General Minimum Deck Size

[Jeff H]

With my group I've noticed a lot of people complaining that they have to cut sweet cards and interactions out of their final 40. One guy ran 41 once but was stressed out about it, lol.

So... why not just make the minimum deck size, say, 45? I feel like this would open up more interactions within your own deck and add some variety game-to-game, which should make games better more fun. Thoughts?

 

[japahn]

There are two knobs there: booster size and minimum deck size. I prefer to keep the booster size at 15 and deck size at 40, and run narrower cards and more utility lands.

If you dislike this approach, you could do what retail did and cut boosters to 14 cards, saving some mental fatigue for your drafters.

If that's not the case, 45 is very attainable, but the tighter you go the more you punish focused decks and reward good stuff.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Larger deck sizes are bad for your synergistic build-arounds.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Yeah, I would cut booster size before enforcing a higher minimum deck size.

 

[japahn]

What I, as a player, have been doing is come to terms with the fact that if I'm sweating too much about the last cuts, they don't matter that much, so I've been playing 41-42 cards in a regular basis and 45-46 sometimes.

You could house rule some small incentive for larger decks. Say, start with 1 extra life for each 4 cards above the minimum, so you'd have:
40 cards - 20 life
44 cards - 21 life
48 cards - 22 life
52 cards - 23 life

I don't think that makes it balanced, larger decks would still be worse, but at least gives peace of mind to people who can't accept playing outside of a local maximum.

 

[Chriskool]

With my group I've noticed a lot of people complaining that they have to cut sweet cards and interactions out of their final 40. One guy ran 41 once but was stressed out about it, lol.

So... why not just make the minimum deck size, say, 45? I feel like this would open up more interactions within your own deck and add some variety game-to-game, which should make games better more fun. Thoughts?

Hi Jeff! I've ran into this problem with some of my fantasy sets, and the best way to address it was either (1) remove some of the generically good cards to bring down the power level or (2) remove the lower power synergy cards and then create new cubes/grids around them. Whenever you change the deck size, you're opening up a much different design space. Do you run a Utility land Draft to support your basic draft? (ULD may make larger deck size less of a strange experience.)

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

If you can run bouncelands in a format, you're running 15 land decks pretty consistently, giving everyone space for those two extra playables.

Pretty much ends any angst over cuts.

 

[sigh]

Just let people do whatever they want. Their is no real reason to change any rules, if people want 43 card decks, so be it. Honestly, it's one if the more important skill development paths a MTG player gets to take. It's not like their deck will fail to operate, but it will run a little suboptimally. My former roommate back in the day would build 80 card standard decks, but he learned over time.

If it's still a route that needs to be explored for a particular format/group, I'd aim for these two tactics first:
1) more juicy fixing. More picks taken on cool lands = fewer picks to "agonize" over later.
2) reduce pack size, as said above. Just use 14 card packs.

Bouncelands are sweet too

 

[Chris Taylor]

Cutting sweet cards isn't a bad thing. It makes you a better deckbuilder when things aren't easy