It’s Thursday, Ya Heathens!

Fuckin’ website ate it. Anyway…

You want to play a card a turn. So put more 1 and 2 mana cards in your deck than 3 mana cards. Put more 3 than 4. Only put a few big cards in there. Don’t clog your deck up with tons of big stuff that’s going to get stuck waiting for mana. Look up “mana curve” for an in-depth discussion.

40% mana sources (lands) is about right. In a 60-card deck, less than 20 is probably not enough, and more than 25 is too much. Mana screw is bad, mana glut is bad too.

Don’t bother with life-gaining cards. You win by killing your opponent, not by outgaining him in life.

Stick with no more than two colors, and your best bet is just to splash the second color. You don’t want to be looking at red spells in your hand and green lands on the table.

Don’t put any more cards in your Library (deck) than you absolutely have to. Your Library is an enemy, because cards can get lost in there.

Related to that, try to stay focused when building your deck. Don’t put stuff in there that you might need.

One card that does two things is better than two cards that can do one thing each. Look up “card efficiency” for an in-depth discussion.

Kind of a related thing, Instants are better than Enchantments if they have the same effect. This isn’t carved in stone, but try not to load up creatures with enhancements. See ‘creature removal’ below.

Creature removal is nice. Bouncing them back to their owner’s hand, or tapping them so they can’t do anything is nice too.

Evasion is nice, like Flying.

For now, I’d just stick with stuff that will kill your opponent, or remove his creatures so you can kill him with your creatures. Don’t try to do cute combos, just try to bludgeon your opponent to death.