With a fresh Standard format and State Championships just around the corner this seems like the perfect time to be writing about constructed. This is my favourite time of the Magic year, when old decks are thrown out the window and new ideas abound. So you're ready and raring to get your teeth into another card analysis article and extract the tender morsels of truth buried within the acres of unsubstantiated opinion? Well, you've come to the wrong place. I won't be discussing any of my ideas for the new cards. No tips on how best to use them to beat Ravager, or what modifications should be made to Tooth and Nail to combat the inclusion of Cranial Extraction in the environment. In fact, there won't be anything at all pertaining directly to Champions of Kamigawa. I want to give you all an idea of how I go about building a constructed deck from scratch and what I try to think about while I'm doing it.
I'm going to start with a few general pointers though, just to help out those of you who may not have tried to build competitive decks before. The most important thing is not to be too slow. Constructed decks are typically designed to be doing something every turn starting with turn 1 or 2. Many players new to competitive constructed are caught by surprise by opponents who cast 1- and 2-mana creatures. I'm telling you ahead of time: if your plan is to cast a dragon every turn from turn 6 onwards you won't be winning too many matches. Dragons are cool and big and they fly but most constructed decks will have cheap answers to them, be doing much more powerful things on turn 6, or will have already killed you. Aim to build a deck that doesn't waste its early turns playing land and saying “go”. Secondly, the type of cards that are useful in competitive Magic are slightly different. You'll find that mana cost is a much more restrictive element, and some cards that may have powerful effects are simply too expensive to be playable. It's also important to make sure that most of the cards in your deck (preferably all of them) are useful most of the time. This is something I touched on in my first article, and it'll resurface often: if you have one or more useless cards and your opponent's are all “working” for them you are at a disadvantage. Similarly if you have several expensive cards in your hand you may not have time to cast them before you die to a horde of small angry men.
The first thing to do when building a new deck is to find a core idea or theme. It could be a single card or two that seem to be potentially powerful with the right support, decks such as Tooth and Nail are of this type. It could be a combination of two or more cards that cause a potentially game-winning interaction, and most combo decks fit this category. It could be a general feeling about the sort of things the deck wants to do and a few ideas about cards that might support that, or a particular combination of colours that seem to have a lot of like-minded cards. Most control decks fit one of these types. Probably most obvious, it could be based around a block mechanic or themes such as cycling, affinity or creature tribes. It can be just about anything you like, the main thing is to know what you're setting out to do. The deck may end up evolving into something completely different; that's fine. For now though we want to try not to stray too far from the original idea.
Once you've decided on the basic theme, collect together as many cards that you can think of that support the theme. Get out all the cycling cards you can find for that cycling deck. Get out every burn spell available in the format for a burn deck. Get out all the mana acceleration and searching available to support your two-card combo. Get out all the elves for your elf deck. I know, this is going to make a mess. If you're worried about that use Apprentice or some other piece of software to do it; I find that I like to see the real cards and be able to move them around with my hands. It's good to use software to help you search for cards fitting your theme though, and it's easy to miss cards that might turn out to be crucial later. If you don't own all the cards (and most people are in this situation when a new set has just come out) it's a bit harder. I like using a combination of Apprentice, printed-out full-text spoilers and partially complete sets of commons and uncommons.
Got that far? Good. Now, look at all the cards. Yes, that's all for now, just look. Familiarise yourself with what you've got to work with. This is important, I'm not saying it because I like the sound of it. Really, spend at least a few minutes (preferably more) studying all the cards you got out and thinking about how they might work together. Then decide if you hate the idea. If you do then put them all back again. If not, you're over the first hurdle: your idea wasn't completely and utterly terrible. Don't laugh, more than half of the deck ideas I have don't make it past this phase. You'd be surprised how many ideas are obviously just bad once you've laid all the cards out and thought about it for a while.
So you think your idea might work, do you? OK, the thing to do now is to put together a deck and start testing a bit. At this stage you're not looking to build a competitive deck, just trying to see if the idea works or not. So don't put anything in that isn't 100% necessary to the deck, don't think about “what if” this or “how can I beat” that. The aim is to build a stripped-down version of the deck in order to be able to play, and to test the core ideas. Try to fill it as much as possible with “4-ofs”, even of things the deck obviously doesn't need 4 copies of. This will make it easier to test how all the cards work together because you'll be drawing each card more often. Now if one of your playtesting buddies is nearby with a deck grab him or her and play a few games. If you don't have someone to play with don't goldfish, grab another deck and play both of them open-handed. Trust me, this actually works fine. Don't tally how many you win, but try to keep track of what worked and what didn't. Get a feel for how the cards play together. Decide which cards are working well, which cards are good but don't seem to fit in properly, and which cards are just plain bad. Try to take notice of situations that come up, and what might have worked better in those situations. Paper and pen come in handy here, don't try to remember everything you discover.
Once you've played a few games consider changing some cards. This is where those precious minutes of looking and thinking really starts to help you out. You'll already have an idea of what some of the other options are, and you should have some ideas about which ones to try now. A particular card doesn't quite fit? Is there a simple alternative available, or would the addition of a totally different card improve matters? Make some changes, play a few more games. Keep doing this. If it starts looking like the idea was bad after all scrap it and start again, but if the deck seems to be taking shape and is working well then continue...
