“Do you ever make a deck without having a theme in mind?”
“… You know, I don’t think I do.”
My articles — that featured decklists — thus far have been scattershot affairs, displaying a handful of decks at a time, often without much rhyme or reason. They frequently have a tenuous connection between them, using some sort of vague theme. “Worst rares I could find a use for.” “Guild representative decks.” And so on. It occurred to me that I rarely do that for the decks I keep playing myself. I don’t rip through two dozen decklists in a quick succession, looking for the bones of an idea that works but isn’t necessarily so refined that players can’t find a way to improve upon it.
While chatting with clanmates, I came to the realization that there are people who genuinely lack the experience I have with building decks. Mike Flores is at a point where he can look at a decklist, ask Why Twisted Abomination and not Undead Gladiator and have a four-word answer satisfy him. Most of us aren’t. Indeed, a number of players I know ask me for deck help and I can only offer bit by bit.
It’s important to me that these players get to keep their own decks. Not that that matters; most of my friends are immensely stubborn, often refusing what I see as good advice simply because they didn’t think of it. Oh, sure, I sound arrogant now, and that’s my fault. I apologize — but there are few ways you can approach an article with an attitude of ‘Here’s how to do something that I think is easy’. So, really, I am sorry.
You want to build your own decks too, if you’re a casual player. You check out my articles, I’ll wager, and instead of copying out one of the decklists I mention, you look at it, and see the principle that makes it work, then go and do something using the same idea. That’s how casual players work; we don’t want to suck at the game, we want to do our own thing. So here’s how I go about building decks. The three basic principles that drive how you put a deck together are the Grozoth Principle, the Sligh Principle, and the Wakefield Principle.
Am I jargoning too flagrantly? Orright, then, let’s move on.
Simple Models I: The Sligh Principle, aka The Everyone-Has-Written-About-It Principle
It’s called a mana curve. It took me a long time to get it myself, because far too many writers wrote about it like everyone could just follow along with them. Nonspecific examples, decklists without any meaning to an individual, and so on, were all the focus of such discussions. So I’m going to try and break it down in a fashion that I can get it.
If you play more cheap spells than you do expensive spells, you are more likely to be able to play a spell every turn at every stage of the game.
Let’s illustrate this with every beginner’s favorite spot to begin, a mono-Green deck. All Ninth Edition cards, again, for simplicity’s sake, with a ring-in from Betrayers of Kamigawa.
4 Norwood Rangers
4 Elvish Champion
4 Trained Armodon
4 Order of the Sacred Bell
4 Spined Wurm
4 Craw Wurm
4 Enormous Baloth
4 Scaled Wurm
4 Body of Jukai
24 Forests
(Hey, check it out! You can buy this whole deck for just over 2 tickets!)
Ignore, please, for the moment that this deck is pretty awful. The point here is to illustrate the mana curve. To new readers who don’t know cards off the top of their head, none of these creatures do anything, except for the Verdant Force. They’re all just guys who have a power equal to their mana cost, or close to it, and they all step up in expense. Now let’s look at why this isn’t a Good Deck, from a mana curve perspective.
Okay, let’s look at the Body of Jukai there. He costs nine mana. You have twenty-four forests in your deck. This means, that if you want to play the Body of Jukai, in this deck, you need to have drawn nine forests, and the Body of Jukai. Now, how regularly are you going to do that?
Thinking about it, you can play a land every turn. You need nine mana, so the earliest you can play the Body is turn 9. The thing is, you won’t necessarily draw nine lands by turn 9. You only have twenty-four lands in your deck; nine of those is over a third of the land available, and almost a sixth of your entire deck. Even if we make the (statistically flawed) idea that you’re going to draw a land every other draw, you’re not going to draw nine lands until you’ve seen just under twenty cards. That means that the Body is going to be lucky to come out until you’ve seen twenty cards, which means, after your initial seven cards, thirteen more draws.
