The Standard metagame is a steadily and quickly evolving beast. From week to week the dominant deck seems to change. Is it Titan Ramp, Blue/Black Control, Red Deck Wins or Blue/Red/Green Control this week? In general, the decks seem to fall into one of three categories:

1. Red and/or White Aggression: RDW, Boros, Quest for the Holy Relic, Uprising Red.
2. Blue Control: Mono-Blue, Blue/White, Blue/Black, Blue/Red/Green, Blue/Green, Blue/Red and Pyromancer's Ascension.
3. Non-Blue Control: Eldrazi Green, Valakut Ramp, Green/Red/Blue Fauna Shaman, Green/White/Blue Fauna Shaman, Mono-Red Control and Mono-Black Control.

I've spent most of this season playing RDW. I played it in three 5Ks and my best finish was third place. My list looked like this:

"RDW"

• Creatures (16)
• 4 Goblin Guide
• 4 Plated Geopede
• 4 Kiln Fiend
• 4 Kargan Dragonlord

• Spells (20)
• 4 Forked Bolt
• 4 Burst Lightning
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Assault Strobe
• 4 Staggershock

• Lands (24)
• 4 Teetering Peeks
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Arid Mesa
• 12 Mountains

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I started playing it early in the Post-Scars Standard season, in part because Eldrazi Green and Valakut Ramp were really popular and they were just too slow to beat me. Since I was running so much burn, I also matched up well against lots of small creature decks, like Boros and Fauna Shaman decks. Generally, my toughest matches seem to be against U/W Control and U/B Control. I frequently can quickly get them down to five or less life, but often have trouble finishing them off.

Playing the same deck over and over can pay big dividends. Knowing how to play against and sideboard against each matchup can win you close matches. Knowing what kinds of hands you should mulligan matters.

On the other hand, ignoring changes to the metagame because you've grown too attached to one deck can be bad also. While I keep tuning and playing RDW, each week I'm designing new decks in an effort to find one that is going to be able to match up well with whatever the current metagame is. After losing one too many matches to U/B Control, I designed an updated version of Dredgevine:

"Dredgevine"

• Creatures (36)
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Hedron Crab
• 4 Enclave Cryptologist
• 4 Fauna Shaman
• 4 Lotus Cobra
• 4 Bloodghast
• 4 Vengevine
• 2 Gravedigger
• 2 Molten-Tail Masticore
• 2 Aether Adept
• 2 Sylvan Ranger

• Lands (24)
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 4 Verdant Catacombs
• 4 Darkslick Shores
• 2 Swamp
• 5 Island
• 5 Forest

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The mana base is a little shaky against decks like RDW that kill my Birds and Cobras, but U/W Control and U/B Control have seemed like a bye so far in my testing and one FNM standard event. I'm still tuning the Dredgevine deck and will probably play it in another tournament soon, but today I want to design a deck from the ground up with you.

When starting deck design from scratch, there are a few things I consider for Inspiration:

1. What kinds of cards are good against the top of the metagame?
2. Is there an existing deck that I think I can improve upon or draw ideas from?
3. Are there any cards that can be abused, but nobody seems to be using?
4. What kinds of patterns are there in the metagame? Are people playing with a few big creatures or lots of small creatures? Are people mostly playing control or aggro? Are people playing with lots Planeswalkers? Enchantments? Non-basic land? Artifacts?
5. Can I combine ideas from multiple decks in the metagame into one deck?
6. Is there a card or cards that seem powerful enough that I want to design an entire deck around it? Perhaps a specific card combination?

I've been seeing a lot of mono-black control lately, but none have seemed to be making it to the finals of tournaments. I also really like the U/B Control deck with Trinket Mage that Nick Spagnolo has been dominating 5Ks with lately. I've been a fan of MBC for many years and I'm curious if we can flip U/B Control into B/U Control, built more like MBC, but better. Here is what I've come up with so far:

"Black Trinket Control"

• Creatures (22)
• 3 Bloodghast
• 1 Nantuko Shade
• 4 Gatekeeper of Malakir
• 4 Liliana’s Specter
• 4 Trinket Mage
• 3 Abyssal Persecutor
• 1 Molten-Tail Masticore
• 1 Bloodhusk Ritualist
• 1 Chimeric Mass

• Spells (13)
• 1 Elixir of Immortality
• 1 Brittle Effigy
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb
• 4 Sign in Blood
• 1 Mimic Vat
• 3 Diabolic Tutor
• 1 Consuming Vapors
• 1 Everflowing Chalice

• Lands (25)
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 4 Creeping Tarpit
• 4 Darkslick Shores
• 4 Drowned Catacombs
• 2 Tectonic Edge
• 10 Swamp

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 1 Vampire Hexmage
• 1 Consume the Meek
• 1 Marsh Casualties
• 1 Doomblade
• 1 Memoricide
• 1 Skinrender
• 4 Duress
• 4 Disfigure

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When building a new deck, you need to make sure you have certain elements in place:

