MTG Salvation

This is what your original thread should have been

Excellent article, but in the elves example near the end Overrun is a rather out of place card (the currently popular build uses Ezuri, Renegade Leader to deal an order of magnitude more damage) and I'm not sure I follow what kind of elf deck are you talking about.

Quote from LGTreturned

Excellent article, but in the elves example near the end Overrun is a rather out of place card (the currently popular build uses Ezuri, Renegade Leader to deal an order of magnitude more damage) and I'm not sure I follow what kind of elf deck are you talking about.

any generic elf deck. i don't even know whats currently played in Elves, but the archetype has existed for years and not much has changed. lets not get bogged down in the details, it was a kind of generic example.

Well written article that I think could help new and veteran players alike. Thanks for taking the time to write it. Definitely tell it was a labor of love.

metamorph:

Lots of good stuff here. . .
Since I mainly play MTG for the joy of deck creation I feel that I may have some additional tips for anyone interested

---

Local Card Synergy:

This might be a slightly more advanced topic in "Efficiency", but I feel that it is so important that it really comes down into it's own basic category

There's lots of ways to explain it, but mainly you can just think about as this one rule:
"Does my deck still work if I can't get (card) during the game?"
or The Reverse:
"Do any of the cards in my deck hurt each other if I play them together?"

It's easy for players to get into trouble with this. . .
Cards like Day of Judgment are fairly obvious so I'll use a different example:

Overwhelming Stampede, Solemn Simulacrum, Garruk, Primal Hunter and Beast Within
They are all strong cards so you may be asking what's the problem, right?
The problem is not the cards it's that they were all in the same deck!

Every single one of those cards hurts each other and for different reasons
They were all together because of one other nice card that you didn't pull (so now you're screwed)

There's a few things to reduce it, but MTG for the most part becomes a random game once you decide to keep your starting hand so if it's one thing I could teach every new player it's to make sure that your deck can play strong regardless of what cards you get during the game and in what order

This thread I can actually get behind, and I support this to be stickied as well. Good job metamorph!

Well written sir. I'm not really a deck builder and definitely more of a netdecker but this is great for us who need to tweak decks significantly for large events.
Hell its a good read for everyone really.

The best thread on this entire forum board.

Easily.

Very nice. I like.

Excellent thread. Stickied!

Awesome, lots of good info here!

demi_god:

haha. . .
I was all like "Where did that thread go?" and thought that it got moved to the SDC

---

Either way congrats on the sticky

Really great article. I liked the sideboard part, I still haven't entirely figured out how to make efficient sideboards, but you were a big help.

Metamorph I was meaning to ask you... Is this the order you attack things on? I looked at your article and saw that your steps are very similar to mine once broken down (mind you go in more detailed in your article compared to mine). But generally I was wondering is that where you start? Looking at the quality of the cards you would build around? Do basically cut down the field of playable cards before you even start?

I look at the plan before I look at card quality. I always try to figure out what I want to do and then see if it's possible rather than see what I have(out of a smaller pool of playables) and see what I can do with it. I only look at card quality when I get into the inevitability but more so the redundancy/repeatability of the deck (which is where I also address mana curve). It occurred to me that perhaps this order of things is what differentiates a lot of different types of players. Some operate on the premise most cards could be good, and some operate on good cards are good. The ones that operate on most cards could be good don't address value until it's in a list. Ie.. does it work well enough in this list or is it still trumped by this obviously powerful card.

I think this might be the most fundamental difference between a lot of deck builders. Although it is unlikely that something outside of the deemed playables is in fact good enough and it saves you more time to discard it ahead of time it misses the chance of finding archetypes that could exist but not in an obvious way. Stuff like Caw Go. Caw Blade largely came around with the printing of SoFaF (there were some running SoBaM at SCG in January) but it wasn't that SoFaF was printed and they where thinking hey lets make the best deck with it. I wonder if Caw Go didn't already exist how much longer it would have been to find that deck? Not sure.. Most of the time the strategies if they work stay pretty rogue and most of the time they don't quite work.

