you already have eight or so board wipes and removal spells.

Some packages will be universal, while others will be deck specific. Additionally, some packages might overlap, this is a good thing. For my deck, I decided on:

• Big Spells: Flashy and fun spells at a high mana value
• Copying: What’s better than one spell? Two spells!
• Card Draw/Selection: Anything that gives me access to more cards.
• Interaction: Cards that can throw my opponent off guard and disrupt their plans.
• Whenever you cast… : Effects that make even tiny spells a force to be reckoned with!
• Ramp: I am not waiting for six turns to cast this spell, I want it NOW.
• Storm: Casting so many spells, the stack looks like a phone book.
• Steam Rollers: Big cards that our opponent must answer, or we will run away with the game.

Packages are the deck’s skeleton. They are the core ideas of our deck. These might change over time. It is much easier to swap one package for another than swapping individual cards. The packages can keep us focused when we are unsure where a card fits into our deck.

We decided on our packages, but what do we put in them? This is where we come back to the top-down vs. bottom-up approach. Some folks might design packages around specific cards. Meanwhile, others will try to curate the perfect package.

Treat your packages like a mini deck.

Avoid picking the “best” cards in each category. Consider the interplay between the packages. Kess, values Strategic Planning over Impulse. The graveyard is a resource we can abuse. This makes Strategic Planning a pseudo draw three cards effect.

Some amount of raw power is always good, but synergy is what can make a deck shine!

An example from CEDH is Glarb, Calamity’s Augur. They allow you to cast spells that cost four or more mana from the top of your library. This means some unconventional cards are up for consideration. Commandeer and Subtelty are not always seen in CEDH. But, Glarb makes them worth playing, especially thanks to their alternative casting cost! This gives Glarb a unique removal package, opting for synergy over generic power.

Going back to Kess I have built out some packages. I will not go over every single card, but I will highlight some picks that stand out.

Under card draw, I included Windfall, Thrill of Possibility, and Secrets of the Dead. All these options work well with Kess. I don’t care if I discard my hand, as I can cast cards from my graveyard! Secrets of the Dead is a nice repeatable source of card draw. It’s a weird card that could only work in a deck like Kess!

The ramp package is very simple in this deck. Nothing cute, smart, or clever. Just some mana rocks and ways to reduce the cost of our spells. Baral, Chief of Compliance is my favorite as it sometimes draws us a card. With that said, he is mostly here for the cost reduction. The mana rocks are pretty standard. Signets or Talisman take your pick. I like signets for the extra colors they offer. This can be useful when casting more color-intensive spells.

This section is where I had the most fun. There were a lot of options, it was hard to decide! I went for a mix of token generation and burn. Young Pyromancer and Electrostatic Field put pressure on the opponent’s life total. Over time, I might transition this deck to focus more on one or the other.

Storm-Kiln Artist, and Archmage Emeritus turn our spells into mana and card advantage! We can grind with these two. Draw cards, make treasure, keep the wheels turning.

The removal spells were interesting with Kess. We only have access to the graveyard on our turn. This means counterspells are not as powerful. I like including modal spells for Kess. We don’t need to choose one option when we can cast it twice!

My favorite removal spell is Mystic Confluence. It acts as removal and card draw! I love casting it once for removal, and a second time for a burst of card draw.

In a similar vein, X spells are very versatile. I like using By Force to remove early mana rocks. Then late game it can remove an entire board worth of artifacts!

I love big silly spells and I love casting them over and over again! This is the place where you can flex and show off your favorite spells! For me, Cruel Ultimatum and Breach the Multiverse are the best! Ok, maybe not the most powerful. But they feel awesome to cast! There are countless big splashy spells. If I was going for a more high-power build, there are better options. But for me, I love the flavor these cards offer. I want to be the big bad Grixis villain. These cards also work well with our “copy” package.

Copying spells is quintessential Blue-Red nonsense! With a graveyard full of awesome cards, let’s find a way to double up the value! I have opted for some slower, permanent sources of spell doubling. This suits the playgroup I have in mind. But, you might have better luck with the “once off” style copy effects. I am aiming for a big battlecruiser style of play so Double Vision, and Thousand-Year Storm fit the bill for me. If you want to go for a more combo-focused route, Bonus Round is a solid inclusion too!

