Community

This thread is for discussion of this week's Building on a Budget, which goes live Wednesday morning on magicthegathering.com.

not at all what i expected clicking the link but still an interesting and insightful article, does hit some key points in deck building in general. It would be interesting a series of articles where they would take the top decks in the formats and make budgetized versions and try them online

This was a so-so article for me.

in parts i just found it down right boring.

Whilst it's hard to go back to invasion block and type out what each turn play is/was i found it a little tiring to go...

"after a couple of games this didn't work so i tried this and switched that and this flopped so i went with this yadda yadda yadda".


I'm not sure of the direction BoaB decks are going these days and whether or not WotC is going to scrap the whole article together, but it would be good for perhaps a week or 2 for a noob or some poor broke player to submit a deck they are using (perhaps relating to the STD format currently) and see what the "pro's" can do about making it more effective, whilst allowing the budget player to shell out less than 5-10 bucks??

It has occurred to me that one of the things mtg.com could always use more articles on is simply "how to build a deck."

• We've had the basics: Make sure you include enough land. It shouldn't be all big dragons! But there's a lot of room beyond that.
  
• We have Chris Millar's creativeness. But that's Johnny-ish playing around with different interactions. And he's the first to say they aren't competitive.
  
• Limited Information is very much about building decks. But I think focusing lessons on draft makes it too specialized in most cases.
  

What is always appreciated is some tips for finding that next level. Some fraction of Resident Genius power. What do Alan Comer, Zvi Moshowitz, Mark Herberholz, Masahiko Morita, Tsuyoshi Fujita, or Guillaume Wafo-Tapa know that the rest of us don't?

If you understand how to build decks, then adding a "budget" restriction isn't so tough. I would therefore like to see anything simply on "how to build decks ... oh and by the way we'll use a budget-based cardpool."

Jacob, I thought it was pretty good. It seems to me the key points are:

2.5) Understand the advantages of the deck (so you know what is or isn't negotiable)

4) Test and Tune (this is where Ben, and perhaps most people, spent the majority of his time)

5) Read the environment. For this I think you have to take a step toward competitive and away from casual. (Which isn't a bad idea.) Look at what Flores reports as the top decks are, and find budget cards to attack the weaknesses. And don't just do it, but show how it's done so that players can adapt that skill to their own environment. For example, if opponents have lots of expensive non-basics, Wilderness Elemental is an uncommon to take advantage of it.

(And as an aside, I just realized that aside from WE, all the nonbasic hate in Standard is rare. Seriously Wizards? The duals are rare, and the anti-dual cards are too?)

Anyway, good read.

I wish I could say this was a good article but sadly it was average at best. It really was "hey this deck is awesome, so....I took out that and replaced it with this....final deck is that!" imo. More understanding how to take cards that are not normally played (budget cards) and apply them to the current meta like the wilderness elemental mentioned above. Also I felt it was a bit rushed and you skipped over a lot of your thought processes and why you picked what you did which is what my point was earlier...which means I'm ranting and my sentences are running away...

2c