Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Disclaimer: I’m really bad at explaining things to kids! Especially since this involves probability.

Let’s say it’s late in the game and you already have 8 swamps in play. You don’t want to draw any more lands, you just want creature to attack with or spells to kill stuff with. If you had 24 swamps in your deck, there’d be 16 more lands you can draw after playing 8 swamps! If you had only 32 cards left in your deck, half of those would be lands!

But let’s say instead of 24 swamps, you had 4 marsh flats and 20 swamps instead. And instead of having 8 swamps in play, you have 6 swamps and 2 marsh flats. Everything else is the same (32 cards left in the deck) If you use the two marsh flats to remove 2 swamps from your deck and put them into play, you now have only 30 cards left in your deck. More importantly, now only 14 of them are lands! (12 swamps and 2 marsh flats). So now your odds of drawing odds are slightly less than 50% - 14/30!

It all boils down to improving probabilities and thinning your deck, making it a bit easier to draw useful cards later on.

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