Transcription
Welcome to a deck building masterclass, one that features Magic's very first lobster. From the moment that I saw the teasers for the new Edge of Eternity set, I had my eye out for what I now believe is the spiciest commander from the set, Ragos Deft Gastron. And now that we're almost at the set launch date of August 1st, I've brewed him and I'm going to take you through that brewing journey step by step from start to finish.
Our Ragos feast will include a starter of how I'd cook him up, followed by a main course that shares my deck list thoughts and possible upgrades. Lastly, you'll be treated to a delicious dessert that shows you how to play him. And throughout your meal, you'll be treated to the doula tones of how I take a commander from raw ingredient to a Michelin starred meal. So, stick around and you'll be able to cook up the finest crustation-based delicacies that will leave your play group ravenous for more. And if it wasn't already abundantly clear, I hope you're thirsty for culinary phrases because this video is going to be jam-packed with them. Before we get too lost in the source, let's take a look at our new crustation bff.
Bragost is a two Boros lobster citizen. Yes, that's correct. He's all crustation on main. He turns all our artifacts into delicious foods and allows us to pay one and tap him and then sacrifice one of those foods to deal three damage to our opponents. He also says that at the end of the turn, if we've gained life this turn, we get to untap him. This sets him up for a sneaky drain tank game plan where he cooks up a spicy feast for our opponents that's delicious on the way in, but oh so very painful on the way out. For better or worse, Ragost has half of his recipe already printed on the card. So, it makes cooking him up that much easier.
When I sit down to brew any commander, the first step is always a mind map of what this deck wants to do, which often inspires a sort of character sheet, as if my deck was a character in a role playing game. If I feel like I'm lacking direction or I'm not sure how to brew a commander, this is when I may look at tools like EDHRE or other similar sources. Though I caveat this with the fact that for every good thing EDH gives us, blindly following it will give you as much bad as it does good. In this case, we already have tons of direction. So, I just went straight to the mind map. It's clear that this deck wants to play many artifacts, especially those that have beneficial enter or death triggers abilities. Alternatively, making many artifact tokens is also a solid viable strategy, especially if it's a permanent with a repeatable ability across turns.
Looking ahead, the perfect turn cycle for us sees us activating Ragos four times, and we will need four artifacts to sacrifice and four mana available to do that. That sounds like it's going to be pretty mana inensive. So, the next thing we're going to want is mana production. Sacrificing so many artifacts will also require us to have some kind of engine, and most importantly, a card draw engine. Now, I've mentioned activating Ragost a bunch of times a turn cycle, and to do that, we need a reliable way of gaining life across our and our opponent's turns. Assuming we get this far, Raghost will be a prime removal target if he wasn't already, and we're going to need ways to protect him. And last, but definitely not least, if our opponents don't successfully deal with him, they're going to opt for player removal. So, we need ways to deal with their creatures. If I were to visualize that on one of my character sheets, it would look a little bit like this.
If you haven't indulged in my video on focus, I would highly recommend that you do. It's linked below the like button with all the other tools and concepts that I use as part of this brewing process. But to speedrun the key points, most commander decks can fit up to about five different things or groups of cards that the deck wants. More than that, and decks tend to become unfocused, inconsistent, or lack identity. And why five? Well, that's because we need about 12 of something to reliably draw it every game. and 12 * 5 equals 60, which roughly matches our non-learned card count in the average deck. The secondary abilities on this character sheet align with this and are the cards that we add to our deck to round out our character skill set. This gives me a very focused idea of what to look for when I start foraging for the finest ingredients.
Now, before I head to Scryfall and start snuffling like a prized truffle pig, this is where I use my 33 card deck template to outline roughly how I want this brood to come together. You'll see the secondary abilities or groups of cards on my character sheet are mirrored here. This gives me an easy way to visualize my brew, spot what's working, what's not, and gives me a very condensed way to goldfish to test the deck to see if it's doing the thing. As this is an early draft, the exact card categories numbers may well change, but we'll see that after I start reviewing cards. Now, off to Scryfall to compile a list of all the possible inclusions for the deck.
