The Ultimate Introduction to Deckbuilding in Magic: How to Build a Deck in 6 Steps

Last updated on May 14, 2025

Stoic Builder | Illustration by Howard Lyon

One of Magic’s biggest strengths is its incredible diversity of deckbuilding options. Five colors (and therefore 32 potential color combinations), seven main card types, and over 30,000 different cards offer countless possibilities for any deck you build.

The task to choose which cards to put in your deck is daunting for many Magic players, especially if you’re new to the game and play on tabletop, Magic Online or Magic Arena. Today I go through the process to build a deck from scratch, outline what steps to follow to make your deck a success.

Ready? Let's start!

Step #1: Have a Plan

Contentious Plan | Illustration by Eric Deschamps

Countless people have asked me how to build a deck during my years working at a game store. The first step to deckbuilding is always to have a plan.

Odds are you already have a cool idea in mind, but little sense of direction. Decide on your deck’s strategy which determines what cards you pick, what your land base will look like, and which colors you play.

There are a few other kinds of strategies than the ones I cover here, but they're the main four that you see. When you start your deckbuilding journey you may have a mechanic you like, a creature type, or even just a cool card that you think is worth building around.

For example, you may be a fan of Innistrad sets and want to build a vampire deck. “Vampire deck” is too broad of an idea to know how to build. Instead, look at the vampire cards available and figure out what kind of strategy they'd lend themselves to. You could play an aggro deck with the cheaper and more aggressive vampires, or you could play some of the more expensive creatures and end up with a midrange deck. The rest of your deck will fall into place once you have your plan.

For this article I'll default to decks with a 60-card minimum to determine amounts unless otherwise mentioned. Now, let’s go over the four most popular strategies in Magic and how they work.

Aggro Decks

Aggressive strategies are generally straightforward, both from a deckbuilding and gameplay standpoint. Aggro decks win games early by attacking with efficient creatures.

A typical aggro deck will fun fewer lands than other decks, and sometimes get away with 18 instead of the usual 22 to 24. They play mostly creatures, usually around 25 to 30. Any noncreature spells you play have to directly benefit the aggressive strategy, either by removing blockers from the board, buffing your creatures, or protecting your creatures from removal spells. More colors often slow the deck down since they need lands that enter the battlefield tapped.

For a sample decklist we look at a Standard mono red aggro deck that wins fast and barely a spell costing more than 3.

Control Decks

Control strategies are the polar opposite of aggro. Instead of attacking the opponent as quickly as possible, control decks prevent the opponent’s deck from winning. They use removal and counterspells to interact with the opponent’s strategy and eventually win with more powerful creatures or planeswalkers.

Control decks use a variety of colors to answer different kinds of threats thanks to their slow nature. They also require you to play lands nearly every turn, so they often play more than other decks, sometimes as many as 26 to 28. You only need a few cards that actually win the game and the rest of the deck should be made up of removal, card draw, and counterspells.

For this sample decklist I switch it up and go to a Pioneer Azorius () control deck used in a MTGO Pioneer League event. It uses the companion card, Yorion, Sky Nomad and thus, an 80-card deck to meet the special companion requirement and access to one of just three maindeck creatures. It handles many opposing creatures at once with spells like Temporary Lockdown and Supreme Verdict.

Midrange Decks

Midrange decks and strategies bridge the gap between aggro and control. A good midrange deck can be fast and aggressive against control decks while also being able to play a more controlling game against aggro decks.

The key to a good midrange deck is finding the proper balance between powerful and efficient creatures, a variety of removal spells to deal with whatever threats you might face, and ways to gain card advantage to put you ahead on cards. You usually want around 24 to 26 lands because you'll want to hit your land drops often.

Let's look at a Golgari midrange deck in the deck builder's playground that is Elder Dragon Highlander. Deck building rules in Commander are restrictive yet freeing at the same time. For now understand that the deck size is 100 cards, only one of any non-basic lands and cards must match their commander's color identity. See our format overview on Commander for more on Commander decks plus examples.

Back to this example, led by Meren of Clan Nel Toth. This well known Golgari commander just needs a few creatures to die, and a few creatures in the graveyard to open up lots of options. Midrange decks can answer almost any other strategy's best threats. This particular one gathers value turn after turn from its creatures and renders removal against it almost useless.

