Deckbuilding Strategy: "Do I want to see this card in the first 10 cards in my deck after shuffling" is the most important criterion for card inclusion
Am I the only one who thinks this way? Wondering what y'all think.
The single most important question for whether a card belongs in the 99 of your EDH deck is this: How happy are you to see this card in your opening hand?
More precisely, how happy are you to see it in the top 10 cards after shuffling?
In cEDH, this isn't even arguable: whether you want to see a card in your mulligan is the primary filter for card quality.
There are quite a few reasons for this.
1. Early turns matter more than later turns.
The first 1-4 turns disproprotionately determine how the game unfolds. The higher the power level, the more true this becomes.
A card that's excellent in the early game turns 1-3 is generally better than a card that's an amazing 15th card off the top of your deck after shuffling.
2. Your opening hand is a large percentage of the cards you see in a game.
A game has to go six turns before you've naturally drawn as many cards off the top as you saw in your opener. Your starting 7 is a massive share of the total cards you'll actually play with in most games.
3. Hands generally need a certain number of lands and early plays to keep.
An \[\[Expropriate\]\] in your starting 7 is effectively a 6 card hand. A \[\[Llanowar Elves\]\] is both a good turn 1 play and a card that makes a 2 land hand easier to keep.
Cards you want early improve the average opening hand quality, and cards you never want early negatively affect your mulliganing rate.
4. The best cards often aren't good late game draws.
\[\[Sol Ring\]\] isn't an exciting turn 7 top deck, but that barely matters. It's so powerful in your opener, and in the first 10 cards off the top after shuffling, that its late-game mid-ness is basically irrelevant.
\>!I'm not going to argue all the corner cases; feel free to point out in the comments the situations where a late game topdecked Sol Ring is good, like if you're behind or mana or you have a \[\[Hullbreaker Horror\]\] etc.)!<
5. Early resources compound.
Cards that give mana or card advantage early mean more spells played and more cards drawn which leads to more available mana, etc. An early game play often affects every later turn.
6. Decks have a lot more slots available for early game plays than late game bombs.
While it makes sense to run *a handful of cards* for late game potency, there are far fewer slots for them athan there are for early-to-mid-game players.
There are more reasons than this, no doubt. But during deckbuilding, there are few questions that are more worth asking than: Would I be happy to see this card in the top 10 cards of my deck after shuffling?
Similarly, a card that you'd rather see early is generally better than a card that you'd rather see late that performs the same function.
The \[\[Phyrexian Arena\]\] discussion got me going on this because I saw too many players evaluating this incorrectly. Show me a content creator who thinks Phyrexian Arena is bad, show me one of their decks with Black, and I'll show you 10+ cards they're running that are worse than Phyrexian Arena. Not that I think Arena is great, but the usual arguments against it—it's too slow and it's a bad topdeck—are wrong. It's just been outclassed by more specialized card draw engines like \[\[Terrasymbiosis\]\], \[\[Ripples of Undeath\]\], etc. that are less generic than Arena but perform better in the decks that want them.
Edit: For clarity, I’m **not** saying that **this is an absolute**—that every card in a deck must meet this standard—or that this is the **only factor that matters**. *Just the most important factor overall for card quality improvement*.