Magic: The Gathering - Commander Deck Overview 8

This deck is still a work in progress. It's built on the mechanic of adding counters to permanents, including +1/+1 bonuses to its own creatures, -1/-1 counters on creatures owned by opponents, and charge counters on artifacts.

Vorel of the Hull Clade is a fairly non-threatening creature on his own, but he multiplies the effectiveness of nearly anything else in the deck once there are counters in play. The rest of the deck includes creatures that evolve, cards that add +1/+1 counters, and artifacts that create or manipulate counters. Ideally, Vorel doesn't appear to be a threat until he makes other things even more of a threat.

I still need to find my Illusionist's Bracers and a few other cards that will improve this deck's performance, but I doubt it will ever be a truly competitive deck. It's nonetheless a fun casual deck, despite the extensive attention to triggers and upkeep it requires when it gets rolling. The ability to shift and double counters can also serve as a distraction for other players who can't quite figure out what's going on. Bioshift, Forgotten Ancient, and Zameck Guildmage are examples here. Champion of Lambholt can prevent other creatures from being blocked, creating an opening so chump blocking isn't an option for opponents.

As much as I like green and blue, I still find it difficult to build an effective deck that combines their attributes. This is the best option I have found thus far though, and it seems promising, so I will continue to evolve this and see what happens. I have tried incorporating other commanders and adding different kinds of counter creation such as the new energy counters in the Kaladesh release, but I found they didn't tend to work very well with the rest of the deck. But deckbuilding is where half of the strategy of Magic takes place, and experimentation combined with playtesting is the way to see what works.