Part Two: Developing the Art

Some people may have objections to using another person's deck. I myself don't care much for copying decks, but that is because I enjoy building them. Building decks is one of the biggest hurdles of playing the game. So much of deck building is centered around how cach of deck building is centered around how cards work together and how they match your play style. Deck construction is an art and a science. I can't really teach you how to build the best decks because decks are best built by the person playing them.

Still, you will need to be able to construct a passable deck from time to time. The formats are always changing and you cannot expect to always have access to large pools of preconstructed decks. The best way to learn how to construct a deck is to borrow another person's deck, disassemble it on the ground, and think about what each card is for. This works well if you borrow a tournament deck, and not a fun deck or a multiplayer deck. After you think about it, reassemble it and play it. If you're like me, you might want to shuffle it over and over and take "test draws" from it. Just shuffle and draw a hand of seven cards and play the hand out as if you were playing an opponent who did nothing each turn. If you do that, it becomes easy to spot trends in the deck, such as how often you can expect to have a certain card in hand. This is a good tool to use for tuning.

Building Blocks

The next step is to take a deck concept, reduce it to the bare bones, and refine it to your liking. There are a lot of tournament proven concepts out there, but I will list just a few for you to get started. These are the basic concepts, the frills removed, that have been popular since the beginning of Magic.

MONO RED BURN

The theme of this deck is fast, early damage. The foundation of the deck is 12-16 spells that do damage to any target (known as direct damage) and low casting cost, high powered creatures (usually with an attack power that is greater than the mana cost). This deck sacrifices efficiency and flex efficiency and flexibility for raw damage and the opportunity to kill an opponent before they can get established. Many of the cards in this decktype have inherent disadvantages, such as conditional abilities (Ironclaw Orcs), doing damage to the controller (Jackal Pup), or card disadvantage (Fireblast).

WHITE WEENIE

The theme of this deck is a solid aggressive offense paired with white's enhanced abilities to control the midgame. Start with 16-24 strong 1 to 2 casting cost creatures, add 4 Crusades, season to taste with flexible utility and defense spells.

BLACK WEENIE

The theme of this deck is similar to White Weenie, except black boasts more aggressive creatures and disruptive hand-manipulating spells. Black also hpells. Black also has the added advantage of speedy mana and direct damage spells. Despite these excellent abilities, a black weenie deck often splashes anywhere from 1 to 4 extra colors in order to make up for black's shortcomings, notably the shortcomings in enchantment/artifact removal.

GREEN STOMPY

The theme of this deck is to overwhelm an opponent with a multitude of green's low casting cost, high powered creatures. Green lacks the control aspect of White Weenie or the disruption of Black Weenie, so it attempts to win the duel by creating far more threats than an opponent can deal with at once. Creature enhancement spells that pump up the power of one or more creatures add to such threats. This deck style is often paired with white or red to make up for green's notorious lack of good, cheap removal spells.

BLUE DRAW-GO

The theme of this deck is simply to exert an advantage over the game and eventually overwhelm a defenseless opponent. This can be achieved by card-drawing, countermagic, and defensive spells designed to slow the game down until an advantage can be established. Start with a base of 8-16 countermagic, add some card drawing spells, and top it off with a kill card or two. Decks of this type usually require a heavy investment of mana and life points to get established.

LAND DESTRUCTION

This deck can exist in any of the major land destruction colors (red, green, black) and varies depending on its base color. Green's version usually contains small mana creatures and 8-12 land destruction spells. Red is most often paired with green and black, but can stand alone as a slower deck due to direct damage and reset spells like Jokulhaups and Wildfire. Black usually limits itself to 8 land destruction spells, but complements them with discard and disruption like Duuption like Duress and Pox. All three decks typically choose to use a creature in play as the final kill mechanism, using their land destruction spells to prevent the opponent from gaining an advantage.

Keeping it Thematic

Keep in mind that every card in your deck needs to be a part of a whole - that is, iof a whole - that is, it needs to contribute to the "theme" of the deck. Defining what you want your new deck to do is quite possibly the first major step in creating it. Keep your theme simple! One of the follies of deckbuilding is to attempt to accomplish too many objectives within the same deck. The end result is a deck that does nothing well.

It can be all too tempting to toss in every card that catches your fancy. Before adding any card to your deck, return to the theme. How will this card help you achieve your deck's goal?

