As I'm reading over the comments I'm seeing the idea of your commander being your only quality card with your deck containing all quantity cards emerge. This is highlighting our point. Without at least one quality card (your commander) you cannot effectively combat the set points of commander (40 life 3 opponents) because the cards were created to combat different set points (20 life 1 opponent). A true quantity deck doesn't need a quality card at all, but commander's version of this is likely the one previously described.

The thing to point out here is that without the single quality card, your deck is a pile of cards that don't do much of anything. In a true quantity strategy each card should be effectively redundant and moves you towards winning the game in a way that is balanced with the other means of winning.

"I don't know much about old school decks, but I remember Siege Rhino."

Feeling kinda depressed all of a sudden.

Vintage has two quantity decks. Dredge is the most obvious. You mulligan until you find Bazaar of Baghdad, and then the rest of your deck essentially does the same thing. Shops is the other, where you have a critical mass of really annoying artifacts that either lock your opponent out of the game, or generate obscene mana or card advantage.

How about Feather the Redeemed as an example "quantity" deck? The basic Feather strategy uses  (and then reuses) low-impact 1- or 2-cmc combat trick cantrips and protection spells to both get on-board value and more cards. Importantly, these cards are usually not high rarity/costly cards, and the true power of the deck comes from the fact that you basically get multiple uses of the same mediocre cards.

I don’t really play MTG, but Yugioh is in desperate need of two things: 1) the most murderous banlist ever; 2) the card design department of Konami to be fired and or arrested lol

This video made me realize that I prefer to build quantity decks in commander. I have a little known and never played cEDH commander with Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion that allows for Quantity over Quality. Once neheb deals damage every single card in your hand becomes mana + card draw, allowing you to go pseudo infinite with extra combat spells that you draw into. There are actually no infinite combos in the deck, but it generates so much value that given the right circumstances the deck immediately wins. It’s really unique at cEDH tables and also can scale down to casual tables by removing a few of the extra combat tricks.

Similarily, decks like Imoti can be played with quantity in mind, where the cascade triggers make for an exciting “who knows what’s going to happen” event. I’ve even built mono-black in the past that avoided tutors and strictly utilized self mill as a form of card draw, which forces you to lean into quantity. Most decks I build have very strict budget standard (every card under $1), which pushes me away from Quality.

10:37 In OG Innistrad standard, there was a rogue deck in which you would use Sun Titan to bring back your Phantasmal Image, to become a Sun Titan, etc, and the last Phantasmal Image you would often use to “kill” your opponent’s legendary creature (eg Geist of St Traft

I think Duel Commander has done a pretty good job with this problem. Being a 1v1 format by itself fixes a lot, then a lot of the biggest offender quality cards (and commanders) are banned.

It's really an end result of the Queen problem, which is what MTG originally tried to solve. When a card is so centralizing like this, commander deckbuilding resembles modern yugioh deckbuilding where cards are broken into 2 categories: Engine, and non-engine. Engine cards are those that push your win condition, in this case Rhystic Study, clones, and tutors. Non-engine is anything that supports the win condition, such as counterspells or removal. Put simply, your deck consists of the most consistent way to win plus enough protection to ensure that it happens.

I remember twice: when Rebels were a thing, people playing Lin Siv so the opponent cant. The same happend again with Jitte.. years later. Today the legend rule is different, but in that time, this worked and people did it.

My first example of a quantity deck is aristocrats in Canadian Highlander. Theres on paper really disappointing cards that either give you additional creatures on death or are blood artists that drain opponents when a creature dies. When you have force of will, black lotus, ancestral recall and all of these legal, why would you ever want to play a 1/1 for 2 that turns into 2 creatures on death? It’s the amount of all of them together that makes them dangerous because it turns the slow bleed into 7 different stab wounds from different angles.

An interesting point about Quality vs. Quantity style decks is that this isn't the first time this has come up in Magic's history.  If you look at the immediate analysis/commentary on the tournament that Sligh and friends first showed off his eponymous deck a lot of the commentary was people trying to figure out how this deck was able to win without huge draw engines or any particularly powerful individual cards.  The deck concepts of the time were very similar in how they wanted to play the game to cEDH decks of today: draw lots of cards, get specific key pieces out, prevent opponent from doing the same.  Because that style was all the game had ever known at the time a lot of people just could not comprehend how a deck built any other way could win and it took a lot of time for some of them to come around on that.

Running a Quantity Deck over a Quality deck usually puts a target on me because my opponents are confused. They assume I'm galaxy-braining and are therefore a threat. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they are so wrong.

