Magic: The Gathering- a Guide to MTG Decks

Magic: The Gathering is one of the most popular and successful trading card games in the world, boasting over six million players from around the world. It numerous Pro Tours and Championships have allowed superb players to make a living through playing the game professionally, and with its card pool of over ten thousand cards, with several new card sets released per year, it's re-playability and enduring challenge cannot be matched. However, it is also beautifully simple, easy to begin with intuitive design and game style, and yet complex and challenging with its many nuances and rulings that experienced players can use tot heir advantage. Magic: The Gathering never gets old.

Magic: The Gathering is a simple game. Each player first creates a deck, a collection of usually around sixty cards from which they play. A deck always contains lands, playable objects that generate "mana", or energy that is used to play most other spells and abilities in the game. Play begins with seven cards in each player's hand and twenty life, and players go in turns. Each player draws one card at the beginning of their turn, and then proceeds to play cards and attack, among other things. Winning is defined by having a player's life total decrease to zero. For more detailed descriptions of the game-play and rules, please consult the Magic: The Gathering website for tutorials and rules.

Introduction to Deck Types

There are an infinite number of possible decks in Magic: The Gathering, but all good ones can be defined into specific categories: Control, Aggro, and Combo. These archetypes describe deck's game plan, what they try to do in the game, and how they attempt to win.

Aggro decks are, of course, one of the simplest to play. An Aggro deck, true to its namesake, tries to win the game as fast as possible. This is usually done by outputting a large amount of damage during the early turns using extremely cheap, effective creatures and "burn" spells and spells that increase the attack power of a creature. Such decks use time to their advantage; opposing decks must match their blinding speed, or lose. Colors classic to Aggro include red, green, and white. Example decks include Goblins, Affinity, and Sligh.

Control decks, however, are the exact opposite. They tend to be very reactionary, and almost never do much early in the game. They try to build up lands and minor resources, while at the same time disrupting their opponent's game plan through countering their spells or destroying their permanents. Having depleted their opponent's resources, they can proceed to win usually through a powerful creature or direct damage or possibly a combo. Numerous control decks, especially those using blue, use the concept of card advantage, or drawing more cards than the opponent, thus gaining access to more resources. Colors classic to Control include blue, white, and sometimes black. Examples of this deck type include Mono-Blue Control, Blue-White Control, and Psychatog.

Combo decks achieve victory through a combination of cards acting together in a synergy that can generate a win in one turn, such as producing an infinite amount of mana or creatures or life, or using several key cards to kill the opponent instantly. Such decks tend to require a number of turns to build up resources, then it suddenly go into action in one explosive, winning turn. Combo decks use a wide variety of colors, but red and black can provide simple mana acceleration and black and blue also provides tutors, card that search for other cards from within one's deck.

Other combinations of these archetypes, such as Aggro-Control, Combo-Control, Aggro-Combo, and Aggro-Control-Combo also exist, and are widely used in all manners of game formats. They include Scepter-Chant (Combo-Control), Suicide Black (Aggro-Combo), and Rock (Aggro-Control).

Formats

Now for a quick look at Magic: The Gathering formats. There are four official sanctioned formats in Magic: Standard/Type 2, Extended/Type 1.x, Legacy/Type 1.5, and Vintage/Type 1. Each progressively allows more of the card pool of Magic to be used in a deck. Standard allows the most recent sets, Extended older ones, and so on. More information can be found at www.magicthegathering.com.

Decks Compositions

All Magic: The Gathering decks are comprised of lands, and other spells, which include creatures, artifacts, enchantments, instants, and sorceries. Most decks contain at least several of these card types. A good deck has a defined plan of winning; namely is it Aggro, Control, or Combo. The cards included in the deck needs to be efficient and effective at achieving the deck's way of winning.

