When we have well over seven thousand card choices to choose from, brewing a new deck is hard and even finding a niche card for the sideboard or alternative finisher can be extremely difficult. You’ll hear many players, myself included at times, comment that you don’t need to find an alternative as there is solid staple already in the format.

Card selection can be tricky and on many occasions there are positive rewards and negative consequences to your choice.

Card Comparison Examples

So I’m going to use a few examples

Divination is the accepted norm for card draw and whilst it doesn’t see much constructed play, it is key in many limited formats. Three mana and your draw two cards so it effectively replaces itself and gives you another card.

Mulldrifter pretty much does the same thing if you use the alternate Evoke cost. However, if you can wait until you have five mana you get a 2/2 flying creature to boot.

On the face of it Mulldrifter is generally an upgrade on Divination as it is more prominent in the format. There is a little bit of a greater risk as few people counter a draw cards spell, it is usually better to counter what they actually draw. Of course, there are going to be cases where slowing the card draw could be to your benefit is you are holding further answers. However, Exclude is a popular pauper card in many decks so countering becomes more important as many a Mulldrifter has flown across for victory over several turns.

Recently we’ve seen some other Divination style cards make an impact in specific decks.

Of One Mind and Winged Words are variants of Divination but when the conditions are met they can be cast for significantly less. A lot of the popular cards in the format enable the cards to be played at reduced cost, and Faerie and a Ninja/Delver of Secrets gives a non human and a human. Winged Words is very similar as plenty of fliers within Faeries or a Delver of Secrets. Using either of these two spells can be a major upgrade but you clearly need to look at how each card synergises with others to improve a decks performance overall.

Quadrant Theory

My FNM experience of late has been drafting every Friday night, I love the challenge of Limited as it is very skill intensive, we get to learn about more cards and gain card evaluation skills and how to priories cards better. You earn to diversify too as you won’t have say four Gurmag Anglers in your deck to increase the frequency of drawing out your winning card. 

Quadrant Theory is very popular in the limited environments but in a word of net decking and streaming content you can pick up a deck, have seen how it plays and have a comprehensive sideboard guide. However, the insight it gives can help Pauper brewers and also help when evaluating whether swapping over a card would be beneficial.

Developing

When the game is in the early turns what card make a difference or are valuable. A good example here are your two drops e.g. Burning-Tree Emissary which brings friends or maybe Auger of Bolas to give you a defensive creature and hopefully a spell to help out.

Ahead

You’ve hit your land drops and plenty of creatures on the board. A card like Act of Treason to steal the opponents blocker and use it to attack too. 

Behind

This is when your opponent has had a better start and you are playing catch up, A Fiery Cannonade against say a creature aggro deck could wreck their board presence and allow you to stabilise.

Parity

This is when the boards are stable and neither side has an advantage. This can be as simple as both players having a pair of 3/3 creatures or one player with a 4/4 and their opponent has a pair of 2/2. Neither side can afford to attack so you have to play a waiting game.  Mulldrifter is a good card here as you get an extra creature that is evasive and gives you a couple more cards too.

For a full explanation we have a link HERE.

So you know what the quadrants, a card has to be analysed in each of the quadrant’s to give you a picture of how useful it is overall.

I’m going to use Ulamog’s Crusher as an example

Developing, this card can’t be cast and is dead in your hand until late game.

Parity, this card can break the deadlock on its own. Probably require multiple blockers and additional destruction from the Annhilator triggers.

Ahead, a good card that will close out a game quickly.

Behind, this can be okay it can hold the board as very little that can get past it.

However, some degree of context Is required as their will be times when a card is too little too late or has the game state has progressed to the point that it is broadly irrelevant,

Best Case Scenario Mentality (BCSM)

“Whenever I play this card I win !”

This is one of the most dangerous statements in Magic and a cautionary one.

Ulamog’s Crusher is actually a great example for this, as stated Ulamog’s Crusher is awesome. When it attacks it also makes it harder for opponents to respond efficiently as they lose permanents from the Annhilator triggers, then they have to work out if they are going to take the damage or take significant damage.

Now when I did my Quadrant Theory analysis the Ulamog’s Crusher I was quite generous in my analysis, you could say I had used a best case scenario.

Here is another scenario. The game state is at parity but then the opponent plays a Gurmag Angler with you on ten life and five land min play. Now, if your next two draws are both land the Gurmag Angler will then be able to hit you twice to win the game for the opponent. You could assume that this is a bad beat scenario as one extra draw and you could have survived. Is it a bad beat ? Or is it an underlying weakness of Ulamog’s Crusher that whilst it has an amazing ceiling, the floor is really low potentially leaving you wide open to defeat.

However, what if you’d picked Colossal Dreadmaw instead, it could have been played two turns earlier and used as a blocker stalling the Gurmag Angler. Colossal Dreadmaw isn’t played in Pauper but in this case it would have been a better draw.

Ulamog’s Crusher is a good card, very good in several cases, but if you are going to play it you need to consider what cards are required around it to get you to a point where you can play it and still be realistically in the match. this would be early turn competent blockers, removal spells and maybe some ramp cards to put additional land into play.

All cards will have scenarios when they are sub optimal and this is a vital consideration with card selection.

Synergy

I touched on this earlier when I mentioned Of One Mind when cards work better with other cards that satisfy a condition. Usually if you can get cards to be synergistic your deck is going to be better.

The Elves deck utilises the card to great effect, add a card to get an additional creatures like Lead the Stampede and suddenly you are casting Elf spells to get more creatures and they come with a token friend to take over the board.

Now put Lys Alana Huntsmaster in another deck it becomes a very expensive 3/3 without any benefits, a card needs to be taken in the context of other cards.

Good Stuff

Sometimes a card is just great, you may not know this immediately but this comes with experience. Exploring the dark recesses of the format to find a new gem for the format is worth the hunt. Magic’s history is littered with good stuff decks like the Rock which plays the best individual cards and grinds out the wins, albeit not in a spectacular way playing solidly good cards at every mana cost. It may not be the best deck in the format at any given time but against the field it has a reasonable performance against the majority of the decks and provides a consistent level of performance.

A prime example of good stuff card is Cast Down, with only a handful of Legendary Creatures in the format, it can pretty much kill the majority of the format.

I hope you found this article useful and gain some insight for evaluating cards.