Deckbuilding 101: Having a Plan

It happens to everyone. You’ve been playing Magic for a little while – either borrowing decks from friends or using a preconstructed deck, but it’s started to seem hollow and empty to you. You want to build something of your own – something you can use to sling spells, summon creatures, and destroy your enemies. Maybe you have a format in mind, or maybe it’s a casual deck, or meant for multiplayer shenanigans. Regardless, you ideally want the deck to work on a fairly regular basis.

Today we’re going to start that journey – building your first deck. We’re going to do this slowly, over the course of a few articles, so we can get an in-depth look at each portion of the process. If you think that the majority of this is too simple for you, then I’d suggest you look at more advanced strategic articles – I’d recommend Star City Games’ Magic Fundamentals articles, which go into significant depth about the math and statistics behind many famous decks of the past years.

Step 1: Know Thy Enemy

When building a deck, the first thing you need to know is your environment. If you’re playing at your kitchen table with some friends, mainly casual games, you can be pretty sure that the bar might be lower than a Pro Tour Qualifier, or a Grand Prix. Likewise, if you’re planning on building for Standard, you should know what decks are good at the moment, so that you know what you should be aiming to compete against. For purposes of this example, I’m going to use Standard, because it’s the format that the majority of people have the most experience with.

Right now, Standard is broadly made up of three decks that would be described as Tier 1 – the best of the best, and the things you should expect to see at every tournament:  Wolf Run Ramp, Delver and Red/Green Aggro. Each deck has variations on it, but the core remains the same. Let’s take a look at each.

Wolf Run Ramp:

Wolf Run is a popular deck that is built on the foundation of a previously successful deck called Valakut. The principle is that if you have access to powerful lands that can win you the game, Primeval Titan is capable of finding those lands and practically ensuring a kill. Previously, this involved finding a number of Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle, and many Mountains to launch a torrent of damage at the opponent to kill them. Now lacking Valakut, the deck has changed to a Kessig Wolf Run/Inkmoth Nexus package, instead using the raw number of lands available as a weapon to feed enormous Kessig Wolf Run activations.

This deck is vulnerable before it is able to cast a Primeval Titan, however, and therefore seeks to minimize the time that this takes by casting ramping spells like Rampant Growth and Solemn Simulacrum, while stalling for time with large damaging spells such as Slagstorm.

R/G Aggro:

Red/Green Aggro is a resilient aggressive deck that uses mana-generating creatures to accelerate into large mid-game bruisers. It aims to push damage through in the early to mid-game and finish out (or just accelerate into) a Sword of War and Peace to close out the game. It runs a number of ways to avoid traditional control decks – Strangeleroot Geist has undying, while Wolvir Avenger has regeneration. Huntmaster of the Fells comes with a  second body, and Sword of War and Peace makes all of these into enormous threats that can blow through nearly any defense.

Delver:

More than either of the previous two, Delver is the barometer of the format. It took 6 of the top 8 spots in the last major standard tournament (at time of this writing) and has taken a huge leap forward with the addition of Restoration Angel to its game plan. At its core, Delver is a tempo deck that relies on casting an early threat and then defending it with inefficient but effective removal and counter magic. The addition of Snapcaster Mage basically allows you to have twice as much removal as you should, and cast it while adding additional pressure to the field. This one-two punch makes it difficult to disrupt Delver and when added to a powerful equipment package, makes the deck extremely potent.

Any deck that wants to make it in standard needs to be able to play on the same stage as these three juggernauts. You need to be able to fight through counter magic, powerful early board presence, and a powerful late game.  You need to be able to fight against 1/1 Inkmoth Nexuses at instant speed, 6/6 Titans before they resolve, Birds of Paradise with Sword equipped on turn 3, and everything in the middle.

If that sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. Doing all three of these is nearly impossible, which is why the vast majority of good decks don’t. Delver cannot fight against a Wolf Run deck that has already resolved a Titan and found a number of its lands. Instead, it sidesteps the problem by trying to kill them first. This brings us to our next lesson.

