This is part one of a series of articles on some different forms of advantage in Magic, aimed at teaching newer players different frameworks for evaluating board states and card interactions. I hope that this is useful for players of all levels.

Figuring out who is winning or losing in a game of Magic is surprisingly tricky. In games like tennis or football, for example, just glancing at the score will give a good enough impression of who is advantaged. Magic has more in common with a game like chess, where determining who is winning from just a glance at the board can be very challenging for a new player. Unlike chess, algorithms for determining advantage have not been developed. Instead, players develop several heuristics for what interactions and board states will most likely lead to them winning. In this series of articles, I’ll go over the most fundamental of these heuristics.

Card Advantage

The basic idea behind card advantage is that, in Magic, the person who has more stuff is more likely to win. Having more cards than your opponent, in hand and on the board, will let you trade off resources and win a game with what’s left. Just like every other way of evaluating the game, there are times when this will start to break down. Magic is a complicated game. However, in most games you play, having more cards will lead to winning. The easiest way to start evaluating card advantage is just to count the number of cards you and your opponent have access to, and to keep track of this by tracking how interactions modify that number. This is easiest to explain with two effects – card draw and removal. At the start of the game, you and your opponent have drawn seven cards. A card like Quick Study draws 2 cards, and the cost in terms of card advantage (we’ll get into mana advantage in later articles) is one card, which is the Quick Study itself. So after casting a quick study, you are net up one card. Then there are cards like Ravenous Chupacabra. This card is a removal spell, but it is also a 2/2 creature. When you cast it, if your opponent has a creature, you destroy that creature and have a creature of your own. This interaction also puts you up one card. A common phrase for these kinds of interactions is a “two for one”, as after spending one card, the net result is that you are up two cards. Something that sometimes trips up players is that removal is not card advantage. Someone casting a Murder on your Sundial, Dawn Tyrant is a net +0 in terms of card advantage. Both players have spent a card, and have received no card in return.

Creatures: Complicating the basics

Where card advantage can start to get more complex is with cards like resolute reinforcements. You do get two bodies from one card, but the utility of 1/1 bodies really matters here. If your opponent has a single Watchwolf, your two creatures cannot attack or block effectively. However, if you have a card like [anthem of champions], the utlity of your 1/1s is increased, and they can now trade with the watchwolf by double blocking it. There are also cards like Knight Errant of Eos, or Vengeful Bloodwitch that can leverage those bodies in other ways. Generally speaking, in magic, creatures are the most variable in terms of how they are exchanged for card advantage, and (mention creatures transitioning into board advantage and life total advantage). The best way to track the net effect on card advantage is just to track the board interactions (for example, if you count casting resolute reinforcements as a +1, then count trading both of those bodies for a cankerbloom or a giant growth as a -1). This may seem like a whole lot of work, but after some experience your brain will start to automatically shortcut a lot of this, just leaving you with the general impression of how ahead or behind you are on cards. It’s useful to be able to drill down and start counting for when that becomes relevant, but the important thing here is to be aware of card advantage and how various interactions negatively or positively impact you relative to your opponent.

Sweepers

Sweepers are a classic form of board based card advantage. If your opponent has four creatures, and you have one, and you cast a Day of Judgment, you’ve lost two cards (the creature + the day of judgement) and they have lost 4, so it ends up being a +2. Sweepers are are at their best when the caster is not commiting creatures to the board, and their opponent is. However, players can also play sweepers even in board based decks, provided that their decks are less hurt by them. A deck focused around playing large creatures like Rotting Regisaur is perfectly happy to play Cry of the Carnarium, while an opposing small creature deck reliant on death triggers from their Judith the Scourge Diva and Cruel Celebrant is going to be devastated by it.

Diminishing Returns, and the Relative Utility of Cards

Contrast Day of Judgment with Settle the Wreckage. Strictly speaking, Settle the Wreckage is always negative in terms of card advantage, provided your opponent has enough basic lands to get one for each creature exiled. You discard the settle, and your opponent gets to replace each exiled creature with another card. Using strictly the counting method of calculating card advantage, this is obviously a bad exchange for you. However, as you’ve definitely experienced, lands have a point of diminshing returns in most decks. If your most expensive spell costs 4 mana, and you don’t have many ways to draw cards, then getting your 7, 8, and 9th lands is completely irrelevant for you. Most importantly, Settle the Wreckage is always a one sided sweeper, in the same way Cry of the Carnarium was for the black stompy deck. Unlike Day of Judgment, even board based creature decks can feel fine playing Settle the Wreckage.

Card advantage in action: Izzet Phoenix

The Pioneer Izzet Phoenix deck produces card advantage in two ways: casting Treasure Cruise and recurring Arclight Phoenixes. The deck is entirely built around enabling these two cards. Cards like picklock prankster and the density of 10-12 one mana blue cantrips all enable both of these cards. To benefit from that card advantage, and to recover the mana and board advantage given up by spending so much mana cantriping and spinning their wheels, the phoenix player plays the 8 best 1 mana interactive spells available to them: 4 copies each of fiery impulse and lightning axe. Axe also enables phoenix and cruise, but the more important role is how hyper efficient it is. This bleeds into ideas about mana advantage, which will be discussed in more detail in that article, but the basic idea is that being efficient with mana when it comes to interaction allows decks to spend their mana on other things, like cantrips or card advantage. A consequence of card advantage is that the player wants to trade their cards for their opponents cards, so that they can win with what’s left. As such, cheap interaction and cheap threats are the best things to pair with card advantage.

Conclusions:

Card advantage provides a useful additional way to evaluate games of Magic, and one that’s useful in all formats and in at least some stages of most games. The game often transitions away from being about card advantage at some point, but having this tool to evaluate games will let you understand how to best use your cards, and hopefully, let you be a bit better at Magic.