Aggro Decks

Aggro decks wants to run cheap, yet powerful creatures which costs a small amount of mana, around one to three, to play, but have either a powerful effect, or have a high attack power for its cost of around two to five or more. To help in its goal of outputting the requisite twenty points of damage, it also needs direct damage spells for when creatures are not enough. What if your opponent has killed off all your creatures with Wrath of God? With only creatures in your deck, and having played them all and run out of steam, only pure luck can save you. But with direct damage spells, it's a simple matter to just Shock or Volcanic Hammer your opponent to death. Therefore, most Aggro archetypes that can include red spells would play a mixture of creatures and burn spells.

One of the most successful of these is Boros Deck Wins archetype, using white and red creatures and burns.

Classic cards used in Aggro decks include Jackal Pup, Grim Lavamancer, Savannah Lions, Isamaru, Cursed Scroll, Lightning Helix, Shock, Volcanic Hammer and more.

Control Decks

Control decks are generally blue, with white splashes for Wrath of God and other creature control, life gain, or powerful white creatures like Exalted Angel or Akroma, Angel of Wrath. Blue is the color of deceit, response, and trickery. Cards that draw cards from a player's deck, counter an opponent's spells, or "bounce" an opponent's cards tend to be, as a general rule, blue. Of course, there are exceptions, but these types of cards are blue's domain. Control decks want to be able to effective respond to all or most of an opponent's threats, thus prolonging the game and allowing it build up the lands and cards it need to win. In a nutshell, Control decks control the board; it decides what to allow to come into play. Win conditions in a Control deck are usually extremely powerful, board-defining creatures or permanents or spells that are far more powerful than anything an Aggro deck can throw out. With a few attacks, the game would be won.

Counter-spells are the backbone of most Control decks. They include the classic counter: Counterspell, and numerous others. Several of the best in each format are listed as follows: Standard: Remand, Mana Leak, Rewind, Rune Snag, Extended: Counterspell, Mana Leak, Rune Snag, Remand, and others Legacy: Force of Will, and others listed Vintage: Mana Drain, Force of Will, Misdirection. Card drawing or card advantage is also an integral part of control. Fact or Fiction is an important card in several formats, Ancestral Recall (Vintage) is the best card drawing spell in the history of Magic, and a diverse variety of others also exists. Numerous other cards exist to be used in Control decks.

Combo Decks

Combo decks are defined by the fact that they rely on the synergy of a few cards to win. Each of these cards plays a certain role in the combination, the sum of which enables a certain goal to occur. Such a combination generally is achieved by the Combo player within a few turns of resource buildup and mana accumulation, after which the Combo deck plays a number of spells and abilities in quick succession, doing things such as gaining a extremely large amount of life, or using the Storm mechanic from the card set Scourge to replicate one key spell, enabling a win in one explosive turn.

Combo decks run the gamut of colors, cards, and spells, and are the most varied of the three deck types. They can be inconsistent in their play, as their win relies so completely on getting a few crucial cards into play. They also tend to have no responses to threats, thus being terribly vulnerable to decks that can win faster, namely Aggro decks. Their fragile combos can also be very easily disrupted by Control decks. On the up side however, Combo decks can be deceptively simple and fun to play, and their combos are powerful enough to guarantee a win once they activate.

Classic combo decks include Oath of Druids decks, which use the green enchantment Oath of Druids coupled with Forbidden Orchard to get an extremely powerful creature into play during the first few turns. Dragonstorm decks uses the card Dragonstorm, which allows a player to put a Dragon creature from their deck into play for each spell played that turn. Dragonstorm decks would also have Dragons that deal damage on their coming into play or leaving play. Thus, a player would play a large number of mana acceleration cards, and then play Dragonstorm, having a large storm count and using direct-damage dealing dragons to deal enough damage to their opponent to win.

Conclusion

Magic: The Gathering is one of the most variable games in the world, and can provide decades of fun through its enormous base of cards and competitive events. Good luck to all the MtG players out there, and thank you for reading this article.