I’ve always preferred making decks to playing decks. Something about the essence of crafting your own weapon to bash the other guy really pleases me. However, because I enjoy designing decks so much, it means I have many decks that go wrong, decks I have to discard because they just aren’t good enough. Over the years, I’ve developed a system to help me when I start work on the base of a deck, and to keep track of where I thought the deck was inferior to existing decks.
I’d like to share a basic list I follow when designing decks and picking strategies. Here’s the summary of how I design decks most of the time.
- Step 1: Identify the most powerful cards in the format
- Step 2: Identify the most powerful strategies in the format, and why they’re more powerful that the majority.
- Step 3: Decide on a strategy that fulfills one of the following:
- A. A strategy that’s the most powerful available.
- B. A strategy that directly counters the strongest strategies in the metagame.
- Step 4: Fill the basic requirements for the strategy to function, along with enablers
- Step 5: The first manabase
- Step 6: The support and filler cards
- Step 7: The retooling of the manabase
- Step 8: The sideboard
- Step 9: Intensive testing
- Step 10: General tweaking
Step 1 is probably the most discussed and used criteria for building decks that I’ve seen. In fact, it’s been such an effective enough strategy over the years that you could probably think of a deck that simply plays "good stuff" as its main tactic, and you have a Step 1 deck. The benefits of such a plan are pretty obvious*, and the main reason it’s Step 1 for me is because everything is a trickle-down effect from there. Many times, the strongest cards are going to be at the core of the strongest decks in a format, regardless if they follow a coherent plan or not.
* Better topdecks, easier to maintain game-state, edge against certain types of decks with weaknesses to said cards, etc.
Identifying the best cards in a format gives you a knowledge advantage over people who haven’t dissected the cards. For example, I know a huge number of people who were prepared for Detritivore coming into Regionals, but when combined with Korlash, Heir to Blackblade? Not so much. By using the strongest cards in conjunction with each other, some people are thrown for a loop and have no idea how to react.
Finally, the fact is that many of the best cards simply will lead you to building a dominant strategy around them (Necropotence, Replenish, Life from the Loam, Skullclamp, etc.). Plus, it gives you an easy-to-reference list of the cards that probably fit well together, helpful when looking to give a certain strategy a power boost.
Step 2 is more or less an extension of Step 1, but with crucial differences. You’re no longer only looking at objectively powerful cards. Instead, you’re expanding the criteria to look at the power of the format’s mechanics and internal synergies. For example, Dredge, Affinity, and Madness are all obvious linear mechanics. They work well with cards of the same mechanic, or interact well from the same area as the mechanics are using. Affinity obviously loves Artifacts, Dredge obviously loves cards that can be played (or have effects) from the graveyard, etc.
Alternatively, the strategy may not be so straightforward, instead relying on unrelated cards that work well together and generally do well against the other powerful cards and mechanics in the format. The most powerful cards from Gruul and Boros are, arguably, Kird Ape, Lightning Helix, and the shocklands themselves. Yet for the last year or so, decks based on the simple strategy of playing cheap efficient men and the best burn / pump in the format has been quite successful on the whole. Many times, this loose synergy is overlooked or downplayed when building decks. People should focus on the sum of the parts instead of each individual choice.
Other times the card choices may not even be particularly efficient in a general sense, but instead rely on a huge number of internal synergies that only become obvious in a specific plan. These types of decks are often the rarest kind, because they almost require the deckbuilder to analyze a plan and strategy for a multitude of matches while still in overview mode. Many times, players don’t stop to think of a plan past a very broad strategy until Step 7 or 8. However, when you’re relying on internal synergies, suddenly almost every card in the deck is part of the strategy, or an enabler of the strategy. It means putting a lot more thought into planning the deck at the early stages.
Few of these decks are actually successful in tournament Magic, often because of the sheer difficulty in correctly planning out tactics against more than three or four archetypes. Not to mention that the synergies needed to overcome the low overall power level of each card, and hence the skill needed to play the deck optimally, is on the rise too. Think of a Gro deck such an example. Every card needs to work well with every other for the deck to ultimately function at a high level.
