Magic the Gathering

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Magic The Classroom: the Rule of Nine

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ January 29, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I am a Math Teacher at a high school in the US Mid­west. I have loved this game since the Spring that Judg­ment came out. That is when a group of stu­dents taught me how to play and let me start­ing build­ing decks from their shoe boxes full of cards. Now I’m the one with the boxes and I am teach­ing stu­dents how to play.

You’ll notice that I say ‘we’ and ‘our’ arti­cles. I don’t do all of the writ­ing nor do all of the ideas come from my head. The stu­dents in school here do a lot of the leg work. I’m just a fun­nel for their cre­ativ­ity. That means a large ran­dom mix of decks will be pro­duced. Whether you’re a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike you’ll find it in our classroom.

Today I’m going to offi­cially write down a les­son that I give to many a stu­dent when they start design­ing their own decks. After learn­ing the game we all go through that phase of insert­ing cards at ran­dom just because they’re cool cards and they match the col­ors of a deck but at some point we start look­ing for con­sis­tency and a cen­tral­ized theme about our deck. It is then that I will deliver the fol­low­ing les­son. I can’t claim own­er­ship of the idea and I picked it up so long ago I can’t even cite the source but I’ll res­ur­rect it now for you.

When you design a deck all you really need is nine cards. That’s right, just nine. Build­ing a deck requires 60 but design­ing one only takes nine. The flaw I see in most of my stu­dents is that they just put any cool card into their deck because they like it. Often going over the 60 count, or worse, replac­ing a land with the afore­men­tioned card.

For those of you with any math­e­mat­i­cal under­stand­ing going over 60 decreases the chance of draw­ing any card you may need and replac­ing a land with a spell decreases the chance of hav­ing enough mana to cast your spells. If a deck is over­stuffed or starv­ing for mana it will lose and that super cool mythic rare you have just gets shuf­fled over and over again.

It isn’t really some­thing to write an arti­cle over but I’m sure that every­one read­ing this has already learned to stay at 60 cards and to be mind­ful of you mana count. After my begin­ning stu­dents learn that les­son and are ready to design a deck I try to steer them into the “Rule of Nine”.

Basi­cally the Rule of Nine says that they way to begin a deck design to start with a list of just nine cards. Each of these cards becomes a full play set (4 cards) yield­ing 36 cards in your deck. After that place 24 basic lands and you have a deck that will con­sis­tently use your ideas to win or lose. If you like the results then you refine the deck with ideas such a mana curve, util­ity, and synergy.

You may be sur­prised (or maybe not) at how hard it is to get stu­dents to embrace this idea. They feel so restricted by the Rule. Only choos­ing nine cards out of the vast pool of Magic cards is like some­body giv­ing you a blank check and only using it to buy a Latte at Star­bucks. In truth I under­stand how they feel but I pre­fer to see it as being focused instead of being restricted. With most stu­dents I need to show them some kind of “proof” that the Rule works. For­tu­nately it isn’t very hard to look at a Pro Play­ers list and deduce which 9 they started with. Sure some of the cards move from 4 to 3 or 2 and the proper selec­tion of non-basic land is a vital but still the core con­cept is there.

I then fol­low by show­ing them how to chan­nel their idea through the Rule of Nine. As an exam­ple I’m going to describe a process a stu­dent and I went through the other day.

Oddly enough the student’s name is Mike Flo­res. He dis­cov­ered Magic one day when he was Googling his own name. In one of The Mike Flo­res arti­cles he picked up the Quill­spike / Devoted Druid combo. For those unfa­mil­iar with this combo it’s pretty sim­ple. If both are able to be tapped you end up with an Infi­nite Power / Tough­ness crea­ture to attack with.

First you tap the Druid for a green mana, and then untap it by putting a –1/-1 counter on it. Chan­nel that one mana into Quill­spike’s abil­ity to remove the counter and give Quill­spike a +3/+3 until end of turn. Now your Druid is exactly the same as you started (no –1/-1) so you can begin the process again. At some point you turn off you engine and attack with some mon­stros­ity that used to be a Quill­spike.

I imme­di­ately grabbed onto Mike’s inter­est in the combo and used it as a teach­ing moment. “Let’s develop and expand on that. You might be on to some­thing there. Let’s find other cards that can go with it.” Now I pro­ceed to explain the Rule of Nine to Mike and also intro­duce him to Wiz­ards’ Gatherer.

The big prob­lem with this combo is that it is crea­ture based with a need for tap­ping and that a 1/1 Fairy could chump block the attack all day long (AKA Bit­terblos­som). Using the words “creature’s power” as a search para­me­ter I steer him into Rite of Con­sump­tion as a third card. Now he doesn’t need to attack and only the Druid needs to be able to tap. Mike also points to Soul’s Grace as a source for infi­nite life. I fol­low this by ask­ing which he would like to use since mana could become an issue with three col­ors. He chose Rite but we make a note of the Grace.

I was inwardly relieved that he chose the black route. Imme­di­ately I point out that some way of draw­ing or search­ing for your combo is nec­es­sary in any combo deck. With black we have easy access to a high num­ber of tutor type spells. We debate the value of many choices includ­ing but not lim­ited to Beseech the Queen, Dia­bolic Tutor, Lil­liana Vess, Elvish Har­bin­ger (only gets Druid), Mar­alen of the Morn­song, and Pri­mal Com­mand. After dis­cussing the value of the card ver­sus mana cost we decide on adding Beseech, Tutor, and Primal.

If you are keep­ing track we’ve now decided upon 6 of our cards. Quill­spike, Devoted Druid, and Rite of Con­sump­tion are the core of our combo. We’ve also cho­sen Beseech the Queen, Dia­bolic Tutor, and Pri­mal Com­mand as tools to help us get our pieces together.

For the final three cards the idea was to build in ways to pro­tect the combo pieces.  My favorite pro­tec­tion for combo’s is either Coun­ter­spells or in the case of crea­ture combo’s Shroud. Both of these rely on Blue sources of mana. The routes avail­able to Green and Black are speed accel­er­a­tion and discard.

We val­ued Thought­seize quickly and put it into our nine. From Green we added Ram­pant Growth since it can find a Swamp at need and up the power of Beseech the Queen. The final slot was rather painstak­ing between Birds of Par­adise and Dis­tress. We finally added the Dis­tress while adding the Birds to our poten­tial list. Dis­tress is basi­cally a Thought­seize for 2 when all is said and done. On the bench­ing of the Birds I per­son­ally feel that we will prob­a­bly drop some of the fetch­ing cards down to 3 of’s and maybe play a 22 land sce­nario. This spots can be filled by some Birds. Espe­cially the slots open from the land removal.

On the mana side the Rule of Nine is based on 24 basic lands. While test­ing we will be able to tweak our land choices and employ some obvi­ous cards like Llanowar Wastes but for now it’s just the basics. We want to know how the cards play with­out some crazy mana sup­port. The nine card split is pretty even with 4 green and 5 black cards so we’ll start with 12 For­est and 12 Swamp to keep it simple.

To sum it all up here’s our first basic build.

Druid Spike V1.0
4 Devoted Druid
4 Quill­spike
4 Rite of Con­sump­tion
4 Beseech the Queen
4 Dia­bolic Tutor
4 Pri­mal Com­mand
4 Ram­pant Growth
4 Thought­seize
4 Dis­tress
12 Swamp
12 For­est

Please post com­ments. We really enjoy all feed­back. There are many types of arti­cles that can come out of the class­room so if you would like to see some­thing in par­tic­u­lar just post and ask for it!

There’s the bell.

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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