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Are we good? Alrighty then lets get started. If you're "That Guy" or want to be "That Guy," you know that this inevitably happens:
You:
Everyone Else:
So what do you want your response to be? This:
Research, Research, Research
I'm going to start right off the bat by saying that creating the perfect deck is going to take a LOT of work. Looking at countless lists and researching endless card interactions. And of course this takes time. The most profitable area of research is usually going to be looking up decks with the same or similar archetype. The best places to find lists is deckbuilding sites and primers. Good deckbuilding sites include tappedout.net (A personal favorite), mtgvault.com and deckstats.net and a popular forum (with primers) is mtgsalvation.com.
Playing Your Pet
And if research hasn't taken enough time already, there's testing to be done. This includes both alone and against others. The initial first step in testing is to test the flow of your deck. In essence, making sure that your deck doesn't defeat itself, because if it does then it certainly can't defeat other players. This means making sure you have things like: the right colors at the right times, the right amount of mana, etc. From my experience, aggro and combo decks are the easiest to test as they require the least amount of interaction with the opponent. Control on the other hand is all about interactions and knowing whether or not you'll have the right responses for the right situations is difficult to replicate alone.That said there are several different ways to play test your deck alone (Keep in mind these were created with 60 card decks in mind):
Goldfish: Take your imaginary opponent from full life to 0 as quickly as possible with no interaction on their part. This method works best testing aggro and combo decks and terribly with control ones.
Turtle: Opponent starts off with an Ivory Tower and 6 Circles of Protection. When you draw a land, the turtle gets a land in play. The turtle doesn't play card from its hand but starts with a hand of 7 cards and draws one per turn.
Snake: Opponent starts with two Black Vise cards in play. This is meant to ensure that you empty your hand fast enough. This is especially punishing against control decks who want to maintain a full hand at all times.
Parakeets: Opponent starts off with a Dredge Skeleton and a Phantom Monster. The Phantom Monster attacks when not futile to do so. The Dredge Skeleton attacks when you have no creatures or it can't block. It blocks your biggest threat and regenerates.
Rabbits: Opponent gets additional Dredge Skeleton once per turn and attacks with all but enough to block your creatures. Other variants use 0/1 regenerating flyers, 1/1 flyers, or 1/1 Thallids. This test is meant to test vs swarm/token decks. Other variants include:
- Rats: Opponent gets a Plague Rat each turn, attacks with half rounded down, blocks most effectively, when you attack with flying creatures half the untapped rats, rounded up gain flying until end of turn. This is meant to be a particularly hard test.
- Angel: Opponent does nothing in the first 4 turns and then gets a free 4/4 Serra Angel with flying and vigilance every turn. Attacks when able to deal damage or kill a creature and blocks when possible. Meant to replicate decks that take a little while to get off the ground.
- Dog: Opponent's deck consists of basic lands (in equal numbers). Each is mean to simulate an action.
It's about the Consistency
Consistency is the key to any good deck. Now how you go about achieving that consistency is up to you and your play-style. Whether it be through card draw, filtering, tutors or simply having functional reprints of cards in your deck, regular access to your cards is essential to success. While card draw, filtering, and tutors is less important to aggro/mid-range consistency is not less so.
It's about Efficiency
Often when making an (EDH) deck, I start out with a huge mishmash of cards, removal, ramp, two-three piece combos etc. And as usually, I'm over by a fair margin of cards. Where do I start cutting cards? Off the top of course. Those high mana cost cards are fun and feel great when you resolve them but often times they're a dead card in hand as you find your opening hand completely uncastable. Now, this is not to say that decks can't be built around resolving high cost cards. Animar, Soul of Elements decks can have an average CMC (converted mana cost) as high as 4 or 5. It's merely a consideration that should be taken when choosing cards to go into a deck.We're playing Rock-Paper-Scissors
As many of you are aware there is a sort of "Rock Paper Scissors" in Magic between aggro, control and combo. What does this mean? In a multiplayer game, it means that sometimes you have to straddle two horses. For instance being a control deck means you could add in a combo kill. This way, as a control deck you can combo kill the aggro player and control the combo player.Understand Your Meta
Whether it be through a sideboard (for 60) or just your general build, a very important part of building your deck is tuning it to the particular meta. For an EDH control meta you might want to add a Defense Grid or in an aggro meta perhaps a Crawlspace or Silent Arbiter would be appropriate. If your meta includes burn start running life gain hosers in your sideboard. A properly sideboard can mean the difference between winning and losing a match.This is why it is also important to understand your match ups. Every deck has a weakness whether it be your commander getting denied or that Tron player who comes on Modern nights. Identifying your weaknesses can help you find ways to shore up those matches and identify threats to your path to victory.
Keep in mind that you don't go too far in your meta tweeking though. It can be easy to get tunnel vision and focus heavily on beating your meta that you start including cards that you could only get away with in that meta. This leads to a narrow deck that wins spectacularly in a highly specific meta but falls flat against everything else. This is why it is often good to diversify your metas so as to not get tunnel vision.
Understand when you're the "aggro" and when you're the "control"
In this section I'm going to use "aggro" and "control" in the loosest possible terms. When I say "aggro" here I mean of two players who theoretically kills faster (Whether that be through a combo, damage or other win cons). In some instances it's very clear. Someone is playing blue + counters and someone else isn't. Sometimes it's not, it might be a mirror match and it's that much harder to figure out who's deck is faster. Other times it's aggro vs combo or aggro vs aggro in which case it's just a race.Now you're probably thinking: Why does it matter who's the aggro and who's the control? To put it simply, because it dictates the decisions you make in the game and because correctly determining who's who can mean the difference between winning and losing.
As an analogy to incorrectly determining who's who, imagine a burn player (or any other heavy aggro strategy) playing conservatively, trading cards one for one, eliminating his or her opponent's creatures and holding his creatures back to block favorably. This seems wrong on just about every level doesn't it? Why is this? That's because burn is THE aggro. It's always the "aggro" in pretty much every match up. As such players play this way, trading card advantage for damage, (almost) always presenting the faster clock. Doing it any other way is a good way to lose you games. This brings us to why it's important to figure out who's the "aggro" and who's the "control" in your game. Because if you turn out to be the "aggro" and you play conservatively trading card for card, preserving your life total, drawing out the game, then you're playing into your opponent's hands.
For example, about midway through the development of my Ghave Deck I started adding in control pieces (primarily removal) and trimmed some of the control pieces (primarily high CMC ones). With that came my attempts at playing the "control" version of my Ghave deck, at times even casting control cards instead of combo pieces. This resulted in a dip in performance that I didn't understand. It was only until later I realized my mistake in always trying to control and then combo instead of just comboing off when I should.
Now, this is not to say that even if you are the "aggro" that you automatically need to go full-throttle. For instance I was playing against Niv-Mizzet with a Drana deck (playing mono-black control/voltron). Now granted I was the aggro and I needed to play the threats but I didn't rush. I ground out the game, gaining card advantage and mana until I could play more threats than could be countered.
For further reading, see Who's The Beatdown?, the article that inspired this section.