Anyway just a thought I had.

Hi Ryan. you bring up an interesting point. there's several schools of thought on how to identify working strategies and that would actually make a really good article in its own right.

the order of sections in the article was laid out in order to create the greatest logical coherence of my points for a reader to absorb. there is not necessarily a 1-to-1 correspondence to sections in the article and my exact process. however, i chose the order intentionally because i think that when viewed from a distance that is the correct way of summarizing the process. i wanted people to think about card evaluation first because it is the most assured way of coming up with quality decks. if you start from good cards you've got a high chance of having a good deck, provided the strategy is also coherent, and the mana base works, and your sideboard is good. so its true that you can map that order of reasoning into a complete process.

but you asked is this my process? sometimes. not always. i use it alot and its reliable. i think its the best process for deckbuilders who are just starting out with building serious decks. it is the best at pitfall avoidance. it is certainly not the only viable deck building process. sometimes its better to start from synergies and go from there, depends on how powerful the synergy is. sometimes its best to build an agile metagame specific deck that is playing with cards chosen only because they are good in specific circumstances and those circumstances happen to be common on one particular Saturday. like i said, there's enough material here for an article itself.

narwhalizer,

i completely agree with you that what you have recommended is superior writing practice. when i write articles for publication (in a paper or electronic magazine, or professional journal) i absolutely do exactly as you've advised. for this forum post i felt a need to include a substantial preface because this forum has SO MANY different types of readers. i wanted to make sure, 100%, everybody was on the same page about what the goal of the article was. i think in this context my preface serves its purpose, though in general its a bad writing practice. i'd certainly cut it out if i submit this post to a magazine.

I been playing since Invasion and this article is kinda useful to an older player like myself. Something that I've noticed over the years is trying to fix the mana problem and how I've solved it and it seem to work relatively well (it really only works for 3+ color decks). I count the mana symbols on each cards casting cost then divide the total by 3, the ratio of non-land cards to lands is usually 3-1. Sometimes that number is off, but most decks usually play 22+ lands so you could fill the rest with the remaining number or add based on what color is most dominate.

Thanks. Very good read.

Metamorph is pretty much the only reason I even look at Standard anymore, however much I try not to.

A respectable guide overall. However retrospectively It's still disappointing that you did not post this thread instead of the "How I know you're not a serious deck builder" thread.

There are a few area's in this guide that I feel are subject to some debate, however as those topics/ideas/principles are more abstract in nature they aren't worth nit-picking over here.

I'd say the "target" audience for this tread would indeed garner significant useful insight from the read.

@yarpus: Methinks you might want to take a different approach; instead of asking "Do I need X?" but rather "Is X worth whatever costs I must pay to have X?". In this case, no you don't "need" other colors. However, when you add blue or white, you gain a huge plethora of options, and because of the mana-fixing available to you, doing so costs nigh nothing. Ratchet Bomb isn't as good as Day of Judgment and Gideon are at stopping aggro rushes. Nothing can duplicate black's point discard. These are all useful, powerful effects that are desirable in a control deck that a mono-blue deck won't have.

As a general note, at some point I'm going to cross-post my own guide from the previous thread. I do not assume the reader has a deep understanding of Magic theory, and I chose to focus more on the physical process of deck building. There is still a significant amount of overlap. As metamorph stated earlier though, there are multiple processes and ideas on the topic, so hopefully my alternate perspective can grant more balanced insight.

Well done metamorph... Well done.

Re-Posting guide from other thread.

So you've played a billion games with intro packs and events decks, you're bored with them, and you want to build your own deck. Unfortunately, as many others on MTGS can attest, deckbuilding is not beginner-friendly, nor is it for the faint of heart. There are literally dozens of ways you can screw up a self-made deck, most of which will cause you to lose a game before you even sit down to play. BUT! Fear not. Even though deckbuilding is hard, there are resources out there that can help you skip many heart-crushing 0-2 drops at your FNM. What follows is my attempt at such a resource.


