I've recently hit a dilemma where I realistically don't think I can cut my deck down to 61 cards. Rather than discuss what all these cards are that I just don't feel like I could cut or what I'm playing I'd like to talk about the idea of running more than 60 cards in the maindeck. Just one or two extra cards, no one is suggesting we start playing Battle of Wits. What are people's opinions on playing 61+ card deck? Is it ever acceptable? Is that tiny decrease in consistency statistically noticable?
I'm personally of the opinion that 1 extra card shouldn't even be noticeable. Not to mention with as many fetches that the format has cracking one instantly thins your deck right back down to normal so to speak.
Unfortunately every try hard from Sacramento to Shanghai preaches from the top of their 27 lands + Mana Reflection that Tooth and Nail and Time Stretch are fine to play in the same turn but Armageddon is unfair.
I've recently hit a dilemma where I realistically don't think I can cut my deck down to 61 cards. Rather than discuss what all these cards are that I just don't feel like I could cut or what I'm playing I'd like to talk about the idea of running more than 60 cards in the maindeck. Just one or two extra cards, no one is suggesting we start playing Battle of Wits. What are people's opinions on playing 61+ card deck? Is it ever acceptable? Is that tiny decrease in consistency statistically noticable?
I'm personally of the opinion that 1 extra card shouldn't even be noticeable. Not to mention with as many fetches that the format has cracking one instantly thins your deck right back down to normal so to speak.
Well, each card increases your inconsistency. drawing a card 1/60=1.67%, while 1/61=1.63%. That is 98.36% of 1/60. A drop of 1.64% in consistency. This will get worse as the game goes on. 10 cards into your library, and you've got a 1/50 vs 1/51 chance (2% vs 1.96%). 1/51 cards is 98.03% of 1/50, now you're almost at 2% less than consistent. I know these percentages don't seem like much, but they will hurt your consistency.
The only time I typically entertain the idea of an extra card, is if the mana balance just won't work at 60. (This comes up more frequently in limited, debating 40 vs 41). For example, you may have a 60 card deck where 22 lands just isn't quite enough, but 23 is just a bit too much. The solution MAY be to go to 23 out of 61. Other than that, I would stay away from the slippery slope of "it's just 1 more card"
Playing 61 cards instead of 60 is like having a 49/51 coin instead of 50/50.
Fetching does not make your deck "normal" again. Let's say you started with 61 cards in your deck, and now have 51 cards after drawing a few. You crack a fetch and go to 50 cards in deck. If you were playing 60 cards instead, you'd be at 49 cards.
Some people can win with 61 cards, that doesn't mean that doing so is OK. It just means they're lucky. One player managed to T16 two GPs with 1-3 Black Cats in his SB that he couldn't even cast, are you going to start doing that too?
Are you sure about the never part? If the downside is small it could be potentially balanced by a small upside as well. Self-mill, dredge and toolbox decks come to mind, which may benefit from that last card. I am not sure I can come up with a specific example, though.
Read the article by Chapin he posted. It talks about all the exception examples you mentioned, and why it is even then still never a good idea to run 61 cards
Are you sure about the never part? If the downside is small it could be potentially balanced by a small upside as well. Self-mill, dredge and toolbox decks come to mind, which may benefit from that last card. I am not sure I can come up with a specific example, though.
Yes, I'm sure. Don't do it.
I don't know why you think self-mill or dredge can benefit from 61 cards, would you like to explain? If I was playing cards that said "draw six cards" and "draw five cards" I would still play 60 cards. Replace "draw" with "dredge" and I'd still play 60.
If you're playing a toolbox deck the incentive for sticking to 60 cards is even stronger. Take Pod for example: Pod is the strongest card in your deck, and having 4 copies of Pod in a 60 card deck means you're more likely to draw Pod, as opposed to 4 copies of Pod in a 61 card deck. Any gain that you make from having a 61st card is immediately wiped out by having less chance of drawing into your tutor, AND in all other matchups where that 61st card is dead. (e.g. 5/50 blanks = 0.1, 6/51 blanks = 0.117) If the 61st card is good in every matchup, or good in the majority of matchups, then do a 1-1 swap with something from your current 60 that isn't good.
I hate to actually weight in on this, but one of the better players in my shop (in a very competitive shop), runs 65 card decks. He plays mid-range in all formats he plays and consistently goes 3-1, 4-0, ect. Week after week. He doesn't really even up the land count to accommodate for it.
My shop is all experienced pilots on tier 1 decks, and yet he manages to pull out good results nearly all the time. I don't think playing 61 cards is a good idea, but knowing this player well--makes me doubt the articles and their math.
He's playing with 5 more things he wanted to play but had to cut--like mainboarding thrun in BGx, stuff like that. Its absolutely baffling and should hurt him, but it really doesnt seem to.
I hate to actually weight in on this, but one of the better players in my shop (in a very competitive shop), runs 65 card decks. He plays mid-range in all formats he plays and consistently goes 3-1, 4-0, ect. Week after week. He doesn't really even up the land count to accommodate for it.
