I haven’t been able to attend any major tournaments in the last few weeks, so I don’t have any epic stories to share with you today — but what I do have is some advice for building better decks.
Magic is full of amazing challenges, and deckbuilding is one of my favorite. Every format presents new and interesting decks for us to build and play with, including plenty of undiscovered technology. Today, we’re going to go over these archetypes, figure out how to best exploit their advantages, and then make the correct decisions for card selection.
While some of these guidelines may seem academic, you will often see plenty of “stock” decklists with what may seem like skewed numbers due to unforeseen reasons. Today we’re going to go over what it means to be a combo deck, an aggro deck, and a control deck.
The Combo Element: Maximum Redundancy and Exploiting Cards
First off, we’re going to delve into my opinion of the strongest archetype in Magic: combo. While you can argue that any archetype is potentially the strongest based on a given pool of cards, people are generally fighting an uphill battle when a good combo deck emerges.
Now, Wizards usually prints answers to these combos — but the best combo decks are always better than the best aggro decks, and Magic is full of combo decks dominating entire formats throughout its history. Rarely have they ever had to ban a card from an aggressive deck, and for good reason. Even if aggro players are doing degenerate, undercosted things, they will still be fighting a war they will rarely be able to win.
Older formats, like Legacy, have fewer problems beating the known combo decks because the aggro players have plenty of tools at their disposal in order to combat the combo decks. A single Meddling Mage or Gaddock Teeg can throw a monkey wrench into the works of Ad Nauseam or Aluren — but there are plenty of degenerate combos that aren’t broken up by either, or have many ways around these cards.
(And if these combo decks
still
lose to those annoying creatures, then they’ll just adapt by playing things like Slaughter pact or Wipe Away in order to deal with them.)
Unfortunately, when Wizards bans a card like Mystical Tutor, it decreases the strength and consistency of combo decks, letting the aggro and control players catch up in power level.
Building a combo deck can be difficult, but there are a few things you really need to keep in mind when putting together the shell. A great man once told me that the key to building a successful combo deck was Maximum Redundancy. Combo decks thrive on a particular combo, and you should do most everything in your power to facilitate this end-game. If you’re spending your time doing things like killing creatures, you’re not doing things correctly. If you’re playing a combo deck, that combo should be powerful enough to win the game once you gain access to enough parts of the combo to go off.
You should also surround your combo with protective elements like discard or counterspells in order to push your combo through resistance. During last year’s Extended season, Muddle the Mixture was an amazing card for ThopterDepths because it allowed you to protect your combos while also acting as a tutor for each of your combos (Vampire Hexmage and Thopter Foundry/Sword of the Meek). While there are rarely cards that will interact as positively in your combo deck as Muddle the Mixture did in that deck, finding the cards that best surround your combo is the key to success. These can range from tutors to card draw to ramp effects.
Aluren from Legacy is a great example of a solid combo deck that surrounds itself with synergistic protection cards. Cabal Therapy works very well with the early creatures your deck spits out in the early game, allowing you to maximize value out of otherwise weak cards. It also acts as an early disruptive tool for battling other combo decks, and keeps you alive long enough to find your own pieces to your puzzle. After sideboarding, your dorks will give you a sacrifice outlet for Natural Order, giving them plenty of utility outside of their normal functionality. This synergy happens often in combo decks, where the deck uses two different combos that have similar surrounding elements — things like Dark Depths and Thopter Foundry, or Aluren and Natural Order.
Looking back through history, the best combo decks were ones that contained an amazing Plan B when your opponent was able to find the answer(s) to your original combo. Kai Budde Illusion-Donate deck was able to sideboard into Morphlings once the opponent had taken out all of their removal, since the maindeck focused on giving your opponent Illusions of Grandeur and played zero creatures. This is another common theme from combo decks — and especially so when the original combo is easily disrupted once your opponent sideboards in hate. One thing you should never do is sideboard into a strategy that is disrupted with the same cards that beat your original combo.
When building a successful control deck, tutors are generally as important as the combo itself. As mentioned before, Muddle the Mixture was an amazing exception for ThopterDepths, since it doubled as a protective spell — but finding the right tutors for any combo deck is key.
Once you find the right tools to assemble your combo, filling out the rest should be rather simple. Occasionally, a particular format won’t offer up good tutoring effects — in which case you must rely on card drawing/filtering spells like Ponder, Preordain, Brainstorm, Peer Through Depths, and the like. Peer Through Depths was especially potent in the G/R/U Scapeshift deck from last Extended season, since roughly 60% of your deck was either an instant or sorcery.
