Introduction
Aspiring Magic players seem to want one main thing; to win tournaments. It is easy to understand why; the prizes, the prestiege, the personal achievement. But there are two names that go on a deck registration form and it has long been the second space where I have been most proud to put my name. The little section entitled 'Deck Designer'.
The deck designer is the person who put together the deck. I'll take a quick aside here to make the small, but important, point that if you take the latest deck piloted by a pro to victory and change five cards before playing it at FNM, that doesn't make you the deck designer. No, the deck designer started out with sixty (or seventy five) empty sleeves and worked from there.
I intend to write 'Creating Decks' as a series of articles where I discuss, comment and (dare I say it) teach techniques on good deck design; I hope they are informative and fun, but enough preamble, let's dive in.
Cards Cards Cards
The most important tool in any deck designer's arsenal, are the cards. Without cards, there would be no deck. The question most people struggle with is 'what cards?' - there are many thousands of Magic cards out there and we all know what happens when you just shuffle them up and hope. Designing a deck begins with limiting the cards. Wizards do some of this for you by defining the format and, as the easiest and most played constructed format, we'll begin our limiting with Standard.
As I write this, Standard decks may have cards from any of the following sets: Ravnica, Guildpact, Dissension, Coldsnap, Time Spiral and 9th Edition. In two weeks, we can use Planar Chaos too. It's one of the largest standard card pools ever (thanks to Coldsnap and the timeshifted cards) and will get even bigger with Future Sight. This is both good and bad; good, because there is a great deal of variety; bad, because we wanted to be limited in our card choices. Still, just by choosing Standard, we've gone from thousands of cards to choose from to merely... well... a couple of thousand!
Before I go further, I should say a quick word about budget. This is no 'building on a budget' series. I assume everyone has access to every card, or at least, the wherewithall to get them. While I'm not about to go mad and put a set of jewellery into a deck, neither to I expect to hear the woes of players who don't have a playset of Ravnica duallands. When you are testing your deck, a plains with 'Godless Shrine' written on it IS a dualland, and if the deck shows promise, I believe wholeheartedly that you should invest in the real thing. Good - got that off my chest. Where were we?
Ah yes, limited cards. The next place to limit is within colour, or at least, concept. When I am starting a deck, I always have some idea of a card, or concept I want to go with. For example, I was enthused by Angel of Despair and Hypnotic Specter sometime last year, and wanted to play blue when Time Spiral came out. This second stage of limited helps us even further - by giving direction and focus. Nothing fails a deck more than lacking direction.
A Deck
For this article, I'm going to go through the processes which ended up with my Blue/White control deck I like to call Trinity. I'm proud enough of the deck to describe it here, as it won me the Oxfordshire Champs and fairly regularly upsets players at FNM.
To begin with, we have to go back to last year's nationals. I'd been playing a Black/White deck which I loved a lot, and though I could have tweaked it to get a second year of use out of it, I was eager to try something new. It had been a while since I'd played with counterspells and I wanted to go back to it. Coldsnap had just been released and with it the Adarkar Valkyrie; a card I was eager to use as a finisher due to its similarity (and power upgrade) to Serra Angel; another old favourite.
So my initial deck idea, pre Time Spiral, looked something like this:
4 x Adarkar Valkyrie
4 x Counterspell A
4 x Counterspell B
4 x Counterspell C
4 x Card Draw A
4 x Card Draw B
4 x Get me out of trouble A
4 x Get me out of trouble B
4 x Other finisher
24 x Land
As you can see, this is the vaguest of vague ideas. I knew I wanted to counter stuff. I knew I wanted to kill with the Valkyrie and I knew I wanted to draw cards and have some way of getting out of trouble. In essence, this is the basics of many Blue/White decks. I was choosing to look at 12 counterspells in the deck, maybe even 16 if I could push it. Ravnica block had a number of good counters, none of which I had any real experience of, and 9th edition had Mana Leak and Rewind which I had plenty of experience with. I knew I could trust Mana Leak, but wasn't sure how Rewind would fit in the format...
