#mtg tips

@that-sure-is-a-person

Hope you don't mind me making this it's own post but I wanted to go more in depth than a comment would make. I'm breaking this into two parts: deck building and obtaining cards

Part 1 - deck building and what to build around

If you're just starting to get into MTG, the biggest advice I can give for deck building is to focus more on card synergy than on building a big collection.

What I mean is this - there's a lot of strategies that work really well in mtg, but it can be really overwhelming building a deck when there's so many options available. The best way to counter this is to pick one strategy and make sure your deck does it well.

For this example I'm gonna turn to the current set, and find a card that we can use to build around. Bloomburrow (the most recent set at the time of this writing) is mostly focused on kindred decks, meaning decks that do well when you have a lot of the same creature type. For this example, I'm going to use this guy:

Squirrels. Sure. Why not?

We're gonna kill our opponent with squirrels.

So the above creature has a power and times of 2/2, with it's ability, if another squirrel is on the field, it becomes a 3/3, and so on. He's a rare, so might be a bit tougher to come across, but easier to get our hands on than a mythic rare card.

Let's see what cards work well with him.

Ah, here we go.

Notice how each card here synergizes with squirrels. Our dreyleader is uncommon, and arguably better than the rare we built the deck around. It doesn't have a constant +1/+1, but it starts out with counters that functionally give the same thing, and it keeps those counters if your creatures start to die. It also gets another every time a squirrel or food enters the battlefield under your control.

Squirrel nest and chitterspitter will be great for pumping out more squirrels, but chitterspitter has the extra benefit of giving your squirrels a buff by sacrificing one. All of these buffs stack, so having squirrel horde and chitterspitter both out will give the horde +2/+2 for every squirrel.

From here you can throw in more cards to pump out tokens, or other squirrels that have other effects. There's a few ways this can go, but finding 2 or 3 cards to base your deck around helps alot.

A few other notes -

In most formats you can have a max of 4 of any card. You have to have a minimum of 60 cards in a standard deck.

But Cece? You say, what if I want more than 60?

That's the devil talking. The closer you are to 60 cards, the more likely it is you'll draw one of the cards you actually need.

What about land?

This really depends on the deck. Arena uses 24 as the default, but if you have a lot of cards with low mana cost, you can go fewer. If you have a lot of resource heavy cards, you need to go higher. This deck seems to revolve around cards with a mana cost of 3, which is fairly low. We can probably get away with running fewer lands.

My suggestion: count the man's symbols in the top right of every card. You should start off with about half of the total number of mana symbols for your lands, and then adjust from there.

Part 2: obtaining cards

Since you're playing arena, you get a chance to practice already. The easiest way I find to get cards both in arena and irl is by doing drafts.

Drafting is fairly simple. You open a pack, pick a card you want, and pass the pack to the left. At the end, you use all of the cards you've picked and some lands to build a 40-card draft deck. You then compete against other drafters in best of 3 matches to potentially win more packs of cards.

Best case scenario you get the top prize, but most players will usually come home with an extra pack or two.

In the worst case scenario, so long as you picked cards that work with each other, you go home with the same amount of cards that you would have by spending the same amount on booster packs, and all the cards you picked out are cards you chose yourself instead of random ones.

MTG arena has a quick draft that's pretty easy to get into, and is good practice for the real deal. Don't bother spending gems on the deluxe draft. Just save your coins from playing until you can quick draft.

If you don't have drafts near you, then I'd suggest getting the larger packs that come with lands. You can usually get at least a couple decks built out of it. Most sets usually also have starter decks that you can just buy outright and tweak as you go.

A few other points -

1. Multi color decks are fun, but generally more difficult to build in a balanced way because you have to rely more heavily on balancing your lands to get the cards you need. I suggest no more than 2 colors per deck if you're a newer player until you get used to seeing how they mesh with each other.

2. Rarer doesn't always mean better. Some of the best cards in the game are commons. Focus on how they talk to each other instead of how valuable they are when building. That super rare card you pulled is useless if it doesn't have anything to work with!

3. Try every strategy at least once. My least favorite color in magic was black when I started. Now it's the color I personally do best with.

4. If all else fails, my fallback strategy is to take all my red "burn" spells (anything that does direct damage), mix em with some cheap creatures with high attack and low defense, and play super aggressive. This is called "red deck wins" and is a great way to make people mad at you.

You're gonna wanna set your water to a boil of about 200 degrees

And firmly folding him into shape you're gonna wanna just shove him into the pot

My friend dragged me into playing Magic: The Gathering when I was 25, worked way too much, and had almost zero hobbies other than doing nothing and smoking.  All I can say is that I wish he had done it sooner, like a decade sooner.  I wish I had gotten in on the ground floor of Magic in every department: collecting, playing, deck building, and learning.  The game is amazing.  The cards could have been an investment the way my sports’ cards never turned out to be, and I could have actually learned how to play the game well.  At 25 and working 70 hours a week (yes, legitimately 70), I used Magic as a mindlessly constructive, social outlet with friends so not to go crazy.  8 years later and it’s still my mindless hobby that comes and goes depending upon how much time I have to do other things.  I may go months or even years without playing, but, damn, I love this game.  Along the way, I’ve learned a few things. 

First, I’m not good at the game by any means.  To be good at Magic, it can’t be a mindless hobby I use just to take my mind off work.  Magic requires focus, thinking, study, strategic planning, quick decisions, and problem solving.  Magic is a constantly shifting rubix cube, like chess but with more moving pieces and variables. Nothing about those things are mindless.  I lose to myself more than I lose to anything else, partially due to lack of practice, partially due to picking up the game later in life, but mainly due to me not being very good because I play the game mindlessly. I don’t take time to read cards before I make plays or gain as much information as I can on each turn.  Information is king in Magic.  All of my best plays I’ve made based on knowing, and that leads to wins.  All my dumbest decisions I’ve made mindlessly, and they led to losing. Almost directly.  No matter how much I try to tell myself that if I tried I could be good, I couldn’t because I use the game for something opposite of what makes a successful Magic player: to not think, to not care, to do nothing with my time.  I still occasionally frequent small IQs to keep my hopes up, but mainly I go to these events to test my favorite part of Magic: Deck Building.