My shop is all experienced pilots on tier 1 decks, and yet he manages to pull out good results nearly all the time. I don't think playing 61 cards is a good idea, but knowing this player well--makes me doubt the articles and their math.
He's playing with 5 more things he wanted to play but had to cut--like mainboarding thrun in BGx, stuff like that. Its absolutely baffling and should hurt him, but it really doesnt seem to.
I'd argue that he achieves success in spite of having a 65 card deck rather than because of having it. I don't think the drawback is great to running more than 60 cards, but every minute disadvantage in Magic adds up.
Statistically it's not a good idea. But these awful numbers people are talking about... 2% less likely to draw card A or card B, that is so small
I personally still never play with more than 60, but if we're taking statistics, it's just as likely you could play 4 rounds of simply never see Card A all night, whether you have 60 or 61. A 2% decrease in chance to see card B is still a decrease, no one can argue that. But it's also still only 2%. Assuming we only see <15 cards from our deck each game, that 2% decrease in chance wouldn't becoming noticeable until many games were played with both 60 and 61, then data recorded any compared.
Yes coming from a guy who will mull over whether to play 23 lands or 24 for hours, losing sleep at night. So I guess it's just my 2 cents. If you plan on doing copious amounts of play testing, and entering a large event, don't ever run 61+ because the inconsistency will become relevant. If you're a casual player who maybe desires more than kitchen table magic so you play FNM or have a LGS play group, you probably won't notice.
Sometimes after sideboarding, I'll take out a 3 of and put in a 4 of. I'll go to 61 in that case. Yes, I may dilute my chances of drawing a certain card by just a little bit, but I'm under no illusions that I'm good enough of a player where the 61st card is going to make or break my game.
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I think we mostly agree. I am just trying to figure out if there are any interesting corner cases.
Legacy dredge can lose by decking itself (I believe), going up to 61 reduces the odds of this. Clearly an advantage. Of course, you are right that by going to 61 you reduce the chances of getting your "best card" (dredge enabler, e.g. LED or whatever). The latter is probably more important.
What do you think about the living end deck with more than 60 cards? As far as I recall it maintains the land-cascade-creature ratio of the regular deck but reduces the odds of drawing living end. (There was a problem with the deck, but I forgot what it was...)
The first problem with playing a deck with more than 60 cards and the same land/spell ratio is that the probability distribution of number of lands drawn in an opening 7 becomes ever so slightly worse. The tails of the pdf (i.e. drawing 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands) are bad - you want to avoid fattening them; you want to avoid starting with a hand of 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands. Unfortunately playing something like 48 lands/72 spells does exactly that.
Let X_n be the random variable corresponding to the number of lands drawn in an opening hand of 7 cards for a deck with n cards, 2/5 of which are lands and 3/5 of which are spells.
P(X_60 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1560983
P(X_120 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1669215
P(X_240 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1722305
P(X_50000 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.177447
What this means is that with 24 lands/36 spells, your chance of drawing an opening hand with 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands is 0.156. With 48 lands/72 spells, it's 0.167, or about 1% more.
Side note, it might be possible to play slightly less/more lands instead of an exact multiple of deck size ratio to reduce the 0/1/6/7 land hand probabilities till they're in line with 60 cards. If I have time I might analyze this.
Another problem is "what are your other cascade spells?" Regular LE has 4 Violent Outburst and 4 Demonic Dread. The only other 3-mana cascade spell is Ardent Plea, and by playing that, you screw up your mana base even further because you now have to splash for white and blue. And don't get me started on cyclers...
Last problem: your sideboard is still 15 cards. Playing more than 60 cards doesn't change this fact, but after SBing, your SB has to contain no more than 15 cards, so you can't board back into a 60-card deck. Now you're going to have trouble drawing into your SBed cards.
Yes coming from a guy who will mull over whether to play 23 lands or 24 for hours, losing sleep at night. So I guess it's just my 2 cents. If you plan on doing copious amounts of play testing, and entering a large event, don't ever run 61+ because the inconsistency will become relevant. If you're a casual player who maybe desires more than kitchen table magic so you play FNM or have a LGS play group, you probably won't notice.
I think this is the heart of the answer. Chapin's article is great, and gets to this. He mentions that
To put things in perspective regarding just how big 0.4 percentage points are, that is one extra loss every 250 games. The average match is 2.5 games. That means that by playing 61 cards one would take an extra loss roughly every 600 matches.
If you're more casual (like myself personally), one game loss in 20 FNMs is not a huge deal. Even a moderate sized tournament (I once placed 2nd at a 5-round+Top 8 PPTQ with 61 cards; likely that falls into the lucky/in spite of category). If you want to be more serious, I think that yeah, cutting down to 60 is the first step. Also, if you've ever fetched to "thin" before drawing, you should play with 60 (I'm guilty of this hypocrisy, and so I'm moving towards 60 cards).
First: I am a die-hard 61-card deck player. Always have been since my first tournament in 1995.
