A fair amount of controversy has appeared over the past few weeks, over the subject of “how to fish.” AJ Sacher wrote in this article that ‘there is too much deck copying, and not enough deck design’, to summarize in very brief. The parable goes that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day, but if instead you teach a man to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life. AJ proposed that players should learn how to design decks, but unfortunately did very little to teach them how after showing them that they should. Patrick Chapin “wrote” a satirical reply, intent on keeping men stuffed with fishes from now until Pro Tour: Amsterdam, with not a word wasted in non-decklist form.
Perhaps you’ve read AJ’s article, and agree that you might be a happier mage if you knew how to fish, really knew how to fish, instead of following the leads of others who have fished before you and assumed they knew what they were doing. Tournament results after all provide very little in the way of explanation, showing you simply by doing and providing the 75 cards that won the PTQ without any context of the opponents those 75 defeated over the course of the day except possibly the last two or three (and that is assuming that 3rd-4th and 5th-8th place decklists are ordered so that 3rd and 5th lost to the first-place finisher, which isn’t always accurately reported). Deck tech articles can go into detail and show you why playing with that particular deck is a good idea, and show you how it was developed and tested, but you can only get out of it what the author puts into it modified by how much attention you put into learning from them; I know plenty of people who just scan for decklists and never even try to learn anything.
Writing is the closest form we have to telepathy, the nearest ability to share concepts and ideas mind-to-mind that there is. Conversation can break down, become labored, lose the point because of one ill-placed word or awkward phrase, so writing has the advantage due to the ability to pause, edit, and hone your work until you have well and truly conveyed the thought you sought to present to the target audience, the recipients of your telepathic transmissions who are supposed to read your work and know your mind. In Magic, well, some writers don’t show you how they fish, others can’t truly describe it, and the fair bulk of readers will skip the point or not challenge themselves to learn from it, and it is this growing modern trend for mass-market instant gratification that is corollary to AJ’s idea that nobody bothers trying to learn to fish. We all have the attention spans of the mice scientists train to press a lever to get a lick of cocaine, nowadays, perhaps especially because we’re challenged to limit our telepathic transmissions to what can fit in a Twitter comment.
So let’s take a fishing lesson. AJ has shown you (or perhaps he hasn’t) that it would be ‘A Good Thing’ to learn to fish. Scouring the Internet for decklists is easy, but has with it the high risk of being the wrong idea and can just as easily lead you to failure instead of success. Learning the fundamentals of deck design is hard, but I’ll try to tell you some of what I know, and maybe you’ll learn something from it. Maybe you won’t. If you’re the sort who just scans to the decklist, you’ll inevitably be disappointed, and the exit’s in your browser bar with the arrow pointing to the left or the “X” in the top right corner.
The most important thing to know about your deck is why it should exist in the first place. Before a deck is sixty cards, and certainly before it is seventy-five, your deck is an abstract concept with no correlation to reality. Decks begin their life spans as the kernels of ideas in someone’s head, often many heads at the same time in the exact same form. There are far too many people walking on this earth to assume that each and every new idea has just one original author, in a world where major earth-shattering scientific advances have in the past had more than one unique creator (we just remember the one who thought of it first, before the idea became commonplace and you could learn it instead of think it up). It’s true, now we have the Internet and ideas travel very quickly indeed from an idea’s inception in one mind to flourishing in others, but the large bulk of the Internet is for pointing out that you had that idea as well instead of copying it from someone when it became known, or for posting first, or pictures of LOLcats.
Decks have a purpose, a raison d’etre. Without this reason to be, you have no organizing principle, and this pseudo-deck is just one of the many bajillion possible card combinations that exists within the greater system heading of “Standard” if you want it to. To some extent or another, decks make sense, and how you grasp that sense is based on what you are trying to accomplish. Before you know what you are trying to accomplish, you have to know why you are trying to accomplish it, so before you ever touch pen to paper you have to have the beginnings of an understanding of what is possible in a format or you’ll just be starting with noise and hoping to get to signal somehow.