If you want your Body and you think he’s Sexy, you’re generally not going to get to play him until turn 13.
So how many games do you play that last until at least turn 13?
Not many?
Now how many games do you play that last until at least turn 2?
Lots?
Can you see now why cheap spells are important? You’re going to get to play them more often. Every turn you end with your mana untapped and no cards going from your hand to any other zone, you have given your opponent a free turn. Do you really want to do that?
So now, we consider…
4 Norwood Ranger
4 Tree Monkey
4 Elvish Berserker
4 Elvish Warrior
4 Grizzly Bears
4 Zodiac Monkey
4 Trained Armodon
4 Gnarled Mass
4 Order of the Sacred Bell
24 Plains
Now, the most expensive spell in the deck is the Order of the Sacred Bell. He costs four mana; how regularly are you going to hit four mana on turn 4?
On turn 4, you’ll have seen eleven cards. Since a third of your deck is land — and I am taking a very rough swing at the statistics here because that’s all we’ll need — you’re typically going to hit your fourth land drop on turn 4. This means that every creature you draw after that point you can play right then.
What about turn 1? Well, turn 1, you suddenly have twelve chances to drop a creature. With twelve one-mana spells, this means one card in five is going to be a one-drop, so your chances of starting the game without a turn 1 play are very slim — you’re seeing seven cards before you even lay a land!
This is, essentially, a mana curve. If you line up all your cards and put them in rows by mana cost, you’ll notice how it smoothly slides down to the four Sacred Bell, sitting pretty at four mana. This is a mana curve, and that’s how you maximize your use of it.
This here is a basic template for choosing which cards get into your deck. Barring for some decks and mana-bases, where you want to bulge in the middle, you really want to avoid having more expensive spells than cheap spells — even having as many expensive spells as you have cheap spells is a bad thing.
Of course, there are, as always, exceptions… but we’re talking the basics here!
Simple Models Part II: The Wakefield Principle
It’s really easy to make a deck using the Wakefield Principle. Grab twenty-six basic lands of the appropriate color. Then, pick nine cards that you want in the deck. Get four of each of those nine cards, and congratulations, you have yourself a deck.
Wait, wasn’t I using twenty-four lands in the previous decks?
Yes. But the principle is simple. Maximum redundancy, spoke Jamie; if a card’s good enough to put in my deck, it’s good enough to draw. It was all or nothing. That was a good rule to work with. Consistency is important and valuable.
This principle is based on the general structure used by Jamie Wakefield in his initial deckbuilding principles; it’s a mana base and card assortment that best befits late game Control decks and midgame Aggro decks. But it suffices, for the most part, for a basic skeleton of a deck. Consider, now, the following decklist. This one’s going to be a shade more complicated, because the deck is going to be, itself, more complicated. I’m going to divide it up a bit — listing the cards in their mana cost order, and making it a bit clearer as to what they do.
Mana Sources
4 Llanowar Elves
4 Fyndhorn Elves
4 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
4 Priest of Titania
Big Bomby Creatures
4 Deranged Hermit
4 Kodama of the North Tree
4 Plow Under
4 Centaur Glade
4 Meng Huo, Barbarian King
Lands You Need to Pay For Stuff
18 Forest
4 Wasteland
4 Gaea’s Cradle
“I hated having less than twenty-six land, and I hated not having nine rows of four cards. I was never able to resolve that. It didn’t seem symmetrical or had enough land any other way.”
– Jamie Wakefield
That’s not a mana curve! Look at it! It has 8 spells at 1 mana, 8 spells at 2 mana, and then nothing but gigantic fricking 5-mana spells — twenty of them! The deck’s not even sixty cards, which of course, must be bad, right?
No.