After you've got a clear theme in your mind, you must attend to the task of picking out the cards to achieve that goal. One of the most obvious lessons of deckbuilding is that all of the cards in your deck need to be good. No kidding, right? Well, what exactly is a "good" card? A good card fills a need within your deck better than any other card. This usually means it is a flexible, cheap, and powerful card that has an undeniable impact on your games. (More about this later.) You might find it helpful to go through your cards (or a list of cards) and pick out all the spells that fit your purposes. Once you narrow the card pool you're selecting from, you can make more educated decisions on their relative strength.

If you've done a thorough job sorting through your cards, you're probably going to have a lot more cards that look good to you than will actually be able to fit into your deck. Most unfortunately, a lot of these cards seem exactly as good as each other. How to choose?

Choosing the Right Card

So say you've got a white weenie deck like the very basic archetype listed above. Maybe your deck is something like this, just four of everything that you own:

4 Savannah Lion 4 Mother of Runes 4 White Knight 4 Soltari Priest

4 Soltari Monk 4 Warrior en-Kor 4 Crusade 20 Plains

This deck contains only 48 cards, which leaves you with twelve empty slots to experiment with. These are the cards you'd like to play, piled up neatly (or not-so-neatly) in front of you on the floor:

Tithe Armageddon Disenchant Cursed Scroll Masticore Wrath of God Allay

Nevinyrral's Disk Forbidding Watchtower Serra Angel Cataclysm Swords to Plowshares Blinking Spirit Empyrial Armor

The first thing that your deck needs is to assert its theme. The theme of a white weenie deck is simple. The creatures put on early pressure, and many creatures hopefully kill the opponent before they can recover. This determines your turn average, which is a term I will use to describe how many turns your deck should require to complete a win. For a weenie deck, the turn average optimally averages between turns three and six. The necessity of killing before turn six is clear - many of the game's most powerful spells cost between four and six mana. It is in your best interests, therefore, to win the game before your opponent can draw and cast such spells.

The greatest weakness of a white weenie deck is that it lacks the explosive speed of red, green, or black weenie creatures. White's creatures typically cost two white mana to cast, do two damage, and have a special ability. These abilities make the creatures ities make the creatures harder to kill, but do not improve their damage efficiency. For this reason, a more realistic turn average for a white weenie deck is turn six. If your opponent interferes with your creatures in any way, that estimate could go even higher, for a turn average of eight - or even nine!

This makes white weenie a special case for an aggressive deck. Because the game has the potential to go on for too many turns before a white player can win, a white weenie deck must also contain utility cards that help return the game to early-game configurations. Such utility cards are also called removal spells, because they remove permanents from play, thus reversing the advance of the game from a mid- or late-game level. For white weenie, this is critical.

Therefore, one of the classic staple cards of white weenie is Armageddon. Since the small white creatures are so tough and cheap and hard to kill, there is very little risk in destroying all the land in play. The sooner this is accomplished, the better, because it returns the land aspect of the game to the very beginning. Doing this while retaining a creature advantage is very important, as it allows a white weenie deck to take the time necessary to kill the opponent without automatically losing to stronger mid-game spells.

Tithe is another great choice, because of its synergy with Armageddon. By taking land cards out of your deck and putting them into your hand, Tithe has several functions. It "thins" your deck, making the probability higher that you will draw a non-land spell. It makes your recovery from Armageddon more swift, by ensuring that you will be able to play land. It also helps to negate the effects of discard spells from your enemy color, black.

Making the Choice

Sometimes, such choices are not always obvious. To a newer player, choices will not always be a matter of intuition. Therefore, all cards within a deck must pass some rigorous analysis. It is the ultimate goal of the deckbuilding artist toal of the deckbuilding artist to advance his or her skills from the level of basic analysis to the level of intuition. Intuition is nothing more than top-speed analysis based not only on basic criteria, but also on experience and play style. Every player who plays long enough will develop some degree of analytical intuition.

One of the first criteria for card inclusion is the overall cost of the card in question. Analyzing the cost of the card can be broken down into several sub-levels:

MANA COST

This is the land cost of the spell, which is a good gauge of how many game turns it will require to put a card into play if you play a land every turn.

