#zegana

Alright, so, if it's a first deck, some of the advice I'll give will be pretty basic, some of which you're likely to already know, but I have no way of knowing exactly what you do and don't know in advance, so pardon anything that seems obvious.

First off, some generic resources: Scryfall is the place to go to search for cards that exist but you've never seen before, through their advanced search options or by learning its search syntax. EDHREC gathers data on the internet about commander decks and synthesizes it for each commander, telling you what other people are playing. It isn't necessarily good for your version of the deck (or for theirs, for that matter), but it's a good starting point for "obvious" stuff. Here's the page for Zegana.

Secondly, generic deckbuilding advice: In Commander deckbuilding, it's good to know what kind of essentials your deck has. Generally speaking, most decks want to:

Win the Game: Unless you're doing something particularly silly, every deck wants to have a plan for winning the game. "Hitting them with a couple of 3/3s and 4/4s for several turns" isn't something that will realistically work out often. As such, most deck want to know what their plan is in advance, and have cards that you know in advance will cause you to almost always win if they aren't stopped by opponents quickly. It can be single super-impactful cards (Avenger of Zendikar, Rise of the Dark Realms, Terror of the Peaks,...). It can be combos. It can be general strategies (make two hundred tokens, get a ton of giant trampling creatures, make one giant creature that can one shot people, sacrifice a dozen creature with three blood artists in play...). It can be spells that create a lot of temporary power (Overwhelming Stampede, Akroma's Will,...). There are plenty of options. But knowing that you have a plan to win, and knowing what that plan is, is good both during the game and during deckbuilding to help you structure the deck around.

Ramp: Ramping means accelerating mana, making sure you play your land for turn every turn, but also getting ahead to get more than one more mana every turn. The goal is to get faster to the point where you can do more every turn, and do more impactful things. Typical ramp includes land ramp (getting lands into play from your hand or deck), mana dorks (cheap creatures that tap for mana, usually cheaper than land ramp but more fragile to removal), mana rocks (artifacts that tap for mana, somewhere in between land ramp and mana dorks as far as cost and fragility, but also accessible more easily to more colors.) You typically want to ramp in the early turns, because accelerating towards later turns makes less sense when you're already in the later turns. Ramp is better the earlier you can get access to it, the cheaper in mana it is.

Draw Cards/Gain Card Advantage: You want to be playing one land every turn, and then casting one or more spell every turn, if you can. Since you only draw a single card per turn naturally, it's not hard to realize that if you do that, you run out of cards at some point. As such, spells that give you access to more cards are invaluable, they're collectively called card draw, with Card Advantage being the concept of having access to more cards than your opponents helping you win. Furthermore, seeing more cards also means you have more options between spells to cast, so assuming you always pick the correct one, you are advantaged further. Card draw is a very layered bag, it includes card draw engines (permanents that sit on the board and let you draw/get access to cards when you do something specific), spot card draw (something like a sorcery for two mana that draws two cards), burst card draw (something like Zegana that give you a big burst of card draw all at once), but also stuff like Looting/rummaging (drawing cards and discarding as many, letting you see more cards and get more options but not get more cards to cast), cantrips (spells that have a minor effect and draw a single card, replacing themselves) and more. Drawing cards is good at pretty much every stage of the game. I tend to throw tutors in this category too, cards that get you anything you want from your deck, even though they aren't necessarily card advantage.

Interact: If every deck has a Plan to Win the Game if not stopped, every deck likely should have tools to stop other decks from winning the game before they can. Interaction is a wide category that contains removals (usually things that kill/exile/bounce a small number of permanents off the board), board wipes/sweepers (that remove ALL of one or more types of permanents off the board, or at least off your opponents' board), counterspells (that can answer anything up to and including instants and sorceries, but need perfect timing), but also stuff that's a bit off to the side like Graveyard Hate (effects that exile cards from people's graveyard or entire graveyards, key to slowing down or stopping some strategies.) Some stuff like Ghostly prisons/fogs could even end up here, if you want to stretch the concept. Some is cheaper, some is more versatile, some has additional benefits... Decks generally want a varied suite to be ready for most threats, but doubly so answers to things they're particularly weak to.