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Scry falling for me is throwing in a lot of broad terms. In this case, matching things like artifact types with words like card and draw or the words create artifact and token and then doing a lot of scrolling and seeing what sticks. It's worth calling out that like most decks that I cook up, this brew will be focused on being accessible, and you probably won't need tons of staples. You may even have most of the cards lying around your bulk right now, and I will share flavor and power-driven upgrades later on. In this case, I was left with a list of about 200 cards that I now needed to carve back into a good deck. Along the way, I stumbled across some cards and themes that I will end up considering, but first, I need to make a base 33 card deck. My initial draft has some artifacts to sacrifice to our lobster lord and savior. It has some ways to create artifacts, especially repeatable ways in the case of the Nucacola vending machine and ascend into Avenous. For life gain, I opted for lifelink, but more on that later. For protection, I chose some of my favorite chief spells and for removal, a mixture of a one-sided board wipe and some reliable single target options, and then lastly, a mixture of ramp and lands. I was now ready for testing.
And part of what makes brewing fun for me is that at times realizing how what you thought would happen just doesn't happen at all. and then something unpredicted happens and it changes your plan entirely. In my first goldfish attempt of this shiny new 33 card deck, I encountered a big problem. Playing and then sacrificing different artifacts was likely going to be very prohibitive. Because to drain the table, we had to sacrifice around 10 or more of them. And we need our mana. So, we don't really want to be sacrificing our mana rocks, which makes us even harder. Even if we do manage to have enough, assuming the average sacrificial artifact will cost us probably two mana and the activations cost us one mana each, that's a total of 30 or more mana, which is a lot. If we're generous and assume that the game goes to turn 10, which it probably won't, we may have a total of about 60 mana to expend across the game, and more than 30 is over half of that. Now, I'm not going to get lost in the math soup, but it is too much of a mana commitment. And to make matters even worse, if a sacrificial artifact draws us a card on the way in or out, it creates a tricky play pattern where we need to be either investing up to eight mana up front on our turn or we draw artifacts on our opponent's turns and we can't play them till our next one. That could be solved by instant speed enablers. But then that's another thing to have to fit into the deck, which we probably won't have space for. I'm talking through my thoughts rather than showing you the process of goldfishing because I think this is more important. how I assess the games that I goldfish and how I actively look at what's working and what's not working and then using that information to make changes rather than simply seeing whether the deck does something is the important part. This analysis is specific to this deck. But hopefully understanding this helps you goldfish more easily and more effectively.
But where magic taketh away, it also giveth because in that same first test, I drew the Nucacca vending machine and realized that it is a silver bullet that solves this problem entirely. So, it's basically required for this deck to function at the level that I'd like it to, which is to be able to activate Ragos 12 times across three to four turn cycles, which meant that what we end up with will likely play a little bit more like a combo deck than I'd anticipated, and that we're going to need some tutors where we're going. But I am a frog of science, so I did a little bit more gold fishing to make sure that I was giving the original strategy a fair shake at the source bottle. My theory was unfortunately proven incorrect, and the original strategy's goose was indeed cooked. Friendship ended with Lembbus, instant ramen, and spare supplies for now. Now, vending machine is our new best friend. And so, I went back to my short list to build a second recipe for our 33 card deck.
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If you're enjoying this, I cook up videos like this that help you think differently about Commander. Videos that help you build better decks, play better, and have more fun. If you want more of that, like the video to tell the algorithm that you think it's good, and subscribe to help me in my quest to reach 100,000 subscribers, and more importantly, to make sure that my next banger gets delivered directly into your eyeballs. Okay, this is what I ended up with. I took out a land, cut down my removal slightly, and swapped out almost all the artifact sacrifice photo for more reliable card draw and whatever tutor we can find in this color pairing. In subsequent gold fishing tests, the deck was doing exactly what it was supposed to. But I did have a concern that ramping this up to 100 cards would make that vending machine far too hard to find. But to test that, this deck needed more time in the oven.
Finishing the completed deck was simply a process of filling out the two matching 33 card lists from my shortlisted cards. Though you'll notice that I didn't have an engine piece in the third list and I've replaced it with a tutor instead. If you use this method, minor changes or deviations like this are absolutely fine. Even if a card you're including is of a different category or function because if 95% of your deck is focused, that's already more than enough. There is still room for whimsy. Fresh from the oven, I now had a completed version one deck for testing that I was pretty happy with. But as testing often does, it revealed that the deck was missing a final bit of secret source to make this dish complete, but more on that finished masterpiece in a second when we talk about the deck in detail.