Generally speaking, cheaper spells are almost always better. Cheaper mana costs translate into more flexibility, since the spell can be cast early as well as late. Cheaper spells also allow a player to cast many such spells in one turn, or cast a spell and have mana left over to use for spells or effects on the opponent's turn.

More expensive spells, however, usually translate into more powerful effects. Swords to Plowshares is a cheap spell which removes one nuisance creature. Wrath of God is a more expensive spell which removes all creatures. Such powerful effects naturally cost more, and that is their main drawback. If a spell costs too much, it will price itself outside of your average game length by being uncastable until long after the game should have logically ended.

Therefore, the mana cost of a given spell should fit neatly within the average amount of turns that you expect the game will last. In general, a mid-game spell that resets the board like Nevinyrral's Disk should only be included in decks that average eight turns or more. It would be worthless to include such a card in a deck where it will be castable less than 50% of the game. However, a finishing spell like a Ball Lightning can be included in any red deck with an average game length of three turns, simply because the spell itself ends the game. In such a case, it does not matter if the spell is only castable for 33% of the game.

COLOR COST

Related to the mana cost, the color cost is a measure of the color commitment of a specific spell. A spell that costs 4 colorless mana, for example, has a much lower color cost than a spell that costs 3 blue mana. In a mono-colored deck, this measure is relatively useless. It becomes more important when considering spells for inclusion into decks that contain more than one color.

Consider a two-color deck, red and blue. Stereotypically, a deck containing both red and blue will be a slow deck, thus it is a deck that can virtually ignore the mana cost of the spells within it (with the obvious exception that all countermagic should be as cheap as possible while still being effective). Unfortunately, the nature of red and blue spells means that such decks often run into trouble with the color costs, as demonstrated by attempting to fit Hammer of Bogardan and Forbid into the same deck. The double red in the casting cost of Hammer means that this deck should contain many red sources of mana. This conflicts somewhat with the double blue in the casting cost of Counterspell, Forbid, and Force of Will. Countermagic needs to be effective as early as possible for it to be maximally useful, and lly useful, and drawing a Mountain early in the game could be disastrous. Therefore, slow red and blue decks must minimize their use of Mountains by minimizing their use of red spells in the early game. The red spells that go into this deck type are often slow and expensive spells, chosen purposely to be uncastable until the game has progressed long enough to draw an adequate supply of red mana.

TOTAL COST

The total cost is a little harder to gauge. A spell's total cost is a compilation of the actual mana cost of the spell and the color cost of the spell, as well as any other resource cost associated with it. Such additional costs could be a payment of life, the sacrifice of land or a creature, or even something as mundane as an echo cost or upkeep. These things all impact the final usefulness of the spell.

For example, consider a spell like Albino Troll. It has a good mana cost and a good color cost, since it costs only two mana and only one of that is specifically green. It's also a great, beefy creature. Unfortunately, it possesses an additional cost of echo, which means that your mana is going to be tied up for two turns to pay for this guy. While you can cast it turn two and attack with it on turn three, don't expect to do anything else on turn three. This sort of disruption is something that you should be very conscious of when including echo creatures in your deck. They may look fast, but experience tells me that too much echo in one deck can choke it, leaving your hand full of uncastable spells.

The remaining evaluation critera are listed in the chart below, with brief explanations of their importance. Most master deckbuilders can grasp such things intuitively, but it often helps when I see the analysis in front of me.

Powerful Effect	A spell that has the potential to strongly affect the game in your favor is better than a spell that just keeps you from losing. Example 1 : Shatterstorm versus Shatter Example 2 : Wrath of God versus Swords to Plowshares Example 3 : Pox versus Icequake, Stupor, and Terror
Flexible Effect	A spell that has many possible effects/targets/uses is certainly better than a more narrow, single-use spell. Example 1 : Forbid versus Counterspell Example 2 : Disenchant versus Divine Offering Example 3 : Fireball versus Blaze
Instant/Sorcery	Instant speed spells are inherently more flexible than sorceries because they gain the flexibility of being castable at any time. Instants usually trade some spell power for speed. Example 1 : Disenchant versus Dust to Dust Example 2 : Pyrokinesis versus Pyroclasm Example 3 : Emerald Charm versus Tranquility

...Next Week

Next week, this article will continue coverage of deckbuilding basics by examining spell and land ratios and also the critical element of card abusability. If you're not daunted by the exponential increase in the size of this article, I hope you will join me for the next installment!