From another thread:

That post really got me thinking, and I was a little sad there were no replies, so instead of calling in to work to spend the rest of the day in a deep depression, or possibly maniacal rage, I figured it needed a new thread.

Where does one even begin to build a new deck? Do you look for a card or set of cards, then build a combo around it? Do you analyze the meta and build a deck to combat the best decks, then let the rest take care of itself?

Here are a couple of quotes that have influenced me personally:

An old quote of his, and I'm not sure it's still applicable. He said it in reference to his avengers deck, obviously now with Enemy of my Enemy, as well as other toolbox cards, things have changed. There is no way he can say the same thing about the massive toolbox TDC played in LA. But how much have they changed? Is there still a grain of truth to this?

And how do you know when an entire deck is trash? What if you lose 10 games in a row, not realizing if you switched out 4 cards it would be amazing? If you can beat 2/3 of the "best known" decks out there, but are destroyed by the remaining 1/3, would you take your chances and still play it?

Another quote I like a lot. However, is this really the best way to go? Or should you just ignore the meta and play your favorite deck? Does it matter if you are playing in a modern format (where the meta is a lot tighter and probably more defined) or a golden format (where you might face 8 different decks)?

And is it even worth the time and effort to do this in the first place? If you're just looking to beat the top 2 decks, why not just take one of the top 2 decks and add some tech?

I'll respond even though I'm not really a deckbuilder:

There are basically 2 schools that I can think of (and I assume you are referring to building a deck for the PC):

1. Easy aggro/beatdown deck that can win you enough games to go to Day 2.
2. Complicated control/combo deck that you know intimately but your opponent will have a hard time figuring out.

If you look at the top records on Day 1 of any PC, you will see a pretty even spread of those 2 categories.

Two of the biggest teams can pretty much fit into each category based on past decklists (guess who goes where).

I prefer number 1 but the true deckbuilders are responsible for most decks that come out of category 2.

When it comes down to it, play what you like most and what you are most comfortable with. You will find that familiarity with a deck will win you games that you should have lost.

I throw my big box o' cards in the air, then I pick the 60 cards that landed closest to me.

My "Three Keys" work best in an environment that's well-defined, with two top decks that go 50/50 against one another (like PC Indy's Good Guys v Checkmate/VU, or PC Atlanta's Squadron v Reservist).

Just adding tech to one of these decks alone makes it hard to get that overwhelming 70-80% advantage in the matchup, without weakening your matchup elsewhere (either against the other top deck or the random scrubby decks you'll see 5 out of 10 rounds). If you could, somebody else will think of it too, meaning you'll be back to a mirror match (and mirror matches are bad under DBP method).

Against more open formats (like Golden Age), you have to emphasize Key #3, beating the random decks. Because you could draw 10 different matchups in 10 different rounds, overall power and flexibility are more important than getting a certain matchup right. Why do you think Doom and Titans have remained so popular in GA?

I never build a deck unless I have some inspiration, or an idea. but in general, I go with 3 phases of deck building. they are as follows:

Phase 1: This phase is dedicated to everything you do before you start building the deck.

Step 1: decide what the deck is going to be like (control, combo, aggro, etc.)

Step 2: decide the character curve style (curve, off-curve, weenie, etc.)

Step 3: decide the win condition. for instance we'll take curve sentinels. the main win condition is Bastion, using an insane amount of army sentinels to pump your guys up.

Phase 2: this phase is the actual building of the deck.

Step 1: put in your win condition. in this case, 4x bastion. then build the support for the win condition in (reconstruction program, lots of army sents, etc.)

Step 2: put in your support. since bastion isat 6, you want to have defense until then. so this basically fills your deck with the rest of the curve.

Step 3: add in a contigency win condition in case yours is taken out. in this case magneto is the contingency win.

Step 4: add in random tech for cards that might hurt your deck (null time zone, no man escapes..... etc.).

Phase 3: this is the extensive testing part.

Step 1: test the deck against all of the main decks out there.

Step 2: find the weeknesses against those decks and adjust the deck accordingly.

Step 3: anticipate what might be ahead, if you see more decks like crisis doom ahead, it might be wise to pack some HAB!, or planet weapons.

That is in essence what I do when I build a deck.

First I watch this.

