Puzzles have always fascinated me. My first puzzle was a little book filled with 9 piece pictures of construction vehicles. I have found that I enjoy gaming partially because with every new game comes a new puzzle. Card games which require you to build your own deck in particular fascinate me. Even when I don't particularly care about the game play I enjoy wrestling with the puzzle of how to build a good deck.
Deckbuilding in Magic the Gathering especially scratches my puzzle itch. Finding the puzzle I want to complete and then working from there to find the pieces that I can slot into my puzzle is a unique kind of challenge. My favorite Magic the Gathering puzzles come from deckbuilding for the format called Elder Dragon Highlander(EDH) or Commander. What draws me to this format is the requirement that your deck focus around a single special card, your Commander, as well as the restricion of a single copy of all cards in the deck. These restrictions help make each deck a new puzzle filled with fascinating challenges.
The first step for me in deckbuilding for EDH is to find a puzzle I want to complete, most of the time this is simply finding a Commander I want to figure out but sometimes I find a mechanic that compels me. Once I've got a puzzle I start looking for the edge pieces, the main walls of the deck which the rest of the deck will be supporting. With the edge pieces in hand I dive into my puzzle box and rummage through all the pieces I have looking for the ones that seem to fit. Once I've found everything that seems like it could fit I'm left with a massive pile of cards, far more than could fit in a legal deck, so I return to the walls of the deck. The walls of the deck help me focus in on what is important for the deck to be doing and how it is doing those things. The focus of the deck becomes clearer over time as I fill in more pieces of the puzzle, the extraneous pieces going back into the box. Finally once I've removed all the excess cards the deck is ready to play.
The culmination of the deckbuilding process often sets me up for a new puzzle when I find a fascinating card or combination that does not fit within the deck I'm currently working on.
