We’ve been playing commander when we get together in person, but I’ve been wanting to play a different constructed format recently.

I like commander deck building, but I keep building low to no interaction decks because the field of possible plays my opponents can make feels huge. I don’t think I can play around anything, expect a game to go any way, or really strategize at all. So I just build combo or artifact ramp into kill everyone with x-spells so I don’t have to read or understand their cards. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose because they play some card I’ve never seen that somehow stops what I’m doing.

I’ve been missing draft and smaller constructed environments where I can think about what cards an opponent might have and how to best play my hand based on that.

Another issue is that I try to make “tier 2” decks, but half the table is playing precons, and sometimes my deck is too strong, too weak, or just sidesteps their fun. It’s tough to find the right level of competition that lets everyone have fun, while still building fun decks in the archtypes I like. Our low-powered games go forever, we don’t get many in in one night, so if someone can’t have fun in one game, they maybe don’t have fun that night.

I’m brainstorming making my own format. Just pick some of my favorite sets and mash them together and try to make decks from it. It’d be cool to not be able to net-deck and see what we can brew up, but I’m not sure all my friends want to spend a bunch of time building constructed decks in a random made up format. One idea I had was I could just make some decks from that format and bring them, like my own precons! But I don’t quite have time to get that all going yet.

A nice kitchen table cube could be a good solution too, rarely rotate cards, everyone can learn the few hundred cards in there over time etc. Especially if we do it a bunch that’d be the most fun, but drafting sometimes takes forever because people don’t know the cards yet.

So I’m going to try Premodern (a format using only cards printed between 1995 and 2003)!

I’m proxying up six decks I pulled from the meta that sounded fun to me, covering a bunch of my favorite archtypes. Hopefully they’re decently balanced or at least rock-paper-scissors!

Decks are listed below, with a little overview and a little write-up of what the deck is trying to do and any tricky combos.

Archidekt links are at the bottom if you want to playtest the decks yourself!

We’ll see how it goes!