‘Autodidacts’ are people who, for various reasons, teach themselves how to do things, rather than being taught by others. Of course none of us lives in a vacuum, and all of us receive guidance in the form of implicit or explicit instructions from others, so there are no ‘pure’ autodidacts. For the purposes of this article, let’s just say that to qualify as an autodidact you must spend the vast majority of your time learning a subject on your own: let’s say 75% or more, if you need to quantify it.

Partly because I spent a lot of my adult life travelling, moving from one social group to another, and partly because I loathe net-decking as much as I love rogue decks, I ended up teaching myself how to build decks from the ground up. Thus, I consider myself to be an autodidact of Magic: The Gathering. There are some virtues to this path: you learn to trust your gut, to take nothing for granted, and have ultimate pride in your craftsmanship. The vices are all there, too: autodidacts are notoriously stubborn, resistant to well-intentioned advice, and, in their worst moments, vain.

Since you’re reading this article, I’ll assume that you’re not as terminally hard-headed as I often am, and that you might benefit from my approach, without having to go through all of the suffering I did to arrive at these conclusions. Today, I’m going to describe the four general principles which guide my deckbuilding, (which help me go a middling 2-1 at almost every FNM; occasionally better) and illustrate these with a concrete example: the one time I broke Standard in half, and only 32 people noticed. Let’s get started with the four basic principles: (1) do something every turn, (2) look for synergies, (3) maximize your options, and (4) make it your own. I’ve woven an automotive analogy through the descriptions of these principles in order to assist the mechanically inclined.

1: Do Something Every Turn

Magic is not a forgiving game. You won’t often have the luxury of sitting around and developing a perfect board situation, or waiting for your ideal top-deck. It’s important to have a plan from Turn 1 until your projected window for closing out the game, and be proactive about executing it as soon as possible, even if Turn 1 is spent ‘setting up future color fixing’, i.e. staring at a tapped land.

Tempo is the motor of your deck, and no deckbuilder can afford to ignore this aspect of the game. If you have a bunch of cool 7-drop cards in your hand, but die on Turn 6, it will never matter that you drew them: they were blanks, for all intents and purposes. Similarly, if you play out your entire hand by Turn 4 and you still haven’t won, if you have no gas left and no Plan B, then you’ve misjudged in the opposite direction: you brought a rabbit to a bear fight.

[table id=2 /]

From the lens of this first principle, look at each turn of a Magic game like you would a decade of your life, with Turn 1 representing your infancy until you’re 10 years old; Turn 2 representing your teenage years, Turn 3 representing your twenties, and so on. You’re going to want to do the most from Turns 1-4, with Turns 5-6 being decisive and important. After that, most decks should have a retirement plan, that is, a way to end the game before it drags on too long. When goldfishing (self-testing against an imaginary opponent who does nothing), a deck with a Turn 5 or Turn 6 kill clock is pretty respectable; everything later I’d consider too slow, and anything sooner I’d consider quite aggressive. In Magic, as in life, you need to make a plan to ensure you do the most with the time you’re given.

2: Look For Synergies

Standalone cards are, by their nature, great on their own. However, standalone cards are even better when they’re enmeshed in a deck which is geared to take full advantage of all of their attributes and abilities. If you take the time to explore both the corner-case interactions and the mainline synergies available to you, you’ll multiply the power of your deck exponentially.

By way of analogy, philosophers Thomas Hurka and John Tasioulas have writtenThomas Hurka and John Tasioulas, “Games and the Good”, in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1), 2006, pp. 222-3. on the subject of knowledge that we can consider a standalone bit of knowledge as having a value of one; but a bit of knowledge which explains another (dependent) bit is worth two. Moreover, a precise bit of knowledge is worth more than an imprecise one, and a bit of knowledge which connects or unifies several other bits of knowledge might be worth several times as much as those bits which get connected. But what does all of that have to do with deckbuilding, you say?

Well, imagine that you have a bunch of creatures in your deck, but they’re not interacting with each other except for the fact that they occupy different places on the curve. Applying the Hurka-Tasioulas analogy, we can see that what’s missing here is a bit of connection which could give each of them more power: maybe [card]Stoneforge Masterwork[/card], which buffs equipped creatures along the lines of shared creature types, or perhaps [card]Elemental Bond[/card] for card draw, if size unites them better than type. Overall synergy is the chassis your deck rides on: you should make sure everything fits together snugly before taking it out for a spin.

3: Maximize Your Options

Any card that gives you a choice, especially modal cards which specifically spell out a menu of options for you, are golden. These will give you the power to interact and wiggle out of otherwise terminal situations, instead of sitting there helpless. If the card is not in popular usage, so much the better: you now have the tactical advantage of surprise on your side as well.
Cards that branch off into multiple possibilities are the gearbox of your deck. They give you the ability to shift from ‘proactive’ to ‘reactive’, from ‘card advantage’ to ‘threat management’. In their absence, you’re stuck in one mode. You know what they call life with no choices? Prison. Don’t unintentionally build one for yourself in your deck by excluding these important modal cards.

4: Make It Your Own

This is the hardest principle to execute, because it is essentially a matter of feel. You’ll know if the deck is right or not when you play it; you’ll figure out which cards speak to you and which don’t. I’ve cut some tournament staple cards which just felt ‘wrong’, and contrarily I’ve included some generally despised cards which felt absolutely ‘right’ in the decks I was brewing. This feel is the last filter you should apply to your decklist; it’s like putting an awesome paint job on your custom-built hotrod.

