1.Don’t overspend on your deck. If you buy budget cards, the card rotations are not disasters. Many new cards drop in price after a few months, so maybe wait a while to buy the newer sets.

2.Be creative with your brewing. Brewing is fun.

3.Don’t expect your idea to work right away. It may take many iterations of a deck before it becomes reasonably successful. At the same time, not every card and idea will work out. Be willing to accept that failures will occur and be willing to correct those mistakes.

4.Watch the mana curve carefully. As a general rule, lower mana cost is better. Too many high cost cards will kill any deck. Some decks will require cards that accelerate the mana growth to help them. While powerful, cards that cost five or more mana are very hard to get into play.

5.The standard legal dual lands are expensive. Getting some good artifacts can help build another “color” into the deck without expensive dual color lands. While ideally one wants to play a few colors, it is better to have an effective mono-deck than an ineffective multicolor deck. Hopefully, the lands become cheaper and this will not be an issue.

6.Check a lot of different online sources to learn what other people are doing. Reddit has some good deckbuilding combo tips. Keep an inventory on Deckbox.org to look at all cards without sorting through the physical collection. Write down the cards needed for the build and then put the first build together. MTGvault has a good deckbuilding tool. MTGVault also has a decent online tool for fishbowling. Always do some paper draws. Fish-bowling a deck over and over again is a great way to see what works and what does not before using the deck in a duel. Tappedout.net will allow you to playtest decks.

7.Ask for suggestions. People will offer many useful tips.

8.With each new release, carefully study commons and uncommons. Look for cards that do something current cards do not already do- unless it is necessary to replace something because of rotation. Obviously add new cards that support existing decks and the overall collection.

9.Take a lot of time when building a new deck. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to take a break from working on a deck and come back to building later. It is not uncommon to wake up in the middle of the night with inspiration.

10.Incorporate a few attacks that cannot be stopped and always consider alternative win conditions including poison.

11.Don’t rely too heavily on one powerful “win” card.

12.Always make sure a deck has plenty of land. I usually go with 24 for 60 or around 40%.

13.Play a lot of Magic. Playing Magic is the best way to learn from others and to test and improve decks.