[Trick]

What did you think of this article? Did you agree or disagree? Did you learn something? Or did it just confuse you more?

-- Trick

[imachampion]

This is why Dralnu was such an effective deck when Ravnica was still in. It could gain so much tempo...that it would just push you out of the game.

In the current meta Faeries and Reveillark are the two Tempo power houses. The problem with Tempo based decks is...they are all muscle and no jaw. One jab to their engine and they crumble.

In faeries...if they miss an early drop...they won't have the ability to strongarm you through the game and will be very easy to just push over.

In Reveillark...if they miss a land drop they look like a silly counterless UW Control deck.

Tempo is something that the Magic environment is still learning about. The idea of tempo has come in many different forms. This is why "Bulkheads" are so important. With Tempo decks reigning on top...you just need that little bit to knock them off coarse and you can usually take the win.

[cRUMMYdUMMY]

Tempo is definitely an important concept to understand as it simply determines the outcomes of many games since it is important to establish as early on as possible which player is control and which player is beatdown.  While your examples are nice, it is probably far easier to show who has tempo (aka board control) with real examples of games.  Just by looking at the board, life totals, and cards in hand it is relatively simple to determine who has tempo and how much.  I think you need to make this more clear to the new players by adding pictures of real games.  Maybe next time you should include some screen shots from MTGO or the like to illustrate your examples.

[theory]

Definitely good advice for basic deck building.  One really important point brought up was that many of the best decks are multi-colored because a single color doesn't necessarily always have all the tools to win (and back when we were building budget decks, this was always the case).  I remember when I first started, all of my friends ran mono-colored decks and the games were all basically the same...beat down, attrition, etc.  Games only really started getting interesting (and better) when we all started to splash or run more than one color.