Slivers (Serious)

Oh boy a Sliver deck. :o My first advice would be to go with the "main" color (most common color) in the deck being Green. Green is essential in 5 color decks as it lets you find the lands you need to enable playing all the other colors. I would also highly, highly suggest Sliver Overlord as he starts strong as a 7/7 and lets you pull the exact slivers you want from your deck to come out and party!

Then id also suggest evaluating your early, mid, and endgame. With Slivers you have a unique control over what route to take to winning. Early game it would be smart to make sure you have ways to stabilize all 5 colors of mana to lead you to the mid game. Gemhide Sliver, Multicolor Lands, and maybe even spells to let you get more lands are all key here.

For mid game you'd want a clear definition as to how you want to win evasive damage (shadow, flying, unblockable) beatdown (+1/+1, first strike, trample) hoard (tokens, low mana) and so on or even a hybrid of more then 1 option. :o Whichever you decide you want will determine the other slivers needed to compose your deck and the colors you'll need majority of to achieve this. Keep in mind that you will also want enough of each effect to be able to play consistently each game.

Finally for endgame you'll want a few slivers that will dominate the board while playing along with your selected win plan to make the final push to the win. These will likely cost more mana and should be potent enough to end the game fast.

I hope all that helped! ^^ I'll check back to followup on your progress as I'm interested to see where this goes. If you have time and would be interested in something a bit different feel free to check out my new deck. I'm looking for comments and feedback to fine-tune it a bit. Heres the link. :D --> http://www.mtgvault.com/vandheer/decks/progress-of-evolution/

I always liked ward slivers.
pull 1 or 2 and youre effectively immune to whatever deck youre facing.
personally i'd lose the caravan vigils and put in some chromatic lanterns and dual lands. should be more than enough to solve any mana issues, especially with gemhides.
i'd also aim for a 60 card deck. land wise i'd stick to 20 assorted dual lands and 4 chromatic lanterns tbh.

Ok, now were starting to make some progress but you'll need to utilize a tough part of deck building called tailoring. Tailoring is the art of examining your deck and figuring out what is and isn't worth it. You'll also need to examine deck efficiency which is how consistently the deck plays and how easily it can play early and mid game key cards needed to win.

To show you the best example of this we'll need to take a look at Shadow Sliver. He/She efficiently makes all your creatures unblockable and is an impressive effect but contradicts with Hunter Sliver who allows you to hand pick what your opponent blocks with. Provoke works great in a beatdown type deck where you want to make your creatures stronger then all your enemies creatures but just doesn't have a place in an evasive unblockable deck where you want to sneak in damage anywhere you can. As such I'd suggest cutting the red slivers (not Sliver Overlord) from your deck unless you wanted a more aggressive beaf up your creatures and overpower your enemy deck.

Additionally id move Root Sliver and Harmonic Sliver to your sideboard (sideboards contain 15 cards and can be used to edit your deck between fights) because they are answers to very specific decks and you shouldn't need them in your main deck unless you know your fighting a counter deck or a deck with enchantments and artifacts that will harm your plan to winning.

As for your lands, Jack does have a good point that dual colored lands are the most effective way to go but they her very pricy and are not the only option you have. Jack also makes good point about having a 60 card deck though I'm not sure yet 20 lands will be enough. Id suggest aiming for a 60 card deck with 24 lands for now. Once the deck is put together at 60 cards you and the rest of us can go back to look at the mana curve (how many low cost vs high cost spells you have) to figure out if we can cut lands out to give you more room for other spells.

Going forward can you please change your deck description or post a reply to your own deck stating what type of deck your aiming for, if theres any slivers you have a particular liking for you want to use regardless, if your on a budget to build this deck, and anything else you believe would be helpful for us to help you make this deck happen? :D

alright i went through and cut some stuff, and put in some affordable dual lands. let me know what you all think about it now.

so i proxied the deck off to see if it would work before buying the cards. As it is now, the deck is pretty damn awesome. If i get that overlord out, i provide mana to pull almost every sliver in my deck out. its awesome. the only thing i could think of to make this deck better would be a sliver that gives all slivers T: draw a card, but the only one that does that is Synapse Sliver, which, early on when i need the draws, wouldnt help so much.

I do have a question about the Gemhides. Gemhide sliver says that all slivers gain "T: add one mana of any color to my mana pool." if there are 4 of them out at once, would each sliver add 4 mana, or just one?

Looking much better now ahelmer. For you card drawing there are no Slivers that tap for card draw but paired with unblockable Synapse Sliver is pretty effective. Or you can take out 3 Frenzy Sliver and replace him with 3 Homing Sliver which isn't exactly card draw but lets you swap slivers for the slivers you need without having Sliver Overlord out. Course to do this you'd need to change your lands from Orzhov Guildgate and Golgari Guildgate to Boros Guildgate and Gruul Guildgate. Which reminds me, do be careful with all those lands that come into play tapped. While they are nifty and cheep you don't want them to slow you down to much.

As for the Gemhides, when you have 4 out at one time all creatures will not tap for 4 mana but will instead have 4 abilities on them that read the same way, each of the 4 abilities tapping for 1 mana of any color each. Since you can only tap to activate one ability at a time It sadly will only produce 1 mana of your chosen color.

I took out the 3 Frenzy Slivers (added damage that wasnt really necessary) and replaced them with Synchronous (vigilance) and Essence (lifelink), synch to add more blocking capability, and essence for the added life. Both of these are because i know as soon as opposing players see me playing a sliver deck, they're gonna jump my ass, and I want to be ready.

ok so added two Spinneret slivers because i played this deck and got stomped by fliers. I didn't add winged sliver because, with shadow sliver, they pretty much cant be blocked anyway, giving them flying seems a bit overkill (even for slivers) but giving them reach seems exceptionally handy, especially if the game goes on a ways and they get real big