So you've decided to join the 5-Color Crowd - it's time to build your deck. The requirements are simple:

250 Cards
18 of each color
Where do you start?

First of all, you want to play 5-Color for fun, so stick to a strategy you enjoy. Visit 5-Color.com to find out if the restricted or banned lists affect your favorite cards or card strategies, and then consider the following:

How do I get through 250 cards to find the cards that will get your strategy going?

A beatdown strategy is often a simple one to begin with. Every turn you want to lay a land and play a creature. It's the same whether you are playing 60 cards or 250 cards. When you are forced to play 5 colors in your deck, though - finding the mana to play double-colored costing creatures may be tough. Look for creatures with a single mana cost that can apply pressure consistently. High power to mana cost ratios are important to any beatdown deck and graveyard recursion is vital to counteract the many Wraths and mass destruction spells that can be found in most 5-color decks. Kurt Hahn's beatdown deck is an excellent example of the use of single-mana high power-to-casting-cost ratio cards, employing such creatures as Nettletooth Djinn, Silt Crawler, and his signature well-worn Grollubs. Kurt piloted this deck to a 2nd place finish at the 5-Color Worlds tournament that took place last October at Pro Tour: Chicago.

Another popular Creature-based strategy revolves around Survival of the Fittest. Survival decks employ Squee, Ghitu Slingers, Avalanche Riders, Vandals, Grangers, and a host of other 187 creatures to make the most out of the strategy. There's one problem with the Survival strategy - Survival is a restricted card in 5-color due to it's sheer power. As a rule, if the card says"Tutor" on it or searches through your deck, you'll find it on the 5-color restricted list. So how do you find one copy of a card out of 250? Play as many tutors as you can. One Demonic, One Rhystic, One Vampiric, One Enlightened, One Academy Rector and Four Worldly Tutors will help you consistently find the Survival and get the ball rolling. Fortunately, the same can be said for many other strategies that are limited by other restricted cards.

Two final issues to consider when building your 5-color deck: How do you ensure mana consistency, and what is your card drawing plan?

First of all, Mana Consistency. 5-Color has a very liberal mulligan rule that allows players to re-shuffle and draw a full hand if they have a no-land or a one-land hand. If you take one of these mulligans, your opponents are allowed to reshuffle and draw a full hand as well. So while manascrew may be more frequent in a 250-card deck, the liberal mulligan rule allows you to only need to use just over one-third of the total deck for lands.

Keeping in mind that you play this deck for Rare Ante - how many dual lands do you intend to play? 40? If not, how do you insure that you will have the colors you need in a timely fashion? Consider using some duals and the sac-lands from Mirage. Employ the use of the new Invasion duals. Painlands are often a necessary evil, but also consider cards like Reflecting Pool and Thawing Glaciers. Key artifacts like Fellwar's Stone and Sol Grail are also often used for timely mana of the right color. Make sure your land meets your deck's needs - while a Beatdown Deck with single-colored CC creatures may work well with only basic lands and Glaciers, Survival decks will need a consistent source of green - so a set of Green Duals and Land Grants might be worth using.

Card Drawing is important to 5-color when cards like Contract from Below, Wheel of Fortune and Time Spiral are in many decks. The simple way to deal with these cards are: 1) Make sure you have them, 2) Make sure you play them or 3) Make sure you can counter them. In truth, find as many as you can and try them out in your deck. Fact or Fictions, Time Spirals, Memory Jars and Diminishing Returns should be in supply at your local store or at Star City. Contracts from Below will be tougher to find, and you'll probably want four, so do what you can to find them (or heck - go out and win them!)

So now you've got some ideas. Time to pile up your cards by color and pull out your mana artifacts. See you at the next PTQ!
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Andrew Wright -- ATWright73@Yahoo.com