Five More Steps That Will Improve Your Deckbuilding Skills

Nate Heiss

In the predecessor to this article, Five Steps That Will Improve Your Deckbuilding Skills, I talked about these five easy steps that you can take to improve your deckbuilding skills:

1) Focus
2) Creativity
3) Mana
4) Simplicity
5) Consistency

The response to the article was so great that I decided to do a sequel: Five More Steps That Will Improve Your Deckbuiling Skills!
6) Use Your Mind's Eye

Envision what will happen when you play your deck. Look at the cards you decided to use and imagine what would happen most of the time. Think about what your deck would do in various match-ups... will it have a chance versus Skies? How about Opposition or Dark Fires? Look at the cards in your deck and think about scenarios that might play out. This will let you know what to look for when you get around to playtesting various match-ups, however the most useful aspect of using your Mind's Eye is the leverage it empowers you with when determining the true strength of and given strategy or focus of a deck.

Any deck can be masterfully built, but just because a deck is perfected does not mean that it will destroy the field. No matter what you do, a Skies deck will still probably fall to Deadguy Red (the deck played by Mike Turian at Worlds this year, popularized by Dave Price). The only way to change this outcome would be to warp the Skies deck so much that it is no longer a Skies deck, which would violate Step 1 (Focus) and 4 (Simplicity). Instead, if you expect a field full of Deadguy Red, simply choose a deck other than Skies.
7) Your Arsenal Does Not End at Sixty Cards

Use your sideboard! No one should win a tournament if they do not have a sideboard. It is the most underused and underrated tool that a deck builder has. Most deck builders just push off the sideboard until the last minute and then scrounge up fifteen cards that probably end up making their deck worse instead of better.

The sideboard is a tool that can be used to help negate the Rock-Paper-Scissors effect that most environments have. You can tune your sideboard to strengthen your chances against the worst of match-ups.

When building your sideboard, keep in mind what you would want to take in and out of your deck versus many different opponents. Usually, the most important thing for a sideboard card to have is versatility. This means that sideboard cards that are fairly good versus four decks are better than a sideboard card that is only good versus one deck (unless you will absolutely lose without it). The best sideboard cards can come in strange forms. My favorite sideboard was in Pro Tour-Rome, where I brought in Brass Men to combat Sligh decks and their horde of Jackal Pups. They had a lot of synergy with my Survival deck because you could find and cast them very quickly to buy large amounts of time... something that is a perfect counter strategy to Jackal Pup Sligh.
8) Open Your Mind

Do you know why all of the Pros never agree on what deck to play? Because most can't get over how amazing they think their own decks are. There is a lot of ego in the world, and I sometimes think that much of it is help in the safekeeping of Magic players. I am as guilty as the rest, and have fervently dismissed one strategy or another as silly and ridiculous, only to discover that during the next month it has won 80% of the Pro tournaments. I learned my lesson very severely in PT-NY two years ago when I (and the rest of the Uberteam, sadly) dismissed Worn Powerstone as a good pick in the environment. Contrary to what Brian Schneider told me, I believed that the Powerstone could never be good. After all, it is a 3 mana artifact that comes into play tapped and only produces 2 mana? How could that be good? Well, Brian is a better man than I, and many of the people who used Worn Powerstone had a much higher finish then yours truly.

Every time this happens to me, I feel the icy irony tingle throughout my body. After all, I am the guy who keeps preaching about Manakin! Yet time and again, I see this mistake being made by myself and others. Great ideas can be hidden in bad decks and bad cards can be great given the right environment. It is all in the way you look at things. Having an open mind is one of the most precious aspects of great deckbuilders.
9) Choose Your Weapons Carefully
Take those Ogres out! There are cards that are strictly better than those guys!

If you were taking a look at your friend's deck and saw that he was playing with four Gray Ogres, what would you say? Well, hopefully you would say, "Take those Ogres out! There are cards that are strictly better than those guys!" In Magic, there are many creatures that are 2/2 for 3 mana and come with a nifty ability. Fault Riders comes to mind, but many more are out there. Gray Ogre and Fault Rider have the same exact cost, and the Rider has undeniably better stats. This means that your friend is using an obsolete card. Be careful to make sure you are using the best versions of cards that you can.

You can extend this sort of thinking by taking a look at the functionality of cards in your deck. If you are playing a black-red deck and want a removal spell, don't use Agonizing Demise... use Terminate! If you want a creature bounce spell for your counter-bounce deck, don't use Barrin's Unmaking; use Repulse! Sometimes you may have overlooked a card that would perfectly fit into your strategy, and once you find it, you will be forced to make decisions like this. At one point I had a black-green beatdown deck with Rancors in it, but I neglected to use Phyrexian Negators in my creature mix until super-player Kai Budde pointed it out to me. Afterwards, it seemed like such an obvious card pick that I had no idea why I overlooked it. Sometimes you have to go through the relevant card lists simply to find out if any cards pop out at you.
10) It's About Time!

No, really... it is. Time is a very important aspect of Magic both in the game and out. When building your deck, you must take the tempo of your deck into consideration. You could play the biggest creatures in the game, but just because they are 6/6 or bigger does not mean you will ever win. You have to look at the mana cost or casting cost of these cards. Sure, Molimo, Maro Sorcerer will be a heavy hitter, but how often will he ever see the light of play? Molimo will probably sit in your hand for the entire game. The only time when this does not happen is when you are playing against other players/deckbuilders of the same caliber, meaning that they also are using these ridiculously hard to cast cards, making their deck have horrible tempo! Here is the rule of thumb concerning tempo:

Fast decks beat slow decks.
Medium-speed decks beat fast decks.
Slow decks beat medium-speed decks.

Figure out what your likely opponents will be playing and tailor your tempo accordingly. To make your deck faster, use lower casting cost cards. To make your deck slower, use higher casting cost cards. Just make sure all the cards are good for your deck, regardless of the casting cost.

Well there are 10 steps that, when followed correctly, will sharpen up your deckbuilding skills. Out of all of the steps, most people need drastic improvement on 1 (Focus), 5 (Consistency), 6 (Mind's Eye), and 7 (Sideboarding). Take a look at the way you are building today. Self assessment is a large step in becoming better at anything. Thanks for reading! Send all questions or comments to nateheiss@yahoo.com.