How do you make a good competitive standard deck?
Standard Deck Help forum
Posted on July 14, 2015, 12:06 a.m. by TruelyNinja
I want to make good decks but i don't really understand what cards are good or what makes cards good like with fetch lands i have no idea why everyone thinks there so great.
For good ideasl look at other Standard decks, and maybe try playing some of them. The idea is to figure out a central plan (aggro, control, tempo, etc.) for each deck.
For example, Jeskai prowess is built around cards that get buffed by playing noncreature spells. So making a deck like this requires 3 things. Ways to get those cards (Card draw), good spells to trigger prowess (like Stoke the Flames, or Lightning Strike), and good prowess creatures (like Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest, or Monastery Mentor). All these cards work toward making a coherent whole deck.
So to sort of clarify if this was a bit of a mess; The idea behind a good standard deck is to come up with a plan, or a theme your deck will be trying to accomplish (aggro, tempo, or control), then to find cards that work together well to create a coherent deck.
July 14, 2015 12:21 a.m.
Sorry to double post but I got nothing better to do and forgot to answer the title. Building a good deck is no easy task no one can just build a good deck out of no where. A lot of what depends on whether a deck is good or not is if its good against the decks you are playing against this is called meta-gaming it just means you are studying what you think your opponents will play and then playing the deck or deck style that will beat them efficiently. If i think that my opponents will be playing alot of slow control decks I can play a very aggressive aggro/burn deck and they are too slow to really have a good match up. So basically you can do that and study what people play at your fnm if thats what you want to do and build a deck thats pretty good against the majority because a deck has to be able to beat more than just a control deck it has to be ABLE to beat aggro and midrange or combo this is where your sideboard can come into play so you can increase your match up against certain decks game 2 and 3. Another option is just to "netdeck" build and play a deck that the professionals build and do well with nothing wrong with that its up to you. Then you can just find a theme or a set of colors and build around them. Find something you like to play and just play the best cards you can find that work well in that kind of deck which goes back to deciding what good cards are. Its a process and a cycle. You will also have to test your deck extensively, know how it works and all the cards in it and its flaws so you can fix them. Anyway im out again goodluck.
July 14, 2015 12:24 a.m.
buildingadeck says... #5
Building a good deck also really depends on how you like to play. For me, I'm a huge blue player, so I tend to build decks that center around that strength. This seems a strange strategy from which to build decks, but it is effective at an FNM level because you're not only playing good decks, but you're playing decks you're good at playing.
Note also that building a good deck takes a lot of time. My first custom build was a UW control deck that I played once. Ha! I went to Khans Game Day, and I went 0-3. I went back to the drawing board, and came up with a Blue Tempo deck, capping at 3 mana and using cards like Quickling to ruin removal spells. I spent two or so months tinkering and optimizing the deck, and when I took it to FNM, I took second place. The tinkering, tweaking, and tampering part takes the longest, but makes your deck able to hang in there with the big boys.
Of course, you will need some concept of what you want to do with the deck, and hashing out a concept can be very challenging. In the early stages, it can be helpful to net deck to get a feel for what a powerful card or synergy looks like. Later on, you will be able to see what kinds of cards appeal to you and the general power level of cards.
July 14, 2015 12:54 a.m.
GeeksterPlays says... #6
Utilites of Fetchlands;
Fixing for the colour you need and it thins your deck making you more likely to draw useful spells later in the game.
You can do it in your opponents turn, so when moving into combat they won't know if you could cast something based on the colours you have available as there is an "unknown" colour.
It adds to your graveyard size for Delve ability (and now helps to flip Jace, Vryn's Prodigy Flip as well).
It lets you shuffle your deck, perfect for if you have Scry'd and had to put good cards to the bottom of the deck earlier in the game.
If you have 2 Courser of Kruphix in play you GAIN 1 life whenever you use a fetchland.
Having land in your graveyard in Modern and EDH is good if you use Crucible of Worlds - you can reuse your fetches each turn to get guaranteed mana on the field and some creatures give you benefits to this as well such as Titania, Protector of Argoth; combo's together each turn for paying 1 life you get a land AND a 5/3 creature and you can do that guarateed. Powerful stuff.
July 14, 2015 5:24 a.m.
Hideousgamer says... #7
How to build good standard decks hmmm. if only we all had that answer. But like others have said it's all a matter of putting the time into making the deck work. Dragonlord BUG Control ( Origins ) this deck of mine has made top 50 on the site the past two days. But not because I am some master deck builder but because of the total info from tappedout itself has gave me. I have came to learn how to build mana bases, Why Fetchlands are used, etc etc. ( Trust me when I say this nothing else matters nothing else matters if the mana base is off.)
Also I would like to say check out MTGtop8 or MTGgoldfish other super helpful sites to learn deck building.
July 14, 2015 10:46 p.m. Edited.
GeeksterPlays says... #8
Hae an idea > build > test > fail > identify why > rebuild > test > identify more weak spots > rebuild > test > feel OK > go to FnM > get destroyed > identify why > rebuild around local meta > test > go to FnM > do OK > look at how to improve more > rebuild > test > finally happy > cry because rotation happens in a few weeks and your year-long exercise in deckbuilding results in only a few weeks' worth of playing at it's best.
Welcome to Standard! lol
July 15, 2015 9:22 a.m.
Realistically, you should just go to a site like mtgtop8.com - not only will that give you ideas of strong decks to play, but most likely, the players you will compete against did the same thing. Even at a low-level event like FNM, you can expect some, if not most, of the players there to be using top-8 netdecks.
So you either play the strongest deck or lose against the strongest deck. You have to know what the most powerful and most popular cards there are in the meta, so you can either use them yourself or choose the cards/decks that can answer those threats.
Ever since I started playing Standard, it seems like what everyone does is just find 9 of the most OP rare cards that exist in the format, put four of each along with a 200$ manabase in some sleeves, then test a bunch to figure out what to put in the sideboard.
EmblemMan says... #2
Ok well first Ill tell you why fetch lands are good in standard although ill probly get ninjad. Fetchlands are good because they get other lands out of your deck. If i play a Windswept Heath and fetch out a forest then thats 2 lands that i wont draw and I can draw spells. They can also be considered color fixing. I can get a plains if I need it or I can get a forest if I need to hit Courser of Kruphix on turn 3. Speaking of courser if I see a land on top of my deck or a card I dont want while having a courser I can sacrifice my fetch land to shuffle my deck to potentially draw something better. These become a LOT more relevant the deeper you get into magic and its various formats like modern and legacy. Next learning whether a card is good or not is not always easy it really depends on the kind of card. Most of the time a card is good if it does something that will hose an entire deck. So take Languish for an example this card is good because it will obliterate any small 1/1 creature or 2/2 creature deck like a goblin deck or a warrior deck. A good way to find out if a card is good is to just discuss it with someone my rule is that if a card can hose a whole deck or is good against multiple style of decks then it is good. A card being good can easily depend on whether it has interactions with cards in your deck like Den Protector and Deathmist Raptor or if it has a positive interaction with your opponents deck if my opponent is playing a lot of instants and sorceries then Duress is great if they arent then it sucks but that doesnt mean Thoughtseize cant be good. Its definitely a hard topic to teach someone it really just comes down to talking about specific cards and then eventually you start to be able to see the value and use of other cards alot more quickly. Hope this helped even a little bit.
July 14, 2015 12:16 a.m.