Think about this ‘feel’ in terms of being at a club and a song comes on: is it better if it’s someone else’s favorite song, or if it’s your favorite song? Avoiding unnecessary cognitive dissonance, by listening to your personal tastes and preferences and going with them, will give you the focus and enthusiasm to power through situations wherein others would likely give up. If you’ve done your homework on the other three principles, you’re ready to turn off your targeting computer and just blow up that goddamn Death Star!

The Four Principles in Action

When I was living in Glasgow in 2006, I was playing regularly with a clique of Pro Tour hopefuls, driving from town to town on the weekends, playing at dodgy venues and eating a lot of pub grub. I was in the beginning phases of taking the game seriously, and being taken seriously at playing the game by others: but I had yet to earn my chops with a ‘big win’.

It was important for me to get better at the game, but being an autodidact, it was also important to me to get better at it in my own way. At the time, there was much ado about a popular Standard tournament coming up: all the big players in the area would be there, and there were going to be trophies commissioned for the winner and the runner-up.A promise which was never honored, as it happened. Highlander Games #stillwaiting Anyway, I started brewing on my own and came up with the following beautiful hot mess, which I dubbed “Sphinx Crossing”, as the plan was to stall out my opponent early game, and then play a couple of mid-game [card]Time Stop[/card]s while my army of Sphinxes flew through the red zone multiple times:

Sphinx Crossing – Christopher Yorke

[deck]
[Lands]
23 Island
1 Minamo, School at Water’s Edge
[/Lands]
[Spells]
4 Annex
1 Confiscate
2 Consuming Vortex
4 Eye of Nowhere
2 Reach Through Mists
3 Remand
2 Time Stop
[/Spells]
[Creatures]
2 Callow Jushi
4 Cerulean Sphinx
4 Ethereal Usher
3 Jushi Apprentice
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
4 Teardrop Kami
[/Creatures]
[Sideboard]
3 Hinder
1 Evacuation
1 Exhaustion
1 Soramaro, First to Dream
2 Consuming Vortex
1 Eerie Procession
1 Flow of Ideas
1 Remand
1 Mana Leak
1 Reweave
1 Time Stop
1 Disrupting Shoal
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]

To this day, one of my crowning moments in my personal Magic career was beating James Love’sA truly great player and leader of the Scottish Magic scene, and a good friend of mine. [card]Heartbeat of Spring[/card] deck in the finals, Time Stopping him just as he was about to resolve a lethal [card]Maga, Traitor to Mortals[/card], and then getting in with my big stupid fliers for the win on the next turn. When the dust had cleared, my odd little deck had done it, trampling over a field of 32 serious players, to take first place. But how?

Well, my deck was built to come out cheap, and disrupt or cycle from Turn 1, deny resources on Turn 2, gain card advantage on Turn 3, ramp on Turn 4, and drop a game-dominating spell by Turn 5. The plan was rock-solid, like a bank robbery in its timing, and it was backed up by a wicked web of synergies. People don’t expect Turn 3 [card]Callow Jushi[/card], Turn 4 double [card]Eye of Nowhere[/card], bounce two of your lands, flip Jushi into Jaraku the Interloper, and then lock you out of the game with multiple Miscalculation-esque free activated abilities because you’re (now) short on mana.

[card]Ethereal Usher[/card] was also a shock for people to see, and was loudly mocked at first, but it brought my hypothetical [card]Cerulean Sphinx[/card] count up to eight, [card]Time Stop[/card] to six, and [card]Confiscate[/card] to five. In a stall, it could be played straight to deliver a ki counter and make a Sphinx unblockable next turn. Minamo was a no-cost-to-include removal spell, as most people forgot that the flip cards became legendary, and so would attack their 2/2 creatures into a freshly-untapped Jaraku or Tomoya an average of once a match. [card]Teardrop Kami[/card] was a removal spell in the same way, as it could stay on the board unnoticed until called upon to untap a Sphinx on defense. Kira was great too, as careless players would waste removal on my important creatures, only to be reminded that their spell had been auto-countered by Kira’s static ability. The sideboard (3 Hinder, 1 [card]Evacuation[/card], 1 [card]Exhaustion[/card], 1 [card]Soramaro, First to Dream[/card], 2 [card]Consuming Vortex[/card], 1 [card]Eerie Procession[/card], 1 [card]Flow of Ideas[/card], 1 [card]Remand[/card], 1 [card]Mana Leak[/card], 1 Reweave, 1 [card]Time Stop[/card], and 1 [card]Disrupting Shoal[/card], if you’re curious) was a tight extension of all of the deck’s main themes, and there are augments for the motor, chassis, gearbox, and even paint job hidden in there.

If You Build It, They Will Come (Occasionally)

While the solitary nature of autodidactic deckbuilding is not for everyone, and won’t succeed all of the time (in fact, you’ll fail more often than not), I can say for certain that there’s no greater joy the game can provide you than winning a big tourney with a brew of your own design. What I’ve given you here today is a recipe for being mediocre 90% of the time, with occasional forays into true greatness. As for the future, I’m thinking of making a remix of Sphinx Crossing, with 4 [card]Part the Waterveil[/card] and 4 [card]Guardian of Tazeem[/card] as the backbone… We’ll see how it all plays out this PPTQ season.