First question is, where do you start in building a deck? There are a number of ways to get deck ideas, be it specific cool cards, a keyword you like, or an interaction of a few cards. No matter what you use as inspiration, you quickly need to narrow it down to a concrete game plan. Decks need focus; you can't just pile random like-colored cards together and call it a deck (well you can, but expect to lose a lot).

Herein lies your first potential to shoot yourself in the foot. Picking a game plan or theme is relatively simple. Picking a winning one is hard. So what makes a winning game plan? Generally, you want your deck to be doing something that builds up a relevant resource, and then has a way to translate that resource into victory. Examples:

- An aggro deck looks to gain lots of tempo. It wants to have the ability to play stuff out quickly. It wins by using its fast stuff to kill the opponent before they can do anything relevant. This is usually done by way of cheap creature swarms.

- A combo deck wants card selection. It wants to assemble the perfect set of 2-3 cards, at which point it uses the interaction of those cards to just straight out win the game. The interaction can be something that generates infinite turns, or reliably deal 30+ damage (enough to kill one opponent most of the time).

- A control deck wants card advantage. It wants to have more options available then the opponent, and then use those options to cancel out everything their opponent plays. It will then land a "finisher" of some kind and use it to kill you off. In the best case scenario, a control deck will grind you down til you've got no cards in hand, nothing on board, while they beat you down with a Grave Titan backed by tons of countermagic.

Virtually all decks are one of the above, or some combination of them (yes I'm sure you can think of exceptions, but they're just that - exceptions). Pick whichever one that fits your playstyle best.

Next step is to figure out what colors you want to be. This could be something you decide fairly quickly if you already had cards in mind. Remember though, gameplan comes first. If you settle on doing a Mono-Black Control deck, don't be afraid to switch it up to Black-Red or Blue-Black if doing so would make it a better deck.

You'll also notice that some colors are better at some plans then others. Blue's counters and defensive spells work well in a control deck, whereas Red's burn and Green's efficient creatures lend well to aggro decks. However! There aren't any hard and fast rules on what colors can support what kinds of decks. I've seen blue aggro decks (Legacy merfolk) and controlling red ones (Big Red).


Now we've got ourselves a plan and a color combo, lets go find ourselves some cards! Typically, for this stage, I'll write out on a piece of paper every card I can think of in a format that my deck might want to play. Then, I'll go to gatherer and do searches to try to find things I haven't thought of.

Start with the stuff that builds towards your game plan - cheap creatures/burn for aggro, card advantage engines for control, combo pieces/sifters for combo. Now, while that may give you a lot of cards to work with, there's another list you need to make - disruption cards. These are cards that are meant to slow down or stop whatever your opponent's game plan is. Face it, you're not always going to draw exactly the cards you need for your plan right away. Also, there are going to be times where your opponent's plan is better for some reason(faster/more efficient/etc). So go find out what your colors have that can make your opponent's life difficult. This includes stuff like removal spells, Counters, and point discard. Somewhere in there make sure to include lands - dual lands of your colors, basic lands, utility lands (like Tectonic Edge or Inkmoth Nexus).

At this point you have yourself a nice big list of stuff to work with. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of the cards on your list will probably be terrible pieces of junk you never want to play with. So we need to weed out the chaff. How do we identify the good and bad cards? Good Question. A lot of card evaluation comes down to experience. I could write a whole separate guide just on evaluating cards (I think I did, somewhere...) So go through and cross off the stuff you think is bad, but have someone else double-check it, preferably someone with deck building experience of their own.

