Sheppy's picture
By: Sheppy, Daniel J. Shepherd Sr.
Dec 01 2010 3:57am
0
Login to post comments
2787 views


Welcome to the third and final installment of my adventure into deck building.

I've had fun putting this series together and I hope that it’s been an interesting journey for you as well, so let’s look once more at the deck from the previous articles:

 

Once more into the abyss!

My initial plan was to take this deck into the casual play room in MTGO and report on a game or two and do a nice little re-cap of the deck. But anyone who has ventured into that arena knows, it’s never that simple. In fact of the first five or so games I played only two were actually finished, I got yelled at for playing such a “noob” combo by one gracious player who promptly conceded the game, had another mulligan down to 1 card and quit, and other such shenanigans. Good times! So anyway, I did get in some epic games here and there and I will highlight a few of them and go over the changes I have made to the deck as a result.

The very first deck I played a complete game against was a typical SOM Infect deck that lasted all of 5 rounds before I had 10 poison counters on me and was done for, I would at a later time have my revenge on this type of deck! After a couple more infect decks I did get to play against a (note to self; refrain from typing “real deck” here) artifact deck, now that’s more like it! Long story short, it was an epic failure!

What went wrong? Well for starters I soon realized two things that I did not put enough thought into from the very beginning, one being when and how far to mulligan before starting a game, the other was mid game stall. And boy was that getting the best of me a lot. I found myself most times getting Liquimetal Coating out soon enough, but then around turn 7 to 10 my deck would stall big time. I was drawing either too many instants or not enough creatures to defend and attack with. I was able to take care of artifacts well enough, but could do nothing against anything else, or even attack in cases where I was able to keep my opponent from building up his attack plan. So I had to go back and take another look at the deck and find out where I was so un-balanced at.

A way to help here is to keep notes as you play, and what I found was that I kept drawing on average a lot of artifact kills with my instant cards but not enough creatures or burn cards were coming up. At this point I’ve played a dozen or so games with very skewed results that were more dependent on things such as card draw, mana screw, etc. than good card balance. So looking over the cards and seeing from actual play just how they were coming up I realized I could shift things around a bit, my first thought was I could trim the instant artifact kills a bit and add more creatures.

So I drop a Naturalize, a Shatter, and a Slice in Twain. Then add in their place a (Kor Sanctifier), a Manic Vandal, and a Tuktuk Scrapper. I almost called it good when I looked it over once more and though a forth Lightning Bolt would be so good to have, but what would I cut? I weighed on this for a bit and decided to cut one of the (Salvage Scouts), they have yet to really show their worth in the deck so I decided to go for it. Here’s the new line up:

 

This small shift in a couple of cards made a big difference from game one! Now with a decent starting hand via good mulliganing (is that a word) and paying attention on how you play, this deck has gone head to head against most decks in the casual rooms so far. Most importantly the mid game stall has been dealt with fairly well. I even managed to totally decimate a Goblin deck! Of course the cards fell my way, but I was able to deny my opponent the opportunity to get his creatures going then I was able to eat away at his mana base effectively shutting him down. More on the deck in a bit.

 

All your mana are belong to us!

The mana base! This was the one area I was really concerned about from the start and the reason why I intently left in a couple of the white cards. A lot of folks have asked me why don't I take them out. Remember it’s about building, not the building. 

The mana base has proven itself to be spot on for this decks needs, and I more than anyone am surprised I got it right from the word go! Who’d a thunk it? I had figured I would need to make a few corrections as I started playing but to my surprise, other than the occasional mana screw I was never without mana that I needed. Having to splash for a single color can be tricky but with the options I had it proved itself to not be a problem. The only thing I could see changing maybe would be swapping out the Kazandu Refuge and Graypelt Refuge for a set of Raging Ravine and Stirring Wildwood, this would give another attack element to the game. But the point is to build with what you have and get playing, there is always room and time to improve.

Earlier I had mentioned how Ancient Stirrings played a bigger role in this deck than I had first imagined it would, this is one of those cards that when you first look at it you may only think of it for its face value. “Look at the top five cards of your library. You may reveal a colorless card from among them and put it into your hand. Then put the rest on the bottom of your library in any order.” My original thought was to use this card to help pull the Liquimetal Coating out and get it into my hand, I came to realize while playing with the deck that it had other uses as well, such as pulling out land cards when needed. This I would have realized had I read all the words in the cards text, (Cards with no colored mana in their mana costs are colorless. Lands are also colorless.) I add this tidbit because it’s important when deck building to stop and read card text closely and thoroughly understand what their meaning is.

Terramorphic Expanse is another good card to consider in your mana base even if you don’t necessarily need to draw a specific land card, as all too often happens with MTGO, the great card shuffler God likes to stack all the land cards together and lump them either on top or at the bottom of your library. Having a way to shuffle the deck during this time could save you a lot of frustration, just something to ponder!

 


All hands back on deck.