1. A way to deal with creatures. It's dangerous to have too much of your main deck dedicated to your opponent's creatures, because he may not have many or any. However, if you don't address creatures at all, it's usually a recipe for disaster. This is one of the reasons I love playing Red: burn spells are great against creatures, but they're also great if your opponent doesn't have any. In this case, I have seven cards that can dispose of my opponent's creatures and lots of cards to help me get them. On the other hand, the way my deck is designed, it's almost impossible for any of these cards to be completely dead cards in a matchup.
2. Card advantage. There are many forms of card advantage. The most obvious are card drawing and mass removal. Many aggressive decks try to gain a form of card advantage by making the game so short that their opponent's expensive spells are dead cards. This deck is loaded with card advantage. Trinket Mage, Sign in Blood, Liliana's Specter and Gatekeeper of Malakir are all built in two-for-ones. Cards like Bloodhusk Ritualist and Mimic Vat have the ability to be even greater card advantage.
3. Consistency. This is frequently accomplished through redundancy. For many decks, this just means playing with lots of four ofs and cards that serve similar functions to each other. My RDW deck has 16 creatures I can play by turn two and 12 one mana burn spells. As a result, my draws will almost always have an early creature and a cheap burn spell. In this case, I'm depending more on card draw and search to give me the consistency I desire.
4. Speed. This basically means either being able to Overwhelm your opponent quickly like most aggressive decks or being able to keep yourself from being overwhelmed early and ideally taking control of the game quickly. In this case, I'm trying to keep my mana curve low with lots of action in the early turns of the game. I only actually have eight cards that cost more than three mana and none that cost more than four mana. After sideboarding, I will usually be speeding up my deck more by bringing in either four Disfigure or four Duress, depending on the matchup.
5. Lots of action/gas. For most decks, this is accomplished through card advantage, like card drawing. For aggressive decks, they usually want to win the game before they inevitably get to the point where they are mana flooding and hoping to get lucky draws off the top of their deck. In this deck, I may not have high casting cost spells, but I have lots of things to sink mana into over the course of the game, such as: Tarpits, Mimic Vat, Nantuko Shade, Masticore, Tectonic Edge and Chimeric Mass.
6. A good mana base. You need to have enough land/mana and enough sources of each color you're playing. If you play cards like Birds and Elves you can play less land, but beware of depending too much on them and losing to cards like Pyroclasm, Forked Bolt and Arc Trail. In this case, I'm running 25 land and an Everflowing Chalice. I'm also running Sign in Blood, which helps keep me from mana stalling. My Mages can fetch my Chalice and my Tutors can fetch land. My deck is very heavy Black, but I'm running 23 land that produce Black mana, which should be plenty. I'm also running 12 sources of Blue for four cards with a single Blue requirement, which seems like more than enough. It might take me awhile to start attacking with my Tarpits, but that's fine.
7. A plan for each of the major decks in the metagame. Another example of the comforting simplicity of playing RDW. If they play early creatures, you burn them. Other than that, you play creatures and attack until you can finish your opponent with burn. That doesn't mean RDW doesn't benefit from high level piloting, because it does. It just means that the plan against various decks in the metagame is very similar. In this case, the core of my deck should be good against most decks: creatures to attack with, hand destruction and untargeted creature removal. In addition, I'm playing with enough search and one of cards that can help me in specific situations, that hopefully I can tune my deck on the fly for any given matchup. One of the nice things about having so much search, is that I can make small changes to the deck over time to keep up with the shifting metagame.
8. Enough victory paths. Another way I love RDW. Every card in the deck is directly focused on advancing me closer to winning. Every spell is either a creature intended to do lots of damage, a direct damage spell or a way to do more damage. This deck has lots of cards that aren't victory paths. It does have 23 creatures though and that doesn't count Mimic Vat, Tarpits or Chimeric Mass. I'm not going to be shut down by a couple Memoricide. Some of the threats are really nasty, like Abyssal Persecutor, others are really resilient, like Bloodghast.

With many of my decks, I pick the best 8-10 cards for my strategy and I play four of each. With this deck, there are interesting decisions about how many of a given card to play. In general, I like my four of cards to fit into one of a few categories: something I would like to play in the first couple turns every game, something I don't mind having more than one of in my opening hand and/or something that's important to making the deck function well. Three ofs are similar, but they are usually a little more expensive and something I don't usually want to draw more than one of early, but would be fine drawing one every game and even drawing more than one over the course of a game. I rarely play exactly two copies of a card. In the case of Tectonic Edge, I would rather not have one in my opening hand, but I could easily see using one and at some point want to tutor for another one. I usually don't play single copies of cards either, but in the case of a deck with search like Trinket Mage, Fauna Shaman or Diabolic Tutor, it makes lots of sense.

So I haven't put this deck to the test against the metagame yet, but I will do that and let you know how it goes next week. In the meanwhile, I hope it has served to give you some ideas of how you can design decks of your own. If you like this one, feel free to try it out and comment on how it works for you.