I typically approach all of my deck brewing with a goal for the deck. Just look at the top right of those cards, see what the costs are, and have your lands reflect this. You may not want to put that 8 cost card into your deck unless it really works well with everything else going on. You’ll never play those cards and it’ll just bum you out. You don’t want to have green creatures in your deck and use swamps. These 5 cards must still follow the same rules for deck construction, so if you have 2 Llanowar Elves in your deck, you wouldn’t be able to swap out more than 2 cards for 2 more Llanowar Elves.Ĭolors and Card Costs: Make sure that whatever colors you want to play have matching mana. You can have a 15 card sideboard that will allow you to swap cards out of your main deck between rounds. Go ahead and have 23 forests, but you can’t have that many Llanowar Elves. You can have no more than 4 of a given card aside from basic lands. Your deck needs to consist of at least 60 cards. I say this because it can be daunting, but you’ve got this: we’re going to get there together and you’re going to have a pretty decent chance if take these tips into consideration.ĭeck Construction: This is about as technical as I’ll get for this article. Other game types within Magic might have unique new card types, such as Conspiracies, (which were from an amazing set to draft), that fall outside of these general classifications. Within them, we have Lands, Creatures, Enchantments, Artifacts, Sorceries, Instants, and Planeswalkers. Those 3 distinctions make up the basics of card types. Putting the Cards Together: Deck Building Basics They generally have some sort of effect beyond providing you basic mana or enter the battlefield tapped for example. Non-basic lands are any land card without the basic supertype. A basic land is any card that has the Basic Land keywords on it such as Plains, Forests, Mountains, Swamps, and Islands. You can play one per turn and there are two types of lands: basic and non-basic. Lands, as mentioned above, are permanents and your resource for playing spells. Creatures are there to fight for you, Enchantments can be played in a variety of ways, and Lands help you to play those cards. Permanents, however, stay on the battlefield after they have been played. Once you play them they go away in some fashion usually to your discard pile (or graveyard for specific magic terms). Instants and Sorceries, however, are not permanents. Creatures, Enchantments, Artifacts, and Lands are all permanents. Some permanents are spells, but not all spells are permanents. Here we have a sort of square and rectangle scenario. Some cards are more specific with how they interact with other cards, such as “Counter target creature” or “Deal target creature 3 damage”, but those cards are still spells at the end of the day. Lightning Bolt, that sweet 4/4 creature you have that costs 3, that counterspell you might have, or that enchantment that affects the game in some unique way. We’re going to work through those together and then talk about some tips to keep you on track for your next deck brew! Card Types SpellsĪ spell is anything that isn’t a land (because they’re cast into play using mana, provided by your land cards). What’s a spell? What do you mean by permanent? What are lands? Don’t worry, we got you. If you’re new to Magic, you may have questions. If you’ve caught our first episode of the newest season of Spellslingers(our Magic: The Gathering show) you’ll quickly learn Magic: The Gathering is an exciting, fun and quick playing game.