How to Build a Competitive MTG Deck Part Four: Combo

I have included a brief translation key below for those of you who are just getting involved in the community. And it also doesn’t matter if the cards do the exact same thing, as long as the name is different. You can indeed have four Essence Scatter and four Remove Soul.. The graphic listed in this section explains how the traditional archetypes use these different aspects of MTG.

Advantages of Scalable Threats

There are different play styles and you should adjust these numbers to better suit your goal. Some decks bump it up to 26 lands while others knock it down to 19 depending on how large their curve is, but the safe starting point is 24 lands which is often the average in Constructed decks. “I’m a reanimator deck” means you want your deck to revive targets or be revival targets, on top of removal and card advantage.

International deck

Tempo players look to control the game early and take advantage of a strong board state. Where purely control decks look to out class players with more quality in the later stages of the game, tempo looks to keep opponents off balance from the very start. ” is constantly on my mind after I’ve decided what colors I’m in. If I’m drafting Prismari, my deck is trying to draw extra cards and cast big spells. It just wants to survive the developing phase and doesn’t care about playing early threats. If I’m drafting Quandrix, my deck should have ramp and ways to spend a lot of mana.

Sometimes there just isn’t a viable combo deck even possible. Slower combo decks need to ensure they have enough interaction or battlefield presence to avoid getting run over before they have time to assemble their combo. If the combo deck is able to drag the game out long enough, they will inevitably be able to assemble their combo and win. Fast combo decks look to focus the vast majority of their efforts on finding and assembling their combo.

The Four Card Types in an MTG Deck: What You Need to Know

No, you generally shouldn’t play more than the minimum deck size. Now think about how you can only have four copies of any card with the same name in your deck at one time. Aspect analysis assigns very specific traits to 3 of the buckets and lists everything else as a combination of those; the 3 main buckets being aggro, control, and combo. From these buckets, different strategies are drawn depending on the type of actual implementation of the deck in question. However, the vast majority of MTG decks use one or a combination of the following aspects to win.

If only one card exists with the effect you need to execute your combo, you can only run four copies in your deck. Using combo pieces with redundant copies can help with consistency by allowing you to run more than four copies. Splinter Twin decks often ran both Deceiver Exarch and Pestermite to help with this. Modern Rhinos uses both Shardless Agent and Violent Outburst (and sometimes even Ardent Plea) to find its namesake card.

You are not typically looking to play cards that serve any other purpose. Next comes the ability text, which tells you the Troll has two important characteristics. First of all, he can’t be the target of spells and abilities your opponents control, meaning he’s pretty tough for your opponent to deal with. To learn more about Magic’s various sets, try clicking on the word “Products” from the navigation bar on the right of the page. That takes you to the Magic Products page, which lists all the sets ever printed, in order, including their name and expansion symbol.

CABS (Cards that Affect the Board State)

This should help you focus your deck on the key cards to get your cards on the board. Magic has so many cards, it’s easy to get caught up in the variety that’s out there. With its card selection, the game has become so complex you could turn a deck mtg card into a functional Turing machine. You want to use all of the cards, but it just makes your deck useless. Not only did these decks never win, I couldn’t play a single spell in many of these games.

Tyrant is a silver-bullet against control strategies for green ramp decks. It often demands that your opponent find a board wipe or lose, and rather quickly, too. At the time of writing, I believe it to be green’s strongest six mana play.

(You may consider this if you have a situational card in your main deck such as Essence Scatter). First of all, you need to consider if a combo deck is even worth building in your format. In Standard, for example, combo is not always a supported archetype.

Others contented themselves with charging a tax on manufacture. The elaborate design of the ace of spades in British decks of cards recalls the (now defunct) 18th-century convention of applying the tax authorization stamp to this particular card (see Stamp Act). Playing cards first appeared in Europe in the 1370s, probably in Italy or Spain and certainly as imports or possessions of merchants from the Islamic Mamlūk dynasty centred in Egypt. Like their originals, the first European cards were hand-painted, making them luxury goods for the rich. The account book of King Charles VI of France (now lost) is said to have noted a payment of 56 sols parisiens to Jacquemin Gringonneur for painting a deck of cards “pour le divertissement du roy” (“for the amusement of the king”).

Finally, if you’re building one for Commander or Brawl, then you’ll need one commander card plus either 99 cards for Commander and 59 for Brawl. To determine your mana curve, consider the following guidelines. Most decks should include at least 1 or 2 unique cards with a mana value of 1, at least 2 cards with a mana value of 2, and at least 1 card with a mana value of 3 or higher.