Premade decks please

[melvin]

Welcome to the forum, Old Nick, and thanks for sharing your decks. I've added them to the official decks folder so they will be available in the next release of the game. Looking forward to playing against the new decks later.

[Old Nick]

Another pair of somewhat weaker decks, just because.

Token Humans.dec

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A BW deck made to pump up a large number of powerful tokens.

Lingering Spirits.dec

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A UW deck filled with spirits, use Drogskol Captain and Followed Footsteps for a impossible to touch battlefield.

[beholder]

The above decks were added to the repository by melvin earlier today.

Thanks!

[glorfindel]

Hi, I just discovered Magarena and have been experimenting with some decks. Here are a few:

Glorfindel_G_Infect_40.dec

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(A very fast deck that can win as early as turn three)

Glorfindel_GWR_Zoo.dec

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(An aggro deck using cheap, efficient creatures)

Glorfindel-Bant-Aggro.dec

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(An aggro-control deck)

The AI plays all of these reasonably well, so hopefully they'll be a good challenge.

[melvin]

Welcome to the forum, glorfindel, and thanks for sharing your decks. I've added them to our development version. They will be part of the June release.

[sponeta]

Hey hey! I'm back after a long while, and Magarena seems to have been updated a few times. Brilliant! Here's a new bunch of decks for you to play around with. The package also includes minor updates to my older decks B_Zombies_40, GW_Aura_Fun_40 and WB_Denial_60.

By the way, would it be possible to make the "Open Deck" file dialog remember its size and position? The number of decks is starting to grow rather large, and it would be useful to be able to maintain the dialog at a bigger size.

BG Sniper 40
Triskelion is a mad machine gun!

BU Gluttony 40/60
Force your opponent to draw too many cards and prevent them from being useful. Destroy lands to prevent casting and stack up your opponent's hand to deal damage with The Rack, Liliana's Caress and Bloodgift Demon.

BU Mind Mangler 40/60
A thoroughly evil blue-black control deck. Use your opponent's cards against them. Destroy, bounce, weaken, steal, clone and reanimate - and if all else fails, just mill. Due to Magarena's tendency towards 40-card decks, milling is particularly powerful. A 60-card variant is also included.

BU Nightmare Control 40
The neverending nightmare: sacrifice, discard or mill yourself, then reanimate endlessly with Recurring Nightmare. Use weenies, Skinrender and Venser to keep opposition at bay, then destroy with Kokusho and Grave Titan. Minor sub-theme with zombies. NOTE: There is a bug that currently allows you to use Recurring Nightmare to reanimate the same creature you sacrifice for its activation cost, as long as there is at least one other creature in your graveyard. This deck is awesome enough even without exploiting this issue, though.

GW Samurai 40
Some surprisingly resilient samurai with buffs and equipment.

Rainbow Dragonlord 60
Want to duel against epic dragons? Give this deck to the AI and fight for glory!

RB Vampire Count 40
Vampires and +1/+1 counters.

RG Rush 40
A semi-fast red-green deck with relatively cheap yet strong creatures with haste, trample and control abilities. Can grant haste to creatures with vanishing to make them more useful.

RW Flash 40
A red-white deck with nasty critters. Ball Lightning + Brion Stoutarm = ridiculous.

RW Holy Fire 40
Red-white burn, control and life gain. No creatures.

W Holy Arms 40
Standard white weenies and equipment deck.

WB Spirit Tokens 40
(Yet another) Spirit and token ramp deck.

[melvin]

Thanks, sponeta just added them to the game. One of these days I should run AI vs AI matches using the different decks we have so far, should be interesting to see how well the AI can play the various decks against itself.

[sponeta]

That sounds very interesting indeed. With some of the more outlandish control decks, I've been surprised at how effective the AI is at using them, at one point even using Zombie Infestation to discard a creature and then Reanimate it! Conversely, I'm starting to find that control decks are not much fun against the Monte Carlo AI, because it's too predictable - it will (almost) never play a card for you to destroy or steal. I've been using Vegas or Minimax (non-cheat version) more, although these sometimes have curious side effects. Monte Carlo works better with more traditional creature-based decks.

So, what would really be interesting to see is going over the same decks with different AIs and seeing which AIs have better success with which decks.

[sponeta]

The deck ninja strikes again! I haven't been playing much lately, and mostly with random decks. Those are mighty fun, because the power level is quite nicely balanced. You can get into actual stalemates, and a good rare card can be decisive rather than a minimum requirement.

Anyway, here are some new decks. Most are 60-card decks, following the lead of the new 2012 decks. As usual, no credit is required - I'm just putting together bunches of cards.

decks_2013.zip

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Angels and Humans
A solid all-white deck utilizing both human soldiers and angels. There's more variety than in an all-soldier deck.

Fateful Hour
A self-sacrifice deck. Get pummelled or damage yourself until you're down to 5 life, use strong Fateful Hour abilities, and keep yourself from dying by using Worship and damage prevention. Would be fun to play against a human opponent - talk about turning the tide.

