Deck Building 101, Chapter I

Your deck (or Library) is the most important piece of equipment you'll ever need to have to play the game of magic. It is where you get your cards to start the game, it is where you return cards when the spell requires it, and most importantly it gives you the spells you cast turn-after-turn. Knowing this, building a well-made deck is very important.

Start off by conceptualizing your deck. Ask yourself "What might I need to make my deck?" or "What theme is my deck going to have?". Once you have done that, the next step follows. Your going to need some money here, so make sure you have enough to meet your deck's requirements. Depending on what color you choose your deck to be, you should always have enough of those colors to make a functional and proper deck. Having to few blue cards in a blue-red deck will make it unbalanced and same goes on having too many gold or multicolored cards in your deck. Keep it balanced using basic statistics and constructing a pie chart on the contents of your deck.

Now just a little note to remember (Thanks to Meritt): Deck-Building is challenging to do alone, and there's not much fun to experience until your near finishing your awesome deck, so you should try gathering your friends up and build your decks together; that way you can share ideas on what goes best in a type of deck, know what your friends' archetypes are, what their themes are, and most importantly, get to have a social "bonding" with your peers.

Once you have your cards, proceed on indexing them (either in your albums or just plain stacking them on the floor) by mana cost (if you think that's what's important) or by color then by card type. Afterwards, build your mana base.

A mana base is a term used by players to describe where they get they're mana from, the most common source are lands, basic lands. But some players who have enough experience try to master the control of nonbasic lands, because nonbasic lands can produce almost always more than one type of mana. But I suggest, if your just starting out or if you're an intermediate player, you should stick to a basic land mana base for now, with some few (2-3) copies of a Terramorphic Expanse or Evolving Wilds.

Last edited by MasterTrainer on 11/4/2013, 12:47 pm; edited 1 time in total