ah well maybe i’m not that in the know. to me 40 cards seemed like a bonus. especially if overplanner is in the mix. that card won me few matches letting me line up a nice combo.
In some niche cases it is an advantage.
If your opponent is planning to kill you with fatigue or if you play a deck that somehow burns its card really fast while also being able to draw a lot
But most of the time it’s a disadvantage. If you include more cards in your deck, you increase your odds of drawing high chains of high-cost cards in early or low-cost cards in late, and that’s just about the mana
Most decks revolve around specific synergies and objectives.
Being very simplistic, aggro , tempo and mid-range decks rely on specific synergies between their cards, and highly rely on their curve. If you need 15 of your cards with mechanic A to synergize with 15 of your cards with mechanic B, you can’t introduce 10 cards with mechanic C that won’t perfectly synergize with both A and B
Control and combo decks rely on key cards on specific timings of the game : anti aggro, then draw, then win-condition. They have to follow a gameplan established at deckbuilding. If they can establish their plan with only 30 cards, then adding 10 more is an obstacle toward the win-condition, and they will simply put the least disruptive-to-their-plan cards that they can. But each time they will draw one of these 10 extra cards, it’s one lost draw toward their key cards and win.
Giving an example : I have one combo deck that has very little anti aggro. It relies on drawing 1 out of 4 cards, then 1 out of 2 other cards, while having a specific card stay in my deck for the whole time. The rest of my deck if half draw to get the first 2 cards, and half minions that I can basically not play.
I’ve tried making a 40 version of that deck, to include a bit more anti-aggro and draw and so the 10 health could help me survive the early.
Instead it lead to more games where I didn’t hit the cards I needed because my tutoring was diluted in the 10 extra cards I added. They did help me survive for 1 or 2 more turns than usual, but in return it also delayed the average turn where I was able to pull my combo out, because drawing one anti aggro card meant not drawing a combo piece, which meant that my opponents also had more time to play higher cost stuff that I then had no response to
Again that’s very simplistic and the example is debattable, but the main idea is there
On the opposite of the spectrum, there recently was a tavern brawl where you only made a 7 cards deck, which meant that you could basically always have the exact oppening hand you wanted. The deck was then filled with portals but it lead to extremely consistent gameplans
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This is you moving goalposts…I appreciate it, saves me a lot of time 