Evaluating Cards for Brews

Introduction

Building a deck can be challenging, especially when working on something novel. There isn’t a lot of proven wisdom you can directly take from, so it’s often on the brewer to assess and adjust based on their own intuition. Evaluating cards and testing to see how they feel has always been hard to do objectively, since there usually aren’t any stats to back things up.

That’s why being able to evaluate cards and test them effectively is so important.

This article is meant to give some direction on how to approach card evaluation for your own brew, drawing from firsthand experience applying many of these principles in my own decks.

Basic Card Evaluation

Card evaluation is one of the most important skills a Magic player can develop. Standard is massive, and there are always a few undiscovered gems. Being able to evaluate cards contextually lets you narrow that pool and focus only on options that are realistic candidates for your deck.

At a basic level, evaluating a card comes down to its rate, meaning its effect relative to its cost. This is a fundamental metric for judging cards at face value. However, rate alone does not tell the full story, since synergy and metagame play a significant role.

Rate can also be difficult to judge, since Standard contains so many unique effects. Some rough ways to estimate a card’s strength include looking at its performance in Limited, its playability in other formats (Modern, Pioneer), or comparing it to similar cards from past Standard formats that performed well.

Basic evaluation is about filtering, not final decisions. Once a card clears this initial bar, it needs to be evaluated in the context of a specific deck, where role, synergy and metagame matter more.

Don’t Evaluate Cards in a Vacuum

That being said, it’s a common pitfall to judge cards too heavily on rate. While rate is very useful, Magic is a complex game with many factors at play. Cards are also often dismissed because of how they performed in Limited, even though that context does not always translate to Constructed.

Even with an open mind, it’s common to unconsciously filter cards through a personal framework of what “good” looks like. While heuristics are useful, they can also cause you to overlook cards that function well in a specific context. If a lot of people are speaking positively about a card, it’s usually worth doing your due diligence and testing it yourself.

Cards should always be judged contextually. Ouroboroid is an extremely powerful card, and one of the best things you can be doing in Standard, but that doesn’t mean it belongs in every green deck. Understanding when a card is good, why it is good, and what role it serves is far more important than assigning it a blanket rating.

The most important takeaway is that you should be able to clearly articulate your thoughts on a card. Having clear reasoning makes it easier to evaluate decisions, iterate on a deck, and contribute meaningfully to discussions around card choices.

Deck Specific Evaluation

When considering a card for your deck, there are a lot of factors at play, so it’s important to evaluate it from multiple angles, keeping synergy and the metagame in mind throughout the process. Here are some steps to help guide that evaluation.

1. Role Fulfillment

When looking for cards to add to a deck, it’s important to first identify what slot you are trying to fill. This is highly context-specific, since different slots in a deck are meant to serve different purposes. The key question is whether a card actually fulfills the role you need it to play. This is most obvious when building a sideboard, but the same level of intention should apply to the main deck.

Identifying a card’s role comes down to understanding what the deck needs in order to function better or improve specific matchups. These needs often become clear during testing, as certain constraints start to show up. Does the deck need more mana or card advantage? Does it struggle to convert an advantage into a clear win? Is it lacking enough interaction to deal with key threats?

Another role to consider is whether a card helps push your advantage or catch you up when you are behind. It’s generally a good idea to have access to cards that can recover cards or board presence in either the main deck or the sideboard, even in more all-in decks, since this can be very important depending on the matchup. Board wipes are the clearest example of catch-up cards, as they reset the board back to parity. Creatures can also fill this role by providing card advantage, lifelink, or other stabilizing effects.

A card can still be a poor fit if it does not address the problem that slot is meant to solve even if it's powerful.

2. Comparing Alternatives

Once a role is clearly defined, the next step is to look at the alternatives that could realistically fill that slot. In a large Standard card pool, there are often multiple cards that can fulfill the same role, but the differences between them matter a lot.

When comparing cards, it helps to first identify what they have in common and what you actually want the slot to accomplish. From there, the evaluation becomes about the tradeoffs. One option might be more resilient, another might be faster or more efficient, and another might offer better long-term value. None of these are inherently better in a vacuum, it depends on what the deck needs.

This is less about finding the “best” card overall and more about finding the card that fits your deck and the metagame you expect. Two cards can fill the same role but play very differently depending on mana constraints, game plan, or matchup spread.

When testing, it’s also important to compare alternatives directly rather than evaluating cards in isolation. Asking yourself whether you would have preferred a different option in the same situation is often more informative than deciding whether a card felt good or bad in a single game.

3. Pros and Cons

Once you’ve narrowed the options for a slot, the next step is to evaluate how well each candidate actually fulfills that role.

Listing the pros and cons of a card is a valuable tool for this. Not every point carries equal weight, but looking at the full picture makes it easier to judge whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and which direction the scale is tipping.

Example: The Witch's Vanity

The role this slot is trying to fulfill is a removal spell. Being synergistic is very valuable but not the main focus.

Pros:

• Creates 2 pieces of fodder (Food, Wicked//Cursed)
• Saga self-sacrifices, providing a sacrifice trigger
• Curves into airship on turn 4
• Kills early threats
• Can still be played out against control for value

Cons:

• Sorcery Speed
• Doesn't hit creatures with mana value greater than 2
• Countered by Annul

Although this isn't a very good removal spell, all of it's upsides can make up for it's weaknesses.

4. Floor and Ceiling

While pros and cons describe a card’s strengths and weaknesses, they don’t account for the volatility of its outcomes in actual play.

It's important not to idealize a card because of it's potential. A lot of synergistic cards have conditional effects that depend heavily on game state, and the upside of the card needs to be worth the times when it's conditions aren't met and the card is suboptimal.

Thinking about the floor and ceiling can really help understand. It's also important to consider how often either of them can occur and what is the most common scenario.

Having cards that are polarizing is fine, as long as your deck is built to achieve the ceiling consistently. The payoff has to be worth the risk.

5. Identify Matchup Impact

Matchups can be very dynamic as the metagame is constantly evolving. If a card is poorly positioned in the current environment, that is a serious knock against it.

This is why identifying the metagame matters so much. I play mostly on Arena, where shifts happen quickly and the field often looks very different from Magic Online. Because of this, I’m constantly re-evaluating cards in both the main deck and sideboard, asking whether the role they are filling is still necessary or if a new need has emerged.

A card that was correct a week ago can easily become a liability as decks adapt, new strategies gain traction, or popular answers change. Staying flexible and willing to reassess these choices is critical, especially when tuning a deck over many iterations. Card evaluation isn’t a one-time decision, but an ongoing process that should evolve alongside the metagame itself.

Conclusion

These evaluation steps provide direction, but testing is still the most important part of the process. Only through real games can you see whether your assessment was correct and move beyond surface-level impressions.

Card evaluation is iterative, and it becomes sharper as you better identify situations that are unique to the deck you’re playing. Continually circling back to challenge your assumptions and biases is what ultimately improves your ability to evaluate cards over time.