Hey everyone! This is my first article, so you will just have to cooperate with me. Alright, let’s get down to business. I will be writing articles to lay down basics for group play games, and then I will show you a deck or two that demonstrate the concept.

On to the idea…

As you might already know, the group game is a very different environment than one-on-one combat. You get more time to get yourself stabilized, which makes more combos and cards available. But it also makes certain cards a lot weaker then they are in one-on-one. Cards like Diabolic Edict and Terror lose a little bit of their touch. Burn spells also become a lot weaker, they may kill one player in a few turns, but that leaves at least one other player aimed right at you.

Even though some abilities like burn are a lot weaker, some get a lot stronger. The two I want to point out today are card advantage and land fetching. Now, card advantage has always been important in magic, but in a group game, it becomes an even greater need. Let’s say that your deck only needs 13 certain cards to win against a single deck, that is all well and good, but now let’s add two more players, that makes 39 (if they were all instants or sorceries… work with me here). Now I know most of us won’t live that long without any other spells. That is why card advantage is important, it keeps your hand filled up with those spells you need.

Now let us move on to Land Fetching. The goal of “The Fetch” is to get a few turns ahead of your opponent. Well… that really doesn’t change at all; there really is no way to make a land fetch worse. It’s not like it is going to suck because it only targets you. So it is important because it thins your deck out so you won’t draw those useless lands late game and it also makes you empty your hand faster. What it also does is it helps players like me get out those huge splashy spells faster. Why wait 10 turns when I can just cast it on 4 or 5? Say I have *insert enormously large creature here* that costs say… 9 or 10 mana, how will I get all that?

“The Fetch”

Now, let us take a look at a completely random deck I threw together that demonstrates those concepts:

Now, let’s go through and explain it all.

As you should have noticed, the deck has an Enchantress theme going on, but with a few twists I threw in to make it multiplayer friendly. Now, if you notice, the deck contains both land fetching (Bauble’s/Elders) and card advantage (Enchantress’s/Libraries). Now my creature choices may seem a little odd to you, but let us look closer. I picked some en-Kor creatures as my creatures for a simple reason, they combo with an enchantment to make for good blocking. If you have out 2 en-Kor’s and a Lashknife Barrier, your creatures won’t be dying to any damage. This is good for multiplayer so when each players’ turns go by, you will still have cheap blockers to save yourself with.

The main way this deck wins is with Collapsing Borders, but I threw in 2 Genju’s just for some extra damage. Now this deck is a very cheap version, and it could go in many, many directions. I use the Thoughts of Ruin to take advantage of all the cards you will be drawing, but you could replace them with a discarding effect if you wanted. You could even take red completely out and throw in some Wild Mongrels for the kill condition.

The deck has many possibilities, and you can do what you want with it. The only problem with this version is that maybe some mana issues will arise and that it has very weak creature control. Well, I hope you enjoyed the article, and I hope it inspired you to make some group decks of your own.

~Shar

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