Now that you have a smaller pool of cards, you can begin to put together how much of each you want. You'll obviously want a good mix of threats, answers, enablers, etc, but often times its far more important to pay attention to what experienced players call your "Mana Curve"

Be careful in how much stuff you put at any given Converted Mana Cost. Ideally you'll have plenty of things to be doing on turn 1, turn 2, turn 3, etc. It's better to have more low cost things, as you can always play 2 1-cost things when you don't have a 2 drop in your hand, or if you're waiting for your 3rd land. Also, realize the gap between 1, 2, 3, and 4 is not the same as the gap between 5, 6, 7, etc. You can usually hit your first 4 land drops via land in your opening hand and land that you draw in the first few turns. After that, you have to wait to topdeck more. Thus, you can reliably play a 4 drop on turn 4, but something that costs 6 probably won't come out til turn 8+ without some extra help.

This arrangement of how much stuff at any given mana cost you have is what we mean by "Mana Curve". You can get a better idea of how your deck is doing by arranging your cards in piles by CMC. I think MTGO can do this automatically if you find the relevant command in the right-click drop-down menu. A good Mana Curve will be a diminishing one, with big piles of cards at low CMCs and smaller piles at high CMCs.

This "Mana Curve" will dictate how much land you need in your deck. A good starting number to start with is 24 land. If you see you have lots of big expensive spells, add more. If the most expensive thing in your deck costs 3 or 4, you might be able to get away with a little less. If its really important to play a certain card that's 4-5 mana, you might want to add more to make sure to hit your 4th or 5th drop.

PAY ATTENTION TO ADVICE HERE. There really aren't any hard and fast rules on mana curves. It's very easy to make a deck with atrocious mana and not notice, because there will be games where you get lucky and it works out. Conversely, you'll occasionally get mana-flooded draws that make it look like you have too much land. This will make it harder to notice your errors! It's hard to know if you're getting mana-screwed because of bad luck, or because of bad deck building. Playtest your deck thoroughly, ask for other opinions, AND LISTEN.


Now you have a decklist. But this list is just a rough draft. Rarely if ever do you get the "perfect" list on the first go around. You're going to need to test it out and refine it. Plus, you're going to want to add a sideboard once you know your deck's good and bad matchups.

If you're unbelievably rich, or your deck happens to not involve lots of Mythics, you might have all of the components of the deck available to you. Most people won't, however. That doesn't mean you should go out and buy the full contents of your list from StarCityGames! Proxy out what you're missing, and test with friends. Make sure to explain it to them before you play; some people really don't like proxies. Most will be ok with it if your proxies contain all the card information and if you make it clear its for testing purposes only.

A word on who you test with...not everyone is an equal playtest partner. If you play casual players with 20GreenUnicorns.dec, don't expect great information on how your deck works. Ideally, you want to test your deck with players that are better then you, playing decks that are better then yours. Nonetheless, almost any test game can tell you if your mana is operating smoothly, so if you are playing a weaker player, focus on that. Pay attention to whether you're making your land drops, whether you have stuff to play each turn, do you have to mulligan excessively, etc.

At this point, if you're on a budget, identify the expensive cards on the list. Ask around online if there are any substitutes, and ask your friends if they've got extras you can borrow. If there are no substitutes and you can't acquire any copies of it, tough luck. You can try to keep going forward, but chances are its going to be a waste of time. You're probably better off shelving the idea and going back to the drawing board. But take heart - even if you don't get to play one particular deck, realize, you just spent tons of times learning the ins of outs of how it works. If someone else comes up with the same idea, you'll be better prepared to play against it.

You'll probably want to first try out your deck at your local FNM as it's a relatively low-stress tournament environment. Even so, realize, there's a decent chance you'll end up losing a ton if you're playing with an original deck. Established decks have the advantage of being refined by many many people over the internet. Thus, be ready to take some punches. Don't go in looking to 5-0 with your brilliant new creation; go in looking to hang out with some Magic friends for the evening and maybe show off your cool new deck.

