Magic Decks

Well, I may not be considered to be an expert at this, but I have been involved with Magic the Gathering, the card game for sometime now, and i consider myself to be pretty good at building a deck. A 'deck' in Magic is a set of 60 or more cards that are used to defeat an opponent. An opponent can be defeated by getting rid of their deck enirely, or attacking at opponent with creatures of sorcerys or instants until that opponents life total reaches 0. To build a deck the first thing that must be considered is what color or colors you want it to be. There are 5 different colors that can be chosen from, that are White, Blue, Black, Red and Green.

White represents life force and law, its used to gain life and stop other creatures from attacking you.

Blue represents the mind, and is used to destroy your opponens decks, while you plan ahead your moves in advance.

Black represents decay, and the power of dead. Black will destroy your opponents creatures, while you bring out powerful demons and monsters to destroy your opponents.

Red represents fire, and being quick at defeating your opponents. Spells will burn your opponents bringing their life down quickly.

Green represents nature and the wild beasts that roam it. Green will allow you to take control of gigantic beasts that will trample your opponents.

To play spells, that is to say any creature, socery, instant, artiact, or planeswalkers, you spend mana each turn. Mana is given to you when you "tap" your lands. Each basic land gives you one mana of that lands color. Forests give you GREEN, Islands give you BLUE, Swamps give you BLACK, Mountains give you RED, and Plains give you WHITE.

Now, as i cannot describe every aspect of Magic, I will be describing the process of building my commander deck. First of all, a commander deck connsists of 100 cards, and is commanded by a ledgendary creature. A ledgendary creature is a creature that has a name, and has the words Ledgendary Creature in its card description. That creature sits in a command zone, and can be brought out at any time when cast using the correct mana. If that commander should die, it goes into the command zome again, and may be cast again for its origonal cost of mana plus 2 more mana.

Onto the deck building. For my commander, I chose to revolve around low costing creatures that could either produce mana (essentially, my mana could double each turn) (only one land may be played during each of your turns), and could defend, and the mana producing creatures would work together with my other mana to bring out the big guns, my larger creatures. With mana costs 6 or higher. For this deck, a land to card ratio is needed, and since my deck requires large amounts of mana, I gave it 40 lands, for a ratio of 2/5 of my deck being land, and the other part of it being spells. I made shure that i had enough cheap mana producing creatures or creatures that could defend, and so far its slightly more than half than the larger creatures.

 This deck also includes a few other tricks up its sleeve, including a card called Asectisism, that allows me to regenerate me creatures at the cost of 2 mana, and can only allow my creatures to be killed in direct combat. As most of creatures are large in this deck, I am at a direct advantage if that card should be drawn.

My commander, Nylea, God of the Hunt, has a power (how much a creature can attack fore) and toughness (how much damage a creature can take per turn) of 6. Her mana cost is 4 but cannot be a creature unless there are 5 green symbols among creatures, enchantments, planeswalkers, and artifacts I control (this is a rare drawback to her)(only four other ledgendary creatures have this ability)(there are hundreds of different ledgendary creatures to choose from). However in a deck where I get creatures out very early which most of all of them have at least 1 green in their mana cost, she will most likely come out as a 6/6. She has many other effects. For instance she gives all of my creatures trample, which means that any extra damage could be dealt to a player from a creature blocked by another, would be dealt to the player. Normally without trample that would not occur.

 For example, if a creature with power of 2 were to be blocked by a creature toughness of 1, the 1 creaure would die. However if the creature power of 2 had trample, an extra 1 damage would be dealt to the player because the blocking creature had only a tougness of 1, because the attacking creature had power of 2.

That was my process of building my commander, and this deck has worked and won plenty of matches so far.