Magic The Gathering: Deck building Tips and Examples

.....*sigh*

You have been playing for 5 months, how about learning basics of deckbuilding. Also why haven't you asked help at fnm?

Basic issues I saw at quick glance from competitive standpoint:
Awful manabase
Creatures not worth running and way too high on CMC
Deck isn't even at 60 cards
Sideboard?

The fact that 99% of magic cards are garbage means you have to buy singles, rest you can burn or whatever.

Looking at your deck:

Jesus man. You need to work on the basics . This isn't just "i haven't bought singles", it's barely even a deck.

>that mana curve/avg cmc 4.85
When do you have the mana for those high cost cards?
>68 card list
Your deck is 15% less reliable than a normal sized deck.
>32% of the deck is lands, 4 colors.
You can manage 32% lands if you're running mono green Elves, or 5 color slivers. That's about it.
Typically people run 24-28 lands in a 1-2 color deck, and that's in a 60 card deck. In a 100 card deck they run 38-46.
But under normal circumstances, The more colors you run, the higher % of your deck needs to be your mana base.
The bigger the deck is , again, the higher % needs to be manabase.

And your manabase is very often the most expensive part of the deck because most people use a majority of rare noon basic lands.

And all of that's before you even start to consider *which* cards to include, specifically.

>99% of mtg is garbage.
Having a good mix of good and shitty cards works just fine for drafting.

The power level of cards just varies too much for most of the low end ones to be useful in the typical standard constructed formats.

>In a 100 card deck they run 38-46.
Huh? I'm pretty sure in EDH the rule is 40 plus 8-10 pieces of acceleration. I personally run 35 because I'm autistic about having a perfect curve, but still, I can only think of 2 decks where I'd want more than 40 lands, and one is landfall, the other is gitrog.

If you do cave and start buying singles, probably the best synergy with emerge is kozilek's return. And pilgrim's eye is a popular choice for emerge decks, because if you can play it, that means you can emerge the next turn, and all you're losing is a 1/1 that you only cast for its etb effect anyway.

On the other hand, perhaps a better archetype for you to learn deckbiilding with is aggro. One 3/2 body is as good as another, so you don't need to worry as much about getting any specific card, and instead just focus on getting as many cards down as quick as you can. This also means you don't need to worry about too many fancy lands, as you generally can't afford for your lands to be coming in tapped anyway, and can just stick with basic lands in one or two colors.

Once you are able to consistently draw hands where you have something to do on every one of your first four turns, that means you have learned the basics of mana curve, and can start thinking about beginner stuff, like how to maintain card advantage, and how to put pressure on your opponent without committing too much to the board.

Some basic deck-building tips:
-try to only play 60 cards for a higher chance to draw the card you need
-know if you want to finish your opponents in the early, mid- or late game. Early game decks mostly consist of cheap cards while late game decks need stuff like control / ramp / etc to even let you bring out your fatties
-play removal / control. If you aren't playing green with its big fat fatties you want to get rid of the ones of your opponents
-if you're playing artifact / enchantment destruction make sure the chosen cards can do something else, too, in case your oppenents don't have of the first ones
-carddraw!! If you have no cards in hand (and it's not part of your strategy) you want something to fill you up again otherwise your opponents will have it much easier to defeat you
-Evasion (like flying, fear, trample, etc). A 10/10 creature doesn't automaticly win you the game if your opponents have enough 1/1 dorks to chumpblock them
-the finisher / wincon! What are the cards that win you the game? You should stick to one win condition and maybe another alt wincon in case your opponents thwart (is that the right word? Just looked it up but it sounds strange...) your first plan. But don't overact! If you have more than two wincons your deck might become messy and you probably gonna draw only the cards you don't need at the moment
-and last but not least: quantity. Key-cards (like Goblin Welder in an artifact graveborn deck) should be played as 4-ofs, while cards that kinda match your strategy but aren't really necessary should be 1-ofs. The rule of thump is: a 4-of is a card you want to see in your starting hand, a 3-of you want to draw later on, a 2-of you only want to draw once in the game (probably cause its a legendary) and a 1-of is just there for the lulz (unless you can tutor it)

That's the things I keep in mind when building a deck, I hope it helps! But in the end the other user is right: Time will tell / game more.

Also important: download Cockatrice and build your deck there first. You can test it against other decks you've build (or others online but I never did that) or just test it alone to see what a initial hand would look like and what cards are weak draws. When you've got a deck you're happy with you can start buying singles.

Consistency. For me, when brewing decks, the easiest way to get something powerful is to pick an interesting card or mechanic to build around. Recently I made standard Harness the Storm. In the end I only ended up playing 2 copies of the main card and 3 Trail of Evidence to fill in value, but 'maximize card X' gives your deck a solid plan and direction. This ties into keeping your deck to 60 cards. Having a main plan means you want focus, and 60 cards is the most focused your deck can be.

