Something Something Staples Something Something Easy Button

When I began playing Commander, I had a couple fat pack boxes full of mostly white cards. Around the same time, the store we frequented in Kingston was offering "Retro Boxes."

These were repacks that were guaranteed a foil rare or mythic, one "good" rare or mythic, 9 other rares, and some number of commons and uncommons. They included cards as far back as revised and were a good mix.

Obviously, I bought a few.

They really were a mixed bag, but for 15 dollars, we got our money's worth; at least, we opened cards that found homes in our decks. CB had a few older cards, but none of the rest of us did, until TB brought some cards out some time later. My first Retro Box had a foil Lich's Mirror and a Revised Balance. After 2 games with Balance, we found out it was banned, and for very good reason. I miss it, but it's probably way too good. I still have it in my binder as a reminder of those early days. Someone else opened a foil Fracturing Gust, which I traded for (DK has a nasty Karn deck, Fracturing Gust blows him out). Some of the foils are memorable, like a Mind's Eye I traded to DK, but I recall very few of the "good" cards.

This is important: "Good" is subjective. "Good" will vary based on your needs.

Look at my Balance- Balance is an awesome card.

So awesome, in fact, that it's banned in Commander.

I'm not complaining- I don't regret these repacks at all. We opened a lot of cards for our decks, built up our collections. But while the guy who built them was correct in his view, it didn't suit my needs; I couldn't play it! So cards that someone else deemed good from their frame of reference weren't good to me.

So let's talk about "staples."

The concept of staples in Commander is a somewhat broken one. Almost every week I see Reddit threads or posts on the WotC forums wherein players ask for "staples" or "must-run" cards of a given colour combination.

Staples are cards that popular opinion dictates you should run in a deck with X characteristics, where X is Commander, colour, mana cost, etc. Makes sense, right? You only get 99 cards; it stands to reason you'd want to run the best ones you could.

But this game has been around for more than twenty years. It's almost defined by corner cases and exceptions. There are a handful of hard-to-refuse cards for each colour and each colour combination, but I would make the case that there are exactly zero staples. For any deck.

Look at Command Tower. Staple, right? References your commander, easy to obtain, no downside apart from being a non-basic land. When wouldn't I run this?

Well... was it in the mono-coloured decks released this year?

That's the kind of thing I mean. Here's another example. Sol Ring. Cheap, readily available, makes for an explosive start. But it makes you a target if that's your turn one, and what if my meta is heavy on artifact hate? Suddenly, not so good.

So we have mechanical reasons not to run cards considered to be staples. We have the political aspect. One's meta can dictate whether or not some staple cards are even worthwhile, much less good.

There's one other reason I can think of that should cause people to take such lists with a grain of salt.

Budget.

I have a taste for foils, and my tendency is to run goodstuff-style decks. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, particularly since I run some less-than-ideal cards because they're "pimp." This has caused me to really watch what I recommend to people when they ask for advice. I don't say, "Run Moat." I might suggest similar effects, but I consider it bad taste to suggest cards out of the price range of most sane, rational people. It has nothing to do with profiling; many of the people I know and play with would balk at spending $400 on one card, when an entire deck can be built for less and still have a shot at winning.

There are so many reasons one can come up with for not playing a given "staple." People will ask you at some point in your Magic career why you're playing Y card when Z card is so much better.

Aside from the fact that this message can be delivered politely and decidedly less so, it should be remembered that you don't answer to these people. People will play the cards they want to, and that should be that.