The key to success in Magic is card advantage. While most players realize this, many don't understand the full impact of this, how many forms of card advantage there are and just how much they are affected by it. Every successful magic deck uses card advantage in some form. The main forms of card advantage in deck design are card draw, card selection, multiple card effects and creating/avoiding dead cards. In addition, specific plays can help you generate card advantage.

Card Draw

How often do you win after mulliganing when your opponent doesn't? Having one less card to choice from early and to use later, will often have powerful ripple effects on the entire game. Drawing more cards than your opponent gives you more than one type of advantage. The most obvious is that you are less likely to run out of mana and things to do with your mana.

If they built their deck right and get a good enough draw this might not always matter though. The other big edge gained by drawing more cards is that it gives you more options to choose from. Maybe your opponent has plenty of mana and things to do with it for the duration of the game, but you have more choices. They get to five mana and play the one thing they have on their hand, on your turn, you look at your hand and decide what to do from the multiple cards you have to choose from. It's often fine to spend time and mana on card draw because you can make up for lost tempo by making better plays then your opponent on later turns thanks to having more choices.

Keisuke Kurata's Blue/White Control deck from Worlds is a good example of card advantage through card draw in Standard:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

3 Wall of Omens

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

2 Gideon Jura

1 Jace Beleren

3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

1 Cancel

3 Condemn

3 Day of Judgment

2 Deprive

1 Into the Roil

3 Journey to Nowhere

2 Luminarch Ascension

4 Mana Leak

3 Preordain

2 Spreading Seas

2 Stoic Rebuttal

[/Spells]

[Lands]

4 Celestial Colonnade

4 Glacial Fortress

4 Island

1 Marsh Flats

1 Misty Rainforest

3 Plains

3 Seachrome Coast

1 Sejiri Refuge

4 Tectonic Edge

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

Wall of Omens, Jace the Mind Sculptor, Jace Beleron, Spreading Seas, and Into the Roil are all ways for him to draw additional cards. Wall of Omens, Spreading Seas and Into the Roil are one of the best ways to do so in constructed: a cantrip that allows you to draw additional cards without losing tempo. The wall gives you a blocker and it draws you another card, Seas allows you to "kill" a man-land and draw a card. If every time you played a card to either deal with a threat or create one of your own you drew a card, you would probably never lose a game. Being able to identify cards that serve a legitimately useful function in the environment and also draw you a card will make your decks better.

Jace is more just pure card draw. At least with the Mind Sculptor, you immediately have the option of other functions, if you can't afford to lose the tempo needed to draw extra cards with it. In both cases, you can replace them with the first activation and get extra cards on ensuing turns. In the past, Blue decks featured more pure, fast, immediate card draw like Ancestral Recall, Inspiration, Thirst For Knowledge and Stroke of Genius. The return with Jace isn't as immediately gratifying, but it can be a constant, steady advantage that becomes overwhelming in a few turns.

Card Selection

Jace, the Mind Sculptor also can give you another form of card advantage immediately: card selection. Even if you don't draw extra cards, making the ones you do draw more optimal is a form of card advantage. If every turn I got to scry for 2 during my draw step and you had to draw normally, I would quickly get an overwhelming advantage, unless your deck was Vintage and mine was Sealed or some other unlikely match up.

Random draws inevitably will eventually end up supplying you with dead cards, often in the form of extra mana or spells that are irrelevant to that particular game. If you can instead draw extremely useful cards every time you would have drawn dead, then you get similar advantages to straight card draw. Stephen Mercatoris' Pyromancer Ascension deck from the SSG 5K in Charlotte makes great use of card selection:

[cardlist]

[Spells]

2 Jace Beleren

4 Burst Lightning

2 Call to Mind

4 Foresee

3 Into the Roil

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Mana Leak

4 Preordain

4 Pyromancer Ascension

4 See Beyond

2 Spell Pierce

[/Spells]

[Lands]

3 Halimar Depths

9 Island

7 Mountain

4 Scalding Tarn

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

Call to Mind, Foresee, Preordain, See Beyond and Halimar Depths all make use of this type of card advantage. Foresee and Preordain use scry, making sure that of the next few cards in your deck you can move the dead/less useful ones to the bottom of your deck in favor of drawing more useful cards. See Beyond goes farther, allowing you to replace dead cards already in your hand with better ones. Halimar Depths starts by giving you the best card that you had coming up faster and then giving you the opportunity to use either scry or shuffle effects like Scalding Tarn to avoid drawing the dead cards.

