So I want to brew a deck, now what?

(A WitchPHD guide to introductory-level deck building)

Disclaimer: There are a lot of ways to make decks, and this way helps me and my needs in a non-combo-centric meta. This is for people who sit down with a deck and say “I don’t know what I’m doing.” So if it’s all Greek to you, if deck building looks like black magic and witchcraft - well, the WitchPHD is here to help get you casting spells and with a decently playable deck!

# Ingredients

Alright, I'm back with more content that no one asked for... but if you're here for it, let's get started.

To bake a cake, you will need:

• Scryfall.com

• Edhrec.com

• A place to store your deck (I prefer Moxfield.com) (optional)

Step 1: Choosing a commander

Sometimes you pick a commander because of some intrinsic enjoyment of a card, sometimes it's more complicated (maybe you've been trying to find a way to make some secret spice work and just haven't found the right leader for your team). If you're here to practice deck-building, you might just be building the decks that people request.

Personally, I prefer to avoid "most played" commanders. For example, if we open the EDHRec page for Golgari, we can see that Meren of Clan Nel Toth is the most played commander in Golgari, followed by The Gitrog Monster. Generally, these commanders are "most played" for a reason: they're very good and will provide ubiquitous value. IMHO no matter what you build, they'll feel a few points stronger than they should, just because of how strong they are on their own. Personally, I prefer to build something more niche (and under the radar). But, when talking about building for newer players/builders, I think these commanders are an ideal place to start.

For this article, I will be talking about Vega, the Watcher. This is a new card (at time of writing), but it is one that I think will be "most played" by this time next year.

Step 2: Building the Manabase

Unlike many other brewers, I like to start with the mana-base first - for me, I'll build a generic mana base and edit it later if need be. The mana base consists of two parts: The Lands and the Ramp.

• To start with lands, avoid ones that ETB Tapped

• Cavern of Souls, Myriad Landscape, and Command Beacon are staples IMHO

• Watch for lands like Prairie Stream, which ETB Tapped, but they make up for it by having basic land types so you can search for them with Flooded Strand. There are a couple of these in a few color combinations.

• Celestial Colonnade and Temple of Enlightenment are the two best ETB tapped lands in these colors.

• We might have to remove more expensive lands for ETB Tapped lands if we are on a budget

• I think we'll have more Blue than White at the end of this, so I'll add 12 Islands and 10 Plains.

• We have room for some utility lands, so I'll add Tower of the Magistrate (A pet card of mine) and Reliquary Tower (A card I usually argue against but think fits decks that might draw a huge number of cards).

Next is the ramp, I'll aim for nine ramp cards. Since we're not in green (and thus don't have access to cheap land ramp), we'll have to use rocks. Our goal here is usually 2 CMC rocks: 3 CMC rocks are too slow, and 0 CMC rocks are usually too competitive and expensive.

• Everflowing Chalice, and Mind Stone are the best ones

• Arcane Signet is right under them

• Whatever Talismans and Signets are in these color combinations.

• Sword of the Animist is a bit slow (But I think it'll work out, since Vega has flying and is cheap enough to re-cast)

I'll usually tag my RAMP and LAND cards as #!Ramp and #!Land on Moxfield. The #! part means that no matter what deck I put them in, they'll automatically be tagged as that.

Step 3: Discovery

In litigation, discovery is the part of the process where you look for evidence to support your case. In this case, we'll search for cards to help our deck work... but first, we have to identify what our deck does. It's easy to identify here that Vega likes to cast cards from places other than the hand, so we can do a few searches with scryfall here... and just add whatever seems good:

• o:rebound ci:uw

• o:flashback ci:uw

• o:foretell ci:uw

• We can also check the EDHrec page for this commander, or similar commanders. (Vega is not on EDHrec yet)

But we have to go a step further than that and find out how we're going to win. The obvious best, most efficient path to victory is finding a few game-ending combos... but I'm not a fan of that path. I've built a few decks recently (case in point) that draw cards to fuel cards like Body of Knowledge and try to win in the red zone... and that's cool, but I don't want to just re-hash a deck I've already built... so after some thought, I decided on "flying matters." So with that, I'll start adding cards from a few more searches... or EDH rec pages.