Testing
There is no way that it is possible to make a deck which works first time around, right out of the bag. One of the things it is very possible to do is to become emotionally attached to cards and refuse to take them out of the deck no matter how many times they fail you. Let me say so now - having this attachment is often a bad thing. That all said, it was my emotional attachment to the Valkyrie that kept this deck on target. Once or twice it failed me in testing and rather than saying 'the angel has to go', I'd move cards around it to help it out.
Early testing before Time Spiral came out showed a number of things:
* Hatching Plans and Perilous Research was too cute and inefficient to be good. I tried this for a while. When you netted five cards for two mana at instant speed, it was phenomenal. When you didn't though, and had to tap out for Hatching Plans and beg your deck to pass the Perilous Research... I even toyed with adding Tempest of Light into the main deck just to help out the Hatching Plans. It didn't work and when plans don't work, you have to change them.
* Grand Arbiter Augustin IV was good. I put Windreaver and Augustin as my other creatures in the deck, and though the Windreaver wasn't as great as it could have been, Augustin was every bit the superhero. As a Legend, I only put three of him in, never wanting to draw into a second.
* Faith's Fetters is my favourite white card in Standard. I'd used and abused this card in my B/W deck and it was as good here. It counted as 'Get me out of trouble A'.
* Psionic Blast wasn't so great. I had this in 'Get me out of trouble B', as it also doubled as a kill condition, but it was never right.
* Snow land were imperative. Early on I cut the Hallowed Fountains for Boreal Shelf so that I could use both Mouth of Ronom and Scrying Sheets in this deck. Again, the Valkyrie helped seal that deal.
Making Changes
When Time Spiral was released, it was like a true Godsend. With Cancel, Ancestral Vision, Draining Whelk and Lotus Bloom all immediate contenders for the deck, and Magus of the Disk and Teferi hovering around too it was almost too good to be true, but what makes the cut and why? When deck building, you have to remember that this is YOUR deck and though other people have some good ideas, and may use or dismiss cards for multiple reasons, it doesn't mean you can't use them.
In: Draining Whelk
Why: I wanted to push to twenty counters at one point. I felt that the deck was doing so well in stopping people, already using Rune Snag, Mana Leak, Rewind and Remand. Draining Whelk was a counter that took up a 'finisher' slot and I loved it. I tested it very early on and never once did it hit the table and not cause a total look of despair from my opponent. Watching your opponent's face fall is a good sign that you picked the right card.
In: Lotus Bloom
Why: Draining Whelk and Valkyrie both needed some way to get out faster. The idea that I might drop a finisher on turn four and still have mana open was awesome to me. It was like building a control deck that was actually fast. Lotus Bloom may have the whole 'wait for it' disadvantage in the late game, but I was prepared to live with that for the short term gamble. To be honest, I don't think Draining Whelk would have been such a major advantage without its partner in crime.
In: Cancel
Why: This is just counterspell. Yes, it's a mana more, but with Augustin on the table, it is actually counterspell! It had to go in and replaced Rewind fairly swiftly.
In: Ancestral Vision
Why: Card draw was really weak in my first version of the deck with the Hatching Plans/Perilous Research combo. My main problem with that combo was that you had to tap out turn two for the Hatching Plans, so though it looked like instant speed draw, it never really was. I wanted instant speed draw because I didn't want to tie my mana up. It was this need the also rejected the oft-played Compulsive Research. I just never wanted to tap out turn three. I was countering on turn three, not allowing them a free spell. Ancestral Vision was the way to simulate good instant speed draw.
In: Magus of the Disk
Why: I wanted to not play Wrath of God. Quite honestly, I felt I relied on it too much and it needed a rest. Wrath never made it to the deck at this stage, but the Magus did, in the 'get me out of trouble B' slot.