Combo Decks

Combo decks win the game when they assemble some combination of two or three cards, or a sequence of several cards that win you the game automatically. The rest of the deck usually runs cards that help you draw into or search the cards you need along with some ways to protect your combo once you’re able to “go off.”

For this sample deck we go back to 2011 to look at one of the most famous combo decks in Magic’s history: Splinter Twin. It’s a fairly simple list that looks to combine Deceiver Exarch or Pestermite with Splinter Twin or Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker to make infinite tokens with haste. The deck plays mostly draw spells to find its combo pieces and counterspells to protect it when you go off.

Step #2: Decide on Your Colors

Golos, Tireless Pilgrim | Illustration by Joseph Meehan

Now that you have a game plan you can make other key decisions, like what colors will you run? If we go back to the vampire example from before, it’s clear that you'll probably be black and red given that vampires appear most in these two colors.

But, wait, shouldn’t you do this before deciding on a plan? Actually, no. The game plan you choose will likely influence what colors you want to be. The more colors your deck is, the slower it tends to get. So if your plan is to be an aggressive deck then you probably want to restrict the number of colors you use.

When you decide on your colors, consider how your mana will look. This is of particular importance given that dual lands and mana rocks in Standard rotate every year. Aggro decks need to be able to play spells every turn of the game and can’t take turns off to play taplands that enter the battlefield tapped. Lands like the fast lands, pathways, verges, pain lands, and shock lands have all helped enable multicolor aggro decks.

In older formats you have access to as many of these lands as you want, along with the fetch lands that dominate Modern and Legacy, but maybe you have your budget to consider. If your budget is a concern then it can definitely be useful to stick to fewer colors so that you don’t need quite so many expensive dual lands to make your deck come together.

Step #3: Do Your Research

Compulsive Research | Illustration by Sara Winters

You know your theme, your game plan, and your colors. You can now start to look into the cards themselves. You’ve probably got a few cards in mind already, but you need to really fill out the rest of your list.

There are a few easy ways to research cards to add to your deck if you don’t know a lot of cards, the first of which is very simple: talk to your friends. Whether you have friends who play Magic with you or the fellow players down at your local game store, talking to other people about your deck is bound to help you out. The most important way to get better as a Magic player is to talk with other players and learn from their experience.

You can also do some effective research online, which is an easy step since you are on Draftsim.com. Even if you can’t find any other decks as a reference you can use Scryfall or Gatherer to search for cards.

Let’s say you really like Bard Class (maybe you even play a bard in your local D&D game), so you want to build a deck around it. You decide to build an aggro deck and stick to red and green. Use these databases to search for all red and green legends available for the format you play goes a long way to help you figure out how to build your deck.

Look at decklists online or Arena Tutor to help you get ideas. Let’s go back to the vampire example from earlier. If you like the idea of adding blue to your vampire deck, then you’re in luck! Grixis () vampires is a great deck. Mike Sigrist made the top 8 of the Streets of New Capenna Arena Championship with this deck. Even if you don’t like parts of top lists or don’t think they work for you, they can at the very least give you some ideas.

Step #4: Deciding Card Quantities

Counterbalance | Illustration by Joseph Meehan

Looking at competitive decklists and seeing all sorts of different card quantities can look really strange for a lot of new players. You might ask, “if you want this card in your deck, why not just run four copies?” In many cases you're correct, but let’s run through a basic example of why this won’t always work.

You may decide that your aggro white deck can afford to run nine 1-drop creatures and there are three good options. That means that the best one should probably be a 4-of and you want a 4-1 or 3-2 split of the other two.

Similarly, you may decide that your control deck needs four 2-drop removal spells, so if your only option is Not on My Watch then you can just run four of it and be happy. But if you have a black control deck and a choice between Nowhere to Run and Shoot the Sheriff, then you can run both since they're good in different situations.

How often you want to see a card determines the quantity of said card in your deck. If a card is truly integral to how your deck functions, it needs to be a full playset. But if you don’t want to see it in every matchup, you can cut it down to a single copy.

