I'm back into the game after 16 long years absence. Aside from getting into the swing of all these new monsters, I find myself constructing a deck again for the first time in a very long time.
I bought a few starter decks and structure decks, but I can't seem to whittle down the number of cards to a reasonable number because in my head they all have utility.
Is there a good method to use for cutting cards and maximizing utility?
There really is no single answer to this question, because which cards are best in a deck depend on the strategy for that deck, different kind of strategies see the same cards with different levels of utility. Even then the same card in the same deck could vary widely in utility based on the metagame - how useful the card is against the decks your opponents will be playing, and this changes pretty heavily over time as new options are printed and from group to group, where different strategies are more dominant and more common than in other groups.
The best ways to make cuts are either to play the deck oversized, or play it using your best guess at cuts and making adjustments. The first option lets you see what cards are least useful or "dead" most often - that gives you a more objective choices about which ones are best to cut, but takes a lot of games to figure out, since the oversize deck makes you less consistent already. the second option lets you see how well each version of the deck performs then make changes, but it too needs a lot of testing to fine tune.
