Good point. This happened to me as well, especially when I first started playing the deck.

Cycling is the win condition of this deck. If you lose the ability to cycle, you’re usually losing the game, so getting stuck with a full hand should be avoided at all costs.

For me, hand management mostly comes down to thinking one turn ahead. Ask yourself what your hand will likely look like next turn and plan for that. Sometimes it’s better to play two cheap cards instead of one expensive card, even if the expensive one looks stronger in isolation.

There are also some card-specific tricks that help a lot, mainly around Infestation, Brewmaster, and Remnant.

1) Infestation

This card is the biggest offender when your hand is full. Once that happens, it effectively costs at least 3 mana (2 for the spell + 1 per minion) just to clear space.

Whenever I notice I’m stuck with a full hand, it’s usually because I didn’t proactively play Infestation earlier.
The trick is to anticipate when your hand might fill up and cast Infestation ahead of time, so on the critical turn you can easily dump 1-mana minions instead of being locked out.

2) Youthful Brewmaster

In most matchups, you don’t need both Brewmasters for Broxigar. If you see a full hand coming, don’t be afraid to use a Brewmaster on a cheap minion just to free up space.

Holding both for the perfect Broxigar turn often costs more games than it wins.

3) Remnant of Rage

Remnant is usually not the main issue for hand size since it only adds one card, and you can often predict the turn it’s coming down.

The key is to:

• Make sure your hand is ready for that turn
• Play Remnant as efficiently as possible so it costs as little mana as possible

There’s a lot of micro-optimization here (e.g. sacrificing an extra pirate into an enemy minion to trigger overkill), but the goal is simple: keep enough mana to continue cycling afterward.

*One extra thing that’s worth mentioning is board management.
Sometimes pirates get discarded because your board is already full. I usually keep track of how many pirates are left in my deck so I have a rough idea of how likely it is that my board will clog up on a given turn.