Despite true card advantage being far from the norm in cEDH, chasing ever-greater access to cards as the game goes on is still a crucial part of the gameplay for two key reasons: effect density and tempo.

Starting off with effect density, it should come as no surprise that drawing a lot of cards is a good way to increase your odds of seeing any particular effect. Whether it's lands or a combo piece, more cards means more chances of seeing what you need.

This is the same core tenet of card draw wherever you play Magic - limited or constructed, Standard or Commander. What makes this matter all-the-more in cEDH is the inherent play variability that comes with a singleton deck. The odds of seeing any one card are terrible in cEDH, but marginal increases in those odds through accelerated card draw can really add up over time.

Moving to tempo, we shift from resource access to resource cost. We've got three opponents to play against in each game of cEDH, and answering their threats is going to take cards. Counterspells, removal, etc., all that interaction eats up card slots.

This presents us with a few options: End the game before we need to answer threats, use cards that that can answer multiple threats at once, and/or draw more cards than our usual one-per-turn, affording us the opportunity to spend the necessary cards to play against multiple players without falling too far behind.

Depending on the deck, we'll lean further into one of these three prongs than we will the others, but that's not to say we should wholeheartedly give up on the rest.

The first type of card advantage that we'll cover is also the most temporary, usually lasting just until the next turn - if not the end step - and that's impulse draw.

Impulse draw works by exiling the top card of your library, then placing some sort of timer on when that card can be played. The most common source of this card advantage, Jeska's WillJeska's Will, puts three cards into exile and lets you cast them until the end of the turn.

March of Reckless JoyMarch of Reckless Joy, meanwhile, provides access to the exiled cards until the end of your next turn, but in exchange that card has a cost that scales pretty quickly with the number of cards it'll give you access to.

So, why run cards that provide only temporary card advantage? cEDH is a format where games can readily end in a pretty short number of turns, so having access to a card for only a single turn is usually enough time to get some sort of use out of it - even if the timing may not be as opportune as typical, unrestricted card draw would provide.

You can see this same logic in the frequent use of bounce spells in cEDH, even in decks that have access to proper removal like Swords to PlowsharesSwords to Plowshares. Doing something for a single turn - be it removing a creature or gaining access to an extra card - is usually just long enough to make things count.

Sometimes you just need to keep the momentum going: the opportunity to take a moderate, but not prohibitively costly, amount of mana, sink it into one card, and draw a fresh seven. These "wheel" effects are risky, as the reset applies to your opponents as well and you never know if they'll draw better cards than you - but the payoff can be ridiculous.

Alternatively, sometimes you need to cast a wheel as a good-ol'-fashioned reset. Fall behind in the game and need a way to catch back up? Wheels have got you covered.

At the end of the day, wheels present a split opportunity. If you're already super ahead and storming off, then casting a wheel is a great way to keep things moving. If things aren't going your way, then casting a wheel is a great way to re-roll the dice and check for a new hand.

There's a whole lot of randomness when it comes to wheels, but the control over when you cast them presents an opportunity for extracting a great amount of value.

Keeping things going in the world of sudden explosions of cards, we come to the true win conditions of the card-draw world: burst-draw.

The cards in this category represent the opportunity to convert a single card into true card advantage, and with it a reliable chance to win the game.

Ad NauseamAd Nauseam, NecropotenceNecropotence, and Peer into the AbyssPeer into the Abyss are in a land all their own here. Resolve one of these, and drawing 20+ cards (at a minimum) in a single instant is usually what happens next.

Each of these cards come with a cost in deck building, whether it be shifting the mana curve of your deck to meet Ad Nauseam's optimal requirements, or running a combo to achieve sufficient mana for Peer into the Abyss.

Despite that, each of these three cards has gone on to define decks and archetypes, cementing their role in the format as the ultimate one-and-done source of card draw.

Last but not least, we switch over from the sources of one-off card draw to the sources of reliable, consistent, and repeatable card draw. These might not provide nearly as much card draw in a single turn as the rest of the cards on this list (well, unless the stack really heats up), but - over time - they often add more than anything other than burst-draw sources we just checked in with.

One extra card in one turn isn't a lot. One extra card per turn, every turn, on the other hand is exactly the kind of cumulative advantage that can leave opponents scrambling for answers.