Regardless of outcome, ask your opponents how they felt about your deck. For most of them, it will be the first time they've played against it, so their opinions should be pretty unbiased as they come. Note, some players are jerks and don't know how to give tactful criticism. Some people will just say "Your deck is trash Learn2Play noob LOL", or some variant thereof. Don't get bent out of shape over it, but don't immediately dismiss it either. Ask them to explain their opinions, ask them what cards are bad, what part of your strategy is bad. Even criticism that's given rudely can still be valuable.

Keep tweaking your deck around, keep playtesting, and keep asking for other people's advice. Even if you are an ace deck builder, realize that you are human, and therefore biased; in order to make your deck the best it can be, you want to go past this bias, and the easiest way to do this is to consult other people, AND LISTEN. If everyone says you seem to be having mana troubles, re-evaluate your manabase and mana curve. If everyone seems to say a certain card in your list is bad, re-consider its place in your list.

If your deck is good, you should start winning some matches at your FNM. If its really good you'll consistently place high or win. In that case you can consider taking it to the next level, ie a PTQ or SCG Open. Make sure to test it thoroughly against all the "known"/popular decks if you go do that. However, there's a chance your deck is not that good. Maybe it just can't beat another popular deck. Maybe the cards that support your gameplan are just too weak. Whatever the reason is, be willing to recognize your deck's shortcomings, and be willing to let go. Even if you didn't break the format, if you went through the deckbuilding process thoroughly, you're probably a better player for it. Furthermore, even if this deck isn't "the one", maybe your next one will be. Keep trying things, keep experimenting, and above all, have fun.

Happy Brewing All!

The above is mostly just my 2 cents worth. You're all free to agree/disagree as you please. I will probably edit/extend this, if people so desire; I sort of intended to have a section on "How to get advice from forums" and another on "Other common mistakes". If anyone has any input for any of this, I welcome you to share it.

Quote from Kabelis

I think a lot of deckbuilders fail in this regard (including me). While there are a lot of cute interactions with cards which are underpowered in a vacuum, trying to make your deck all synergy based usually fails. Cute 2 or 3 card combos are usually terrible. I made plenty of decks which, while undisrupted are pretty sweet, fall ~1 card short of assembling the 'engine'.

"Synergy" and "Multicombo" decks that go on to be successful are built around a mechanic that lets them have a guarantee of at least two cards that interact in every starting hand; Shadowmoor persist decks are an example, they can almost always count on having a persist creature which is either a threat, a response, or both, and having something that feeds off -1/-1 counters in time to make their synergy count for something (It helps that persist had strong cards to start with). The ultimate example is affinity decks; almost everything in it is an affinity artifact that are cheaper for all the artifacts you have in play, and make your other artifacts cheaper in turn. Frogmite, for example, is completely unplayable outside of an Affinity deck, and yet it is one of Affinity's biggest enablers.

Decks that rely on a single, instant-win combo depend on a metagame that is slow enough, and rich enough with card draw/tutoring to let them assemble their combo with consistency. Pure combo decks can run so much card draw/tutoring/ramp they have to be very unlucky not to get their pieces in place by turn n, but it's a very brittle strategy that is usually too slow to work in most Standard environments. A lot of the time, the dominant combo in any given environment is the win condition of a control deck, not something that is being used in a "pure" combo deck.

Following suit since this seems like a good place I will repost from the other thread as well:

A few weeks back I had a very similar feeling to Metamorph's about repeatably making the same sort of comments on posts. So I decided to write down all the things that I generally look at when building decks. After seeing the attention to the thread, and hoping that it isn't just from people being drawn to the aggressive tone in the OP I thought maybe I'd post up what I wrote if it could be a help to anyone, or atleast provide a language to properly describe mechanisms within decks.

