Planeswalkers International

A sister teaching her siblings how to play Magic

[planeswalkersinternational]

I'm thinking of rebranding, returning with custom jumpstart packs, still with the goal of keeping complexity down.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Journey (of self discovery) into Nyx

Focus Card 1: Rescue from the Underworld

Like Rise from the Grave, Rescue from the Underworld cost 5 mana. But Rescue can only target our graveyard, and requires us to have a living creature on the field, is that really worth it just for the instant speed? Not really, but Rescue can do so much more: First off it can save a creature from a kill spell, I don’t expect the children to get that right away, don’t worry about it, that time will come. this deck is built around teaching them what else it can do.

Mechanic 1: Morph

Morph is pretty straight forward, you play it as a 2/2 for 3, and you can turn it face-up for a cost. We’re not really looking to unmorph these creatures, we want to turn them face up with Rescue from the Underworld which is much cheaper.

If our morphs dies, we’re not to sad either, we need targets to rescue too.

Focus Card 2: Maelstrom Djinn-

Maelstrom Djinn has a lot of intimidating text, but all the kids need to know is that it dies 2 turns after being morphed.

We’re including a pre-8th edition frame here, so the kids can ask questions about it if they’re curious, I’ve made sure to not do this with a focus card.

Mechanic 2: Fabricate

Fabricate is here to show that we can use enter the battlefield abilities multiple times with RftU, we’re using a keyword so the effect is the same on all our cards.

Our land base is mostly swamps as well as duals that produce black. Occasionally unmorphing is nice, but it’s not really one of our goals. it’s much more important that we can cast our non-morph cards.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: One Hit Kill

Combining keywords can be fun, and today we’re messing around with a very potent combination.

Keywords: Deathtouch and First Strike

When a creature with both first strike and deathtouch battles another creature, the other creature is usually destroyed before it gets to deal any damage. The creature is virtually unbeatable. of course, there are a lot of ways for an experienced player to break up this combo, but it’s good to let the kids feel like they’ve run into something broken once in a while.

I recommend only letting kids play this deck against adults an not each other, as this deck has the potential to be frustrating to play against for the kids.

Focus Cards: Nightshade Peddler & Hanweir Lancer

We’re using the Soulbond keyword to grant the abilities. these creatures can be paired together to make two death-strikers, or they can be combined with other creatures to make more disposable death-strikers.

We of course can’t rely on always getting both of our Soulbond creatures, so we’re including alternatives, where we can replace one of our soulbond creatures with a regular French Vanilla

If the kids ask why this card is white bordered, you can tell them it’s what they used to do with reprints, but this isn’t something they need to know unless they ask

I’m also including other simple keywords, as well as both high power and high toughness creatures, so the kids can experiment with which combinations works best.

Since we’re granting deathtouch, I’m omitting trample from this deck since the interaction can be confusing.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Two Headed Giant Deck Idea: Bulk Discount

This is the second Two headed Giant Deck. It should work on it’s own, but shine in a two headed giant setting, especially when paired with the Support Factory deck. This is the more aggressive of the two decks.

Mechanic 1: Surge

Focus Card 1: Grip of the Roil

Grip of the Roil gets rid of a blocker for two turns. It can also be used defensively if the game goes long and the Factory deck needs some time to close it.

Comparative Analysis can target either teammate and is often cheaper if cast on your turn, but can still be cast at the end of the opponents’ turn.

This deck aims to churn out efficient, evasive creatures and overwhelm the opponents. this is even more effective in Two Headed Giant games where we can consistently get these out on turn two and three.

Mechanic 2: Affinity for Artifacts

Qumulox can often end games, especially when it’s Supported by the other deck.

Ornithopther is usually not worth it in most decks. Here tho, it enables Surge when our teammate can’t, and we can drop it to make our Affinity creatures cheaper. it’s basically a mana rock for us.

A 0/2 flyer isn’t completely useless either when our opponent can Support us.

Lastly we have some cheap creatures to attack with.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Two Headed Deck Idea: Support Factory

I’ve stated earlier that I sometimes play against my siblings as a two headed giant, so I made a pair of decks that work well together. The decks should work on their own, but really shine in a two headed giant setting.

the other deck is here

Mechanic 1: Fabricate

Focus Card 1: Marionette Master

This is our win condition,  usually we want to put as many counters on Marionette Master as we can while pumping out Servos with our other Fabricate creatures.

Mechanic 2: Support

Focus Card 2: Together Forever

Together Forever let’s us recur creatures. Marionette Master costs 6 mana so we don’t want too many of her in or deck, therefore it’s nice to have some form of insurance. Together forever can even recur our teammate’s creatures, which are mostly low cost creatures as you’ll see in my next post.

