The original bopmtg’s featured strategy article was about the Turbo Xerox rule. Reviving this site without revisiting it would feel wrong, because almost thirty years after Alan Comer built the deck that named the principle, it remains one of the most important deckbuilding ideas in Magic.

The original insight

In 1997, Alan Comer built a mono-blue tempo deck called Turbo Xerox that ran far fewer lands than convention said it needed. The trick: the land slots were replaced with cheap card-drawing and card-filtering spells. The deck did not need as many lands, because the cantrips dug it to the lands it did play, and every land not drawn in the late game was a real spell instead.

The principle, stated plainly:

Cheap card selection spells let you cut lands, and cutting lands for cantrips raises the density of action in your deck without hurting consistency.

The commonly cited exchange rate, and a good rule of thumb still: roughly one land can come out for every two cheap card selection spells, with one mana being the price point that matters. A two-mana cantrip is a different (and much worse) deal, because the tempo cost compounds.

Why it works: two kinds of consistency

A deck’s consistency problem is really two problems wearing one trenchcoat:

• Early game: will I hit my land drops?
• Late game: will I keep drawing spells instead of lands?

A high land count solves the first and worsens the second. A low land count does the reverse. Cheap card selection is the only tool that improves both at once: early, it finds lands; late, it finds spells. That asymmetry is the whole engine. A 19-land deck with eight cantrips sees lands early about as reliably as a 23-land deck, but floods dramatically less.

There is a second, subtler benefit: cantrips shrink your effective deck size. When you cast eight cantrips over a game, your remaining deck behaves like a smaller deck built from your best cards, which makes your one-of and two-of choices matter more and your draws more repeatable. Decks built this way play like they have a plan every game, because statistically, they do.

The costs, because there are always costs

Turbo Xerox is not free, and knowing the price is what separates using the principle from cargo-culting it:

• Cantrips are not cards, they are card selection. A hand of three cantrips and a threat is often just a slow threat. The deck needs its actual spells to be efficient, because it is spending mana and time on the digging.
• Tempo tax. Every turn-one Ponder is a turn-one play that did not affect the board. Xerox shells want cheap, high-impact threats that catch up (this is why the archetype pairs so naturally with cheap interaction and evasive clocks).
• It bends toward blue. The principle needs one-mana selection, and blue historically owns that effect. Formats where other colors get real selection (red’s impulse draw, for example) widen who gets to play Xerox games.

Where you can see it today

Once you know the shape, you see it everywhere:

• Legacy Delver decks are the purest descendants: 18 or fewer lands, Brainstorm and Ponder, cheap threats, cheap interaction. This is Turbo Xerox as a way of life.
• Izzet Phoenix, in its Pioneer and Modern lives, is a Xerox deck whose payoff actively rewards the cantrip density: the selection spells are also the engine that returns Arclight Phoenix.
• Pauper blue tempo decks have run 17-18 lands with full sets of cantrips for years, in a format where the principle is arguably at its strongest because the card pool’s threats are cheap.
• Modern Prowess-style decks convert the principle into damage directly: every cantrip triggers the threat it found.

Even outside dedicated Xerox decks, the principle quietly prices individual cards: whenever you evaluate a one-mana spell that says “look at the top cards, take one,” part of its value is the fractional land slot it refunds.

Using it in your own brews

Three practical tests before you shave lands for cantrips:

1. Is the selection one mana? At two mana, the tempo cost usually exceeds the consistency gain outside of dedicated combo decks.
2. Do you have eight or more? The principle scales with density. Two cantrips is a rounding error; eight is a mana base adjustment (see our land count reference for the exchange rates).
3. Is your curve low? Xerox shells top out around three mana. If your deck wants five lands anyway, cantrips do not excuse you from playing them.

Comer’s deck is a museum piece now, but the idea it proved is permanent: consistency is a resource you can buy with deck slots, and cheap card selection sells it at the best rate Magic has ever offered.