So, how about building a deck based on some color combination? How about BUG?

Sure, sounds fun.

What’s BUG about? What are the first things which come to mind?

Juzam, serendib, erhnam. Elves of deep shadow, for some reason.

Okay, let’s go with that. First shell. What’s the mana like? With full power, we can’t fit too many elves in. Birds have to be better. How many duals? Let’s start with the other stuff. Moxen, lotus, sol ring, 4 city, 4 mishra, strip mine; that’s 16 already. Probably not library. Maybe 30 mana including 4 mishras and a strip mine (which do something else than produce mana) and 4 birds (which die a lot) seems reasonable. That leaves about 10 duals. Should be workable. Not great when the birds die, but it will have to do. One color will have to be the splash, and it’s likely it’s blue, as we want juzams and birds.

After the mana, let’s add the broken stuff. 3 blue cards and braingeyser (which should be good with all that mana). Tutor and mind twist. Regrowth. A couple of sylvans seem like a good idea when we’re aggressive. Chaos orb. That’s 10 more cards. 20 more to go.

A couple of nether voids seems like a good plan with all this acceleration and heavy board presence. Some removal maybe? Two or three psionic blasts, maybe we have to run a crumble. A couple of sinkholes might be good. Not a full set, just two, to handle mishras, kill library and as general tempo. We don’t want to flood on non-impactful cards late game. 13 more to go.

We probably want something like 10 or 11 creatures; the full eight djinns are too much, I think, but 4 serendibs seems good. Add a mirror for some extra reach and life gain against aggro; we have enough acceleration to get it down early enought, I think.

What is missing now? No rituals, no hypnotics, no argothian pixies. Rituals don’t go too well with birds and serendibs, and they cause us to lose cards too much (cf. the Handleman school). I prefer not to have any important creatures to die to lightning bolts, I think that is a real plan. Not very much removal, but we have giant creatures. If we really need to kill some permanent, we have an orb and a tutor and a bunch of card draw to find it with. No recall, but I doubt we have enough cards in hand to use it effectively most of the time.

So something like this:

5 mox

1 lotus

1 sol ring

4 birds

4 mishra

1 strip mine

4 city

4 bayou

4 tropical

2 underground sea

1 ancestral

1 time walk

1 timetwister

1 braingeyser

1 regrowth

1 demonic tutor

1 mind twist

2 sylvan

1 chaos orb

2 nether void

2 sinkhole

2 psionic blast

1 crumble

4 serendib

4 juzam

3 erhnam

1 mirror universe

1 mystery card

This actually sounds sweet. Too bad getting juzams is far away in the future for me. What could I use instead? Oh yeah, su-chi is quite good, also not dying to lightning bolt.

Wait. What are we using black for, exactly? Why are we not just splashing nether void and the broken cards? Sinkhole is hardly important. That would help the mana base a bit, possibly freeing up a mana drain.

Thinking about the mana base: we have 4 cities, 4 birds and moxen and lotus. That’s roughly enough to play any splash we’d want. A fireball or two would probably be good as a way of utilizing all that mana. And upgrading the crumble to a disenchant can be useful.

This, then:

5 mox

1 lotus

1 sol ring

4 birds

4 mishra

1 strip mine

4 city

2 bayou

2 forest

4 tropical

2 underground sea

1 ancestral

1 time walk

1 timetwister

1 braingeyser

1 regrowth

1 demonic tutor

1 mind twist

2 sylvan

1 chaos orb

2 nether void

2 psionic blast

1 disenchant

4 serendib

4 erhnam

3 su-chi

1 mirror universe

1 fireball

1 control magic

1 mana drain

What about sideboard? 4 blue blasts to handle blood moon and burn. Some terror maybe, another control magic against midrange. A crumble. Gloom, probably. Maybe a concordant crossroads as more removal for the abyss. An avoid fate or two. Something along these lines:

4 beb

1 terror

1 control magic

1 crumble

1 steal artifact

2 gloom

1 concordant crossroads

2 avoid fate

2 whirling dervish

Man, this looks kind of good. Now I need to start aquiring serendibs, and erhnams, and birds and nether voids and …