Magic: The Gatheringhas many formats, one of the longest-running being its Modern format. Modern is a constructed MTG format that uses cards from the Eighth Edition of Magic onward and includes sets in most other formats, such as standard and pioneer – excluding its ban list. As a result, this format has one of the largest pools of cards available to choose from.
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To build a modern deck, you need 60 Modern-legal cards, accompanied by a 15-card sideboard. While it is very easy to make a modern deck, making a good one requires a lot of thought, research, and, very likely, money. By looking out for these common mistakes, you can make your Modern deck all the more effective.
10Trying To Counter Everything
While removal and counters are essential in Magic, it is impossible to account for every deck. Building around countering every option your opponents have will leave your own deck lacking in critical cards that should be going toward helping you win. Even control players should not be aiming to stop every possible win condition your opponent can make because there are simply too many possibilities to consider.
Keeping moreuniversal removal spellsand counters allows for a broader range of responses to opponents while still keeping the majority of your cards available for building to your own win conditions.
9Playing With More Cards Than Needed
While it may seem like a good idea at the time, playing with more than 60 cards often leads to trouble. While some decks go beyond the 60-card limit, it is not usually a good idea. You want predictability in your draws as much as possible, and minimizing the cards in your deck is the best way to accomplish it.
Having more than 60 increases the chance of drawing cards you may not need. Not to mention, properly accommodating more than 60 cards means allotting more land, which only further complicates the mana curve. Keeping a tight deck with the most efficient cards you may muster is the better strategy.
8Not Adjusting For The Current Meta
Just because Modern is an eternal format does not mean that it does not change often. New sets are released all the time, and with them come new, powerful options that can shake up the Modern format. Researching new cards is critical to maintaining a top Modern deck as you not only look for new options to include but you may see what new cards your opponents can adapt into their own decks.
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Likewise, studying the current meta offers good insight into what cards you should include to shut down the most popular decks. Often the meta is changed because new counters come out that completely shut down the best cards in those meta decks. Keeping an eye on what these counters are is not only good for beating the meta but to change your own meta deck to adjust for the new threat.
7Ignoring The Sideboard When Building A Deck
While you shouldn’t build your deck to counter everything, there are just some decks geared toward shutting you down or winning too fast for your current deck to manage. This is where the sideboard comes in to plan for these outcomes and adjust your deck for more niche plays that are betteragainst certain opponents. Ignoring this option will leave you completely unprepared for some decks and will all but ensure your defeat.
6Not Playing A Proper Land Count
The universal destroyer of every Magic deck: the mana screw. Knowing how many lands to play can help avoid this dreaded effect. Having too little prevents you from playing critical spells but having too much increases the likelihood of only drawing land when you need game-winning cards. Fortunately, Modern has many cards that help you prevent this from happening, but it does bear keeping in mind the optimal amount of land you need for each deck, which is around 22 in most 60-card decks.
5Trying To Play Worse Versions Of Legacy Decks
Legacy is another eternal format with an even larger pool of cards dating back to before Eighth Edition. As such, there are a lot of shared cards between the two formats; however, you should never adapt a Legacy deck to fit into Modern. Legacy simply hastoo many powerful cardsthat are not allowed in Modern.
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For this reason, Modern will always be a powered-down version of Legacy, and that is the point of it. As an example, all white decks in Legacy have access to Swords to Plowshares, an exceptionally powerful card that will make every white deck in Legacy significantly better than a Modern equivalent. Do not bring the principles of one format into another; they all have their own place and power level.
4Playing Splashy Cards Just Because You Can
Modern is an eternal format and thus has a massive card pool, so it is tempting to play flashy high-cost, or niche cards. However, many of these cards can be traps, putting you in a bad strategic position with little payoff. If the card has to be big, then it should directly contribute to your win condition.
When building a Modern deck, it is more important to nail the essentials and make sure every card has its purpose rather than gear around a few powerful cards.
3Playing A Deck You Don’t Like Simply Because It’s ‘Good’
While this list is dedicated toward making your Modern deck competitive, playing a powerful but uninteresting deck can quickly sap your interest. Once that deck inevitably starts losing due to the meta changes, you will be more likely to give it up and move on to a whole new deck, costing a lot of time, effort, and money.
It is always best to at least start with a deck you like and build upon it. Often the meta is just tweaks on classic favorites, so you’re able to always adjust your current deck to incorporate the more powerful changes. If in doubt, pick a deck archetype (control, aggro, combo, etc.) you like the most and build upon that archetype. The important thing is not to burn yourself out chasing the newest, most popular decks simply because they are powerful now. The meta changes so quickly that you will often just be left with a pile of uninteresting cards.
2Not Knowing Your Win Condition
Every deck has a win condition, whether that is smacking the opponent with a big creature or using one of the game’s many win-the-game spells. However, you should always keep your specific win condition in mind and build around it lest your deck contains cards that do not play to the greatest strengths of your deck.
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This is especially important on decks not focused on simply battering your opponent down with creatures, such as combo and control decks. In the context of combo decks, every card in the deck should either be in service to getting that combo online or stopping your opponent from disrupting that combo. Any other card is unnecessary and does not play to the deck’s strength. Knowing how to beat your opponent most efficiently is critical to making a successful Modern deck.
1Not Building Around A Cohesive Strategy
This mistake is the underlying core of many of the previous points and is the most important one to take away. Every card in a modern deck should have a purpose, whether that is to fetch a game-winning combo or to play a low-cost tempo creature.
Knowing your deck’s strengths is key to winning in Modern, and most, if not every card in your deck should be built around those strengths. All it takes is for one suboptimal card to be drawn at the wrong time, and your modern deck can be beaten. Cut the chaff and play to your strengths; it will greatly help you as you build your Modern deck.