Call to Mind is an example of a very powerful form of card selection: tutoring. Diabolic Tutor, Trinket Mage, Eye of Ugin, Fauna Shaman, Liliana Vess, Nissa Revane, Primeval Titan, Quest for the Holy Relic and Stoneforge Mystic are all cards that have a tutoring effect that are being used in Standard. In these examples, they all let you search through your library for a card that will be helpful. In the case of Call to Mind, Gravedigger, Sun Titan and Rise from the Grave, you get search through you graveyard for a card that will be useful. In any case, being able to search through several cards from your deck and choice the one that is best suited to help you in your present game situation is a very advantageous effect.

Multiple Card Effects

Using one of your cards to affect more than one card is another form of card advantage. If I have no creatures in play and my opponent has several, Day of Judgement gives me card advantage. If I have a card that can do a useful effect over and over and I have the time to do so, I get card advantage. Guillaume Wafo-Tapa's Blue/Black Control deck from Worlds makes use of this type of card advantage:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

3 Grave Titan

2 Sea Gate Oracle

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

2 Jace Beleren

4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

2 Consume the Meek

2 Doom Blade

2 Duress

2 Inquisition of Kozilek

4 Mana Leak

4 Preordain

2 Ratchet Bomb

4 Spreading Seas

1 Stoic Rebuttal

[/Spells]

[Lands]

4 Creeping Tar Pit

4 Darkslick Shores

4 Drowned Catacomb

5 Island

1 Misty Rainforest

3 Swamp

4 Tectonic Edge

1 Verdant Catacombs

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

Consume the Meek, Jace the Mind Sculptor, Ratchet Bomb and arguably Grave Titan are good examples of multiple card effects. Not only are Consume and the Bomb both capable of destroying many permanents each, but his deck plays with very few permanents that can be affected by either of these cards, especially Consume the Meek, which he only has two real cards that would normally be affected by it. Both cards are especially good in Standard right now because of the number of decks running cards that generate token creatures. Jace can be used over and over to bounce cards, including your own card advantage creatures: Grave Titan and Sea Gate Oracle. Grave Titan gives you multiple creatures for one card, which can either be used to deal with multiple of your opponent's creatures or at least usually requires multiple of your opponent's cards to deal with.

Pyroclasm, Day of Judgment, Destructive Force, Inferno Titan, Arc Trail and Consuming Vapors are some of the more common cards being used in standard right now that gain card advantage by effecting multiple cards. They all can be used to destroy multiple creatures and Destructive Force can make cards in your opponent's hand dead by mana-screwing them.

Creating/Avoiding Dead Cards

One of the reasons card advantage is so important is to avoid and/or overcome having dead cards. One of the ways to gain card advantage is to design your deck in such a way as to make cards in your opponent's deck into dead cards and/or by making certain none of yours can be. For example, most decks dedicate some of the cards in their deck to dealing with opposing creatures. If you build a deck without creatures, they will then have dead cards in their deck. If you know that Pyroclasm is popular, you can avoid small creatures. If Doom Blade is being frequently main decked, then maybe mono-black has advantages.

Another way to accomplish this is through speed/tempo. If your deck is fast enough, then some decks will have cards that are too slow and thus become dead cards. A good example is the RDW deck I played at the 5K in Boston:

[cardlist]

[Creatures]

4 Goblin Guide

4 Kargan Dragonlord

4 Kiln Fiend

4 Plated Geopede

[/Creatures]

[Spells]

4 Assault Strobe

4 Burst Lightning

4 Forked Bolt

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Staggershock

[/Spells]

[Lands]

4 Arid Mesa

12 Mountain

4 Scalding Tarn

4 Teetering Peaks

[/Lands]

[/cardlist]

I avoid having dead cards, because the cards I use to remove creatures can also be used directly to damage my opponent. The real secret to my success though, is killing my opponent so quickly that much of their deck is useless. This works especially well against the various Ramp decks that are popular. Since cards like Goblin Guide, Kiln Fiend and Assault Strobe make it so easy for me to win on turn three; it's easy for a deck with lots of cards costing six or more mana to have a grip full of dead cards.

Most magic players realize card advantage is a key to success. My friend Chad Ellis introduced me to his future wife Trish at a Grand Prix in Spain. I thought she was unfamiliar with Magic, so I was surprised when she remarked, "that's some serious card advantage" during the tournament. As it turned out this was a phrase Chad had taught her to say periodically to give the impression that she knew about the game. So even people that haven't played yet can realize it's important. J

Like Trish, some actual players also use card advantage as a catch phrase without really understanding it. A close analysis of successful decks shows that every one of them has it in some form. Even when playing limited, the games you win will usually involve some form of card advantage. Did you take control of one of their permanents with Volition Reins? Kill something with Skinrender? Make tokens with Myrsmith? Perhaps you used Shatter during combat to get them off metalcraft so you could make favorable blocks. Maybe having metalcraft allowed you to two for one them with Dispense Justice. Whether playing constructed or limited an understanding of card advantage and the ways you can achieve it will help you make better drafting, designing, building and play decisions that will hopefully lead to more wins.