Cutting cards

Adding cards to a deck feels like progress. Cutting is the part that decides whether the deck works, and nobody teaches it because there is no card to point at. It is the skill that turns a pile of good cards into sixty that agree with each other.

Sixty is a floor, not a target

The rules never tell you to play sixty cards. They tell you sixty is the fewest you are allowed to play.

In the Constructed format, each player's deck must contain at least 60 cards, can't contain more than two ink types, can't contain more than 4 cards with the same full name, and can't contain any banned cards.

Comprehensive Rules 1.10.1.1

In plain terms: sixty is the minimum, two ink types is the maximum, four copies of any one full name is the maximum. Everything above sixty is your own choice, and nothing in the game will stop you.

That is exactly why cutting hurts. No rule forces it. You are allowed to keep the card, and you pay for it somewhere you cannot see: every extra card makes every card you actually wanted slightly harder to find.

Here is the size of that payment. In a sixty card deck, a card you run four copies of turns up in your opening seven about 40 percent of the time. At seventy cards it is about 35 percent. That is a smaller penalty than it sounds, and it is not the real cost. The end of this lesson says why.

Cut the copy before you cut the card

The cut most people reach for first is a whole card. There is a smaller cut available, and it is usually the better one: take a four down to a three, or a three down to a two.

Read the shape rather than the numbers. Dropping the fourth copy costs about eight percentage points in your opening hand. Dropping all the way to a single copy costs nearly thirty.

That gives you something to act on. Cards you want early and every game stay at four. Cards that are strong only in certain games sit at two or three. And one copy of anything is a card you will not see in two games out of three, even after drawing a full third of your deck. If it is worth one slot it is usually worth two, and if it is not worth two it should probably not be there.

One more place the fat hides. The four copy limit applies to a card's full name, its name plus its version (5.2.6, 5.3.6.1), so four of one version and four of another version of the same character is eight cards and entirely legal. Eight slots aimed at one job is where a first deck is overweight more often than anywhere.

Four questions that do most of the cutting for you

Run every card in the pile through these, in order. Most of the list will cut itself before you have to make a judgement call.

1. What job is this card doing, and does another card do it better? If two cards are doing the same job, the weaker one is the cut. This is the only question that answers itself, so enjoy it while it lasts.
2. Which ink cost is most crowded? Cut from the crowded cost, not from the card you like least. A card is not competing with your whole deck, it is competing with everything else that wants the same turn.
3. Can it go in your inkwell? When two cards are genuinely close, the one that cannot be inked goes first. Not because uninkable cards are weak, but because each one you keep is another turn you might spend with nothing you are willing to ink.
4. Does it need a second card to be good? A card that only works next to one other specific card is two slots wearing one card's clothes. Weigh it as two, because that is the price.

Whatever survives all four is the small set you actually have to decide about, and it is almost always smaller than you feared when you started.

Where the numbers stop being the argument

Everything above pushes you toward a lean sixty. Here is the case against it, put fairly. The statistics are smaller than they sound: sixty cards against sixty three moves your chance of opening a four copy card from about 40 percent to about 38 percent. Anyone who tells you three extra cards lost them a match is telling you a story about one game.

The real cost is not the odds. It is which three cards those are. By definition they are the three you already judged worst, so you are not diluting the deck by a couple of percent, you are choosing to draw your worst cards as often as your best. That argument holds even when the arithmetic shrugs.

There is one honest reason to run more. A player whose turn ends with no cards left in their deck loses the game (1.8.1.2), so extra cards buy turns at the very end. If your games are genuinely reaching that point, those cards are earning their place.

And the quiet one: a deck you enjoy picking up beats a deck you optimised into something you do not want to play. If cutting the card takes the fun out, keep it and know what you are paying. Knowing the price is the point of this lesson. Paying it is optional.

Rules quoted from the Disney Lorcana Comprehensive Rules, version 2.2.0, effective 9 July 2026. Draw percentages are calculated for a sixty card deck and rounded to whole numbers. They describe probability, not a promise about any single game.

Next: Build your first deck. It is where every number from this tier gets used at once, on sixty real cards.