Want to know how to build a Magic: The Gathering deck? It’s a difficult skill to master, and the amount of sheer choice can be paralysing at times. We’ll run you through the basics and answer all your key deckbuilding questions. Fear not, you’ll be a talented deck tinkerer in no time, racking up wins with your own synergistic creations.
This guide is designed to teach fairly new players how to build a MTG deck, but it can also work as a handy refresher for more experienced fans. However, if you are completely fresh to this trading card game, we recommend reading our how to play Magic: The Gathering guide first. You should try the game with prebuilt decks for a while, before setting out to build your own.
Here’s how to build a MTG deck:
- How many cards are in a Magic: The Gathering deck?
- How to pick a strategy for your MTG deck
- How to choose your deck’s colors
- How to build a mana curve
- How many land cards should your deck have?
- How many copies of each cards should you include?
- How to playtest your new MTG deck
How many cards are in a Magic: The Gathering deck?
Before you can decide what cards should go in your Magic: The Gathering deck, you need to know how many you need to include. Fortunately that’s a pretty easy question to answer, it just depends on the format you’re playing.
If you’re building a deck for a Constructed format like Standard or Modern, you need a 60-card deck. If you’re building for a Limited format like Draft or Sealed, you need a 40-card deck. And if you’re building a Commander deck, you need 99 cards plus your MTG commander. We’ll get to what kinds of cards you should play, and in what proportion later on.
It’s worth telling you now that this guide is mainly written with Constructed play in mind. Much of the advice will hold true for other MTG formats as well, but if you’re working on an EDH deck, our guide to how to build a Commander deck has more specific advice for you.
Pick a strategy for your MTG deck
What is the goal of your deck? It’s no good just jamming a bunch of cards together and calling it a day. A good MTG deck has a gameplan, a series of actions it hopes to pull off to secure victory – in other words, a strategy. Ideally, you should be able to tell someone what your deck is trying to achieve in just a sentence or two.
Perhaps your deck aims to clog up the board with big defenders and win by attacking with flying creatures. Perhaps you want to put an expensive card like Omniscience in the graveyard and then reanimate it early for massive value.
Your deck might win by sacrificing little token creatures for an incremental advantage, or by playing the largest monsters available and trampling your opponent into the dust.
There are untold hundreds of possible playstyles – that’s part of what makes building Magic: The Gathering decks so much fun! Deciding on a strategy is likely to be the starting point for any deckbuilding adventure. You need to pick one and design your deck with the aim of making it as consistent and powerful as possible.
Common MTG playstyles
However, if you’re daunted by all the options, it might help to know that many MTG decks fall into one of three broad categories.
Aggro decks can be some of the easiest to build and play, though they still take time and effort to master. These are the most aggressive decks in Magic, and they work by delivering as much damage as possible, as quickly as possible. Ideally, your opponent will be half-dead before their gameplan has even started.
In an aggro deck, you want to include lots of low-cost cards, generally plenty of little creatures that can attack early. Your other cards should help you hit your opponents, either clearing away blockers, making your attackers more effective, or dealing damage directly to your enemy to finish them off.
Aggro decks don’t need as many lands as other strategies, and often make use of only a single color.
Control decks are in for the long haul. They win by shutting down opponents’ strategies with well-timed counterspells, removal, and boardwipes until the best cards in their opponent’s hand are depleted.
Once the key threats have been dealt with, the Control player can play an expensive creature of their own, or start drawing cards and gaining resources until victory becomes inevitable.
Control decks can afford to play more colors (because they don’t need to be as fast), and tend to include a relatively high number of land cards. They might not have as many creatures as other decks, and will usually have lots of Instants and Sorceries.
Midrange decks are harder to define. It’s easy to think of them as ‘the rest’, meaning anything that doesn’t fall neatly into Control or Aggro, but this is not quite accurate.
If Control decks perform best when a game goes long, and Aggro decks do well when they can end games quickly, Midrange decks are in the middle. These decks look to apply early pressure with smaller creatures, but run plenty of larger beasts too.
They’re not as fast as Aggro decks, but run higher quality creatures that can provide more value over the course of a game.
How to choose your deck’s colors
Once you have a strategy in mind, it’s time to pick your deck’s colors. Now, it’s quite likely that picking a strategy has already narrowed this down for you.
For instance, if you want to play faeries, you’ll probably want blue and black cards in your deck, as this is the color where almost all faeries are found. If you want to play MTG mana ramp to reach big creatures faster, you’ll almost certainly need to be a green deck, as this color has the biggest creatures and the best ramp.
There are five colors in total in Magic: The Gathering – White, Blue, Red, Black, and Green. Our MTG colors guide has more detail, but here’s a rough idea of what each color is best at:
- White – protection, small creatures, life gain
- Blue – card draw, counter spells, hard-to-block creatures
- Red – fast creatures, direct damage, temporary power
- Black – removal, sacrifice, reanimation
- Green – ramp, big creatures, enabling other colors
It’s quite easy to figure out what colors you want to play, but figuring out how many colors is more of a challenge.
