Gimmick Decks

Flavorful decks will focus their theme around a non-mechanical element. Budget is a pretty obvious one. Building a deck with €20 is a sort of gimmick. Maybe you’re doing it to prove a point, or you don’t want to spend €1,000 on a deck.

A more extreme and personal example of this is Douglas Johnson’s Gonti deck. I will not tread old ground. Rhystic Studies did an excellent video covering this before. But, in short, Johnson has built a deck with the worst-condition cards I have ever seen!

Gimmick

VS.

Archetype

Choosing a gimmick requires some research. You might have a solid idea, but the selection of cards is not good enough. Simply put, the gimmick is too weak to be viable. Over time, your gimmick could resurface and become viable!

An example of this was Gates. The Gate subtype debuted in Return to Ravnica block. The first two sets Return to Ravnica, and Gatecrash featured ten Gate cards. Nine cards synergized or made reference to Gates in some way. This cohort was weak and unremarkable. Sure, you could make a deck using these cards, but why bother? The quantity and quality were not there.

Dragon’s Maze changed everything. Six new cards for the Gate gimmick. Among them, Maze’s End. This card gave a meaningful reason to play Gates. The selection of cards was still weak, but you now had a clear end goal.

For years Gates stood as a gimmick. There were exactly ten Gates, and not much else you could do with them. However, with the release of Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate the Gate deck was supercharged! Nine new Gates were printed. There were so many Gates, you could play a three-color Gates deck! Nine, Fingers Keene was a great option. With that set, Gates in my eyes went from a gimmick to a real archetype!

Not all gimmicks will get this sort of metamorphosis. Consider if the gimmick you are pursuing has the card quality to make it work.

I think it is best to learn with an example!

Let’s build a gimmick deck together. Follow me along, and see what you can come up with.

My partner loves to collect “Art Series” cards. They feature an entire edge-to-edge rendition of a piece of art from the set. No textbox, no mana value, no words. Just art. These are of course not tournament legal. It just looks cool. This got me thinking: “Can we make a deck using only art cards?”

This is a “flavorful” gimmick deck, but the steps below will work for mechanical gimmicks too.

We need to evaluate how many cards are available for our deck. Scryfall is a fantastic resource for this. You can search for much more than just card names! Here are some useful searches that might help you!

layout=art-series
Get all cards in the art-series layout

artist=”John Avon”
Get all cards illustrated by John Avon

art=”chair”
Get all cards with a chair in the art
Note: The art field is populated based on volunteer efforts some cards might be missed.

USD<1 or EUR<1
Get all cards worth less than one Dollar/Euro

border=gold
All gold border cards

Scryfall has a lot more detail hidden away in its documentation. I suggest giving it a look if you are trying to find something not mentioned here.

Whatever your gimmick, take a real look at the card pool and consider if it’s worth it. An all gold border deck is a cool idea, but the concept of gold cards was defunct decades ago. The card pool is small and probably not getting bigger any time soon.

As of this article, there are around 1,700 art cards, and it grows with every set! This is great for a gimmick deck, especially one we want to maintain.

I exported the list of cards to a spreadsheet using Scryfall’s API. This stands for Application Programming Interface. The API is a link that returns data in a standard format that makes it easy for programmers to design around. I won’t get in the weeds, but you can check out the documentation if it is something that interests you!

We have our list of cards. Now we need to figure out what to do. At this point, I still have no idea what commander or archetype I’m building. In Scryfall we can add “is:commander” to our search to help. In my case, 455 commanders. The more colors I build, the more slots I need to devote to lands. I wasn’t sure how possible a “playable” mana base was with my limited selection. Focusing on fewer colors might be a good idea.

Digging through the Commanders, I stumbled on Omnath, Locus of Mana. A green commander that hits hard and encourages you to generate lots of mana. The generic power means this deck could be easily upgraded over time as new art cards are released!

Before committing 100% to Omnath we need to check for the basics of our deck. We need card draw, ramp, and removal.

Card draw was missing some staples, but there were certainly some powerful options! Given Omnath is a big mana deck, cars like Garruk’s Uprising, Owlbear Shepherd, and Throne of Eldraine excite me. We draw cards as long as we keep playing big creatures!

Toski, Bearer of Secrets, and Ohran Frostfang give us card draw when we attack. We now have repeatable sources of card draw to keep the mana and monsters coming!

Green’s removal is often lackluster. It typically targets artifacts and enchantments. Creature-based removal is usually fight effects. Reclamation Sage, Sawblade Slinger, and Collective Resistance all get the job done.