Before moving on I'll go through an example to make what I'm saying a bit clearer. Say you like the interaction of indestructible artifacts, March of the Machines and Obliterate in pre-Champions Standard. This forms the core idea or theme of the deck, and we start looking for cards that might help us out. What else do we want in this sort of deck? Well, obviously we want some indestructible artifacts. Obliterate costs 8 mana and we want to be alive when we cast it, so we probably want mana acceleration of some sort. We're unlikely to want any creatures since we're going to try and win with artifacts and March, so Wrath of God or other similar effects might be good, although that means adding another colour. Starstorm maybe. We need to find both Obliterate and March reasonably quickly so some card drawing is probably a good idea too. Scry cards might work well since they'll help in other ways too (like countering spells or killing creatures). Following these thoughts you might come up with a stripped-down decklist that looks something like this:
This is obviously a very rough list, but that's the whole point. It's good enough to tell you whether the idea of Obliterate, March and indestructibles actually works or not. You'll soon figure out that 4 Obliterates is too many and that Seething Song is maybe not the best idea, but these things can only be discovered by playing. Thinking and theorising alone will only take you so far, and it's hard to theorise without actually trying things out a bit too. After playing ten games with the above deck you might be able to tell me that the deck needs more card-drawing and you've always got plenty of spare mana so Thirst for Knowledge is just what the deck needs. Or maybe you can tell me that Thirst is not going to work, because you know that you never had a spare 3 mana that you wanted to spend just drawing cards. With a bit of experience with the deck you'll be able to make judgments like this more accurately. However if in doubt, try it out!
The rest of the testing and tuning process involves the same sort of activity: playing a number of games, changing a few cards, then playing some more. As you proceed the focus changes though. Initially you're trying to figure out whether an idea has potential or not, and which cards are the best for supporting that idea. Later on you're trying to figure out exactly how many of particular cards are necessary, trying to decide between variations on the theme, and figuring out how to beat particular strategies your opponents might be using. Getting a good mana base sorted out is important. You should also be thinking about a sideboard. Yes, already. I know a lot of people like to throw together 15 cards at 1am the night before the tournament, but this should be avoided if possible. The sideboard is an integral part of the deck, not an afterthought. Significantly more than half the games you play with a constructed deck will be post-sideboard.
The way I try to approach sideboard design is not to “build” a sideboard, but rather to test several different versions of my deck against a range of other pre- and post-sideboard decks. Take note of which versions are better against which decks and why. Some of those differences can usually be incorporated into the sideboard. The version of your Goblin deck with 4x Electrostatic Bolt does better against affinity decks, and the one with 4x Sulfuric Vortex seems to beat white-based control decks more often? Well, this change can certainly be done with sideboarding. Sometimes the best cards for a sideboard are “hate” cards (like Circles of Protection or Choke, which are virtually useless against most decks but highly effective against a particular deck), but more often there are too many decks in the format to “hate” all of them.
The question about which one of two cards (if either) to maindeck is one that deserves some thought. Now we're entering the realm of metagaming, the final stage of testing. If the best decks in the environment are already well established (such as the type 2 environment at this year's National Championships) it is just a matter or deciding which decks are going to be most numerous, and most often this just comes down to a guess. It can also be influenced by how much the card choice affects other matchups too. In the example above, it is probably not right to maindeck Sulfuric Vortex unless you expect a very control-heavy environment, since Electrostatic Bolt is not just better against Ravager but against any deck which has small creatures (such as other Goblin decks or various rogue creature decks). By improving your matchup against control decks you're making most of your other matchups worse, so there had better be a good reason for doing that.
In a new format such as for the upcoming State Championships only a few decks are known, most of which are likely to be modified block-constructed decks. Since decks made from cards from the new set haven't yet had a chance to prove themselves it doesn't make as much sense to pack targeted hate. Instead what I try to do it to think about which cards from the new set are powerful, and which mechanics or themes are likely to make an impact on constructed play. Tune your deck with these in mind, and try to build the deck and sideboard so that it has answers to a variety of strategies your opponents might use. In unknown metagames I have found that having more widely useful cards in the sideboard tends to work better. Cards that work better against counterspells, cards that improve your deck against decks with lots of small cheap creatures, some amount of enchantment and artifact removal; these are all things I like to have in my sideboard in unknown metagames, regardless of the sets involved. This way you're likely to have at least something to improve any matchup you encounter, even again completely unexpected decks.
To close, I'd like to make a few final points. I can't stress enough the importance of playing as much as possible. If you can get a small group together to test your ideas this will help immeasurably on the tournament day. Try to use version control for your decks: keep a record of changes you make and your reasons for making them. This is much easier than trying to remember exactly why there are only 3 copies of a certain card in the current version of the deck, or what that particular card in the sideboard is for. Also try to keep a record of how the deck is going during testing. This doesn't necessarily mean recording match results, although by all means keep track if you want to. Better is to keep track of why the deck is winning the games it's winning, and why it loses when it loses. Then try to make changes that cause the winning situations to come up more often and the losing ones to come up less. It sounds simple, but you can't do it if you don't keep track. Above all, try not to become emotionally attached to your creations: if it looks like another deck will give you a better shot don't be afraid to throw your deck in the bin, that's where most of mine end up.
'Til next time, may you break many $1 rares.
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