Step 3 is picking your strategy out. This is where things get interesting, and where a lot of people make bad decisions and talk themselves out of playing Tier 1 decks. The reason people separate everything in games into tiers is because some decks/characters/mecha/whatever are just going to be better than others. In Magic, this difference in power is largely based on the first two steps. The problem is that people are generally bad at objectively weighing the pros and cons of strategies.
There are many reasons for this. However, I don’t want to get into psychology or pure analytical skills, as neither of these areas are my forte. Suffice to say, at lower level events – unless the Tier 1 is so obviously metagame distorting that the average player will sit up and take note – then Tier 2 decks will equal or outnumber the Tier 1 stuff.
So let’s begin by breaking down the three options I presented earlier.
A. Building around the most powerful strategy available.
An oldie, but a goodie. Many times, the best deck in the format is the best because it has a strategy that just trumps the other guys. Trix, Affinity, Academy… there are times when you can see tournament results pan out to prove there was one dominant strategy, and other decks are simply weaker. The best example of this may be Pro Tour: Tinker*, where seven of the Top 8 decks, including the winner, included Tinker. It was a clear case of one type of strategy simply being better than the rest. Regardless of the exact build, the best strategy in the format was to combine fast mana with Tinker and huge overpowering effects.
*Pro Tour: New Orleans 2003. Extended.
This isn’t to say creating the best version of the most powerful strategy isn’t your overall goal, but if you pick this route you want to be sure that this strategy is the strongest in the format to begin with. Picking an inferior strategy and then attempting to build around it can give you false expectations in your matches before you begin testing, and can waste a lot of your time.
B. Building around a strategy that either counters the strongest strategies in the metagame, or allows you to adapt to them without disrupting the core strategy of the deck.
Bomberman in Vintage is one of the most recent examples of this philosophy at work. People saw that the Salvagers base allowed for an easy-to-modify toolbox that could answer nearly any deck in the metagame via tutors the deck already featured to help its core win tactic (creating infinite mana, drawing the deck, dumping all the creatures on the table, and resolving Time Walk). As a result, people became drawn to it in the current metagame since they could adapt it to run the grave hate to beat Flash and Ichorid, have a cycling way to beat Darksteel Colossus, and have enough counters to avoid death by other combo decks.
The idea behind picking this type of strategy is that the most powerful strategy in the format simply isn’t heads and tails above the rest of the pack. Thus, you can afford to be weaker and not be at a huge deck disadvantage even if you’re not actively using an inherently powerful strategy. Remember that you don’t always have to trade flexibility for power, though; Steve Sadin Flash deck from the recent Legacy GP shows that quite well. By running a Counterbalance / Sensei’s Divining Top engine, he’s adapted Flash to beat the field, and counter the most powerful strategy in the field, while at the same time playing that same strategy.
Essentially. the key and general rule when picking a strategy to build around is choosing one that shows clear signs of power but doesn’t lock you into running entire sets of enablers, thus giving up and chance at adaptation. The exception is when you know the deck can simply overpower whatever hate you run into. Ichorid was a decent example, as is Dragonstorm more recently. However, more often than not you see decks like Hatching Plans or the majority of Dredge builds – which have serious flaws – in which the core and enablers take up so much space they can’t easily be molded to fight opposing strategies.
If it’s a more open-ended deck without an obvious core eight to twelve cards, then you should ask yourself a couple of questions about the core.
Will I be relying on these cards in the majority of my matches?
Does the card have the same general effectiveness against differing strategies or does it fluctuate?
Is the card unique in its effect?
After that, you want to be looking over cards that enable your deck to execute its strategy. The main draw and search engines in decks will fall under this category, and the same with mana acceleration in almost all decks. After you’ve established the core of your deck, you want the cards that are going to allow you to give it the most speed and consistency in executing the deck’s strategy, at an efficient cost, compared to other decks in the format. The core of the deck and the enablers you choose will typically determine what kind of support cards you put into the deck, and how effective the deck will be in a general sense.
In decks that strongly rely on internal synergy or mechanics, enablers are typically valued within that context. People sometimes are too quick to jump to conclusions from power levels of cards in a vacuum instead of along the deck’s actual tactics from game to game. For example, in Vintage (for a time), Vampiric Tutor was sidelined. Merchant Scroll was played in maindecks of control instead. This may seem odd to those who actually remember playing with a full set of Vamps, but the key was that Scroll found Ancestral Recall and Force of Will immediately, which was of higher importance than extra flexibility and one less mana.