Introducing new cards or commanders won't change this in EDH. The preference for quality decks over quantity decks arises from the structure of the format, as you point out.

There are three main resources in Magic: cards, mana, and life. Yes, there are others in niche scenarios (energy, cards in graveyard, etc), but those are the main three. In 40 and 60 card formats, there is a natural progression in the relative importance of these resources.

You start out with lots of cards, so the value of an additional card isn't that great at first. Initially, you don't even have the mana to deploy most of them. But as you get closer to being hellbent, the value of a single card goes up. Drawing Fact or Fiction in your opening hand is ok, but topdecking it on turn 10 is amazing.

You start out with no mana, so the value of each new mana source is massive in the early game. But as the game progresses and you have tons of this renewable resource, additional mana sources become redundant. Dark Ritual is amazing on turn 1 but worthless on turn 10.

Life is a bit different because the relative value of life depends heavily on what deck you're facing. That's where aggro decks contribute to the diversity of a healthy metagame - they make life matter sooner than it otherwise would. 20 life is a healthy buffer against most decks, so the value of a life point is small at first. "Fetch a shockland untapped, Thoughtseize you?" In 20 life formats, that's a valid, perhaps even good, turn 1 play. Against a control deck on turn 4 it's probably still valid. But on turn 4 against an aggressive deck? Suicidal.

One of the strengths of Magic's fundamental systems and deckbuilding is that players can build their decks in such a way that different game resources are prioritized at different points of the game. And players have to adapt to that. It creates a ton of novelty in play experiences.

Commander neuters that healthy and dynamic balance by giving everyone an absurdly generous life total and forcing combat-focused decks to deal with 120 opposing life points instead of 20. As a result, most combat-focused decks have win conditions that look more like combo decks (e.g. token maker + Craterhoof/buff spell/extra combats/etc) even if they don't rely on infinite combos per se. Or they rely on their commander for damage or for voltron kills. True quantity decks don't exist because the quantity of damage they have to do is just too high. The only way to fix this is to alter the fundamental rules of Commander to be more in line with the environment the cards were designed for. And the simplest way to do that is to just reduce the starting life total in commander to something closer to 30 (the optimal value would need a lot of testing to find).

That would fix a lot of other problems, especially in cEDH and higher power contexts. UB decks are most able to trade life for cards, either explicitly (black) or implicitly (blue, by drawing cards, setting up engines, and ignoring attacks for a while). RW decks are notoriously weak in commander because a lot of the strength of those colors comes from quantity-based strategies, especially those that do damage. RW isn't great at drawing cards in any format, but in formats where RW decks can threaten kills quickly enough, the UBx decks have to respect that threat and focus on interaction and preservation of their life total, rather than just setting up value engines that inevitably lead to a win. The game is more diverse and dynamic when all three of its fundamental resources matter, rather than just two.

Commander is a quality format because its fundamental resource balance is broken.

Feather the Redeemed is the perfect quantity commander in my mind, as most of the deck is combat tricks that are not only redundant between each other, but Feather allows loops of this to further simulate more copies than there are. Orvar could be another example, depending on how you look at it. Using a ton of low mana instants to copy things has high redundancy, but the decks usually do still rely on having a few quality cards worth copying.

To give another example, midrange decks in Pauper Commander require quantity deckbuilding. Because of the power cap of having only the commons in the 99 (even without the ban list of regular Pauper), the format really rewards resilience. Of course you can put in a combo or two, a lot of card draw, and hope you'll eventually get all the pieces, but having a pile that keeps on going even if your commander is removed or you get under heavy control feels rewarding in a way that a bracket 3 regular EDH deck will probably not in the current landscape.

You guys are looking for the cEDH deck Varagoth, bloodsky sire. It goes under everything and hits fast enough to tutor for exactly your win. Though this does center around 1 card (ad nauseam), every card in your opening hand pushes toward varagoth, which pushes toward Ad Nauseum. Which pushes toward the win. And it’s wicked fast and consistent.

When Uro was legal in standard, its deck archetypes were referred to as “piles,” as in Bant Uro Piles

8:29 I would say that Magda/Winnota/Yuriko/Edric/Belbe/TymnaX are quantity decks.
Since they play many bad cards, they become good when combined with the commander.

I do feel like WotC is printing a lot more cards that scale with the number of opponents. Purphoros is a good example of that type of card as are things such as Kreat Boltbringer out of Foundations and the RW guy out of assassin's creed that damages all of your opponents every time you play a historic spell. There probably aren't enough of these for cedh yet but we may get there.