Do you want to write a primer?

Pandora's Deckbox

Epochalyptik

12 April 2015

21274 views

As many of you may have noticed, having a detailed deck description helps you attract feedback, and it gives other users specific ideas to address in their comments. A fullsome description also helps you convey your expertise and establishes you as a knowledgeable player. In one of my older articles, Getting More Views on Your Decks, I covered some of the basics of having a good description to accompany your decklist. Now, I'll go over some of the specifics.

This article will teach you how to write a strong primer for any deck, and it will also give you the code you need to format it properly.

Table of Contents

1. The Basics of the Deck
   1. Deck Name
   2. Context
2. The Primer
   1. Introduction
   2. Reading the decklist
   3. Deck colors
   4. Strengths and weaknesses
   5. General strategy
   6. Combos and synergies
   7. Card choices
   8. How to build this deck
   9. Event report
   10. Change log
   11. Feedback
3. The Code
4. Conclusion

Before we get to the primer itself, we should start with a few basic principles. For example, what is the name of your deck? Is it creative? What's the context of your deck's construction? Is it casual or competitive? Do you have a budget? Does the deck have an event record? Do you need to beat a certain meta? These are all things you should consider ahead of time; doing so will make your life easier when we get to the primer itself.

Deck name

Your deck's name is the first thing anyone will see in a link to your list or on the deck page itself. It has to stand out. If you poke around the site for a bit, you'll notice that a lot of decks have pretty generic names like "Abzan Midrange" or "Burn" or "Grixis Control." Some of these decks probably also have a "(suggestions needed)" in the title, and most of them probably have pretty low vote, comment, and view totals. That's because they're generic decks; the names don't draw people to the list, so they get fewer views and even fewer comments and ratings. Often, the users who view these lists are the ones who play the same deck or one of its matchups and are checking out what other people are doing with the list.

So it's pretty clear that generic names are a no-go when it comes to generating interest and feedback. (You shouldn't include the call for suggestions, either.) But what do you want to do? Well, give your deck a creative name, for starters. I'll shamelessly advertise two of my own decks here to give you an example:

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Dominus - Dreamcrusher Edition

Commander / EDH Epochalyptik

SCORE: 1279 | 2951 COMMENTS | 351447 VIEWS | IN 574 FOLDERS

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0% Basic

Commander / EDH Epochalyptik

SCORE: 190 | 140 COMMENTS | 16662 VIEWS | IN 41 FOLDERS

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The first deck is a BUG combo-control build meant for use in competitive Commander games. The second is a five-color Hermit Druid combo-control build designed for the same kind of meta. Now, I could have given these decks fairly middle-of-the-road names like "Damia Combo" or "Hermit Druid Combo," but neither of those is really appealing. Inject some creativity into your work. Even if you feel like you're playing the same kind of deck that many other people are (this is more of a concern for Standard, Modern, and Legacy players), you can still give it an interesting name. You might choose to incorporate a detail about the deck into the title (for example, 0% Basic includes no basic lands), or you might go for a culture reference ("All your creatures are belong to us" for a creature theft deck, or "The Shire" for a Kithkin deck). Maybe you'll use a song lyric or just make something up as you go. Whatever you do, make it exciting somehow.

Context

Now that you have a spiffy deck name, you need to think about the context of your deck. You won't do anything with this at the moment, but it will help you to understand how to write some of the primer sections later on, and you'll likely use much of this information while writing about the deck's event history and matchups. Consider the following questions:

1. What is the purpose of your deck?

   Is your deck designed to execute a combo? Win before a certain turn? Control the game until a certain turn?

2. What is your general strategy?

   Are there certain things you want to mulligan for? What's the order in which you like to cast certain cards? Should mana sources be held open for something during particular turns? How do you decide when and with what to attack?

3. What is your meta?

   What are your matchups like? How do you sideboard against certain decks? What are your deck's strengths and weaknesses in the current meta?

Think of information that would be useful to your readers, and try to frame the deck discussion in a way that relates to the deck's context. The more you tell your readers about the deck's purpose and your particular situation, the more targeted their advice can be and the more use you'll get out of the discussion.

The primer itself is quite a project. Both of the decks I've linked above have primers that demonstrate most of what I'll be showing you in this article. Be prepared to spend a few hours coding and writing everything; it'll be worthwhile. The subheads in this section will be the same as the subheads of the primer sections they represent. Feel free to add, remove, or modify sections from your own primers; this is simply an example. The code provided here will be based on the spoiler code show in the formatting guide and some other bits and pieces I've picked up.

