Magic the Gathering: The Urza Tron Deck

Despite the name, Magic the Gathering Tron decks have nothing to do with the movie Tron. Tron is the shortened form the word electron and means to combine and accelerate, and that is how the cards that are put together in a tron deck operate. They work together in such a way to accelerate some aspect of your deck.

The most popular of tron decks, and one of the easiest to build, is the Urza Tron deck which makes use of the three Urza's Lands to give you a lot of mana allowing you to play big creatures and spells quickly. Recently I decided to make use of these lands to make my dragon deck run faster. I often find myself playing against someone who saves all of his artifact kill spells to take out cards like Dragon Arch and Belbe's Portal so I end up having to hard cast everything anyway.

For those who have never put together a Tron deck or are unfamiliar with them I am going to go over the basics of how to construct one.

Start with collecting your land cards. For the Urza Tron deck the idea is to build your deck around Urza's Mine, Urza's Tower and Urza's Powerplant cards and filling out the remaining lands with whatever color or colors you want your deck to be based on how you want it to run. These three non-basic land cards work together to give you a lot of mana. Alone, each card gives you one colorless mana. When all three cards are out together they provide 7 colorless mana. Once you have out a full set of the Urza Lands, each time you play a subsequent one you have and additional two or three more mana at your disposal instead of the one that most land cards give you.

Since four copies of each of these cards give you a total of 12 lands, you will want to decide if you want a mono colored deck or a multicolored one. If you decide to play a multicolor deck this way, you may want to drop down to 3 of each card where you have more room for colored lands. It's really a matter of personal preference here how you handle the land issue. 12 Urza's lands leave open 8 spaces for additional mana in a standard 20 land/20 creature/20 everything else deck. In a mono colored deck this isn't an issue. In a two colored deck, that is four of each color land. There are 56 other cards in the deck so odds for drawing those cards quickly are low. You really want more than 4 copies of any colored lands in your deck. You can solve part of this problem by dropping your Urza's Lands down to three sets to give you more room for colored land or you can run your colored mana by using land cards that you tap and they give you a choice of what color mana the card is going to tap for. Just remember that these type of land cards traditionally come into play tapped so the mana won't be there if you need them right away.

To get even more land, if you are running green in the deck consider dropping Mana Reflection into the deck where everything taps for twice the mana. That 7 mana given to you by the Urza's Lands is now doubled for 14. That will allow you to play most Eldrazi cards without additional colored mana and all of the larger artifact creatures! Mana Reflection is an enchantment that stays out so you probably don't want more than two copies in your deck.

Once you have sorted out your land decide what you want your deck to do. Your deck will be constructed differently if you want to take your opponent out quickly by using kill spells than if you want to play large creatures like Eldrazi or dragons to run over your opponent en mass.

X spells are one of the ways to make the most of all the mana you have at your disposal. These spells now become particularly brutal. Fireball costs one red to play and when you have at least 7 colorless mana in your pool you have the ability to destroy large creatures. Savage Twister works the same way but takes both one red and green.

Some X spells will allow you to do such things as put X number of 1/1 creature tokens on the battlefield giving you a small army that you can sacrifice as blockers or to creatures with devour. Other X spells will allow you to draw X cards helping you get the cards you need faster, destroy a creature with power and toughness of X or have your opponent put X cards in their graveyard.

Depending on how your deck is set up you will want to use land find cards. Urza's Lands don't do you any good if you can't play them. Terramorphic Expanse will allow you to draw your basic land cards. You will want to make use of cards that let you search for non-basic lands such as Sylvan Scrying, Crop Rotation and Reap and Sow. Diabolic Tutor will also do in a pinch if you are running black in your deck.

Using cards that allow you to draw and scry get you through your deck faster. Drawing cards, scrying and counter spells are the jobs of blue cards Terramorphic Expanse works here as well. It does double duty in both thinning your deck and helping you find the basic land cards you need. Cycling cards that allow you to sacrifice them to draw or search for specific cards are also a good choice. Cards that allow you to scry let you look at your top cards then put them back in order. In the same turn you will want to try and play a scry card before a draw card to make the most of these card types. For example, if you have Foresee and Jace's Ingenuity in your hand playing Foresee will allow you to order the top four cards of your deck to your liking. Playing Jace's Ingenuity right after gets you three of those four cards.

Cycling cards that allow you to sacrifice them to draw cards or to search for land cards also help you get through your deck faster where you can get your Urza's Lands into play.

Adding cards with activated abilities also helps make optimal use of the large amount of colorless mana at your disposal. These are the cards that you pay for without tapping. For example Flameblast Dragon not only attacks but if you pay X when it does, it does that much more damage to either a creature or player.

Don't forget to make use of counter spells that buy you time to get out your lands. While blue has the majority of counter spells like Cancel, Mana Leak and Stoic Rebuttal don't forget about mass control spells like Meekstone and Ensnaring Bridge.

Then there are your creature cards. Since you can produce the mana needed to play large creatures, take advantage of them as well as some of the larger equipment cards. Creating an 18/18 dragon with infect is actually relatively easy with the right cards in your deck.

How you create your deck is up to you. What I have tried to do is show you the basics of how cards work together in a tron deck for the desired effect. There are over 22,000 different cards in the world of Magic the Gathering giving you unlimited deck possiblities.