Today I’m going to officially write down a lesson that I give to many a student when they start designing their own decks. After learning the game we all go through that phase of inserting cards at random just because they’re cool cards and they match the colors of a deck but at some point we start looking for consistency and a centralized theme about our deck. It is then that I will deliver the following lesson. I can’t claim ownership of the idea and I picked it up so long ago I can’t even cite the source but I’ll resurrect it now for you.

When you design a deck all you really need is nine cards. That’s right, just nine. Building a deck requires 60 but designing one only takes nine. The flaw I see in most of my students is that they just put any cool card into their deck because they like it. Often going over the 60 count, or worse, replacing a land with the aforementioned card.