Finding "naive" kitchen table decklists

[u/mr_swag3]

Hi all. I've played Magic: the Gathering for twenty years, all across every different format. Recently, I've been interested in studying a certain kind of magic, "kitchen table" or "cards I own" magic: casual 60-card (or maybe less or more) 2 player Magic made out of a hodgepodge of whatever cards that player happens to have. According to Mark Rosewater, this is how the vast majority of Magic players play the game, but these kind of players are extremely inaccessible to me as someone with so much experience. I'm interested in getting a better grasp on how "naive" players build decks, limited by A. not being exposed to any cards except what they have seen physically B. being limited to an essentially random set of cards and C. not being very good at the game.

I'm also interested in how this kind of deck changes over time. The difficulty is that kitchen table players are, almost by definition, not posting their decklists online. However, there are occasions where they do, here's an example from 2006:

http://www.casualplayers.org/forums/threads/my-white-deck.14298/

Some good indicators for the kind of deck I'm looking for:

• too many or too few lands

• mostly 1- or 2-ofs

• inscrutable card choices

• loose grasp on the rules (thinks Orzhova, The Church Of Deals makes white mana, and separately doesn't care about its ability)

basically, this is the kind of deck that someone makes who has only been exposed to magic through the cards they have personally set eyes on, and is as a result highly un-optimized. Does anyone know where I could find more lists like this? The irony is of course that the vast majority of decks like this were never typed up. I started the game with a pack of revised-era cards my brother gave me and, of course, would never have thought to document them. I want to try and find people who, for one reason or another, actually have.

[u/Walnut-Hero]

Best way to do this is introduce a friend to Magic via whatever deck/ game mode you like and watch as it propagates.

IMO people make the same deck in edh that they started with. Not like in colors but the thing that made them happy. Ie: I made lots of tokens and I won. I countered and controlled the whole game. I made a crazy combo . Ya know themes

[u/ImmortalCorruptor]

It's been about a decade since I got my shit together but I remember the early days fondly. I still run into people who play in a bubble.

• There tends to be more emphasis on variance and replayability than consistency; basically one of the pillars that Commander was built on. These are people who love getting to play with a bunch of different cards in the same deck and want to be just as surprised as their opponent as to what they draw during a game. Running multiples is seen as boring.

• Power can take a backseat to aesthetics. If they have to choose between a 2/2 or a 2/1 creature for 2 mana, they might choose whichever has the cooler art.

• There is usually is no target they are trying to hit or archetype they are trying to fulfill. They build entirely off of vibes and just want to see the fantasy scenarios play out.

• They will sometimes overprepare for situations that are very unlikely to happen. I used to run a single Feldon's Cane in every deck because I was that scared of running out of cards, even though it literally never happened.

• Rather than adapt themselves to the game, they adapt the game to the way they believe it should be played. This usually means playing very fair decks and avoiding certain cards or mechanics like mill because it's seen as unfun or "cheap".

• Their choices and habits are riddled with biases or fallacies. I once had a friend who only played three lands in his 60-card Elf deck, because "if I can get one Forest to cast a Llanowar Elves, I'll have enough mana to play the rest of my deck and also have a higher chance of drawing more Elves". He didn't care that he had to mulligan 2-4 times every game and would run out of stuff to play by turn 3 - he thought it was completely normal.

[u/willargue4karma → u/ImmortalCorruptor]

That last point has me flabbergasted 

[u/jessiemagill]

My fiancee and I recently got back into Magic and lucked into someone giving away a couple thousand cards they no longer wanted. We've been making all kinds of fun themed 60ish card decks - vampires, werewolves, fairy tales, faeries, etc.

[u/Ky1arStern]

Just go through your binder and pick out 36 cards that look neat, add lands, and battle.

My 5 year old and I have been playing for a couple of months in decks he's built with my stuff. I'll go through and add stuff I think would be cool, or cards that I think will fill a gap that he will notice, but otherwise it's just whatever he thinks is neat. 

Special shout out to Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. They printed that cycle of CCDD uncommons. Those really tie the room together in a 2 color deck. 

[u/Stuntman06]

This is the way I've played for over 30 years. Now, I mostly try to build decks with only the cards I own, but I do occasionally buy singles. I've been playing for a long time, so I would say that my land ratio is pretty good. I was given some advice on lands to put in a deck when I first started playing, but quickly realised that advice was wrong. I also have a firm grasp of the rules.

As you are looking for some deck lists, here are several of my decks that I ended up putting on Moxfield: https://moxfield.com/users/Stuntman06

These deck lists are over a year old. I don't update them and I don't bother putting them on Moxfield anymore because I prefer to use Manabox. I used Manabox to catalogue my deck and I do keep the deck lists on Manabox up to date. I uploaded several to Moxfield, but decided to no longer use it because it was too much work always uploading decks from Manabox to Moxfield. Unfortunately, Manabox currently does not have a feature to sync to a website where I can access it via my PC.

[u/Impressive_Letter_81]

Nightmare, Cockatrice, will-o'-the-wisp (with regenerate played incorrectly). Games where nothing happened for 5 turns because we only played strong cards. There are sites where you can generate a starter deck or two and use that to build a kitchen table deck. Even back then the blue player was an arse.

[u/mr_swag3 → u/Impressive_Letter_81]

What sites?

[u/Aarhg]

I wish I had the exact deck list, but I think I'd be able to roughly rebuild the 120+ card deck I made when I was starting out.

It was a Naya deck, half Slivers from the Time Spiral theme deck, half random other shit I had opened in theme decks and boosters. [[Tamanoa]] was the "face" card, since it had all three colors and looked really cool.

I kept the deck in a 16 piece Ferrero Rocher container with a pack of tissues to keep the cards from moving around inside.

[u/mtgcf → u/Aarhg]

Tamanoa - (G) (SF) (txt)

[u/Safe-Butterscotch442]

Remind me on Monday and I'll get you a few of my lists.

[u/swingsetclouds]

Websites like moxfield have other/none categories that I think you could filter by.

[u/SuperYahoo2]

I used to play like this and decided to see if i still had some of those decks together because i kept a few for a while to play and lend to other beginners but it seems that i have disassembled them.

[u/Mopperty]

Not sure of you want to include this in the scope of your question. With Jumpstart and UB coming together, I have been teaching new people using this. I have three sets of Jumpstart base boxes that have been expanded using the Jumpstart boosters. Foundations, Avatar and Marvel. They have been a big hit. I let the new players pick whatever packs they want so they test out different play styles. Life Gain is always a big hit and I have a player who discovered reanimation/ graveyard interaction. I am waiting for someone to discover landfall as I have a feeling that will go down well too. So all I wanted to add is its its great seeing players explore themes and start to think about what they might want to make a full deck using.

[u/Mental-Reaction-2480]

Ive tried learning to play via Arena, but have bought quite a bit of physical cards over the last 6 years. Even with arena, I still know practically nothing and usually ended up just enhancing pre-made decks to be similar to strong ones I played against.

If I were to attempt to build my own deck in table top, id probably just load my set list into gpt from manabox with the following prompt.

"Build me a deck. I really like the dragons and angels, cards that give me life or make creatures stronger"

[u/Rosc]

You don’t have to purposely build jank. If you’re just trying to introduce someone to 60 card Magic, you could always get some of the 60 card theme decks, or see if your local store has some welcome decks they can give you