See, the Jamie Principle is actually a lot more subtle than just ‘slap nine cards you like in piles of four and add twenty-six land’. It’s have enough mana to play your spells. This deck is going to get a first turn accelerator almost all the time. It will be able to play its Wastelands proactively, popping opponent’s lands, because it can rely on drawing more land. It can lay a turn 2 mana accelerator almost all the time. And those 5 drops, thanks to the amazing amount of mana in this deck (forty-two cards!), are really three-drops that come down on turn 3 and just crank out bomb after bomb after bomb. The deck has ways to further its acceleration after that point — the Centaur Glade is more than happy to spit out things for the mana you feed it. Plow Under is a total game-wrecking bomb. As for the Deranged Hermit, well, there might be players who’ve never played with him before, but let me make this eminently clear.
Deranged Hermit is nearly broken in half.
The deck loads up on Big Effects, and all it asks is that you pay for it fairly. I can’t help but see this deck as an enjoyable one to play, certainly casually.
Consider this!
4 Jackal Pup
4 Goblin Cadets
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 Goblin Sledder
4 Frenzied Goblin
4 Goblin Patrol
4 Seal of Fire
4 Shock
4 Firebolt
4 Last-Ditch Effort
16 Mountain
This is a deck that doesn’t care if it never sees a second land, and it’s only running 16 mountains. There are other, more extreme examples — this deck here is of course, pretty silly, running no spell that costs 2 mana or more — but these two decks do make it clear. If you want to play expensive spells, you have to run decks that can support and handle them. Otherwise, you’re just fooling yourself into thinking you’ll get lucky with your draws.
There’s the Wakefield Principle: Play With Enough Mana.
There are other principles that deserve to be under the Wakefield name. Flexible cards are better than narrow answers; removal should never be dead; give your opponent as few targets as possible; it’s the last fattie that kills you… and so on. For this article, this is the first tenet of Wakefield that is vital to your understanding.
Simple Models III: The Grozoth Principle
This is the principle that most people land into really quickly. Every deck, to some extent or other, is based around the cards in it working in context with one another. Every deck I’ve shown so far has had this essential tenet down — but the thing is, they don’t always have it to the same extent.
Now, I’ve already made you look at a bunch of awful decklists so far, so I’ll keep my trap shut on this regard, and instead, let’s talk about how cards subdivide things.
Cards, inherently, have some divisions that are nice and easy to notice. Blue cards, Green cards, Black cards, Red cards, and White cards are all different. Creatures, sorceries, instants, and enchantments are all different. But some cards let you know, quite clearly, that they have ideas about where they want their decks to go.
Look who we have here.
Perplex asks to be played with Blue and Black. As it’s a spell and not a creature, it can’t really be played unfairly. It wants to be played in a deck that wants to stop your opponent from doing things. Perplex can stop a threat, or it can stop an answer. However, it doesn’t stay useful all the time, which kinda sucks.
So Perplex comes with a built-in backdoor. It can do something useful, even when it itself isn’t useful. For a small investment, away it goes, getting you a card that costs the same… so it doesn’t want to be alone in your deck as a card that costs three mana. That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?
Well now, what does Goblin Warchief tell you? He’s a Red card and he costs 1RR. So he says “I want to be played with other Red cards.” He also wants to be played with other goblins, and he even makes those goblins cheaper, which means you can afford to play more expensive cards than normal.
What about another fellow?
Grozoth is willing to load your hand with a bunch of cards, cards you can even afford to cast, and all you have to do… is be able to play him. Those cards have to be, you know, like Grozoth… and be expensive. On his own, he makes a bunch of demands. He wants a lot of mana in the deck (using the Wakefield Principle) or some way to get him into play without that being a concern; he wants at least a few cards that cost as much as he does or he won’t give you any cards in hand; and he wants Islands, if you’re going to play him. Once he does that, you’re left with What To Do?
You have a lot of cards in hand. Soramaro likes that. You have a lot of expensive spells in hand. Pyromancy likes that. You potentially have nine mana on the table. Krosan Colossus likes that! So there’s three directions that you can take, and this presumes you’re playing Grozoth in the simplest fashion possible.
