Critical Thinking: Building a Deck
- by Razgriez -
Friday, February 24, 2006

            A lot of people struggle with building a deck. To fix this they borrow someone else’s deck idea and change one or two cards. This isn’t always a bad thing to do but it helps make others decks better then you. If you fallow the “mainstream” idea, counter decks, and rouge decks are going to walk all over you, and most of the time people who have been playing the deck you copied will be better as they have more practice with deck. So, today I am

            The First thing to do when building a deck is to get an idea. There are not many original ideas out there left so I find it best to combine two ideas. (ex. Beat-Stick with Pinger’s as support.) Once you have an idea, find a few different cards that support that idea and build from that. How you build from that is by finding main support cards (cards that supports the idea of the deck), finding secondary support cards (cards that support the main cards), and backup cards (cards that increase speed, mana, ect.).

            The second thing is to narrow down cards. Yes narrow down cards, this means you don’t have to be picky in the first step. Normally you can expect 75-110+ cards in the first step. The way to narrow down cards is finding cards that give speed and power at the same time. All cards have speed and power; so don’t take me to literally at that point. (ex. Traumatize is powerful but slow and you probably don’t want to play 4 in your deck. Pyroclasm is fast and “strong” as it can destroy a WW or other blitz class decks early on so you can build up.) When narrowing down cards don’t be afraid to go back and do it again if you only cut down to a total of 70 cards. Your goal is to try and cut it down to 60 or 62 is you are running the sligh method. (26 mana 62 total cards in deck)

            The third step is to review the deck. It is fast? Dose it accomplish the desired goal? Dose it have offensive and defensive capabilities? Can the deck improvise with bad situations? Questions like that are good to ask yourself and see if your deck can do that. After you do that play-test the crap out of the deck, record your wins and loss’s on a piece of paper with what went right and what went wrong, along with possible cards that could help you in the situation.

            Step four. Layout your deck and review it, try and make fine tune adjustments based of your notes. Also I would suggest researching base elements of other decks that share similar elements with yours and see if you pick up additional ideas from that. Once you build it again to the best of your abilities repeat step 3 and four as many times as you feel necessary.  When you think your finished with this process take it to an FMN or a small tourney and test it out there if at all possible.

            Now I will review a deck.
 

“Hi razgriez, this is a 1.5 Blue/Green Deck that splash’s for Glimpse of the Unthinkable. This is a very large experiment for me and I figured I would get another opinion on it. This deck is mainly at the FMN stage and isn’t competitive yet. I have no real budget as I have been playing a long time but don’t have experience in U/G. I am fluent in Library Destruction decks and wanted to make one that had fast mana. I use Fallowed Footsteps with Wall of Tears to buy time and another situation I can use Fallowed Footsteps to copy Scalpelexis. The deck use’s the 8 stones to deck the person out with Traumatize and Glimpse as backup support. I think it needs a bit more mana Accel. and a bit more defense. Also please keep deck count where it is at (65) Just my own personal preference)

Creatures(15)

4x Birds Of Paradise (Cheep Mana Accel.)

4x Llanowar Elves (Cheep Mana Accel.)

3x Scalpelexis (Discarder)

4x Wall of Tears (Defense)

Spells(15)

4x Vision Charm (cheep Discard)

4x Sylvan Scrying (mana Hunter)

3x Traumatize (mass Discard)

4x Glimpse of the Unthinkable (mass discard)

Enchantments(4)

4x Fallowed Footsteps (copyer)

Artifacts(11)

4x Grindstone (discard)

4x Millstone (discard)

3x Ensnaring Bridge (discard)

Lands (20)

4x Tropical Island

6x Island

5x Swamp

5x Island

Well this deck is very interesting and I like the idea a lot, it is very original. Well first of id like to tweak the mana curve and take out 2x Fallowed Footsteps. They are great but they cost 5, yes there is mana accel. but if you use your mana for that that’s less for the stones and other discard. I also want to take out 1 Traumatize to add in 3x Harrow. This in my opinion is one of the best mana accel cards. It brings out 2 untapped basic lands of your choice for 2G. Next lets take out Sylvan Scrying’s for Fyndhorn Elves there is a slight speed advantage here, no it doesn’t make blue mana but your deck doesn’t run anything but #B and things like that so the elves will help. Lets also ditch the Vision Charms in favor of Lotus Petals, once again we are going for mana accel. Next lets take out 1 traumatize, 1 Scalpelexis, 1 Ensnaring Bridge and 2 fallowed footsteps for 4 fog banks. The lands are messy so lets go off the final list.

Final List

Creatures

Birds of Paradise x4

Fog Bank x4

Fyndhorn Elves x4

Llanowar Elves x4

Scalpelexis x2

Wall of Tears x3

Spells

Glimpse the Unthinkable x4

Harrow x3

Traumatize x2

Enchantments

Followed Footsteps x2

Enchantments

Ensnaring Bridge x2

Grindstone x4

Lotus Petal x4

Millstone x4

Lands

Tropical Island x4

Yavimaya Coast x4

Swamp x4

Island x4

Forest x3

The deck should now be faster and have more defense in it. I love the idea to make a LB deck fast. It also still decks someone out in a descent amount of time also.

To the readers, I chose this deck for its originality and its neat format (how he sent it), and now for the final part of this article I will give my thoughts on a card and rate it.

Pyroclasm

1R deal 2 damage to all creatures.

Rating(overall): 3.5/5

This card is extremely good. It completely destroys WW decks and speed decks and gives you time to build up AND IT CAN BE SPLASHED IN MOST DECKS!! They say Volcanic Hammer is the baseline burn card for 2. I think this is the most broken for 2 by far. Can reset a field in the right situation and can be used offensively to all cards that run or splash red should keep some in there side-deck at least.

CONSTRUCTED:  3.75
CASUAL: 3.0
LIMITED: 4.0