I'm trying to make a simple card game with a Card class and a Deck class that is composed of Card() objects. One of the functions in the Deck class is deal() which takes a specified number of cards from the deck and uses them to create a new Deck() instance. However the pop() function does not seem to reduce the size of the deck and I'm not sure why, even when called only a single time in the pick_top() function. Hopefully someone can look over my code and tell me why. Thanks

class Card:
    """Represents a card that would be used in a deck of cards."""

    VALUES = {
    "2" : "Two", 
    "3" : "Three", 
    "4" : "Four", 
    "5" : "Five", 
    "6" : "Six", 
    "7" : "Seven", 
    "8" : "Eight", 
    "9" : "Nine", 
    "10" : "Ten", 
    "J" : "Jack", 
    "Q" : "Queen", 
    "K" : "King",
    "A" : "Ace"}

    SUITS = {
    "hearts" : "Hearts", 
    "diamonds" : "Diamonds", 
    "clubs" : "Clubs", 
    "spades" : "Spades"}

    def __init__(self, value, suit):
        self.value = value
        self.suit = suit

    def __str__(self):
        return f"{self.VALUES[self.value]} of {self.SUITS[self.suit]}"

​

import random
from card import Card

class Deck:
    """Represents a deck of playing cards."""

    STANDARD_DECK = (Card(value, suit) for value in Card.VALUES.keys() for suit in Card.SUITS.keys())
    EMPTY_DECK = ()

    def __init__(self, cards = STANDARD_DECK): 
        """Creates deck of cards. First card in 'cards' attribute is top of the deck, last card is the bottom."""
        self.cards = list(cards) 
        self.card_count = len(self.cards) 

    def __str__(self):
        """String representation of a DeckOfCards."""
        string = ""
        for card in self.cards:
            string  = (str(card)   "\n")
        return string

    def shuffle(self):
        """Shuffles the deck."""
        random.shuffle(self.cards)

    def pick_top(self):
        """Top card is taken from deck."""
        top_card = self.cards.pop(0)
        return top_card

    def deal(self, hand_size):
        """Deals a new deck of cards of given size from top of deck."""
        cards_taken = [self.pick_top() for card in range(hand_size)]
        new_deck = Deck(cards_taken)
        return new_deck

Test Code:

my_deck = Deck()
print(my_deck.card_count)
top_card = my_deck.pick_top
print(my_deck.card_count)
new_deck = my_deck.deal(26)
print(my_deck.card_count)
print(new_deck.card_count)

Output:

52
52
52
26