I would have called this principle the Goblin Warchief Principle, since he’s the best of the cards here, but… but… c’mon, Groozzzzooooooooooothhhhhh.
The Grozoth Principle, in summary: Make your cards relate to one another. The more they do that, the better the deck will hang together.
Playing Good Cards And Why Fat Sucks
Alright, more stuff for casual decks. We have, theoretically, a good heart of a deck here. We’re only playing expensive spells if we run enough mana to make it worthwhile. We’re running cards that want to be together instead of just flinging anything together. We’re making sure that we know what we’re getting into when we build a deck with expensive cards. So what now?
Well, we get to a simple point.
Play good cards.
What?
You need more than that?
Oh, geeze, what am I, your mother? Fine, okay. Look, there’s a problem with cards. Because there are roughly sixteen hojillion of the damn things, some of them are better than others. Just flat-out better. Do you know how many creatures in just Green are 2/2s for 2? Seventeen. Grizzly Bears is basically the worst of them. So there are better options available than your Grizzly Bears.
What makes a card good? Honestly, the best measure of card quality is relative. In the big pool of all Magic cards ever, there’s basically one Red creature who’s actually powerful (that being the esteemed Goblin Welder), but in the context of Onslaught Block Constructed, our friend Goblin Warchief was the man with the Big Stick. When I say Grizzly Bears are bad, it’s kinda a disingenuous statement — in 8/8/8 Draft, he’s probably a good enough man, and it’s not like you’re going to get much better for two mana.
Moving on!
It’s common conception amongst new players that Bigger Is Better. This is, technically, true. A bigger creature can take care of itself, bigger spells have commensurately bigger effects, and bigger enchantments are generally much more board-wrecking. So playing expensive spells, with the mana to play them is the best bet, right?
No.
Here’s the problem. There are big, and I mean big, gaps between the effect you get for the mana you spend. Consider this:
A 1/1 creature will kill you in twenty turns.
A 2/2 creature will kill you in ten turns.
A 3/3 creature will kill you in seven turns.
A 4/4 creature will kill you in five turns.
A 5/5 creature will kill you in four turns.
A 6/6 creature will kill you in four turns.
A 7/7 creature will kill you in three turns.
An 8/8 creature will kill you in three turns.
A 9/9 creature will kill you in three turns.
A 10/10 creature will kill you in two turns.
An 11/11 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 12/12 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 13/13 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 14/14 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 15/15 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 16/16 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 17/17 creature will kill you in two turns.
An 18/18 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 19/19 creature will kill you in two turns.
A 20/20 creature will kill you in one turn.
Down at the cheap end, creatures get a lot faster a lot quicker. A 2/2 will get the job done twice as fast as a 1/1. When you move up, however, the shift gets a lot slower… indeed, a 6/6 is more or less the same as a 5/5, when it comes to Eating Enemy Face. A 7/7 and a 9/9 don’t kill any faster than one another, and every creature with a power north of 10 kills at the exact same speed as its brethren, up until you get a creature with a power of 20.
Of course, tougher creatures are good because they can run into other creatures and live. It’s true. When it’s a 7/7 and an 8/8 staring one another down across the table, the 8/8 gets to run into the red zone without being scared. Of course, this is a rare situation.
Do you need a Craw Wurm? He’s a 6/4, yeah. But Spined Wurm is a 5/4 and costs only one mana less. You’re going to kill just as quickly, and the only time it’s going to make a difference is trying to bust through an opponent’s 3/6 blocker — which is not a very common situation. Looking at it, for five mana, you could be getting Arashi the Sky Asunder — who is a 5/5, and she has a pair of abilities as well.
Alright.
Look, I’ve made this article seven pages long already, and I’m still not sure if it’s interesting. So. Now. Shutting up and letting you guys get back to your lives. This is just a basic template system. Back to the bulk rubbish stuff next article, I promise.
Hugs and Kisses
Talen Lee
Talen at dodo dot com dot au