My favorite part of Magic the Gathering is developing new decks. I love to design them and then test them out in both casual and competitive settings. Generally speaking I play three formats Modern, Commander/EDH, and casual multiplayer (sometimes with planechase). Although all of my EDH decks are original, meaning they are my own decklists, they are not all necessarily unique as others use the same commander and have included similarly powerful/useful cards. Due to this my favorite format to develop decks in is modern. Legacy is generally to expensive and more used as a casual format when playing with friends. Modern currently has over 9000... unique cards (couldn't resist), and for some reason people seem to gravitate towards a very small percentage of these cards. It is granted that some of these cards are selected because they are ideal for instance you are not going to take a Lightning Strike over a Lightning Bolt. Even so tier one contains only a little over 100 unique cards (considering currently there are 6 decks worth of cards which often use 3-4 of each not including lands. So in terms of T1 only 1% of all the available magic cards are used. T2 consist of another ~12 decks. Not taking into account the fact that a lot of T2 uses cards many of the same cards, we can estimate T2 uses about another 200 unique cards for a grand total of 300 unique cards or about 3% of all the cards in modern. Some people like to just look at these deck lists, go buy the cards, and then use the deck. That is perfectly fine, but, personally this takes all the fun out of the game for me. I like the challenge of finding a way to make cards that I enjoy playing with usable in a competitive setting.

Puresteel Delight

Modern bcornett24

SCORE: 14 | 25 COMMENTS | 3996 VIEWS | IN 7 FOLDERS

The deck above is an example, I consistently place well with this deck. People don't know how to deal/interact with it because they are so used to the T1/T2 common deck lists.

Silly Kniggits

Modern bcornett24

SCORE: 13 | 18 COMMENTS | 2321 VIEWS | IN 6 FOLDERS

Story Time! Firstly, I want to say this deck could be potentially be classified as T3 but is something I created out of loving to play knights.

I was playing at my local FNM and I played against a kid (high schooler) playing with a $2000+ U/B Faerie control deck. I play Mirran Crusader in the main board, he is a 2/2 double strike with protection against green and black, two of the most common removal and large creature spells. During the match the kid complained repeatedly that nobody plays Mirran Crusader in the main board. He could not figure out how to deal with this card. He ended up losing horribly and threw a screaming fit in the parking lot after the match. I'm honestly not sure what deck he has played against that even runs Mirran Crusader unless he had recently played against another tribal knight deck, which don't tend to be common to knowledge.

So, the reason I am telling you this I find is because I find the general lack of creativity to be appalling. I make it a point to play around cards I like as this makes the game very fun for me. Beating people with these decks is even more enjoyable, but I often purely enjoy the chance of getting to test these decks. In fact I base my deck construction around cards I find to be interesting and fun regardless of what the current meta happens to look like.

Here is a list of my current favorite cards: Demigod of Revenge
Fathom Mage
Kor Duelist
Waste Not
Howling Mine
Killing Wave
Assemble the Legion
Cathars' Crusade
Heroes' Reunion