Hey, thanks for the super detailed and useful response, Cloaca! My own attempts to deck build seem to be following similar steps, so I’ll definitely be referencing this. The deck snapshots at various points of completion are super helpful. Are those different decks or does TappedOut have a history feature? (That’s something I didn’t know I wanted until now).

Oof if building up is better I’m going to have to completely change the way I go about building decks, as my mindset has been to take the EDHREC “average deck” for a commander/style and think of it as, essentially, a precon that I then modify.

In the 8x8 theory, what does it mean by “choose 8 different kinds of effects you would like to see played”? Scratch that, I’m assuming they mean the card packs that are in the #8x8 tag on the blog. The first page was all Q&A stuff so I missed that

As an extremely casual commander player, I always feel like a noob even though technically I’ve been playing MTG for over half a decade at this point. My commander decks have all been precons and I’ve mostly just got cards through drafting with my friends, but this year I’ve been trying to build my own deck from scratch and it’s… exciting but frustrating.

Does anyone have any tips for taking a (commander) deck from the “theoretical pile of cards” stage to a functioning deck? By that I mean, I’ve done the preliminary research (scryfall searches, EDHREC most used cards for the commander, etc) to find possible cards, and I’ve read some high level theory stuff about deck building (ramping, threats, etc) to categorize my possible cards… But can’t really find any articles/videos showing workflows to actually build the deck.

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.