Recursion & Protection: I tend to bundle these together even though they probably could in theory be dispatched into other categories. Commander is a singleton format, you only have one copy of most cards. As such, being able to defend the ones you have or pick what you want to reuse from your graveyard is valuable. Protection can range from Heroic Intervention to Lightning Greaves, depending what you need, and recursion typically includes reanimation to the battlefield or regrowth effects to your hand.

Lands: Every deck needs lands to cast spells. That's technically not true, but if you're building a deck that doesn't need lands, you should make sure you know exactly what you're doing first. A good number of lands is important, though I'll get to that a bit further down.

Fun Stuff and Theme Cards: At the end of the day, decks tend to be built because we like certain cards or want to build around a theme. It's important to remember that's the point, and this is much wider a category than any of the others. With that said, if you play your cards right in deckbuilding, you can hopefully fill the other categories with cards that are still fun and/or on-theme.

Different colors will have access to different categories at different power level or efficiency. Zegana is in green and blue, for example, so you'll have a very easy time finding ramp and card draw. For interaction, you'll have access to blue's versatile counterspells, but your suite of removals and particularly creature sweepers will pale in comparison to what the other three colors have access to.

This list of categories is not just an excuse to put down paragraphs and paragraphs of text: it's also an useful way to split your deck while building it into a workable number of piles, and see what amount of each you have. If a card fits multiple of these categories, assign it to the one it feels it will more commonly or more effectively fulfill. As an example, one of my decks sorted as such

Deckbuilding is an art, not a science, so what each deck wants exactly varies. But I do have some numbers I use as a barometer of "notice if you go under these numbers" for each category.

Ramp, Card Advantage and Interaction are the three main pillars of deckbuilding. I get worried if I go under 10 cards in each of those categories, though more usually leads to more consistency at the cost of some theme. In your case, since your commander, Zegana, is a big card draw spell at 6 mana, you might want slightly less card drawing and slightly more ramp, particularly if you aim to cast big creatures. As evidenced by the above screenshot, I'm also not above dipping just below, but it always needs to be pretty careful.

For ramp, the most important is cheaper pieces, 1, 2 and 3 mana. Bigger ramp pieces are more niche and dependent on the strategy.

For interaction, I prefer versatile and always useful to the most efficient, at least at the power levels I play at. I like to include 2 to 4 sweepers in most decks, ideally with some that leave my own board alone. The above screenshot doesn't have proper sweepers, but that's an exception within this specific deck, not the rule, this deck tends to be the one to present problems and is in mono green where sweepers aren't great... And is only playing permanents, which cuts further into options. A few counterspells are welcome in blue decks, but going too hard on them is not recommended. They require a bit more maneuvering than most removal, and are generally not great in term of card economy, you're spending one of your card to answer one opposing cards, and have three opponents drawing cards for your one a turn. With that said, Counterspells get better the higher power you play at, as instants and sorceries become must-answers and permanents spending any time on the battlefield is a bad idea.

Also always include some amount of graveyard hate, even if it's only a piece or two. These strategies tend to be very resilient to other forms of interaction thanks to a lot of recursion, so you need something that can actually make them stumble. As was outlined in the recursion category, all commander decks make SOME use of the graveyard, so the cards aren't dead even if you're not going against dedicated graveyard decks.

Wincons and protection&recursion have less fixed numbers, it depends heavily on the deck... But make sure you always have at least a reliable way to win you can get to each game.

As mentioned before, ideally, you can fit fun stuff into the previous categories. But once you have those down, it ends up filling the rest of the space.

LANDS are an important point. Playing a land every turn is really important. All the ramp in the world is just wasted mana if you're not playing a land for turn, because that also gets you ahead on mana without having to pay for it. As such, I'm an advocate for a higher land count. As tempting as it is to cut lands to play more "real" cards, I'd never go below 36 lands, and feel more comfortable at 38. If I want to cut down from 38, I typically try to maintain the land count higher with spells that can also be lands. We have a few of these now, MDFCs (modal-double faced cards) with a land on the back and a spell on the front, from Zendikar Rising and Modern Horizons 3, but also the 1-mana landcyclers from Lord of the Rings qualify here, as well as the Adventure Towns from Final Fantasy. These half-lands half-spells are invaluable in keeping a high land count, and if I want some of the spells to be actually cast, it's not rare for me to go up to 40 or 42 lands including these, with 36-38 "real" lands and 2-6 "spell" lands.

