Playing more than sixty cards
General forum
Posted on Jan. 12, 2025, 5:12 p.m. by Bookrook
Is there any value in playing more than sixty cards in constructed formats? Other than cards that specifically care about having more cards in your deck, like Battle of Wits or Yorion, Sky Nomad or combatting a mill deck? The reason I ask this question is because I see people playing about seventy cards or more on arena.
wallisface do you know any examples of situations where there is a mathy reason to play more than sixty?
January 12, 2025 6:51 p.m.
wallisface says... #4
They’re extremely niche - i remember hearing of them but I can’t recall any of them sorry.
I don’t think there are any current-day reasons.
January 12, 2025 6:59 p.m.
Tardigrade says... #6
Some variants of Life (the old Starlit Sanctum combo deck) apparently used to play 62 cards in order to make sure they could mill their opponent after gaining infinite life. These versions were probably worse than the decks that just aimed to execute the combo in the statistical optimal way.
Billy Moreno played a 61 card Madness/Psychatog deck at PT LA 2005, utilizing Lonely Sandbar as the last card, and came in second. At least one commentator says that "[Moreno] played a statistically strange array of decks throughout the tournament", however, and his record against the top meta decks was apparently dismal, so take that result with a grain of salt. Gabriel Nassif's tournament winning 61 card Cruel Control list at PT Kyoto 2009 is even less statistically defensible, but the deck was so good it didn't matter much.
The people you're running into on Arena are, as Wallisface says, just bad at Magic.
wallisface says... #2
There’s no real competitive reason, and the people you’re seeing doing this on arena are just evidently bad at deckbuilding.
There is very very rarely some mathy reasons to maybe justify 61-62 cards… but even this application is incredibly narrow and the vast majority of people doing this are just illustrating to the world that they’re too lazy/inept to make a cut down to 60 cards.
January 12, 2025 6:46 p.m.