Happy new year, for those of you who celebrated the beginning of a new year recently!

Now that we've moved to 2023, it's a good time to move on to Jumpstart 2022 for our seed packs as we continue our process of building decks from Jumpstart. Lucky for me, the two packs I got built a straightforward deck, so we can use it as an opportunity to delve even deeper into the deck-building process. My goal here is to show you how to build a deck which will work right out of the gate. Note "working" does not mean "winning every game every time." "Working," in this case, means "allows you to be engaged in the game, cast your spells, and actually do some stuff". Nothing, to me, is worse in a game of Commander than simply never being in the game at all; building a deck following some of these basic strategies allows you to have a deck you'll actually want to play and, over time, upgrade, rather than just junk because it doesn't work.

Using a Junpstart 2022 Booster Pack Generator, I got two packs: Elves (2) and Multi-Headed (1). Both packs are Green, so we have our first example of actually having to get rid of a card: Thriving Grove appears in both. We actually don't want even one, and it'd probably be better to ditch the other one for a Forest, but I said we were going to use every legal card, so here we go.

Elves is, unsurprisingly, Elves Tribal, and Multi-Headed is Hydra Tribal. These two strategies go really well together, because Elves are good at making mana and Hydras often want a lot of mana to be relevant. So, it seems to me we have an excellent Elves Tribal deck with Hydra finishers. Who better to lead our wild pack than this Planeswalker, embodying the fury of the Elves' homeland:

Freyalise spits out Llanowar Elves, which is great because if they stick around they can help feed a big Hydra. She also acts as a Naturalize, which is always a nice effect to have around, and her ultimate allows us to draw at least some amount of cards, which is fantastic to have on a Commander. Let's talk through the deck.

I set aside 40 slots for lands. If you've never read any of my stuff up till this point, you're saying to yourself "wow, that's a lot of lands for an Elves deck." You're not wrong, but deck-building practice over several years has proven to me it's much easier to cut lands than to add them. I'd always rather start from a place of too many and remove some, and 40 is a solid number to make sure we're hitting our land drops up till around turn five without assistance. We can always remove some later. While I was at is, I removed that extra Thriving Grove and added in a few utility lands I know will be useful. Karn's Bastion and Llanowar Reborn both aid our +1/+1 synergies, stuff like Tectonic Edge is always useful, Rogue's Passage might help us with a giant Creature when we want to push it through, and Homeward Path is really helpful when someone decides they want to start taking our stuff.

Elves are well-known for Llanowar Elves, and we're not mad that Freyalise makes those for us, but unless we're looking to make a critical mass of Creatures (we're not), I'd rather get my mana from Lands. That means the majority of our ramp is in Land fetch - we won't have a problem hitting our color, of course, so let's run a Cultivate and get some extra Lands out. They won't die to a random board wipe, at least.

The thing we really needed was card draw, so once I was done adding lands, I did a Scryfall search for my colors with "draw" and "cards" and organized the results by Mana Value. This showed me every card with those words on them in ascending order of cost. I had to dig through some stuff which didn't do what I wanted, but I saw a lot of the things I did. Harmonize is the classic Green example, but I'm a huge fan of Hunter's Insight and it's slower, bigger cousin Hunter's Prowess in decks like this. Momentous Fall can be an excellent response to a Wrath of God effect, especially if we have some giant Hydra out. Return of the Wildspeaker gives us options: we can draw some cards or we can make our Elves much bigger and possible Overrun someone with a big attack. I really like Citanul Woodreaders in Mono-Green decks, too; we almost always have the mana to kick it, and we wind up with a decently-sized blocker for our trouble. Thinking about it, the Woodreaders are kind of a Green Mulldrifter.

Normally I'd stop here, but I'd like to give a little more insight. Card draw comes in many forms, and depends wildly on what your color identity is, but also on what you're trying to do. Green's card draw is often tied to Creatures, whether amount or size of a single Creature, but a Creature-less Green deck won't do particularly well with draw based on those things! In a deck like this, which gets a lot of mana, maybe we should run something like Tower of Fortunes, which I've happily run in big mana Green decks before. Our Commander (and other cards) spit out tokens: maybe we want Skullclamp! In this case, we're going to reliably get a large Creature out and often swing with it, so we can lean into that to draw a lot of cards. I'd rather draw eight cards off a massive Hydra than keep killing off my tokens with Skullclamp.

We have several Hydras to wallop our friends with. Some are better than others, but I think my favorite is Domesticated Hydra; we run it out for cheap, then can make it Monstrous and attack all on the same turn, which grants it evasion and a bunch of extra power in the attack.

We are severely lacking in answers. Green is capable of killing Creatures, mostly through the Fight mechanic, and we have a couple of ways to do that, but not many. We're not running any of the colorless board wipes, and we're pretty limited in our ability to solve big problems. Freyalise can kill a problematic Artifact or Enchantment! In a way, we're playing solitaire: we're going to play out a bunch of Elves and Lands, then land a massive Hydra, then swing for the fences. If you find you're losing because you can't manage your opponents' threats, consider adjusting the deck to have more answers.

