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design notes

mathias would like to welcome today's guest speaker, Hurkle

While playing manalink, I have encountered many new Magic players, who have been frustrated, depressed, and exasperated at their performance and/or ranking.  While talking with them, I have realized that these players are at the point I was 3 years ago, when I was first playing other people, and discovering that there was a lot more to deck construction than I had previously thought.

With this in mind, I decided I would take a stab at creating a short but effective document that might help new players design their decks more effectively for the manalink experience.  Because, believe me, I know what it is like to get beaten consistently, especially when you have no idea what is wrong with your deck.  In addition, I urge any players who encounter someone who may need deck help to point them to µ·'s manalink site and this page.

I am assuming that you are planning to play either type 1 or type 1.5, as unrestricted and wild can be a little extreme for the new player.  If you plan to play in those environments, be sure to speak to your opponent before the game, so that they know you are not playing some horrible first-turn kill monstrosity of a deck, and will make their deck choice appropriately.

The Basics of Deck Construction

When designing a deck, there are many things to keep in mind.  Not only do you need to include offensive threats, but you need cards to support those threats, some defensive cards, and of course - mana!  This means that almost every card in your deck needs to be thought about to some degree, and in fact, some professional players/designers spend hours and hours doing this, agonizing over the addition or subtraction of just one single card!  Now, in a friendly environment, this level of intensity is not to be expected (or desired), but your design does need to be thought out and analyzed to some degree.

In addition, you need to decide if your deck is going to be based around a really neat combination (like Circle of Protection: Red, Earthquakes, and Infernos), or if it is going to have a theme (like Attack of the small white creatures), or if it is simply to be composed of cards that will all work together to defeat your opponent.  This will make some differences in how your deck is constructed.

  1. Combination decks:
  2. Theme decks:
  3. General decks:

The Beginning

Once you have decided on a deck type to play, you need to build it.  Some of the important things to remember are: For the rest of this diatribe, I am going to assume that you are going to build a general type 1.5 deck, one that is just composed of some creatures and spells that you like, instead of a combination deck.  Much of this discussion will apply to theme decks, though.  For more strategy information, you can check out www.thedojo.com, which has some excellent strategy material for new players and experienced ones alike.

Let's take a look at deck design by building a green and red deck.  It won't have a theme, but we will think some about the card choices for this deck.

  1. How will we kill our opponent? - this is the first question we need to ask ourselves.  After all, this is the point fo the game, right? :)
  2. How will we prevent them from killing us? - this question may or may not need to be asked.  Some decks are designed to be totally offensive, focusing only on damaging their opponent and ignoring their actions.  Our deck is not going to be that focused on attack, as those kinds of decks can be basically a coin flip - did I get the right draw?  Yes - I win!  No - I lose!  Not much fun, and not much chance to learn the game in more detail.  In any case, there are 3 ways we can prevent them from whomping us: We are going to focus on the 2nd and 3rd choices above.  The 3rd choice doesn't need to be discussed much, we'll just make sure to put the right kinds of damaging cards in our deck.  The second needs a little more thought, though.
In Magic, there are four kinds of permanents (cards that are played from one's hand onto the table/computer screen): We are going to want cards that can help us deal with some, and possibly all of these threats.  Both Red and Green have cards to deal with Lands: Stone Rain, Ice Storm, Fissure, and Desert Twister.  The latter two can be used for Creature control in addition to: Lightning Bolt, Disintegrate, Fireball, Drop of Honey, Hurricane, Winter Blast (for flyers), Earthquake, Immolation, and Pyrotechnics (whew - what a long list).  They both have cards to deal with Artifacts, too: Shatter, Detonate, Shatterstorm, and Crumble.  Red has no way to deal with enchantments, but Green has Tranquility - but if we use it, we will need to be careful that we don't use many enchantments ourselves.  In addition, there may be some artifacts that can help us out - Forcefield and Nevinyrral's Disk for creatures, and Rod of Ruin and Triskelion for direct damage.

Now that we have an idea of what support cards are available to us, let's start by thinking about what we want in our deck as offense:

This gives us about 8 sets of 4 cards each, or 32 cards that can be used to create our offense.  About 16 of them are creatures - we may want more after we play the deck a few times, but only testing will show that.  Together with the 23 land we will use, that leaves us 5 card slots for permanent control.  Let's see if we can figure out where our deck is weak...

First, this deck has no flyers.  This can be very dangerous, as many decks do use flyers.  Our direct damage should help us control flyers, but we may want some hurricanes in there as well, just in case.  Let's try 3 Hurricanes, leaving us 2 card slots.

Side note: The reasons you may put from 1 to 4 of a card in your deck are:

Our deck may prove to be susceptible to some types of artifact damage, too.  We probably don't want to use Crumble, as it will give our opponent life, and that goes against our deck idea, so perhaps a Detonate (which can damage our opponent as well), and a Shatter.  We need some enchantment removal, too, (and as noted above, our deck has no enchantments in it) so lets throw in two Tranquility.  This leaves us with 0 open card slots.  Since we only have 16 creatures, let's try adding the two artifacts above - Forcefield (protecting us from big creatures) and Nevinyrral's Disk (in case they build up a big creature advantage on us - like a RESET button).  If you are counting, we've gone over 60 cards - let's not worry about that right now :)

So, our deck now looks like this (note: casting costs are noted like this - 2RR means two colorless mana and 2 red mana, XG means 1 green mana plus X colorless mana):

That gives a total of 64 cards.  We'd like to cut it down, so: since there are only 16 creatures, let's cut down on the Giant Growths - and have them be more of a surprise card - we'll only use 2.  Also, while direct damage is one of our methods for winning, let's cut down just a touch, as that's not all we want to draw - we'll only use 3 Disintegrate.  That brings us down to 61 cards, and that's low enough for a first try.

Finally, we need to look at our land.  As we are playing red and green, the red/green dual land - Taiga is essential in our deck - we'll use 4.  We have 17 red spells, 19 green spells, and 2 colorless spells.  Also, notice that only one spell - Whirling Dervish uses more than one colored mana in it's casting cost.  This can be crucial in a multi-colored deck.  Spells are of no use if you can't cast them.

So, we need a little more green mana than red mana.  We have 19 land slots left, so let's use 10 Forest and 9 Mountain.  And our final deck looks like this:

For a total of 61 cards.  Now, the only thing left is to go out and try it!  Play about 5 games with it - versus real opponents, not the computer AI.  See what weaknesses the deck has, and then go back to the deck builder and try to fix those weaknesses.  If you are getting beat by flyers, add another hurricane, or a winter blast or two.  If it is enchantments that are crushing the deck, add in another Tranquility.  And most of all, have fun, and be creative!

The best of luck to you, and if you have any questions, feel free to email me.  I hope this has been of some value to all of you new players.

- Hurkle

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