Introduction

The first section of your primer should always be an introduction that answers the following basic questions:

1. What kind of deck is this?
2. What kind of event or environment is it meant for?
3. What is the deck's general strategy in two to four sentences?
4. What were the one to three biggest goals in the deck's design?

In general, the introduction should include about two short paragraphs addressing the above topics. Keep it brief; the purpose of this section is not to catalog all of the details. Rather, it will serve as the teaser text for the deck and tell people what they need to know most about the deck in approximately ten seconds.

Reading the decklist

Not many people seem to have a section like this yet. Not long ago, the site was updated to include custom categories. By default, decks used to be able to be displayed according to card type, converted mana cost, color, and a few other options. You now have the option of defining your own categories for the deck and also setting those categories to be the default display categories. I highly recommend doing this, as it allows you to organize the deck's presentation in a way that highlights what you want to discuss in the primer.

You need to make sure that the deck is organized into logical categories. Use enough different categories to accurately represent the nuances of the deck, but use few enough that the categories don't become distracting or overcompartmentalized. Also, it's alright for some cards to cross over between multiple categories, but these instances should be fairly infrequent. For example, Dominus - Dreamcrusher Edition has only five custom categories: Land, Ramp, Utility, Control, and Wincon. These five categories are enough to sufficiently characterize every card in the deck in an obvious, yet descriptive way, and with only relevant crossovers.

The formatting for custom categories is covered in the formatting guide.

Part of your primer should be dedicated to explaining the custom categories you've created. Even if the sorting is fairly obvious (this will likely be the case for any custom setup of five or fewer categories), it still helps to explain the criteria for the categories and the general uses of those cards in the deck.

Deck colors

In some cases, it may be obvious why a deck is certain colors (for example, most burn decks are likely to be predominantly red). In most cases, however, your readers will benefit from an explanation of why you chose your deck's colors and what role they played in the deckbuilding process. Consider the following questions:

1. Were the colors determined by a need for certain cards?

   Did you have to play a specific color in order to gain access to a family of effects or perhaps to one or two cards in particular that are irreplaceable in the deck?

2. Did you want to play specific colors because you like the colors themselves?

   Do you like something in particular about the colors or the effects they offer? Was there a particular effect or card you wanted to build around?

3. What do the colors offer to your deck?

   What makes them better than other colors that may offer the same kinds of effects? Do they offer things outside of your mainboard that make them more attractive than other options? Could any of the colors be replaced without losing something?

4. What are the shortcomings of these colors?

   Do the colors lack a specific kind of utility that makes the deck vulnerable to certain kinds of effects?

You shouldn't feel the need to describe every obvious detail about the colors you chose, but you should go into enough detail to help your readers understand the full value of those colors within your deck. Even if the colors were chosen by virtue of being the only way you can include certain cards, they still do have certain benefits and weaknesses that should be addressed if you're going to conduct a thorough analysis of the deck's qualities.

Strengths and weaknesses

Speaking of strengths and weaknesses, you should also dedicate one section to each in your primer. Both should be fairly detailed. Consider the following questions:

1. Does the deck have strengths and weaknesses in a vacuum?

   Are there objective shortcomings about your deck, such as a lack of ability to respond to certain kinds of threats? What about objective strengths, such as the ability to function without any particular card?

2. How does the deck perform in various matchups?

   Are there certain things that (almost) always lose to or beat your deck? Why? How does your deck deal with certain threats, and how does it adapt to (including boarding against) other threats?

3. How would you rate the strength of your deck as a product of its characteristics?

   Is your deck sufficiently flexible, resilient, sustainable, consistent, cohesive, efficient, and effective? What design elements give it these characteristics?

4. Did you make any intentional design choices that mean that your deck isn't as strong as it could be?

   Decks have trade-offs. Choosing to improve your deck in one aspect generally means weakening or otherwise depriving it in another aspect. What trade-offs have you made in your deck's design? Why did you determine that these trade-offs were worthwhile?

You need to do an honest evaluation of your deck in order to help identify the areas that can be improved and the areas that are strong enough for now. If you skip out on this part, the feedback you receive will likely not reflect the true needs of the deck.

General strategy

This section should outline the way you play the deck. The goal here is to provide readers with a solid picture of what piloting the deck is like throughout the game. Consider the following questions:

1. What is the objective goal of the deck?

   Irrespective of any particular matchup, what does the deck try to do? What does an optimal game plan involve?