Let’s use the cutting edge of the modern era of Standard to begin a system analysis. The ability to look at the contents of a format, with the thousand-plus possible cards you can play, is the single most important ability I possess as a would-be deck designer, and I’ll try and convey for you some of how it is done. What you look for is the kernels of decks, the things that one can begin to organize around to bring form out of the void. Power cards are often these kernels, and usually one can start working on a format by identifying the power cards and seeing how they break down on color lines and by casting cost. Ideally, you’d be able to play any of these together if you wanted to, but realistically “what you can do” is constrained by your mana… sometimes you live in a world like that of vivid-land control, and can cast Cloudthresher one turn and Cruel Ultimatum the next, but more often you will find there are reasonable limits to how many colors you can support in a shell that will find them in reasonable time and paying only reasonable costs, because once we begin to be unreasonable the whole house of cards falls down once we’re under pressure or introduce such simple realities of the game as “that game when I had to mulligan”.
In modern Standard, there are some key power cards. Primeval Titan and Fauna Shaman are the newest of these, which is why you’ll note Naya creature decks beginning to use Fauna Shaman are starting to come out of the woodwork, and Primeval Titan ramp decks are doing excellently as of the past two weeks. Jace, the Mind Sculptor is perhaps the best of the power cards, because he is the power card that is also both Blue and a planeswalker, both of which are clear marks in a card’s favor for power nowadays. Bloodbraid Elf is still bonkers and will be till they nail her coffin shut in October. Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle is potentially bonkers, and given enough mana ramp spells you’ll find that if you just play all of them they self-assemble into 20 damage that is very hard for an opponent to stop, since you don’t need nonland permanents to survive in order to deal that damage and lands are the hardest permanent type to reasonably interact with just as a matter of fact.
Each of these power cards creates a niche that it can then try to fill, and by process of survival of the fittest decks that try to fill that niche will evolve to more established forms based on what you can reasonably try to put together based on what your mana can do, how games open up based roughly on the casting cost of the cards you are playing, and what the other cards in the format are capable of doing. Fast creatures gravitate towards other fast creatures, while slow control cards gravitate towards other slow control cards. Combo decks are stranger animals, the platypus or giraffes of the Magic world, each capable of becoming what they are simply due to the peculiar confluence of cards available at the moment… they don’t self-assemble and aren’t usually ‘obvious’ to see, like designing a Red deck or tuning a Blue-White Control deck.
When you understand roughly what all of the possible shapes are in the format, you can begin to design your deck by choosing one of those shapes and trying to fill it. Each is a room for possibility to grow in, a wide-open space to explore that is roughly defined by what you are trying to accomplish and what colors you can combine at reasonable price that limits your self-selected card pool. The important thing to note is that decks inter-relate with other decks, and have to justify their own existence. The reason many, many writers go on at length to explain that your baby is in fact an ugly baby and you’d probably be better off playing Jund instead of whatever homebrew you cooked up is because decks don’t exist in a vacuum, they exist to be played against other decks, and as the format becomes more well-defined these potential niches to fill become less and less likely to succeed, or have already been discovered. But don’t give up just yet, because the Magic Hive Mind is at work discovering all of the decks: new ideas are always possible, and critical thought always rewarded.
Case in point: I began this PTQ season with a PTQ-winning deck in my bag. I didn’t play it the first week, because I was not yet confident in it and I sensed a void waiting to be filled, and attacked the format with an infinite-turn combo deck loosely templated off of U/W Turbo-Fog for the first event of the season while I was still working on that PTQ-winner I’d unveil the following week, a hyper-aggressive Vengevine Jund deck powered up by Lotus Cobra. Sure, we know now that Lotus Cobra is actually very good and thus one should aim to be able to kill early creatures in Standard lest you lose to one, but at the very start of the season this was an idea people were resistant to. I designed an excellent deck that had great reason to exist, and was readily curb-stomping my way through the second PTQ of the season when I hit a crucial decision-point: to Lightning Bolt my Magical nemesis to death, or to be conservative in case he had “It!” and attempt to maximize my chance to definitely kill him by the next turn. There was never an “It!” and I was too nervous to correctly apply Lightning Bolt to forehead, because I haven’t beaten Josh Ravitz in a match of sanctioned Magic in a decade and got caught up in that instead of making the right play. I said I knew how to design decks, not play Magic well at the highest level, after all. I also ended the season with a PTQ-winning deck in my bag, sensing a new control version was possible that could both face the new breed of Ramp decks and the U/W control decks that I determined would gain popularity to react to their existence… but didn’t have time to learn how to play the deck, and shot myself in the foot early in the tournament with some pretty messy misplays.
