Why The Internet Will Always Build a Better Deck.

This is my first article written for the MTG community, and I’m pleased to be writing for the awesome folks at Power 9 Pro. Today I’m going to talk about net decks and using the power of community to create a better deck, but first I’m going to say a word about what you can expect most often from my articles.

Now, you’ve obviously turned to the internet to research Magic and maybe get some fresh perspectives on the game we all love. I can tell because that is where this post is located and you have chosen to read it. You are seeking to improve your game. For some you simply want to beat Jund, Affinity, or MUD. You may want to know what to do about Blightning, Baneslayer Angel, or Tarmagoyf. I am going to do better than tell you how to make those worries go away. I’m going to strive to develop reasoning and tools that will drive your game, my game, and the game to new levels. I deal in cognitive and practical tools. Please, step into my shop.

A lot of players fresh to the tournament scene or who have gotten slightly more competitive within their casual group become frustrated at so called ‘net decks’. The internet is always going to build a better deck, and you shouldn’t begrudge that, because you can be part of the process and you can reap the benefits. Besides, odds are you already do ‘net deck’, but you’ll see what I mean a little later.

All decks begin with selecting a goal. The obvious goal of the game is to win, but there are a number of ways to do so. Commonly the goal will be to reduce the opponent’s life total to zero, so we will work with this most common objective. Combos aside, an opponent’s life total is usually reduced to zero through attacking with creatures or using direct damage sources.

There are 1,118 cards in standard as of the launch of Worldwake. There will be 1,575 cards in standard with the release of M11 in July. How many do you know? Ok, perhaps that is unfair, so lets say that only 20% of the cards in the environment are constructed playable. That brings the number down to 315 cards. Now, do you know all of them? Maybe you do, but do you remember them all at once? Of course you don’t. We can only remember 5-9 different units of information at any one time, and that is something that you need to think about when you are deck building. You do not, and can not remember all the cards, all the time. You need help.

Help comes in many different forms. Some rouge deck builders sit down and flip back and forth between the cards in their collection, or the cards legal to the format on Gatherer or Magiccards.info, an idea in mind, scribbling down notes. They are helping themselves, extending there mental capacity to deck build by using the images to store the details of the cards and the notes to store the fleeting thoughts they are having about interactions. This is good, but still limited. Let’s find more help.

Our deck builder constructs his deck and takes it over to his Magic playing friend’s house. They sit down and play a couple games and our hero asks his buddy what he thinks. Now here is where things get interesting. The buddy has played games that our hero hasn’t. The buddy has his own criteria on what cards are good and just how good they are, and they aren’t all the same as our hero’s. The buddy suggests a few changes, Our hero likes some, as a good case has been made, and he makes a few adjustments. Here we have doubled up on the brain power and experience involved in the deck’s creation, but we can do better.

Our hero and the buddy go to the card store to play a few game with friends. After each match-up, our hero surrenders his deck for inspection and comment. The deck is interesting to some, doesn’t work well enough according to others. Discussion breaks out and cases are made for more efficient card choices, different variations that can be tried, and the addition of an more obscure card to serve a special purpose in the deck. Our hero couldn’t have come up with all these different opinions by himself. He may be quite smart, but the power of, lets say five, other brains working on the same problem as he is, in addition to the variety in styles, experiences and preferences, dwarfs the effort that he could bring to bear on it.

Our hero, without ever looking at a deck list or browsing a forum has just net decked. In this case, the net was not the internet, but the network of players around him. The MTG community online is doing this same thing, but we are taking advantage of the gifts of technology to bring the raw power and vastly varied experiences of hundreds, if not thousands of minds to bear on the same problems.

Now, I believe the thing that people actually are disturbed by is when a player completely turns their brains off and simply selects the winning-est deck that they can assemble without serious consideration to improving on it or an alternative to it. Honestly, if you are simply a Magic playing computer, running iterated decision trees and card-counting probability algorithms, then this approach is probably fine. If you have been cramming for exams, or working overtime and you just need something to play in a tourney without much thought, I can understand grabbing the latest Red-Deck-Wins list and running with it. However, if you have any creative impulse or opinion about Magic, and if you love this game you must, you will be a part of the network and contribute back to the development of others’ decks.

With the processing power of the human brain at approximately 100 million computer

instructions per second, and hundreds of people playing a game with hundreds of cards, hundreds of rules and millions of possible interactions, I believe that I can make two assertions. The first assertion is that the only way to create a deck and make it an optimal winner is to bring the power of as many human brains as possible to it, using whatever network possible, including the internet. I think that most can agree to that, but my second assertion will probably be a bit more controversial. I believe that there can always be a better deck made than whatever is ‘best’ given enough brain power applied to the problem.

Tags: constructed, deck building, magic community, Netdeck, strategy