On a larger scale, we have Pest Infestation and Ezuri’s Predation to wipe the board!

Ramp is plentiful in green. We have classic mana rocks such as Sol Ring and Arcane Signet.

Omnath loves extra mana. This means lands are crucial to help get Omnath big! Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Skyshroud Claim, and Extraplanar Lens let us get ahead on mana and bank it into Omnath!

Our deck has its basic needs covered. Now we need to see if we can execute a game plan. Omnath wants me to generate lots of mana, and swing. This game plan will never die out. It’s broad and easy to maintain.

With that said, I found some powerful diamonds in the rough that were worth trying to build around. In my case, Staff of Domination is a great find! It can combo with anything that produces six or more mana. Circle of Dreams Druid was the best option in my card pool!

Finding unexpected synergy and power is what makes these decks so exciting to me! It allows you to play powerful cards while keeping yourself in check. It would be very easy to turn this deck into an all-in elfball combo deck. But, the gimmick keeps me modest. I can run some power without going overboard.

I won’t labor this point too much. If you need some help deciding what to do, I recommend checking out our previous article on building commander decks. It will give a good foundation to help you focus on the remaining chunks of your deck.

Try to find unique options in your gimmick that let it shine! Given my deck is very visual, you can check out two versions below. One with all art cards, and one with legible versions.

Omnath, Locus of Mana Commander Deck – Regular Version

Omnath, Locus of Mana Commander Deck – Art Version

When brewing your deck, it is always best to find a community. I would like to take a moment to shout out some wonderful resources to get you started.

The ‘Magic: the Gathering Artist Commander Resources’ by Steven Tavener is a great resource. The site is hosted on Tavener’s personal website. They have developed a system to pull data from Scryfall based on artists. In their own words:

I’ll aim to update this list after each new set release; if I don’t, give me nudge! The current set was generated at 15/11/2024, 10:45.

Tavener has some notes on what they consider a ‘viable’ artist deck based on things like basic lands by the artist, commanders, and sufficient non-land cards.

They also maintain a list of ‘collaboration’ decks where two or more artists are the focus. This is appropriate for artists like Sam Guay and Rebecca Guay (mentor, no relation). This duo is particularly powerful as you can see Rebecca’s influence on Sam. Both artists have a talent for blending natural imagery into their subjects. Bitterblossom and Deadly Cover-Up highlight this. You can find similar techniques in Change of Fortune and Peppersmoke. You could make an awesome deck showing off these two artists!

If you want to show your appreciation for a favorite artist, then Tavener’s site should be your first stop!

Silver border decks likely deserve their own article. For now, I will direct you to the EDH Silver community. This website is no longer updated, but it is still available. They divided the silver-border card pool into ‘legal’, ‘banned’, and ‘use with caution’. Within the world of silver-border cards, there was some gold to be found! With a couple tweaks, these were playable, or even powerful!

Legal cards have little or no issues besides being a little weird. As Luck Would Have It is a perfectly normal card these days. Especially after the various Dungeons and Dragons sets introduced us to die-rolling. Blast from the Past is a little complicated thanks to its five keywords. But, it isn’t much more complicated than something like Questing Beast.

Banned cards include Mox Lotus for simply being too powerful. Elvish House Party meanwhile is banned for making references to the real world time!

Cards marked as ‘use with caution’ could leave you scratching your head or are on the brink of being too silly/powerful. This might lead to confusing board states and rules, but most of the time they are fine.

Mise feels like it would be an amazing card with Sensei’s Divining Top. Maybe too strong.

AWOL on the other hand is just a little confusing. It exiles a creature and then puts it outside the game. This means the target cannot be brought back to the game ever! Essentially, how exile was supposed to work in the first place.

CEDH Budget Brews is a community focused on CEDH power below $500, $750, and $1,000. While this is still a decent chunk of cash it is a great source of information for the budget brewer.

Their goal is raw power within the budget. This often means original dual lands and fast mana are off the table because they do not fit the budget. I enjoy the Budget Brews community as it leads to slightly slower games than full-on CEDH.

Their $500 version of Minsc, Beloved Ranger was one of my first CEDH deck. The main combo pieces are Protean Hulk. Arena Rector, Birthing Pod, and your favorite creatures to cheat into play.

This deck can be scaled up and down to fit a budget. Once you identify the key pieces, you can adjust them to your means. Many decks on the site have a full CEDH equivalent too. This gives you room to upgrade over time and experiment with higher and lower power.