Second: I KNOW statistics do not lie, and I KNOW every deck I have ever played would have been better had I played 60 instead. So why do I do it? Because it makes me happy and I like to go against the grain a little. Because it annoys people when I tell them I do. Because those same people will sometimes take me less seriously, and that's fine. And because it gives me room for a pet card or one more of something I like, or whatever in my list.
Third: Although I recognize that statistics do not lie OVER HUNDREDS OF MATCHES, I also know that the statistics say you will never be able to measure or notice the difference between 61 and 60 cards in a single tournament. Never. Anything you think you noticed is simply what happened that day. I have won a small legacy tournament playing 61-card zoo with off-color fetches, no goyf, and no chain lightning. I have won modern FNM with 30 players playing 61-card soul sisters with a black splash. I'm a mediocre player who has only played perhaps 100 sanctioned matches in my lifetime. In both cases, my deck choice alone should have net me losses, but I won thorugh them anyway. Why? Variance!
First: I am a die-hard 61-card deck player. Always have been since my first tournament in 1995.
Second: I KNOW statistics do not lie, and I KNOW every deck I have ever played would have been better had I played 60 instead. So why do I do it? Because it makes me happy and I like to go against the grain a little. Because it annoys people when I tell them I do. Because those same people will sometimes take me less seriously, and that's fine. And because it gives me room for a pet card or one more of something I like, or whatever in my list.
Third: Although I recognize that statistics do not lie OVER HUNDREDS OF MATCHES, I also know that the statistics say you will never be able to measure or notice the difference between 61 and 60 cards in a single tournament. Never. Anything you think you noticed is simply what happened that day. I have won a small legacy tournament playing 61-card zoo with off-color fetches, no goyf, and no chain lightning. I have won modern FNM with 30 players playing 61-card soul sisters with a black splash. I'm a mediocre player who has only played perhaps 100 sanctioned matches in my lifetime. In both cases, my deck choice alone should have net me losses, but I won thorugh them anyway. Why? Variance!
This is very much true. The difference in statistics between 61 and 60 card decks is not noticeable. Even though, statistically speaking, 61 cards had only downsides and no upsides to running 60.
A friend of mine plays Utron and always runs 61 cards, saying that Platinum Angel is his 61th card, as a lucky charm
First: I am a die-hard 61-card deck player. Always have been since my first tournament in 1995.
Second: I KNOW statistics do not lie, and I KNOW every deck I have ever played would have been better had I played 60 instead. So why do I do it? Because it makes me happy and I like to go against the grain a little. Because it annoys people when I tell them I do. Because those same people will sometimes take me less seriously, and that's fine. And because it gives me room for a pet card or one more of something I like, or whatever in my list.
Third: Although I recognize that statistics do not lie OVER HUNDREDS OF MATCHES, I also know that the statistics say you will never be able to measure or notice the difference between 61 and 60 cards in a single tournament. Never. Anything you think you noticed is simply what happened that day. I have won a small legacy tournament playing 61-card zoo with off-color fetches, no goyf, and no chain lightning. I have won modern FNM with 30 players playing 61-card soul sisters with a black splash. I'm a mediocre player who has only played perhaps 100 sanctioned matches in my lifetime. In both cases, my deck choice alone should have net me losses, but I won thorugh them anyway. Why? Variance!
This is very much true. The difference in statistics between 61 and 60 card decks is not noticeable. Even though, statistically speaking, 61 cards had only downsides and no upsides to running 60.
A friend of mine plays Utron and always runs 61 cards, saying that Platinum Angel is his 61th card, as a lucky charm
He'd probably be better off cutting the Angel than playing a 61st card.
I'm of the opinion that if your manabase forces you into a 61 card deck, you should suck it up and play the extra land and cut your deck down to 60 cards.
I've played 61 cards from time to time. Never more than that. Only do that when it is very hard to hit the right balance between 2 cards (usually cards in the 3 drop slot for some reason).
Most recently it was the fact that last standard I was running 4 courser of kruphix and 3 boon satyr instead of a 3/3 split or 4/2 split.
I hate to actually weight in on this, but one of the better players in my shop (in a very competitive shop), runs 65 card decks. He plays mid-range in all formats he plays and consistently goes 3-1, 4-0, ect. Week after week. He doesn't really even up the land count to accommodate for it.
My shop is all experienced pilots on tier 1 decks, and yet he manages to pull out good results nearly all the time. I don't think playing 61 cards is a good idea, but knowing this player well--makes me doubt the articles and their math.
He's playing with 5 more things he wanted to play but had to cut--like mainboarding thrun in BGx, stuff like that. Its absolutely baffling and should hurt him, but it really doesnt seem to.
It will catch up to him sooner or later. When I first started Limited (a good 9 years after I started playing Magic), I used to go with 24 non-lands and 16 lands. I used to think that I was so slick, but it caught up to me months later. From then on, I stuck with 17 land decks for the most part, obviously adjusting slightly for a low or high curve.
