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Welcome back to Part 2, the final half of this two-part series in which I offer up the list of twenty questions I ask every deck before sending it out into the wilds of multiplayer Magic. If you haven’t read the first half, I recommend checking it out. Assuming many of you are either lazy or read it last week but can’t remember, here are the first nine questions:
- Can the deck kill a creature with something other than attacking creatures?
- Can the deck deal with enchantments?
- Can the deck deal with artifacts?
- Can the deck deal with nonbasic lands?
- Does the deck have enough land?
- Does the deck have the correct ratios of one color to the other?
- Does the deck have a way to kill a planeswalker?
- Does the deck have mass removal?
- Can the deck stop flyers?
Now that the bookkeeping is out of the way and everyone is up to speed, let’s get back on track!
10. Can your deck tutor for the card it needs? (Reduce)
11. Can your deck draw more than just one card per turn? (Reuse)
12. Can your deck recur cards? (Recycle)
Maybe it is a bit of cheating to make these three separate questions, but if your deck can’t answer at least one of these positively, you need to make that happen. It took me forever to finally understand how important it is to draw more cards. Invariably, I’d be building a deck and look at a card that said “draw a card” and decide that rather than wasting a card for that, why not just put in more good stuff? I finally realized the error of my ways with Rhystic Study. I was drawing more cards than I could use. I realized how much better off I was when I could keep the best seven of twelve cards rather than simply drawing the single card every turn from my draw phase.
Recommendations: Again, this is different for each deck and personal play style, but I prefer incremental increases over massive leaps. Drawing five cards at once is nice, but everyone at the table perks right up when they see it happen. You suddenly become the center of attention. Cantrips are something no one even seems to care about, but if you play them consistently, your hand size will always be close to seven without ever appearing too gaudy. On the other hand, Consecrated Sphinx is a ton of fun, and you get to see if your opponents asked twenty questions!
13. How quickly can your deck recover from a mass removal spell?
This whole section is my recommendation: Just as you should always have mass removal, you should always try to be ready for it. I’m not suggesting that you be holding a counter at the ready to stop someone from playing it at any moment. What I am saying is: “Don’t overcommit! Hold back cards!” Before you play your next creature, ask yourself if you really need it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it in your hand and ready to play right after one of your opponents Wraths the table?
The same is true of all those lands you keep playing every turn. Think back to your last multiplayer game. I’ll bet someone drew a card, gave a disgusted look, and threw down his twelfth land. You knew he had nothing else in hand, and now you knew he drew nothing. If you don’t remember that from your last game, it was probably you who did it. Hold your cards! Let your opponents wonder what horrors you have in store for them. They may not play those mass removal spells if they think you can counter them or if they think you are just going to load up the board again.
14. Is your deck running any graveyard removal?
Some of these questions are dependent on your metagame, and some are not. This is not dependent on your metagame. Someone in your next game is going to be using the graveyard as a resource. It is a guarantee. Karador, Ghost Chieftain and The Mimeoplasm are recently printed ways to abuse a graveyard. Flashback, threshold, retrace, and haunt are just a few abilities that use the graveyard. ’Goyfs care about cards in your graveyard. Straight up, old-school recursion uses the graveyard. Graveyards are just exposed libraries that take a little bit of work to use. You spent all that effort getting rid of opponents’ creatures, and now they are just getting them all back to make you do it again. Simply putting cards into your opponents’ graveyards is only a start against some decks. You have to be able to empty an opponent’s graveyard.
Recommendations: Bojuka Bog and Tormod's Crypt are my go-to cards. They aren’t fancy or earth-shattering tech, but they get the job done. If you are using lands that make you return another land to your hand, return the Bog. Now everyone knows you can wipe out a graveyard when they least want you to.
While I haven’t tried it, Morningtide looks like an interesting option when graveyard recursion has heavily infested your playgroup.
15. Does your deck have a way to stop losing due to milling?
While almost every metagame has someone abusing the graveyard, milling is not as common. Right now, my metagame has some of this, so it is a good idea for my decks to be ready. If you are starting to see these decks pop up in your playgroup, you will want to do the same. This archetype generally comes at you from a different angle than you can normally defend, so be ready.
Recommendations: I know some people like Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or some card that allows them to automatically put their graveyard into their library when it goes to the graveyard. That’s generally a good plan, but it tends to use a card that is good for nothing else, and I’m not thrilled with that. I don’t have a very good plan for this, so I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments.
16. Can your deck protect its essential card; or, Does your deck have an essential card?
Recommendations: This is genuinely difficult since it is so dependent on the key card. Suggesting Lightning Greaves or some piece of Equipment that gives shroud or hexproof is great for a creature that can wear it, but not so great if your key card is an enchantment. Privileged Position protects a wider swath of cards and is particularly fun when you have two of them out. That Which was Taken is a novel way of protecting your stuff without shroud, especially if your Commander is Skullbriar, the Walking Grave. Making the permanent untargetable is nice, but you may even want to consider a way to play something that appears more threatening to your playgroup, diverting their attention from the true threat. This doesn’t work repeatedly, but it is a consideration.
17. How is your deck’s mana curve?
Set your deck out by mana curve and see where most of the cards fall. If you find that most of your deck is landing in the 6 mana cost or higher columns, or for that matter, if half of your cards have the same converted mana cost, you have some work to do.
Recommendations: This is less about a specific card and more about revamping your deck. Do you lower your curve or add ramp so that your curve is more attainable before turn one? I hate losing games when I have nothing on the board and great cards in hand that I can’t cast yet.
18. Can your deck win?
After you have jumped through the rest of the hoops these questions offer, you want to go back and make sure you haven’t taken out your path to victory. The path to victory is probably the reason you choose to build the deck the way you did. How much fun will you have if you had to take it out in order to have all the answers to the questions? Being able to stuff your opponents again and again is great, but eventually, you will die without a way to win. Boring.
19. Can your deck win? 1.1
This is your alternate path to victory. It doesn’t have to be all kinds of crazy, but you need a backup plan for those unfortunate times when an opponent is so rude as to interrupt your planned win. Even if the backup plan is to use all the utility creatures you have to gut your way to victory, you need something. I have lost too many games in which my plan of putting out four hundred Pegasus tokens was foiled, and I had no realistic way to win. Now I stop and ask myself what the backup plan is.
20. What are your opponents going to do?
We’ve come to the final question, and we’ve saved the best for last. If you are playing against strangers, you can’t really answer this question, so you will have to make your best guesses and rely on your deck’s ability to answer the previous nineteen questions. If you are going for your weekly game against your friends, you should have some idea what your friends are doing. Knowing what they are running allows you to take chances with the first nineteen questions. If no one is trying to mill anyone out, you don’t really have to do much to answer that question. If everyone in your playgroup is running some kind of graveyard recursion, a single Tormod's Crypt and a Bojuka Bog are only going to be the first step in answering that question. Think of this question as an aid. Use your knowledge to determine how strongly you need to answer each of the previous questions.
Recently, I noticed that my friends are running theme decks with Knights, Saprolings, Treefolk, and Zombies. It is obviously time for Tsabo's Decree and Extinction to make their way into my decks. My opponents have noticed that a number of my decks are enchantment-heavy. It is time to either ramp up my ability to protect the enchantments or shift the decks so they are not so reliant on that type of permanent.
Your metagame is the biggest factor in determining how strongly you need to answer the other nineteen questions. Always keep it in mind, and the questions will start to answer themselves.
Bruce Richard