The kinds of cards you should be looking for when building a combo deck are the cards that have a particularly “bad” drawback, but one that you can use to your advantage. These kind of cards are often the biggest point of innovation when building a deck, because most people ignore cards that seem “bad” in a vacuum.
Finding the best combo for a particular format (or finding a potent one with little or no hate against it) should be your first major decision when building this archetype.
When there are plenty of options for different combos, find the fastest or most consistent one. For example, Hive Mind was not particularly strong during last year’s Extended season because it was neither faster nor more consistent than either ThopterDepths or Scapeshift. Even though it had powerful tools at its disposal, it lost to the more consistent and faster combo decks. Sure, it had nut draws that could win on the first turn — but those draws happened very rarely, and often required you to be on the play, due to the presence of Thoughtseize in the format.
While people continued trying to make Hive Mind better, there were already better options on the table that they could have been working on, but chose not to for whatever reason. Don’t make this mistake.
Born to be Wild: Varying Aggressive Strategies
If you are like me, then you love attacking with Wild Nacatls. While it may not always be in your best interest to play an aggro deck depending on the particular metagame, most of the time you can find a way to make an aggro deck good in any format. Hate cards are plentiful, and Wizards loves printing creatures that are undercosted these days, so you don’t really have to do a lot of work.
When building an aggressive deck, you should first realize what kind of aggressive deck you are trying to be. There are many types of aggressive decks, but most can be grounded down to either:
a) Pure Aggression
Purely aggressive decks try to interact with the opposing deck in a variety of ways, but overall they try to play fair. Purely aggressive decks don’t interact well with combo decks, but they usually have a few bullets that can stop the combo cold. Doran decks and Zoo decks alike have the ability to play things like Ethersworn Canonist to shut down storm, or cards like Thoughtseize to disrupt them just long enough to finish them off. Occasionally a niche hate card like Damping Matrix will come along to shut down an entire archetype, giving you the ability to keep up with them.
b) Aggro-Control
Aggro control decks rely on a fast clock, but usually back that up with countermagic. Mana Leak has been the standby option for recent aggro-control decks — but people have been using cards like Delay and Mystic Snake in this archetype for a long time.
Nearly every format in the history of Magic has contained a deck that played aggressive curves and backed those up with counterspells, giving you the ability to positively interact with your opponent. That’s usually where pure aggressive decks fell behind, since they will rarely have the tools to fight a good combo deck in the opening game. Combo decks will often be able to outrace the pure aggro decks, but there have been some formats that allowed the pure aggressive deck to have a faster clock, which is quite a frightening prospect.
When building the best aggressive deck possible, you first have to determine what aspects of the format you will be trying to exploit. If the format is full of slower control decks, then you should try to maximize early aggression. However, if everyone is trying to grind you out with removal, then maybe you should consider playing things like Ranger of Eos to shore up lost cards. Some aggro decks want to play Noble Hierarch in order to land their mid-game creatures before their opponents come online, while other aggressive decks rely on one- and two-drops to put a clock on the opponent that they can’t fight efficiently.
Most creatures with two power for a single mana fit perfectly here, but even those have been outclassed recently by Wild Nacatl. The 3/3 for G really shines in formats full of fetchlands and dual lands that count as both Plains and Mountains, since he can effectively attack for three on the second turn. This upgrade to traditional aggro decks is what resparked my fire for attacking, and I worked on different Zoo builds over the last Extended season in order to find the one that best attacked a combo-filled metagame.
At some point, cards like Ranger of Eos became the norm in Zoo maindecks, mostly due to the fact that it was the best card for fighting the mirror match. Often the early game would be full of trades where you both exchanged creatures until you both ran out of threats… At which point Ranger of Eos would effectively allow you to produce nine power in a single card, snagging multiple copies of Wild Nacatl. However, some cards were great as tutorable options like Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender and Mogg Fanatic — but that wasn’t the primary function of Ranger of Eos.
These “inbred” Zoo lists were a bit worse against combo decks, because they played a card that had very little interaction on a time-frame that mattered. While Ranger of Eos was really good against other aggressive and control decks, it was pretty miserable when your opponent didn’t want to interact with you.
Finding Your Bitterblossom: The Control Aspect
After the printing of Bitterblossom, I really found my taste for Control. Cryptic Command was the best card in Standard, hands down, and could dig you out of virtually any situation your opponent could possibly present to you. Additionally, Faeries had a synergistic mastery that few decks could handle unless they packed plenty of hate.
Certain archetypes did put a beating on Faeries — but Faeries was so powerful for so long that it warped the formats it inhabited. Maindecking Volcanic Fallout became the norm for any deck that could produce two red mana… And even then you could just lose to a timely Thoughtseize or careful play.