Illusionist's Gambit (60)
A 60-card version of what's still my favourite deck (even if not the strongest one out there).

Life Manipulator
Life gain and life drain. Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood is an infinite loop, but easily broken by enchantment removal. However, this deck is strong even without the combo. You can afford to pay life for multi-lands, Phyrexian Arena and Reanimate.

Merfolk Mayhem
Standard Merfolk spam deck.

Rainbow
An epic all-colour deck. Fun to play against.

Slivers
A blue-white aggro-control deck with Slivers.

Tapmaster
A 3-colour deck using many different ways of tapping your opponent's permanents.

Undying
Resurrect undying creatures indefinitely by putting -1/-1 counters on them. This is a real puzzle deck: you must be very careful about the order of events and which creatures to sacrifice! Use the Undo button to try another sequence. Often a seemingly impossible situation can be turned to your advantage by changing the pattern.

Vanish and Reappear
Open with cheap creatures with fading or vanishing, then recycle them by exiling and returning to battlefield. Since most creatures are cheap yet powerful, this deck can survive even if you have bad luck drawing lands. Silly combo: Armada Wurm, Conjurer's Closet and Trostani, Selesnya's Voice.

WB Weenies
Cheap black & white creatures with cheap auras. Most creatures are both black and white, so you can get a 4/4 creature with lifelink for just two mana by using Edge of the Divinity.

Essential Black (40)
I had the intention of building "essential" decks for each colour, containing iconic cards, typical abilities and even abilities that are effective against a specific colour, but without overusing rare cards. Something a beginner could cobble up by trading. The limits: 15 basic lands, 17 common cards, 6 uncommons, 2 rares, and and only one copy of each nonland card.

I started out with black, and was actually surprised how effective the deck was. It's extremely versatile, and doesn't rely on combos or drawing a specific card. Most cards are useful in many different situations. I've survived with this deck against most of the pre-built decks that come with Magarena, including my own, and even when the opponent hasn't been particularly unlucky.

What about the other colours, then? Well... I didn't do so great with them. They were pretty pathetic, and I didn't win a single game. So, a challenge to other deck-makers! Use the same card limits, and make a deck that can battle the other essential colour decks!

[Salasnet]

Thanks for sharing! Always nice to have a few more decks!

[melvin]

@sponeta Great work as always. They will be part of the March release, expected to be out this weekend.

[jeffwadsworth]

@deckmaking ninja

Note that Melvin has coded some Planeswalker's into Magarena. That should make for some interesting decks.

[sponeta]

I did spot those Planeswalkers, awesome! I've never actually used them before. It's been nearly fifteen years since I played MtG with real cards... anyway, the ones that were added weren't a clear match for any of my old decks, except perhaps for Elspeth for the white weenie decks. But that just means more decks to be invented! I also spotted a big gap in colors: I don't seem to have any decent green-black or blue-white decks. Time to get cracking.

When I build decks, I usually try to avoid focusing on a single card, even if there are 4 copies of it. I focus on themes and abilities that give synergies no matter what you draw. These Planeswalkers are an odd bunch to be sure. Seems like almost any deck can benefit from one, but no deck is perfect for them.

And thanks for all the fungus! I have a Thallid deck in the works now...

I'm also thinking of doing pairs of decks that are meant to be played against each other. Very strong themes and niche cards that people wouldn't otherwise use. Like vampires vs. humans, spirits vs. samurai, burn vs. counter, that kind of thing.

[sponeta]

The deck ninja has failed and must commit ritual self-sacrifice. Those duel decks I talked about previously? Turned out to be really boring. Maybe I'll have another go later, but for now, have these regular decks instead:

decks_2013-04.zip

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Myr
Pure artifact deck based around indestructible Myr. Less overpowered than a blue affinity deck. Buff up Darksteel Myrs for medium-strength but indestructible creatures. If opponent attempts removal, use Arcbound Ravager to sacrifice your creatures before they get destroyed.

Weaken
Novelty deck for weakening weenies in a variety of warped ways. Contains just about every black and blue card that gives -X/-X.

Elemental Rage
Hard-hitting single-use critters with cheap buffs. Double-striking Ball Lightning with Rancor and Bloodrush buffs? Yes please.

Human Sacrifice
Get your evil on and feed humans to vampires! Stack up cheap humans, then start feeding them to Falkenrath Aristocrat, Village Cannibals, Blade of the Bloodchief and Predator Dragon. Uses the rare color combination of black, white and red.

Eldrazi
The Eldrazi will rise... eventually, once you get enough mana. And they're vulnerable to removal. But still awesome.

Fungus
101 ways to use a dead saproling! And look, I got through without making any fungus jokes!

[melvin]

Awesome decks, love the decks descriptions. Will be including them in this month's 1.37 release. So far, not much new cards for 1.37 but we'll finally get a decent non cheating version of the monte carlo tree search AI. Preliminary AI testing suggests that at the highest level, it is better than cheating minimax.