You want to know why I run 60 cards in every deck I play? The sole reason is that I can't beat myself up mentally when I fail to draw some specific card. I can be at peace that I played the maximum copies and the smallest deck, so I gave myself the best chance. Obviously against something like Mill, the SB can be put in more than taken out, but I don't think I've faced Mill for 6 months.
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If you're playing competitively, the small edge from the 1 card difference does make a big deal (as well illustrated by izzetmage's reference to the house edge in roulette). SCG actually had a decent article on this today (not about deck size specifically, but rather how the aggregation of small percentages is what gives strong players their large edge).
I don't think it is reasonable to say never run 61 though. If you look at the old Type2 Valakut lists with Primeval Titan, the optimal version may have actually been to run 64-65 cards simply because cramming the mountains in there for valakut wasn't really reasonable otherwise. Similarly, I've seen a couple vintage and legacy decks over the years that ran 61 because the percentage of inconsistency gained from the extra card was lower than the cost of cutting one of the cards in the deck. These cases are and should be the result of significant testing and analysis though, not a "I felt like it and my horoscope says to take risks today", and even so, well-justified instances are still very rare.
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I can see an argument for playing 60+ cards in the mainboard. If you have a list with 60 cards and you can't afford to cut any cards, but you have a card that is a four of that you want to increase your chances of drawing. You can add the extra one or two cards that have a very similar effect to that four of, in this way you decrease your chances of drawing the other cards in your deck very slightly, but not as much as if you reduced the number of one of those cards, and you increase the chance of drawing that four of or the similar effect in your deck. Basically it is a trade off of a slight loss in overall consistency of your deck for an increase in redundancy of the particular effect.
Preface this: I'm doing (close to finishing) a masters degree in mathematics. I know a little bit about statistics and counting.
I have OFTEN played 61, or even 62 cards in competitive REL events. However, in most of these cases, it was about reducing an inconsistency in one area at the cost of increased inconsistency in another (opening hand land draws, basically), in a way in which the loss of mainboard consistency increased the ability of the deck to win games in the meta-at-large.
Case in point--UW control last season. I played 61 cards in every single event I entered. I lost on breakers to top 8 in both of the opens I played in, and top 8'd a ptq. I can definitively say that the reason I made it that far was that my mainboard had 61 cards--specifically, a deicide. That list was pretty tight--there was a core to the planar cleansing/rev/elixir/verdict/quicken engine, and it was prefaced on doing almost nothing but drawing cards, so if I needed that deicide, I was guaranteed to draw it AT SOME POINT. I won more games because of having access to that deicide to get rid of random gods that somehow slipped through in long game 1's than I lost to poor opening hands, and in fact if you look at it like running the extra land that I would have otherwise cut, well, that deck liked to flood out a hell of a lot more than it liked to deal with mana screw.
Second example--for quite a while when I was starting to play esper in modern, I ran a 61st card--a grave titan. In that instance, it was more of a training-wheels type of situation, in that the deck was slow and grindy and I liked the safety net of having a two turn clock to draw into if games were going to time. I've since become a more experienced pilot and no longer need the fast clock because I have more experience playing quickly, eliminating the problem.
These two examples illustrate a pair of general cases in which I believe a 61st card is defensible--firstly, if you have a single card that can make an EXTREME impact on a large number of games because you can guarantee the ability to see it in the games you would otherwise lose without it, and secondly that the amount of games you win BECAUSE of that addition outweighs the number of games you would lose without it. Generally, this involves control decks, and specifically control mirrors, where some otherwise un-sideboardable, cheap, utility spell is game breaking if games go long, and not a large liability otherwise, just non-optimal.
The second reason to play a 61st card is as a safety net to time constraints. Often this involves combo-control kills, but it can also involve just straight up control decks. The reason to play this 61st card is acknowledged to be sub-optimal to the best the deck can perform, but is a concession to the fact that you as a pilot are not good enough to take advantage of those percentage points, and that its better overall at that point in time, usually for that specific event, for you to have access to that 61st card. Again, this is usually controlling decks, and for reasons like this it's often just an additional win-con. I refer to it as the "training wheels" 61st card because that's exactly what it is--an extraneous card that disappears once you become proficient with the deck. It's hard to pilot decks that have these cards in them because for the entire time you have them handy, you have to remind yourself to play the deck as if you didn't have access to it, and make use of it only when you have to. I'm always cautious about recommending this to people when they pick up a deck because there's often a tendency to draw the card, then play as if you've drawn it--this is poor and leads to learning bad patterns of play with the deck for the future.
The only other reason I've ever had to play 61 or 62 cards is in a tutor-heavy deck, usually a gifts, loam, or mystical teachings shell. In these cases, provided that your deck is constructed properly for the archetype, the first thing to note is that an overly high land-count is usually acceptable for these decks because flooding out is already part of the deck design, since you're actively removing non-lands from your deck with the tutor, or incentivized to play extra lands anyway. The second thing to note is that these decks have the ability to search for or dig to 1 of's much more readily than a typical deck, and already have been designed in mind with the inconsistency of having a bunch of 1 of cards anyway. For these decks, you therefore aren't sacrificing *as much* consistency as a normal deck constructed on a normal curve, and so the benefit of having access to those 1-of cards outweighs the losses you would have if you traded their power for the consistency of a 60 card list. Another common build that I've seen (but never played myself) is the 5 color teachings lists in modern--they operate on the premise of having a ton of different bullets available anyway, and I've seen the 15 singleton sideboard supplemented with 1-2 other "sideboard slots" in the main. I don't necessarily agree with that type of construction, because I believe in that case the solution is to play narrower bullets and be more selective about them, but I understand the reasoning.
