In order to have a competitive deck – your deck needs to have the minimum number of cards possible and the maximum number of key cards. So, if you want to draw fireball consistently, you should have 4 copies of fireball in a 40 card deck. This is the prevailing wisdom in most trading card games and generally holds true for Shadow Era. But it’s not always true, and to understand those exceptions (like 80 card Garth decks) you need to first understand the rule.
Probability of drawing a single card
The math behind figuring out the probability of drawing a single card in a deck is complex (you can read about it here). The most important thing to know about it is that it is tied to deck size, number of matching cards within the deck, and number of cards drawn.
Smaller Deck = better chance of getting target card
If I have 1 Jack of Spades shuffled in a deck of 4 cards, and I draw one, then I’ll have a probability of 1/4 to draw that Jack of Spades. If I increase the deck size to 10, my probability will drop to 1/10. For this reason, if drawing a Jack of Spades will make me win, I want to minimize the size of my deck.
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