A ton of us Commander players are always on the search for ways to tune up our decks and make them more efficient.

Plenty of videos on this very channel examine ways and resources to help you make your decks more consistent, more powerful, more likely to do the thing.

However, sometimes we can get a little carried away, right? Let me be the first to say that sometimes I get a little lost in the sauce.

Sometimes we end up tuning things up to such a level of mechanical efficiency that it turns out we've optimized the joy out of the game.

This is a common experience in the evolution of a commander player.

A lot of us go through these stages along the deck building process of learning how to play,

getting excited to brew stuff, discovering powerful interactions, and then focusing on how to make those interactions more consistent. But then at some point we look behind us at the path that we've just traveled and we yearn for the things that we left behind along the way. I'm Joey. Welcome back to the channel. Let's get EDH wrecked. And let's talk about

how to D-optimize your commander decks. This video may not apply to everyone out there. For

many folks, the idea of tuning down a deck is uninteresting. It might feel like backtracking

or returning to a style of gameplay that you don't necessarily enjoy as much as you used to.

And nowadays, chasing the complex and perfectly efficient

versions of magic is what you find more thrilling. But there are many players out there who

hit this point where they kind of long to get back in touch with some of magic's simple joys.

And those of you who are indeed at that stage of the game, this video is for you. And for those

who don't relate to that experience at all, well, hopefully this video still helps you to understand that other perspective a little bit. Regardless of whichever way you fall, this video is here to help you better identify the types of potential podmates who will vibe with the game in the same way that you do. Neither way of playing magic is right or wrong, and at the end of the day, we can all relate to the goal of finding

a way to make the game more fun for ourselves and for others.

So how do you detune your commander deck?

Well, as per tradition with YouTube video essays, I've compiled the steps into an internet

friendly numbered list.

First things first, let's examine what we even mean by that.

When we say that we're tuning down a deck, that doesn't mean that we want to make it garbage. You know, we could curb the land count, remove all of the draw spells, scupper the ratio of enablers and payoffs, and we would sure have a weaker deck, all right. We could even turn it into a pile of 99 forests, you know? But that is not really what we mean by tune down or de-optimize a deck.

What we're actually trying to do here is make sure that the deck can still, you know, play magic.

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