Bullgrit said:
A rare card by itself is not a game winner. I've seen whole decks of rare cards loose to a deck of all commons. There was nothing inherently powerful about a rare card. For instance, you could have a bunch of weak common white creatures in your deck (weak usually also means easy to get into play quickly), and then have a rare "boost all white creatures" card to make them all better.
Yep. My favorite deck would not have worked without its commons. However, it also would not have worked without the rares, either.
The basic idea is that you get a theme where all the cards work together. While there are some cards that you can just throw into a deck that will make it more powerful (like, oh, I don't know, the Black Lotus), those are few and far between, and usually hellaciously expensive.
Also, like has been mentioned previously, decks evolve over time, as new cards come out (which, of course, open up new possibilities), and you come up with new combos.
As an example, my favorite deck was originally a Red-Blue Blast deck, built around the one Drain Power card; I thought it was cool to take someone's mana and throw it back at them in the form of a Fireball. The obvious corollary is to put in Mana Flares, to get more mana with which to nuke the enemy. This, of course, leads to mana burn if I'm not careful, so I put in some creatures that I could use to bleed off excess mana (like Dragon Whelp), and later, enchantments/artifacts to store it for later use. As play went on, it became obvious that I needed to increase how fast I could draw cards, so I put in Howling Mines (+1 card/draw phase/mine). And a Black Vise, 'cause, hey, may as well get some damage out of the Howling Mines. Soon, I noticed that I had land piling up in my hand, so I put in a sprinkle of Green, to get Fastbond, so I could pay 1 life per each additional land I put out. Then I put in Stream of Life to get my life back, and Birds of Paradise, for the occasionally necessary point source of mana. Oh, and for fun, Channel, just to get the abusive old Channel-Fireball trick.
Eventually, I noticed that a good portion of the time, my opponents couldn't deal with the environment nearly as well as I could. They damaged themselves with manaburn, and had to discard a lot of cards, messing up their strategies, and what cards they did get to play I was often able to Counterspell. What it ended up as was a lot more powerful than what it started out being, even with many of the same rares available.
Also, you can play multiplayer Magic, as well. I used to love having 4-6 players. It opens up all kinds of different strategies, and those fast killer decks that everyone plays at tournaments don't work so well in a multiplayer game.
Oh, yeah, those were great fun. We typically did the 3x2 Emperor games. I really enjoyed nuking the other emperor's two generals simultaneously. But that almost never happened.
Brad
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
