making 40 card deck

[becauseafrica]

Hi all
How can I make deck with 40 cards in?
The system automatically put 20 lands more... Where I can change it?

[RiiakShiNal]

You can't it is hard coded in the engine to fill in basic lands until the deck reaches 60 cards.

[Drakno]

actually it could be possible to do something similar to it, Just make a sorcery speed card that says draw a card for 0 mana, throw 20 of these guys in a deck and bam it's pretty much a 40 card deck assuming there's no card in either player's deck that triggers when you draw a card, far from perfect but a practical alternative

[RiiakShiNal]

Definitely far from perfect because it could cause problems with cards that depend on what is in the library, how many cards are in the library, or things that mess with the library. Some that come to mind are Traumatize, Vampire Nocturnus, and anything with Scry or Kinship. Because it would change the structure of the deck there would be issues with cards that mill the deck, for example with Millstone and it mills two of the placeholders that the player doesn't care about instead of two other cards. There are literally hundreds of cards that this could interfere with.

Not to mention it would also mean more cards in the graveyard which would affect other cards as well.

Some problems could be solved by making them exile themselves (instead of going to the graveyard) when the game starts, but then you have to be careful and test for when they are in the player's hand and replace any that get exiled from the hand. It's still not a good solution though because when the player is determining whether they mulligan or not they may not be able to tell what kind of hand they have due to the placeholders.

[NEMESiS]

How about a card that at the beginning of the match automatically exiles 19 lands from your on deck and then it exiles itself? Is there a way to trigger that card from within your library?

[thefiremind]

How about a card that at the beginning of the match automatically exiles 19 lands from your on deck and then it exiles itself? Is there a way to trigger that card from within your library?

A card can trigger from a library, the problem is when: I think that no effect can happen before accepting the initial hand (which would be too late for this idea).

I just thought about something probably stupid: I'm sure that someone tried it before, but I can't remember what happens if you try to make an encounter deck available for the player to use. If that encounter deck has less than 60 cards, is it filled with lands anyway?

[RiiakShiNal]

A card can trigger from a library, the problem is when: I think that no effect can happen before accepting the initial hand (which would be too late for this idea).

Basically it was the same as what I said the card exiles itself when the match starts and if in hand replaces itself in hand, but as I stated before it is too late for the initial starting hand so that problem remains.

I just thought about something probably stupid: I'm sure that someone tried it before, but I can't remember what happens if you try to make an encounter deck available for the player to use. If that encounter deck has less than 60 cards, is it filled with lands anyway?

If you are talking about the MINIDUEL decks then they are constructed exactly like a regular deck so I'm sure they would auto-fill to 60 cards. There is probably some special code in the engine for campaign encounters so that they don't have land automatically added and they aren't shuffled. But if they are used regularly that special code doesn't apply.

In Campaigns regular 2 player matches are of type "two player duel" while the encounters are of type "mini duel" so the special code is probably switched based on the type.