Hey guys I'm new to MTG. Could I get some opinions on how to best build a deck? How many lands, creatures, etc. Thanks for the help
>>47310681
The exact spells-to-creature ratio kind of depends on the colour you're playing - green needs creatures more than blue, for example - but a good rule of thumb is that your deck should be about 60% creatures/spells and 40% land to ensure a consistent mana curve.
>>47310681
Just netdeck
You're new?, did anyone tell you how much this cost beforehand?
>>47310681
Keep an eye on mana costs when selecting what to put into your deck, because as cool as that 6 mana beast of a spell might be, it's way less likely to see actual play than the workhorse spells that only cost 3. At most, you shouldn't have more than, say, four cards in the deck that cost 5+ CMC to cast, the majority of your cards should be in the 2-4 mana cost range.
>>47310681
23 Lands is usually a safe bet, 20 lands is acceptable in a deck with predominately 1-2 mana spells.
What else you put int he deck is up to you, you can have a deck of just creatures, or one with just instants and sorceries. Many choose to mix both.
>>47310681
Depends on what kind of deck you're looking to play. The higher the average mana cost, the more lands you'll need. Fast, aggressive decks can get away with 18-22 lands, slower control decks need 24-26.
How to play magic:
Step 1: this photo
Step 2: immediate regret because you realize you have just wasted 1500$ on 75 peices of thin cardboard with pictures of fucking dragons and elves on them.
Step 3: reconsider all of your life choices and have a bunch of cold showers, stay inside for 18 weeks don't answer the phone don't get out of bed, order pizza every day.
step 4: rinse and repeat
>>47310681
Run and save your life and your money!
>>47311538
this guy gets it.
>>47310765
Maybe he justd wants to collect and have fun and not get 1000$ modern decks like you.
>>47311610
lets try standard
budget brew 25-50$, doesn't win very much, but didn't cost fuck all.
top 8 net deck 200-600$ rotates out in 6 months now.
well fuck, this sucks
>>47310681
Deck-building is on the harder end of the MtG learning curve. To know what a good deck looks like, you should have some experience "piloting" a deck made by someone more experienced. If you have a few friends interested in MtG, Duel Decks are good for this.
With experience piloting a deck, you'll be more able to understand deckbuilding:
* You want a mana base that lets you draw and play lands every turn up to some maximum so you don't get stuck with a bunch of spells you can't cast (mana screw).
* But little enough land that you don't stall at the end witha hand ful of land and now spells (mana flood).
* The sweet spot is ~40% land, but it varies a bit. Expensive spells => more land to reliably draw it => flood is more likely, so you should plan on have some mana sinks... activated abilities and kickers and things that let you invest the extra mana you have sitting around without wasting a card. Cheaper spells => you can "curve out" sooner => get by with fewer lands.
* Your mana base and your 2-drop interact most strongly. Getting two mountains by turn 7 to pay a 5RR cost is much easier (i.e. requires fewer red lands such as Mountains to do consistently) than two mountains by turn 2 to pay RR. In the former case you can just splash in a little red land, maybe as a third color using dual lands in your primary colors. In the latter, you are very committed to red as your major color. Triple-colors in a cost is pretty much an unheard-of burden.
>>47312060
* You have two resources: cards you can access and mana you can spend. Using them more efficiently than your opponent is a way to win. Look up theories on Card Advantage and Tempo.
* You get to play one land and draw one card a turn. Hopefully you use your mana efficienty and have something to sink your mana into every turn, which means you'll draw a card, play a land, cast a spell, and be down 1 card net almost every hand. Eventually you run out of cards. That means every game has three stages: 1) you have spells, but not enough mana; 2) you have mana and some spells you can cast; 3) you have mana out and can cast whatever you have, but have run low on spell cards.
* This means there are fundamentally two ways you can play: you can try to kill the other guy before he kills you as fast as possible (beatdown), which means cheap, fast creatures are golden. You don't have to care about downsides like "can't block" and "must attack" because those are things you plan on doing anyway. You want to win before your opponent reaches stage 2.