2. Does the goal of your deck change based on the matchup?

   Do some matchups force you to play faster? Slower? Change your game plan entirely?

3. What do you look for in a mulligan?

   Are there specific cards that your deck must open with? What is the optimal opening ratio of lands to other kinds of cards? Are there any cards that you must mulligan? How do you balance the risk of losing a card in hand and possibility of picking up a worse hand against the possibility of getting a more useful opener?

4. What do each of your turns generally look like?

   What is the optimal goldfish game like? What happens on each turn? How do you have to modify your plans according to the matchup? Is there a certain window within which you must achieve a certain play?

5. How do you sideboard against various decks?

   How do you account for the deck's weaknesses and address them against decks that exploit them? Do you take risks by weakening the deck in one area to strengthen it in a particular matchup? What cards are most useful against what kinds of decks?

6. What is your deck's contingency plan?

   What is your course of action if something goes catastrophically wrong? What do you do if your board state is reset, a combo is broken, or a critical card is countered? Can your deck recover? Is there an alternate plan available?

You may opt to have an introductory section to cover the true generalities of your strategy and several subsections to cover mulligans, sideboarding, and the early, mid, and late game. This way, you can further segment the organization of your primer and provide great detail without becoming too long-winded in the process.

Combos and synergies

If your deck includes any combos or synergies, be sure to list them somewhere. Generally speaking, synergy between two cards means that the cards interact in a way to provide greater advantage than either card would produce on its own. Combos are synergies that can be repeated ad nauseam or that create locks that prevent players from taking certain actions. If your deck includes either (or both), you should dedicate a section to listing and explaining them. Combo decks in particular will rely on this section to clarify the deck's major engines. Consider the following questions:

1. Are the interactions critical to achieving victory?

   Can the deck function without these interactions? Are they the true win conditions, or do they just enable the deck's win conditions?

2. When do you assemble the interactions?

   Do the synergies occur over the course of the game if you happen to have multiple cards out? Do you go out of your way to assemble synergies? Do you play the combo pieces individually, or do you use other cards to get them into position? Is there a certain window of opportunity outside of which the interactions are not viable?

3. How can the interactions be disrupted?

   Are there common threats to your combos? Do they require a specific board state in order to function properly? What responses do you anticipate from your opponent?

4. How do you execute the interactions?

   Do you need to perform a set of actions in a specific order, or do the interactions take place as soon as all of the pieces are in place? What considerations need to be made before executing the interactions? What are the buildup and the followup to the interactions?

Depending on how complex your deck is, this section may run on for quite a while. Being detailed here is productive, though. The primary goal in writing a primer (or any good description) should be to help other players understand how your deck works. If they have an incomplete or inaccurate understanding of your deck, you're less likely to receive helpful feedback, and you may need to spend much more effort to explain everything later than if you had just invested the time in the beginning to write with more detail.

Card choices

I tend to put the card choices section after the aforementioned sections because you won't need to repeat yourself as much to explain card choices if you've already gone over why and how they're relevant to the deck's strategy and interactions. However, it's still a good idea to write a dedicate card choices section because it helps to clarify how some cards fit into the deck's mission and why they were chosen over the possible alternatives. Consider the following questions:

1. What functions do each of your cards serve in the deck?

   How does each card contribute to the deck's strategy? Are they useful at all times, or are they situational? Are they critical to victory or do they merely advance your game plan? Why is each card important?

2. Did you choose any of the cards over alternative options?

   Are there other cards that could serve a similar purpose or otherwise compete for deck space? Why did you pick the cards you did over the cards you didn't? Are there budgetary restrictions on what you can do, or are your choices made only on characteristic comparisons?

3. Are there risks involved with your choices?

   How do you capitalize on each card's strengths while mitigating any potential weaknesses? Do some cards present inherent risk that you decided to accept as a balance to the card's strengths?

4. How are your choices related to your meta?

   Are some of your choices responsive in that they're meant to defeat certain decks or help protect your deck against common threats? Were some choices simply not viable in the environment you most often face? How would you change the deck to suit other environments?

Depending on how much detail you include and how many cards need to be addressed, this section may stretch on for quite a while. It may be helpful to break it down into multiple sections by card type or custom category (yet another reason why custom categories are relevant) to organize it into more digestible pieces.