Finally, as long as we have a Planeswalker Commander, I thought it'd be fun to do a mini-superfriends sub-theme. There are some great 'walkers in Green, so we have a few of them kicking around. Garruk, Caller of Beasts keeps Creatures flowing to our hand; Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter turns our Hydras into mana dorks; the two Nissas give us even more mana, and the two Viviens give us extra +1/+1 counters.

But there's another fun thing about Planeswalkers. In a casual game of Commander, Planeswalkers warp the table in wild ways. People panic. They'll ask you how many till the ultimate, ask for a reminder of what the ultimate is, then check again next turn. They'll attack it and not notice they could have killed you if they'd not worried about it. It's hilarious, but it also takes the heat off you as you build up some massive Hydra to send screaming back at them.

Jumpstart Freyalise | Commander | Mark Wischkaemper

• Commander (1)
• 1 Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury

• Creatures (30)
• 1 Benevolent Hydra
• 1 Canopy Tactician
• 1 Citanul Woodreaders
• 1 Clockwork Hydra
• 1 Domesticated Hydra
• 1 Dwynen's Elite
• 1 Elderleaf Mentor
• 1 Elvish Rejuvenator
• 1 Elvish Warmaster
• 1 Farhaven Elf
• 1 Feral Hydra
• 1 Fertilid
• 1 Frontier Guide
• 1 Ghirapur Guide
• 1 Ilysian Caryatid
• 1 Imperious Perfect
• 1 Ivy Lane Denizen
• 1 Leaf-Crowned Visionary
• 1 Lifeblood Hydra
• 1 Oran-Rief Hydra
• 1 Primeval Herald
• 1 Quirion Trailblazer
• 1 Realm Seekers
• 1 Reckless Amplimancer
• 1 Servant of the Scale
• 1 Ulvenwald Hydra
• 1 Wild Wanderer
• 1 Wood Elves
• 1 Wren's Run Hydra
• 1 Yavimaya Granger

• Planeswalkers (6)
• 1 Garruk, Caller of Beasts
• 1 Jiang Yanggu, Wildcrafter
• 1 Nissa, Genesis Mage
• 1 Nissa, Nature's Artisan
• 1 Vivien of the Arkbow
• 1 Vivien, Nature's Avenger

• Instants (5)
• 1 Band Together
• 1 Hunter's Insight
• 1 Might of the Masses
• 1 Momentous Fall
• 1 Return of the Wildspeaker

• Sorceries (15)
• 1 Adventurous Impulse
• 1 Cultivate
• 1 Harmonize
• 1 Hunter's Edge
• 1 Hunter's Prowess
• 1 Hunting Wilds
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Life's Legacy
• 1 Migration Path
• 1 Nissa's Pilgrimage
• 1 Rishkar's Expertise
• 1 Roots of Wisdom
• 1 Scale the Heights
• 1 Soul's Majesty
• 1 Soul's Might

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Hydra's Growth

• Artifacts (2)
• 1 Chariot of Victory
• 1 Elven Bow

• Lands (40)
• 30 Forest
• 1 Blighted Woodland
• 1 Encroaching Wastes
• 1 Homeward Path
• 1 Karn's Bastion
• 1 Llanowar Reborn
• 1 Myriad Landscape
• 1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
• 1 Rogue's Passage
• 1 Tectonic Edge
• 1 Thriving Grove

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This is the kind of deck which would work out great for someone looking to join their first Commander group or without a lot of experience participating in a complex, multiplayer format. There's less threat-assessment and tricky rules knowledge and more PLAYLANDSANDSMASHFACE. Kindly, it also upgrades itself nicely as time goes on. One could go in an Elves direction, more in a stompy direction, add a color and change direction entirely - the options are as plentiful as they are interesting.

It's also worth noting the value of building to a single color. If one were to play this deck and discovered its relative complete lack of answers is a problem, we'd have to start getting creative to solve it, since Green isn't the world's best solver of Creature problems at a table. The box we're forced into by having only one color is worth the challenge as we try to make our deck compete in every category of deck-building: Mana, Draw, Threats, Answers, and Synergy.

My editor likes Endless Atlas in Mono-Green decks, and it's a solid option frankly in any deck which runs a lot of the same kind of basic Land. If keeping cards moving into your hand isn't working, consider that. Additionally, stay aware of the lack of interaction; there are a few power-based kill spells like Bite Down or Master's Rebuke which might do well. Spinning Wheel Kick could clear the board for a big attack, and Ambuscade and Clear Shot both add some power before killing another Creature. Lignify, Song of the Dryads, and Krosan Grip are all solid choices for removal, as well.

I hope I'm helping you understand how you can build decks in lots of different ways. We'll do one more Jumpstart build, but if you'd like to see more articles on where to get the basis for a deck, please let me know in the comments on Facebook or Instagram Even better, build one yourself and let us know the decklist!

Thanks for reading.