There are a lot of intricacies to card quantities that you only learn from experience. If you’re unsure why a deck only runs one, two, or three copies of a certain card, ask a friend to see if you can figure it out together.

Step #5: The Mana Curve

Manabarbs | Illustration by Jeff Miracola

Your mana curve is one of the most important aspects of your deck. If your curve is way off then your deck will be inconsistent and you'll lose games to mana screw or bad draws or more often.

What is a Mana Curve?

This question I deserves a whole article of discussion, so let me give you the broad strokes. A deck’s mana curve is basically a description of the distribution of your deck’s mana values. You should notice a curve if you sort your deck by mana value and lay all of the cards out in front of you with one pile for each mana value. The number of cards at each mana cost generally starts low, then increases, and then goes down as the mana costs increase.

Let me give you an example of a Commander deck with 36 lands:

This deck in particular has two free spells, seven 1-drops, 14 2-drops, 13 3-drops, and so on. The numbers start low before increasing to a peak over the 2- and 3-mana spots, after which it trails off. If you create a simple chart of these mana values, you get this:

This graph is literally my deck’s mana curve. You can see the curve peaking up at the 2- and 3-mana points before trailing off as the mana values increase. This is generally how you want your mana curve to look. The higher the mana cost of your curve’s peak, the less consistent your deck will be. Your deck needs to be able to do things early as well as late.

Figure Out Your Ideal Mana Curve

Each deck’s mana curve is different, but it’s important to work towards one that suits yours. Your aggressive deck doesn’t need to have any expensive cards and should peak a lot earlier. A control deck can afford to play more expensive spells but still needs enough cards to interact early with other decks. If you build a ramp deck that tries to accelerate its mana to cast huge threats as early as possible, you naturally find your curve has two peaks instead of one.

If you have, for example, 80 cards that you want to play in your Commander deck but you know you have to cut that down to somewhere around 60 to 70, then the deck’s mana curve is a great tool to help you figure out where to make your cuts.

If you find peaks in your curve at high mana costs, that’s a good indication that you don’t need that many 5- or 7-drops. Similarly, if you don’t have very many cheap 1- to 3-mana spells, when you make room for them, it helps improve your deck’s consistency.

Step #6: Playtesting

Strixhaven Stadium | Illustration by Piotr Dura

I apologize in advance for how harsh this next statement will sound, but it’s something that all Magic players should learn at some point. Whatever deck you’ve built at this point will be terrible, because the most important part of the process is playtesting. All great decks began as first drafts, then went through extensive playtesting and tweaks until their designers ended up at the final build that won the Pro Tour (or whatever event they were in).

I've built dozens of different decks in my Magic career. I’ve seen sweet cards printed that I thought were going to be the next big thing, only to slot them into decks and find out they were total crap. I played in the first Modern tournament ever held in the UK and played Simic () Cloudpost. I didn’t have time to playtest and had never built the deck before, so naturally my list was terrible. I wrongly thought the deck in general was just bad, but Cloudpost ended up banned just a couple months later because players a lot better than me managed to break it.

Playtesting doesn’t need to be an intensive process. You want to play with the deck at the end of the day. Play your finished deck and pay attention to how it plays. Are there any cards that overperform or underperform? If so, you adjust their quantities later.

I could scroll down to see earlier versions of my Sanguine Bond combo deck, including which cards I swapped.

A fast digital way to test your deck is to import your deck to Arena where Arena Tutor can give you sample hands and track your deck's performance as well as note when you made edits to the deck.

Deckbuilding is an ongoing process, so you should never assume that the first pile you put together is perfect and always look for new ways to improve it.

Wrap Up

Finale of Devastation | Illustration by Bayard Wu

Deckbuilding can be a very complicated process, but also an enjoyable one. My advice is intended to help you get better and uncover the fundamentals behind deckbuilding. There’s still so much you can learn about how to build a deck, and all you can do is shuffle up again and have fun while doing it.

Do you have any deckbuilding tips of your own to add? Or maybe you want some extra advice on top of what's already here? If you want to ask me any questions, you can hop into the comments down below or come see me hovering around our Discord server.

Thank you and take care of yourselves!