Building Your First Magic: The Gathering Deck

Magic: The Gathering has been captivating players for over thirty years, and for good reason — it combines strategic depth with creative expression. If you've just picked up your first cards and you're wondering how to turn them into a working deck, this guide is for you.

What Is a Deck?

A standard Magic deck contains exactly 60 cards (or more — 60 is the minimum). You can also have a sideboard of up to 15 cards that you swap in between games in a match. For your first deck, focus on getting that core 60 right before worrying about the sideboard.

Every deck needs a win condition — a plan for how you're going to defeat your opponent. Common strategies include:

Aggro — flood the board with cheap creatures and attack fast
Control — slow the game down with removal and card draw, then win with a powerful finisher
Midrange — play efficient threats at every point in the game
Combo — assemble a specific combination of cards that wins immediately

Beginners often do best starting with aggro or midrange, as these strategies are more forgiving and easier to pilot.

Understanding Card Types

Before building, you need to know what you're working with. There are six main card types.

Creatures

Creatures attack and block. They have two numbers in the bottom right: power (how much damage they deal when attacking) and toughness (how much damage it takes to destroy them). A 2/2 vanilla creature is the baseline — two power, two toughness, no special abilities.

Pay attention to keywords like Flying, Trample, and First Strike. These abilities dramatically change a creature's value.

Instants and Sorceries

These are your spells. Sorceries can only be cast on your turn during your main phase. Instants can be cast at almost any time — including in response to your opponent's actions. This flexibility makes many instants much more valuable than equivalent sorceries.

Enchantments and Artifacts

Permanents that stay on the battlefield and provide ongoing effects. Auras attach to creatures to buff them; global enchantments affect the whole game. Artifacts are typically colourless and fit into any deck.

Lands

Lands are the engine of your deck. Each land you play produces one or more mana, which you spend to cast your other spells. You cannot win without lands. Getting your land count wrong is the single most common mistake beginners make.

The Mana Curve

The mana curve is a histogram of your deck's converted mana costs. A good curve ensures you always have something meaningful to do each turn.

A typical aggressive 60-card curve might look like:

Mana Cost	Number of Cards
1	8–12
2	10–14
3	6–10
4	4–6
5+	0–4

Control and midrange decks shift this curve higher. The key principle: you should rarely have turns where you can't cast anything. If your curve is too high, you'll spend early turns doing nothing while your opponent builds a board.

Choosing Your Colours

Magic has five colours, each with a distinct playstyle:

White — removal, life gain, weenie creatures, tokens
Blue — card draw, counterspells, flying creatures
Black — discard, removal, graveyard effects
Red — fast burn spells, aggressive creatures, haste
Green — large creatures, mana acceleration, trample

As a beginner, stick to one or two colours. Each additional colour requires more complex land management and risks having uncastable cards in hand. A focused two-colour deck is almost always stronger than an unfocused five-colour pile.

Two-Colour Synergies

Some colour pairs have particularly strong synergy:

White/Blue (Azorius) — control and flying
Black/Red (Rakdos) — aggression and disruption
Green/White (Selesnya) — creatures and +1/+1 counters
Blue/Black (Dimir) — card advantage and removal

How Many Lands Do You Need?

The standard rule of thumb:

Run 24 lands in a 60-card deck for a curve that tops out at 4–5 mana. Run 22–23 for an aggressive deck with a curve peaking at 2–3.

This advice assumes you're not running mana-producing creatures (Rampant Growth, Llanowar Elves, etc.). Every mana accelerant you include lets you shave roughly one land.

Never go below 20 lands unless your curve is extremely low or you have significant card draw. Running too few lands — known as mana screw — is one of the most frustrating ways to lose.

Card Ratios: The Rule of Four

In most formats you can run up to four copies of any non-basic-land card. To maximise consistency, run four copies of your best cards. Run fewer copies of:

Situational cards you don't want to draw every game
Legendary permanents (you can only have one on the battlefield at a time)
High-cost finishers (you don't want multiple expensive cards clogging your early hand)

A common structure for a creature-based deck:

4x your best one-drop creature
4x your best two-drop creature
3–4x your best three-drop
4x a key spell (removal, pump, etc.)
2–3x a late-game threat
22–24 lands

Testing and Refining Your Deck

Building a deck is an iterative process. After each game, ask yourself:

Did I get mana-screwed or mana-flooded? Adjust your land count.
Were there cards I never wanted to draw? Cut them for more copies of your best cards.
What did my opponent do that I had no answer to? Add answers.
Was my win condition consistent? If you rarely assembled it, you may need more redundancy.

The best way to learn is to play, lose, and adjust. Every loss teaches you something.

Using MTG Card Library to Build

Our card search tool can help you explore options as you build:

Search by name to find specific cards you've heard about
Browse by set to discover cards available in a particular expansion
Check prices to see what's accessible on your budget

Once you have a core strategy, search for cards that support it. If you're building aggro red, search for cards like "haste" and "lightning" to find efficient threats and burn spells.

Next Steps

Once you've built and tested your first deck, consider:

Learning the stack — understanding how instants and abilities interact
Studying format legality — Standard, Pioneer, Modern, and Commander each have different card pools
Joining a local game store — Friday Night Magic events are beginner-friendly and a great way to learn faster
Watching streamers — content creators like Reid Duke and Reid Duke break down decision-making in real time

Magic: The Gathering has an enormous depth of strategy, but every great player started with a messy pile of cards and a lot of questions. The most important thing is to play, have fun, and keep improving.