That being said, I would NEVER in a million years advocate for any deck that is designed with the consistency of its topdecks or opening hands in mind be built with more than 60 cards. Which means, midrange, agro, and most combo strategies should generally have an optimal 60. It only becomes reasonable to think about adding extra cards when you already don't care as much about the consistency of your topdecks or opening hands as you do about the consistency of your long game, so we're pretty much left with control decks.
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The only genuine reason to run 61 over 60, other than "just because I can". Is when you need an extra land to make your mana base work. And specifically the ensure enough color and fetchable sources, in a deck that absolutely requires every single one of it's other slots. Usually this is combo decks with unchangable slots.
The only genuine reason to run 61 over 60, other than "just because I can". Is when you need an extra land to make your mana base work. And specifically the ensure enough color and fetchable sources, in a deck that absolutely requires every single one of it's other slots. Usually this is combo decks with unchangable slots.
Pretty much blatantly disagree. Classic example: Loam decks. In a deck where you're already running 8-12 "engine pieces" that do the same job, alongside a deck core with tutors to get individual bullets or engines active, playing even as many as 62 or 63 cards can be correct, when you start considering that there's no way to go lower on some of the "engine" slots because they're needed for the deck to operate on all cylinders, but the extra bullets are required to lock out matches that would otherwise be lost and don't have a high opportunity cost if you draw them as versus your other pieces. BOM had an assault-loam deck with a 62 card mainboard top 8, and like two years ago a lands deck top 16'd with 63 cards in the mainboard. Note that these are interesting exceptions because the decks are already designed with the idea that you run a large number of enablers to get your loam online, that are then "dead draws" when you loam them into your graveyard. These decks function based on the premise that getting the engine online far outweighs the inconsistency of having dead dredges. It also helps when the bullets you're adding are lands to a deck with mox diamond.
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I'm not quite as high as you in the math department but I'm still pretty good at it. I agree with what you've said, in Legacy I play BUG Nic Fit and that's one of those decks that wants to go above 60. The consensus on their forums is 61 but I'm not so sure that's optimal and it may be a couple cards higher. You have the issue of hitting Veteran Explorer consistently as an upper bound on the number of cards to run but there's Brainstorm, Top, and GSZ to find the explorers, and later on Baleful Strix and even Birthing Pod. The idea there is that the slight consistency hit you take is made up for with the increased tutor options.
I think this applies to constructed more so than limited, in 40 card formats the impact of the extra card is more pronounced which makes it a worse idea.
Anyways as far as it applies to Modern I would say if you aren't reliant on a specific card (like in Twin) and you can expect to see a lot of cards in a game (30+?) you're probably ok running 61 and possibly even more but it shouldn't be your default action in deck building. I guess a more mathy way of saying it is if your lowest power level card needs to remain in the deck, and the card you're adding is higher than the average power level of the deck then you're better off going over 60.
I agree with the premise, but I think in practice the requirements are even stronger than just affecting the average power level of the deck--I believe to really justify it, the entire structure of the deck has to be one prefaced on the idea that your resources are interchangeable as far as opening hands are concerned, and that the only thing that matters is getting the engine going, at which point you will have reasonable access to any individual card in your deck. Pod, loam strategies, and mystical teachings decks are the only ones in recent modern play that have come close to that level of engine, in my opinion.
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The only genuine reason to run 61 over 60, other than "just because I can". Is when you need an extra land to make your mana base work. And specifically the ensure enough color and fetchable sources, in a deck that absolutely requires every single one of it's other slots. Usually this is combo decks with unchangable slots.
Pretty much blatantly disagree. Classic example: Loam decks. In a deck where you're already running 8-12 "engine pieces" that do the same job, alongside a deck core with tutors to get individual bullets or engines active, playing even as many as 62 or 63 cards can be correct, when you start considering that there's no way to go lower on some of the "engine" slots because they're needed for the deck to operate on all cylinders, but the extra bullets are required to lock out matches that would otherwise be lost and don't have a high opportunity cost if you draw them as versus your other pieces. BOM had an assault-loam deck with a 62 card mainboard top 8, and like two years ago a lands deck top 16'd with 63 cards in the mainboard. Note that these are interesting exceptions because the decks are already designed with the idea that you run a large number of enablers to get your loam online, that are then "dead draws" when you loam them into your graveyard. These decks function based on the premise that getting the engine online far outweighs the inconsistency of having dead dredges. It also helps when the bullets you're adding are lands to a deck with mox diamond.
