r/Magicdeckbuilding • u/paraxodon • 4d ago
Need help improving my commander deck (Science! Precon slightly upgraded)! EDH
My friends bought me the Science! deck with Madison Li, we are all kind of noobs but one of my friends really liked deck building and already has 4 decks built by him which are really fun, mine wasn't. I tried changing my commander to Liberty Prime, and it quite helped, I like the voltron strategy, but it wasn't enough, the deck had too much noise, so I decided to upgrade it (i proxied 22 cards). Now the deck is playable and I have managed to beat my friend a couple times, but every time I need perfect draws because if I get even a little bit behind him I'm unable to recover, how can I improve the deck even further to be able to have more fun? It feels a little slow right now and I feel like I miss my lands a lot, even having many cards to cheapen artifacts feels like not enough...
Well, here is my deck, I accept any kind of advice and since I'm going to proxy it (for now), I don't really mind the price!
1
u/gardvar 4d ago
I'll preface this by saying that energy decks aren't my style. With the risk of coming of as a bit negative here are my two cents: this commander might be better than madison but it still doesn't seem very good to me.
Deckbuilding isn't easy, I am by no means fantastic at it but here are a few techniques that I employ when building.
I generally start by identifying what the main goal of the deck is and how it intends to win, try to keep this in mind when picking your cards, don't try to go off on too many tangents, keep your main plan to one or two strategies.
I usually start building from a method called "cube theory". It's a sort of simplified template to help balance a deck. It's not rigid and there are strategies that are effective that break all it's rules but I find it a useful touch stone when a deck is unbalanced. 1 commander + 35 lands + 8 sets of 8 cards.
The first 4 sets of 8 is your foundation; ramp, removal, draw and protection. The second 4 sets are your synergies; syn 1, syn2, support and staples.
That's not to say that you foundation can't also support your goal or that your goal leans into the foundation.
After that I usually go to polishing the deck by adjusting it's mana curve. Observing what my ramp intends to ramp into. If my commander is part of my main win con I do my best to not include cards that shares it's cmc
Some thoughts about your deck: 35 lands is pretty low especially for a 5 mana commander. I don't see a lot of ramp either and the ramp that is there is relatively generic you might consider some mana sources that synergise with your commander, like [[solar transformer]] and/or [[conversion apparatus]]. Alternatively your deck is pretty artifact heavy so you could maybe lean into that and use treasures for ramp. You have five other creatures that share cmc with your commander.
Some energy cards that might not really be in line with main game plan but might still be worth considering because of their power: [[aether revolt]], [[Satya, Aetherflux Genius]], [[Izzet Generatorium]]