How many magic cards in a deck

This includes the Ace through the King. The Ace replaces the number 1 in a deck, then it is followed by the standard numbers of 2 through But instead of 11, 12, and 13, the cards are represented by the Jack, Queen and King.

This is in contrast to the number cards, which do not have pictures of people, but rather the picture of the suit repeated as many times as the value of the card is. So, if we take 4 suits of 13 cards each, and we multiply 4x13, we arrive at 52, which is the total number of cards in a deck of cards. Although the Ace takes the place of the number 1, and is the lowest card numerically, in many card games such as poker, the Ace is the highest valued card, being above even the King.

There are some interesting connections between the number of cards and our modern calendar we will get to later. The number of cards in deck is 52 without Jokers. The number of cards is 54 with Jokers. I think the exact origin and reason is unknown, but there is something very interesting about a deck of cards , whether it was done on purpose or not.

A deck of cards is very close to a modern calendar. There are 52 weeks in a year, which could correspond with there being 52 total cards.

Also, there are four different seasons in a year, summer, spring, fall and winter. Likewise, there are four different suits in a deck of cards. Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. While there are exceptions, a basic guideline is to set aside your non-land cards in your deck and count up your total converted mana cost.

Once you have that, divide that number with the total of non-lands in the deck, and that should give you an average of non-land CMC.

This can be tricky, however, as cards like Gitaxian probe use Phyrexian Mana which allow you to pay life rather than mana for the card. Some, like Street Wraith, will never be cast and will always cycle for 2 life, so it will can count as 0 rather than 5 cmc. Similarly, take a closer look at Lee Shi Tian's Jeskai Ascendancy combo deck, shown above; he had an ingenious plan for beating people's sideboard hate cards.

If people were going to bring in a lot of overly narrow cards like Erase and Stain the Mind , he would transform into a creature deck to dodge these hate cards and take advantage of his opponent's watered-down deck.

He would simply catch his opponent by surprise with a giant monster— Savage Knuckleblade or Polukranos, World Eater —and steal the game. Transform sideboards can be fun and impressive when they work out, but I recommend turning to it only as a Hail Mary, when nothing else is working. After all, sideboarding should be about perfecting your deck, not about clumsily trying to employ two conflicting strategies at the same time.

Building your sideboard is a task that's as challenging and as important as building your main deck. From my experience, though, it's typically given only a small fraction of the attention it deserves. It can be quite difficult to hone in on the perfect 15 cards. One way to start the process is to employ the elephant method. When you employ the elephant method, you're thinking of your deck as a complete card unit.

You consider what you'd like your deck to look like after sideboarding in each of the matchups you expect to face—you make sure you have the proper number of cards to bring in and take out in each matchup—and you construct your deck and sideboard accordingly. In short, you look at the big picture, and your sideboard is as important to the big picture as your main deck is.

One common pitfall to avoid is over-sideboarding. It's dangerous to bring in so many sideboard cards that you compromise the original game plan of your deck. In sideboarding, continue to pay close attention to your creature count, your mana curve, and the other important details of your deck's composition. For example, if you're playing an aggro deck, you might encounter a problem if you swap out six creatures for six answer cards.

You're liable to lose too much of the aggressive potential that made you choose the deck in the first place! Similarly, if you're playing a control deck against a fast aggro deck, you might be unimpressed by a slow card-drawing spell like Jace's Ingenuity. To be sure, Jace's Ingenuity is not one of your "best cards" in the matchup, but you do need to maintain a certain density of powerful late-game cards or else you might no longer be able to win the game!

Many times, I've made the mistake of sideboarding in too many cheap removal spells, only to find myself suffering from mana flood and losing the long games that my deck had been designed to win. Sometimes the way two decks match up after sideboarding has virtually no resemblance to the way they match up in Game One. When this is the case, you want to know about it ahead of time instead of facing a trial by fire in the actual tournament.

Like most things in Magic , there's no secret recipe to building a perfect sideboard. Remember the Mana Curve. Have Great Manabase. Find New Cards for Deck Building. Reevaluate Your Deck. Your email address will not be published. Skip to content. You might be interested: How many times a day can a debt collector call?

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