Article by Samaca

Deck building may seem simple to most, but it is a difficult skill to master. This article will help you better understand deck building by explaining some tips and tricks to help you build a winning deck!

The “3 Y’s”

The “3 Y’s” is a concept that I have carried over from my time as an avid Magic: The Gathering player and deck builder, these 3 key components are what make a cohesive enough to combat different situations with a high rate of success, so without any more annoying text let’s get to it!

Synergy

Synergy is what makes your deck work, function, and fit together like a puzzle; it keeps your deck together and lets cards work with other cards instead of just having a handful of cards that just do their own thing without any type of cohesion. A simple example for synergy could be something simple like including “+X Spell Power” minions in a deck with lots of damage dealing spells or it can be something a bit more complex like having lots of minions that summon other minions to power up cards like Frostwolf Warlord or to use something like Bloodlust on them. This synergy is what causes a deck to have the power it needs to overwhelm its opponents.

Versatility

Versatility keeps your options open to any threat. Think of your deck as a Swiss army knife. You want to have many tools to help you in a number of situations that you could find yourself in. A great example of this is Starfall; you can use it to eliminate a large threat that may be on the board or you can use it to eliminate a large force of minions with low health. Another more subtly versatile card is Abusive Sergeant, you can use his “+2 Attack” buff on one of your minions to deal extra damage to something or you can use it on a bothersome enemy minion with 5 or 6 attack to bump it up past 7 so a Big Game Hunter can deal with it, and as you can tell those two cards have good synergy together. Versatility gives you those tools that you will need when faced with a variety of situations.

Consistency

Consistency is what makes your deck do what it’s supposed to do almost every time, it is one of the most simple factors in deck building but it is also one of the most crucial, without consistency your deck becomes less likely to perform as you want it to and these are decks people will generally refer to as “gimmicky.” Consistency is usually achieved by having 2 of each of your key cards in a deck or by having a decent amount of card draw in your deck (This is why so many people have been running Nat Pagle). Having consistency increases your chances of getting the cards you need when you need them, it lets you get what you need more often and usually quicker than your opponent gets the cards he needs.

Putting it Together

Now that you understand the “3Y’s” you can probably start to understand why some decks you see win tournaments do just that and why some decks don’t really work. So now that you get these concepts you have to put them together, now doing this is the really hard part because adding one of these elements will usually reduce another one and thus to make a great deck you have to find a balance of each.

For example, here is my Shaman deck I put together recently, it isn’t the greatest deck by far and has some problems but in truth no deck is perfect. But the point of me showing you this deck is to show you how it looks when the “3 Y’s” are all put together and how they stress and blend with each other. Let’s start with synergy; in this deck I have 2 Unbound Elementals so I want to maximize the potential of their effect, thus I added 7 total cards with overload, most of these are damage dealing spells such as Lightning Bolt and Lightning Storm so I want to be able to up their effectiveness so I added 2 Azure Drakes.

As for versatility let’s look a bit closer at those spells with overload; we have single target removal in Lightning Bolt, multiple target removal Forked Lightning, a board clear in Lightning Storm, and finally some defensive minions in Feral Spirit, so when I added these overload spells I made sure to have a variety of uses in them. Azure Drake is another extremely versatile card in this deck, it is a well-rounded minion costing 5 for a 4/4 body which can be a pain to deal with (especially for Priest decks), it has spell power for those damaging spells I mentioned and lastly it draws us a card which helps consistency and card advantage.

Finally, consistency can be shown like this: the cards I have 2 copies of I will draw more consistently compared to cards I only have 1 of; I will also draw the cards I need more often if I have effects that draw cards for me such as, Mana Tide Totem and Azure Drake. Consistency is really simple but if overlooked it can leave you empty handed and hoping for the perfect top deck.

The Wrap Up

That should about sum up the basics for deck building, there are a few more concepts such as archetypes and mana curve, but I feel as though those are more geared towards perfecting a deck, so if you want to learn more on those subjects, be sure to do a little research. I hope this article helps you build better decks and I hope you go far with this knowledge, but if you have any questions feel free to leave questions here and I will gladly answer them. Until then, good luck on the battlefield!

Article by Samaca, Edited by Homebrewed, Formatting by Whale_Cancer