I'm not exactly sure what you are "Blatantly disagreeing" with here. All you did was give a specific example of a deck that has too many specific combo pieces it needs to run to be able to fit comfortably into a 60 card deck while at the same time running the number of lands it requires. Aka exactly what I said.
I'm personally of the opinion that 1 extra card shouldn't even be noticeable. Not to mention with as many fetches that the format has cracking one instantly thins your deck right back down to normal so to speak.
Well, each card increases your inconsistency. drawing a card 1/60=1.67%, while 1/61=1.63%. That is 98.36% of 1/60. A drop of 1.64% in consistency. This will get worse as the game goes on. 10 cards into your library, and you've got a 1/50 vs 1/51 chance (2% vs 1.96%). 1/51 cards is 98.03% of 1/50, now you're almost at 2% less than consistent. I know these percentages don't seem like much, but they will hurt your consistency.
The only time I typically entertain the idea of an extra card, is if the mana balance just won't work at 60. (This comes up more frequently in limited, debating 40 vs 41). For example, you may have a 60 card deck where 22 lands just isn't quite enough, but 23 is just a bit too much. The solution MAY be to go to 23 out of 61. Other than that, I would stay away from the slippery slope of "it's just 1 more card"
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/standard/12478_61_Cards_Magic_Russian_Roulette.html
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/pvs-playhouse-the-five-six-best-decks-ive-ever-played/
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-is-playing-more-than-60-cards-always-a-bad-idea/
Playing 61 cards instead of 60 is like having a 49/51 coin instead of 50/50.
Fetching does not make your deck "normal" again. Let's say you started with 61 cards in your deck, and now have 51 cards after drawing a few. You crack a fetch and go to 50 cards in deck. If you were playing 60 cards instead, you'd be at 49 cards.
Some people can win with 61 cards, that doesn't mean that doing so is OK. It just means they're lucky. One player managed to T16 two GPs with 1-3 Black Cats in his SB that he couldn't even cast, are you going to start doing that too?
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Big Johnny.
Read the article by Chapin he posted. It talks about all the exception examples you mentioned, and why it is even then still never a good idea to run 61 cards
I don't know why you think self-mill or dredge can benefit from 61 cards, would you like to explain? If I was playing cards that said "draw six cards" and "draw five cards" I would still play 60 cards. Replace "draw" with "dredge" and I'd still play 60.
If you're playing a toolbox deck the incentive for sticking to 60 cards is even stronger. Take Pod for example: Pod is the strongest card in your deck, and having 4 copies of Pod in a 60 card deck means you're more likely to draw Pod, as opposed to 4 copies of Pod in a 61 card deck. Any gain that you make from having a 61st card is immediately wiped out by having less chance of drawing into your tutor, AND in all other matchups where that 61st card is dead. (e.g. 5/50 blanks = 0.1, 6/51 blanks = 0.117) If the 61st card is good in every matchup, or good in the majority of matchups, then do a 1-1 swap with something from your current 60 that isn't good.
The good Pod players all played 60 cards.
http://archive.wizards.com/magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/eventcoverage/ptbng14/moderndecks
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Big Johnny.
My shop is all experienced pilots on tier 1 decks, and yet he manages to pull out good results nearly all the time. I don't think playing 61 cards is a good idea, but knowing this player well--makes me doubt the articles and their math.
He's playing with 5 more things he wanted to play but had to cut--like mainboarding thrun in BGx, stuff like that. Its absolutely baffling and should hurt him, but it really doesnt seem to.
I'd argue that he achieves success in spite of having a 65 card deck rather than because of having it. I don't think the drawback is great to running more than 60 cards, but every minute disadvantage in Magic adds up.
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I personally still never play with more than 60, but if we're taking statistics, it's just as likely you could play 4 rounds of simply never see Card A all night, whether you have 60 or 61. A 2% decrease in chance to see card B is still a decrease, no one can argue that. But it's also still only 2%. Assuming we only see <15 cards from our deck each game, that 2% decrease in chance wouldn't becoming noticeable until many games were played with both 60 and 61, then data recorded any compared.
Yes coming from a guy who will mull over whether to play 23 lands or 24 for hours, losing sleep at night. So I guess it's just my 2 cents. If you plan on doing copious amounts of play testing, and entering a large event, don't ever run 61+ because the inconsistency will become relevant. If you're a casual player who maybe desires more than kitchen table magic so you play FNM or have a LGS play group, you probably won't notice.
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Big Johnny.
The first problem with playing a deck with more than 60 cards and the same land/spell ratio is that the probability distribution of number of lands drawn in an opening 7 becomes ever so slightly worse. The tails of the pdf (i.e. drawing 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands) are bad - you want to avoid fattening them; you want to avoid starting with a hand of 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands. Unfortunately playing something like 48 lands/72 spells does exactly that.
P(X_60 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1560983
P(X_120 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1669215
P(X_240 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.1722305
P(X_50000 = 0, 1, 6, or 7) = 0.177447
What this means is that with 24 lands/36 spells, your chance of drawing an opening hand with 0, 1, 6 or 7 lands is 0.156. With 48 lands/72 spells, it's 0.167, or about 1% more.
