I have Spark, Core 19, Dominaria and I want to build a good deck to play with, but with so many cards where do I start? I am fairly new to this. If someone could help me out, I would greatly appreciate it.
You could look up some good Standard decks (in the Standard section of this forum) and either buy missing pieces or substitute them with similar if probably less powerful cards from your collection. Or simply buy the cards for a deck you like.
If you want to actually build your own decks to excercise your own creativity, look over your collection and take not of the cards and mechanics that catch your interest. Then pick a few in no more than 2-3 colors and go from there (3 is already borderline if you don't have the nessessary fixing, but your sets contain useful budget options for dual lands). Or you start with a particular strategy (like discard, milling, aggro, etc.) or theme (like tribal, artifacts, etc) in mind and pick a preselection of cards to cut down your choices, anything that you think could work in such a deck. Again, stick to no more than 2-3 colors. Then put together a prototype from that preselection.
No matter how you get your deck together, though, you have to actually play it to test it out and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, cards that don't work as well as intended, ways to improve it, etc. And you have to get experience playing the deck. Even a good deck can crash if the pilot doesn't know how to play it well.
Keep the basics of good deckbuilding in mind:
- have a plan, and have only one plan. Different plans are for different decks.
- include enough lands (around 24 in 60 cards is best for most decks, aggro can thrive on less, control often needs more)
- play a full 4 cards of the core pieces (or at last as many as are available) to increase deck consistency
- include ways to interact with your opponent (discard, creature removal, counterspells, etc.)
- card advantage wins games, so get yourself some by including 2-for-1s, mass removal, extra card draw, etc. Repeatable effects like planeswalker abilities also count towards this. The goal is to get as many options for yourself while denying as many to your opponent as possible.
- and lastly, good decks play good cards. So if a card is only useful in very specific cases or simply has much better alternatives, don't use them.
If you want to actually build your own decks to excercise your own creativity, look over your collection and take not of the cards and mechanics that catch your interest. Then pick a few in no more than 2-3 colors and go from there (3 is already borderline if you don't have the nessessary fixing, but your sets contain useful budget options for dual lands). Or you start with a particular strategy (like discard, milling, aggro, etc.) or theme (like tribal, artifacts, etc) in mind and pick a preselection of cards to cut down your choices, anything that you think could work in such a deck. Again, stick to no more than 2-3 colors. Then put together a prototype from that preselection.
No matter how you get your deck together, though, you have to actually play it to test it out and figure out its strengths and weaknesses, cards that don't work as well as intended, ways to improve it, etc. And you have to get experience playing the deck. Even a good deck can crash if the pilot doesn't know how to play it well.
Keep the basics of good deckbuilding in mind:
- have a plan, and have only one plan. Different plans are for different decks.
- include enough lands (around 24 in 60 cards is best for most decks, aggro can thrive on less, control often needs more)
- play a full 4 cards of the core pieces (or at last as many as are available) to increase deck consistency
- include ways to interact with your opponent (discard, creature removal, counterspells, etc.)
- card advantage wins games, so get yourself some by including 2-for-1s, mass removal, extra card draw, etc. Repeatable effects like planeswalker abilities also count towards this. The goal is to get as many options for yourself while denying as many to your opponent as possible.
- and lastly, good decks play good cards. So if a card is only useful in very specific cases or simply has much better alternatives, don't use them.
Former Rules Advisor
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