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How to Brew, Part 1 – Inspired

Nine out of ten decks built by the best…SUCK. – Patrick Chapin, The Innovator

In case you’re not someone who listens to Magic podcasts, you might not know that I am the host of a rogue deckbuilding cast called Horde of Notions. The fact that I do host such a thing should tell you that I enjoy building my own decks and coming up with crazy and wacky ideas. That doesn’t quite tell the whole story though. See, I absolutely fucking love it.

There is an intrinsic joy in winning games, matches and even tournaments with a deck that is all yours. You found an idea, you fleshed it out, you tested it and then it won. That’s a great feeling, I assure you. It’s so addictive that for a time, I was rabidly against ever playing a netdeck. I’ve since softened on that stance somewhat, but now I will only use a netdeck as a starting point, and only for major tournaments.

With that said, what exactly does a brewer do? How do you build your own deck? Where do you start, how do you continue, what’s the process? I’m hoping that over the next few columns we’ll walk through the process of brewing a new deck and get some of you into the addictive world of rogue deckbuilding. People make a lot of mistakes when brewing their own decks. Those who don’t brew just can’t understand the how or the why. Well, stick with me!

Whispers of the Muse Falling Into Your Lap?

We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action – Frank Tibolt

You’re not Mike Long, are you?

Every deck starts somewhere, and that somewhere is the idea. Coming up with a deck idea is no different from coming up with a song or a book idea: you need inspiration, you need a creative spark and you have to know how to capture it for future use. Nobody comes up with 75 on the spot and plays that list at the next FNM. Well, nobody serious anyway.

Magic is not just a game of play skill. At least it didn’t start out that way. Before there were two dozen sites to search for decklists and just as many for strategy, tournament results and videos of drafts and matches, players actually had to come up with their own ideas, their own decks. Sometimes they would be tweaked versions of decks they had seen at a tournament, sometimes they would inadvertently come up with the same idea as someone else, and some people even worked together. Regardless of the method, the ability to actually build a competitive deck was meant to be just as important as the ability to play one…if not more so. These deckbuilders got their inspiration and they sat down to brew.

Inspiration is not some magic bullet, some bolt of mental inspiration that generates synergy, metagame considerations and consistency and injects this potent mixture of knowledge into your skull. It is not fabricated of thin air and desire. You can’t Wish for it and expect it to materialise out of your sideboard. You have to look for it, actively seek it out. So…where?

Take Notes, There Will Be A Test

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

Remember ProsBloom? SquirrelCraft? Aluren? Trix? Cocoa Pebbles? Full English Breakfast? Affinity? Academy? I do. All of them. I have decklists saved in a notebook and on a hard drive from almost every major archetype in the last 15 years. I also have my own combo ideas kept in a similar fashion. Every time a new set comes out or I see a card I hadn’t seen before, I will go back over some old lists to see if anything sparks. In addition I’ll crack open the old notebook to a random page from time to time to see if any old lists could be viable again.

The point here is that Magic has finite design space. A lot of the new cards are twists on old designs, or improved versions, or in some cases toned-down versions. If a deck stopped being Standard-legal because a card rotated, or something got banned in Legacy and killed an archetype, then these new cards can often revitalize the deck. What’s important here though is to keep notes. If you look at something and think it might be worth trying with a new card, note it. If a deck stops working or being playable, note why. This will make it that much easier to come back to it later.

Another important point is that you don’t just keep track of decks. Any time you come up with a combo or interaction, note it. Doesn’t matter if it works within the rules, or if the card with which it combos actually exists yet. Wouldn’t you love to be the next person to come up with something on the scale of Donate-[card]Illusions of Grandeur[/card]? There are cards out there that are just missing one key component or one rule change to be broken. Make note of it! That way when it happens you’ll be ready…and you can one-up the speculators to boot!

One thing I have found incredibly valuable for this is Evernote. Frankly if you’re serious about Magic and you don’t have a smartphone, you’re doing it wrong. Evernote, for those not in the know, allows you to synchronize notes between multiple locations: smartphone, tablet, laptop, anything with an internet connection and the Evernote app. That way if inspiration strikes you on the bus, on the toilet or on the couch you can save it in one place. It also backs up your info remotely so you don’t have to worry about data loss.

It’s Not Netdecking If You Change It!

The internet is really really great… – Anon

I’m not going to get into the debate of what netdecking actually is and why you should or shouldn’t do it. That’s another column for another time. However, the internet is a perfectly valid source of inspiration.

