Building an ABC deck -------------------- Throwing a random bunch of cards into a pile and adding lands will almost certainly result in a rather poor deck. This is true even if the cards one-by-one are excellent cards. To make a good deck the cards need to work together so that they can help each other to get even better than they are alone. In short, your deck needs a basic idea, or a "theme". Choose a theme -------------- Let us assume you have an idea for a theme. It could be "Flyer deck", which potentially is a great theme as it will make all your creatures difficult to block, but also a problematic theme becuase flyers generally are expensive to cast and rather fragile. To make a flyer deck you need to be able to deal with those two issues. Another theme could be "Mana starvation" meaning that your deck would aim at removing all your opponents mana-sources quickly enough that he/she does not have time to cast spells. That then leaves the opponents spells as harmless cards in his/her hand. Here the problem is that the one small creature that may then be successfully cast, could indeed end up killing you, so you need a way to deal with that situation. Themes do not have to be selected as particular play strategies, but may be selected e.g. to make use of a particular "combo". You may think that a Sparksmith and a Circle of Protection Red would work well together, and then try and build a deck supporting this combo, or Pestilence and Circle of Protection Black. Your theme could also be less scheming and more "artistic", say "I like to watch old Bogart black-and-white movies, so let me try to make a B/W deck". Let us try out this last idea which is a bit more tricky (and I do indeed like Bogart movies). First question: What are typical good black abilities, what are typical good white abilities? Black: Swampwalk, fear, regeneration, protection from white, bury [kill with no questions asked, and no regeneration. Mostly this does not work on things that are already dead (black things) or never were alive (artifact things)], discard. White: Healing (damage prevention), flying, banding, first strike, vigilance, protection from black and from red (from any colour in fact), disenchant, "caging type enchantments", pump +1/+1 abilities, ping damage to attackers, tap opponents creatures. Find cards that support your theme ---------------------------------- You may not want to include all of those abilites. A single discard type spell is not necessarily very useful, a deck based mainly on this type of spells could potentially be very strong. OK, let us look for some of those things, and see if we can fill the alphabet. I usually use this site: http://gatherer.wizards.com/default.asp? but I think there are better search engines than this one. The biggest problem here (for me) is that I cannot figure out how to select only common cards. Here is the one that Arne recommends: http://magiccards.info/search/ For now I refer to the "gatherer.wizards engine". Leave it at "all sets", set it to "black cards", set it to to "full spoiler view", "sort by rarity" (that way all the commons are at the bottom of the list), enter keyword swampwalk. You find 27 matches, 13 of those are non-common so you are left with 14 potentially useful cards. Go through all of them and decide which of those you would like in your deck. Some of the letters have more than one. E.g. "L" has a creature with "Snow-covered Swampwalk" which is not so useful, and one with normal Swampwalk (Lost Soul), so pick the lost soul. The "M" spot also has 2, but one of them requires red mana in addition to black, so pick the other (Moor Fiend). Fill in letter slots one at a time ---------------------------------- On a piece of paper make a list of letters, one letter per line, each letter of the alphabet, or you can use my "ABC deck-build form" which I have conveniently placed on the web (may be accessed from the ABC page). On each line write the name of your selected card, but leave room for alternatives. Now go back and do the same search for white cards. You find that there are in fact no white creatures with swampwalk, as one would expect (why would angels feel at home in swamps?) You can now keep on searching this database for cards with all the abilities you were looking for. White "creature removal" is not as good as black (cage of hands, arrest, pacifism etc) they don't actually remove creatures, just prevent them from doing things. On the other hand they have no restrictions (work on both black and artifact creatures). White creatures with "tap target creature" abilities are also in a sense creature removal, at least they can prevent a creature from attacking and blocking for a turn. In addition to B/W cards you may also want to check if there are good artifacts, but for your first deck try to limit your searches, you will quickly get too many choices. The difficult letters first --------------------------- For many letters you will now have several choices, but for some you probably have nothing yet. Now you should first of all fill those difficult letter slots, because for those your hands are pretty much tied. When filling those slots you should also search for artifacts. When you have filled those slots, then go through the list, select for each letter the best card, but keep in mind (1) to have a good balance between creatures and removal (disenchant type spells should be counted as removal) (2) to have a good mana curve (3) to maybe have a few "combat tricks" (things that suddenly make your creatures better, or those of the opponent worse). They have be instant speed effects in order to be surprises (4) maybe to have a few things that make creatures better more permanently (e.g. equipments, creature enchantments) When you have your final list of cards, then count up the mana symbols, and decide how many swamps/plains to add. Sideboard --------- Now you have your deck. However, if your opponent does not play black then all your swampwalkers do not get their benefit. Therefore, for each swampwalker you should find an alternative card that works well against non-black decks (ideally a fear creature). Similarly, if your opponent plays black, or many artifact creatures, then your fear creatures do not get their benefit, so for those you should also find alternatives, ideally swampwalkers or white creatures with protection from black. All those cards should go into the sideboard. If you run a circle of protection from black, then you may want to add circles of other colours to the sideboard. Terror and similar spells do nothing against pure black decks, so find alternatives for those also. In the end, cut all the alternative cards down to a 15 card sideboard. Congratulations, you now have your first ABC-common deck! Getting the physical cards -------------------------- Now, take your list of cards along when we meet, or on a game night, or send it by email to someone with cards. We'll tell you what we can let you borrow, sell you, trade you. For the rest, you can start by making some proxies (click on the blue name of the card in the search engine, a pop-up appears with a scanned picture of the card. Download, scale and print the image. If you put it in a sleeve with another card behind it (e.g. a land), then you can play it like a normal card. Test the deck several times, find the weak spots and the strong sides. Tune it to either strengthen the weak spots, or drop them all together, they may not be possible to save. Focus your deck around what it is good at. When you are happy with your deck, go get the cards (all are common, i.e. most of them very cheap). Final important issue --------------------- Now the most important, a cool name. Since this is a Bogart theme deck you could call it "The African Queen", but that was actually made in colour, and should be a green deck anyway (lots of jungle there). A good name would be "Casablanca", or "Everybody comes to Ricks", but I'd probably call it "Here's looking at you kid". You also need to identify some main characters: Bogart (Rick) should be one of your white knights I think, Major Strasser one of the ghouls, Miss Ilsa (Bergman) could be a pretty little angel (she is not dangerous enough to be the Benalish Hero). And Sam? Good luck with it :-)