I can teach you how to fish. I can’t promise you that anyone will ever be able to teach me how to play.
“The right deck to play” is usually something you can figure out, based on what is actually good and what others are merely perceiving to be good. It took a pretty long time for people to accurately weight how good Lotus Cobra is, for example, and a good deal of the time between the printing of Zendikar and around Rise of the Eldrazi when we finally figured him out could have been an excellent breakout time for a deck using Lotus Cobra well from inception to design. At first he was only present in a fringe deck called ‘Mythic’, but now he’s showing up in a variety of places that accurately use him to his strengths without creating in themselves new weaknesses if he were to die. There are usually good windows of opportunity like this for a lot of cards, and figuring out something is good but not yet getting played is a good kernel to start building a deck around.
There are some fundamentals that are very important to learn how to do well, once you have understood what you are trying to accomplish and understand why it might be a good idea to try and accomplish something within that design space. The ability to build a mana-base is a critical skill that will always be vital and will always follow the same basic tenets, because we are always playing Magic: the Gathering even if the feel of Standard changes over time. Balancing how many lands of each color you have, how many lands can be used to accomplish some other purpose besides just adding mana, and how many lands come into play tapped are vital things to learn, and for this too you need an understanding of the system as a whole. In Standard, playing nonbasics can be punished by Tectonic Edge and Goblin Ruinblaster, so if you have heavy color commitments or really need to hit the higher mana costs there is good reason to consider relying more on basic lands than nonbasics, which is why sometimes you’ll see U/W/R or Jund decks starting to play Terramorphic Expanse or its twin, Evolving Wilds, perhaps even at the expense of the Savage Lands that are considered sacrosanct to the Jund deck.
This is not an easy skill, though it is a fundamental one, and I can’t explain how in one article or even five probably. I will however point you to some expert advice out there: there is first this article by Stuart Wright that is well worth reading, and also this series by Richard Feldman that is still a useful resource. A more recent look was had by Alex West, here that more clearly lines up to the kind of mana we use presently in Standard, and thus is probably the least dated.
One fundamental thing to understand is what broad, sweeping archetype you fit under, as deciding this will begin to organize your conception of which cards you should be playing and nominate candidates for inclusion. “Control”, after all, usually doesn’t have 20+ creatures in it, so it’ll look at noncreature permanents and spells in general to do what it is trying to do, and “beatdown” is rarely creature-sparse so you look for power and toughness in the bottom right corner versus mana cost when trying to decide your starting lineup. Jund designed as a beatdown deck usually has something besides Putrid Leech in the two-drop slot, even if it’s only mana ramp, and because it’s trying to attack with creatures will start with at least sixteen of them on the bench. Jund designed as a control deck will have expensive drops like Siege-Gang Commander and Broodmate Dragon, or perhaps the new Grave Titan if that’s your thing, but the number of creatures is pretty thin after the ‘starting twelve’ line-up of 4x Leech/Thrinax/Bloodbraid. “What you are trying to accomplish” determines what you choose to play, and “what you are trying to accomplish” is something that doesn’t happen in a vacuum: there can only be so many control decks in a format before some of them are just clearly better than others, and while there can be a beatdown deck for each color and each color combination, usually only the ones with an unique facet have reason to exist, which is why you see Naya creature decks and Bant creature decks but not just plain G/W creature decks anymore, as the tri-color strategies dominates the two-color strategy at very low opportunity cost in the mana department.