Not In: Teferi
Why: He found his way into the sideboard. Teferi quite simply fought Augustin for the slot and lost. While against blue decks, the master of time is simply incredible, in many matchups he's just a 3/4 and Augustin is never useless. It was a testing issue and one which fell on the side of a blind old man.
Let me say now, some of these decisions were considered crazy by those around me. I didn't put in Akroma because I didn't want to mix old card face with new (NEVER use this as an excuse not to play a card, I was lucky that it worked out) and I didn't have the Wrath either. Lotus Bloom was thought of as a bombo card, except for being in storm decks, and no one liked Augustin either (despite hating being on the receiving end of him). The card most disliked at this point though was the Draining Whelk. I lost count of the number of times I had to defend the card to people watching over my shoulder. I was determined though, maybe a little too determined. I knew I was onto good things with all of these cards and I was going to prove myself.
Tournaments
You can test and tweak with your friends until the world ends, but nothing tests a deck like a real enviroment. My first real environment was the Store Challenge Final. I knew I was going to be facing a lot of Zoo, but I had no idea what the rest of the field was like and, for my part, I felt confident against Zoo (mainly due to Faith's Fetters, which did me so well in the B/W deck). I was packing CoP: Red in the sideboard too, what could go wrong?
The answer? Everything. The first real tournament of the season can be a real blow to your ego as a deck designer. You've beaten all your friends but you come to a real game and scrub out at 0-4. Why? Why? Why?
My answer was simple. I was too stubborn and needed to put the Wrath of Gods in. That and learn that Rune Snag counts opponent's graveyards too (I'd have won an all important match if I'd remembered that). I hadn't tested enough against real decks with real opponents and this was my punishment. On a design basis, though, what were my mistakes?
* Wrath of God. Yes, I've mentioned it a number of times, but there is a reason why blue/white control decks run Wrath. You need to have the option of resetting the creatures on turn four. Magus is turn five, and though useful, needed to move over to the sideboard.
* Bounce. Once something hit the table, I had no way outside of Faith's Fetters and Mouth of Ronom of stopping it. I needed to be able to put things back into their hands so I could counter them the next time around.
* A little too counter heavy. I needed to relax a little on the counters and be more able to win the game.
* Something uncounterable for the long game. Urza's Factory happened once on the other side of the board and I wanted to be able to do that too...
And so the deck was tweaked. That tournament taught me a great deal, the most important of which was to allow room for other people's suggestions to filter through. By all means, be stubborn and stand up for what you believe in (Draining Whelk vs. Akroma, for example), but listen to what people are saying.
The next tournament was county Champs, which I won, dropping only one match in the swiss. Every time I saw the Wrath I smiled...
For the record, the deck looked (and looks) like this:
Trinity
6 Snow-Covered Island
4 Snow-Covered Plains
4 Boreal Shelf
4 Azorius Chancery
2 Mouth of Ronom
2 Scrying Sheets
1 Urza's Factory
4 Draining Whelk
3 Adarkar Valkyrie
3 Grand Arbiter Augustin IV
4 Wrath of God
4 Faith's Fetters
4 Lotus Bloom
4 Cancel
4 Remand
4 Rune Snag
3 Ancestral Vision
Sideboard
4 Circle of Protection: Red
4 Repeal
3 Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir
3 Magus of the Disk
1 Urza's Factory
Conclusion
Building a deck, or at least, a successful deck, is not an easy process. It batters the ego and frustrates the soul, but it's all worthwhile in the end - just stick to your beliefs but be willing to bend. In this first article, I moved swiftly through deck construction from start to finish, but in the future I'll be concentrating longer on each section and, I hope, helping those of you who struggle with constructing a winning deck to make a real masterpiece.
As for Trinity moving into Planar Chaos, I'm looking very carefully at Pophyry Nodes and Magus of the Tabernacle...
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
