And what a year it has been.

I am writing this at 1 AM in the morning. Not because of a special and cool reason, but because December has been a menace work-wise, so this is the chance I got to write this. Non-magic related complaints over.

On the 22nd of December 2024, I decided it would be a great idea to try my luck with The Commander 32 Deck Challenge. Now it’s the 26th of December 2025, and I’d like to see if it was a great idea indeed.

Let me spoil it for you. It’s been an awesome year.

But let’s start with the bad

For me, Magic: The Gathering is a game I only want to play in a casual and relaxed environment. I have tried various formats (anyone remember Extended?), and I did enjoy the variety the brought. However, a major component of how casual magic can be is the people. People will forever be the defining element in how a local MtG community is shaped. I am not going to sugarcoat it. In the case of my local MtG scene, 70% of the players think they are Luis Scott-Vargas or Gabriel Nassif. Now, to make this more hilarious, the local MtG scene is comprised of about 30 people at the most. So imagine, if you may, a pre-release of 8 people (which is a good number in the context of my local scene). Two of them are attending a pre-release for the first time, one of them is an older player but not with a ton of experience, and the other 5 are people who are attending because they want to get as many packs as possible from the first 3. One of the two new players isn’t sure he wants to attend a pre-release again.

You can extrapolate this to every single situation where there was an attempt to set a league in Standard, or a regular bracket of Pioneer, etc. These people would get a whiff of a possibility of an extra pack as a reward, and swarm said events. And once attendance would drop, because they had turned a casual situation into a grindfest, they would complain about the lack of rewards and quit. But the damage had been done. For now, they are banished to their Modern league, where they cannot hurt anyone.

Enter Commander Fridays

In the autumn of this year, there was an attempt to resurrect the Commander community, both by the local game store and by players who like the Format. The 19th of December was the last game night for 2025, due to the holidays. In September, we could barely fill a table of 4 players. Now, we can go up to 3 tables, if everyone is attending. Mind you, we are talking about a scene of 30 players at the absolute most, so these numbers are excellent. And do you want to know the best part? The rewards do not whet the appetite of the grinders, so we can enjoy our games.

If I hadn’t decided to do this challenge, I don’t think I would be so active and willing to resurrect the Commander community. I would play a round every now and then, but nothing as close to almost every Friday. So, this challenge that I started to satisfy my hoarding collecting tendencies turned into a motivation to foster a community that does well for the local scene. Plus, I have more decks than I can play in one night, so I have extras to give to new players.

So now that something I started writing, thinking I was going to rank my decks, ended up as me talking about something kinda personal, let me go back to its initial purpose.

Behold, my decks!

Throughout 2025, I filled 12 slots of the challenge. That’s 37.5% of the challenge done. That’s not bad at all. And considering 3 of those slots were filled last month, it shows how strong the challenge-community combo is.

One thing I like doing is getting precon decks and working on them. This helps me because I am going for a list of 32 decks, and there are a bunch of staples that I need multiples of. Plus, there were some exceptionally good precons this year. I cannot rank them because I don’t own them all. But let me tell you something. World Shaper is the deck I enjoyed playing the most this year. Coincidentally, it came out this year, so it also gets the best deck of the year award. The deck has so many things you need to keep track of that I felt I got better at playing Magic overall. The same goes for Counter Intelligence, but not at the same intensity.

Abzan Armor was one of the latest additions to my list. However, it made up for it by being a super fun deck to play. Things can get heated really quickly when your side of the board has a ton of little defender creatures, and suddenly they can attack, while they deal damage based on their toughness. I only need to get a copy of cherry blossom Doran and the Walls of Ba Sing Se, and the deck is going to be exceptional.

The next spot goes to Ghyrson Starn and his love for shooting stuff. This is another classic example of a commander deck that is built top down, as in around your commander. This deck has about a handful of cards that cost more than $10, but the only one of them that is actually necessary is Ghyrson Starn himself. Everything else is optional and can probably be replaced by whatever is in your collection. Basically, this is how I built the deck. I just threw any card in my collection that fits the theme into a deck box and went to play. And the fact that this deck gave me a win at a table that contained Kaalia of the Vast and Edgar Markov, both as bracket 4 decks, has earned it a special place in my list.

Following that, my mono-black deck is something worth mentioning. It is another of my creations following the true and tried “let’s just put cards that look interesting into a deck box and see where that gets u”. This and Ghyrson Starn have benefited immensely from my habit of getting those old themed decks or From The Vault products. It’s currently in my “to-fix” list, because it needs to have some focus, and not just cards that lead to 4-hour games.

Next is another of my random decks, this time with Yennett, Cryptic Sovereign. This one suffers from the same fate as my mono-black deck, but Esper good stuff is something close to a win condition. Still, I consider it a deck I should work on a bit.

And now, time for Nicole’s favourite deck, Scrappy Survivors. This deck can go from 0 to 100 out of nowhere and finish two players in one turn. And that’s with a precon without any changes. I am quite interested in finding out what a couple of upgrades can do for this deck. Still, I consider this a pretty straightforward deck that I offer to a lot of new players to try. Probably not the best deck for new players in some areas, but it encapsulates the spirit of Commander quite well.

Staying in the Fallout franchise, Mutant Menace is next, with our favourite bug, The Wise Mothman. This deck is pretty good from the get-go. It can deal damage to everyone at the same-ish time through Radiation (at the same time since it distributes Radiation to everyone), but also deals a ton of commander damage, basically through the same mechanic. The concept is pretty great. I have seen what an upgraded version of this deck can do, and it’s not pretty.

Now the next spot goes to two of my decks. Mardu Surge and Mishra’s Burnished Banner share the same spot because I have the same thoughts for both of them. Both are pretty cool, but I feel I am either not piloting them well enough or that they need some upgrades for them to be viable. The former is something I need to figure out myself. The latter is not something unheard of. Precons aren’t known for their power, so that’s why some of them end up on headlines when they are better than people expect from precons. But to give credit where credit is due, precons are getting better. Be it better design or the need to deal with power creep, the last few commander decks have been really good.

And last, I will give the spot to two of my decks again, and for similar reasons. Eldrazi Incursion and Tyranid Swarm are at a similar spot with Mardu and Mishra, but these two give me a feeling of not wanting to play them. Does this mean I am going to replace them? Not for now because I blame myself, so I just need to figure out in what way I can play or upgrade those so I can have fun with them. Eldrazi Incursion will most probably be replaced on the list, because I have some cooler ideas for 5 colour decks, but it is going to remain in my deck collection.

And those were my decks, in a somewhat ranked order.

But what about 2026?

I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2026. I don’t know if I’m going to keep up the same pace as in 2025. I am definitely continuing the challenge, though. The best-case scenario would be to finish up with all the 3 colour decks, work on a couple of 2 coloured and mono coloured ones, and also do a 4 coloured one. Of all that, I think the hardest part will be that vacant Bant slot. I have lost any inspiration with it. I have some ideas, but they will require getting a bunch of cards, which will make a dent in my budget, especially since I am working on another MtG project, which I should talk about at some point. But what’s probably going to happen is that I will get quite a few more precons, which are going to give me a lot of new cards and inspiration, and work on my mono-coloured decks first.

And I think that’s all for now. At least, I should put an end to this at some point, since it’s now 2.30AM. If you play Commander, I suggest you try the challenge. It’s quite fun, and you get to try different play styles and interactions. And I also wish you all happy and calm holidays.

And until next time, have fun!