The speed with which you act or react is critical, so low cost cards have the priority no matter if you’re control or beatdown, as you get a high impact from cheap but potent cards whether you’re trying to kill the opponent or keep the opponent from killing you. Decks self-select for low mana cost by competing with each other for life points, and again there is a systemic approach you can take to understand what is going on in the format and just how fast it is, as this information can tell you how low your curve has to be or how many cheap reactive spells you need to have if you don’t want to fall behind. Broodmate Dragon is awesome but Standard has gotten faster, so the one-time “best card in Jund” is now voted “most likely not to be in your deck box”.
Standard right now is an interesting beast. The two-drop is very potent, with things like Putrid Leech, Lotus Cobra, and Fauna Shaman having a potential impact far above what we used to think we got for two mana (remember the Zuberi?). The three-drop is not as critical; one of the best cards in the format is a three, Knight of the Reliquary, and yet he is not even always seen in creature-based decks that are able to cast him. Some decks after all are using mana acceleration to jump from one mana to three mana, while others are more concerned with going from two to four. Jund doesn’t really think much about three-drops, as it tends to want to cast spells at that drop instead of creatures, thanks to the power of Blightning and Maelstrom Pulse. The four drop is the sweet spot in Standard for many archetypes, with numerous good planeswalkers and some of the best creatures like Vengevine and Bloodbraid Elf in this spot. After that, anything that costs more than four has to have a massive impact on the game. Baneslayer Angel, Gideon Jura, Primeval Titan, Sovereigns of Lost Alara, Sarkhan the Mad, Bituminous Blast… each of these has a massive impact and a strong correlation with winning the game, if you play them when they’re able to do their job instead of when they’re placed under greater stress than they’re capable of operating under.
You can begin, then, to sense all of the tensions that exist in the format you’re aiming at, if you look at the cards that are playable as a whole and begin to understand all of the possible niches that can be filled by good decks that have a reason to exist. If you’re having a hard time figuring out what might exist, you can begin to derive this by looking at the mana and figuring out what is possible. Ruling out four- and five-color decks, which are possible but don’t come easily and thus have no clear reason to exist in our minds yet, you can identify the following shapes that a deck might grow to fill:
Mono-White: control and aggro.
Mono-Blue: control and aggro.
Mono-Black: control and aggro.
Mono-Red: control and aggro.
Mono-Green: control and aggro.
W/U: control and aggro.
U/B: control and aggro.
B/R: control and aggro.
R/G: control and aggro.
G/W: control and aggro.
W/R: control and aggro.
U/G: control and aggro.
B/W: control and aggro.
R/U: control and aggro.
G/B: control and aggro.
W/U/B: control and aggro.
U/B/R: control and aggro.
B/R/G: control and aggro.
R/G/W: control and aggro.
G/W/U: control and aggro.
W/U/R: control and aggro.
U/B/G: control and aggro.
B/R/W: control and aggro.
R/G/U: control and aggro.
G/W/B: control and aggro.
Combo decks of any color combinations that makes sense for those combos.
Picking through these 40 realistic possibilities, you’ll notice some strategically dominate others completely, while others are absent but don’t have a good reason to say they don’t exist. Looking at Standard at present, we can identify the following:
Mono-White: control and aggro. Neither exist in any realistic fashion.
Mono-Blue: control and aggro. Control dominated by non-mono-colored builds; aggro doesn’t nor shouldn’t exist.
Mono-Black: control and aggro. Both exist but aren’t strong market competitors; MBC is oft-attempted year after year, and Vampires is the only linear tribal deck we have right now.
Mono-Red: control and aggro. Control doesn’t make sense, though M11 has two powerful cards that suggest it might have reason to try. Aggro exists with two distinct builds and is a strong competitor, the only strong monocolored competitor.
Mono-Green: control and aggro. Neither realistically exists; mono-G aggro makes more sense with a second color added given the low cost for doing so right now.
W/U: control and aggro. Control, yes, aggro no.
U/B: control and aggro. Does not exist at present. I can see reason for UB Control to exist, but UB Aggro seems nonsensical… what are you going to do, splash Blue cards into Vampires?