Speaking of combo, Dualcaster Mage makes an appearance. This can combo with Twinflame to produce infinite hasty tokens! It also produces infinite triggers for magecraft! We can win even if swinging for damage is somehow not possible. A combo that naturally slides in is a fantastic way to juice up your deck.

Dualcaster Mage is awesome no matter what spell it copies! Twinflame enables big plays. Copy a Storm-Kiln Artist, and suddenly all your spells come with two treasures!

Storm is a great way to get extra value from our magecraft triggers or even win the game outright. This deck focuses more on the latter. Grapeshot and Galvanic Relay are here to give our deck some stability.

• Grapeshot is cheap and efficient. It can ping our opponents for damage or clear the board of small threats.
• Galvanic Relay gives us a chance to reload. We do not need a large storm count for this card to be valuable.  Exiling three or four cards goes a long way!

To enable our storm shenanigans, we have the Frantic Search and Turnabout. These let us dig deeper, and reset our mana to keep our engine spinning!

With all that said, we need ways to end the game. These are the cards that win outright or make our opponent wish they had a removal spell! Laboratory Maniac is a classic. It is the cheaper and “fairer” Thassa’s Oracle. As this deck aims to grind, I think the Maniac fits my desired playstyle more than the Oracle. If you would like to go down that road, Tainted Pact, and Demonic Consultation are your best friends!

Another awesome way to take over the game is Niv-Mizzet, Parun. We plan on drawing a lot of cards, so let’s turn that into damage! Niv is always going to generate some value for you. Even the act of casting a Swords to Plowshares to remove him is going to let you draw a card! In a similar vein, The Locust God turns our card draw into 1/1 creatures. Like Niv he is hard to get rid of.

After playing some sample games, you can begin to understand your packages and their importance. If you generate lots of mana but are never able to find your big spells. This might be a sign to run a couple more big spells.

Once you identify the problematic package, it is easier to diagnose problems. Here is also where packages might begin to change in size. I like starting with eight packages of eight cards. It is easy to remember and builds a good foundation. But you might find some packages grow and shrink.

Tuning can also involve swapping generic cards for more flexible ones. Kitsa, Otterball Elite is a wonderful inclusion for Kess. It can copy spells, draw/discard cards, and it can deal lots of damage thanks to prowess!

Lastly, you can consider retiring old packages. For Kess, if I ever decide to move towards CEDH I would begin with the Big Spells package. I would remove it entirely in favor of an Underworld Breach combo package. This would include Breach itself, Lion’s Eye Diamond, and Brain Freeze. This would give me a much more direct path to victory.

I would change the Steam Roller package to focus more on Thassa’s Oracle based win-conditions. Tainted Pact, Demonic Consultation, tried and true solid strategies.

That’s the joy of packages! It turns your 99 card deck into an 8 card deck.

We have all our cards, but now we must tie everything together with lands! Using our method, we should have 35-40 land slots. There are lots of fancy calculators that can show you how many lands you should play. With that said, I think it is important to have an idea of how the process works.

1. Count up the number of cards you have of each color. If you have a multicolored card, count it towards both colors.
2. Next, count the mana symbols on your cards. This will give us a break-down by color and their importance. Seen below for my deck, we can see red is the most intense color, while black is a much lighter splash. This can inform our land count.

If your numbers don’t add to 100% that’s ok! Because we are counting some cards twice (e.g. Niv-Mizzet is both a red and a blue card) our percentages will look a little funny.

From here we can add lands to match these percentages. Get your land count somewhere between your pip percentage and non-land percentage. While we could go for 6 Swamps, 14 Islands, and 16 Mountains and call it a day, we can do a lot better. Non-basic lands are a must. Just like how Niv-Mizzet counts two colors, use multi-colored lands to smooth out our mana base.

Fetchlands are another great way to complement a mana base. Even the old-school “slow fetches” from Onslaught are fantastic budget options. For example, Bad River can find Smoldering Marsh. When it’s time to upgrade the deck, you can pick up a Polluted Delta and Badlands!