These are some basic do's and don't for constructing a deck. There are no secrets of the universe in here, but if you are a novice player these points may help you get past some of the early mistakes that people make. It is aimed at someone who is constructing a deck for the first time or who has played a few games and has not had a great deal of success.

• Keep the size of your deck down. For a deck to be regular and consistent it needs to be small. For tournament legal decks 60 cards is the minimum, and decks should always be at least close to this number as it increases the consistency of the deck. Decks with more than 70 are probably a bad idea.

• Examine the casting costs of spells you are putting in your deck. Don't put in too many high casting cost spells, and remember to put in some spells that are cheap and can be cast on the first few turns of a game. Also if playing with more than one colour don't put in too many spells that use multiple mana of a particular colour.

• Make sure you have enough land in your deck. If you have a deck where nothing costs more than 4 and most things cost 1 or 2 then 1/3 land may be enough, however if your deck has many cards which cost 4 or more then you will require more mana sources and probably some way of getting it fast such as Llanowar Elves, Dark Rituals and Felwar Stones.

• Combinations of cards are useful, and quite often more powerful than individual cards however don't put in combo's of cards that will otherwise be totally useless, since in many games you will only get part of the combo out.

• Don't base your deck around many-to-one card destruction such as Thoughtlace and REB. Firstly these are combo's, and probably bad for the reasons given above, but also because it gives your opponent card advantage. If you lose 2 cards every time they lose 1 then eventually they will have cards left with which to damage you when you have used all of yours.

• Try to have different ways to threaten your opponent, a strategy based on different ways of damaging your opponent by say creatures and direct damgage will ususally be more effective in the long run than one based solely on either creatures or direct damage since it is relatively easy to design a strategy to effectively defeat one kind of threat.

Stephen Edney edney@physics.usyd.edu.au