How To Build Your First Modern Deck In Magic: The Gathering

Some players are negative about Sealed and claim that it requires less skill than Drafting. Regardless of whether or not that is true, Sealed most definitely requires players to have substantial knowledge about how different cards can work together and Deck Building skills. Sealed events ask you to analyze a pool of 84 cards and find the best 23 or so to make a 40 card deck.

Many of these cards have to do with voting mechanics, letting you and your opponents vote on various outcomes, with them almost always being in your favor. Brian played Magic intermittently between 2003 and 2017 when he fully embraced his love for Commander. Finding ways to maximize the value of each piece of cardboard in the deck is one of his favorite things to explore, especially if it involves putting lands in the graveyard! Outside of Magic, Brian works as a consultant in the marine industry, turning his passion for boats and ships into a career.

In poker, expert players nearly always have a close approximation of their odds of winning a hand. The best players nearly always take a line of play that gives them the highest chance of winning when considering these factors. This is something that we are all constantly getting better at as we play and reflect. Perhaps not everyone is capable of juggling all of the variables and doing those calculations at the highest level, but there are mtg decks some more basic tactics that everyone can implement. For example, this very recently released (at the time I am writing this) set contains an unprecedented 36 planeswalkers. Up until this point, Planeswalkers were powerful rare cards that would only be seen in limited once in a while.

There are also opportunities to gain a tempo advantage by playing Shock in addition to something else on the same turn, taking advantage of its one mana cost. Shock can also trade with more valuable creatures, such as Snapping Drake. Finally, being able to target a Player or Planeswalker in addition to creatures with Shock allows players to find the place and time where it is going to have the greatest amount of impact. Combo – True combo decks are almost never seen in limited, because they rely on very specific cards to create a game-winning interaction.

Play Good Cards

There are all sorts of ways to go with this strategy, and every few years it becomes a little more viable in various formats as Elves rotate in and out of Standard. The deck archetype got a boost with the release of Modern Horizons 3 with Eladamri, Korvecdal, who lets you manipulate the top card of your deck and put creatures into play directly from it or your hand. Any time a creature does come into play under your control, you get to either add three green mana, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control, or scry two and then draw a card. Since you have access to blue, you get all sorts of control elements between counterspells, extra turn effects, and bonus card draw. While you might lack some of the pure power that other color combinations might have, you get plenty of gas to back it up with. Elves are a fairly versatile creature type, lending themselves to a wide variety of play styles.

MTG Arena meta guide: Using popular cards to better your strategy

Control decks use a variety of colors to answer different kinds of threats thanks to their slow nature. They also require you to play lands nearly every turn, so they often play more than other decks, sometimes as many as 26 to 28. You only need a few cards that actually win the game and the rest of the deck should be made up of removal, draw, and counterspells. It is great to build decks around powerful interactions like this. Drafting enough enablers and payoffs allows you to reliably draw some of both and support a life gain archetype. Understanding which archetypes are possible/best within a given card set is imperative to your success.

If it’s your only wincon, you might go an entire game without seeing it. If you have some heavy-hitting creatures which require more mana to summon, you’re going to want to increase that number a bit. You don’t want to find yourself short on mana either, however, or you’ll be sitting there with no way to summon your amazing hand.

There are some cards that you don’t want to draw until very late in the game. Heavy control deck might play one Dream Trawler to close out the game. You also get access to quite a few pieces of removal thanks to white’s proclivity towards board wipes and targeted removal that green normally can’t compete with on its own. While mass removal is a bit counterintuitive to your game plan, it’s always nice to have one in the back pocket when the game isn’t going your way. “Hate” cards are another type of card that combat a specific archetype.

Using our Elf example from before, Fierce Empath is an effective way to find Craterhoof Behemoth. If you want more clarity, try looking at similar lists on Archidekt as well. No matter how you do it, you’ll want eight to ten cards that increase your deck’s card velocity. Trading one card for two or more (Sign in Blood) is a classic example of velocity, but like we said with ramp, it’s dependent on your deck and commander.

How to Build a Magic The Gathering Deck in 2021

You may realize that you added a bunch of cool cards to the deck, but you didn’t realize they were all 6+ mana to cast. The best way to do that is increasing the number of cards you can play in a game. Some would call this “card advantage” or just straight up “card draw” but I think the concept is a lot more nuanced than that. I like the term “velocity” because it evokes a feeling of speeding through your deck, and there are different ways to do that.

Of all the strategies, more limited decks fall into this this one as it is difficult to find enough tools in most card sets to create a dedicated aggro or control deck. Creating an example midrange deck is sort of meaningless because there is so much variance. Instead of attacking the opponent as quickly as possible, control decks play the game by preventing the opponent’s deck from winning. They use removal and counterspells to interact with the opponent’s strategy and eventually win using more powerful creatures or planeswalkers. For two-color decks, running a mix of basic lands is okay, but lands that tap for two colors will go a long way in improving consistency. Imagine you’re playing a blue-red deck and you have all red creatures in your hand, but you only draw blue lands!

The best way to achieve this is with a well-constructed mana curve. This is the jargon-y term for the way that mana costs are distributed among the cards in your deck. If you want to find out how to build an MTG deck, we’ll teach you how to devise a strategy, select cards, build a mana curve, and playtest your creation. There’s nothing worse than staring at your hand full of spells you can’t cast.