* Or, you can try to trip up the guy trying to outrace you, wear him down, knowing that his cheap, small guys are in the end no match for some huge spell you have coming (Control). You want to deflect your opponent until he's in stage 3, him with nothing really left to do, and you just drawing cards until you reach your inevitable win condition.
* In any game, you're trying to figure out whether your opponent's build is faster than you, or better in a stall than you. If he's better at control, you have to play to your out and be more aggressive, even if it wasn't your original plan. Alternatively, if you're fast but he's _faster_, you have to play like a controller or just get outraced.
* In fact, you will at time have to swallow your pride and "play to your out". If you only have one incredibly unlikely path to victory, you have to go for it. You have to commit to unlikely victory rather than graceful but guaranteed defeat
>>47310681
There's not a great "one size fits all" guide to building a tournament-winning deck. However, here's a good place to start for a new player:
-Pick a card or strategy that you want to build around.
-Find the nine cards that best help you execute that strategy. Keep in mind that you need some way to protect what you're doing from your opponent's interaction, as well as ways to stop their game plan if they can execute it faster than you. Also keep your mana curve in mind - don't play twenty seven-mana cards, since odds are you won't survive to cast a single one of them.
-Play four copies of each of your nine cards, and 24 lands. In order to figure out how to balance the colors, get a ratio of the mana symbols in your deck (so a card that costs 2R has one red symbol, and a card that costs BBB has three black symbols). Use that ratio to determine how many sources of each color to play. Remember that dual lands exist - a single land can count for multiple colors if it can tap for either or both.
So let's say I want to build a deck around flying creatures. Blue and white tend to have the best ones. So I'll play Suntail Hawk, Pride of the Clouds, Midnight Haunting, Emeria Angel, Azorius First-Wing, and Lyev Skyknight as my creatures (that gives me four one-drops, eight two-drops, eight three-drops, and four four-drops). Now I want some removal and interaction, so I'll play four Swords to Plowshares to kill my opponents' creatures, four Mana Leak to counter some of their spells, and four Favorable Winds to my my creatures bigger.
For my manabase, I want access to white a little earlier and in slightly larger quantities than blue. So let's say I need 18 white sources. I also want 14 blue sources, so eight need to overlap. I can play Evolving Wilds as four of them (also has synergy with Emeria Angel) and Glacial Fortress as the other four.
>>47310681
The most important part of playing mtg is finding a group/friends/family that you enjoy playing with.
Take the deckbuilding advice from the other anons here, but no matter how good you are at deckbuilding and understanding the meta, you won't be able to enjoy the game if everyone around you that plays is unpleasant, unless that's your fetish.
>>47312199
* Often (especially in limited) games stall. You each have similar forces and end up afraid to attach, because if you can't kill him outright, he could find a way to kill you first. Bear this in mind, and have ways to break stalls. Clear the board with Wrath of God; make your team impossible to both block and defeat, as with Overrun.
* You need ways to force final damage through to an opponent. Red agrro decks will often include a lot of burn spells to finish a player off with fire to the face. Stompy decks just use huge creatures with evasion abilities, such as flying. Trample is a good evasion ability for Stompy builds as well.
>>47310681
Take 500, buy the same deck as the winner of the last GP, get your shit pushed in because you don't know the why of each card and end up taking only bad decisions when in play. Throw a fit. Expend another 500 in homebrewing a deck that is full of expensive cards but no sense to them and get your shit pushed in again, now you are finally in your wau to make a good deck. And you also have a decent pool of stron cards as well.
Or start slowly trying to play in as many drafts as possible, and if you are consistent with it in two years you should have slowly built a very competitive Standard deck.
Dont think so much about deck strategy during a draft, all my experience in them shows that the one throwing the most creatures with a mildly usefull ability almost always wins.
More complex decks are for Constructed tourneys.
>>47310681
What do you want to deckbuild for?
You can build a deck designed just to win, decks designed to work around themes like keywords or gimmicks, tribals, or even based on concepts. Deckbuilding really just depends on what you want to do with it, and how it works for you and your group.
>>47312254 This guy gets it.
dont play unless you're playing casually its a fucking retarded waste of money