With our Support cards we want to make sure all non-tokens on our side of the ‘field have at least one +1/+1 counter, while we’re also dumping as many as we can on Marionette Master.

Lastly we have some cheap creatures to support early on.

Consulate Skyguard even triggers Marionette Master when it dies.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Two Against One

Menace makes our opponent double block more often. This doesn’t really seem fair, I think we should make things more even.

Mechanic 1: Pump Spells

With these spells, we can make our opponent afraid to block. Gift of Strength also helps us dealing with flying creatures our opponent might send our way.

Focus Card 1: Emergent Growth

Emergent Growth is the only sorcery in this deck. It forces our opponent into unfavorable blocks, and if they’re unable to block we can usually get in 7 to 9 damage.

Mechanic 2: Deathtouch

Deathtouch creatures discourages our opponent from attacking us

Focus Card: Coat with Venom

In case our opponent tries using high toughness creatures to deal with our attacks, we can make them venomous to remove the blockers easily.

Consistency is more important than speed in this mana base, that’s why we’re playing two playsets of dual lands.

And as usual, Meteor Golem to deal with unforeseen complications.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: All out Attack

New players usually hesitate to attack, and beginner matches often drag on because of this. That’s why this deck tries rewarding attacking, while removing some of the downsides.

Focus Card 1: Military Intelligence

 Drawing cards is a simple, powerful effect. It is a great reward for attacking and it also mitigates the risk of attacking since we can replace a lost creature.

Mechanic: Vigilance

Vigilance lets us attack without having to worry about having blockers during our opponent’s turn. I leaned towards higher toughness on most of these since surviving is more important than dealing damage or destroying blockers here.

We also have flying creatures with vigilance to keep us safe up in the air.

We have multiple griffins, while making a tribal deck is difficult with our restrictions on complexity, the flavor of tribes can be fun, even if there isn’t a mechanical reward for it.

To make sure we always have enough attackers, I’ve filled the deck with additional flying creatures. These aren’t as focused on toughness as the vigilance creatures, they’re more focused on getting damage through.

Goliath Sphinx is a Spinx, but it’s similar anough to Griffins that I’m fine with including it.

Focus card 2: Smite the Monstrous/Collar the Culprit

Either of these will help with removing annoying blockers, I’m not sure which this deck will struggle the most with, so I’ll need to do some playtests.

Ideally I’d go for Divine Verdict, but I’ve found that timing restrictions can be really hard for children, even more so than targeting restriction.

And as always we’re including Meteor Golem to deal with stuff we don’t have answers to.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Empty Throne

I went a little overboard with enchantments in my first token deck. I wanted to trigger Sigil of the Empty Throne often, but I realize now that every enchantment requires the user to read them sometimes to figure out how they work. so they’re not ideal for my purposes.

Except that Auras are quite simple, as long as they only boost the creatures stats or give them an approved keyword.

Mechanic 1: Angel Tokens

Focus Card 1: Sigil of the Empty Throne

this is our deck’s only token generator, but that’s fine, it’s repeatable, and it makes big tokens, so the game should close pretty quickly once we get one out.

Mechanic 2: Auras

Focus Card 2: Rancor

Auras are bad, it’s an inherent part of their design that they become a 2 for 1 unless they actively have something preventing it. In the case of Rancor, it returns to the hand, which is perfect for this deck, we get to trigger Sigil multiple time off of it.

We do need more things that can trigger the Empty Throne tho, and we only have two focus cards where we can get complex. Oakenform is a nice, simple aura

Nimbus Wings gives our creatures evasion.

Prodigious Growth is a finisher that lets us trample in with a huge creature, often an 11/11 Flying Angel with Trample

For creatures I went with loads of different vanilla creatures with high power or toughness, allowing the player to build their own threat. I also chose a variety of animals for my siblings to give wings or turn into trees.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Goblin Pilots

I think I went a little overboard with complexity with yesterday’s token deck, so I decided to split it into two decks. From now on the decks will focus on one or two cards with non-keyword text (this is where I can use most instants/sorceries, enchantments and artifact) and up to two simple mechanics (usually a keyword, but can also be a subtype like aura or equipment or something like simple token generators)

Mechanic 1: Tokens

Tokens is a rather simple mechanic to grasp, but it’s not something I want to include in every deck, I want them to be a little special. Decks should only have one type of token. In this deck the token is a 1/1 Goblin.

Our enchantments give us goblins with haste, but haste is really only something you pay attention to for the first turn, and haste will often not be relevant in this deck.

