Built From Within: Baylen, The Haymaker Deck Tech

I absolutely love building new decks. The endorphins in my brain start swirling when I discover a new commander that speaks to my playstyle. Normally, I like to first check out other players builds. It helps to give a guiding hand in making my own version. For this series, I did something different. I built the deck exclusively using the deck builder and card search function available on Nerdleagues. This created a fun challenge where I used keywords to find the cards I need. Are there Baylen staples that I may have missed? Probably. Will I find a glaring issue with the deck after a commander night with the boys? Possibly. All that means is that I will dive into the card search again and have a narrower scope of what cards I need. It could be that my card draw was lacking, ramp was too heavy, win conditions lacking, etc. The journey is always the best part of any adventure and I will continue to improve the deck as needed.

Lets take a quick look at Baylen, the Haymaker. It's immediately evident that this commander loves tokens, and not just creature tokens. Any kind of token that the deck creates can be used to create mana, draw cards, or pump Baylen. This caused me to initially search for all cards that create tokens within Baylen's color identity. I was greeted with seemingly endless pages of search results. This wasn't efficient, so I refined my search to only include cards with mana value 3 or less. I wanted to solidify my early game first. Now I had results that were more manageable and targeted. I know that my best creature token generators are likely coming from green and white mana sources so I refined my search even further by removing the red cards and adding creature tokens to my keywords. Perfect, now I was looking at the best creature token generators. Treasure tokens are going to be important in this deck and logically we turn to red mana for the best generators. By searching only red cards that create treasures i was able to locate the cards I needed to consider. I did similar searches to find clue token generators and food token generators, all will serve.

While scrolling through my results I was able to easily drop potential deck candidates into my sideboard for later review, or immediately drop slam dunk cards directly in the main deck. After performing my various searches I was left with a sideboard that had about 60 cards for review. It was agonizing, but I was able to narrow it down to the cards I would put into the deck from there. It was like I had just created a recommendation page for Baylen. The deck needs more than token generation though, and those were easier to find. Separate Keyword searches for Boardwipes, targeted removal, card draw, ramp, protection, and win conditions all helped me round out the deck. Here are some of the notable inclusions.

The deck was finished using my own research and narrowing down the sideboard cards based on my personal preferences. Will you find a lot of these cards in other Baylen decks? Sure. There are many staple powerful cards that cannot be overlooked when building a new deck. My personal playgroup is at a high power level that I need to match in order to have fun and be competitive. I don't expect the deck to perform seamlessly the first night I shuffle it up but I will be able to recognize its flaws and go back into the card finder to search for cards that absolve its weak points. For me, editing a new deck is just as enjoyable as building it because you begin to understand the deck's identity after playing it a few times. Discovering what truly makes a deck tick and reinforcing it is what makes it successful.

Check out the full deck list below!