A · Fundamentals · §3
How the twelve creatures, the engine and the burn divide the work, and where the redundancy actually is.
18 lands sit outside the curve. A land has no mana value to spend, and stacking a third of the deck at zero would flatten every other bar.
Card types
60 cards in the main deck.
Colour identity
Colour identity across all 60 listed cards. A card of two colours counts under both, so these do not sum to the deck size.
Mana value, type and colour identity are printed card values from Scryfall, joined against this guide’s list.
＋ Bring in (tap to add copies)
− Take out
12 creatures.
From the guide . §3 Deck Architecture
The deck divides into four jobs: land a threat, reach two spells a turn, convert the triggers into damage, and clear whatever is standing in the way. Almost every card does at least two of them.
Eight one-drops and four two-drops. has haste and grows +1/+1 per noncreature spell. flies, has haste, and grows +2/+0, which is twice the rate on a body that does not need the ground to be clear. is the best of them in a long game because delirium makes it a 3/3 flier.
One card, four copies. is the only thing here that generates new material, and the material it generates has haste. It is also the only artifact the deck cares about protecting, which matters because the most-played maindeck answer in the format destroys artifacts from a land slot.
Threats are redundant: twelve of them, plus Monks. Selection is redundant: twelve cards that dig. The engine is not redundant in kind, only in copies, and there is no second engine. A game where all four Cutters are answered is a game decided by whether the one-drops got there in time.