Focus card 1: Goblin Assault

Goblin Assault generates a goblin every turn. Having to attack every turn might seem like a downside, but the second mechanic in this deck greatly offsets this.

Focus card 2: Goblinslide

Goblinslide gives us a mana sink for the late game. Since we only have a single playset of creature spells, Goblinslide is gonna trigger a lot.

These three spells will flood our board with goblins.

Goblin Instigator is just here to give us more creatures.

Mechanic 2: Crew

Crew works well with the rest of our deck. We’re casting cheap non-creatures, so we’re triggering Goblinslide often. And if a forced attack from Goblin Assault is unfavorable, we can just tap down the goblins.

Some of our Vehicles just give us way more power than we put in. we canuse these to beat down our opponent, or to pilot even bigger vehicles

Other vehicles have evasion, making it hard for our opponent to block.

Ovalchase Dragster does a little bit of both.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Tokens

I like playing against my siblings, but my decks are a lot more powerful than theirs are. That’s why they usually play as a two headed giant. In one game we played, one of my creatures incidentally made a token, and my sister got really jealous. that’s how I got the idea to make a token deck for her.

Token Generators:

As a token deck we of course need cards that create tokens.

Raise the Alarms makes Soldiers, at instant speed even.

Krenko’s command gives us goblin tokens.

if Krenko’s Command wasn’t enough, we can fall back on Dragon Fodder.

Sigil will help us end games, but we need some other enchantments to enable it

Goblin assault is an enchantment. It also forces goblins to attack, which is a downside, but at least that makes the game come to an end.

Now attacking with a bunch of 1/1s isn’t really that interesting, what if we made them bigger?

Intangible Virtue is cheap to cast, and it even gives vigilance, which further encourages attacking.

In case we didn’t already have enough tokens, here’s Heroic Reinforcements.

And lastly Charge! for a combat trick.

We’ll be using a lot of small creatures so we need something to deal with the bigger ones

Banishing Light even triggers Sigil.

Since this basically is an answer for anything, I can even take out Meteor Golem, which was a little slow for this deck anyways. I just have to make sure his isn’t a thing I do regularly, as Metor Golem is a tool for me, and it’s less useful for each deck I make without it.

This deck used Vigilance, so to make sure she’ll remember it, I’ll include my sister’s favorite creature here too

[planeswalkersinternational]

This deck might be a little too complex, tokens are simple enough, but the sheer amount of non-creature spells make it too much if you can’t actually read the cards

[planeswalkersinternational]

Deck Idea: Reanimator

This Deck is based around filling either player’s graveyard with creatures, then dragging them up with Rise from the Grave

Rise from the Grave is on the long end of what I’ll allow when it comes to text, but it is the focus of the deck and is a pretty flavorful effect, so it should be easy to remember. The black Zombie rider usually isn’t relevant either.

I give each deck some freedom in using keywords other than the 4 main ones I described in this post and this deck’s keyword is deathtouch.

Deathtouch is perfect for half of our strategy, it gets the opponent’s creatures into the graveyard so we can use them later.

Deadly Recluse protects us from those pesky fliers.

Giant Scorpion is a little more resilient and can hopefully kill multiple creatures.

I make sure to include multicolored or hybrid creatures when possible, and a three color deck is the perfect place for some hybrid to make the deck smoother

I’ll probably include more cheap deathtouch creatures. Complex mechanics are easier to remember when they’re done in volume

With all these cheap creatures, we can run out of gas quickly, that’s why we’re in blue.

Catalog lets us fill up our hand, and it even helps us get rid of expensive cards we can’t cast yet. Maybe it’ll even draw us into Rise from the Grave.

Now, reanimator wouldn’t be reanimator without some expensive creatures to cheat out.

Metor Golem is an auto-include in all of these decks, to make sure every deck has some kind of answer.

Tidal Kraken is a nice finisher

Colosal Dreadmaw isn’t totally unreasonable to cast normally

While Deathtouch isn’t really relevant on a 5 power creature, volume is important for kids to remember mechanics, and there are corner cases where it is a bonus.

Black Mana is important for the various 1 mana deathtouch creatures I’m considering. Pitiless Gorgon also make our blue dual lands slightly better. that’s why the main focus of the non basics is on Submerged Boneyard.

However, tempo isn’t really a concern for this deck because of all our deathtouch creatures, so including more dual lands won’t be as detrimental as in other decks.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Instants

My brother’s first deck included the card Unsummon

There are multiple “correct” times to play unsummon:

Before your opponent declares blockers, to get in damage.

