In the Zone -- Thirteen Decks and Counting

Over the past few weeks, I've been wanting to build Magic decks so I can have fresh things to play over the nice, long Christmas-to-New-Year's break.

Well, I've made progress.  The photo shows the decks which I have either built from scratch, or significantly re-built during this stretch.  That's 13 decks, so far.  It's possible I'll build one more tonight (Tuesday) before bed, but then I'll take a break for a couple of days to spend time with Sherry before she goes back for her last two Finals.  Then before she and Leah are home on break, I probably have one more night of opportunity for building. 

Designing and building decks is always a hot/cold thing for me.  I put episodes of Stargate: SG1 and Star Trek: Voyager on the DVD player as background entertainment, and they often distract me.  But then, all of a sudden, inspiration will strike and I will grab cards from this box and that box, run into my den to grab more cards, and lay them all out in front of me. 

That's when I get "in the zone."

A digression:  Both of my boys play Magic.  So does my son-in-law.  Sarah learned enough to be able to test Troy's decks with him occasionally, but I can't recall ever playing a game of Magic with her.  Until recently, though, I never thought Leah would want to play.  

Well, it turns out she had learned to play, too.  She told me one of her goals for this upcoming break is to learn to play better.  She asked me to help.

A little tear comes to my eye.  [Figuratively.]

I doubt she really needs to know how to design & build a deck.  She probably just wants to have me talk about the finer points of the rules, and how they affect tactics and strategy.  But as I got "in the zone" this time, I did reflect on what I teach people when I teach them about deck design. 

Back to "the Zone":  So, I have all these cards in front of me.

It seems like I always have about 80 cards which fit whatever "theme" I'm building, and I have to trim it to 37. [A deck should contain 60 cards, with rare exceptions, and approximately 23 of them need to be land, with slightly less rare exceptions.]  I divide the cards into piles based first on color, and then on effective converted mana cost.  As much as I am drawn to the cards which are hardest to play [I am a "Timmy" -- which means nothing to you unless you've read my blog entry about types of Magic players -- or the great Mark Rosewater columns {One, Two and Three} which describe them] I know a deck won't work unless I limit the number of them in the deck far more than I want to.  So I pick out which of them I really, really want to experience.

The rest of the cards ... well, I didn't really intend this blog entry to turn into a full deck design treatise ... so let me say I typically make my selections of the rest of the cards to support the "bombs" -- those cards which are the hardest to play.  It's pretty frequent that some mid-range cards which I initially threw in the pile because I thought they would support the theme get left out of the deck.  Those mid-range cards often become the theme for another deck.

Anyway, I now have thirteen "new" decks.  Troy "helped" me try out five of them this past weekend.  If all goes well, I will get to play them all by the end of January.  If it goes really well, I will play them all by New Year's Eve.

As if there weren't already plenty of reasons to love Christmas and vacation!