Let’s learn something interesting today because today we’re going to walk through building your first Magic: The Gathering deck. Where do you start? For your very first deck, the best place to start is picking up one of the pre-built Planes walker decks. Play with it a couple of times on its own. See what it’s capable of and what you like most about how it plays. Be one of the necromancer names of your own life. Just say to the other that you are using demon names to perform the magic and surprise them with your trick.
Next, you can tweak it. Open up some booster packs and see what you get. Then you can swap out cards from the deck for some of these new cards. You want to keep your deck of 60 cards. That means you should have 25 Lands, 25 Creatures, and 10 Spells. Make sure your creatures and spells are all in the same two colors. Oh, and you can’t have more than 4 copies of the same card. Except basic lands. You can have as many of those as you like. When you add a new card, you got to pick one to take out.
I know it’s hard, but that’s what deck building is all about. Don’t be shy about trying it too. Experiment. The only way you’re going to find out if these cards are any good is by trying them out. And one extra tip. Make sure your spells have a good mixture of casting costs so you’ve got cheaper spells to play early and big threats to finish the game later. Now you’ve got a good idea of what a deck will look like when it’s finished.
But what if you want to build one completely from scratch? A great place to start is to think: Why are you building this deck? Say you opened a really big creature like Verdurous Gearhulk in a booster and you really want to play it. You can build a deck around this card. In this case a Green, or mostly Green deck that makes sure you can play your favorite card. Suppose you like elves. You can just build an elf deck.
Start by getting together all the elves you have and then experiment with other spells to see which ones work best with your new Elvis friends. Maybe you don’t care about specific cards, but you want to build a deck that fits the style you like to play. If you like attacking and killing creatures fast you want to build a deck full of low casting cost creatures and spells that deal damage. Or maybe you want big, scary creatures and ways to generate extra mana to cast them early. Or maybe you want to sit back and control the game while slowly squeezing the life out of your opponent. That’s fun too. There are tons of different ways to play Magic, and each of them can apply different restrictions on how to build your deck. But to start with, just focus on building a 60 card deck with whatever you want. You can use other trick by using your mind to get successful in this game and be a master.