After your opponent declares blockers, to save your attacker

On an attacking creature, to avoid damage

On the target of your opponent’s kill spell

On the target of your opponent’s pump spell

My sister’s deck had the card Rallying Roar

The “correct” times to play Rallying Roar is the following

After your opponent declares blockers, surprising them with higher P/T than they expected.

After your opponent declares attackers, surprising them with more blockers than expected.

To pump your creatures in response to a spell.

Unsummon is an easier card for a beginner than Rallying Roar, Rallying Roar would be misplayed a lot more than Unsummon. On the surface, it might look like the reason for this is that unsummon have more “correct” plays, but the truth is much simpler.

My siblings would mainly cast their spells in their first main step, even if they knew they where allowed to play them whenever. For Unsummon, casting it in your main step is basically the same as casting it before blockers are declared. There is no “correct” play for Rallying Roar that isn’t miles better than casting it in the main step, therefore Rallying Roar is easy to misplay.

This taught me that I have to be careful with instants. In addition to keeping to simple effects I should make sure that, while maybe not the perfect play, casting them in the main step shouldn’t be strictly worse than casting it at a more strategic moment.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Complexity

In the first iteration of my siblings’ decks I Included Evolving Wilds

It has a lot of text, but I told myself  “They need mana fixing and they both have it in their deck so it’s likely at least one of them will remember.” They didn’t have any problem remembering what the card does, but Evolving Wilds did have a different problem: Shuffling. My siblings are young and their hands are small, this makes shuffling their decks hard for them. that’s why the next iteration of decks are using tap-lands instead.

These lands have a lot less text, hopefully they’ll just remember that dual lands enters the battlefield tapped (The land entering tapped was the one thing they sometimes forgot with evolving wilds.) I’m also debating creating 40 card decks to make shuffling easier.

My experiment with Evolving Wilds did show that I can use pretty complex mechanics if I include it in all or most of the decks however. And there is one card in particular I have in mind:

Meteor Golem is colorless and can therefore go in any deck. I’m gonna include it as a “safety valve”. Because of Meteor Golem I can include artifacts and enchantments in future decks without worrying about match-ups where one player doesn’t have any removal.

[planeswalkersinternational]

Creatures

Magic has these creatures nicknamed vanilla creatures. These are creatures with no abilities. They are ideal for my purposes since they don’t require any reading during play.

It would theoretically be possible to create decks using only basic land and vanilla creatures, but that would quickly become boring. That’s why I’m also including French Vanilla creatures. French Vanilla creatures have keywords, but not any written abilities. Since there’s a limit to how many keywords it’s reasonable to learn for children, I’m focusing on four main keywords.

Flying:

Flying is the perfect keyword. It’s super intuitive, “of course Runeclaw Bear can’t block Phantom Monster, it flies.” WotC also has a policy of having all flying creatures, and only flying creatures, visibly flying in the art, which is a big help.

Reach:

Straight up not being able to block half your opponent’s monsters is frustrating, that’s why I’m letting green keep reach. I’m also making sure to only include spiders with reach, attacking with a flier only to have it eaten by a reach creature you didn’t see can be frustrating.

Menace:

Red and black less access to flying than blue and white, therefore the red/black keyword menace fits perfectly. This is an evasion keyword (one that makes it harder to block) which helps games go quicker. When introducing people to games, it’s much better that games are too short rather than too long, to avoid players getting bored.

Menace is also works in a way that is very different from flying, which is good for variety. It serves as a reminder that double blocking is a thing, and might help players realize they can do it, even if it isn’t strictly needed

Menace is sadly a newer keyword, which means there aren’t a lot of creatures with it. There are currently 11 french vanillas with menace. Of these, two have the ability written out instead of as a keyword, two pairs are functionally identical and one is strictly worse than another. leaving me an effective 6 cards to work with.

Trample:

All the main mechanics have been evasion or ways to deal with evasion, trample is a bit of an outlier, but it still has the same goal, reducing the opponent’s life to 0. Trample is probably the most complex of these keywords, but it is necessary to not force green into too defensive play. I believe you can have some complex mechanics, as long as you choose the right ones, and that you have them in a high enough volume, but I think that’s a subject for another post.

Other keywords:

I will also include other keywords on creatures, but that will usually be as the focus of a deck rather than having a little of it in each deck. I’ll make another post on deck complexity.

[planeswalkersinternational]

What’s this?

I’m getting my siblings (11 and 9 yo) into mtg.

My siblings don’t speak English yet, which causes problems for them, since I can’t always be around to explain to them what their cards do.

I’m currently in the process of building a set of “starter decks 2.0″ both for them to play against each other and to play against me.

This blog is for me to collect all my thoughts about the design of these decks