Practice · cutting a sealed deck to forty

The deck is built and it is forty-two cards; a deck is forty. Cut two — not the weakest two, but the two that are not doing what this deck does.

What decides the last two cards

• A deck is a strategic idea, and the idea has components. The guide names five, and what each is made of:
  • Blitzkrieg — cheap aggressive creatures, removal, a finisher.
  • By land and by air — cheap creatures, evasive creatures.
  • Hammer and anvil — defensive creatures, evasive creatures.
  • Green likes it big — big creatures, accelerators, tricks.
  • Strength in numbers — card draw, removal, defensive creatures.
• The card to cut is the one with no part in that. Not the weakest card: the one whose job this deck has no use for. The guide names the commonest case — an answer to one kind of card, sitting in a main deck, waiting for a game it may never see. It goes even when it is the better card.
• The next candidate is a creature that is not part of the plan. Every deck plays a few creatures that are simply creatures. Cutting one is a fair call — but not while something in the deck is doing nothing at all.
• The lands are a function too. The guide puts them at 40 to 45 per cent of the deck: sixteen on especially cheap spells, seventeen by default, eighteen on expensive ones. So on a cheap curve the seventeenth land is a card with no job, and it is one of the two.
• The decks are dealt from one hundred and twenty-eight real sets, Legends to The Hobbit, two colours, commons and uncommons, on the colour pairs the guide gives for each idea. A different set each deck, or one set, as you choose above the deck.
• The curve counts what a player pays, not what is printed: a morph creature is a three-drop, and a delve or convoke spell costs what is left after the graveyard or the team has paid. A card played for less than its printed cost says so under its name.
• A card is judged against its own set, not against the whole history of the game. Creatures have grown over the years, so a big creature has power four in a modern set and three in an older one where the average creature is smaller, and a cheap creature is one at or above what its set gives for the cost.

This exercise practises The Secrets of Sealed, Part II. The deck it hands you was dealt whole; a deck you drafted a card at a time is cut at the end of the two-player draft.