B/R: control and aggro. Control is strategically dominated by either U/B/R or B/R/G Control. Aggro exists but is strategically dominated by B/R/G aggro AND either mono-B or mono-R aggro, as the second color actually doesn’t pay for its opportunity cost to add in either of those two decks.
R/G: control and aggro. Control is strategically dominated by B/R/G Control. Aggro exists but is not plentiful, as R/G Tokens.
G/W: control and aggro. Control is strategically dominated by G/W/U Control. Aggro is strategically dominated by either G/W/U Aggro or R/G/W Aggro.
Enemy-colored two-color decks: R/W Aggro exists to some degree as Boros Bushwhacker; in all other instances, these seem to be dominated by allied-color two-color options or tri-color options.
W/U/B: control and aggro. Exists as a possible control option, not really considered for beatdown.
U/B/R: control and aggro. Exists as a possible control option. Dominated by B/R/G as an aggro option.
B/R/G: control and aggro. Two flavors of Jund deck, both viable to consider.
R/G/W: control and aggro. Exists as aggro, kind of silly as control.
G/W/U: control and aggro. Next Level Bant and Mythic Conscription. Many flavors in between.
W/U/R: control and aggro. Super Friends, for control. No real reason to exist as aggro.
U/B/G: control and aggro. Does not currently exist.
B/R/W: control and aggro. Does not currently exist.
R/G/U: control and aggro. Does not currently exist as a control deck; some exploration has been tried as an Aggro deck (Jace and Bloodbraid Elf!) but is generally just better as B/R/G Aggro.
G/W/B: control and aggro. Does not currently exist; aggro options seem to be dominated by R/G/W, G/W/U and B/R/G Aggro options.
Combo: Turbo-Land, R/G Ramp, Open the Vaults, Runeflare Trap, Pyromancer’s Ascension, Dredgevine all potentially exist.
Systems are awfully big things to try and fit into your mind, as we can see by just looking at the mana and figuring out what could potentially exist gives us a whole host of options for possible decks. But thus you can see why I say that building a deck starts by finding a space to explore, as you can see there are a lot of spaces to explore if you just look for them. Powerful cards self-suggest what should exist, and that’s why we can see Jace, Elspeth, Path, Wall of Omens, Mana Leak, Day of Judgment, and figure there’s probably something in there to look at as a U/W control deck, and why Putrid Leech, Sprouting Thrinax, and Bloodbraid Elf have been hanging out together since Alara Reborn.
You’ve found a space. Now what? Now, you get to explore the act of creation. Sometimes you have an obvious overarching design principle: a tribe you wish to exploit, because there are only so many possible Kithkin in Extended, so the design begins to suggest itself intuitively and obviously. Usually when you strike out to explore this space you seem to have thought up, something interested you in the first place and brought you there, a card whose potential you wanted to advance (like Vengevine, which led to the existence of Next Level Bant) or a two-card combination that really gets you interested in figuring out what you can do (like Primeval Titan and Valakut).
Sometimes this is art, sometimes science. There is more math than creativity in building a beatdown deck, because considerations like mana curve and the beneficial advantages of your potential candidates readily suggest a top tier of creatures you’re considering playing, and almost anything else with power and toughness falls beneath your notice. This is why Cedric Phillips earns props for playing Kithkin well but is somehow not given the same nod for designing the deck well, because it is not understood to be a difficult thing even though Cedric’s going to play a list of his own tuning every time because his intent during play and intent during deck design are the same, and it is knowing what he is trying to accomplish that lets him make all the right choices for the deck during the deck design portion of the tournament that so often gets overlooked.
This is also why people for the past year have been looking down their noses at the Jund deck: once you stop building and start playtesting, the deck tunes itself based on those playtest games very quickly, as the principles of mana curve and how those decks win become incredibly obvious once you step into that design space, even if it’s not “easy” to play the deck well. There’s some room for creativity in exploring a control deck, but again these start to tune themselves during playtesting, as you quickly figure out what is advancing your overall plan and what is just pretty fluff once you have to stop someone from killing you and have that particular piece of cardboard in your hand.