However, now many control decks have become fully hybridized, and as a result they re-added Vampiric Tutor because of the flexibility in its search targets. This is because the strategy of the time subtly changed to "set up and win" rather than "control the game, then set up and kill the opponent." The Dredge debate around Regionals is much the same. Some people simply view their decks strategy differently, even though it relies on the same type of mechanic and general plan, and as a result this influences what preference they give to the enablers.
You want to take a good long look at what your strategy is, and how you want to execute it, when picking these initial 20-25 cards or so, since they’ll be the basis for how well your deck functions and flows over time.
The final topic I want to look at today is the rough work-up of a manabase. Many people wait until they’ve fully filled maindeck slots, and just rough out a manabase to run through testing. I personally like to base an initial draft of my mana at this point in the process, because ultimately I’m building around the core and enablers, not the support cards.
When I see lists in tournaments with one and two-ofs with odd mana costs that they couldn’t reasonably support on the average, I assume they simply added the support cards first. The goal in making a manabase is to make sure the majority of the deck flows as smoothly as possible through the first phases of the game. You must consistently hit the mana flashpoint at which your deck functions optimally, and minimize the chance of flood or screw.
A recent example was the Glittering Wish control deck we took a look at a couple of weeks ago. That was a deck that clearly wasn’t built around the core, but rather was trying to support a deck that was already established and jotted down. First and foremost, you want the mana to always support your key cards consistently, even if it means basing decisions around the mana rather than the other way around. Oh sure, people are quick to dismiss obvious things, like triple-cost cards in splash colors and so forth. But trying to balance a relatively equal color configuration with a slight slant towards the color you’ll most likely need to cast a card? Not so much.
This article is already pretty long for pure wordage and I’ve got a headache, so I’m going to end the list here for today and pick up the other five criteria next week. Until then, he’s a quick breakdown of one of the older decks I basically refined.
Lands (26)
Spells (34)
- 4 Counterspell
- 3 Wrath of God
- 3 Force Spike
- 3 Cunning Wish
- 4 Thirst for Knowledge
- 4 Isochron Scepter
- 3 Orim's Chant
- 2 Fact or Fiction
- 4 Absorb
- 4 Lightning Helix
Sideboard
Scepter-Chant is a pretty easy deck to breakdown, and hopefully will illustrate what I’ve been talking about in this article. Max McCall and I worked on this build, and it ended up winning a PTQ and was one of the first of many similar lists to come down the pipe in the month or two following PT: LA.
Step 1: At the time we were making the deck, the best cards in the format were Gifts Ungiven, Wild Mongrel, Arcbound Ravager, Mind’s Desire, Isochron Scepter, and Chrome Mox. We hadn’t fully realized Life from the Loam as the centerpiece of a Tog engine. I apologize if I’m missing anything obvious, since it’s been a couple of years now.
Step 2: The most powerful strategies that were known to us were Scepter, Tog, Desire combo, and some sort of Red deck. Like many players, Moreno’s deck hit out of the blue since we hadn’t fully considered combining multiple mechanics together using a few common enablers.
Step 3: We picked the Scepter strategy since the Scepter itself was a great combo piece against aggressive strategies, and a big edge against control decks if it hit early. In addition, many of the enablers we would then run to support the Scepter itself covered the bases that it wouldn’t necessarily excel at. To top if off, the core was small, so we could adapt the rest of the deck to the metagame as we went along.
Steps 4 & 5: The main advancement we made was to determine the usefulness of Lightning Helix and go to lengths to include it into the strategy, making it a bit more powerful. After that, the rest should be obvious. We added some Counterspells and the first card drawing engine to the deck, and then molded the manabase around having a difficult-to-disrupt Blue base that could easily make our support colors on command.
The only downside to the step system is just how boring it is to use in retrospective, unless your deck was colossal failure and you want to back-track to the step where you screwed up.
Alright, enough for now. Hopefully you learned something, and I’ll see you next week!
Josh Silvestri
Team Reflection
E-mail me at: JoshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom