In this recurring column, I will be posting the decks I’m working on for my favorite card game – Magic. I started playing Magic shortly after they first traveled to Jamuraa back in 1996 and have been playing steadily for last twenty-six years. Me and many of my close friends cite the game as a primary factor of our initial disasters in higher education. I digress.
One of the things I’m going to include in this column are my deck lists. Now there are a couple of odd things I do when designing a deck; some self-imposed rules to force myself to think creatively and not just cram my deck full of the most powerful rares I can find. The first rule is my limit on rarity. In a mono-colored deck, I run exactly four copies of a card if it is Common, three copies if it is Uncommon, two copies if it is Rare, and one copy if it is Mythic, Legendary (regardless of rarity), or Restricted. The card’s rarity for this rule is based on its lowest rarity printing.
The second rule is that my mono-colored decks must include five copies of one “near-basic” card. To qualify as a near-basic card, the card or a functionally equivalent card of the same mana cost must have been printed at Common and there must be at least one functional reprint of the card.
For example, Elite Vanguard is a near-basic. It was printed at common in Eternal Masters, and functionally reprinted as Expedition Envoy. If my deck cared about whether or not the creature was a Soldier, I could still justify it by saying my fifth copy was a Soldier of the Pantheon without the benefits.
The third rule that I follow is that each card name is unique in my arsenal, meaning that if I run a card in one deck, I don’t run it in any others.