Condensing Commander Decks

Wan Shi Tong, Librarian card art

I love building Magic decks; it's a huge part of the experience. And I like having a lot of decks on-hand for game night. One challenge is space; the other is cards. As I've blogged about frequently this year, many Commander decks will leverage the same staple cards. And of course every Magic deck needs lands. I recently decided to solve the space and card challenge by condensing; this post explains that.

Commander decks are 100 cards; 35-40 of those are lands. I currently use KMC Card Barrier 1000ct boxes as my deck storage method; each can hold 12 Commander decks unsleeved (9 decks sleeved).

I have four such boxes to house my Commander decks, meaning I can store 48 total. Awesome (and more than adequate). But I can store more by condensing.

I condense Commander decks by storing the same color-identity decks together, then extracting the land cards that are common between them to save space, keeping one set of the lands needed and using them for the deck I am playing. 

Example: I have three mono-blue commander decks. Each has at least 35 of the same lands (most of them islands). Previously, I stored these three 100-card decks in a row; 300 cards total. Since they all leverage the same 35 lands, I removed those 35 cards from all decks and kept one set at the end of that row. Now, those decks occupy 65+65+65+35=230 cards in the row. I saved space for 70 cards, which lets me make and store a fourth mono-blue commander deck (65 more cards) in the same space.

The same logic applies for two- and three-color Commander decks. If I have more than one of a given combination, I can determine the land cards common across them, keep one set, and remove the rest for more space. This is also helpful for the rare/expensive lands, as I don't have to buy multiple copies to keep in each deck.

The downsides of this approach:

- if I want to use two of the same-color decks at the same time. Easily remedied by pulling the needed lands from storage, and not a common scenario.

- remembering which cards are common between decks. This can be hard to remember once you shuffle and play. Right now, I'm keeping it to lands for this reason (see next paragraph). 

While the above describes only lands, I could apply the same concept to staple non-land cards. I suspect each of my Commander decks has 50 unique cards, and 15 or so staple cards that will show up in any deck of that color. So I could take it a step further and condense more. I haven't, yet, because it is easier to track and keep lands separate. But it is an option for the future.

The above method is letting me store at least 16 Commander decks per Card Barrier box, letting me store 64 total. That should keep me for now.

Until next time, keep exploring.