Building a Deck Is Easy, Tuning It Up Is The Harder Part

There’s a lot out there online about deck building, but I want to go out on a limb and say that deck building isn’t what’s really important.  (Pauses while collective gasp goes out from the masses).  It’s not deck building that makes a good deck, its deck tuning.  Let’s be honest, you could make a hundred decks, and in their very first form ninety-nine will probably suck, until they get tuned anyway.  Yes it’s important to build a deck with a solid strategy, a sense of tempo, an understanding of balance and the proper mana curve, but a new deck will always be just that, a new deck, one that it is untested and untried.  It’s what happens next that will determine whether that new deck becomes a good deck, or even a great one.

What happens next is the tuning process.  When I’ve made a new deck, whether its online or a live deck, I like to test them out and after I’ve done that there’s a series of questions I run through in my head to help me decide what changes are necessary.  Typically speaking I prefer to accomplish this process online, and there are a variety of reasons that’s true.  For one thing it is just easier to make changes to the deck in the online format where a single click takes you to the editor and a click puts you right back into the mix to test those changes out.  Plus I don’t have to constantly sleeve and un-sleeve cards, which quite frankly is a pain in the ass.  I don’t have to pull cards from one deck to try them in another.  Thirdly, playing online means that my deck in progress is going to have to face a multitude of deck types and I’ll get a better idea of how well it’s actually performing.

The questioning process goes something like this…

1. Did this deck do what it was supposed to do? (i.e. if it was a creature removal deck did it effectively remove creatures?)
2. Did it move at an acceptable rate?  Was the tempo good?  Did I get specific cards when I needed them?
3. How often did this deck win?  How often did it lose?
4. What types of decks did it lose to?  How do I defend against those threats?

I do that, go through the mental checklist and all, and then make changes accordingly.  The trick is that I do this repeatedly.  I have decks that I have been tuning for years, literally.  They are among the best I have because they have been vetted in play and have been tuned to be efficient.  Also, they have evolved to take new cards and sets into consideration.

If you have a deck idea, by all means build it, but don’t expect the process to end there, and don’t be too quick to give up.  My mill deck was ‘in process’ for three years till I struck gold as it were.  Got a deck tuning tip of your own?  Drop a comment and let us know.