Mastery of card evaluation is mastery of the game. Every skill critical to success in Magic: The Gathering derives from the ability to look at a card and determine (often under time constraints) whether the card is good or bad.

• Correctly picking cards from a draft pack
• Successful arbitrage in combat trades
• Understanding when to play into or around a threat
• Knowing when to use or save a counterspell effect
• Making good choices when playing hand disruption

None of these can be done well without judicious reasoning at the game’s atomic level which is, of course, a card.

But aren’t ‘good’ and ‘bad’ subjective things? Yes, if we’re talking about music or movies or food, etc. but competitive games come with metrics. We can look at the top X% of highest performing decks in a format and note a card’s rate of occurrence in a given slice of the color pie, or which card is most often included in a color splash. If a card is “too good” we can even observe the metagame drifting towards answers to a single threat, which is exactly how Wizards of the Coast curates the ban list.

With over twenty-thousand cards in the catalog it’s not reasonable for most players to perform a multi-dimensional ranked comparison on the spot just to make one optimal choice. We are not computers but we do have a mental shortcut for solving problems: heuristics. My hope is that, after reading this guide, you will be left with a practical set of heuristics to help you evaluate cards in any situation.

Good Cards vs. Bad Cards

What makes a good card ‘good’ and a bad card ‘bad’? Simply put, good cards have value and bad cards have little or no value. If you’re frustrated with these vague qualifiers, bear with me because I promise this is going somewhere. First we need to define value by putting into the context of the game.

The most valuable assets in a game of Magic are cards that help you win consistently. I’ve emphasized ‘consistently’ here because we don’t judge overall performance on individual matches, but on win-loss ratio over a period of time.