Step 2: Have a Game Plan

Many times, I’ll see a beginning deck builder misinterpret this as ‘have a theme’, and that’s not terrible advice. There have been many ‘theme’ decks that have been powerful. Faeries was strong, as was Vampires during Zendikar. Zombies is a powerful ‘theme’ deck, and there are plenty of others. The difference between these decks and most freshman attempts is that these have an underlying plan that points towards victory.

Let’s take a fairly standard Werewolves deck for example. It’s full of creatures that are relatively unassuming on the front side, but extremely dangerous for their cost on the reverse. We have instant speed ways of making them more dangerous in Moonmist, and the vast majority of them cost between 1 and 4 mana. In addition, few of them have a way to survive a board wipe (outside of Full Moon’s Rise). All of this is pointing towards one conclusion – we want to kill them before bad things happen to us. We want to attack, relentlessly, and ideally force them to flail for survival.

So, our plan is to kill them quickly. This means that we want all of our weapons to be able to be their strongest as fast as possible. That means that, although something like Uvenwald Mystics is a potential 5/5 with regeneration for 4 mana, it won’t be able to attack before turn 6. That’s way too slow for us. We want quick and powerful. You know what kind of cards fits that mold?

Ideologically, these cards are the cornerstone of a good werewolf deck. They’re cheap, they’re designed to attack, they get a lot of benefit from their creature types. The Captive even gives us an easy way to flip our werewolves.

A plan can be simple. “Kill Him Quickly” is a plan, but having that plan in place helps us guide our deck to the place that we want to be in by the end of the game. Caw-Blade had an extremely complicated plan involving a mixture of Equipment, Stoneforge Mystic, Jace the Mind Sculptor, and Squadron Hawks. While all the parts rarely came into play simultaneously, they all formed pieces of the puzzle that made it so powerful and nearly unbeatable before its ban.

By comparison, Jund was fairly simple – it focused on casting creatures and spells that gave incredible advantage to their owner by virtue of how the cards worked. Each card you used earned you two of theirs to answer, and at the end of the day – you had cards and they didn’t. It’s not hard to see how to win those games. You bury your opponent in card advantage.

Next time you’re starting to design a deck, start by thinking about what you want to do with it. You could be a ponderously slow control deck, trying to take control of the game before landing a single game ending threat. You could act like a combo deck – surviving until you have the pieces you need to win, but when you’re designing a deck, always keep that plan paramount in your mind.

Step 3: Know what is possible in the format.

I could make up a deck right now and know that it would be terrible. I’m going to play a five color aggressive deck that focuses on flooding the board with powerful one and two drops. We’ll play Stromkirk Noble and Stormblood Berserker from Red, Champion of the Parish from white. Diregraf Ghoul and Gravecrawler in black, Delver of Secrets and Snapcaster Mage in Blue, and finally Birds of Paradise and Strangleroot Geist in Green.

All of the cards I just mentioned are good enough to be played in Standard. Together, they are all terrible.  This deck would rarely get to play cards, let alone win games. In Standard, this deck doesn’t have a reasonable way to cast it’s spells because the mana base is insufficient.

Building a deck requires that the tools be available. Mass Land Destruction is rarely supported in standard. Building White/Black Land Destruction (for example) in the current standard is impossible. The only ways to do such a thing are complex and difficult to actually perform. You should not build a deck based around this idea. By comparison, a deck like tokens has a significant amount of support – there are many token generators in standard, and many effects that gain increased potency from a large number of creatures in play (like Anthem effects such as Intangible Virtue, Favorable Winds, and Honor of the Pure).

When you’re building a deck, take a close look at the card pool and decide – can I even do what I want to in this format? Are the other decks too good? Is my plan easy to execute? Does the mana work?

Obviously, this isn’t everything that there is to deckbuilding, but it’s a start. Ideally, this will get you thinking about what kind of cards and decks you’d be interested in building. From here, we’ll take a look at how to construct a deck and begin to test it for flaws.

-----

An exercise for all of you right now, new player or old. Think of an archetype that you could play in whatever format you’re most familiar with. Make it an archetype that isn’t currently winning, if possible. Post it in the comments (either here or on Reddit) and answer the following questions:

-What is the game plan for this deck?

-Can I accomplish this game plan in the format I have chosen?

-How do I interact with 3 of the major decks in the format?