If you like the alphabet, alliteration and EDH deck building challenges why not give the EDH 1 letter challenge a try? If you know me (or have read some of the other EDH articles) you'd know that deck building challenges are one of my favorite aspects to EDH and MTG in general, so I thought what better way to start off a new year of EDH than with a fun new challenge and this is what I came up with. There's just 1 rule -
Build an EDH deck where every card in the deck shares the same 1st letter of their name with your Commander.
For example if your commander is Atraxa then the name of every card in your deck needs to start with the letter A.
It seems simple enough but if you think for a moment the main difficulty becomes obvious - the land base. If you want to be a bit easier on yourself you could exclude basic lands but that's not my style so I worked out a tier list of options (see below)
Obviously letters that are shared with basic lands make for the simplest options so S, F, I, M and P are the top choices. Making a Red/x deck using a commander starting with M and Mountains as your main lands is the best to build a workable deck in this challenge.
That said S is slightly special, it's not just in S tier because it's literally an S. You can of course make a Black/x deck using a commander starting with S and Swamps as your main lands. BUT the power of S comes from the existence of the Snow-Covered Basic lands which make any colour combination viable.
W is another special case, it has a basic land type - Wastes but as that land is colourless and as W is not a super commonly used letter the decks you can build with it seem ... mediocre at best.
As far as I can tell the other letters don't have enough lands to make a viable deck (if anyone can work out a way please prove me wrong, i'll happily try building and playing anything).
I (uncharacteristically) decided to go easy on myself and start with the easiest option so last week for my LGS's EDH night (big shoutout as always to the Card House crew) I built and took a Selesnya Shalai, Voice of Plenty deck where every card's name began with the letter S.
The amazing thing I learnt from this challenge was how many top level EDH staples are in the letter S everything from ramp like Sol Ring, removal like Swords to Plowshares, tutors like Sylvan Tutor, card advantage like Skullclamp and finishers like Storm Herd.
Somehow I even managed to win my pods (I'm usually in the middle or further down thanks to all my meme-y challenge decks), although admittedly I was partly gifted one win by the table who seemed to enjoy my somewhat strategic use of strange and special sentences throughout the match (thanks guys).
As usual, if you got this far I hope you enjoyed the article and any feedback (or decklists based on this challenge) is always welcome. TabletopLG is now hopefully back in regular released (1-3 per week) if you have any suggestions for challenges or want to publish an article with us please contact me through the facebook/twitter provided.