Side note, it might be possible to play slightly less/more lands instead of an exact multiple of deck size ratio to reduce the 0/1/6/7 land hand probabilities till they're in line with 60 cards. If I have time I might analyze this.
Last problem: your sideboard is still 15 cards. Playing more than 60 cards doesn't change this fact, but after SBing, your SB has to contain no more than 15 cards, so you can't board back into a 60-card deck. Now you're going to have trouble drawing into your SBed cards.
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Big Johnny.
I think this is the heart of the answer. Chapin's article is great, and gets to this. He mentions that
If you're more casual (like myself personally), one game loss in 20 FNMs is not a huge deal. Even a moderate sized tournament (I once placed 2nd at a 5-round+Top 8 PPTQ with 61 cards; likely that falls into the lucky/in spite of category). If you want to be more serious, I think that yeah, cutting down to 60 is the first step. Also, if you've ever fetched to "thin" before drawing, you should play with 60 (I'm guilty of this hypocrisy, and so I'm moving towards 60 cards).
Second: I KNOW statistics do not lie, and I KNOW every deck I have ever played would have been better had I played 60 instead. So why do I do it? Because it makes me happy and I like to go against the grain a little. Because it annoys people when I tell them I do. Because those same people will sometimes take me less seriously, and that's fine. And because it gives me room for a pet card or one more of something I like, or whatever in my list.
Third: Although I recognize that statistics do not lie OVER HUNDREDS OF MATCHES, I also know that the statistics say you will never be able to measure or notice the difference between 61 and 60 cards in a single tournament. Never. Anything you think you noticed is simply what happened that day. I have won a small legacy tournament playing 61-card zoo with off-color fetches, no goyf, and no chain lightning. I have won modern FNM with 30 players playing 61-card soul sisters with a black splash. I'm a mediocre player who has only played perhaps 100 sanctioned matches in my lifetime. In both cases, my deck choice alone should have net me losses, but I won thorugh them anyway. Why? Variance!
This is very much true. The difference in statistics between 61 and 60 card decks is not noticeable. Even though, statistically speaking, 61 cards had only downsides and no upsides to running 60.
A friend of mine plays Utron and always runs 61 cards, saying that Platinum Angel is his 61th card, as a lucky charm
He'd probably be better off cutting the Angel than playing a 61st card.
I'm of the opinion that if your manabase forces you into a 61 card deck, you should suck it up and play the extra land and cut your deck down to 60 cards.
Most recently it was the fact that last standard I was running 4 courser of kruphix and 3 boon satyr instead of a 3/3 split or 4/2 split.
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It will catch up to him sooner or later. When I first started Limited (a good 9 years after I started playing Magic), I used to go with 24 non-lands and 16 lands. I used to think that I was so slick, but it caught up to me months later. From then on, I stuck with 17 land decks for the most part, obviously adjusting slightly for a low or high curve.
You want to know why I run 60 cards in every deck I play? The sole reason is that I can't beat myself up mentally when I fail to draw some specific card. I can be at peace that I played the maximum copies and the smallest deck, so I gave myself the best chance. Obviously against something like Mill, the SB can be put in more than taken out, but I don't think I've faced Mill for 6 months.
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Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)I don't think it is reasonable to say never run 61 though. If you look at the old Type2 Valakut lists with Primeval Titan, the optimal version may have actually been to run 64-65 cards simply because cramming the mountains in there for valakut wasn't really reasonable otherwise. Similarly, I've seen a couple vintage and legacy decks over the years that ran 61 because the percentage of inconsistency gained from the extra card was lower than the cost of cutting one of the cards in the deck. These cases are and should be the result of significant testing and analysis though, not a "I felt like it and my horoscope says to take risks today", and even so, well-justified instances are still very rare.
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I have OFTEN played 61, or even 62 cards in competitive REL events. However, in most of these cases, it was about reducing an inconsistency in one area at the cost of increased inconsistency in another (opening hand land draws, basically), in a way in which the loss of mainboard consistency increased the ability of the deck to win games in the meta-at-large.
Case in point--UW control last season. I played 61 cards in every single event I entered. I lost on breakers to top 8 in both of the opens I played in, and top 8'd a ptq. I can definitively say that the reason I made it that far was that my mainboard had 61 cards--specifically, a deicide. That list was pretty tight--there was a core to the planar cleansing/rev/elixir/verdict/quicken engine, and it was prefaced on doing almost nothing but drawing cards, so if I needed that deicide, I was guaranteed to draw it AT SOME POINT. I won more games because of having access to that deicide to get rid of random gods that somehow slipped through in long game 1's than I lost to poor opening hands, and in fact if you look at it like running the extra land that I would have otherwise cut, well, that deck liked to flood out a hell of a lot more than it liked to deal with mana screw.
Second example--for quite a while when I was starting to play esper in modern, I ran a 61st card--a grave titan. In that instance, it was more of a training-wheels type of situation, in that the deck was slow and grindy and I liked the safety net of having a two turn clock to draw into if games were going to time. I've since become a more experienced pilot and no longer need the fast clock because I have more experience playing quickly, eliminating the problem.
