My Most Important Deck-Building Rule MAGIC: THE GATHERING

It was a bit overwhelming, but breaking it down into chunks made it manageable. It helps to start with a theme or a “win condition,” which is the main way you plan to defeat your opponent. This could be anything from overwhelming them with powerful creatures to slowly draining their life points with spells. During a turn, a player draws one card and can play cards from their hand onto the board. Creature cards are used to attack opponents or block incoming attacks from opposing creatures. By attacking each other or dealing damage with non-creature spells, players aim to get their opponent’s life from 20 to 0 to win the game.

So if a large number of people at your local gaming store play control, you might want to consider playing an aggro deck. However, in conjunction with playing a bunch of other burn spells and piling on your opponent with fire and lightning, Lava Spike becomes dramatically more powerful. A burn deck is essentially a combo deck—except instead of assembling a combo in its hand or on the battlefield, it casts spells over several turns to bring its opponent to 0. Now that we have a core set of cards for our deck, let’s fill in the rest. Gnawing Vermin is a good start because it can kill an early creature in combat with it’s death ability. Nezumi Informant is a good way to make our opponent discard cards.

Refining Your Deck: The Importance of Testing

Since eminence triggers in the command zone, you don’t have to rush to cast it. You’ll be able to amass a ton of Vampires quickly without ever needing to cast Edgar. It’s often better to wait to cast Edgar until you’re ready to push toward victory at the endgame.

There are even creatures that get stronger simply by having equipment cards attached to it, like Myr Adapter or Loxodon Punisher. Just keep that in mind if this is the style of deck you are making. And there you have it—a comprehensive guide to the best Magic decks for beginners. Whether you’re into smashing with creatures, burning your opponent out, or controlling the board, there’s a deck for you.

What Are the Rules for Building Magic Decks? A Quick Guide

We don’t have very many high cost spells so we don’t to draw too many of them. Midrange decks will want around lands, and control decks want 26 lands, sometimes a little more. First thing’s pauper decks first, building your own deck is going to require having a knowledge of the cards that exist in the format you’re building for.

Cheap cards that can destroy your opponent’s creatures are the best. [c]Dragon’s Fire[/c] and [c]Infernal Grasp[/c] are a couple of great examples. An ideal gameplan would consist of first playing a bunch of cheap goblins early on in the game.

Picking cards to go with your theme

It can be simple, like “I am a red-white aggressive deck that wants to attack and win quickly.” No problem. Your deck can focus on one color or combine multiple colors. A single-color deck provides consistency, while multi-color decks offer variety and power.

Most decks should include at least 1 or 2 unique cards with a mana value of 1, at least 2 cards with a mana value of 2, and at least 1 card with a mana value of 3 or higher. Generally, you want more lower-cost cards, with a focus around the 2 or 3 mana value range. In the case of the Stone-Tongue Basilisk deck, I would need ramp cards to help build my mana-sources as well as cards to help fill my graveyard to enable the Threshold ability. Nowadays, cards like Mulch and Grisly Salvage would help add lands to my hand while filling up my graveyard as well.

For instance, if you want to play faeries, you’ll probably want blue and black cards in your deck, as this is the color where almost all faeries are found. If you want to play MTG mana ramp to reach big creatures faster, you’ll almost certainly need to be a green deck, as this color has the biggest creatures and the best ramp. If you’re building a deck for a Constructed format like Standard or Modern, you need a 60-card deck. If you’re building for a Limited format like Draft or Sealed, you need a 40-card deck. And if you’re building a Commander deck, you need 99 cards plus your MTG commander.

The ‘meta’ is the current state of the game, what decks are popular, what strategies are working, etc. You’ll know what to expect from your opponents and how to counter it. The more you know about your opponent, the better you can plan your moves. You’ll learn how to build a board state and use your creatures effectively. Plus, there’s something incredibly satisfying about watching a horde of tokens overwhelm your opponent. What colors you choose to run is up to you, but some colors work better with some deck types than others.

Perfecting Your Strategy

Now, it’s quite likely that picking a strategy has already narrowed this down for you. If Control decks perform best when a game goes long, and Aggro decks do well when they can end games quickly, Midrange decks are in the middle. These decks look to apply early pressure with smaller creatures, but run plenty of larger beasts too. Aggro decks don’t need as many lands as other strategies, and often make use of only a single color. It’s no good just jamming a bunch of cards together and calling it a day. A good MTG deck has a gameplan, a series of actions it hopes to pull off to secure victory – in other words, a strategy.

Artifacts are great stat boosters and are harder to get rid of than creatures. Vanquisher’s Banner, Coat of Arms, and Banner of Kinship are all artifacts that’ll boost your Vampires drastically. If you want a strong theft deck, you have come to the right place. Check out Rev, Tithe Extractor’s mono black Commander deck in MTG. Coat of Arms is the easiest way to give all your creatures a massive stat boost. So, if you have four Vampires, they’ll be boosted by +3/+3 (as they do not count themselves in the stat boost).

correct ratio of creatures to spells Magic General Magic Fundamentals

An aggro deck in Limited will function similarly to its Constructed counterpart. You want a low curve of creatures to beat down early, backed by a stouter threat or two. You could find yourself running combat tricks like Giant Growth both to help win combats and push through some extra damage in lieu of burn spells.