There is a lot of Magic content on the web these days. Have you noticed? Why yes, I do believe you have! Devour it, my neophytic brewers. Consume it. Nobody can possibly take it all in but go for anything with a decklist in it. I don’t care how casual it is, how bad it looks or how expensive it is. We’re doing this for ideas and inspiration, not a shopping list. Read the list, read the article around it, and figure out if it’s something you like. Maybe you can see a different way to build it, maybe a more economical way. Maybe you hate it. Maybe it’s way too obvious for you. The fact is that any pro who publishes a decklist is 90-95% likely to never play that list again. Why give away their hot new tech like that? So if it’s not their optimal version, why couldn’t you tweak it too? The inspiration behind wo of the best decks I’ve built came from two amazing deckbuilders (Conley Woods and Randy Buehler), changing 6 cards in one and almost half the deck in the other.

Noel de Cordova and Jacob van Lunen both write tremendous articles on the Mothership for brewers. They’re aimed at different markets but both have provided me with a lot of inspiration, and not just for Standard decks. Sometimes Noel will publish a combo that really only works in EDH, or Jacob will put up a deck that could be even better with a few more bucks spent on it. These articles are MEANT to provoke thought, so use them.

Although less useful for brewing purposes, the quality tournament decks from StarCity, KYT’s The Rundown and Mike Flores’ articles can also be muses. They do require far less in terms of creativity but any change you make can make the deck feel like your own.

The same goes for Magic Online. People will play all sorts of janky brews in the tournament practice and casual rooms (especially that Smi77y guy, he’s TERRIBLE) and sometimes you’ll see something that tickles your fancy (giggity). This isn’t college folks, plagiarism is perfectly fine. More than likely you’ll want to build it differently from the guy you just stomped into the digital sidewalk, but the kernel is there.

In a Deckbuilding Bind(er)?

You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas. – Glinda the Good Witch, Wizard of Oz

I know a lot of Magic players, and no two of them organize their binders alike. Some have common and uncommon staples in there, some have a binder for trades and one for keepers, some organize by colour and alphabetically, some by set, some put one card per pocket while others jam a playset in…there are many, many ways of doing it. My own style is more conducive to brewing, in my opinion. Any rares or money uncommons I own and for which I have immediate plans are in the binder that nobody sees. All others are in the trade binder. Periodically, I will review the trade binder to see if anything jumps at me. In fact, my most successful deck (BP Green) came from just looking through my binder.

The BP stands for Binder Pull, which is basically what I did here. So many good green cards so why not play them together?

This method works particularly well if you draft a lot and have a lot of random cards, or if you have a lot of old cards. If you only keep tournament staples then you’ll likely only see tournament decks when leafing though your binder. Of course there’s just as good a chance you’ll come up with something when looking through other binders, be they from a store or another player. This is where the trading part of the game comes in. Have fun!

A Little Self-Promotion

I’m not gonna lie to you. One of the very best places to get inspiration is from podcasts. A lot of them focus on tournament-winning decks and strategies and they all have their place. The ones that are more casual in nature, like The Mana Pool or The Avant Card Show, while not necessarily making decks intended for tournaments, can still set you to thinking of more efficient or consistent ways to do the same thing in a deck that IS intended to win a tournament. Of course the one podcast that is aimed at people who like to brew, namely Horde of Notions, is the ultimate in deckbuilding inspiration. That’s why I started the show. The co-hosts and guests have all come up with stuff that has sent me off in a deckbuilding frenzy, and some good ideas have even come out of it. Xenoranger, which combines Turntimber Ranger with Xenograft for an arbitrarily large number of Wolf tokens. Combined with an untapped Harabaz Druid and Blue Sun’s Zenith, or Hagra Diabolist, or even Halimar Excavator, you don’t even have to untap to win. Joe and Joey mentioned the combo on an episode and I threw it together.

Two of the three decks I’m considering for grinding into Nationals were conceived on Horde of Notions. The Illusions deck that was played this past weekend was very similar to the modifications we made to the Illusions M12 Event Deck. We also talked about Hive Mind before it hit the Legacy scene and TwinBlade before it dominated Jace’s Last Hurrah (the last big tournament before July 1). Inspiration across the board!

An Inspired Move

Deckbuilding is 1/10 inspiration, 9/0 perspiration – Paraphrased from Thomas Edison, who totally would have played Magic

The bottom line here is that you have to work to become inspired. You won’t go from nothing to Pro Tour overnight, so keep at it. Don’t be discouraged and don’t feel like anyone or anything is beneath you. Most of all, try it. Go to FNM with something goofy that you built yourself. No you might not win, but so what? Think of the fun!

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