Artisan Commander (variant format intro)

[Oversoul]

As detailed in this thread, I've gotten into Pauper EDH this year. I currently have 16 Pauper EDH decks...

1. Pauper Aristocracy — Khabál Ghoul
2. Scrappy Paupers — Auriok Salvagers
3. The Drake Equation — Iridescent Drake
4. Cochineal Storm — Grinning Ignus
5. Diseased Marsupial — Rabid Wombat
6. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime — Gamekeeper
7. Impoverished Memory — Quintorius, Field Historian
8. Shōchō Rebellion — Vizkopa Guildmage
9. Savagely Broke — Savage Ventmaw
10. Slumyard Survey — Survey Mechan
11. Frozen Assets — Kjeldoran Frostbeast
12. Trailer Park Elves — Abomination of Llanowar
13. Undercity Hustle — Safana, Calimport Cutthroat + Dungeon Delver
14. Cloakwood Maulrats — Amber Gristle O'Maul + Cloakwood Hermit
15. The Mad Mendicant Knight — Lim-Dûl's Paladin
16. Gentrification of the Lotophagi — Garth One-Eye

The main venue for this has been a group nicknamed "Pauper at the Parsonage." And I'll still be playing PDH there. I'll still work on decks too. I don't think I've built my last PDH deck of 2026. However, there's been some clamoring among the players in that group for variety. While I was away on vacation, these guys decided to start running games under a different format: Artisan Commander. They felt like this would be a good change of pace from PDH. And since I currently have 16 PDH decks and 0 Artisan decks, I'd better hurry up and make some adjustments there.

Compared to Pauper EDH, this format is both more an less restrictive, but mostly a lot less. Here's why...

• In Pauper EDH, your commander can be any uncommon creature, vehicle or spacecraft, but does not need to be legendary. In Artisan Commander, your commander must be legendary, although common legendary creatures can be commanders. Still, this overwhelmingly favors Pauper EDH in terms of depth, as there are only 66 common legendary options for the command zone in Artisan Commander, and there are well over 5,000 options that are legal commanders in Pauper EDH, but not in Artisan Commander. These include 11 of my own 16 commanders from my PDH decks.
• In Pauper EDH, the ban list outside of typical bookkeeping (no ante cards, conspiracies, etc.) is just two cards: Rhystic Study and Mystic Remora. Essentially all commons in the game are legal. In Artisan Commander, the entire Commander ban list is used. Now, that's actually not such a huge difference, because almost all relevant cards for that are rare anyway. So really the functional ban list for Artisan Commander is just four cards: Channel, Library of Alexandria, Karakas, and Tinker. That's technically more banned cards (twice as many), but the two lists are similarly compact. And there actually aren't any maindeck cards barred from Artisan Commander that are legal in Pauper EDH anyway, so the point (narrowly) goes to Artisan Commander for permissiveness on this one.
• In Pauper EDH, maindeck uncommons are forbidden. The commander(s) must be uncommon, but the maindeck is strictly commons only. That's over 10,000 possible maindeck cards legal in Artisan Commander that are not available in Pauper EDH. That's huge. And this drastically raises the power level ceiling of the format.

I'm a bit torn. On the one hand, I've been enjoying Pauper EDH a lot and still have ideas I want to explore in that space. Also, being able to run non-legendary creatures as commanders opens up interesting possibilities, and I've really embraced that with commanders like Rabid Wombat and Lim-Dûl's Paladin. Changing the format to Artisan Commander effectively opens up no new command zone options that interest me in any way. Furthermore, it seems like the appeal of this change in our playgroup to those who advocated for it was based mostly around manabase colorfixing and combo engines, and those are actually excellent reasons why I'd prefer Pauper EDH. However, there are some maindeck uncommon cards I might really be enticed to build around. My first thought was about Underworld Dreams. But this morning I realized that there was a much spicier option: Bazaar of Baghdad. So yeah, I'll be doing something with that.

No decks yet, but I'll be working on it and hope to have on ready for this week's "Pauper at the Parsonage" meetup. As I brainstorm, I find myself thinking of three distinct approaches I might take toward deck construction in this format...

1. Upgrade an existing Pauper EDH deck or retrofit a Pauper EDH rough draft concept to fit into Artisan Commander. Commanders like Abomination of Llanowar and Quintorius, Field Historian are fine in both formats and I could make my decks substantially stronger by incorporating uncommon maindeck cards, if I'm so inclined. I was also brewing a PDH concept for a deck helmed by Mabel, Valley Hero. I could take any PDH deck helmed by a legendary uncommon commander that I've ever built or might want to build, and give the deck a boost by adding uncommons. I could even maintain set it up so that some decks could be modular and be swapped back and forth between the two formats on the fly, if I wanted to.
2. Find some uncommons that really interest me, which I couldn't use in PDH and which might shine in Artisan Commander. The aforementioned Bazaar of Baghdad is a candidate for this. Other cards I can think of for this include Tendrils of Agony, Worm Harvest, Sensei's Divining Top, Land Tax, Loyal Retainers, Cabal Coffers, Aphetto Alchemist, and Windfall.
3. Find EDH deck concepts that might function in Artisan Commander, but which aren't tenable under PDH rules. My first thought here was Shadowborn Apostles. There are no common demons worth cheating out using a Shadowborn Apostles deck, but some uncommon demons are decent enough to maybe make the concept work. I also couldn't come up with a PDH Goblins deck I liked, but if I have access to uncommons, I think it could easily work.

We'll see where this leads. I might take all three approaches. If the playgroup enjoy this variant, then I almost certainly will employ all three eventually.