Before You Read: Sorry this isn't fancy, Im new to the forums and don't know how to use most of the formatting and if this is in the wrong forum as this was the best I could find. Im also new to magic, with only a little bit of experience playing mostly commander and modern, so explanations on how cards work if something tricky occurs with it, and how it would fit in the deck and what to us it with would be amazing! Thanks a lot!.

I recently started playing magic with a few people every week. Since I was new I went with just a pre-made deck that was sold(Inalla, Archmage Ritualist, just the regular one sold by MTG) and am having trouble doing well or sometimes anything in games I play. These people have 15+ years of experience on me, and Id like to at least have a better shot of winning than I do.

I would love if anyone made suggestions on how to improve Inalla's deck. Card tips, Card Additions, Combos, or even how she/he(Im not really sure to be honest) should be played would be great. One of my biggest problems is the regular unmodified Ur Dragon deck that kills me almost every time. I cannot afford to buy hugely expensive cards, so if you can, try not to suggest cards that cost a lot. I generally do 3-person to 4-person games, but only the Ur Dragon is consistent, and almost all my 1v1 games are versus the Ur Dragon.

My main problem is getting cards that are useful and playing them before I am crushed by Ur or another commander. Ur kills me by placing high level dragons that just kill me by sheer force as I have little to no flying cards to combat them.

Also, I have a Deck with Daxos(Also one I got from a friend that is unmodified) which I also play if you would like to make suggestions on that. It has the same problems as the Inalla deck with the same Ur Dragon menace.

It would really help a lot if I could get a few suggestions! Thanks !

Hi BurnNDie, welcome to the NGA forums! ^_^

No worries, you're absolutely in the correct area of the forum to be asking for deck construction advice.
Should you be interested in learning cool deck formatting tricks take a look at the following post for all magic related formatting:
http://forum.nogoblinsallowed.com/viewtopic.php?p=43495#p43495
That whole thread is chock full of good forum info so feel free to explore more than just that one post.
And a quick trick: If you see someone doing something cool with formatting and you want to see how they did it you can hit the "quote" button to automatically bring up a reply that will show you all the formatting for whatever they did in their post.

Anywho, I actually don't have any experience with Inalla, but I'm one of those guys who has 15 years under their belt so I might be able to make some suggestions. =p

So you have the Wizards preconstructed deck. Cool! That's a great place to start. In order to give people more options in deckbuilding WotC (Wizards of the Coast, the company that makes Magic) actually prints three different cards that can be commanders for their preconstructed decks. So, my first question to you is: do you want to stick with the face commander Inalla, or would you prefer to build your deck around Mairsil, Kess, or Marchesa, the Black Rose (the three alternate commanders included in the Wizards deck)?
At this point I'm going to assume you want to stick with Inalla just to get started, but if you change your mind, no worries we can adapt. Just know that each Commander will naturally favor some different cards vs what you might put in for one of the other two Commander options.


Even with General deckbuilding advice out of the way, I can't quite yet start addressing the problems you're having dieing to dragons, because first I need to familiarize myself with the deck as it stands.
Having not looked at the Wizards deck before I'm going to go ahead and drop it in here and then evaluate it against the 5 categories I listed above.

Looking at the list I can see why you're having a hard time winning. They really packed this deck full of card draw and removal but didn't give you much in the way of closing out the game (this is also a personal failing of mine that I fall into sometimes so I know it well). That and the deck construction is pulling in a couple different directions, but that's actually normal for a preconstructed deck. WotC likes to give you some ideas for how to use each of the different legendary creatures in the deck, but in doing so they hose you on synergies for any one given Commander.

Another thing I noticed, but haven't yet touched on is the concept of a mana curve: that is to say having cards at different casting costs so that you have something to do at every stage in the game. Naturally the higher cost cards are the splashiest and coolest, but you need lots of lower cost stuff in order to make it to that point in the game. What I'm trying to say here is that there appear to be a few too many high casting cost things in this deck for my liking.


Unfortunately, I don't have time to finish evaluating this right now, so I'm just going to leave some of my brainstorming ideas here. I haven't checked these against what the deck needs or anything like that, but I'm leaving it here anyway so I don't lose my progress.

Hello Flyheight ! Thanks a lot for taking time out of your day to respond to my post for help.

As of now, yes, I would love to stick to Inalla. She is the easiest for me to understand, and the others take a bit more knowledge and experience with the deck itself as I see it. Maybe once I learn all of the ins and outs of the deck, I can try for something a little different.



Dragons pose a problem because of the cards that make dragons cost less. My opponent brings these out early on, and then proceeds to drop a bunch of dragons that I need to respond to quickly or else I start ticking down health and many other effects. I just cannot deal with them at all and I always lose. The deck has a very low skill floor and is way better suited to beginners in my opinion.

