Editing Magic: The Gathering (section)

==Building a Deck==
Alright so you've read this article, looked at a few cards, maybe even gotten yourself a few booster packs or a hand-me-down collection. What now?
	  
The process of deckbuilding can, at first, seem like an extremely difficult one, and in many ways it is. You have possibly hundreds of variables to consider depending on what you're building for and thousands of cards to sort through to find the best ones for the job. 
	 
But before you overwhelm yourself, look at what you have in your stuff and find a card you like. It doesn't even have to be a powerful one, just something that catches your eye and gets the gears turning. For this example, we'll use something flashy yet robust, the card Fireball. A classic design and very easy to find, Fireball is a card that can generate truly explosive results and kill your opponent in one shot. Awesome! What now?
	 
Well, let's think of what we want to do here. Let's say in this case we want to use Fireball as our win-condition. For this, we'll need obviously Red Mana to cast it, but also additional Mana to make it lethal. So now we're going to look for things that feed into that concept; making more Mana for a bigger Fireball. This is the process referred to as focusing the deck, and is essential to building a successful one. The more streamlined and tight your focus is, the more of a chance the deck will do what you want it to do. Trying to do too many things at once will leave you lacking in all of them, so it's usually better to have a strong theme to accomplish your Plan A.
	 
So focusing, we need a way to make Mana for our Fireball. Land is of course the most basic way of generating Mana, so we should play more lands to make more Mana! Right? Well perhaps, but by filling up the deck with too much land, we're not going to be drawing any spells. Too little though, and we won't be able to cast the spells that we draw. Finding that balance is another key part of deckbuilding and takes a lot of time to get the right feel for it. In general though, your deck should contain 24 lands, adding in 1 or 2 for a slower deck with big mana threats, and removing 1 to 3 for a faster more aggressive deck. 
	 
In this case let's start with 24 lands, and 4 Fireballs. We have 28 cards, so we need 32 more to make a legal deck. Since we want the greatest chance of drawing the cards we need as possible, we won't exceed 60 cards here. In most cases in fact, you should never play more than 60 cards. Every card you add is keeping you one card away from drawing the one you really need. A common mistake for many new players is to just keep piling on cards until they make some 78 card monstrosity, don't do this. Treat 60 as the minimum and maximum for every deck you make, it will make your deck faster and more consistent. So what will we add into those 32 slots?
	 
We have Mana to cast a Fireball that can deal up to 23 damage at once, which is lethal, but would require every land in our deck to do so. Sounds kinda slow, right? So what can we do to speed it up? Since we're playing a Red deck, we should start by looking at the options Red has to generate more Mana. Red has access to a few Ritual cards, which can make mana fairly quickly but only in single shots. This means that to make this path work we'd need a lot of these Rituals, and to get lucky by drawing enough of them to make a lethal Fireball. Not the most efficient option, but it can work! Our other obvious option in Red is Artifacts that generate mana. We can play something as small as a Fire Diamond, or something big like a Gilded Lotus. These also feed into each other, but come with the downside of clogging up our deck when we have enough mana to make a lethal Fireball. So a step in the right direction, since this mana is renewable, but still not quite as fast as what we need. But we're out of options in Red, what now?

Now we look at our other colors, of course! The best place to start is to look at the color wheel on the back of a Magic card. Notice the arrangement of the colors on the wheel. Any color that is adjacent to another on the wheel is "allied" with that color, which is to say that they work well together. Red is allied with Green and Black. Many Black cards let you draw cards or even search your deck for specific ones, which could be helpful for the deck to find the cards it needs when it needs them, but since Green has some of that too now and since Black is more about making little aggressive dudes, killing things, bringing things back from the dead and giant demons, let's skip it and look at Green.

Green is the color of nature, and as such has cards that revolve around the generation of mana. Perfect for our goal, and once you start looking you'll notice that green has a ton of cards that are dedicated to making more mana. They come in two flavors; abilities that put mana in the pool, and cards that pull lands from the deck itself. But which flavor do we need? In this case, the ones that pull lands from the deck itself are the ones that we want. This is because they thin our deck out, eliminating lands and reducing our chances at not being able to draw spells. Afterall, what good is having tons of mana if you have nothing to cast with it? Some common options in this slot are Rampant Growth and Cultivate, so we'll add 4 of each to the deck.

Now we have 4 Fireballs, 4 Rampant Growths, 4 Cultivates, and 24 lands. We have 36 cards and need 24 more. Since we still have space, we can add some of those cards that add mana to our pool. Elves tend to be very, very good at this, so we can rock a tribal theme with these guys to generate a lot of mana very quickly. Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystics, and Elvish Archdruid are easy to find solid slots in this section. With 4 of each in play at once we can generate a potential 4+4+(16x4) mana per turn. Quite lethal for casting a Fireball. So let's add 4 of each!

Now we have 4 Fireballs, 4 Rampant Growths, 4 Cultivates, 4 Llanowar Elves, 4 Elvish Mystics, 4 Elvish Archdruids, and 24 lands. We have 52 cards and need 8 more. Wow, that was fast, suddenly we have only 8 spaces left! This is where we add the extra utility stuff to get our deck fully streamlined, and since we absolutely need to draw our Fireballs to win, we should add spells that draw cards. Sadly this is neither Green nor Red's strong suit, but we do have a few choices.

Since we're already ramping lands out of the deck, we might not need a powerful draw engine anyway. A solid option in Green for straight card draw is Harmonize, but it clocks in at 4 mana. If we get a good start, this is nothing though, so we can rock 4 of these guys with not too much worry. Now we have 4 slots left, so how do we top it off? Well, we do have a lot of Elves, why not add in Elvish Visionary? 4 of her gets us to 60!

Now you have a deck that is streamlined to win off Fireball, but can also win by playing a ton of Elves and beating face! A Plan A that just so happens to have a solid Plan B! By playing with the deck you'll probably start to find it could use some fine tuning to beat what you play against, but what matters here is that we have a solid foundation to build from. When making tweaks, be sure to keep the central idea of the deck in mind. And of course, keep practicing making decks and test them to see what works for you.