In general, the fewer colors your deck has, the more consistent it will be, but stripping out colors also restricts what cards you are able to play. Each color has different strengths and weaknesses, so it’s common to pair multiple colors together to get the best of both worlds.
The trade off is that with each color you add, you increase the chance that you’ll end up in a situation where have multiple lands on the table, but too few of any one colour to cast anything from your hand.
You can counteract this to an extent by including multicolored land cards, but these usually enter tapped, slowing down your deck. They can also be quite expensive.
It’s simplest to stick to one or two colors for your first deck. Beyond that, a good rule of thumb is that you should have a very good reason for adding an extra color to your deck: whether that’s gaining access to a card that’s particularly powerful, or shoring up a major weakness.
How to build a mana curve
If you haven’t already picked some out, now is the time to start adding cards to your deck. But as your deck begins to take shape, understanding the idea of a mana curve is really useful.
To win a game of Magic: The Gathering, you need to make the best use of your mana, which means in an ideal world, you’d want to use all the mana you have available on every turn.
The best way to achieve this is with a well-constructed mana curve. This is the jargon-y term for the way that mana costs are distributed among the cards in your deck.
If you laid out your deck and put every card with the same mana cost in a separate pile, lowest cost on the left and highest on the right, it should form a neat curve that peaks somewhere in the middle.
Different kinds of decks will have different shaped curves. For instance, an aggro deck doesn’t need any cards that cost six mana, so its peak will probably be in the two mana slot. A control deck will have a mana curve that peaks later, perhaps in the four mana slot.
But in general, you often want to have a small number of one drops, plenty of two and three drops, and then a gradually decreasing number of four, five, and six drops.
Understanding mana curves can help you complete your deck, as you’ll easily be able to see which kinds of cards you are missing.
How many land cards should your deck have?
Lands are not the flashiest part of any deck, but they are essential building blocks: you need their mana to cast your spells.
For a well-constructed deck, you don’t want to have too many lands or too few. The only thing more infuriating than drawing land cards when what you really need is a useful creature is having that useful creature ready in your hand, but no lands to cast them.
A tried and tested benchmark is to have lands make up around 40% of your deck – about 24 cards for a 60-card Constructed deck, and around 17 for a 40-card Limited deck.
If your deck leans particularly aggressive, feel free to cut a land or two. And contrastly, if you’re playing a more controlling deck, you may want extra lands.
These numbers should help to ensure a stable supply of lands throughout a game, while avoiding an unwelcome glut of surplus land cards later on.
How many copies of each card should you include?
One of the most difficult parts of deckbuilding, and something even experienced players can struggle with, is deciding how many copies of each individual card to include in your deck.
In Constructed formats, you can (usually) only play up to four copies of any card that isn’t a basic land in your deck. But should you play all four copies of that removal spell or creature, or should you just include three, two, or even one?
In general, you should aim to play four copies of a card if:
- It’s a vital part of your game plan
- You want to be able to consistently draw it
- It gets better in multiples
If you’ve built your deck correctly, this should be the case for most cards you’re running. However, you can consider playing fewer than four copies of a card if:
- It gets worse in multiples (such as legendary creatures)
- It’s only useful against certain matchups
- It’s a win condition, and your control deck will have time to dig through the deck and find it
- You’re stuck choosing between two cards which have equally strong, similar, but slightly different effects (you could play two of each)
- It’s a slightly worse version of a card you have four copies of already, and you’re including it because you want even more of that effect.
While there’s something to be said for the surprise factor that comes with having lots of different cards in your deck, this is usually outweighed by the benefits of consistency. After all, you don’t want to be surprised by what you draw.
How to playtest your MTG deck
The best way to improve an MTG deck is to try it out. There are loads of deck testing tools you can use to see how your deck performs. Some, like Archidekt, just let you ‘goldfish’ – playing a game solo against an opponent that does nothing.
This can give you an idea of how your mana curve is operating, if you have the right lands in your deck, and what your opening hand is like – useful!
But you’re only going to be able to get so far with theory. The best way to playtest a Magic deck is in the crucible of combat. Whether you’re using official clients like Magic Online or MTG Arena, tools like XMage, or playing games in person, playing real matches with a deck is the fastest way to see what is and isn’t working.
As you’re testing out your deck, pay attention to any cards you’re happy to draw or have in your opening hand, and any cards you groan when you see.
When judging over and underperformers be careful of obvious biases. It feels great when a flashy expensive spell wins you your tenth game, but did it rot in your hand in the other nine? It’s obvious when a clutch removal spell saves your bacon, but less clear when early pressure from a two-drop is what ensured your win.
If you want to skip the deck-building process altogether, you could just play the best MTG Arena decks instead. Or if you want to give EDH a whirl, the best Commander precon decks are a handy starting point.