Card Advantage - Terminology

Terminology

The basic concept of card advantage is one player having more cards in hand and/or in play than their opponent. Card advantage is generally indicated in terms of a positive number: if a player casts Ancestral Recall, a spell that causes a player to draw 3 cards, that player is said to have gained +2 card advantage (he gains three cards (the ones he drew) while losing one (the Ancestral Recall itself)).

Card advantage is often also the result of making a play where your own cards are used to neutralise or eliminate a greater number of your opponent's cards. This form of card advantage is often stated in terms of X-for-Y, where X and Y are numbers; if X is bigger then it expresses card advantage, if Y is bigger it expresses card disadvantage; i.e. a 3-for-1 is a positive advantage, a 1-for-2 is not. Example: If in a game of Magic a player plays Day of Judgment, a card which destroys all creatures in play, when they themselves have no creatures in play and their opponent has two creatures in play, they are said to have gotten a "2-for-1", where 2 indicates the number of opposing cards removed from play and 1 indicates the card spent in order to accomplish this task.

It is seen as a baseline to spend one card to get rid of one opposing card; this is often referred to as trading (not to be confused with the actual bargaining/trading of cards outside of a game.) A player who "trades" one card of their own for two of their opponent's is often gaining a long-term advantage as their opponent will run out of cards before they do.