However, if you’re daunted by all the options, it might help to know that many MTG decks fall into one of three broad categories. One of Magic's old-school monsters on the battlefield, Arcbound Ravager was a staple in tournaments for years during its time in the Affinity decks. Even though it has fallen off in recent years, the Ravager can still terrorize the battlefield in the right deck.

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Or if you want to give EDH a whirl, the best Commander precon decks are a handy starting point. If your deck leans particularly aggressive, feel free to cut a land or two. And contrastly, if you’re playing a more controlling deck, you may want extra lands. Understanding mana curves can help you complete your deck, as you’ll easily be able to see which kinds of cards you are missing.

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After all, you don’t want to be surprised by what you draw. A tried and tested benchmark is to have lands make up around 40% of your deck – about 24 cards for a 60-card Constructed deck, and around 17 for a 40-card Limited deck. They’re not as fast as Aggro decks, but run higher quality creatures that can provide more value over the course of a game. It’s no good just jamming a bunch of cards together and calling it a day.

The Sealed events on Arena pop up while a set is still fresh, usually a few days before the official paper release. It's premium in that you can't use gold to enter, and if you ask me, much more fun than spending the 2,000 gems on 10 packs in the Arena store with no chance to win your entry fee back. Yep, there are plenty of leftover cards for you to choose from and you can definitely change the whole dynamic of your deck in games two and three. Sealed games tend to get very long because they’re fairly even. Decks are unlikely to have the right number of copies or a critical mass of cards to execute a streamlined, synergy-based gameplan.

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To win, you reduce your opponent’s life points to 0, so you need to focus around 1–3 unique cards that will win you the game. It would be years of struggle for me to learn a proper method for deck building. Even my first two functional decks were nothing to brag about. Over the years, I would learn to focus my deck not only a winning strategy but increasing my chances of getting that strategy out.

Technically you can have as many as you want (assuming you can shuffle it in your hands), but that’s a talk for another time. In Magic, with the exception of basic land cards, you’re allowed up to four copies of each card, unless the card itself states otherwise. As a starting point, you want to reserve 24 cards for lands, 40% of your 60-card deck. Since you’re allowed four copies of each card, that gives you nine unique cards to focus your build on. A spell is anything that isn’t a land (because they’re cast into play using mana, provided by your land cards).

Limited formats are, in my opinion, one of the fairest format in all of MTG and a fun way to improve your deckbuilding skills. Sometimes your card pool won’t have the most sought-after lands that produce multiple colors like Valgavoth's Lair and Thornspire Verge. The cards that aren’t used in the deck are counted as your sideboard.

You can run more in the sideboard, but you don’t need more than one to start with since it’s super situational and you’ll only likely ever need it once if at all in a game. It’s important to remember that different formats have different deck sizes. I’m here today to go over the rules when it comes to deck sizes and discuss the strategy behind deck sizes when building your decks.

If you play all four copies in your main board, your opening hand has a 40% chance to have one copy of the card and a 60% chance to not have any of the four copies. Every card you draw after that increases the odds that the next card you draw is Ob Nixilis. While tournaments were ruled at a 60-card minimum at this point, the rulebooks had yet to change.

So long as you have two extra mana, you can pay four to return it to play with the Deathmantle attached to it while also creating four 1/1 Myr artifact creature tokens. Keep sacrificing the Myr Battlesphere and at least one Myr token to recur them endlessly, giving you infinite mana, tokens, and death triggers. You need to be careful with Darksteel Forge, though, since you can still be forced to sacrifice your artifacts through any number of spells or effects. You can adjust this number as needed, but 40% should be what you run in any given scenario, regardless of the format. That’s 24 lands in Constructed formats, and in Limited formats that’s 16 lands if you’re adhering to the minimum. You’re looking at 40 lands in Commander, but you can easily cut it down to 38 to sneak in another fun card or two.

If your deck is entirely made up of two drops (cards that cost two mana), then you’ve got a low mana curve. You’ll generally want your mana curve to be a bell curve of sorts, with a few one- and two-mana spells, a higher concentration of three- to four-drops, and then a few cards that cost five or more. You’re new to Magic the Gathering and have learned how to play the game with the starter deck you’ve been given, but now, you want to build your own. You look at your collection and you throw in the best cards you got, along with a few lands.

But if you’re looking for a fun way to start your MTG collection, Sealed is the format for you. You can only activate this ability on your upkeep, making it a little narrow in terms of use but still a powerful deterrent for your opponents. If you have a way to cheat it into play on an opponent's turn, say with a Master Transmuter, you can watch your opponents over commit to the battlefield just to disrupt all their plans.

One of the most popular ways to play is the Commander MTG format. Personally, I use our very own simulators to practice how mtg decks I build my Sealed decks. Draftsim is no doubt the best tool out there (and will also give you power ratings for each card so that you can know what cards to build around).