I Thought Zada Needed More Power. It Actually Needed More Ways to Work.

When I first built Zada, Hedron Grinder, I wasn’t exactly aiming for subtle.

The whole attraction was that Zada can go from doing very little to doing something completely ridiculous in one turn.

Get a few creatures down, cast Zada, throw a cheap spell at her and suddenly that one spell is being copied across the whole board.

Draw cards. Make mana. Pump everything. Cast more spells.

Hopefully kill everyone before I run out of steam.

Lovely.

The problem was, after actually playing the deck for a while, I realised I’d been worrying about the wrong thing.

Zada didn’t really need more power.

When the deck worked, it was already powerful enough.

What it needed was more ways to actually get itself working.

This is probably obvious in hindsight.

A good Zada hand feels fantastic.

You have a couple of cheap creatures, some mana, Zada, a cantrip or two and maybe something like Birgi, God of Storytelling to keep the mana flowing.

Those are the games where you start casting spells and suddenly realise you’ve drawn half the deck.

That bit works.

The problem was the other hands.

The ones where I had Zada and loads of spells, but barely anything on the battlefield.

Or a pile of creatures and nothing useful to cast on them.

Or one of the cards I considered an “engine” just never turned up.

Birgi was probably the first card that made this really obvious to me.

She is brilliant in the deck.

Every spell giving you another red mana is exactly what Zada wants.

So for a while I thought of Birgi as one of the important pieces of the deck.

Which is fine, apart from one small issue.

You have to actually draw her.

And quite often I didn’t.

That sounds stupid written down, but I think it’s quite an easy Commander trap to fall into.

We find a card that is perfect for what the deck wants to do, then mentally start building around that card appearing.

But a singleton deck has 99 cards in it.

“Hopefully I draw this one” isn’t much of a plan.

That became the useful bit.

Instead of asking what other card is as good as Birgi, I started asking what I actually wanted from her.

Mana.

More specifically, mana while the deck is trying to chain spells together.

Once I looked at it that way, there were suddenly several answers.

Runaway Steam-Kin can help keep the mana going.

Storm-Kiln Artist makes Treasures.

Battle Hymn and Brightstone Ritual can turn a developed board into a big lump of mana.

They don’t all work in exactly the same way.

That’s actually the point.

I don’t need four copies of Birgi.

I need several different cards that can get me to roughly the same place.

That idea has slowly become one of my favourite ways of looking at Commander decks.

Many roads, one destination.

If the deck needs something to happen, I want more than one route to make it happen.

Zada needs creatures.

Obvious again, I know.

But knowing something when you build a deck and feeling it repeatedly during games are slightly different things.

A lot of Zada’s spells become absurd because they are being copied five, six or ten times.

If there’s nobody else standing next to Zada, all that nonsense disappears.

You’ve just paid four mana for a 3/3 and are now staring at a hand full of cards that would be much better if you had bothered to make a board first.

That happened enough times that I started paying much more attention to the first few turns.

Cards like Young Pyromancer, Akroan Crusader, Mogg War Marshal and Goblin Instigator suddenly stopped being the boring setup cards.

They were the cards that allowed the stupid stuff to happen later.

That changed the way I judged the deck.

I’d spent quite a lot of time thinking about its ceiling.

How explosive can it be?

How early can it go off?

How many cards can it draw?

I started becoming much more interested in the floor instead.

What does this deck look like when I don’t draw well?

Because those are the games where you actually find out whether the deck is built properly.

Not enjoyable.

Useful.

A brilliant hand can hide a lot of problems.

If you naturally draw the right mixture of mana, creatures and spells, almost any vaguely sensible Zada deck can look amazing.

The ugly hands tell you where the holes are.

No creatures?

Maybe the deck doesn’t have enough early bodies.

Plenty of creatures but no gas?

Maybe it needs more ways to find or replace the cheap spells.

Deck stalls halfway through the turn?

Maybe the mana engine isn’t redundant enough.

The question stops being:

“What card can make this deck stronger?”

and becomes:

“What keeps going wrong?”

That is a much better deckbuilding question.

My favourite example of all this probably came in a game where I was down to three life.

I was basically hanging on.

Then Underworld Breach gave me access to the graveyard and I managed to put together Twinflame and Dualcaster Mage.

For anyone unfamiliar with it, Dualcaster copies Twinflame, which can make another Dualcaster, which copies Twinflame again.

And again.

And again.

You end up with as many hasty Dualcaster Mages as you need.

It won the game.

Very satisfying.

Also slightly awkward for the commander sitting there whose name is supposedly on the deck.

But I actually like that.

The deck’s destination is not really “do a Zada thing”.

The destination is to build a board, generate a load of resources and turn that into a win.

Zada is one very good way of getting there.

Twinflame and Dualcaster is another.

Different road.

Same destination.

And importantly, the cards involved aren’t necessarily dead outside the combo.

That matters to me more and more.

I still love finding ridiculous cards.

That isn’t going away.

But I’m becoming more interested in packages.

Bodies.

Mana engines.

Card draw.

Ways to find important pieces.

Backup win conditions.

The deck isn’t really 99 separate cards.

It’s a collection of jobs that need doing.

The interesting bit is working out how many ways the deck has of doing each job, and which job becomes the bottleneck when things go badly.

That is where I think Zada has taught me the most.

Not how to make the deck explode.

That bit was easy.

How to make it explode more often.

There’s a difference.

Most of this comes from building and playing my own Zada deck.

It is not a controlled TDA experiment yet.

That distinction matters.

I know the deck has sometimes struggled to establish enough bodies early.

I know some of the cards I thought of as important didn’t appear nearly as often as I expected.

I know adding alternative engines and win lines has made the deck feel less dependent on one particular draw.

But “it feels better” only gets us so far.

So the next interesting question is something we can actually test:

How much redundancy does a Commander deck need before its main plan becomes genuinely reliable?

That is a much bigger question than Zada.

And I think it is exactly the sort of thing The Deck Analyst should be trying to answer.

For now, though, Zada has already changed one thing about the way I build decks.

I’m not just looking for the best card anymore.

I’m looking for all the roads that get me where I’m trying to go.

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