Hello and welcome to the EDH recast, in person.

Dana and I are here in person, folks,

can probably already hear a difference in the sound quality than we're used to,

because we're here in person in a hotel. Hey, Dana. How's going, Joey? It's going. It's going. I was going to tell a dad joke about a hotel, but I had reservations. So I decided not to tell it. I'm glad you had a reservation, Dana. Actually, Matt lobbied me to not actually make it. Stop. Stop. It's so much worse in person. And I actually couldn't make it until 4 o'clock anyway. That was when the joke time was. So anything earlier than that was an early check. Anyway, welcome to the EDA Trek podcast. We're all about commander, data and dad jokes and also torturing Joey very explicitly. We're in a hotel. We're here hanging out on a trip, but we still want to get some content out to y'all. So you'll have to put up with it being a little bit more rudimentary than usual, but we still wanted to make sure that we got something out for you guys. And we got a fun topic that we cooked up that we thought we could go over here today. Yeah, we want to talk about like basically 10 strategic rules to make yourself a good commander player.

Yeah, and we also decided to rank them from these lessons that improve us as commander players

from like lessons that we think were maybe the easiest for us to learn, and then over the course of the episode,

ramp into the episodes that were, the episodes episodes that were the lessons that were the hardest

for us to learn so we're going to increase in complexity as the episode goes on but real quick before

we do want to shout out one of our fantastic patrons Julio LeBraw this one is for you thank you so much

for supporting us and if folks out there you would also like to support us on patreon you can do so at

patreon.com slash edh recast we appreciate it so much. Yeah, we've got actually quite a bit of exclusive content on Patreon and we're planning to ramp that up over the course next couple months as well. So if you're not currently supporting us, now would be a great time to do so. Oh yeah. You get to see a lot more stuff from us that isn't available anywhere else. True, true, true.

And we've got one other sponsor to think as well. This show is also brought to you by the folks at Dragon Shield. They are makers of fantastic, amazing game accessories. Thank you so much, Dragon Shield. We freaking love your sleeves. Yes, thank you very much. And if you want to get a chance to meet us and play a couple quick games, We'll be at the Dragon Shield booth at MagicCon Atlanta here in just a couple weeks.

Heck yeah.

Okay, Dana, let's get into it.

We've got 10 lessons that we feel made us better EDH players, ranked from stuff that was kind of relatively easy to learn to the more complex stuff. What is lesson number one that we want to start off with? What made us better at EDH? So the first lesson, I think, is baking resource advantage or acclamation into your decks.

Yes. And the easy way of saying that is, like, draw more cards. Yeah, rampant card draw, ramping card draw, very commonly set amongst the community for sure. Yeah, but it isn't just that, right? Like, if you're, like, replaying cards from your graveyard,ards, like, that's resource advantage. If you are taking cards from your opponents, that's resource advantage. Like, there's a lot of ways to do it. Card draws the kind of easy and most basic one, but your deck just needs to have more stuff. Yeah. Like, in a one-on-one game, in something like standard, in something like draft, sort of figuring out which ones of these I will need, which ones I can get rid of in order to get those last few points of damage against my single enemy, that's a fantastic tempo to play. But in Commander, it's just about more is more as more as more. Like the more game actions that you can take later on in the game, the better off you're going to be. So prioritizing a lot of your deck building and your early plays around setting yourself up for success in the future is just the wisest thing to lean into.

And it's a thing that I think we all learn pretty quickly.

And it's one of those things that like it's obvious.

Like you know you want to draw cards or get resources.

But I remember, you know, when it really drove home for me was playing in some different limited environments and you would get those like Clustone kind of cards in the Ravnik cassettes or something where, you know, turn six you're not using it anymore. You crack it to draw a card.

Sure.

Those little advantages in a limited environment, just drawing one or two cards is massive.

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