The most rewarding gameplay for all players in any game is when that game is well balanced. If, like me, you play a lot of your Magic the Gathering in a playgroup, or enjoy building your own decks, cubes, or even formats then it is important to understand how you can balance those out so that gameplay is enjoyable for as many builds as possible.
I spoke last week on the overly narrow focus on competitive play, and emulating the top decks some players have, and this is because they see Magic as a means to an end. Not as a game they want themselves and their friends to get maximum enjoyment out of. If you’re always steamrolling everyone in your path then pretty soon no one is going to want to play with you.
Veterans Can Also be Mentors
I own a lot of cards, and I do a lot of deckbuilding. Many of my lists are lost to the mists of time, but something I love doing is building decks for beginners that are meant to be played against each other. Products like Duel Decks, Duel Decks Anthologies, and Clash Packs are good for this, but once you’ve already played what you have bought to death then you must keep buying new products. Knowing how to balance decks means you can create fun games from your existing collection without having to buy additional cards. It’s the “Teach a man to fish” of the Magic the Gathering world.
Having a Cube is a good way to maintain a group of Magic players and bring new players into the fold. Building a Cube is basically building your own Limited format, it’s a quagmire of interactions and possible decks, and balance is absolutely essential to a Cube’s operation.
Avoiding the Arms Race
Playing with purposely balanced decks, or a Cube, also helps eliminate a phenomenon I see all too often in Magic playgroup’s — the arms race. We all know what happens when you’re playing Standard and some Netdeck Nicky decides to buy all the best, most expensive cards because he’s sick of losing games. Other players feel pressured to do the same, and before you know it your group is spending inordinate amounts of money to stay competitive with each other.
You need to agree to house-rules on banned cards if needs be, or you need to work together to ensure everyone is running a deck of roughly even power. When you lower the power-ceiling even a little you lower the cost ceiling dramatically as the three or four most expensive cards in a set, or format, can often account for a large bulk of its cost.
What do I mean by balanced? A player should feel they at least have a chance of winning a few games in a given meta. Some decks are bad match-ups, and this is always going to happen even in a well balanced environment. But if a single deck, or even a couple of decks, are beating everyone else a large percentage of the time your games and meta either become stale, or you end up rebalancing it.
Know Your Meta
The variance in power present in Commander can be even more wild; most players don’t tune their deck to be as punishingly powerful as possible, but if I brought a deck with dual-lands and an efficient infinite lock-out combo to a group where people had even quite powerful Commander decks then it would upset the balance of play.
Balance is all about context. If you’re playing in a Legacy GP against top-tier players a balanced game is going to require a top-tier deck. If you’re playing a game of casual Magic against a friend who only has one ragged casual deck then even a fairly decent Standard deck is going to create a one-sided experience. In the past I’ve created decks specifically to play against a friend who just has that one old deck so we can get some fun games in. It’s an interesting challenge to tailor a deck like that, and it lets you flex your accumulated knowledge of the game outside of the usual confines of competitive play.
I’ve noticed quite a few local games stores have been running a ‘Toolkit League’ using the deckbuilder’s toolkit, or have their own in-house cube for just this purpose. This is cheap and balanced gameplay with a deck you can still refine and keep between games.
You need to tune your deck to your environment; there is no such thing as a “bad deck” provided it is built reasonably competent. You have to know how to refine what you have.
Powering Up
This is the more straightforward route, but generally the most expensive. The simplest route is just to look for “strictly better” alternatives to what you already have. Cancel becomes Sounterspell, Shock becomes Lightning Bolt, and so on. The second step is to look for cards that fit well in the strategy you’re playing, or look up a similar deck in a different format. Yes I’m telling you to Netdeck. Netdecking can be used for good as well as evil, as it gives you an idea how far off the most optimal version of your deck you are. Sometimes you might just need a couple of cards from an online list to make your deck competitive enough. Again, we are looking for balance not dominance, and it isn’t inherently bad to check the field for what is being played.
If we’re talking about a singleton format like Commander then a great way to increase the competitive edge your deck has is to decrease variance. Variance is the randomness of your deck; it’s what stands between you and your most powerful spells. Decks run a playset of their most needed cards to increase the chance of seeing those cards in play, and to increase the likelihood of seeing powerful cards or combo pieces.
Tutors are able to search for a card directly out of your deck, with cards like Mystical Tutor or Diabolic Tutor giving you the option to find the right card for the situation at the right time. This is incredibly useful in a format like Commander that is filled with powerful effects. Filtering effects are cards that let you manipulate your draws to get what you need at the time, with cards such as Brainstorm or Dig Through Time.
Placing a few individually powerful cards into a strategy, or deck theme, that might be a bit goofy has made me able to at least keep pace in the past. Examples of cards that are simply powerful by themselves, and can fit in any strategy, would be Sol Ring, Thran Dynamo or Wurmcoil Engine.
Powering Down
Purposefully reducing power-level isn’t something players are particularly used to, but when you’re aiming to build a Cube or a deck that plays fairly against a metagame then it is very useful. I’m not talking about purposely ham-stringing your deck, or pulling your punches. When you rebuild a deck to be less efficient you can also make it more fun, or substitute in effects that are not traditionally seen as competitive or “top tier,” but are interesting and unique still. When building a Cube, I had to learn how to nerf certain strategies, but not replace them with un-fun or bland alternatives no one would want to play with.
A good way of doing this might be to expand a sub-theme in a Commander deck or Colour combination in a Cube into a full blown theme. This will reduce power-level whist increasing synergy; making the cards feel like they belong. In a budget deck or Cube this can be a fun way to utilize cheaper cards without them feeling powered down at all. In a Commander deck you simply might want to power down your deck by removing some of the tutors and filtering effects we talked about earlier but keep your strategy intact.
Of course you can always remove cards like Counterspell, or Lightning Bolt, which are individually powerful and well known for being efficient, but it’s often combinations of cards that make a deck or strategy unfair — not a single item. All of the interactions between cards can be hard to see in a plain deck-list. Which brings us onto our next point.
Test, Test, and Test Again
There is only so much you can do on paper without taking what you have and running some games. Due to the variance caused by the large deck size, the singleton format Commander, and EDH most decks require a fair number of games before you get a feel for how well they play. If you don’t have the time, or the people, to do full testing then the first step is to deal a few sample hands of seven cards and run through the mulligan process to see how usable an opening hand the deck gives you in a testing process.
Fully refining and balancing a beloved Commander deck with just the right cards at the right power level can take months, or even years, but once perfected these decks can be powerful, fun, and fair all at the same time. Get to know the decks you use in Casual or Eternal formats.
Power level and balance are problems all game designers wrestle with; Wizards of the Coast R&D puts months of testing into each set to try and ensure it has some level of balance and even they get it wrong on occasions. For instance, in the current Standard metagame, Battle of Zendikar has proven that most of its cards are dramatically underpowered.
This is more of an introduction to the concept of refining your play. If I went through specific examples we would be here all day, but I hope this can get you thinking about how you play the game, and how much enjoyment groups of players can get out of it without breaking the bank or steamrolling your friends with overpowered decks.
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