Brews can be solid, for FNM level at least. Harness the Storm is a pretty bad card, but by building a deck to maximize its power and good meta knowledge (knowing what threats I needed to answer), I took 5th place out of 20 at game day, in a fairly competitive field (only loss was white humans, lost to the same guy twice - once in Swiss and again in top 8).

Also, seriously, buy singles. You don't need to buy the biggest, most popular and expensive cards, but you will save money regardless of what you're building. Another recent deck was RG aggro (this time, built to maximize Blood Mist). To finish the deck I bought 4 Lambholt pacifist, 2 Blood Mist, 3 Noose constrictor, 2 fiery temper, 2 duskwatch recruiter, and an impetuous devils. Add in a pyromancer's goggles for a friend, and the total was still only $10 (CAD). That's basically 2 custom packs filled with cards you are guaranteed to play for the cost of... 2 packs. As opposed to buying randoms, getting maybe 2 usable cards and a bunch of draft chaff. I was lucky and had all these at my lgs, but even with shipping, you're only maybe down another pack's worth.

Put another way, after a prerelease, I can fill in a (FNM) competitive deck for $15-$20. Trying to do the same solely through buying packs probably take 10 times the amount of money (booster box) AND a bit of luck AND aggressive trading (and good luck trading for commons and uncommons, most people only bring rares). Seriously, buy singles.

Paupers not really cheap anymore it's cheap compared to other magic formats.

Pauper suffers from the fact there is a limited selection of good commons which have become staples and thus are rising in price because Wotc doesn't think enough of the format to crash their prices with reprints.

A little more advice for your deck specifically.

Right now it's kind of a mix of all three Edrazi mechanics, and none of them play to the same objective. Devoid, especially with Forerunner of Slaughter, tends to be aggressive, emerge tends to be slower, and ingest doesn't have a whole lot of payoff (the processors are all pretty weak), but also tends to be slower, but in a different way than emerge. Pick one and stick to it.

Pick two colours. One is too weak and restricted, three is unfeasable unless you shell out hundreds of dollars for rare lands, but two is the sweet spot where basics and a few evolving wilds will be reliable enough, and you get to draw on twice as many cards as mono-colour.

Have a payoff. Emrakul is the big bad in standard, nothing your deck is doing is that strong. If you go with the devoid plan, aim to hit as hard and as fast as standard will allow. If you go emerge, look at how far emrakul's influence will take the deck. There are one, maybe two possible 'goodstuf' decks able to exist in a single format, so you can't just play ransom cards, you need to have some kind of synergies to take advantage of to compete against the raw power of random piles of good stuff (Bant CoCo, in this standard).

Buying just a few singles will help these objectives a lot, and cost very little.

>unwilling to buy single cards
Why?

How's pauper for Standard these days? Just getting back into the game after years but don't want to spend an arm and a leg for the best netdeck, mostly wondering how reasonable it would be to make decks with just commons, uncommons, and cheap rares? For FNM of course, though it would be cool if I could end up making something that would be PTQ or Regionals worthy at some point. Mostly just wondering about the cost of the game currently, if you need to buy a bunch of really expensive shit to be competitive or if you can be creative at all and still be competitive on the cheap? That way I could also play a larger variety of decks.

Damn these threads are dead af, never going to get my questioned answered...

Harness the Storm guy from above: my dirt cheap brews seem to be doing all right, so it's definitely possible, with the caveat we're talking about FNM level. As long as your lgs isn't exclusively made up of netdeckers with way too much disposable income, you should be able to function well enough with brews and cheap rares to have a good time and win a few matches.

>48-50 after accelerants
Really? I definitely thought it was 42-46 after accelerants.

My sliver deck runs way less than that, but slivers are weird.

>Cockatrice
Or octgn, or maybe Forge .

>pauper is no longer cheap, just cheap-er.
Fair enough.

You can typically build a semi cheap standard deck good enough to sometimes win at fnm.

You're not really talking about pauper though, just cheap standard.

Pauper standard is "only Commons allowed" which does make it a rather different (and cheaper) format.

>unwilling to buy single cards
> I have tried making quite a few decks but I can't even compete against anyone at any Friday Night Magic events
> I don't know what to change.

Gee... I wonder...

4-colors is crazy. I've struggled with just 3.
If you're gonna run many colors and if you're playing Eldrazi you're gonna want to find a playset of Corrupted Crossroads (playset=4)

Try to get more than 1 of a specific creature, especially the ones you think are the best after playtesting. Also, focus on 1 strategy, it seems your deck is trying to do too much at once.

Pauper is an eternal format, there is no pauper standard

Also in case you didn't understand, pauper magic isn't just "cheap magic", it's magic with commons only, from any era of magic

If you try to play standard with only commons, your deck might end up better than the one you posted in the OP, but only because that deck is complete and utter garbage and the avg cmc is too high, so you could make a deck of all commons with a good mana curve and it would be more playable

That said, commons used to be mor powerful and current design practices (i.e., the design practices that came up with the cards currently legal in standard) revolve around making commons almost unplayably bad, and every standard deck needs money rares to compete