What Story Does Your Deck Tell?

Building a deck is one of the most challenging but rewarding parts of playing any trading card game (TCG). Each deck tells a story about how it wants to win.

We can improve our decks by thinking about the story we want to tell and how well the cards in our deck fit that story. Below, we'll look at the structure of a deck's story and walk through an example of how to build one.

The Story Every Deck Follows

The story of every deck follows three basic phases:

Setup
Gaining Advantage
Maintaining Advantage

Number two is the most important; the moment your deck plays its key cards that take control of the game (i.e., a win condition). Setup is where you try to survive long enough to play your win condition. Likewise, maintaining the advantage means keeping it long enough to kill the opponent.

To use a simple example, say your win condition is playing strong monsters, like Gnarled Wendigo or Dormant Monstrosity, earlier than expected. Your setup phase would likely consist of cards like Overflow that develop more sites, or creating many small minions to sacrifice or position to help summon those monsters.

Your "gaining the advantage" step is when you actually play the Gnarled Wendigo or Dormant Monstrosity, likely earlier than your opponent can play similarly powerful - and -mana minions. You might then aim to maintain the advantage with cards that let you move around the board quickly (e.g., Blink, Tactical Move) to attack your opponents quickly, or maybe kill spells (e.g., Stormy Seas) that can get rid of your opponent's blockers.

When reading about deckbuilding theory, you'll typically encounter three deck archetypes: aggro, combo, and control. Let's look at how each of these uses the three phases.

Aggro

An aggro deck's goal is to win the game as fast as possible. Aggro aims to immediately play threats the opponent has to deal with, and try to win before the opponent finishes setting up (or before the aggro deck runs out of gas).

Overlaying the three stages above onto this deck, aggro decks generally try to skip the setup stage entirely: they want to gain the advantage immediately, ideally from turn one. Turns 1-3 are where aggro decks thrive, immediately gaining the advantage over slower decks.

From there, the rest of the game is spent maintaining the advantage, trying to rush down the opponent before running out of cards.

Combo

A combo deck typically relies on getting two or more specific synergistic cards at the same time in order to create a powerful effect. This effect can either cause you to win the game outright (e.g., Wedding Hall, King Arthur, and Queen Guinevere) or create a large enough advantage to convert a win (e.g., Plague of Frogs and Gilman House).

A combo deck will fully utilize all three phases. During the setup phase, they'll focus on cards that let them draw to find combo pieces, as well as removal to keep their opponent at bay. Then they'll play the combo to gain the advantage and try to maintain it long enough to win.

Control

Control decks aim to outlast their opponent, running them out of resources, then playing a few powerful spells to win the game. This deck is the opposite of an aggro deck.

Most of the game is spent in the setup stage, trying to survive everything the opponent throws until they run out of resources. Once the opponent slows down, you gain the advantage by playing a powerful minion or two that the opponent will struggle to kill.

At that point, you typically don't have to worry about maintaining the advantage, since the opponent will no longer have resources to effectively contend. Be mindful not to run out of time in a tournament setting.

Example Deck

In my previous article, I discussed how Sorcery's rarity system makes Peasant decks, which only use Ordinary and Exceptional cards, viable. With that in mind, let's look at a sample Peasant deck and how it uses the three phases to tell a story:

Peasant Harbinger

1 Harbinger

Minions (36)

3 Hauntless Head air
4 Forsaken air
3 Estranged Loner water
3 Gibbous Nightgaunts air air
3 Headless Haunt air air
3 Nommo Monitor water water
3 Phase Assassin air air
3 Failed Mutation water water
4 Roaming Monster air
3 Gnarled Wendigo water
4 Shoggoth water water

Magics (24)

4 Lightning Bolt air
4 Grapple Shot air
4 Ice Lance water
3 Monstermorphosis water water
3 Abyssal Assault water water
3 Stormy Seas water
3 Whirling Blades air air

Collection (7)

3 Ghoul air
4 Horrible Hybrids water

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The easiest way to start building a deck is to pick an Avatar and ask how you can use them to create a win condition. Harbinger generates three squares we can summon minions to at a discount and potential positional advantage if those squares are close to the opponent.

Thinking about how to best use this, our win condition is consistently playing minions that are more expensive than our opponents; generally stronger minions than whatever our opponent plays.

This difference starts strong and weakens as the game progresses since the difference between a -mana and -mana minion is larger than the difference between an -mana and -mana minion. This likely pushes toward a more midrange playstyle, where our - and -mana minions win the day.

The additional consideration is that our Harbinger portals will often spend the early-to-mid game being on void squares. These incentivize playing minions with Voidwalk. Looking at the list of minions, most of the early and mid-game minions all have Voidwalk. This allows us to make the best use of our portals, regardless of where they appear.

When designing our top-end, we feature many powerful minions with the Monster subtype. Monstermorphosis takes advantage of this, offering another way to play a monster ahead of schedule.

Our sites lean into the theme of playing minions early, with sites like the three towers, Den of Evil, Ghost Town, and Town.

Finally, our Magics are removal to help us survive against more aggressive foes, and movement spells to help us close out the game once we've played our bigger minions.

Looking at our phases above, we expect the deck to play out as follows:

Setup: play low-cost Voidwalk minions to establish early pressure, or use removal to slow down our opponent.
Gaining the Advantage: Using our sites, Harbinger's ability, or Monstermorphosis, play one or more of our or -mana minions on turn four.
Maintaining the Advantage: use removal to prevent our opponent from taking the advantage, use Grapple Shot and Whirling Blades to finish the opponent.

Putting It All Together

Above, we explored the different phases of a deck and looked at an example Harbinger deck to see how they play out in practice. To begin applying this to your decks, it's easiest to start with a single card to centralize on; identify how it can be used most powerfully, and then build the deck from there.

It's easiest if the build-around is your Avatar, since you're guaranteed to have them, but it doesn't have to be. In fact, my main deck is a Waveshaper deck that started when I fell in love with Drown.

This is a great way to put together an initial version of a deck. Most decks require tweaks to reach their full power. Next time, we'll explore how to analyze your games and use this data to modify and grow your decks!