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Comment by tacone | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK 60 the minimum number of cards you have to put in your deck, but (at the least at the times) there was not a maximum number.

20k is the number of unique cards, but you can put as much as 4 copies of the same card in your deck for the vast majority of cards. You can also put as many "normal" lands as you wish in your deck.

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For constructed formats the minimum is 60. For limited formats the minimum is 40. For EDH/Commander it is 100 (including the commander card).

Every card that either has the subtype "basic" or that has a card text that explicitly states so (for example: Relentless Rats), can be included in any number of copies. All other cards can be included at most 4 times or at most 1 time if it is a EDH/Commander deck.

There are 11 cards with subtype basic: https://scryfall.com/search?q=t%3Abasic&unique=cards&as=grid...

And 4 non-basic cards that can be included in any number: https://scryfall.com/search?q=o%3A%22A+deck+can+have+any+num...

As many as you can shuffle unassisted is the upper limit.

Does this mean that players with larger hands are allowed more cards? Or is it an idealized "you can shuffle"?

In practice there is no strategic benefit of having more cards. There is one bad deck that uses more than 250 (to win with Battle of Wits). It arguably breaks the rule already.

This is an interesting rule, as it seems to provide an advantage to players on the basis on hand size.

It's not, pretty much all decks stick to the minimum required number because the more cards in your deck the less likely you are to see any particular card you want or need. To that end where they're available in the format many decks will run 'fetch lands' which search the deck for a particular type of land in order to thin out the remaining deck.

More cards is not seen as an advantage. There are a couple cases where you may want more cards, but usually up to about 75. It's about drawing the right cards, not just many, and more cards makes your deck less reliable, simply on the likelihood of drawing the card you want.

Unless you really really want a Battle of Wits deck (which is maybe tier 7) there is really no advantage and quite a bit of a disadvantage to running more than the minimum allowed number of cards.

For those who don't play Magic, this is on a scale where tier 1 decks are top decks, tier 2 decks are reasonable, tier 3 decks have serious weaknesses but are playable.

And at least there is a card that can be insert an unlimited amount of times and it is not a land. So technically, the combinations are infinite.

Presumably there is an optimal Island / Persistant Petitioners only deck ratio against a dumb opponent who does nothing but draw a card a turn and play a land.

I wonder if it's irrational?

Since you want to draw both lands and petitioners, there's an advantage to having a smaller deck, so this probably wouldn't be the case.

Aha, thanks! Then my comment does not apply!

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