Magic: The Gathering Deck Types: Healing Deck

Magic: The Gathering, more commonly known as simply Magic, is the first collectible trading card game.  It was released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993.  A player can create his own deck using cards he obtains through booster packs, etc.  He is then able to play against other players, who will have a deck of their own.  This is what makes a trading card game so interesting.  It allows for each player to customize their own deck to suit their play style or utilize the cards they have in the best possible way.

In a game, each player has a deck of at least 60 cards.  There can be more than 60 in a deck but 60 is recommended as it helps you to draw your best cards.  One cool thing about Magic cards is that they are made to work together, unlike Yu-gi-oh, which focuses on the power of individual cards.  Each cards requires mana to cast, which is obtained mainly from land cards.  Each land card has a specific color, which can only be used to summon certain cards.  This means that you will need to fill your deck with cards that can use that color.  This is a direct cause of themed decks, which are much more interesting than packing a deck with as much power as you can manage.

A rather obvious strategy to employ is healing yourself.  If you can heal yourself enough, then obviously your opponent can’t kill you.  A healing deck will usually run white and black mana, though it may splash green, as these are the colors that have healing spells.  Lifelink is very important, as this will allow you to do damage to the opponent as well as healing yourself.

Creatures like Rhox Faithmender and Vampire Nighthawk work perfectly in a healing deck.  Using cards like Angel’s Mercy can also be helpful.  Unfortunately, while these cards are great for healing yourself, they aren’t nearly as effective at causing damage to the opponent.  If you use this deck, using cards like Divine Favor to heal yourself and buff a creature’s defense can be very useful.  When it comes to offense though, it’s best to get some strong attacking monsters.  White angels work well, as they are usually strong, with flying and other good abilities.  Another option could be Blazing Archon.

The whole point behind the healing deck is surviving, making your life total so high that the opponent can’t touch you.  Therefore, the success of the deck will be based off whether or not you can do this.  Unlike with other decks where you can usually see pretty quickly whether or not the strategy is working, with a healing deck, you kind of just have to wait to the end.  It’s just a matter of whether or not the opponent can kill you.  To stop that from happening, it’s also a good idea to put cards like arrest and pacify in your deck.  Not only will these stop an opponent’s monster from attacking, but they will also get a blocker out of the way, allowing for even weak creatures with lifelink to get some damage in and heal you in the process.  If you can keep the opponent from killing you, and drag it out into a war of attrition (also note that this means this deck could be combined to good effect with a library depletion deck, though as they say, jack of all trades, master of none.), you very well may win.

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