As you mentioned I never get to finish a game in a way that my opponents can't stop it. The only reason I win is because they leave me alone because they know im a weaker player, and then after they finish fighting each other I pick the scraps off and win(It's happened once or twice and is the most effective strategy for me so far.) These players always have a way of making sure I cannot play my spells or my wizards have little to no effect. I can be very effective at completely sweeping a player off their feet and leaving them in the ruin in a 3+ person battle, but after I am left to the mercy of the other players and cannot effectively pull ahead.

As for your card suggestions, I will try to look through them and see what I like and what I think will work, but of course Im new and your insight will be 100x better than anything I can come up with. Also, this group of people are really friendly and are 100% ok with printed cards if you want to try something new. Its not a competition, so any card you suggest I can print off to use as practice with these people(Someone brought in a deck of literally only printed cards to practice with before buying it to make sure they liked it). A friend of mine also mentioned something a bit ago that I just remembered and looked into. Its the combo with Inalla, Bloodline Necromancer, and Ashnods Altar, that gains you infinite mana. I see problems with this such as someone interrupting the cycle so I don't know how well this would work. So if you have any ideas that might cost a little more than cheap, just tell me, I can print the card, add it to the deck and try it the next time I play.

I was also doing a bit of research about cards that I could add in my deck before facing dragons just to counter them. I am very competitive with the person playing Dragon decks and doing something like this would give me lots of joy of seeing his entire deck just useless .

Thanks a lot for replying!
-Burn

I think the most important thing to do with a precon is to try out each commander. That way you know what direction you want to go in. Until you know where you're headed with the deck, it's hard to give advice on how to get there.
Is your heart set on Inala?

I have actually tried a few other decks. Other members of the group have let me borrow and use some of the decks they own(Super-friends, Vampires, slivers and allies to name a few. I myself actually own 2 precon decks. Draxos and Inalla. Inalla has been my favorite as of now, and has gotten the most of my playtime being the deck I'm the most comfortable with. It's not that I am unopen to other decks and will never stop with Inalla, but for now I'd love to learn more about commander and deck-building with Inalla. Thanks for pointing that out though !

First of all, edhrec is a solid resource.
https://edhrec.com/commanders/inalla-archmage-ritualist
https://edhrec.com/commanders/inalla-ar ... get-budget
https://edhrec.com/commanders/ubr#grixisstaples

Tomer also makes articles on how to upgrade the commander precons for cheap.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/bu ... ry-upgrade
I don't personally know how good they are, and Tomer is far from an exceptional play, but there's probably some nuggets in there.

I would certainly put in Dimir Signet, Rakdos Signet and Izzet Signet, and Dualcaster Mage is an easy high-value wizard. Trinket Mage and Trophy Mage are also easy to make worthwhile, but anything beyond that will probably depend on what you want your specific game plan to be. Your inclusions will vary depending on whether you want to assemble a lot of wizard synergies, reuse enters the battlefield effects over and over, play a lot of large game-winning spells, grind out your opponents with card advantage, or try and assemble a combo.

Ach, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you for so long. Alas, life happened.

Ah, so you are willing to proxy some moderately pricey cards.
Some of the following may be too much $$ (although some of them are actually cheap) but it's where I would start looking for what I would personally put in my version of an Inalla deck if I were to make one. I do think you should strongly consider the first four cards for your build if you can afford them though:


Pulling back a bit from what I would do I'm absolutely positive that this deck can be upgraded on a budget. Upon further examination though I am struggling to find some solid win conditions, so we'll just have to see how that goes.

Since you've made it clear that you want to work with Inalla I want to break the precon deck apart into three parts:
1)Cards that work really well with Inalla
2)Cards that function, but don't necessarily synergize with Inalla
3)Cards that just don't feel like they want to be in an Inalla deck.
Keep in mind that these categories and what goes in them are just my opinion and, given time to think it through more or input from other people, I may change my mind as to which category any particular card goes into.








Now to finally get to something I know you're interested in: Dealing with those Dragons! Preferably in some wizardly sort of way, but anything will do.


Moving on from dealing with dragons I want to delve into wizards and wizard tribal stuff, straying towards the budget end where possible. I won't necessarily cover all the same things I did in my previous post (though I might, just for emphasis), but that doesn't mean the stuff from my previous post is no longer relevant, just changing what I focus on.

Note that not everything I list in here would be stuff that I would necessarily put in the 1) category, some will be 2).


Please pardon the lack of organization. These suggestions are still very much in the brainstorming stage. I understand if it isn't much help to you given it's just SO MUCH to look through, but I figured I'd stop here for two reasons:
1)Wasn't sure how much help would be too much.
2)I've been writing this reply all weekend and I'm just done right now. =p