Magic the Gathering – How to Gain Card Advantage

In Magic the Gathering, there are quite a few ways to gain card advantage. However, card advantages does not always means just drawing more cards than your opponent. In this article, we will showing you the different kind of card advantage to add your deck strategy and how to gain them.

Simple card advantage (CA):
The crudest form of CA. To achieve this benefit, you need spells that can help draw more cards from your library or make your opponent loses cards. Tidings and Ancestral Recall helps greatly in drawing cards.
To make your opponent loses card, you can make discard his hand or destroy his permanents. However,if you are using 1 card to destroy 1 card, it isn't that effective. It has be 1 for 2 cards or more. Or that spell can destroy 1 permanent and also allow to draw 1 card. In this case, you are leading in card number, and thus having an edge.

Card selection advantage
Cards allows you to search for a the card you want makes your deck more consistent. Cards like these are extremely helpful to combo and control decks. Searching for the missing combo cards that can help you win the game at that point of time or find the answer to destroy your threat is always welcome.
Demonic tutor, Diablolic tutor and Survival of the Fittest helps you gaining this advantage.

Virtual CA
The hardest to notice but also one of the most powerful CA in the game.

Powerful spells or creatures that has effects that limit your opponent's options. Creatures like Serra Angel and Lightning Angel can not only fly and attack, but also block smaller creatures to save some life points.
Spells like the moat will cause only flying creatures can attack you. If your opponent does not have flying creatures, he will never able to touch you.

In the above example, you and your opponent does not lose any cards. But because of the effects, your opponent has restricted options or unfavorable combat situations.

These 3 kinds of CA, simple, selective and virtual, are the most commonly used strategy to win your opponent. As the game progress and evolved with more and more game mechanics and new powerful cards appearing. Understanding the different kinds of card advantage is getting more and more important.

Manferd is a seasoned player in Magic the Gathering since 1997. He runs a website which gives his insights,information and free downloads to help new players to improve their experience in playing this card game. To take advantage of his experience, pay a visit to http://magic-sg.com.

by: Manferd_J_Hoe