Building Good Decks

A while back Michael Flores wrote an article on the qualities he felt all the ‘Best Decks’ in Magic History had (http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/article.asp?ID=9178). He listed them off as:

1. The Ability to Present an Unbeatable Hand
2. The Ability to Present an Unbeatable End Game
3. They Get the Most Out of Their Mana
4. Avoid Attrition Battles
5. They Can Defy Plans and Go “Over the Top”
6. They Bias Resources
7. They Ignore Card Advantage

As you can imagine this list starts obvious and then goes into the controversial. Ignore Card Advantage? Really? The thing is he isn’t really wrong. The ‘Best Deck’ or the trendsetter in most formats is usually something that is so powerful in what it can do it punishes any misstep of the opponent and takes advantage of any opening. It’s hard to say Jund didn’t care about Card Advantage and that it avoided Attrition, but when you actually played the deck you were not really counting cards. You weren’t playing attrition as a way of fighting back at the format but rather as part of a proactive strategy. However, from this list a Control or ‘The Rock’ deck can’t be the ‘Best Deck’ in the format even if it is the best deck to play or you concede the ‘Best Deck’ generally has most of these qualities. You can see with this list a bias to Combo decks. Often a combo deck does do the most powerful thing in a format that the other decks are warped around. It becomes clear that while this list describes some of the most powerful decks in magic ever and clearly some of Flores all-time favourites, it is a much too narrow set of criteria to describe all the best decks (vs ‘Best Deck’s).

Most of us will never create a ‘Best Deck’. This should not stop us from trying to make good decks though. Whether that is tweaking existing archetypes, or trying to exploit different interactions in the card pool there should be a set of shared qualities that make a deck good. Whether I’m building or critiquing decks I usually run down the same list to figure out where I’m going. This is a top-down process that I usually do over and over throughout the different stages of development and it always acts as a check that I’m heading the right direction.

A deck is a balance of all these qualities and you would generally like it to score as high as possible in each. However, usually bumping up one quality comes at a slight cost of another and certain strategies lend to certain qualities more. You want to generally make the deck score the highest holistically it can. Remember though that certain qualities are rewarded more and less in certain metagames and this is an always fluxuating occurrence. You may be able to adjust certain archetypes to fit the expected metagame, but sometimes this change comes at such a loss to other qualities and the deck loses the ability to be good on a whole.

Additionally, you will notice that I do not consider Synergy a key quality of a good deck in itself. The reason is synergy is not limited to what’s in a deck but the interactions with all cards in the available card pool and more specifically the cards that regularly see play in the metagame. So while synergy may show up in other qualities it in itself is not a quality I focus on. Your deck might be a masterpiece of cards working well together but if the rest of the metagame plays cards that are anti-synergistic and your deck lacks in other qualities it is likely the deck will not be that good.

Proactivity

“How effective are the cards are in the deck at achieving the game plan?”

This is always where I start. What’s the plan? Regardless of what archetype you are playing you need a plan. It might be as seemingly simple as “Beat with efficient cheap creatures using burn to clear away blockers, until I get the opponents life to a range where I can finish them off with burn” or “Play ramp spells until I can land a Primeval Titan so I can reach a critical mass of mountains with Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle”. It might be seemingly more complex such as “Use cantripping creatures, removal/mass removal and permission to stall opposing strategies while I draw deplete their threats and draw into my more powerful threats.” Either way you should be able to probably say what your deck does in one sentence.

So proactivity is a quality that measures how well the deck can push forward this game plan. Obviously some decks are more proactive than others. Answers in general are narrower than threats. So a deck that relies on answers to be proactive will likely not be as proactive as a deck that all its cards just push its aggressive game plan. Similarly a game plan that focuses on getting the opponents life to zero as fast as possible will likely be more proactive than other decks since it will be playing the most efficient cards to achieve this and probably won’t be as concerned with the opponent’s game plan. Proactivity could also be gathering resources in a control or combo deck. Whether that is drawing cards or putting lands into play for Valakut that is part of those decks proactivity. Valakut is very proactive deck in that pretty much every card in the deck either is a land or ramps land.

