How many cards you need, what to include and how to put it all together from scratch. Whether your favorite format is Constructed or Limited, Commander or Cube Draft, keeping what your deck actually aims to do in mind—your mission statement—is paramount to success. You can supercharge your deck with Darksteel Colossus, a titanic creature capable of turning the tides of battle. Players who purchase any introductory product as part of a Magic Academy event will receive this borderless copy of Darksteel Colossus while supplies last. Connections is a daily word puzzle game that pits you against a collection of words, and you need to put the right ones into the right groups to win.
Three or more color decks
Karn, Legacy Reforged adds a colorless mana for each artifact you control, but can only be used on artifacts. Silver Myr and Ornithopter of Paradise are more traditional mana dorks, tapping themselves to add mana, and Urza, Lord High Artificer can tap artifacts for blue mana. The decklist consists of 35 creatures, two sorceries, eight instants, 13 artifacts, seven enchantments, and 34 lands. Nearly every creature in the deck is an artifact creature, or a creature that has an effect relating to artifacts. In November 2021, Alchemy, an online-only variant of Standard, was brought forth as a new initiative from MTG Arena.
Deckbuilding
That’ll once again skew your mana pool a bit from a construction standpoint. Keeping this in mind will help determine what cards you want to put into your deck so that every card matters. This is where you get to be a little more tricky given that I just named 4 card types. This is where you really get cards that don’t always do what creatures might. If you aim to control, you might have counterspells or things that return cards to your opponent’s hand. If you’re playing aggro, you might have direct damage to hurt your opponent or their creatures.
Be on the lookout for future articles that will include topics like choosing the right commander for you, becoming a better deckbuilder, and how to tweak your mana base. If you’re interested in building decks on a budget, you can always check out my other series, Brew For Your Buck, here on EDHREC. The primary win condition of the deck is winning through combat. You want to amass an army of artifact creatures, done through casting them or creating tokens.
It was inducted as a tournament format in the first high-level event in 2022. Magic Online’s leagues are a great way to play Standard against some exceptionally strong players without having to work your way up to the diamond or mythic ranks on Arena. You can win real rewards through these events by selling the prizes you get, so if that’s something that appeals to you then this is a great way to play the format. Leyline of Resonance is banned in Best-of-One Standard formats on Arena. Resonance can be played in traditional matches, Limited and paper.
On MTG Arena, best-of-one (or BO1 for short) formats are very popular, as opposed to the traditional best-of-three format that is commonplace in live events. The main difference is that because you don’t get to use your sideboard, you’re much weaker against your bad matchups. Faster and more aggressive decks are much more widely played as a result.
However, it’s a bit like swimming only in the shallow end of a huge and deep pool. There are a lot more for you to potentially face in the Modern card pool compared to Standard card pool. According to our own Arena Tutor, the Standard decks with the highest win rates on Arena are Boros Convoke. Gleeful Demolition is one commander combos of the best tradeoffs for an early artifact token. Knight-Errant of Eos is a big curve topper for that rarely needs five lands, and Nurturing Pixie is an example of how a trickery spell still helps apply pressure. Whether building a deck is a strength of yours or not, looking at winning decks is an important resource.
Now you’ve left the “building” phase and you’re into the “tuning” phase. Heroic Intervention’s mana value is two, but casting it on turn two probably doesn’t do anything. You can see we have a nice curve of spells, focused primarily on mana value two and three. Once you’re done with that, head back over to your commander’s page and take a look at the utility lands section, where you can see what other lands (color producing or not) work well with your commander.
Midrange Decks
Imagine you’re playing against your friend Stromboli, who has what looks like an aggressive red-white beatdown deck. Build unique decks and battle with the cards you find in each pack. Build the ultimate deck with cards from the latest sets, then duel your competition and reign victorious. Ready to play right out of the box, each deck contains 3 foil Legendary Creature cards. Koma, World-Eater is a very difficult commander to deal with, being un-counterable, an 8/12, AND having Trample and Ward 4, it is essentially invincible once it gets onto the battlefield. If any of its combat damage gets through, which is highly likely thanks to Trample, it creates four 3/3 creature tokens to bulk out the battlefield.
We see a couple of “lords” (creatures that enhance other creatures of a certain type) like Leaf-Crowned Visionary or more effects that can pump all your creatures, like Overrun. Urza, Lord High Artificer is one of the best blue creatures ever printed, and it’s especially strong in a Reality Chip deck. It turns all your artifacts into mana dorks that can tap for a blue mana.
Like MTG’s starter packs, they tend to correspond to one element – meaning all the other cards in the deck operate off of the same mana. Once you’ve decided on your hand, you both then continue drawing cards with each round of play. In fact, there is no right answer when it comes to building MTG decks!
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. I hope this has helped you get started or boosted your confidence in some way. I’m no pro, but I absolutely love building decks that are weird and having fun. I don’t believe there are wrong ways to build decks unless you’re not using the right lands and you’re not having fun. After all, the number one objective of any game is to have fun.
Part of the fun in deckbuilding is experimenting and trying things that have never been done before. For most formats, there is no maximum limit on the number of cards you can have in your deck. However, the more cards you have in your deck, the lower the chances of you drawing your best cards. For more on the number of cards in different formats, see How Many Cards in an MTG deck? Deckbuilding can be a very complicated process, but also an enjoyable one.