• o:creatures o:with o:flying ci:uw

• EDHrec's Flying page

• EDHrec's page on Kangee, Sky Warden (a commander that is commonly built as flying matters).

In this stage, I'm just looking for anything and everything that could fit, so I'll likely end up with more than 100 cards... and will have to make cuts later.

Step 4: 7x9 is a good place to start

If you haven't heard the demonic chant "7x9 every time," I'm about to explain it to you. Essentially, when you have a 4-of in your standard, 60 card deck, that's 4/60 - which is 6.66% of your deck being that card. The closest we can get to those odds in our 99 card deck is 7/99 - or 7.07% of our deck. The numbers aren't perfect, but the formula is then: 9 categories, 7 cards in each category, 36 lands, and 1 commander.

This is a cool rule, and a great starting point, as long as you don't take it as gospel. For example, a high-tier deck might not just run 4 copies of Doom Blade, but also 2 copies of Go for the Throat, so that they have 6 total "removal spells." Conversely, they might run just 2 copies of Cruel Ultimatum, because drawing too many is cumbersome. For me, I think that an EDH deck doesn't really need to do 9 things, so I usually start off with 7 categories (9 cards in each category) as my general guideline. I think that an EDH deck needs to have three things to work well... so our first three categories will be those things:

• Ramp

• Interaction

• Draw

But, since we're in blue-white, and we can protect our board with more interaction, I'll actually divide interaction into two categories:

• Counterspells

• Control (board wipes, cyclonic rift, etc)

After some looking, our Final categories for this deck ended up being:

1. Ramp

2. Draw

3. Control

4. Counterspells

5. Flying Matters

6. Tokens (4/4 Angels)

7. Misc (I always throw an extra category here, for stuff that can't or don't want to run that much of, but still want in the deck)

On Moxfield, I'll tag these categories with "#" instead of "#!", which means that the tag only applies to this deck. This is because I might have "Swan Song" listed as a #counterspell in this deck, in another deck I might have only one category of control cards and instead just list it as #control. This just gives me more flexibility to categorize according to what I want for that deck.

I'll mark all the cards we found in the Discovery process into these categories, then start to cut down to 100 cards total. One helpful tool is to look at a category with more than 9, and try to cut the most expensive/worst cards in that category... but we also might need to end up filling in categories. For this deck, I had to take some time to fill in my counterspells and removal spells - and like with everything else, we're looking for low CMC and instant speed when applicable.

If you take nothing away from this article except for one thing... that thing should be that YOU SHOULD SORT YOUR CARDS INTO CATEGORIES WHEN EDITING. Whether you're using physical piles or tags on your deckbuilding site. If you don't do this, there's no way to know how many of each type of effect you have!

The Deck: The Rest of the F*** Owl (Formerly: Eule mit drei Augen)

So is this deck any good? Eh, It's probably alright, I mostly made it for demonstration purposes. It’s also pretty basic, no “spice” was included:

• It's 259.21$ but can be lowered by cutting some expensive lands for generic taplands

• It has a lot of sort of high CMC spells like Cast Through Time which are cute but too expensive

• The average CMC is 3.25, which is a bit on the high end in my opinion (average CMC is not an end all be all for this deck, but as a diagnostic tool it points us towards that previous problem - some big cards like cast through time that are too bulky)

• I forgot to look up aftermath cards, so if I was making this deck again (or wanted to edit it later), I'd check out "o:aftermath ci:uw" on scryfall for additional ideas.

Anyway, if you liked this post, found it useful, or hated it... let me know in the comments below. Feel free to also describe how you build your decks!