How big a library?

'What do you mean by "more spammy"?'

By that I mean many of the decks I am seeing put up on these sites tend to be like 50-60 cards, and run 7-12 of the same card. I don't know, looking at those decks, they seem very one dimensional and easily beaten by anyone with a sense of balance.

Also, back in the day, we used to play that you could not have more than 4 of any card in your deck. Does anyone actually still that?

Cool, my 80 card decks are not totally abnormal, I'll post up a deck list at some point to show what I do.

-Ray

Almightyray wrote:

Also, back in the day, we used to play that you could not have more than 4 of any card in your deck. Does anyone actually still that?

This never was an official rule. The creator of the game is against it anyway IIRC.

Almightyray wrote:

By that I mean many of the decks I am seeing put up on these sites tend to be like 50-60 cards, and run 7-12 of the same card.

Less than 60 means not legal deck

Many copies of a card, like 7-12 copies, means that the deck is just highly focused on doing what it does.


I have hard time of thinning my decks down from 90.
Luckily recently this has become slightly more easy and I don't have to spend long time to cut the decks I'm building down to 90 from, say, 125...

It's all about how fluid the deck is and how long the average game is in your meta.

Some decks burn 90 cards like it's nothing (combat tend to burn more) others always end up with half the library left.

If you never use up 60 cards then there is absolutely no reason IMHO to have more than that (unless your meta love raptor/slaughterhouse deck burn tactics).

Almightyray wrote:

By that I mean many of the decks I am seeing put up on these sites tend to be like 50-60 cards, and run 7-12 of the same card. I don't know, looking at those decks, they seem very one dimensional and easily beaten by anyone with a sense of balance.

Some decks are very highly focused and do one thing very well, some decks are more rounded and do a lot of things ok (those are the "toolboxy" decks). The decks that are highly focused tend to be very good, until they run into something that stops them dead.

Also, back in the day, we used to play that you could not have more than 4 of any card in your deck. Does anyone actually still that?

Oh, yeah, that was never actually a rule. A lot of people kind of accidentally ended up there from previously playing Magic, but the game was designed specifically for not having a card limit (using other things for balancing cards rather than arbitrary limits, generally speaking). This kind of lingered in the game in pockets of players for a while, but by the early 2000's, most folks who were proponents of a 4CL eventually were won over to playing the game like it was designed.

Cool, my 80 card decks are not totally abnormal, I'll post up a deck list at some point to show what I do.

Oh, sure. Again, 90 card decks are incredibly common; it isn't at all unusual to sit at a game where everyone at the table is playing 90 cards. 80 cards is a fairly common compromise between "lean and mean" and "having enough cards to not worry about getting decked". 60-70 cards tend to be played by folks who really want consistency and focus.

As mentioned somewhere above, 60 card decks that are half or more "burn option" cards (which are cards that you can freely discard during any player's untap phase if you don't have a certain clan in play), allowing you you approximate a much smaller deck, show up once and a while as a kind of trick deck (i.e. a deck that has, like, 20 actual cards and then 40 "burn option" cards that lets you pull off a very specific, possibly game winning maneuver). These are not common. And don't always work. And usually are very goofy.

I gun for 90 in all my decks because I usually play for the long game. I also don't spam more than 4-5 of any one card because I think it's one dimensional juvenile game play. Stealth bleed. Deflect. Yay fun.

Once you see someone with that kind of deck it's fairly easy to shut them down by not playing in their linear strategy. Clog up their hand and make them mess up the play style. It's harder if not impossible to do that with someone who has a balanced deck build as you can't isolate any one strategy.