Where deckbuilding is an clearly an art is where it falls between these two extremes, or the normal restraints of a card pool limited by the number of colors you can play evaporates. Patrick Chapin ever-changing Five-Color Control decklists were a thing of beauty, deck design as an art in motion, because there was no simple scientific ‘mathematical’ approach where you could just crunch numbers and get a decklist, you had to know what you were trying to accomplish and pick the right tools from a vast, vast array of options, and what you were trying to accomplish changed subtly over time as the metagame developed one way or the other. There’s also some art to the thing when the decisions you’re making aren’t immediately obvious, because you are following an overarching principle in design that is not immediately and intuitively obvious.
For example, Mythic isn’t “clearly” a beatdown deck, from a deck design perspective, because it is part mana-ramp deck and part combo deck all disguised as a beatdown deck; it doesn’t follow the obvious “beatdown deck” mana curve, since it skips and accelerates, and has interesting synergies built in as cards begin to interact with each other that build mounting pressure far beyond what each card as an individual would have been able to accomplish. Mythic began with a purpose and an intent, as Zvi himself can tell you in his articles on the deck, and its design explored that potential space which is what deckbuilding is all about.
In this sense, deckbuilding is an act of creativity that is limited only by ‘what might work in Magic’ and ‘what you can imagine is possible’, a joyful experience that deckbuilders literally never stop doing because it is so enjoyable: Brad Nelson reported in his Grand Prix: Washington report that he had a deckbuilding revelation for the Pro Tour the following weekend in San Juan during the middle of a match, in the Grand Prix that he won, and it’s not like he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing at the time (though he says he lost that game due to the distraction). It’s more that exploring deck design is something you can do consciously by thinking about it with intent and focus, but also something you can work through subconsciously and constantly, as not all thought is conscious thought and ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘revelations’ can happen when you least expect them.
So I’ve told you what ‘deckbuilding’ is, why it’s important if you want to succeed, and to some degree how to do it: what the steps are, what process you need to follow to identify possible decks, and the joyful spree through an open design space you can take if you just want to brew up a deck for the fun of the thing. And in the end I’ve still ended up being cryptic and mystical, because there is only so much explaining I can do and so much doing still to be done if you want to learn how to do it. But there is grander advice I can give you, if you want something to take away from this all.
One of my favorite pieces of fiction is Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series; it is through Terry Goodkind after all that I found the philosopher he greatly admired, Ayn Rand, in my teenaged years, and his “Wizards’ Rules” are amusing thoughts that have some deeper reverberation when you think about them instead of just fun catch-phrases he seems to have managed to write a book around. It’s funny that someone who ascribes to the idea of rational and objective thought would write books about a universe of magic, but I can’t really argue that point considering that I share that high value for rational thought and the book I’m all-too-slowly working on exists in a world where science explored black magic and found a few things it didn’t expect actually works. But to me the deepest of his Wizards’ Rules is a simple phrase: “Deserve Victory”.
Not “Expect Victory”, you’ll notice, but deserve it. Or as we try to say it in Magic, “luck only matters when you’ve done everything else right”. You can expect victory because you think you’re great, or because you want it, but you can only deserve victory when you’ve put the time and effort into picking or building your deck for the tournament, honed your skills practicing with the deck and playing against the other decks that one can expect to appear at the tournament. (And imagine how annoying it can be to know that while I might “hope for” victory or “want” victory, I won’t “deserve” it until I put a lot more hours into playing this game well than I have for the past year, visibly watching my not-stellar-to-begin-with skills degrade because I value the relationship I am in and the book I want to write over Magic: the Gathering, but still go to PTQs anyway!)