The V1 deck was functioning really well, and you may even prefer it to my final version, and there are links to everything down below the like button. I had a lot of card draw, so it was reliably drawing the parts of my deck that I needed to, like protection, removal, and lifelink. I also managed to find some non-game changer tutors for our prize vending machine in Oswald, Reckless Handling, Nihiri, and Culotha Forge Master. In terms of practical testing, I played a game against friends that was a pretty good representation of what this deck does. I managed to get my engine online and start draining the table. As players started getting a little bit worried about their shrinking and my rapidly growing life total, I had to deflect two attempts to kill Ragos with him ultimately falling prey to a third. But given I had 90 life by that point, I managed to replay him and close the game out. A great thing about this deck is how it progresses the game equally. It doesn't see you kingmaking a certain player. If you do your thing, you're either going to win or you'll leave the table in a very brief fight to the death as they battle on very low life totals. In this game, I did, however, luck into the vending machine in my opening hand. In other goldfishing and test games, I encountered a flaw in my grand plan. The deck was great at doing the thing and was fairly resilient when I had my engine online. But if I didn't draw one of those engine pieces or tutors, it would do a whole lot of nothing. This led me to make some small but impactful changes, aka that secret source I mentioned a minute ago to build some redundancy into the deck.
With all that said, let's take a look at the result of all this cooking. And we'll start with the most important part of the deck, the engines. I have obviously already mentioned the vending machine a few times. But it's so good because whenever you sacrifice an artifact with Ragost, the vending machine creates a tap treasure. You can then sack that treasure over and over again because when you do, you guessed it, the vending machine creates a new one. Because of how good it is, we've got two ways to go and find it in Reckless Handling and Oswald Fiddlebender. If we don't manage to find it or one of our tutors, we do have some backup engines like weapons manufacturing. We have over 30 artifacts in the deck, so weapons manufacturing gives us a great way to make plenty of additional sacrifice fod. That fod also pings anything for two damage when it dies, making it the perfect fit for our strategy. Eventbrush razor gives us impulse draw that sticks around for each non-token artifact we sacrifice, allowing us to refill our sacrifice foder the next turn. And Descent into Avenous makes us a whole heap of treasures and lowers life totals, doing two things we want at the same time. This pairs really well with our last engine, academy manufacturer, which turns all of our treasure generation spells into three for ones.
Next up, we have our card draw sources, most of which are either a bunch of artifacts or create artifacts that can be sacrificed fod. I've prioritized card draw over cards that produce multiple tokens or permanence like Bumbleflower SharePot. And the reason for this is that if we're yet to find our engines, drawing cards is far superior to having an extra piece of sack fodder and it helps smooth out how the deck plays significantly. On the flip side, we also have the gaffer who is just nuts when we have Ragos plus a lifelink source online as that can net us up to four cards a turn cycle. Lastly in this category, we have unexpected windfall, pirates pillage, big score, and seize the spoils, all of which make us treasures and draw cards.
For the life gain portion of the deck, I focused on lifelink because of the way that it interacts with Ragost. One ping will net us nine life and untaps him, allowing him to activate four times per turn cycle, provided we have the artifacts in play to facilitate that. We've got an array of cheap in charits that enable lifelink, and I've used them rather than artifacts because they're significantly cheaper to cast. As examples, spirit loop is great because it comes back if Raos dies. Sheltered by ghosts doubles up as arguably the best removal spell in the deck, and we have bassilis collar in case we're in a position to tutor for it.
For protection, we've got some of my favorite cheap instant protection spells. I personally prefer spells that give hexroof or protection as targeted removal is usually my main problem. If someone is board wiping, it means the table's probably as badly affected as I am, which is fine with me. The standouts for me are Lauren's escape, blacksmith skill, and restoration magic, as they can protect Ragost or the vending machine. Our removal is pretty simple, but we've got three board wipes that don't affect our blessed lobster and six targeted removal. Arguably my favorite is Cloud's Limit Break. We then have a bunch of artifact ram sources, artifact lands, and of course, our mana base.
