Fun MTG Deck Ideas and Themes to Inspire You!

Oftentimes, when you look up MTG deck ideas online, you’re presented with a wide range of ultra-competitive decks to choose from. They tend to be very streamlined and designed with one specific goal in mind: to win.

But what if you’re just playing for fun, and you want a unique MTG deck that reflects your interests? If you’re someone who wants to build a deck with personality and are looking for some fun MTG deck ideas and themes, then you’ve come to the right place! These deck ideas will inspire you to make your deck stand out!

Why Should You Choose a Deck Theme?

You might be tempted to just cram all your favorite cards all into one deck, but choosing a theme will make your MTG experience so much more fun. If you make your theme about pirates, for example, playing a game will feel like a pirate crew has just boarded a ship and is seeking pirate legend glory! I think that’s way better than a bunch of random creatures reduced to power and toughness scores.

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Creature Types

Choosing an MTG creature type as a theme is one of the best and simplest ways to get started.

Some of the more traditional creature types, such as Elf, Goblin, and Merfolk, have many cards that encourage you to focus exclusively on one creature type. Goblin Chieftain, for example, gives your other Goblins +1/+1 and haste.

On the other hand, if you were to build an Octopus deck, you might have a harder time finding cards that make that synergy work. But, since you’re building a deck that’s just for fun, you can go ahead and pick whatever creature type you want anyways!

MTG sets with some of the best tribal synergy cards are Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, Eventide, Ixalan, and Rivals of Ixalan.

For some creature deck inspiration, see what you think of these deck ideas!

Dogs

Hounds, Cur, Dogs, Wolf and Werewolves are all creature types you can search for to build your deck of four-legged friends! The combination of creatures you choose and the colors you play will of course bring a different flavor and style to your deck. For example, the sorcery Release the Dogs has a completely different feel to the Hound of Griselbrand.

Cats

If you’re more of a cat person than a dog person, then build a deck around your feline companions! There are far more cat creature cards than dogs including several legendary creatures perfect for a Commander deck. If you search for ‘cat’ creature types, you’ll get a lot of humanoid catfolk cats like Cat Warriors. For a deck with less sentient cats, look for a specific type of cat species like lion, tiger, lynx, puma, leopard, and cheetah.

Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs are roarsome! A dinosaur deck can be a fun way to bring an interest from outside of Magic to the game. There are a decent amount of dinosaur creatures to choose from thanks to sets like Ixalan, plus you can add in some other cards like eggs to mix it up a little while sticking with the deck theme.

My dinosaur Commander deck has Atla Palani, Nest Tender as the commander. Her ability creates egg tokens, which when destroyed let me get a creature into play for free. Sometimes this works out wonderfully and gets a high-cost dino out for only two mana! I like to use the eggs from the Wingspan board game to represent the eggs!

Woodland critters

A squirrel might not be the most obvious creature to include in a deck, but it could drive your opponent nuts!

Squirrels could work together with other woodland creatures like badger, fox, owl, eagle, bear, and elk to create a fun woodland themed deck. Sprinkle in some Magic cards with ‘woodland‘ in their name to bring some stunning forest artwork to the table.

Sea creatures

To feel like Poseidon, rule your own underwater kingdom! Pool together crab, octopus, fish, squid, shark, whale, and dolphin. Naturally, this theme lends itself to a blue deck, but it’s bound to make a splash on your table!

Card Type Decks

Most MTG decks revolve around creatures, but picking a different card type to focus on can be a refreshing change.

Take enchantments, for example. Rather than go down the traditional attack-with-creatures route, you can pick a more defensive stance with a couple of enchantments that shield you from your opponent’s attack.

An enchantment such as Enchantress’s Presence will keep your hand full with more enchantments to play, Sterling Grove will keep them shielded from enchantment destruction, and Ghostly Prison will keep the opposing creatures at bay. Feel free to be creative!

Card Mechanics/Abilities Decks

Something casual and competitive deckbuilders alike enjoy is focusing on a certain MTG keyword and trying to make an entire strategy revolve around that.

Take lifegain, for example. Cards such as Ajani’s Pridemate and Heliod, Sun-Crowned are ripe with possibilities when it comes to lifegain decks. Add in a few copies of Soul Warden and Soul’s Attendant, and you’re looking at a powerful deck with an interesting theme.

For some inspiration on abilities to build your deck around, see our list of MTG Evergreen Keywords.

Deck Archetypes

You could always choose a deck archetype to base your deck around.

Will you opt for a green stompy deck with the game plan of getting huge creatures out to squash your opponents? Or perhaps a burn deck of cheap spells and creatures with haste is more appealing to do lots of damage early game and in quick succession? Or perhaps you want to build a counter-control deck so that you can force your opponent’s hand?

There are loads of different types of deck archetypes to take inspiration from. See our MTG Deck Types Explained + 20 Popular Archetypes article for more ideas!

Events / Seasons / Special Occasions Deck Themes

How about a deck that’s perfect for Friday Night Magic and ties in with that particular season or special occasion?

Halloween

There are a huge amount of sets that will boost a Halloween themed MTG deck with vampire, werewolves, witches, and spirits. For a Halloween mtg deck, Tempting Witch, Turn into a Pumpkin, and Scarecrows like Wild-Field Scarecrow can help the ghoul times roll.

Winter

Encased in Ice, Snow Day, and Winter Orb all feature wintery scenes that conjure up images of a cool winter deck. These three cards all control your opponents tapping/untapping so they already have mechanic synergy. Sprinkle in a snow lands for visual impact and keep other players wondering if you have anything buried in your deck that will use their snow ability!

