Playing a five-color deck is very different from playing a normal deck with only one or two colors. Your mana resources are much more important and you'll have to play very defensive because of the lack of speed of five-color decks. It's also a lot more fun when you play with more than two players, because only then you'll have enough time to gather all mana colors. Also, a five-color deck can be very large. You must have all five colors in it as well as enough mana producing cards to support those colors.
It must have at least four cards of all five colors (multicolor cards no not count as cards of a certain color). This rule was just made by us to ensure the real "5-color" nature of a deck.
When creating a five-color deck it's hard too choose exactly how much of a certain color you should put in, but it's a good thing to have a little more green in your deck. Green has lots of good multiplayer cards and it has the ability to produce different colors of mana. Examples of typical mana-producing cards are:
Then, artifacts are obviously a good choice because they only have colorless mana in their casting-cost. Don't overdo it though, artifacts are easy to destroy. Examples of good multiplayer artifacts are:
You can also use artifacts as a mana source. This way you can put lands of only one color in your deck and you will avoid being land-walked, which is a very good strategy in a five-color environment. Examples of mana producing artifacts are:
For the choice of your lands (depending on your strategy) you could choose not to include any basic lands, or basic lands of just one type. This will make you less vulnerable to land-walking. If you do want to include basic lands, use equal amounts for all colors, exept maybe for one primary color (this would most certainly be green).
A good strategy is to use lots of "slow" cards. With this, I mean cards that need time to grow stronger, like the growing enchantments from Urza's Saga. Examples of good "growing" cards are:
Of course you must have tools to kill your opponents. A good way to do this is to use a combo like the one below:
Of course all players will try to win. In multiplayer games you can easily get killed by a 38 damage fireball or a 50 damage Hurricane. Therefore you must have some cards to protect yourself from such lethal attacks. Cards you could use are:
Another way of protecting yourself is to gain such a vast amount of life that nobody can hurt you enough for a kill. Life gaining is one of the most important strategies in multiplayer games. Good life gaining cards are:
You can also choose to protect yourself against creatures. A great combo to achieve this would be:
First you redirect all damage done to you by creatures to the bodyguard and then you regenerate it. A Regeneration would also do the trick but a Broken Fall is very hard to destroy with the new 6th-edition rules because you can now even regenerate a creature that's not dead. (if an opponent uses this combo: Disintegrate to Bodyguard to remove it from the game so it cannot regenerate!)
With all the things you must be prepared for, a theme will be hard to implement in a five-color deck. The best one I've seen so far is a deck using Slivers, with the Ashnod's Altar/Heartstone/Acidic Sliver/Sliver Queen combo.
Slivers are (mostly multicolored) creatures which give each other abilities. Good slivers are:
Wow, thank you Jerhova! If you would like to send me an article, e-mail it to BigMac620@hotmail.com
