In my articles about picking cards to fill roles (such as threats or removal), I invariably end up talking about theming. So, it would probably be worth my while to nail down what exactly constitutes a theme.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it’s a bit too broad to be of much use. The problem is that themes have enormous range, and it’s difficult to capture all of it under a single umbrella. Often, people associate themes with synergy; that offers an explanation for why a deck with a token theme might include Beastmaster Ascension, but it doesn’t explain everything. Not so long ago, a friend of mine started playing and built a Vampire deck, the oddity being that nothing rewarded him for playing Vampires. There were no Rakish Heirs, Captivating Vampires, or Malakir Bloodwitches. So, I asked him why, and he responded: “I had a lot of Vampires, and they’re cool.”

Vampire Nocturnus by Raymond Swanland

Cool counts for a lot. Whether you’re a hardcore Vorthos building a Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir deck with a lot of his own spellcraft or you just don’t want to include the decidedly non-Orzhovian Identity Crisis in your Obzedat, Ghost Council deck, you’re theming. Whether you cut all the non-Elves from your Ezuri, Renegade Leader deck or you just make room for Fireshrieker alongside Isperia the Inscrutable, you’re theming. Even choosing the Urza’s Legacy printing of Opportunity over the Magic 2014 Core Set copy for your Barrin, Master Wizard deck is theming. Most of these methods require you to go by feel, so there’s not much advice I can offer, but I can speak on synergistic theming.

Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

When building a theme on mechanical synergy, you’re ultimately looking to make the cards in your deck work more effectively than one would expect based on reading them. Some of us are driven to see pieces click together and patterns emerge, others by the desire to prove that they’re clever enough to make bad cards good, and others still just to find new experiences. But whatever the impetus, the tools used to unlock cards’ full potential are the same. Well, almost.

There are actually two ways to go about building a synergistic deck. The first is the province of GatheringMagic’s own Andrew Wilson; let’s call it the direct route. To follow the direct route, you find a powerful type of interaction and then build your deck to make it happen consistently. This might be using Flicker effects on creatures with enters-the-battlefield abilities, putting +1/+1 counters on creatures with persist, or reanimating a bunch of Shadowborn Apostles.

Shadowborn Apostle by Lucas Graciano

The results of the interaction will vary from game to game depending upon the specific cards you’re working with, but you’re always abusing the same loophole in costing or effect.

The second method is much more difficult, but more rewarding when it can be accomplished. We’ll call this the interlocking route. While following the interlocking route, you build an intricate latticework of synergies. Rather than everything tying back to one synergy, each group of cards is a link on a chain, connected at both ends. Take, for example, the Iname, Life Aspect deck I made back in November.

"The Cycle of Life"

• Commander (0)

• Draw (9)
• 1 Greater Good
• 1 Slate of Ancestry
• 1 Carven Caryatid
• 1 Haru-Onna
• 1 Primordial Sage
• 1 Soul of the Harvest
• 1 Glimpse of Nature
• 1 Collective Unconscious
• 1 Regal Force

• Gathering Spirits (6)
• 1 Altar of Dementia
• 1 Sands of Delirium
• 1 Birthing Pod
• 1 Survival of the Fittest
• 1 Lifespinner
• 1 Wild Pair

• Riding the Surge (7)
• 1 Briarknit Kami
• 1 Kodama of the South Tree
• 1 Door of Destinies
• 1 Akroma's Memorial
• 1 Bounteous Kirin
• 1 Venser's Journal
• 1 Nostalgic Dreams

• Removal (5)
• 1 Arashi, the Sky Asunder
• 1 Rending Vines
• 1 Oblivion Stone
• 1 All is Dust
• 1 Duplicant

• Spiritual Warriors (12)
• 1 Ayumi, the Last Visitor
• 1 Body of Jukai
• 1 Harbinger of Spring
• 1 Jugan, the Rising Star
• 1 Kodama of the Center Tree
• 1 Masumaro, First to Live
• 1 Myojin of Life's Web
• 1 Nightsoil Kami
• 1 Sekki, Seasons' Guide
• 1 Thousand-legged Kami
• 1 Yew Spirit
• 1 Chameleon Colossus

• Quick Ramp (11)
• 1 Life from the Loam
• 1 Kodama's Reach
• 1 Silverglade Pathfinder
• 1 Hermit Druid
• 1 Elder Pine of Jukai
• 1 Carpet of Flowers
• 1 Everflowing Chalice
• 1 Expedition Map
• 1 Sylvan Scrying
• 1 Reap and Sow
• 1 Crop Rotation

