Being on the internet in the year 2025 means that there are a hundred conversations going on at once, and you only hear the funny parts of a few of them. Magic: The Gathering is no exception. In addition to the keywords and rules that are on the cards themselves, there is a subculture’s worth of best practices and approaches to building decks and playing the game. One of the best sources of information are the articles written by pro players that have come and gone throughout the years, with one of the most notable being Who’s the Beatdown?
But one MTG pro, Patrick Chapin, actually wrote two books on the subject: Next Level Magic and Next Level Deckbuilding. The latter was $37, which I think people might feel weird about spending on a PDF. For that reason, I’m making my way through it and breaking each chapter down to you so we can all get a little better at this game we love.
The first concept Patrick covers are the four deckbuilding perspectives. If you’ve been on Commander Youtube, you’ve probably heard of Top-Down and Bottom-Up styles perspectives on deckbuilding, but you probably received a lackluster definition of what these mean. Here’s the easy way to think about it:
Top-Down deckbuilding is “Big Picture” deckbuilding, because you are starting at the top, then working your way down. What this means in Magic is building your deck around a specific interaction, where you start with the interaction at the Top and work your way down from there.
Bottom-Up deckbuilding is deckbuilding that tries to identify details about what is “missing” in a deck, set, or rotation, then building to address that gap. If your meta doesn’t play a lot of flying creatures and you build a deck to exploit that absence, then you’re using the Bottom-Up perspective.
Prior to reading this chapter in Next Level Deckbuilding, I understood Top-Down deckbuilding generally, but I misunderstood the power of Bottom-Up deckbuilding. The only place I was introduced to this concept was Salubrious Snail’s video on building your deck first and selecting a Commander that rounds out the deck. While that is valuable in it’s own right, I had never thought about what gaps might exist outside of the deck you’re building, let alone in a particular set or format.
But Patrick also introduces two new perspectives: Backward Thinking and Forward Thinking. Backward Thinking is somewhat like Top-Down design: you are identifying how you will win the game, then going “backwards” to identify what steps you needed to get there. For example, if you knew you wanted to win through combat damage, Backward Thinking would lead you to figure out how you are damaging your opponents, whether through big tramplers or unblockable infect creatures. But Backward Thinking goes up a level when you start doing it for your opponents. You know that the Lifegain player needs over 50 life to fire off Aetherflux Reservoir, so you work to make sure they go below 40 life quickly to keep them from being able to achieve that.
Forward Thinking, on the other hand, is about how you can take your current situation, no matter what it is, and make decisions that get you closer to winning. You practice Forward Thinking in every game, as you make plays that bring you to a wincon. What’s different about Forward Thinking is your ability to be flexible in your methods AND the win-con that you have in mind. It’s not unusual for games to experience rapid turnaround in who is winning at what time, so you need to be able to answer the question “How do I win this game?” with a series of options based on your available materials.
These perspectives in deckbuilding have already helped both my deckbuilding and goldfishing practices. I think Bottom-Up design is most interesting, as I have never necessarily asked what is lacking in my meta, or even in a set that I am attending a prerelease for. I encourage you to start practicing yourself. Next time you do a draft, hop on Scryfall and do a little research on how many creatures have or give keywords to other creatures? When you are able to see the absences of certain keywords, certain cards with keywords you need might look more attractive as a result.
That’s all for this Monday. Next Monday, I’ll review some of the math that Chapin covers in the book. See you Friday for the weekly card review!