Anime Deckbuilding: Blue Lock

Two things I love outside of Magic: The Gathering are anime. Specifically, I’m a big lover of Hunter X Hunter and Blue Lock. For a while, I’ve been thinking about these two shows and how they influenced my thinking when it comes to deckbuilding. Let’s start with Blue Lock: the edgy soccer anime.

Blue Lock: Weapon Formulas

One of the key elements of playing the Commander format well is deckbuilding: how each card builds into elements of a deck and how those elements synergize into a winning strategy. In Blue Lock, soccer players are forced to identify “weapons”, or skills that will allow them to score goals. The protagonist, Isagi Yoichi, feels like he is an unremarkable player compared to the others: he doesn’t have flashy techniques or an impressive physique. What he comes to realize as his “weapon” is his spatial awareness, which up until this point has only allowed him to execute helpful passes to his teammates.

This is until Ego, the coach/mentor of the series, points out that he needs a formula. He describes it as such:

I think what made this scene so compelling for me is the panel that follows:

The anime goes on to provide an actual example of the formula and what each variable is defined as. If you want the lore, I recommend watching the anime, but for our deckbuilding purposes, we can define it as follows: Theme x Board State = Win

I want to provide an example with a deck I built around the time that I started to get really into deckbuilding. My commander of choice was Jetmir, Nexus of Revels.

Jetmir’s ability states that if I have 3+ creatures, they will get +1/0 and vigilance. If I have 6+ creatures, they will get +1/0 and trample. If I have 9+ creatures, they will get +1/0 and double strike. At max potency, Jetmir grants +3/0, trample, vigilance, and double strike. With this ability in mind, our primary weapon is attacking a large number of creatures. We want to get as many creatures on the board as possible. Because our commander gives a wide array of bonuses based on quantity, the quality of the creatures is far less important.

Jetmir offers lots of weapons. Because he also receives the benefits and is already a 5/4, Commander damage is a weapon we can use to finish off opponents (Jetmir, at his max power, can do 16 commander damage in a single attack, meaning two rounds of combat will kill a single player). Because our primary weapon is creating a large number of creatures to attack wtih, combat tricks, or spells that give advantages to us for attacking/to attack with are great.

So this defines our ideal Theme. What about the Boardstate? After all, it’s not enough to simply have weapons; we need to identify the ideal scenarios for us to use those weapons. This can usually be done by identifying the ideal board state to summon your commander. Let’s identify some qualifiers to determine the best situation for the weapons our deck uses. 

1. Number of Creatures: Jetmir is a powerful creature in his own right, but without other creatures to give his blessings, he is just a vanilla 5/4. We want to wait to summon Jetmir until we have not only enough creatures to meet his conditions, but enough creatures that can attack. This does not mean that you need enough creatures to get his effects immediately. If you make 9 creatures, you are vulnerable to a board wipe and attackers coming your way because your opponents know that at 9 creatures, you reach max power. You can have 5 creatures that are weak and unassuming, bring out Jetmir and three other creatures to reach 9, or simply bring out Jetmir and get 9 creatures on the following turn. 

2. Resources: This section is split into two sections. The first discusses our opponent's resources, and the second discusses using our own.

   1. Opponent Resources: We also want to make sure that people’s resources are low or being used to deal with a different problem. Bringing out Jetmir early in the game means everyone will use their resources to dispose of him. Similarly, bringing him out early means that we will likely not have enough mana on board to continuously produce more creatures to keep his bonuses active at their best. Thus, we want to spend the early game generating mana and building up token creatures to prepare for Jetmir’s arrival. 

   2. Our resources: We also want to make sure we have enough resources to enact combat tricks. Several spells make your creatures indestructible, like Boros Charm or Akroma’s Will, and these are going to be used when our opponent has plenty of blockers or when they try to wipe the board. Although our quality of creatures matters not, the quantity does, so we want to pack spells that protect our crowd.

3. Blockers: Our deck deals with blockers effectively by using double strike and trample to our advantage. That said, there are scenarios where we might want to try and kill an opponent by using commander damage instead of regular damage (if our opponent has above 100 life, for example). As a result, we may want some single-target removal to get rid of any blockers, or we may want to wait until one of our opponents is vulnerable after getting attacked by another player. 

By identifying the board states that our deck wants to create, we are quickly able to ascertain what kinds of cards we need. Using the three qualifiers above, we know we need: 

1. 9+ cheap creatures

2. Creatures that are ready to attack

3. Jetmir on board

4. Creature token generators

5. Ramp for the early game

6. Attack enablers

7. Combat tricks, particularly ones that protect multiple creatures by making them indestructible

8. Single target removal

We may not even need all of these conditions to be met at the same time. I’ve bolded the conditions that are necessary in order to achieve victory on the turn that you have them.

This is the basic breakdown of how I thought about Deckbuilding then. There’s a part two that I developed later, which is analyzing the weaknesses of both your opponent and your strategy, but I’ll review that in a future post.

Curious about my Jetmir deck? I built it with lots of instant speed creature token generation to make sure I could always have creatures ready to attack whenever Jetmir was ready. Here’s the decklist from those days (before I used Moxfield).

Bonus Card Review

This is one of my favorite cards in my Jetmir deck. Not only does it have one of my favorite keywords, Strive, but it summons a mess of creatures at instant speed. It allows you to catch up and even scale with other players at the table as well, which is a great demonstration of White’s color identity.

The only con of this card? It’s been sitting at $5 despite being reprinted three times in three different Commander precons.