Regardless of where you go with the deck, never lose sight of proactivity.

Inevitability

“How effective is the deck at creating a winning gamestate, regardless of what the opponent does?”

This seems simple enough. At this point we are not concerned so much in what specific hate they could run, but rather how well the deck at getting the opponent in Checkmate position given their proactive strategy. This differs from proactivity in that proactivity only cares about how quickly and efficiently the deck gets to where it wants to go, not what it does when it gets there. This quality is not concerned with time at all, outside of the increased likelihood of the opponent having answers. You do have to consider the typical answers an opponent could run here, but in a general sense more than a hate sense. If your inevitability is based on enchantment allowing your creatures to trump opposing creatures, you probably have more inevitability than if it was a creature with the same ability since creature removal is more common. If you exploit resources opponents aren’t typically geared to battle you raise your inevitability. If you split your threat across different card types you usually have upped your inevitability. If you overload on a certain type of card type/resource you have usually upped your inevitability.

Inevitability can both be an aggressive and defensive quality. Aggressively we use terms like ‘Reach’ to describe how certain aggressive decks can push damage in the late game, since usually by that point the majority of their threats are trumped by larger opposing threats. A combo deck that just wins in a single turn assuming it can protect it going off has a good degree of inevitability in that it should eventually just win the game straight out. Defensively, part of creating inevitability is not just winning, but making it so the opponent can’t win. Having answers to most opposing strategies and card advantage can come into play here. If you have removed all the opponent’s cards in hand, and you continue to draw more threats and answers than them, you should win the game. This is how Control decks build inevitability.

Remember though, while inevitability might appear the factor that gives the most success, it will never be enough if you can’t get to that point.

Redundancy

“How many cards does the deck have that duplicate functionality?”

We’re now moving away from qualities that strictly describe the plan to ones that look at its execution. This is actually a very important quality that a lot of people overlook. The redundancy I refer to is not unneeded dead weight but in the engineering sense when creating a design. Redundancy is the duplication of critical components of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.
In magic this takes you to the reason cards are limited to 4 ofs other than basic lands. Can you picture how powerful a deck that was 16 Mountains and 44 Lightning Bolts would be? Yes the opponent could run Leyline of Sanctity, but generally speaking short of some specific life gain etc 7 Bolts is 21 damage. By turn 3 or 4 the probability of having more than lethal damage in your hand would be almost 100%. I’d call that both incredibly proactive, and inevitable.

This quality really hammers home the difficulty of building around single cards or single card interactions. A lot of combos work off this premise, but they too use forms of redundancy. For example if you are digging for combo pieces draw spells, or filtering cantrips are your weapons. At a certain threshold certain strategies can become viable. A burn or aggressive deck are usually the most redundant in that every card is a threat, but these redundancies can be a lot more subtle . Decks like Soul Sisters only become viable when there is a certain threshold of effects with gain life on creature entering the battlefield present in the card pool. This threshold is key to decks being viable. Not only for the consistency it can bring but for the ability to fight through hate. If we had only Primeval Titan, and no other ramping spells/abilities Valakut would probably not be a deck.

Redundancy doesn’t always come in the form of straight duplication but rather cards that do the same purpose in a deck. When looking at redundancy you have to see that the cards effectively do the same thing in function rather than if they just appear to. Venser, the Sojourner has more common functionality with Birthing Pod, than Fauna Shaman or Mimic Vat has with Birthing Pod. Not to say these other cards don’t work synergistically but in practice Birthing Pod is a way to build value off creatures in play that moves to creating an inevitable board state off a minimal mana cost (mostly a one-time investment). Fauna Shaman might find you creatures but you have to cast them (other than taking advantage of the discard) and Mimic Vat requires the creatures to be dead and to pay mana each turn to activate it.

Arguably there is nothing more powerful synergistically in magic than redundancy. When any functionality hits a certain threshold it probably should at least be considered.

