Thursday, December 02, 2004
Deck Building: Structure
Why build a deck using a strict structure? It is much easier to add cards to a new deck than to remove them from an old deck. Having a structure and a method for building decks of that structure lets you build up a deck to 60 cards, rather than painstakingly hone it down.
Here is the most basic of deck structures.
20 creatures 20 spells 20 land
This is the foundation on which my deck construction strategy is built. We'll come back to it later. No real deck is actually broken down this precisely, I've not built one with more than 8-16 creatures for some time, but it gives us a way to break the 60 cards down into managable groups.
Let's walk throuh my deck building process. I'll just make your standard red/green creature deck. Start with the land at the bottom:
8 Mountain 8 Forest 4 Taiga
Then add the restricted cards on top of that, replacing a couple basic land with the appropriate colored Moxes:
1 Berserk 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire 1 Mox Ruby 1 Mox Emerald 7 Mountain 7 Forest 4 Taiga
Now we start from the top of the deck, adding the core cards that define the deck. These are blocks of 4 each (at least for now). If your starting hand had one of each of these cards you'd be happy.
4 Kird Ape 4 Barbary Apes 4 Elvish Archers 4 Granite Gargoyle 4 Birds of Paradise 4 Giant Growth 4 Lightning Bolt ... 1 Berserk 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire 1 Mox Ruby 1 Mox Emerald 7 Mountain 7 Forest 4 Taiga
Now let's brainstorm some cards that might go in the middle, but not decide how many of each to include yet:
4 Kird Ape 4 Barbary Apes 4 Elvish Archers 4 Granite Gargoyle 4 Birds of Paradise 4 Giant Growth 4 Lightning Bolt Fireball Disintegrate Shivan Dragon Blood Lust Sylvan Library 1 Berserk 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire 1 Mox Ruby 1 Mox Emerald 7 Mountain 7 Forest 4 Taiga
Now we need to go in and break this up into 3 blocks of 20. I prefer to push these cards around in notepad, so I divide the deck into sections using rows of dashs. I start at the top and section off the top 5 blocks of 4. Then do the same from the bottom, sectioning off 20 cards:
4 Kird Ape 4 Barbary Apes 4 Elvish Archers 4 Granite Gargoyle 4 Birds of Paradise -------- 4 Giant Growth 4 Lightning Bolt Fireball Disintegrate Shivan Dragon Blood Lust Sylvan Library 1 Berserk 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire -------- 1 Mox Ruby 1 Mox Emerald 7 Mountain 7 Forest 4 Taiga
Now, presumming for a minute that the top and bottom blocks are complete, let's split the middle section into 5 blocks of 4 cards each, separating them with blank lines. This way we can see how much room we have for those cards in the very middle:
4 Giant Growth 4 Lightning Bolt Fireball Disintegrate Shivan Dragon Blood Lust Sylvan Library 1 Berserk 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire
Now this is the hard part. We're looking at 4 blocks of 4 cards, leaving us room for only 4 more cards in the deck. Thinking about the role each of these middle cards is going to play (thinking back to Deck Building: How Many?), let's pick a few that we'd like to keep, and decide how many we want of each:
3 Fireball 2 Shivan Dragon 1 Sylvan Library
Now is when we give a good hard look at the top and bottom 20 and see if there's anything we can take out because we're trying to fit 6 cards where there's only space for 4. I think with all the Moxes and the low cost of most of our cards that 4 Bird of Paradise is a little overkill, I'll take out 1. And with Giant Growths but no Blood Lusts, Berserk isn't as killer a card so we'll take it out too. Now we have a finished deck. I haven't played it yet, which is the only way to really hone a deck, but it shoud be pretty solid:
4 Kird Ape 4 Barbary Apes 4 Elvish Archers 4 Granite Gargoyle 4 Giant Growth 4 Lightning Bolt 3 Birds of Paradise 3 Fireball 2 Shivan Dragon 1 Sylvan Library 1 Fork 1 Wheel of Fortune 1 Sol Ring 1 Black Lotus 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Jet 1 Mox Sapphire 1 Mox Ruby 1 Mox Emerald 7 Mountain 7 Forest 4 Taiga
You may have noticed that I moved the Birds down. I like to keep my blocks of 4 together at the top, and a Bird is more like a spell than a creature anyway.
The next article will discuss further honing of this deck after playtesting. It needs some more "cleverness," maybe a third color (blue for Time Walk/Twister, Ancestral Recall and Braingeyser would help keep the momentum going), or maybe a lock down card like Mana Barbs. We'll see.
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