As with any deck brew, there are tons of cards I wanted to or considered including that I ended up leaving out, either because they weren't as good as the cards in the deck or because they didn't align strongly enough with my primary game plan. Often brewing a good deck is more about what you leave out than what you include. A really good example of this is life gain cards like Leon and Elder, Soul Warden, Scrap Heap, or even Authority of the Consoles, which you'll see on Ragost's EDH wreck page. While these cards are really good and on paper synergize really well with Raost, any card with Lifelink does this job better and makes these cards a direct downgrade. This is also why I don't run damage amplifiers like Torbin or Sulfur Mayhem Dominus or other sources of ping damage like Reckless Firew Weaver or Heedron Detonator. These cards are great when I have Ragos's Kitchen already up and running, but if I don't, they're not going to achieve nearly enough to warrant their place in the deck. Many decks go wrong by including far too many supplementary win conditions or win more cards rather than ensuring that their primary win condition is reliable enough to begin with.
If you like your commander decks on the spicier side, you might want to talk about upgrades. Our base Ragos deck is a bracket two deck. It could probably hang with threes, but if you want to do that on the regular, you probably want to upgrade it. These are changes that you can make to elevate it to operate better in that environment. I've shown cards that I'd swap in in brackets so that it's easy for you to know what I'd also take out. As this is bracket three, the game changes that I opt for are the one ring, gamble, and enlightened tutor. Given our life gain and the ability to easily sacrifice the ring if it becomes a liability, this is a great natural deck for the one ring. And gamble or enlightened tutor can help us grab it or the vending machine of our dreams. We also bring in idyllic tutor as it can grab one of our engines or a life gain source. There are then a few straight swaps to make improvements both in land and non-land cards. Probably the most notable is inventor's fair that can act as a tutor for our big artifacts like the vending machine or the one ring. There are some cards that you may expect to see like patriarch sealar sovereign or kaducius. But if they're not here, it's likely because I've already considered them and decided against them for a particular reason. Feel free to ask me in the comments if you want to know the reason for a particular card not being in the upgrade list.
So now you have a deck list, but you probably want to know how to pilot it. By this point, you should already have a rough idea of the general game plan, but another quick look at the menu won't hurt. In your opening hand, your priority should always be an engine piece or a tutor and a source of lifelink. Next up in priority is a source of protection, and the rest doesn't really matter, provided that you have at least three sources of mana. The early game is all about ramping and setting up. You'll most likely be playing manorox, sacrifice fod, and card draw spells. There is no reason to rush Ragost into play. And if you play him early for no reason, you'll likely just end up catching stray removal. I personally don't like playing him without protection in hand. Instead, play him once you've got your engine pieces ready to go, which are at least Ragos and a source of lifelink. And for me, that's usually around turn four.
Once he's in play, the most important thing is managing how much of a threat you are or appear to be. Don't play him only to nuke the table for 12 damage and sacrifice half your board on the next turn cycle. That's going to get you ganged up on and sent back to the stone age. Instead, start slow with maybe a ping or two per turn cycle. Ideally, you want your opponents to be down in the mid20s before they really identify you as the problem. By that point, you hopefully have an artifact source engine online and have one, if not two sources of protection to keep Ragos's kitchen safe while you get to work. That should put you in a great spot to aggressively start pinging the table down for 24 plus damage over two to three turn cycles. In most games, this should set you up to threaten to win by turn eight to 9, but in the best case scenario, and depending how much damage the table has inflicted on itself, this could be as low as turn six. If played correctly, your everinccreasing life total should provide a fairly healthy buffer to survive attacks. So, save your removal for when you really need it. The biggest threats to your game plan are either Ragast or your artifact production engines getting removed or opposing Voltron commanders hitting you in the face for 21 damage. And that is where I focus my removal. The rest isn't too hard to figure out and I think you'll do just fine by yourself. But if you have any questions, ask me in the comments or in the base deck department Discord.
Last, but definitely not least, I'm still hard at work in the kitchen cooking up a maximum flavor version of this deck. I have no idea whether my regular viewers want that though. So, comment give me the flavor below if you want that deck list. If there's enough interest, I'll make sure it's done really soon and share it on my social channels, my Discord, and update the description of this video. I hope you've enjoyed this and if you want more deck building raw source, go check out the Vincent deck that I built for Matt Mercer or my Aragorn Spells Slinger deck if you haven't seen them already. I've also put links to all the videos, deck lists, and everything else below the like button.
Pre-releases for Age of Eternities happen this weekend of the 25th, but given I'm in the future, I'll likely be down with my LGS for a pre-release when you're watching this. Either that or getting my singles orders in so that I can afflict my play group with my culinary delights as close to August 1st as lobsterly possible. And as always, thank you for being here.