Go from Commander to Standard

Everyone on the internet puts Commander and Standard on two opposite sides of Magic: The Gathering. I remember being told, “Can’t afford Standard rotation? Play Commander!”

Looking at the prices of Commander staples these days, I don’t know if I would tell a new player the same thing. I would instead tell them: “If you’re interested in learning how to play Magic, try Arena.” The problem is: Arena is great, but the nature of wildcards can be a barrier to entry. The game does give you some starter decks, but it doesn’t really help you figure out how you should take those cards and start playing. Luckily for you, learning how to play Standard is possible… Why?

Every journey begins with a single step. Commander advice to beginners often starts with a template for deckbuilding, but for Standard, it’s a little different because you don’t just have one of each card; you can have up to four of a card. If Commander is the format of variance and unique deckbuilding, if Draft and Sealed are the formats of card selection, then Standard is the format of deck consistency. Your deck needs to be able to enact its plan every game, while simultaneously poking holes in the enemy game plan. This is similar to how you deckbuild for Commander, but another hallmark is that with 20 life and only one opponent, the timeline is drastically accelerated. This is why Standard is the format of consistency.

As you build your deck, follow this guideline for how many of each card you should include:

Source: Posts I’ve seen on Reddit + Bluesky + I made it up

As you build your deck, this can help you understand how often you can expect to see a card depending on how many of the cards you have. We’ll use my “Rootem” deck that I’ve used to get to Platinum rank in Standard as an example.

Decklist

Creatures

• 4 Overlord of the Balemurk

• 4 Scavenging Ooze

• 4 Chupacabra Echo

• 3 Reclamation Sage

• 3 Mosswood Dreadknight

• 3 Curious Forager

• 3 Disruptive Stormbrood

• 2 Timeline Culler

Enchantments

• 4 Insidious Roots

• 4 Dredger's Insight

Sorceries

• 2 Blasphemous Edict

• 1 Season of Gathering

Lands

• 8 Forest

• 8 Swamp

• 3 Temple of Malady

• 4 Underground Mortuary

How does the deck win? I use Insidious Roots, Scavenging Ooze, and Overlord of Balemurk to mill cards to my graveyard and remove them from the graveyard (either to the hand or exile) to make increasingly powerful plants that also serve as mana dorks. Cards like Dredger’s Insight, Mosswood Dreadknight, and Curious Forager allow me to remove cards from my graveyard as well, but primarily serve the means of utility.

How does the deck interact? Disruptive Stormbrood, Reclamation Sage, and Chupacabra Echo provide excellent forms of targeted removal of a wide range of permanent types, with the latter being especially synergistic with the deck’s overall strategy. Blasphemous Edict and Season of Gathering provide excellent methods of board wipes when needed that can also destroy multiples of more persistent permanents, with the Edict forcing opponents to sacrifice indestructible or hexproof creatures and the Season removing artifacts or enchantments while also allowing me to buff up my team or draw more cards.

Any meta-specific decisions? Scavenging Ooze allows me to remove troublesome creatures from my opponents’ graveyard, disrupting the many reanimator decks that plague Standard. Timeline Culler allows me to quickly get bodies on the board against more aggressive opponents, plus an outlet for removing cards from the graveyard that I can depend on even after a boardwipe. Dredger’s Insight and Scavenging Ooze both make the deck more resilient by providing lifegain, which allows me to compete with more grindy lifegain decks that often make an appearance in both casual and ranked play.

Be warned: Rootem does break some of the conventional rules of the guidelines I established earlier. I have more copies of some creatures like Reclamation Sage and Disruptive Stormbrood than I might normally run, but this is primarily because the deck mills so much that having multiple copies of cards I only want to see once or twice allows me to exile them with Scavenging Ooze without worrying about the consequences.

But no matter the deck, if you can answer the three above questions and loosely follow the guidelines for the number of cards, you should be able to build a consistent standard deck. However, you will eventually come up against the wall I’m facing now: the meta.

For those unaware, the meta refers to the metagame, or the best strategies within a game that are not necessarily made explicit from having pure knowledge of the rules of the game. The meta is something you have to be aware of either through experience or explicit study, and it’s why Standard is such a competitive format. Observing the highest level of play and building variants of those decks is an excellent way to get into Standard, but it can also be somewhat cost-prohibitive as the best decks tend to be the most expensive. You can see the meta decks listed on MTG Goldfish through this link > > >

But if you need a deck to play, just in Standard and not necessarily Ranked, I have a solution. Try my Standard Elfball deck > > >

This deck isn’t perfect, but it’s serviceable in five main ways:

• It will help you learn some basic rules of magic, specifically, it will teach you when to use something for resources and when to use it for removal through the usage of modal cards like Pawpatch Formation and Heritage Reclamation

• It’s consistent and has a simple and reliable game plan of winning through getting a bunch of elves and winning through combat damage.

• It is comprised mostly of commons and uncommons, with only four rares being necessary to complete it, and most of the cards will be in rotation for the next three years.

• It is cheap to buy in paper form if you want to take it to your Friday Night Magic.

• It’s customizable by being built on a creature type that is reliably in many magic sets: elves. It’s also worth noting that we are likely to see some great elf reprints and new cards when we return to Llorwyn next year.

That’s all for this Monday. If you try Elfball on Arena, let me know what you think! My challenge to you: as you play the deck, answer the three questions that I listed above. When you can answer those questions and adapt the deck to fit your answers, you’ll have made the leap from Commander to Standard.