Finding a direction to build in
Most heroes support several builds, and some lists can hold more than one thanks to sideboarding. Three questions narrow it down quickly:
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Do you want defense reactions to help you block? Decks built around powerful small hands usually do.
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Do you have enough disruption to play a midrange game? Also typically decks with smaller hands that want a longer game and defend reasonably well.
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Do you have enough access to go again for an aggressive build? Some heroes can convert their full hand on offense every turn at the expense of defending.
The answers usually follow from what you found earlier. A hero with powerful small plays, limited go again and an ability that takes several turns to switch on is telling you to defend, survive and win on value. A hero with cheap attacks and easy go again is telling you to convert hands aggressively. When a card serves both the defensive plan and the hero's condition at the same time, that's a strong signal about which direction the hero was designed for.
Choosing a build
Once you've mapped the options, pick one. This is where most first decks go wrong, because it's tempting to include a bit of everything.
Start with a single 60-card deck built around one plan. You can sum up a good plan in one or two sentences, the same way a piece of writing has a thesis. If you can't state what your deck is trying to do in a sentence, it doesn't have a plan yet, it has a card list.
A build can also be aimed at maximizing one particular play pattern, at assembling a specific combo, or at beating a popular deck in the current metagame. Those goals call for very different cards, which is exactly why picking one first makes filling the remaining slots so much easier.
Once you've picked, be strict about it. Only include cards that serve the plan. A deck built to convert four or five cards into damage every turn shouldn't be running defense reactions, however good those cards are in the abstract, because they don't advance what the deck is trying to do. Cards that hedge toward a second plan usually make the first one worse.
There's room for other plans later. Sideboarding is where you adapt to different matchups, and combining approaches is easier once you understand each one on its own.
Your first list won't be optimal, and that's fine. Its job is to be coherent. A focused deck teaches you what the hero actually does, and that understanding is what lets you improve it.
Taking the deck for a test drive
A list on paper is a hypothesis. The next step is playing with it to see how it functions.
For proactive decks that mainly want to convert their hand into damage each turn, goldfishing is the fastest way to start. Goldfishing means drawing hands and playing them out with no opponent, just to see what your turns look like. You get through a lot of hands quickly, which matters in early deckbuilding when you're swapping cards in and out constantly. Decks built around disruption, defense or combo don't goldfish as well, since so much of what they do depends on what the opponent is doing. Those need real games.
Either way, play with your evaluation hat on. Two things are worth watching.
The first is how much each hand is worth: the combined attack and block value you get out of it. Track it across a session and you'll see whether your deck produces consistently or spikes occasionally and stalls in between.
The second is your own reaction. Notice which cards you're pleased to draw and which ones you find yourself hoping for. That instinct is reliable and it tells you something the math won't. When a card keeps producing your best turns, the follow-up question is whether you can get more of that effect: other printings of the same card in different colours, or different cards that fill the same cost and serve the same function. Redundancy is what turns a good turn you sometimes have into a good turn you usually have.
The same instinct works in reverse. If you keep drawing a card and wishing you hadn't, because it's clunky or it stops your hand converting well, that's a signal it should leave the deck. The exception is a card that's awkward most of the time but decisive when it lines up. Those are worth keeping if the payoff is big enough, but be honest about how often that actually happens.
Looking for pain points
Beyond individual cards, play with an eye on recurring problems. Questions worth asking after a session:
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Are you drawing too many blues, so your hands lack offense?
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Are you drawing too few, so you can't pay for your turns?
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Do you regularly end turns with resources you couldn't spend? That's a gap in your resource curve, and it means you need cards at the costs that would soak them up.
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Are your equipment abilities getting used, or are they sitting idle all game? Equipment you never activate is a wasted slot.
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Are you struggling to execute your gameplan? Dig into why. You might not be drawing your enablers often enough, in which case add more. You might be drawing more enablers than you have fuel for, in which case the fix is the opposite: fewer enablers, or more of whatever they consume. You might be executing the plan fine but arriving at it too low on life, which points to needing better defensive options rather than more enablers.
One caution: this is still a card game, and variance is real. A single bad hand proves nothing. Even the most powerful cards in the format are awkward sometimes, and a deck heavy on blues will still occasionally draw a hand without them. Don't tear up a list over one game. What you're looking for is patterns that repeat, and cards that consistently underperform across many hands.
Going back to the drawing board
Deckbuilding is iterative, so expect to revisit earlier steps rather than move through them once. Sometimes a fix is as simple as swapping one card for another. Other times the problem points further back, and you need to reconsider your equipment, your power plays, your resource curve, your blue count or your glue cards.
Change things quickly when something isn't working, but change one thing at a time. If you swap five cards at once and the deck feels better, you've learned nothing about which of the five did it. Isolate a single problem, make a targeted change, and test it long enough to know whether it worked.
If you've iterated repeatedly and the deck still comes up short, the issue may be the plan rather than the cards. That's a harder call. Don't write off a direction too early, since most decks feel bad before they feel good, but don't sink weeks into a concept that isn't getting there either. Knowing when to cut your losses is part of the skill.
You're never really finished. The bar to aim for is a deck that executes its gameplan consistently, has a resource curve leaving few resources unspent, and converts hands well on average. Once it clears that bar, it's time to shift focus to specific matchups and a sideboard. That's a different lens, not a final version. You can always come back and change the 60 later.
Source: https://fabtcg.com/articles/masterclass-deckbuilding/