Repeatability

“How effective is the deck at producing repeatable results?”

At first glance this might seem to be a lot like redundancy. Redundancy helps with this but this quality looks more generally at how repeatable the lines of play in the deck are. Up to this point you can get a lot of value without looking at playtest data. This is where in the list you start having to really look at how a deck plays out. Repeatability stretches right down to the mana base and early turn plays all the way to setting up that inevitable gamestate.
The classic Repeatability example is with a Ramp deck. How many of lamented over getting either the all ramp or the all expensive threat hands, instead of the perfect mix. If you keep all expensive threats you might never be able to play them, and if you keep all ramp you might never find the threat to play in time. To a smaller extent this happens with land amount and the cost curve of the deck. Not being able to play your spells or alternatively having all lands with no spells to play is the type of variance you want to minimize.

It’s easy to see how spells or abilities that draw cards can greatly increase repeatability. Quite often control decks make this trade off with proactivity to increase their consistency. Since this helps them find their end game it is a minimal trade off increasing their inevitability. But putting draw cards in an all in small mono-red aggressive creature deck would make a lot less sense since due to redundancy the deck is already very repeatable and by drawing cards they are trading their proactivity for no real gain in most cases. A deck like Caw Blade greatness largely came from its repeatability since it was able to reproduce the same lines of play over and over almost every game.

After all, it is only with a consistent deck you could expect to win consistently.

Resilience

“How effective is the deck at fighting through opposition?”

Now we are coming at it from the other side. We started at point that paid no attention to what the opponent does to now looking at how a deck can fight through the opposition. This is where we consider the hate that we overlooked when looking at inevitability. Unlike inevitability this is less about how you are able to overpower the opponent’s deck but rather how you are able to prevent them from disrupting your game plan. This is the only somewhat reactive quality I consider in designing decks since you want to push the game on to your plan. Even if your plan involves being reactive at certain stages of the game, it is still your plan you are forcing the game into. This quality isn’t necessarily purely reactive since it can also be a proactive measure. Spellskite in an equipment deck gives resilience while still supporting the game plan of playing effective small creatures and equipping them.

Decks that can protect themselves (or run cards that don’t need much protecting) often have the best resilience, but decks that are very redundant or flexible can be resilient as well. This is an important point since you often hear people say, “My deck beats ______, now that I play ______.” How often is this not the case? You deal with that Squadron Hawk, or that Sword of Feast and Famine and they just seem to continue to pop up out of nowhere or Gideon Jura shows up to ruin your day. Some of this can be attributed to other qualities but most often resilience is the most important factor in reaching your end game.

It is no coincidence I leave this quality to last. In some ways it is the most fickle and requires you to divert assets from the other qualities to shore up. When you are a rogue deck you can ignore this quality largely to hedge the other areas, but if a deck has any staying power it needs to score in this area as well. It is both the most overrated and underrated quality of a deck by many deckbuilders. This might be because they are either overrating or underrating their creation but it largely is something that you cannot measure until you have played a significant number of games.

Building the ‘Best Deck’

Those 5 qualities (Proactivity, Inevitability, Redundancy, Repeatability, and Resilience) give a complete spectrum to use to describe characteristics of any deck. Looking back at Michael Flores list you start seeing a very clear trend. None of his traits of best decks are reactive and they all are the result of these qualities. However, these qualities are also often found in abundance in control decks, and 'The Rock' decks and to a certain degree in any deck you design.

It’s easy to say any deck could have these qualities to make it the best. I could convince you a deck was the best deck, and you could apply these criteria and say it fits. I could then say that isn’t the case and you’d have no way of knowing if I was lying. If anything this is a guideline for identifying the qualities that make decks good and the ability to compare any 2 decks regardless of archetype. It is also a very useful when discussing what makes a deck work mechanically and where it fits in a metagame. Some metagames reward certain qualities over others due to the card pool. But over and over it is these qualities that make certain decks standout.