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inally, we get to the meat of the matter; building the deck.

We’ll begin with the basics, because sometimes people neglect simple aspects of deckbuilding, which is why their decks fail.

One of the most important aspects of deckbuilding that many beginners fail to understand is that a good deck must be as close to 60 cards as possible in order to be effective. This has to do with chance, percentages, and other numerical issues that a casual player really doesn’t care to deal with.

The point is that when you begin to exceed 60 cards, the [highlight]chances of getting one specific card in the deck gets lower.[/highlight]

Say you need to draw a kill spell in order to survive against your opponent’s huge creature. If you have too many cards in your deck, the chance of you getting one card out of it is much lower than it would be with a deck of normal size.

Additionally, including too many cards…

…makes the building process much more complicated!

A good deck needs a certain ratio of lands to nonland cards, and this ratio becomes less clear when more cards are included in the deck.

Decks too large not only affect your own playing, but the playing of those around you. I once knew someone who had an “artifact deck” that was nearly 300 cards. We hated playing against it, not because it was a good deck, but because it took him so long to shuffle.

It was also the perfect example of [highlight]trying to do too many things[/highlight] with your deck.

Keeping your deck down in card number is important to the game as a whole.

How do you effectively keep the cards you need, but get rid of the ones that are holding you back?

Become one of the few players in the WORLD who know…