These two examples illustrate a pair of general cases in which I believe a 61st card is defensible--firstly, if you have a single card that can make an EXTREME impact on a large number of games because you can guarantee the ability to see it in the games you would otherwise lose without it, and secondly that the amount of games you win BECAUSE of that addition outweighs the number of games you would lose without it. Generally, this involves control decks, and specifically control mirrors, where some otherwise un-sideboardable, cheap, utility spell is game breaking if games go long, and not a large liability otherwise, just non-optimal.
The second reason to play a 61st card is as a safety net to time constraints. Often this involves combo-control kills, but it can also involve just straight up control decks. The reason to play this 61st card is acknowledged to be sub-optimal to the best the deck can perform, but is a concession to the fact that you as a pilot are not good enough to take advantage of those percentage points, and that its better overall at that point in time, usually for that specific event, for you to have access to that 61st card. Again, this is usually controlling decks, and for reasons like this it's often just an additional win-con. I refer to it as the "training wheels" 61st card because that's exactly what it is--an extraneous card that disappears once you become proficient with the deck. It's hard to pilot decks that have these cards in them because for the entire time you have them handy, you have to remind yourself to play the deck as if you didn't have access to it, and make use of it only when you have to. I'm always cautious about recommending this to people when they pick up a deck because there's often a tendency to draw the card, then play as if you've drawn it--this is poor and leads to learning bad patterns of play with the deck for the future.
The only other reason I've ever had to play 61 or 62 cards is in a tutor-heavy deck, usually a gifts, loam, or mystical teachings shell. In these cases, provided that your deck is constructed properly for the archetype, the first thing to note is that an overly high land-count is usually acceptable for these decks because flooding out is already part of the deck design, since you're actively removing non-lands from your deck with the tutor, or incentivized to play extra lands anyway. The second thing to note is that these decks have the ability to search for or dig to 1 of's much more readily than a typical deck, and already have been designed in mind with the inconsistency of having a bunch of 1 of cards anyway. For these decks, you therefore aren't sacrificing *as much* consistency as a normal deck constructed on a normal curve, and so the benefit of having access to those 1-of cards outweighs the losses you would have if you traded their power for the consistency of a 60 card list. Another common build that I've seen (but never played myself) is the 5 color teachings lists in modern--they operate on the premise of having a ton of different bullets available anyway, and I've seen the 15 singleton sideboard supplemented with 1-2 other "sideboard slots" in the main. I don't necessarily agree with that type of construction, because I believe in that case the solution is to play narrower bullets and be more selective about them, but I understand the reasoning.
That being said, I would NEVER in a million years advocate for any deck that is designed with the consistency of its topdecks or opening hands in mind be built with more than 60 cards. Which means, midrange, agro, and most combo strategies should generally have an optimal 60. It only becomes reasonable to think about adding extra cards when you already don't care as much about the consistency of your topdecks or opening hands as you do about the consistency of your long game, so we're pretty much left with control decks.
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Pretty much blatantly disagree. Classic example: Loam decks. In a deck where you're already running 8-12 "engine pieces" that do the same job, alongside a deck core with tutors to get individual bullets or engines active, playing even as many as 62 or 63 cards can be correct, when you start considering that there's no way to go lower on some of the "engine" slots because they're needed for the deck to operate on all cylinders, but the extra bullets are required to lock out matches that would otherwise be lost and don't have a high opportunity cost if you draw them as versus your other pieces. BOM had an assault-loam deck with a 62 card mainboard top 8, and like two years ago a lands deck top 16'd with 63 cards in the mainboard. Note that these are interesting exceptions because the decks are already designed with the idea that you run a large number of enablers to get your loam online, that are then "dead draws" when you loam them into your graveyard. These decks function based on the premise that getting the engine online far outweighs the inconsistency of having dead dredges. It also helps when the bullets you're adding are lands to a deck with mox diamond.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
I think this applies to constructed more so than limited, in 40 card formats the impact of the extra card is more pronounced which makes it a worse idea.
Anyways as far as it applies to Modern I would say if you aren't reliant on a specific card (like in Twin) and you can expect to see a lot of cards in a game (30+?) you're probably ok running 61 and possibly even more but it shouldn't be your default action in deck building. I guess a more mathy way of saying it is if your lowest power level card needs to remain in the deck, and the card you're adding is higher than the average power level of the deck then you're better off going over 60.
Yes, I am a local area mod.WELP. GOOD LIFE CHANGES ALL HAPPEN AT ONCE AND SOME ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVEPrimary Decks:
Modern: Esper Draw-Go
Legacy: RUG Lands
EDH: Sidisi turn-3 storm
I'm not exactly sure what you are "Blatantly disagreeing" with here. All you did was give a specific example of a deck that has too many specific combo pieces it needs to run to be able to fit comfortably into a 60 card deck while at the same time running the number of lands it requires. Aka exactly what I said.