How to build this deck

Although it's perfectly possible to build any deck by acquiring the specified number of each card, actually using that deck involves more than owning it. There's a great deal of nuance in piloting many of the more complex decks, regardless of archetype (although some archetypes are generally considered to be more complex than others). It's rare that someone can netdeck and immediately pilot it with the same skill and sensibility as a player who has been piloting that deck for an extended period of time; it takes a while to get used to the interactions, in-game decisions, strengths, and weaknesses pertaining to the deck. Think about what another player might need to know in order to be successful with your deck or a version of it. Consider the following questions:

1. Are there certain elements of the deck that should be preserved if at all possible?

   What cards and interactions does the deck need in order to function? To what extent is it possible to customize the deck? What are the trade-offs for making different design choices?

2. What card substitutions can be made based on budget?

   Are there expensive cards that are not in your version of the deck but are worth acquiring if possible? Are some of the cards that are in your deck prohibitively expensive for the average player to use? What substitutions can be made?

3. Should the deck only be used in a certain kind of meta?

   Are there local metas in which your deck may not survive? Is it possible to customize the decklist to adapt to such metas? What cards have you included that others could cut depending on their situations?

4. What's the approximate learning curve for the deck?

   How long might the average player expect to take to get used to the deck? To become proficient? What kinds of experiences were (and are) valuable to you as you learned (and continue to learn) the deck?

To some extent, the earlier sections of your primer should cover the gritty details of how to use individual cards and how the deck should be played over the course of the game. However, it's helpful to explicitly address things like budget-forced card substitutions, meta-dependent design choices, and room for customization. This will help readers understand the variability of your deck and help them build it to suit their own needs rather than yours.

Event Report

This is where you get to show off your deck's performance. Some people go into great detail with event reports, listing dates, venues, and game-by-game matchups. These reports can even include sideboard decisions, which are helpful to both the deck's owner and to any readers because they help track how the deck responds to various matchups and what has and hasn't worked in those matchups. Other people use this section to share amazing plays and funny stories from their games.

Change log

This section isn't strictly necessary, but many readers may enjoy seeing how your deck has changed over time, especially if there are any radical developments in the deck's composition or theory. You can also use this section to explain possible inclusions and cuts. It's a good idea to bring testing and game experience into this section to help explain why you've made or planned the changes you list. You can also tie the discussion into the event report discussed above.

Feedback

You should always end your primer with a call to action asking for feedback and suggestions. If there's a particular aspect of the deck that you want to improve, be specific and ask about that aspect in this section. You should also reinforce any budgetary or design restrictions that limit your card choices as well as the meta in which you play. If you've intentionally diverged from some of the more common design choices, you should clarify that the divergence is intentional and that you aren't looking for certain cards because of that. If you're looking for general help, you might want to start the discussion by providing a couple observations from playtesting (this will give readers a place to start when offering help).

One of the things I hate to see in primers is bad formatting. I've read many primers and descriptions that were obviously written by knowledgeable players but that were also formatted in a way that made them somewhat hostile to navigate and probably discouraged many readers from finishing. To help you avoid this trouble, I've provided a modified version of the code that I use for my own primers. It's all HTML, and it should work across any browser and device. Cut and paste, then get to work!

Copy and paste this directly into your deck description and modify only what is specified to be modifiable. Modifiable elements will be in all capital letters. These elements will also be colored orange on this page (the coloring will not be preserved when you copy this section). HTML experts may want to customize other elements, but you should be very careful not to break the code.

NOTE: Following the April-May 2015 redirect attacks, basic users can no longer implement certain kinds of code. The code written for this spoiler will not function properly when implemented by basic users. Basic users may instead use the shortcode for spoilers and accordions listed here.

Important notes:

1. You should not attempt to implement the above code without at least basic understanding of HTML. Feel free to ask coding questions before you're in a situation in which you might break your page.
2. I highly suggest using CTRL+F (CMD+F on Macs) to find "text goes here" sections so you don't get lost in the document.
3. Remember that every paragraph within the code must be set off in individual <p></p> tags. If you don't put each paragraph into these tags, then they will be formatted into one long, run-on paragraph until the section ends.
4. This code is meant to serve as your entire deck description. You should merge existing elements into this format if you want to use this code. Leaving elements outside of this code will result in a messier-looking description.
5. This code contains spoiler elements to help condense the information and make the primer more presentable.

This is how the primer should look if you've implemented the code properly:

I hope this article proves useful to you as you update your existing decks and create new ones. If you have any questions or comments about the material above, let me know!

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