New Years

A deck that conjures up images of fireworks with Sparkmage Apprentice, gathering groups like Goblin Gathering, and parties like Life of the Party could make a fun New Years deck! I’m not sure how Goblins, a human wizard, and an elemental would get along in real life though. Maybe actual sparks would fly!

Movies, Books, and Games

Maybe you just read an amazing book or you just got invested in a new TV series. Whatever it is, you may be inspired for your deck to have a certain atmosphere when you play it.

Let’s say you just watched a Vampire movie, and now you want your deck to be full of Vampires and bats. The first place to look for cards would be a Vampire-themed set, such as Innistrad: Crimson Vow. Not only would such a set contain a whole lot of Vampires, but it also features a bunch of other Vampire-related cards, such as Voldaren Estate.

In general, MTG sets are a great way to find a bunch of cards tied into a unified theme. Here’s a list of some of the best thematically-inclined sets and their themes.

Deck Theme Idea	MTG Sets
Greek mythology	Theros, Born of the Gods, Journey into Nyx, Theros Beyond Death
Ancient Japan	Champions of Kamigawa, Betrayers of Kamigawa, Saviors of Kamigawa
Modern-day Japan	Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty
Ancient Arabia	Arabian Nights
Snow	Ice Age
Werewolves, Vampires, and Zombies	Innistrad, Dark Ascension, Avacyn Restored, Shadows Over Innistrad, Eldritch Moon, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Innistrad: Crimson Vow
Central and East Asia	Khans of Tarkir, Fate Reforged, Dragons of Tarkir
Steampunk	Kaladesh, Aether Revolt
Ancient Egypt	Amonkhet, Hour of Devastation
Pirates	Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan
Dinosaurs	Ixalan, Rivals of Ixalan
Fairy Tales	Throne of Eldraine
Monsters	Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths
Vikings	Kaldheim
Crime city/Mob bosses	Streets of New Capenna

Funny MTG Cards

Not all Magic cards were designed with the intent of being played in super-serious tournaments. In fact, a few sets, namely Unhinged, Unglued, Unstable, and Unfinity, were designed with the sole purpose of being funny.

Take a look at the card Skull Saucer, for example:

Obviously, such a card would never fly (get it?) in a tournament setting. But if you’re looking to have some fun with your friends, these kinds of cards are perfect for changing things up.

If you feel like playing a light-hearted game of Magic using decks using only joke MTG cards, then check out Unsanctioned the game on Amazon. It includes 5 x 30 card decks made of un-set cards. You and your opponent each combine two decks and play them against each other for funny MTG card mayhem!

Combining Deck Themes

Sometimes, sticking to a single theme is too difficult or too boring. A deck has 60 cards after all, which leaves you plenty of room to squeeze in two or even three different themes. You can implement as many themes as you want into your deck, but remember that the more themes you cram in, the less impact your other themes have.

Example Deck: Baron Von Count Commander

Now that we’ve covered a list of ways to find MTG deck themes, let’s apply this in practice.

I’ve decided to build a Commander deck because Commander decks are generally built for casual play anyways. If you aren’t familiar with building a Commander deck, see our in-depth guide.

Picking the Theme

As my commander, I’ve selected Baron Von Count to lead the team. Baron Von Count is from Unstable, a non-tournament-legal MTG set, but since we’re just building a deck for fun, that won’t be an issue for us.

Baron Von Count is all about counting, so we’ll integrate that into our theme. Counting is a bit of a vague term, though, so we should focus on something more specific. Something that’s related to counting, but with a more tangible relationship to Magic.

How about clocks?

Right off the bat, I don’t know how many clocks (if any) exist in MTG, but if we could build a deck revolving around clock artifacts and a bunch of creatures helping us build our clocks, that would be great. Let’s take a look at what cards might fit our theme.

Finding Cards that Fit the Theme

Our clock deck will need clocks. A simple search on gatherer.wizards.com shows us 21 Magic cards with the word “clock” in their name. I’ve found these ones to be the most interesting:

We also need creatures to build our clocks. I searched “engineer” into Gatherer and found these nifty workers:

From here, it’s just a matter of searching through a bunch of cards and finding anything that fits our theme. Steel Overseer, for example, can watch over our creatures and make sure they’re working around the clock to win the game in time.

Our creatures will need tools to build our clocks. Searching “hammer” into the MTG database gives us these cards:

Also, remember how I said that certain sets are great for finding theme cards? Let’s go ahead and do that.

I searched for all the black and red cards from Kaladesh, an artifact-centered set, and I found a couple of gems:

The cards above are all related to tinkering in some form or another.

This whole time, I’ve also noticed that we’re a bit light on creatures. Let’s have a bunch of goblins help us build our clock, since they’re known for being great engineers in the world of Magic. Again, the MTG card database will help us out:

If you pay close attention to all the cards we’ve mentioned so far, you’ll see that the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 appear many times, but the number 5 hardly appears at all. Remember that the numbers one through 5 are required if we want to win with Baron Von Count, so let’s make sure we fix that right away. Let’s also stick to our theme of clocks, clock-building, and goblins while doing so:

Also, not every single card in your deck needs to fit the theme. Once you’ve got a decent number of cards related to your theme, you can put in whatever cards function best in your deck. Even if a handful of your cards are off-theme, the deck will most likely be awesome to play!

More Fun MTG Deck Ideas + Themes

I hope our MTG deck ideas and themes have inspired you to create a fun deck of your own!

For more inspiration on the different types of deck you could create, see our MTG Deck Types + 20 Popular Archetypes article.

For full guides on how to build competitive decks, see our articles on How to Build a Standard MTG Deck and for Commander, How to Build a Commander Deck.