Finally, another important way to look at your deck is through its mana curve: How many cards of each cost do you have in your deck. It's important to realize that costs aren't as linear as they seem. As a rule of thumb:

A 2-mana spell costs roughly three times as much as a 1-mana spell. A 3-mana spell costs twice as much as a 2-mana spell. The same is true for a 4-mana spell compared to a 3-mana spell, as well as a 5 compared to a 4 and a 6 to a 5. Anything 7 mana and above is in the Expensive Pile.

The math isn't mathing very well, but it makes more sense when you consider that to cast the more expensive spell, you need several turns to deploy lands and possibly ramp where they're just dead cards in your hand, and they're also much more difficult to fit into a turn, much less flexible. If you have five mana and a hand full of 1 and 2-mana spells, you have a lot of possible permutations of what you're gonna cast and when. If you have five mana and a hand full of 3 and 4-mana spells, you're gonna cast one thing and be done for the turn.

With that said, Magic's designers are aware of that, so higher cost spells are often suitably more powerful and impactful compared to lower costed alternatives. You get more bang out of a single card, which also has value.

With all that in mind, a deck wants a healthy amount of cheaper spells, and fewer expensive spells. The more expensive, the fewer, in general. Because you want any given card to have a minimum amount of impact, it's not uncommon in commander for the peak of the mana curve, the cost at which there is the most cards, to be at 3 mana, though the more optimized and powerful a format become, the lower that number gets. Peaking at 2 is generally a sign of a more efficient and fast deck. Peaking at 1 is what is expected in more competitive environments, the more powerful the more common. Follows below a couple example from some of my commander decks:

This is from a green deck of mine, it peaks at 3 but has a LOT of 4s, 5s and even 6s. It is rather heavy a curve, and as such the deck wants plenty of ramp. With that said, a lot of the costs here are not accurate, the cards have alternate costs I use more often that skew the data down a bit too.

This is from a more responsible deck of mine, but also one with less alternate costs. The deck doesn't have access to as good a ramp package, though decent enough, and is generally more low to the ground, using synergies and cheaper cards to generate more values, and ending with more of pieces coming together than singular impactful cards.

This one is from one of my more optimized combo decks, and we can see the higher costs practically vanish. It probably SHOULD play more one-cost spells too and cut back on 3s.

Aside from sorting your cards as you're building by what they do with categories, you can sort them by how much mana you expect to spend on them. Not necessarily their costs, in case they have alternate methods to be used, but it's a good shorthand. Visualizing your mana curve that way gives good indications on how your deck might play, and can inform your deckbuilding if you're hesitating on which cards to add, or which of two cards to cut.

“Regal and reticent, this former prime speaker believes Vannifar’s rule is a dangerous experiment. After her ouster, Zegana returned to the seclusion of Zonot One. She did not remove herself from public life, however, and has remained a staunch supporter of the Utopian vision. Other Utopians have rallied around her, and if Vannifar goes too far, Zegana will be there to make a case to the Combine that the prime speaker should be removed. Until then, she seeks to curb Vannifar’s excesses and guard against her failures.”

Hey everyone, this week we’re continuing with the series of deck techs for guild leaders from Ravnica Allegiance with Zegana, Utopian Speaker of the Simic Combine.

Zegana is a 4/4 for four mana in Blue and Green, that when she enters the battlefield lets us draw a card if we control a creature with a +1/+1 counter on it. Zegana also gives all creatures we control with +1/+1 counters trample, and for six mana she can Adapt 4 to get four +1/+1 counters. Zegana cares about +1/+1 counters, and the Simic care about +1/+1 counters, this leads to easy synergy for a deck of big +1/+1 counter creatures.

Guilds: 1/2: Simic Combine

“Moment by moment, we evolve. We were all swimmers in the womb, crawlers in our youth, and walkers since maturity. But this is not our final form. We of the Simic Combine understand that life is change. And since change can be altered, life can be engineered.”