• Slow Ramp (16)
• 1 Emerald Medallion
• 1 Urza's Incubator
• 1 Planar Gate
• 1 Cloud Key
• 1 Vernal Bloom
• 1 Gauntlet of Power
• 1 Caged Sun
• 1 Mana Reflection
• 1 Boundless Realms
• 1 Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
• 1 Patron of the Orochi
• 1 Genesis Wave
• 1 Perilous Forays
• 1 Loam Dweller
• 1 Petalmane Baku
• 1 Tangleroot

• Lands (33)
• 1 Gaea's Cradle
• 1 Winding Canyons
• 1 Deserted Temple
• 1 Mosswort Bridge
• 1 Mystifying Maze
• 1 Reliquary Tower
• 1 Thawing Glaciers
• 1 Vesuva
• 1 Blasted Landscape
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Slippery Karst
• 1 Evolving Wilds
• 1 Terramorphic Expanse
• 1 High Market
• 19 Forest

Buy This Deck

Sacrifice outlets allow you to trigger Iname, Life Aspect, returning Spirits to your hand. Casting those Spirits generates mana, allowing you to cast more and put more Spirits into play. Numerous cards in the deck let you draw a bunch of cards as you play Spirits, finding more Spirits and mana acceleration before feeding all those Spirits to your sacrifice outlet and then beginning the process anew.

The difficulty lies in the fact that simply connecting the ends of the chain isn’t enough. Once you’ve built up a lot of links, you’ll run into issues drawing ones that aren’t connected, and you’ll be left with no synergy, such as with a token deck where you draw Crusades and Attritions but no token makers. To avoid this issue, every link needs to interface with most other links, but that’s not always simple to accomplish. If you can manage it, you’ll have a deck that stays exciting to play for years on end, but I find most of my own deck-building following the more reliable direct route.

Instant Connection

Whichever approach you follow, the initial steps are the same. You need to start with a card and find some interesting synergy with it. I spend hours combing card databases for interactions, but it’s quite simply unfeasible to actually look through all of Magic’s more than thirteen thousand cards every time you build a deck. Instead, you’ll want to figure out how to pinpoint cards you might not even know about that are likely to yield results.

Spitting Image by Jim Nelson

If any synergies did immediately jump out at you, you have a head start—there are more to be found among cards that share the relevant piece of text. For instance, knowing Thragtusk will work well with Momentary Blink will lead you to look for other cards with abilities that trigger upon entering or leaving the battlefield. But we can delve deeper. Where did that synergy spring from in the first place? The answer is often costs. Thragtusk costs , a card from your hand, the opportunity cost of being unable to cast it without green mana or before you hit your fifth land, and many other hidden costs. Most synergy stems from letting you generate an effect for less than it regularly costs. Momentary Blink doesn’t give you another 5/3 body, but it offers Thragtusk’s other effects for approximately half a card and . Similarly, where Attrition usually costs you a card to activate because you had to cast a creature, token generators will give you multiple uses for a single card.

Hidden Strings by Daarken

Working around subtler costs can likewise yield exciting results. Runeclaw Bear not only costs 2 mana and a card, it costs having a creature card in your library. That might not seem like much, but you’ll have a much better time Polymorphing Mutavault instead. Cards like Mutavault and Advent of the Wurm are what I like to refer to as “uncoupled;” they provide an effect without one of the costs that effect usually has that we take for granted. These cards become integral once you’re trying to abuse a card that’s balanced around one of these ingrained couplings like Enduring Renewal. Surely having creature cards to return to your hand must mean you could draw them from your library! Well, unless you Living Wish for them or use Necropotence instead of drawing cards.

Peer Pressure

But the subtlest cost to work around is opportunity cost: the chance that your cards won’t do what you need them to. Mitigating opportunity cost leads to some synergies so simple that we don’t even think of them as such—creatures make Equipment less likely to sit around doing nothing, and Equipment make creatures less likely to become outclassed in the late game. Each creature you add makes all of the Equipment better, and vice versa.

Brothers Yamazaki by Ron Spears

But mitigating opportunity cost also leads to subtler connections, such as the fact that Darksteel Sentinel is better in a Fumiko the Lowblood deck than in most other places. Opposing creatures attacking makes having impassable defenses more valuable, as they don’t just mean you’re not being attacked, but that somebody else is. Moreover, in a format where the Sentinel would often end up blocked by something bigger, such as Wurmcoil Engine, Fumiko ensures that it will push past for damage. Synergies like this exist at all levels, down to ones that have so little effect they aren’t worth worrying about, but even some seemingly small synergies can make an impact by dint of numbers.

There are tiny synergies everywhere if you take the time to look, but you’ll never uncover all of them. But I guess that’s a good thing: It means there are always more to find.