Discussion Forum

I think your issue lies less with deck construction and more with the fact that you're getting beaten on by 3 other players at the same time.

If your main concern is winning each game, then as far as I can tell, you're going to have to make your deck(s) so that it can deal with being the focus of everything and still come out of top. Probably going so far as to construct your deck to deal specifically with your friend's decks. Otherwise I might suggest backing off a little, and letting someone else become the main threat. I don't mean to say that you should start throwing games, but maybe try a style of deck you haven't before or play cards that will screw with the rest of the game (cards like Hive Mind and Knowledge Pool come to mind).

Multiplayers games can be less killing-off-all-your-opponents, and more waiting-for-everyone-else-to-die. Sometimes there's some diplomacy, spoken or otherwise, that can easily dictate the direction of a game. If everyone knows you will win if they don't defeat you outright, then they're going to gang up on you from the start. If your opponents feel that there is an uncertainty about the outcome, then it might be longer before your so-called friends start coming at you with torches and pitchforks.

Hope this helps :)

the dude above pretty much said it, multiplayer is about endurance and survival not about aggressive play. You need to outlast everyone else and you can't play a deck that draws focus.

Kokusho draws focus, so does a T1 reanimator deck. The fact alone that you try to play reanimator in multiplayer is that you don't get the format. It's rediculous. It's a perfect example of a liniar strategy that is extremly easy to break. If you take a deck like this to my playgroup everyone is going to be playing extirpate the week after.

Multiplayer is about drawing tons of cards, gaining life, putting down a good defender that is not a real threat to the rest of the group but is enough to persuade your opponents it's betr to attack someone else then it is to attack you.

Kokusho is not a great multiplayer card because it's to good a multiplayer card. If you can use it as surprise kill then good for you but usually ploeple will gang up on you or play rite of replication on your kokusho or just abuse your card in ways that actually kills you. It's a timebomb and unpredicatable.

A card like Enigma Sphinx is a good multiplayer card, it's card advantage, it's a great blocker and it can finish games. Solemn simulacrum and Edget Oracle are good multiplayer cards, both are card advantage with a body and are good at any stage in the game. Multiplayer games can take hours. I once played a 7 hour game. It just takes a different type of deck and a different type of player :)

Most good multiplayer decks are more then 60 cards and don't play a liniar strategy. They are build to last a long game and can win in a lot of different ways so that no one can predict and attack one strategy. One of the best decks played in our group is a 400 card deck a friend of mine plays, it's insane overpowered and it just doesn't die.

Thanks for the input. And I usually wouldn't play the animator deck that often. But I did a check of the 20 or so decks that I have and those are the ones I figured I would start with first. The majority of my decks arent suited for multiplayer, but 1v1. And yeah I need to work on a deck that can last the onslaught of 3 other people. But that's hard to do. I was thinking going blue white with propaganda and prisions. But again one of my opponents will kill any enchantment or artifact. So I need a deck with bigger critters. Counterspell ability removal and several win conditions. It gets much harder to build a deck that has all of that. I was thinking of my wall deck. But there's a lot of flyiers.
I at least have a good card advantage mostly with years of play under my belt since beta.

multiplayer part 1: In a healthy multiplayer game people will attack the strongest opponent to retain the balance. You usually don't want a weak opponent to die because it means you will have to deal with the remaining stronger opponent alone. You basically want to stay impartial switching targets every turn as a symbol to the rest that you don't pick sides, that way everyone's life total drops slowly and equally. You can also justify attacking the strongest and only the strongest to restore balance and not out of some personal vendetta. The benefit of this is once everyone is at low life totals you can launch your surprise attack, break the balance and take someone (the stronger opponent) out without risking facing a strong remaining opponent.

multiplayer part 2: Every card you play in a multiplayer game generates a certain amount of card disadvantage for yourself. In a 4 player game for every card you play you'll face 3 cards from your opponents so basically playing a card generates a card disadvantages of 3 cards. If each of your opponents plays a 6/6 wurm and you kill one of them with terminate you'll still be 2 cards behind where in a 1vs1 game you would have just exchanged a card for a card.
The way to fix this ties into multiplayer part 1. You don't want to be the stronger player, at least not visibly. Bascally you want 7 cards in your hand at all time and something insignificant on the field that can protect you but isn't a big deal. If an opponent attacks you and it's not critical let him. Pretend you don't have an answer to everything so that the focus of the game turns on your opponents who are more active.
Like I explained a counterspell or spot removal are way worse in multiplayer then they are in 1vs1 because they create a disadvantage. This means you have to use them wisely and only in critical situations. You should also try to avoid showing you have a counterspell. The less they know the better chances you have of winning.

These two guidelines help at being succesful in multiplayer games but in the end it always comes down to politics, you can't beat multiple opponents if they all gang up on you all the time, no deck can do that and no player can do that unless the powerlevel difference of your deck versus theirs is absurt and that's no fun either.

Play a draw go deck that doesn't reveal to much info, don't play cards that combo out so people are forced to attack you before you can combo out, and play smart. Work the table.