What is Plan A (when there is a Plan B) ?
The Plan A is the obvious idea of a deck:
It might be control, it might be aggro, it might be combo or mill. Any deck is designed to fulfil a theme, a role, to have a certain mana curve, to have synergies. You might even think of „Turn 1 Drops“, „Turn 2 Drops“, when to ideally play your commander and so on. You could even calculate your perfect hand, and playtest: draw several starting hands, play your perfect hand and calculate when you can archieve 40 damage or a combo to win.
This is of course just theoretical. As you shuffle, you will likely draw the perfect hand just once in a while, while on other occasions you simply will not draw the good stuff. Yes, a deck is stronger of it can theoretically win on a low turn number, and the lower the number is and the more often you consistently can archieve a victory on this turn, the more aggressive and stronger and competetive your deck might be.
The next decisive factor (especially in a more tournament orientated environment) is: how fragile is your deck ? While it is nice that certain decks can potentially do this and that on turn x, you must take into account that you do have two opponents in Team Commander, and they both will do their best to hinder you. So, a strong deck aims for being as indisruptable as possible. The fewer cards can hold you off archiving your Plan a, the meaner and nastier and more tournament-style your deck seems to be.
Ok, and you might guessed it by now… most likely your plan won’t work out as intended. You put down your commander, you put on some really nice equipments for lethal unblockable commander damage, but then, your opponent just plays an Oblivion Stone and all your dreams crumble to dust – oh my. So, boardwipes do occur, and they might not only reset the board but change the win propability enormously. Why is this so ? Because, not every deck has an equal …
Plan B !
So when your deck Plan A was interrupted, your (primary) combo piece got disenchanted, your commander was sent to a path to exile, and your hand is now empty, then Plan B is active.
So, what the heck is Plan B ? Do I have a plan B ?
Well, while you might have other combos in your deck, we don’t define our Plan B factor as the amount of combos your deck can pull off. Sometimes a deck just moves on with Plan A once again.
The Plan B factor however is the ability to recover from a board wipe, a devastating blow against your hand and cards and commander. remember, we told you you do have opponents, and their job is to interrupt you and your nasty deck. And while there might be meta-relevant anti-cards against specific decks, a normal board wipe occurs quite regularly, and commanders are also quite regularly tried to be sent to the command zone.
The big question however is, how do you handly such a situation ?
a) Some commanders and decks are simply crushed. Your hand is empty, you will draw cards from top of your library, and you may just play your commander from the command zone, but as it has no comes into play trigger, it has no overwhelming abilities by its own, and little to no protection, your deck is overthrown. You might recover in 5 or 6 turns if you draw some good cards, but it is not very likely that you will win the game. A good example for such a deck is any commander which is more creature focused, hasn’t got indestructible and no haste or carddraw or ramp ability.
b) Some commanders are simply indestructible. They can’t be killed that easily, sometimes the color identity of your opponents decks just make a certain commander quite „unkillable“ (e.g. protection of a certain color, or a God enchantment commander playing against colors which can’t exile enchantments). A good example for such a deck is any commander which
is indestructible.
c) Some commanders are killable, but this doesn’t slow down the deck that much. So, the cheaper the cmc of your commander is, the more likely it is that you will recast him or her. Some commanders as Liesa or Emry even don’t get more expansive in mana cost most of the times. So the propability that you will recover from a board wipe is quite high. Or, your commander is killabel, and the cmc does rise, but once you replay your commander he has haste or nasty comes into play trigger which just give you an immenent advantage.
d) And lastly, the strongest commanders are killable, but they include such potent abilities, that just by casting them (Maelstrom Wanderer) or when they hit the board (Zacama) or when they can be activated (without summoning sickness) like Golos or Kinnan or Aminatou they can simply win you the game out of nowhere. Ok, you might need some luck when cascading or activating Kinnan or Golos, but these decks are tuned for pulling off tricks, and they do regularly win by just casting their commander, turning their commanders theoretically into a „one card win combo“. It’s no coincidence that these decks mentioned above regularly dominate the format.
So, this is our answer-article to: which decks do dominate and rule the meta: the decks which have a better Plan B factor, meaning they can’t even be effectively hindered by a board wipe, and once they are recast they can dominate the game once again by thereselves or even win the game out of nowhere while they were just handled the turn before make them the strongest decks. So, watch out for the PLAN B FACTOR of a commander!
