Common Mistakes in Deck Building.

#10Using bad substitutes.

When you don’t have a card that you need, you can actually hurt yourself by playing a bad substitute. If you want to use Dark Banishing in your deck but don’t have any, it doesn’t make sense to use Smother instead if all the decks in your area play lots of creatures that are four casting cost or higher. Sometimes it can do better to play with out the card you are missing rather than playing a sub par card in your deck. The same goes for creatures, lands, artifacts, and all other card types. My tip is don’t bring a knife to gun fight just because you cant bring a shotgun, just pick out a different gun.

#9Building decks without win conditions.

The goal of a game of magic is primarily to have fun. The way that many people achieve that goal is by winning. If your deck only wins by removing all off your opponents cards with Isochron Scepter imprinted to Brain Freeze what will you do if they destroy all of your Isochron Scepters? Do you have a back up plan? Some decks can control the game long enough to play the one creature in the deck and kill their opponent but can you do that? When you build a deck make sure that you have a back up plan. Think about how you win the game and what you would do if you don’t have that option. Make sure when you build you ultimate deck of bouncing, burning, or life gain that you keep you options open for a back up plan.

#8Using cards that are good but not in your deck.

I love this particular mistake. Dampning Matrix is a card that stops creatures from using activated abilities unless they are mana abilities, so playing it in your elf deck that has twenty creatures with activated abilities is pretty much a bad idea in most cases. Another example of a card that many people are using when they don’t always need to is the card from one of my previous rants, Skullclamp. Just because a card is good in one deck doesn’t mean that it is good in every deck. Look at a card and think hard about why it goes in you deck before you choose it. Using good cards is like peer pressure in magic, you don’t have to follow the crowd.

#7Focusing on the one deck that beats you.

Working at the local store that I manage one of the more common things that I hear from my magic patrons if “I need a card that beats this card ______” or “my friend is playing this deck what card beats that?”. When you keep changing you deck to beat one specific deck you usually end up making your self vulnerable to a host of other decks. I have a friend that will play a person five or six games and then go take his deck apart to make alterations to beat the deck he has just played. Then when he goes back and wins a few games he believes that his deck is fixed until his opponent pulls out a new deck at which point the cycle starts again. Remember that there are just going to be some decks that you will have trouble beating. I your deck loses to one deck consistently but beats most of the other decks then your deck is probably good. If everyone is playing that same deck then you might make a sideboard change to help you out or a subtle main deck change.

#6Building a deck with no focus.

When a deck is built its like needs to have focus to be successful in most cases. If you have deck with eight life gain cards, eight creatures, eight burn spells, eight bounce spells, and four graveyard emptying spells what is the purpose of the deck? Don’t fall into the trap of building a deck that is supposed to do one thing but you put in cards that do something completely different. There are the occasional decks that are like a tool box and have an answer for everything, but they are few and far between. Pick a style for the deck and focus on that style. The quote that I use for this mistake is “jack of all trades, master of none”.

#5Building decks that you don’t understand.

This is a most recent occurrence. I say it’s a recent problem because with the amount of information available many players are building decks that they just don’t understand. Many a player knows that a deck was good at a tournament they have read about and will build the deck but they wont play the deck worth a darn. Maybe the deck doesn’t fit their style of play or is beyond that players ability. A deck is a tool and just because it can be a good tool doesn’t mean it is suited for you.

#4Forcing cards that are not acceptable.

I have seen many players try to use cards just because they think they need to be in every deck they play. Sometimes you just have to say no to your favorite card. I don’t consider this the same as using good cards that don’t need to be played in every deck. This is a more dangerous animal all together. You probably all have a friend who has to play a Shivan Dragon in every deck he plays, or a girl that just has to play Serra Angel in all her decks. Don’t force cards that just don’t make the deck.

#3Land Ratio.

An error that many new players make when building decks is not having the correct amount of land. This actually falls into two categories. Category one is not have enough land or too much land. When the game first started the most used practice was playing one third of your deck land. The current trend is too play roughly thirty four percent to thirty six percent land. The reason that most people make mistakes in their land count is by applying the same land count to all of their decks. If you are playing twenty four cards that have a casting cost of one mana it doesn’t make a lot of sense to say that you automatically should play twenty four land. If you are playing a lot of mana producing source that are cheap you also might want to stay away from a lot of land in your deck. The second category is have the color ratio set incorrectly. If you are playing a two color deck that doesn’t mean that you should split your mana ratio to fifty percent one color and fifty percent in the other color. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to play twelve islands and twelve swamps when you only have four copies of a Brainstorm in you deck which only has one blue in the casting cost. Remember mana may be the life of deck but too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

#2Using the single card strategy.

On average each week I receive at least ten decks that have twenty five or more cards that are what I call “one offs”. What are “one offs”? Having a single copy of a card in your deck is a “one offs”. When you add multiple copies of a card you get more consistency in your deck. You can actually start to think about what card you could potentially draw in the following turns. Some of the best players of the game can actually tell you the odds of drawing a specific card just by checking the graveyard, what is in their hand, and what is in play at that moment in time. If you have twenty five different cards the odds of you being able to draw specific cards goes down substantially. If you do the math, the odds of you drawing a certain card that you only have one copy of in the deck in you opening hand is roughly eleven percent. If you had four copies of that same card in you deck, your odds go up to roughly thirty nine percent. I don’t know about all of you out there but I like the odd when I have four copies of a card as opposed to one.

Now the big daddy most common mistake that I see in the Deck Garage.

#1 Over sixty cards in the deck.

One of the most common things that people will do is play above sixty cards in there decks. Now many people will say its just one card above sixty or two cards above sixty and think that its okay to do that. Well yes according to the rules you are allowed above sixty. The problems with being above sixty cards is that you start to effect the odds of drawing certain cards and maintaining deck consistency. One of the major things to always remember is to keep the deck at sixty cards if possible.

Jason