Simple Offensive: Aggressive Boros

After all, they’re still just lands, and they don’t take up those precious deck slots for all those spells. Sometimes, the planeswalkers will have abilities that can help win the game, usually by generating creature tokens. An example of an Aggro deck is the “White Weenie” deck archetype. These decks use the cheaper creatures in white to deal consistent damage and overwhelm an opponent in the critical first few turns of the game.

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Dredge is also filled with flashback spells like [c]Conflagrate[/c] (and [c]Ancient Grudge[/c] in the sideboard). Like a midrange deck, it uses these spells and creatures to gain incremental advantages and apply pressure, and like a combo deck, it relies on synergy to really get its gameplan going. Green Stompy decks are most common in Standard, where formats tend to be slower and fairer. This deck archetype struggles against fast and powerful combo decks, which is why you won’t see it played a lot in Legacy and Modern. Johnny enjoys winning with cards that no one else wants to use. What sets Johnny apart from the other profiles is that Johnny enjoys deckbuilding as much as (or more than) he enjoys playing.

Not every strategy will be successful, which is why playtesting is important. Using and modifying pre-constructed decks may help you start your journey in building your own decks. The worst mistake in deck building is tossing in your best cards without considering their costs. This oversight can result in being unable to play a single card during crucial moments. To avoid this, aim for a distribution that ensures you can play something every turn, even if it means waiting a bit.

By paying attention to your mana curve, you can increase the likelihood of having playable cards at every stage of the game, leading to a more effective and enjoyable deck. My second functional deck followed a stun combo called Pickles Control, a combo that prevented your opponents from ever having an Untap phase, leaving their entire field useless while you rolled over your opponent. I think I even did well in a few tournaments, but barely managed to make it into a few elimination rounds. Control-Combo is a control deck with a combo finisher that it can spring quickly if need be. A notable subtype of Control-Combo is “prison,” which institutes control through resource denial (usually via a combo). On top of usual spell counters and negations is Chrome Host Seedshark which can create +X+1/1 Tokens per cast of non-creature spells.

From there, it’s a simple matter of playing a powerful creature or planeswalker to finish off the game. Some of MTG’s most popular cards often see reprints in new sets, while other cards considered too powerful can be banned or restricted in certain formats to keep the game’s competitive scene fair. The sets permitted for tournament play in the Standard format periodically change to include only the four most recent sets released for the game, an action known as rotation. The sets allowed in other formats depend on the format itself. Of course, some of them aren’t in games because they’re prohibitively, ridiculously expensive. Combo decks are unconventional and use strategies far off the beaten path.

They often have enough removal to snipe key combo pieces, their creatures tend to blunt aggro offensives, and they have enough redundancy and card advantage to deal with control. However, they also don’t necessarily excel in any one of those particular matchups. Midrange is the “Jack of All Trades” deck, but as a result, it is also a master of none. It’s essential to have a rough idea of what each one does as it’ll help you identify them when playing against them. Back then, green didn’t have many good removal options except for dealing with flying creatures and enchantment and artifact cards. They did have buff cards that acted as dual use support cards, offensively and defensively, such as Giant Growth.

Your opponents have your life points down to 0 by turn 3 with ease. You may even have some of the best cards in the game, but the deck just doesn’t function. Aggro-combo decks employ aggressive creature strategies along with some combination of cards that can win in “combo” fashion with one big turn. This name of this archetype is a misnomer, as there is rarely an “infinite” loop in Magic, such loops end in a tie. Instead, these decks are often made of a few combo pieces, that will guarantee either a win or the time to do so.

Magic: The Gathering deck types

Consider how many spells of each color you’re using in determining how many mono-color lands you use. By the time players get to cast any of the Creatures in the deck, there should be a substantial number of Instants and Sorceries in the graveyard. To make the opponent’s lives much harder, players can use Baral and Kari Zev to either cast their second spell at a lower cost or create a 2/1 Monkey Pirate to build their ranks. Alternatively, they can build up towards an Arcane Proxy that can exile a card from a graveyard and cast it without paying the Mana cost.

Of course, you could also be using any other combination of colours, though it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be playing Green. Azorius Control combos edh is a very powerful deck in nearly every format. If you were to look for one single MTG card that embodied the Control way of life, you could probably stop with planeswalker Teferi, Hero of Dominaria.

The initial deck construction is a starting point, and the real refinement comes through playtesting against various opponents and decks. As you engage in games, certain aspects of your deck’s performance will become evident, guiding you in making necessary adjustments. Then, Nature’s Revolt turns all of our lands into 2/2 creatures, helping me take out a chunk of his life points as all my lands would hit my opponent for 2 damage apiece. What about his lands, those too are dealing with the Basilisk. Not only did these decks never win, I couldn’t play a single spell in many of these games.

The Three Main Types of Magic Decks: Explained for Beginners

These decks are great for players who want to puzzle out the best route to victory. Playing combo decks well is about understanding the lines you take to get from zero to Griselbrand and executing them around whatever disruptive elements your opponents might be playing. This is the perfect archetype for anybody who looks at their hand and sees how they want to win. “Archetypes” in Magic refer to the strategy and game plan of a decklist. The difference between deck lists isn’t just the cards they play, but why they play them. A control deck plays Lightning Bolt primarily for removal, while an aggro deck uses it to end the game.

Since you’re allowed four copies of each card, that gives you nine unique cards to focus your build on. With this Mono-Red deck, players will focus on dealing more damage to the enemy player instead of creatures. However, this deck also slowly introduces card combos and trains players in terms of their timing. This deck introduces players to the idea of exiling cards, as well as Haste, Flying, First Strike, and Double Strike.