People like to say that Faeries built itself — but people built it in a substandard fashion for a very long time, using cards like Oona’s Blackguard. It had to evolve into the monstrosity we all remember.
Five-Color Control was also another popular deck during that time period, but fought against the opponent on a very different level: 5-Color Control was the “traditional” type of control, while Faeries was a deck that could take the control or aggro role in almost any game, depending on what the opponent presented. If the opponent was really slow to start, a Scion of Oona or Mistbind Clique sealed the game. If they presented many early threats, Damnation could sweep the board before Bitterblossom overwhelmed them.
Mid-Range Control decks like Faeries or CounterTop-Goyf are great at deterring early aggression, and have elements that can either grind a game out or end them immediately. Bitterblossom acted as a virtual Forcefield against aggressive strategies, but could also turn the game around completely when you flashed in a Scion of Oona.
Bitterblossom could also single-handedly beat a control deck while you sat on counterspells. This gave Faeries an overwhelming advantage while on the play, seeing as there weren’t any good counterspells costing a single mana to stop Bitterblossom from hitting the board. Rarely do cards like Bitterblossom come along to facilitate such synergistic strategies, but it single-handedly brought the Faeries deck together. Before Bitterblossom, you could find Zvi battling in a Pro Tour with Cloud Sprite — which goes a long way to proving just how far along the archetype came with a single card and a lot of innovation.
Classic Control decks fight the opponent on two levels: preventing early pressure while building to an unbeatable end-game. These types of decks often rely on early removal such as Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Lightning Bolt, or even Agony Warp to stall, then finish the game with a lock like Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top. That, or they just destroy your resources with something like Ajani Vengeant or Cruel Ultimatum.
These types of decks are traditionally an underdog to aggressive decks packing countermagic, because you will spend most of your resources trying to recuperate from early pressure, and get absolutely hammered when you tap out for a big spell. In these situations, often you will be relying on your big-win card to take advantage of the game, falling too far behind when your spell doesn’t resolve.
While there are exceptions to every rule, Classic Control decks shine in formats where these types of aggro-control decks don’t exist. Faeries was a particularly bad matchup for 5-Color Control in Standard last year, but this matchup was made positive thanks to Faerie hosers as Great Sable Stag and Volcanic Fallout.
The Fringe Archetypes
There are a plethora of archetypes in Magic that don’t fall perfectly into these three major categories, but contain many elements of one or multiples.
It’s very difficult to categorize a Burn deck as either Combo or Aggro, because it is neither. It doesn’t play on the same field as either, yet has elements of both.
Prison decks, or “lock” decks, are another exception, acting as both a control and combo deck, ultimately building to an unbeatable end-game — but doing so in a pretty absurdly broken manner. Enchantress is a great example of this in Legacy, because it uses combo elements to generate an absurd amount of mana and card advantage through Serra’s Sanctum and various Enchantress cards, using enchantments that can lock you out of the game.
It is much harder to build these kinds of decks, because there is rarely a set-in-stone method for building them. Each deck has different niche cards that, while powerful, do not fit into a variety of other archetypes, so people have problems finding ways to surround these cards with the proper facilitators. These types of decks are not usually successful in the long run — but occasionally someone finds a way to push the archetype over the edge and takes down a tournament.
…
There are no perfect answers in deckbuilding. One of the greatest aspects of this game is that you can build any archetype any way you want, and rarely will it be considered “wrong.” There are a plethora of answers to the infinite threats that your opponent produces, and finding the most efficient and powerful way to approach any tournament should be your ultimate goal when building a good deck. The most successful players at major tournaments are usually the ones who take chances, but they usually have a lot of testing to back up their choices. There is no such thing in Magic as a “solved format.” so there is always room for innovation. With the way tournament metagames evolve over time, you can constantly change what cards you maindeck and sideboard in order to combat whatever decks you think are going to be popular. There’s no such thing as a perfectly-built deck; as such, you should always be open to trying new things.
If you find yourself in a rut with a particular deck, don’t just throw it out immediately. Try to find a way to attack whatever decks are giving you problems. If those matchups are both popular and ultimately unsalvageable, then when you should consider changing decks.
Deckbuilding is an art. This was just an attempt to give you an idea of how things “should” operate. But never let someone tell you to build inside of a box. There is no such thing as a bad deck. There are only rough drafts and the steps you take towards creating the final product. If you’ve never built a deck before, then get out there and try it! It’s one aspect of the game that many players don’t have much experience in, and one of the most rewarding.
Thanks for reading.
Todd
strong sad on MOL