One way you can ‘deserve’ success is by bringing your subconscious mind to the tasks you are consciously thinking of. Many a Magic article has been written about trying to master your ‘will’ and gain ‘the fire’ to succeed, the most famous of which is probably Michael J. Flores’ “How To Win A PTQ”. In short, all of these such articles work towards the same ill-described purpose: aligning your conscious mind and your subconscious mind to be alike in purpose, as the conscious mind is powerful as you think and analyze, but the subconscious mind when working at cross-purposes is expert at undermining your conscious efforts. Those rare times when a player’s mind is entirely focused on what they are doing are hard to obtain and powerful indeed; attaining that state even briefly is something you tend to remember for a very long time, and strive to attain despite how slippery the subconscious mind is. Creating this need to succeed is a powerful state that can only rarely be accessed, ephemeral as the subconscious mind tends to be, but harnessing the subconscious is proven to be quite powerful indeed when you can do it.
The reason Terry Goodkind springs to mind is because of an interesting bit from one of his later stories, “Phantom”. In one fight against an impossible-to-defeat monster that defies the regular rules of magic, the good guys win the fight by themselves defying the rules of magic as described by their world: instead of imagining the spell (which the monster is immune to, regardless, by its nature) and following the process of creating the magical effect and performing it, one of them imagines not a traditional spell but instead a need, a void waiting to be filled by something that would suit their purpose. Their enemy was intended to defeat rational thought, and was in turn defeated by turning to the subconscious instead, a peculiar turn of events for a novel written by a self-described Randian objectivist. But using your subconscious is something you can learn to do, if only in a limited fashion, and something you can apply to deck design as well.
Why might this be useful? Conscious thought makes rational decisions after all, and thus seems like it might be ideal when I’ve said that designing a deck is largely based on figuring out what you can do and why you should do it, and that from there many parts of the solution will present themselves as “things you want to have in your deck”. But conscious thought tends to follow your biases and the status quo; you’ll give a certain weight to a certain card and rarely challenge that belief when you’re building a deck, unless you have a reason to re-evaluate a card from experiences you’ve had that don’t agree with your previous assessment. This is in a nutshell the tale of Lotus Cobra: he was advertised as the most awesome thing ever, and didn’t live up to that initial hype, and so was relegated to the world of ‘terrible’ until it could be played with enough to be understood to be very awesome instead of the most awesome thing ever, and re-evaluated to understand its true value. Conscious belief on the party of one or many persons that was then rejected and thus believed the opposite of, only to be challenged by someone to properly weight its worth. The backlash against Lotus Cobra was unconscious and nonrational, but nonetheless widespread, systemic, and difficult to challenge on an individual basis… an emotional response, shall we say.
For all but the most experienced deckbuilders, even after you’ve built the deck, you’ve got to do the work: playing and honing and exploring, essentially looking at that large whiteboard of possible deck archetypes that might exist and figuring out which ones are unique and viable and throwing away the ones that are like these better decks in concept but just less good in execution. It’s a long, methodical process of evolution to become well-versed in a format, and it’s incredibly hard to build a deck for a format you aren’t well versed in… well, actually it’s easy as pie, just not if you want to play a good deck, and I’m assuming if you’re reading an article about this game that it’s not because you want to lose.
It’d be wonderful if we could control our subconscious, but that’s just not how we work. Our subconscious is always active, always collecting information and making intuitive leaps, but it’s not something we have any control over and all too often we see it only in our dreams when our conscious mind turns off and our subconscious is left to play. Deck design feels like playtime, and is to some degree at least just the methodical combination of multiple items alongside each other… that same work of extensive deck testing to hash out what the ideal version of a deck is and what all the decks in the format are like, something that the Magical Hive-Mind seems to eventually tabulate, despite no intent to explore or be creative on the part of many or even most of the individuals that seem to compose it. And so you can follow deck design through two avenues: the first, conscious thought, just sitting and thinking about what would happen if you do this and then this and then this other thing too… and the second by subconscious thought, tasking your subconscious with a need to be fulfilled and seeing what it comes up with.
