Five Rules for Fun Kitchen Table Magic Decks for Beginners

There has never been a better time to get into Kitchen Table Magic. While the Commander format has taken over casual play for highly invested players; Standard, sixty-card decks might be more inviting to new or returning players. While you’re quarantined with your family and closest friends is an ideal time to return to magic and play for fun. Even invested players might want to give standard another chance after Wizards of the Coast is finished banning broken cards to provide a (temporary) sense of parity to the colors and play styles of Magic. Whatever your history, these are my suggestions for stacking up cards at the kitchen table.

Rule 1. Start with a couple cards that you are excited about.

Ideally, your cards will have some things in common. This is the only way to begin building your library; the kitchen table is no place for “net deckers.” Start with cards that look fun and then try to build cards around it that make it more competitive. My daughter’s favorite deck started with a four-cost enchantment that allows its owner to sacrifice an enchantment to go look for a creature that costs one more than the enchantment sacrificed. The enchantment, Enigmatic Incarnation, helps her get to other cards she loves: Barin Tolarian Archmage, and Kogla Titan Ape. Going through her cards and looking at sets online, she discovered the other great enchantment for the deck, Omen of the Sea, and a host of spells that are both creatures and enchantments like Dryad of the Ilysian Grove, Thessa Deep Dwelling, and Witness of Tomorrows that fit her ideal library. She isn’t going to win any tournaments with it but it does just fine against the deck I built around my favorite mutation, Vadrok Apex of Thunder. If you want to have fun playing with your close friends and family, you have to play with fun cards. You also have to be willing to lose for the sake of playing with cards that make you feel good. On that note, make sure to check in with your local game store when you’re looking for specific cards or when you’re just looking for inspiration.

Rule 2. Mind the curve.

The game of Magic is played in turns. Ideally it is played on every turn, even the first turn. One step that you can take to try to have parity among your fun decks is try to build them all so they have cards to play each turn. The more hip players call this “curving out.”  You might see aggressive green players say that they play eight one-cost creatures, eight two-cost creatures and the same for three and four-cost creatures. If you have spells that keep you drawing or you are trying to win really early in the game, you might play more low-cost spells. If your deck is successful at building up more than a single mana per turn, you might want more expensive cards. We don’t have to make it more complicated than it is, when you notice that you tend to pass on turns one or two without a play, we should look at our deck critically. If we always end up holding on to a card without an opportunity to play it, consider removing it. I suggest that you line your cards out by mana cost and try to think about how to solve those delays.

Rule 3. Don’t get too complicated.

This card game is about two things: statistical chance and skill. I tend to relate statistical chance to the decisions we make when we build the deck and skill to the decisions we make when we play the deck. But the truth is that there is a great deal of skill to building a working deck. Statistical chance means that you’re going to eventually see all sorts of combinations of the cards that you put into the deck. Aggressive decks that just try to get at the opponent are likely to value more of the cards they draw. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to use defensive cards or cards that combine effects with each other for devastating results. All right, so this game is about three things: statistical chance, skill, and fun. Just keep in mind that when you start to draw combinations of cards that aren’t working with each other or aren’t winning early enough, you might want to figure out how to keep control or pressure earlier in the game. The answer is often a less complicated approach.

This might also be the place for me to suggest that you keep your decks at 60 cards. The smaller the pool of spells, the more predictable it will be.

Rule 4. Mind your starting hand.

You are unlikely to build the perfect library on your first try. I invite you to make adjustments after every game night. My favorite way of testing the composition of my spells is to shuffle my deck and then draw a starting hand. I might look at the next couple cards as well. I want to see options for the first couple turns and the appropriate lands. Repeat this process until you are comfortable with the pattern that you’re seeing or until you decide that you might need to make some substitutions. This is honestly one of my favorite ways to pass time. These days, I tend to use an app called “Power 9- Magic: The Gathering” to look at sample hands without all the shuffling. Sometimes the hardest part is getting the right number of lands.

Rule 5. Have patience with your land.

Single-color decks might be fine with 22 or 23 lands, dual-color decks might only want a couple more if you have dual color lands among them, three-color decks might want a couple more than that (three color libraries are hard to make work without several specific rare lands like the triomes and Fabled Passages). As you look at your card selection, it is unlikely that you have an exact equal number of cards from each color represented and some spells that you include will likely require more than one mana from a single color. The following has been the approach that has worked for me:

1. Lay your spells out by mana cost and by color.
2. Make an educated guess at what mana to include. You can start with equal number of lands from the colors represented in your deck. It os not a bad idea to include some lands that provide more than one color of mana.
   • Favor a color of land if it is represented in more of your lower-cost spells.
   • Favor a color of land if you have more spells of that color.
   • Favor a color of land if your spells require more than one of it to cast.
3. Make adjustments as you play the deck.

Just because you get some perfect draws doesn’t mean that you have got the land just right and getting poor draws doesn’t always mean it is wrong. Lucky and unluckly hands are a part of the game. But don’t hesitate to make a swap after several games of drawing the wrong lands. As I refined my Vadrok deck, I ended up taking all white spells other than Vadrok out of my library. I also removed all cards that required more than one mountain to cast. Changing my spells was the trick to fixing my lands.

None of us can wait for this pandemic to pass so that we can get back to our normal lives. Until then, some friendly games of Magic could prove to be the bonding opportunity that you didn’t realize you were missing. Competitive card games are fun and watching your family take ownership of their strategies and decisions can be even more rewarding.