Then I am inspired to make a deck.

ahh tatatatatatatatatatatatattatatata ahhh tatatatattatatatatatatatattatatta

just recalling as to what i did for the recent future foes deck i built.

1st: Find an idea and work towards it. In this case it was FF breakthrough/discard.

2nd: Find the Character cards, equipment, plot twists etc to facilitate the 1st step. (Lost in Translation, Computo, Time Trapper, Chain Lightning, etc)

3rd: Put all the cards together and start trimming the fat. Start with a 50:50 ratio of character:non-characters.

4th: Playtest and adjust accordingly. If it doesent work try again with something else/get outside help.

It's generally pretty foolish to try and analyze the meta, because ninety-five percent of the time you will be wrong.

When we were testing Lost In Space, for example, we ditched Kree pretty early on in testing because we found our build of Kree tanked pretty hard against offcurve, and concentrated on CheckVU, Good Guys, Heralds stall and Exstatic Villains as the primary threats. Of course, there was a sick, sick Kree/VU build that we hadn't exactly not anticipated (because the synergies were obvious) but we hadn't built a good version of it and so weren't prepared for it. We also weren't prepared for the flood of Faces decks, especially not Beauty School Dropout (which, incidentally, is a deck I absolutely love), which tended to wipe the floor with LiS.

This might sound nice, but really, it's an after-the-fact fantasy of bad deckbuilders. "Man, if only I had known <counters> would be so abusive! I woulda ran <Counterterrorism>!"

If you lose 10 games in a row, four meta cards aren't going to make you 8 and 2 in the next ten, because you'll only see the meta cards in about two or three games in five and they won't always decide the game for you anyway. If you lose 10 games in a row, you have a bad deck.

I think an excellent example of this is Morlocks evasion in Silver. Morlocks evasion right now is a great wildcard deck because so much of the field randomly scoops to it. Got a hidden-field blitz deck? Caliban rapes you. Got a deck that relies on the KO pile? Tar Baby beats your ###. Got off-init stuns? Leech snickers at you. And they all do this while furthering the win condition of massive beats with Marrow and Scaleface, and thanks to running eight tutors (Bloodhound and Mobilize) the deck is exceptionally consistent.

But here's the problem: Morlocks in turn scoops to any basic curve deck that runs non-KO field removal. They've got protection against KO cards like, say, Mutant Massacre (via the Alley) or Deadshot, but drop a Removed From Continuity or an Improper Burial or even a lousy Death Trap on 'em and you instantly gain the upper hand because the Morlock win condition demands keeping their field intact via evasion until turn 6.

So there's your choice. Do you go with Morlocks, knowing that it randomly beats 2/3rds of the field, or do you think that there's going to be enough curve with field removal that your ### will get owned?

Theories like this are the reason it took so long for perfectly solid cards like Meltdown to flutter into competitive play. Meltdown is a good meta card that at the very least is never a waste (because, hey, life), but it's a bit of a stretch to say it's amazing every single time.

But it decides games nowadays, and the disappearance of Meltdown from Modern (and Silver once MTU appears) and its replacement with Level 12 Intelligence makes for one of the more interesting changes in competitive play.

Playing your favorite deck is the sentimental choice, not necessarily the right one. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

Again, going back to 10K Columbus: although I was part of the LiS team, until a week beforehand I wasn't planning on playing LiS at the event. I had instead been planning on running my Energy-based burn deck, which was solid against everything except CheckVU (which could beat it nine times out of ten if the CheckVU player knew what he was doing). Since we assumed there would be heaps and heaps of CheckVU, I switched away from it in the last week to Lost in Space.

This was the biggest mistake I possibly could have made. I knew Lost In Space fairly well, but not as intimately as I should have. In comparison, I knew Energy burn down to a frigging science, and made the unfair assumption that everybody playing CheckVU would know how to beat me. With the matchups I had at Columbus, I went 5-5 with LiS; the same matchups with Energy burn would have been a very easy 7-3 at the least. Admittedly, two of my LiS losses were games I should have won (I just made very, very stupid mistakes), but that just proves my point, frankly.

On the other hand, sometimes bad decks are just bad decks. There's always one guy who brings Revenge Squad ongoing abuse to any major tournament. He is the guy who loses, no matter how good some of the RS cards are as tech.