This is far from a simple proposition, as anyone who has ever had “the fire” and tried to re-ignite it well knows. The mind is a fickle thing, and the subconscious does what it does, not what you want. Having a subconscious mind is a lot like having a cat… the belief that it should do what you want is just not how it was made. But the way I have described deck design is a good way to think of things, either with your conscious mind or your subconscious mind. The conscious mind will see the wide avenue of play space and start exploring it by trial and error, starting with the obvious candidates and then eventually moving on to the things other people haven’t tried before, in the pursuit of accurate information and the best deck. And the subconscious mind will see the purpose waiting to be filled, and the challenge of filling it… you create the need and express your desire, and whether you like it or not your subconscious mind will do what it does best and start exploring. It will work, and work, and work, because that is what it does, sort of like a computer that just keeps compiling until it reaches the end result, searching out that deck design you told it you wanted to work on until you have your eureka! moment and have arrived at the design you’ve been thinking about laboriously with at least part of your mind.
The best way to think of this is as “supercharging your subconscious”. By setting up the objective you wish to complete and the void that is there to be filled, your brain will virtually leap to do so, as anyone who has ever realized they can’t fall asleep until they get out of bed at four in the morning and write down the idea they have can attest to, be it deck design or the shape of the ending of the novel they’ve been working on. It isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not controllable, but it’s a tool in your toolbox that you can play with and explore, and perhaps even learn how to use once in a while, for deck design or another purpose. Either way, it takes a lot of thought and a lot of time, it’s just that there are parts of your brain that can do this thinking while you do other things, and it’s a part of your mind you can learn to access at least sometimes… some people do it without even knowing that was what they were doing, as Brad Nelson earlier example of ‘seeing Magic cards in the sky’ as his signal of that eureka! moment goes to show, and if they can do it without meaning to, presumably you can learn how to do it if you try to do it.
Simply by philosophy, I prefer the conscious method; you can follow a set process, playtest actively and challenge your assumptions with results to derive correct card valuations and make a good deck decision. But rational though I strive to be, at least sometimes I’m aware of changes to card valuations unconsciously before I’m aware of them consciously, and it’s certainly true that people can work with subconscious thought and achieve good results so long as they apply rational thought after getting insight from their subconscious minds. And it’s certainly possible to receive information from your subconscious, either intentionally or unintentionally, though it’s very hard to try to actively push your subconscious to work for you… cats don’t work that way, remember, so you have to lead it to a problem it will want to work at, instead of push it because you think you’re in charge. There’s evidence for both conscious and subconscious thought working in deck design, once you’ve set yourself out to play in that space you want to explore… just remember that at the end of it all it’s the rational rigors of playtesting that will tell you if your baby is ugly or not, and the ability to build a deck is something you learn by doing, not by wishing and receiving immediate results.
So go play with your mind and see what sort of decks you come up with! It’s a rewarding experience just from the sheer creative acts that Magic: the Gathering allows, whether you brew up the next Pro Tour winning deck or not. Just remember that not every idea is going to be good (we like to say we have nine bad ideas for every good one we have, and it may be even more bad ideas than that!), but every idea is worth having and worth thinking about if you want to fully explore the large system that is a metagame and succeed at building decks. Don’t get discouraged… just get discerning. Some decks are not as good as others, no matter what you do they’re just strategically dominated by this other option that has better reason to exist… don’t be attached to these decks just because you explored the design space and thought them up yourself, there is no value to being different just for difference’s sake, in a world where we can show that some cards are simply better than other ones are.
The process is more important than the result, and it is this shortcutting of the process entirely to just get at the result that AJ found so intellectually damaging to would-be “good players” in the first place. Learning to fish takes time, but is itself satisfying and rewarding, an infinite playspace of creativity and exploration that gives you lots and lots of excuses to play this wonderful card game we call Magic: the Gathering. And sure, I posit there are shortcuts you can take that aren’t damaging… you can learn to dream about decks instead of tabulate them, but either way you’re doing it, you have to know how to think about putting cards next to each other and seeing how they behave, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, so this is dangerous advice: it’s meant for the expert deckbuilder who already knows what he’s doing but wants to save on active brain time by relegating some of the work to the powerful subconscious processors we all possess, not as another alternative to learning how to build decks. After all, if wishes were fishes, we’d all eat for free.
Sean McKeown
s_mckeown @ hotmail.com