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.
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).