You don’t need to be able to design decks to be a successful Constructed Magic player. If you’re an extremely talented player, you can just monitor the Internet to see what you should be playing. As long as you choose a deck that’s good for your metagame and your play skills, you can be quite successful.

But where’s the fun in that? For many players, the creative process of deck design is the greatest joy and satisfaction of being a Magic player. Not to mention the glory that comes with being the designer of a deck that wins a tournament. In addition, while you can win a tournament with someone else’s deck, being able to design a great deck specifically for an event gives you an extra edge over the rest of the field.

Most players understand the basics of deck design: synergy, focus, curve, good mana, high power, and targeting the metagame. What many players fail to put enough emphasis on is maxing out the power of every single card in a deck and thus maxing out the power of that deck. When considering a card for your deck, there will often be many choices that could serve that function, but how do you determine which is best? Every card choice in your deck needs to be held to an extremely rigorous standard.

There are two big questions you need to ask: What is your deck trying to do? What else is going on in the environment? A good example would be if you were choosing a green 3-drop for your deck. There are many exciting green 3-drops worth considering in Standard at the moment:

There are three things your deck needs to be doing to max out the Champion. First, you need turn-one mana creatures such as Birds of Paradise and Llanowar Elves. Getting the Champion into play on turn two or on turn three and immediately playing a 1-drop can be a strong opening. It helps to put the Champion into play before playing your other creatures.

The third way to max out the Champion is to have cards that generate creatures coming into play while they are in play: Garruk, Strangleroot Geist, Mayor of Avabruck, Shrine of Loyal Legions. This can make the Champion into a solid top-deck.

As you can see, Champion of Lambholt can either be a good fit in the right deck or it can even be a card to design your concept around. The other question that needs to be addressed is: What is the rest of the field doing? For example, if you don’t expect your opponents to have potential blockers in play, one of the Champion’s more powerful abilities is irrelevant, making it less exciting. If you expect Spirit tokens from Lingering Souls everywhere trying to get in the way, that makes the Champion a better call.

Every detail matters. The Champion has in the cost. Will you have that by turn three? Does it benefit you that it’s a Human? Is Human Frailty being used in a lot of sideboards?

Dungrove Elder – This one is pretty obvious. If all of your lands are Forests, this guy’s a powerhouse. Most decks in Standard are full of nonbasic lands—even ones that contain two colors. Among other things, one of the big reasons to play green is that it helps you play multiple colors easier. If you’re playing multiple colors but green is your base and you have mostly Forests, it might still be worth it, especially if you place a high importance on hexproof in your deck or in the environment you’re competing in. Given the other great choices in green at 3 mana, it usually just comes down to whether you’re playing all Forests.

The real determining factor is: How much value can you get out of the fact that the Ooze is indestructible? Are there decks against which a cheap indestructible blocker is good? Are there decks that will kill all your other creatures but that lose to an indestructible one?

Splinterfright – While green has many strong options at 3, few are just generically powerful; they’re all looking for the right deck to make them powerful. Splinterfright is no exception. The most obvious drawback to Splinterfright is that you can play it on turn two or three and have it die immediately because your graveyard is empty.

Wolfir Avenger – The Avenger is perhaps the most generically powerful 3-drop in Standard right now. It’s good in any deck that can handle the casting cost. It’s an amazing surprise, regenerating blocker in a controlling deck, and it provides excellent durable pressure that can be played around permission in an aggressive deck. The main reason it’s not necessarily the most-played green 3-drop is that Constructed decks are currently so specialized that a more narrow card like one of the ones mentioned above will often be more powerful.

Wrapping Up

This is usually the defining point in deck construction—not what your deck’s trying to do or even how it’s trying to do it. It’s the precise contents of your deck; each card needs to have its presence in your deck fully justified. Just looking at the top-finishing decks from the recent StarCityGames Open Providence will show you that a number of players played virtually the same deck with similar structures and game plans but with many different choices of cards.

Bryant Cook finished third with a Delver deck using Invisible Stalkers and Runechanter's Pikes. Matt Costa’s sixteenth-place Delver deck had neither, but instead featured Phantasmal Image, Sword of Feast and Famine, and Faith's Shield. Chris Lachmann’s second-place Ramp deck used Whipflares and Devil's Play, while Joel Paradee’s eighteenth-place Ramp deck ran Zealous Conscripts and Bonfire of the Damned. In these cases, each player had a different idea of what cards would max out the power level of his deck and make him best prepared to face the metagame he was expecting. It’s not enough to decide what deck to build and play. You need to make the right card choices to max out your deck and thus max out your chances of winning the tournament.