Deckbuilding is a skill that many new players of Magic are not proficient with. This makes sense, however, as playing a netdeck that has been playtested more than a thousand times with is just plain better and more time-saving than spending a whole weekend refining your own concept.

But what if you're going to attend a Constructed tournament when a new set just turned legal in the tournament? There won't be a netdeck for one to use, and you won't even have decks to test against. In this article, I'll introduce a simple and effective deckbuilding method for Magic players of all kind — the Power 9 deck building technique, which a good way to solve these problems for the clueless, and it speeds up the time needed for serious playtesting. But before this technique is discussed, the most important factor of winning this game must first be clearly acknowledged.

What might that factor be? Is it the witty moves that a good player makes? One needs to wait for an opportunity to do such tricks. Or is it luck? Luck is quite an issue, but since it affects everyone in every game, it cannot be considered as a factor. Actually, it is consistency that improves a player’s winning odds. A good example is Jon Finkel winning the US Nationals last year: He simply used his deck to play against all the available deck archetypes for a hundred times for each of them, and learned about all the situations that he would encounter. As a result, his chance of making a mistake was far less than other players — and with that consistency and with the help of his skill, he won the US Nationals 2000.

Now how do we apply that to a deckbuilding technique? The fact is, the same theories can be applied to any sixty-card deck — a good deck is a deck that is consistent. The consistency of a deck is determined into two parts: Consistency in its mana base, and consistency in getting the right spells at the right time.

First of all, the mana base. Twenty-four lands out of sixty cards is the"ideal" ratio. This ratio is produced from a series of complicated calculation, in which nobody would bother to read in an article about a hobby game. Anyway, this"ideal" ratio gives you the highest odds of a fourth-turn land drop while having the least chance of getting mana flooded.

Secondly, you need to get the spells you want. The answer to this question is quite obvious — the chance of getting a spell you want is the greatest if you run the maximum amount four copies in your deck. Running Tutors and cantrips will help — but in general, this is the only way to maximize the probability.

By summing up those two points, we come to the conclusion that a consistent deck would run twenty-four lands, and would run all its spells in clusters of four copies. Since that leaves only thirty-six spells in the deck, we'll choose nine different spells to fit into the deck at four copies each. This is known as the"Power 9" deckbuilding technique, named from the fact that the deck runs only nine different spells. Note that when applying this technique, we no longer build a deck in terms of thinking of the number of a specific spell type (e.g. creatures), nor thinking in terms of having one to three copies of a spell to serve a specific purpose (before a spell can serve any purpose, at first you have to be able to draw it). We now choose the nine best spells and go to the tournament.

But how are we going to choose which nine spells to play? Here is a guideline for the selection of spells:

• Mana curve (you cannot choose all the spells with converted mana cost of six, for instance) (And since your land is calculated to get you to four uninterrupted land drops, casting costs of over four should be seriously considered, if at all)
• Complementary spells (will my Wrath of God kill my Chimeric idol? Will my Duress protect my Phyrexian Arena from being Disenchanted?)
• Synergy between the spells (i.e., combos)
• Card advantage
• Metagaming (Opposition, Saproling Burst, Worship; should I play Disenchant to take care of these nasty enchantments that I know I may face?)

An example of a successful deck that obeys this system are Skies decks that can be found all over net. Although Skies obeys this method by coincidence, it is renowned for its unmatchable stability and consistency, which proves the importance of this technique.

In short, using twenty-four lands and nine different spells of four copies each to build a deck provides a shortcut to maximum consistency. This power nine deckbuilding method also provides a new dimension for deck designing and deckbuilding. However, there are always counter examples for everything (like CounterRebels), and the problems you have in fitting two spells of a similar ability is also unsolved (like deciding between Wrath of God and Rout). Such matters will be discussed at a later time.

Bruno Lam