Yes. You can't really anticipate the Golden meta any more. At 2400 cards and counting it's essentially impossible.

The obvious comparison here is back in the day of Curve Sentinels, where you could play Curve Sentinels or Teen Titans and those two decks would beat ninety-nine percent of everything else no matter how much tech you played. (Consider Phantom Phone Booth, a deck specifically designed to beat Curve Sentinels, and which still only managed to go 50-50 with it at the best of times.)

However, the play environment is a lot more diverse than just CS and Teen Titans now, in just about every format. Admittedly, it's diversified into picking the appropriate selection of crazily overpowered cards and using them in some abusive combination, but it's still harder to anticipate.

Playing a "top-2 deck" in this environment is like walking around with a big-### bullseye on your back. When people build new, competitive decks, the first thing they do is make sure that their deck can beat the old king of the mountain, because competitive-ish netdeckers will tend to go for the old and proven over the new and untested every time and even when there isn't an overwhelming amount of carryover, there's still a fair amount (like in Columbus, where the anticipated 50-60 percent CheckVU and Good Guys representation was more like 25 percent), and why not be able to rack those matches up as autowins, right?

I'm a casual player. I've never played in a tourny, don't think I ever will.

First and foremost, I go for theme. I only play decks for teams I like. I have decks for Doom, Hellfire Club, Justice League, Villain's United, among others, but I won't touch certain teams, like Emerald Enemies or Legionnairres because I don't like the characters.

Most of my decks are mono. A few have two teams. And those decks only have thematically matching team-ups, like HoG/Negative Zone, or JSA/Shadowpact. No cross universe stuff. First and foremost, I play for fun. None of my decks feature more than two affiliations.

So let's take LoS. I like the Teen Titans. I have a box and 4 packs worth of the set. I sort everything out, figure I have 95% of what I'd need to start with a deck. (35ish characters/equipment to 25ish plot twists/locations, give or take) I grab some older TT cards, and voila! Time to start playtesting.

For Darkseid, on the other hand, the Mockery's strike me as a little "meh," so that counts out focusing on substitute. I'd love to try something like the one character in play thing with Darkseid, but I didn't get enough out of the cards I got to do that, so I tinker around and grab the Female Furies too. That still wasn't enough for a deck though. Then we have Future Foes, who are imho, a largely lame team character-wise. But they're this sets Morlocks; lame team, really good mechanics. So mixing and matching with the salvagable characters from Future Foes, (the Emerald Eye and Empress because of 52, the rare Time Trapper, and a handful of others) now I have a Future Foes/Darkseid deck.

If there's a blatant mechanic theme for a team, like no-hand Squad or Brotherhood reservist, or Shadowpact Stall, I'll focus on that, otherwise I just try to hit the curve.

Every now and then, I'll come across a pet deck idea, like the Crime Syndicate subset in Anti-Matter. Though there's no where /near/ enough cards to support that as a deck yet, I keep trying.

I don't think this is true at all. If you spend the time to analyze the meta correctly you can come pretty close. You will occasionally miss a deck or 2, but that is okay. As long as you get close you will benefit greatly from it.

He's probably talking about TWAC's and New York's total miss at LA.

I don't think that was mis-analyzing the metagame, I think that was just not playtesting accurately enough. When we first built the Quicksilver decks we were like "OMG, this is sick!" but then we playtested it and found that it lost to a lot of things. Titans, Good Guys, various Doom builds, etc. Not to mention the builds didn't seem optimal.

And many times... teams get lucky and a decklist appears and they just run that even though they didn't test very much with it.

I hope you don't mean FTN and Crisis Doom. If you do, you should get your facts straight. We tested Crisis Doom for 2+ weeks (which was as much as we tested any other deck for LA). And the decklist we played was like 10 times better than the original that "appeared" in our hands. If we hadn't gotten pushed towards the Crisis Doom deck we probably would have ended up playing our CE deck which was almost as good (though obviously not as good).

Easy... you still admit getting a decklist from elsewhere. And I think testing for "2+ weeks" still counts as "didn't test very much with it".

This more goes to the point that a team can test certain decks for months but sometimes end up playing something they've only had for a few weeks... or even days (Jebaily-Squad anyone?). This is not a mark on any team... just goes to show that building/testing decks sometimes falls to the playskill of better players.