Since a deck is limited to only four copies of a non land card usually, this added diversity comes at the cost of significantly reducing the chances of getting a certain card in a given game. Since most decks are designed around getting certain cards, increasing the size of the deck beyond sixty decreases the probability of drawing any one card. In contrast, you pretty much can't go wrong playing exactly 60 cards in your Constructed deck, or 40 cards in your Limited deck.Īdding diversity seems to the biggest reason you'd want to go over 60.

It's okay to experiment with deck size, but you should go into it armed with a good understanding of Magic strategy and probability, and the awareness that the overwhelming majority of such experiments are going to fail. Try sticking a Blue Sun's Zenith into your TurboStasis deck before you go adding extra cards.)

(Note that forced-card-draw spells or library recursion like Elixir of Immortality are probably better than diluting your deck, though. It's good to be aware of these archetypes because they sometimes come up in Limited, like the Lost in the Woods 'combo' in Dark Ascension Limited, or making your own surprising imitation of a Fog deck by just drafting a pile of removal and no good win conditions. This is for lockdown archetypes like Fog and Stasis. Very rarely, it'll be a good move to play a deck that has no win condition other than just letting your opponents run out of cards in their library. However, since increasing deck size hampers your ability to actually find your key cards, it seems that it's only worth it for one-card combo kills - and you should play lots of tutoring and filtering cards so you can find them faster. Examples are Battle of Wits (which requires a huge library to win the game) and Scapeshift (which requires playing enough Mountains to one-shot your opponent with Valakut triggers). Specific combo-style win conditions can justify going over the minimum number of cards. If you really need to add half a land, then cut an expensive spell and add a cheap cantrip. Running a 61st card to add “half a land” to your deck is almost always wrong. His findings:Īdding extra cards is not a good way to tweak mana ratios: the added variance of the 61st card tended to be greater than the value of getting your lands-to-spells number just so. Pro Tour Hall of Famer Frank Karsten wrote an article called 'Is Playing More Than 60 Cards Always a Bad Idea?' to examine some special cases. Generally speaking, this is not a good plan! Even in a casual environment where playing an optimal deck might not be your top priority, losing because of flood/screw or bad mulligans isn't fun. Pushing your deck above 60 (or 40) cards makes it harder to find key cards, increases the risk of 'mana flood' (drawing only lands, so you have nothing to cast) and 'mana screw' (drawing too few lands, so you can't cast any of the spells in your hand), and makes it more likely that you'll draw unplayable hands.

Exceeding the minimum deck size is only worth it if it gives you a powerful benefit you can't gain otherwise, like a surprising way to attack the metagame. Tutors, Skyship Weatherlight, Captain Sisay, and so on, to find the exact card you need for any situation.Įffective Magic decks thrive on consistency. You can build powerful decks around this approach, using the idea of cycling, digging or searching through your deck with e.g. )Ī third reason is if you want to keep your deck general, and include lots of options for dealing with different types of enemies. Clearly this is not a general approach, but is handy for wiping the smirk off your regular gaming partner's face. I built a deck specifically for this purpose after getting annoyed with my friend's Millstone deck. These are some of my favourite kinds of decks for casual play, and are routinely large.Īnother strong argument is if you expect to be on the receiving end of someone trying to 'deck' you. or any of the infinite card drawing combos. This can quickly happen if you play with Recycle, Worry Beads, Anvil of Bogardan, Riptide Director, Tolarian Serpent, Cephalid Vandal, Prosperity, Ambassador Laquatus. You can easily run yourself out of cards if you build a standard-sized deck based around card-drawing, decking mechanics (where you try and exhaust your opponent's deck), or graveyard-pilfering (where you want to get as much stuff into your graveyard as possible).

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