I posed this question a few days ago as a comment and was encouraged to make it into a standalone post. I’m asking it specifically within the context of Commander, but suggesting your workflows for other formats would probably be helpful for people who aren’t me :P
As someone who has been casually playing MTG for several years, I’m only now starting to try to build my own EDH decks from scratch (as opposed to just buying and tweaking precons). I’ve tried to do my due diligence and research important topics like ramping & mana bases, read articles & posts about determining wincons & threats, and have scoured through EDHREC and Skryfall for thematic/synergistic cards… And all of that is great for finding cards that *could * work in a deck.
But this is the part that most articles & instructional pieces stop at (or glaze over). So now I have a giant pile of theoretical cards for a theoretical deck, and no idea which ones I should actually purchase or playtest with. There is no one-size-fits-all method for paring down your deck, so I’m hoping to hear how you, personally, go about doing it (and whether or not you’ve come across articles that address this part).
Currently I’m trying to use tags on Moxfield but it’s mostly a confusing mess as I try to trim down ~200 possibilities into a lean, functioning deck. Tags seem a bit too inflexible when I’m trying to tag by both function (ramp, threat, protection) and priority.
Big thanks to Mike, Andrew, gildedjake, and LovesTha BGU who have already chipped in some ideas at this comment. I’ll leave it up to them whether or not to repost their comments here.
This is by no means an especially good or tested method, but it’s what I do. Like you, I start with a larger list of cards that I import to Deckbox. First I trim the cards I don’t have the budget for, and then I look aty curve. Depending on whether I have an expensive or a cheap commander, I’ll focus on trimming down cards to get a curve that fits well with my commander (e.g. a medium curve with enough low cost creatures and ramp for higher-costing commanders, and a low-to-the ground curve with a few expensive finishers for lower-cost aggro commanders). Once my curve looks semi-decent, I’ll make sure that I have a nice mix of removal (both sweepers and spot removal) and evasion, and that I don’t have too many cards that don’t impact the board. Lastly I check to make sure I don’t have too much of one card type so that I’m robust enough against different types of removal. Then I goldfish the game a few times, see if my opening hands and draws make sense, and cut some more cards if needed. I don’t really have guidelines for “you need X amount of creatures and X amount of enchantments etc.” Every commander deck has a different focus and a different way to build. It helps looking at the 'average deck ’ option on edhrec to find what mix of card types most people are using. I also tend to favour cards that have a higher % of inclusion in decks on edhrec.