• Intro
• Character generation
• Task resolution
• Combat
• Magic
• Experience
• Miscellaneous
• Deck construction
  • Mathematics
• The colours of Magic

Mana Burn

Roleplaying with your Magic cards

Deck construction is as important in this role playing game as in the card game. The emphasis is different, though; you don’t try to build a winning deck, but one that helps you play your character.

The deck represents the character. The cards show aspects of its personality, profession and history. By now there are several thousands different Magic cards out, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find fourty that fit your character concept. Some ideas:

- Pick cards that are related to your history or profession. A sailor can look for cards that are related to the sea, boats or pirates. A knight of soldier (or someone who used to be one) can find enough cards that are related to those.
- Pick cards that are related to your race or to races and animals that you encounter regularly. A falconeer can fill his deck with all sorts of falcons, and there are enough dwarves for several clans and contacts.
- Pick cards that show your abilities. If your character is strong, you can show that by putting lots of red pips in your deck, but another possibility is to use cards related to strength. Those cards are almost all over the spectrum; red Giant Strength, white Holy Strength, black Unholy Strength and Fevered Strength, green Seal of Strength..

At the same time some mathematics is important for the design of a character deck. The diehards can find an example of statistical analysis here, with tools that allow them to compute the exact probabilities of drawing successes. For the others a summary follows below.

Each colour has two dimensions; breadth and depth. Breadth is the number of cards of a certain colour in the deck while depth is the number of pips per card. A large breadth enlarges the probability of drawing the colour, while a large depth helps you in case you need many successes. Suppose that you decide to put twenty red pips in your deck. You can then decide to put twenty different goblin cards (R) in your deck, giving you a nice spread; every other card you draw is a red one. The other extreme strategy is to put five Wave of Flames (3RRRR) in the deck. There is a much smaller chance that you draw them, but if you do, you have four successes at once. Quite handy if you need to fight a 4/4 Barrow Ghoul, for instance.