MTG: Constructed

Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. He's pretty cool 

Constructed play
As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) after a (decades) long break, and I'm going to be sharing what I've learned. I want to start by talking about Constructed play, as it is the MTG format I am most familiar with, and until recently, the only format I knew. In brief, Constructed play is a game where players construct decks of no less than 60 cards, no more than 4 of any one card (except basic lands), starting with 20 life. The cards in the deck come from the players collection. This interfaces with the collectible aspect of Magic cards, both in good and bad ways.
Problems with constructed play
One of the pitfalls of constructed play is that there is a severe economic slope. If you spend more money, you are more likely to win, it’s as simple as that. This has always been the case, but when I was a teenager back in 1994, it didn’t come up quite as often, because most of us didn't have much money to speak of. But these days if you focus your spending, you can construct a $300 deck with nothing but amazing cards and wallop your friends. This approach is not good for the game, in my opinion. It’s not fun to get your butt kicked all the time, and it’s not cheap to try and compete in that way. I am not about to get into an arms race for the biggest and baddest. Not to mention, it is a boring way to construct a deck, and it takes away the randomized fun of opening packs and seeing what you get.

Another problem I have with constructed play is akin to the above – instead of playing a variety of cards, the "best" decks are constructed of 4 copies of the best possible cards. This leads to a major drop in variety, and a generally boring deck that yes- wins a lot. Zzzzzzzz. Out of the thousands and thousands of possible magic cards, people like to construct decks made up of 10 different cards in multiples of 4. I hate this method, I find it insulting.

Singleton
Fortunately, there is a style of play that cuts right against that. It’s called Singleton, and to have a singleton deck, you are required to have no duplicates at all (basic lands excluded, as always). I really appreciate this variety, it is challenging, and leads to interesting variation. Not to mention, if you really don’t want that much chaos in your deck, a great number of cards in the dozens of MTG sets have reasonable facsimiles, or out-and-out duplicates with different names.

terror, doom blade: pretty much the same thing

Pauper
Another solution is to play Pauper decks. If you have a friend who drains the fun away with a huge collection of obscure and overly powerful rares, challenge them to a pauper game. That means only common cards. 10 out of 15 cards in every pack is a common card. These cards are typically worth .10 or less. It’s worth noting that spendy jerkoffs can mess this up to, as there have been, over the many years of magic, some really excellent common cards printed. So it is possible to create an overpowered pauper deck, though I doubt this happens as often. In the most level playing field, a Standard Pauper deck should work for everyone, drawing cards only from the most recently released sets. Without ever buying a pack, you can make a decent Pauper deck for about $5.00.

*Just for your information, a deck made up of only Uncommon cards is called a Prince deck, and a deck made with Uncommon and Common cards is called a Peasant deck.

Standard
As I mentioned above, there's another form of constructed play called Standard. Standard is made up of the last three blocks of cards released. A block is usually 2-3 sets of cards, and about three sets are released every year. This helps to limit the pool of cards, and can help to faze out some of the absurd, overpowered cards of past sets. Depending on your play style, this can be a curse or a blessing, and there will still be those who just buy up all the very best, and most expensive rare cards.

As I've illustrated above, Constructed play has some key pitfalls that can make it hard for beginners or even experienced players on a budget, but there are ways to get around these pitfalls, such as Pauper or Singleton play. Another way around these pitfalls is Limited play, which I will get into in detail during my next post. Limited play forces you to construct a deck out of a very small cross-section of cards, making it impossible to stack the deck with only majorly over-powered cards. However, the building of the deck is also part of the game, and adds a new dimension. Limited has become my favorite way to play Magic, and I can't wait to tell you all about it.
-D