Card advantage (often abbreviated CA) is a term used in collectible card game strategy to indicate one player having access to more cards than another player.[1] The concept was first discovered early in the history of Magic: The Gathering strategy. Many early decks relied on gaining more cards than their opponent then using this advantage in order to play either a game winning spell with enough counterspell backup or to slowly kill their opponent while preventing their opponent from casting meaningful spells. Today it is recognized as one of the most important indicators of who is ahead in a game.[2]
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The basic concept of card advantage is one player having more cards in hand and in play than their opponent. Card advantage is generally indicated in terms of a positive number - if a player casts Ancestral Recall, a spell that causes a player to draw 3 cards, that player is said to have gained +2 card advantage (he gains three cards - the ones he drew - while losing one - the Ancestral Recall itself). It is also often stated in terms of X-for-Y, where X and Y are numbers. If a player plays Plague Wind, a card which destroys all enemy creatures in play, when they themselves have no creatures in play and their opponent has two creatures in play, they are said to have gotten a "2-for-1", where 2 indicates the number of opposing cards removed from play and 1 indicates the card spent in order to accomplish this task.
It is seen as a baseline to spend one card to get rid of one opposing card; this is often referred to as trading.[3] A player who "trades" one card of their own for two of their opponent's is often gaining a long-term advantage as their opponent will run out of cards before they do.
Card advantage is typically generated in four ways.
Other means of one player getting ahead on cards exist. For instance, if one player attacks with a Hill Giant, and the other player blocks with a Grizzly Bears, the Grizzly Bears will die and the Hill Giant will survive. If the defending player then casts Shock on the Hill Giant, they will have traded two cards of their own (the Grizzly Bears and the Shock) for one card of their opponent's (the Hill Giant), putting their opponent ahead in terms of card advantage.[1]
Another relatively common mode of card advantage generation is when one player plays an aura spell, an enchantment card which attaches to another card in play. If the card the aura is attached to is destroyed in some manner, then the aura will be placed into that player's discard pile because the aura no longer has anything to enchant. Because many auras are cast on creatures, and creatures are fairly easily destroyed, playing with aura spells often provides a player's opponent the chance to get a "2-for-1" by destroying the creature the aura was attached to with a single card. As such, auras are seldom seen in competitive play unless they have some way of overcoming this inherent weakness.[5]
Virtual card advantage is when one card one player plays makes several cards their opponent has played or has in hand useless. One example of this is the card Moat; any non-flying creatures that player's opponent has cannot attack, so this can create situations where one player has a large number of useless cards. This is differentiated from "real" card advantage in that if the card which is nullifying large numbers of the opponent's cards is gotten rid of, then the "card advantage" disappears.[1] It is also usually rendered ineffective in the post-sideboard game; when the opponent realises the uselessness of several cards within their deck, they can sideboard out or in specific cards to nullify this advantage. Other such examples include no or only untargetable creatures, rendering targeted removal useless; the emptying of a hand against a discard deck, which renders their discard completely useless; and the use of repetitive effects that don't require the cost of a card, impacting the game without expending any significant resources.