Now that the deck is playing good and the mana base is solid I can really start paying attention to making any changes to finalize it. In this case I’ve been winning pretty solidly against most casual decks, it still shows weakest against decks like Infect, and weenie types so I need to work on that a bit since they are currently being played a lot! Looking through my notes I see that the Liquimetal Coating is not 100% as vital to this deck as I first thought it would be, this is mainly due to the decks creatures abilities to destroy artifacts and face it, artifacts are in vogue now. So that made me rethink the role Salvage Scout was really playing in this deck. Having 4 Liquimetal Coatings, I have not needed to use the ability to bring them back from the graveyard in the 30 or so games I have played, and honestly the deck has evolved so much since my initial design that the Scouts no longer fit. So out with them they go! Now what do I fill that slot with? Many, many choices here. I decide to keep it simple and within what appears to be the theme this deck is morphing into, burn! So I add three Burst Lightnings, seems like a natural choice. Here is my final cut for the article:

 

So you can see how the deck has evolved since my initial idea. The basic concept has stayed the same but as play testing revealed flaws, other ideas came into being and the deck went from being based on one card to themed around several, eventually evolving more into an artifact kill\burn deck.

I have made a lot of changes to the actual deck I’m playing on MTGO but in the spirit of this article I’m stopping here, after all it was all about the journey and not the destination. I hope I have made the point of how I went about testing, adjusting, testing, adjusting, until you find that right balance that works. Even if it drifts off course of your original idea or theme, just go with it and keep trying different things until you find that right balance. Also don't be afraid to jump in with a deck a test it out, I have taken a few test decks out for a trial only to concede a game and think to myself, "what the @#&* did I just do?"


Cast him a Sideboard mate!

I have a challenge for ye old budding deck building swabbers. Let’s see some ideas on a sideboard for this deck. What would you do? Me, I’ve not really given it much thought but it would be interesting to see what you would do. So go on, do it and be off with ye! Argggg!

 

Parting shot!

Okay, note sure where all this pirate stuff came from but I’ll stop. Here is a simple guide to help you get started, it’s pretty much what I used and if nothing else a good place to start:

1. Come up with an idea, base it on a combo, theme, etc.

2. Choose the main theme of the deck, agro, burn, weenie, standard, extended, etc.

3. Think of other play strategies complimentary to your main idea.

4. Find all the cards that play within the given the idea or theme.

5. Work around a 60/40% ratio of spells to land for starters.

6. Build your main deck and lock down your starting cards.

7. Design your mana base.

8. Get on MTGO and test, test, test, and take notes, notes, notes!

9. Tweak the deck accordingly by your notes and save your old decks in case you need to fall back.

10. Write up a really cool article and have it published here on PureMTGO.com for all of us to admire!

You have at your finger tips a plethora of knowledge and help, I highly recommend the three following web sites to help guide you along:

www.puremtgo.com THE best resource for articles related to all things MTG.

www.mtgotraders.com Hands down (IMHO) the only place to buy cards on-line.

magiccards.info/search.html Awesome card search site

Thanks for reading this and I hope you enjoyed it!

Dan aka Wovoka!

4 Comments

On tip for a finisher could by ShardFenix at Wed, 12/01/2010 - 04:05
ShardFenix's picture

On tip for a finisher could be Hoard-Smelter Dragon

I got that! by Sheppy at Wed, 12/01/2010 - 09:35
Sheppy's picture

In the version I'm running now, I have replaced the Kor's with the Hoard-Smelter Dragon and it is a big game finisher for sure.

The first thing that comes to by Paul Leicht at Wed, 12/01/2010 - 05:11
Paul Leicht's picture

The first thing that comes to mind for your sideboard that you don't have in main deck is sweepers. Also Steel Hellkite is a huge beating against slower decks.

As usual, a great read. by NetHwarang at Wed, 12/01/2010 - 11:51
NetHwarang's picture

As usual, a great read. ;-)

For the sideboard, you need to consider cards that allow you to "just win" against the decks that give you trouble.

Also I would like to point you towards another useful article:

Probability: Drawing Cards From a Deck
http://www.kibble.net/magic/magic10.php

The article deals with hypergeometric distribution, a neat tool that allows you to design your manabase based of your manacurve (how many land drops I have to get in order to play my deck) and timing (when do i need to cast certain spell).

This will help you to discriminate between mana fixing solutions. For example I've got a 5 color domain deck, and I tested a lot of land ramping spells, and it came down to sakura tribe elder and, either; harrow or cultivate.

Due to the fact that I had a 88% probability of having a 2cc spell on my hand during turn 2 (considering original 7 cards + a card drawn), and only a 23% probability of having a 5cc spell on turn 3, I went with harrow. If I had had more 5cc spells on my deck, and less 2cc spells, I would probably had gone with Cultivate.

You could use similar math, to pick between Terramorphic Expanse v/s one of the Panoramas.

By the way, I'm an Arts major, so I could say that I'm mathematically challenged, but, the technique described in the article can be done using MS Excel or OpenOffice spreadsheets, so do not be afraid of the maths!

Hope it helps ;-)