I Made Kalbi My Commander

As a memorial to my fallen best friend Kalbi, I designed a custom commander card for him and designed a deck around it full of existing cards re-skinned with various elements of his life.

As always, if your image was featured here and you’d like me to remove it, please let me know right away and I’ll take it down. (I tagged each person on social media when I started working on these and received no objections so far.)

Rule Zero

In order to play this deck, I have to get consent from my fellow players for two things. The first is two custom cards designed around Kalbi and my previous dog SooCoo, who he heard about constantly but never had the pleasure of meeting.

The other concession I need in Rule Zero is about the alterations made to the types represented by several cards in the 99. These mostly include:

• Adding “dog” or other types to several cards, sometimes instead of their existing ones
• Adding or removing “Legendary” supertype from several cards (for flavor, not function)
• Changing rules text on a few cards to affect Dogs and Cats instead of other types

None of these changes aim to change their power levels, and I’ll adjust them if they need it.

Here’s an example:

The 99

I have an approximate unlisted deck list on Moxfield: Kalbi, The Goodest Boy (Dogmeat represents Kalbi and Collective Blessing represents The Legend of SooCoo for deck validation purposes).

Creatures

Non-Creature Spells

Lands

Tokens

Design Notes

As I went through this process, I landed on a few consistent design choices.

Not Too New

I only created two custom cards for this deck because I didn’t want to clog up the gameplay experience by making everyone learn about dozens of new spells. This is why I tried not to change too many things about the skinned existing cards. I want to be able to just say “Mirari’s Wake” and have everyone at the table just know what the enchantment does, and it’s pretty minor to see a Dog Token instead of a soldier once in a while.

No Creature Sacrifice Effects

Originally, Kalbi’s rules text was just going to prevent himself from being sacrificed so he could more effectively change sides on the board without his regeneration ability being useful.

The last thing anyone ever wants is for their pet to be sacrificed. It’s one thing to have combat and removal occur, since those are important parts of playing a decent game of Commander at all, but I feel it’s a whole other thing to sacrifice one. Because of this, I cut all creature sacrifice effects.

I considered adding Everybody Lives! to the deck, but cut it because it felt like wishful thinking. When I pictured casting it in a game, I imagined I might break down crying. I may add it later when I’m a little more healed.

How the Deck Should Feel

I’m aiming for the barely-controlled chaos of the dog park. I want to play creatures of habit who do what they naturally want to do and trying to balance them all out so they create a harmonious chaos of battle and perseverance. Sort of like a classic Zoo deck.

I want Kalbi to feel like he goes nuts doing whatever he wants until he smells a treat and then he runs right to that person’s side and starts his charisma play. We’ll see how I did when I can sleeve these babies up!

Simplified Templating

Several cards have their rules text modified for simplicity. I want to maximize the art on these cards and prioritize clarity for how they work in this deck specifically. I removed all reminder text because no beginners will be playing these cards. I also re-worded some rules text

I removed the partner ability from Sam, Loyal Attendant because this deck isn’t using Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit anyway. Same for Guardian Augmenter’s wording to account for planeswalker commanders we’re not using here.

Legends and Humans

Obviously, all of Kalbi’s animal friends had to be Legendary. We’re using their proper names and likenesses, so it just felt right. But what about humans?

I thought about the privacy of the humans in these photos and decided not to use their real names. I also felt it was a good balance to remove some Legendary types since I was adding so many elsewhere.

I also didn’t want to leave people out if I could help it, but I only had so many photos of them and Kalbi or other pups together. Not using their proper names and instead describing a role allows me to swap in different art or photos later to include more of his human friends.

Technical Notes

I created all of these using PhotoShop. My templates were all made based on Bazuki’s Full Art Templates as a starting point. I added many of my own elements over the last year or so making custom cards, so there are several features not included in those. I also changed many of the raster layers to vector so I could stretch them a bit further than the original options offered.

Most of the photos weren’t taken with vertical framing in mind, of course, so I used the clone stamp tool, content-aware fill, and good old fashioned air-brushing to fill out the vertical space and get some nice bleeds on the edges for print. I tried not to let myself get too crazy about those details, so flaws probably aren’t hard to find. 😅

The Feels

I designed the first version of Kalbi’s card over a year before he passed, but as I’ve been grieving it became a whole project to see him fully honored in a joyful way. I want to be able to pull out this deck at Commander night and reminisce about him to my friends, telling all the backstories of the photos and card choices. It was a wonderful way to keep busy over the last few weeks and create something from the hundreds of photos and memories I gathered for it.

To Everyone Who Helped

Thank you to everyone who sent me photos, reminded me of things he did, suggested card ideas, and let me include them and their pets in Kalbi’s deck. Let me know if you want a copy of your cards! I’m getting them printed soon!

And if you find any more photos of Kalbi or his friends absolutely send them my way! I’ll likely update this deck in the future with little tweaks.