Deckbuilding 101: Mulligan with a Plan

Let’s play a game.

You’re sitting down at a Saturday Standard Shootout. You’ve never been to this shop before, and you’ve got no idea what anyone is playing. Your deck is a honed weapon of destruction in your preferred style of play (Combo-Control) and round one is just starting.

You think back to last night, when you were agonizing over those last two slots, and you’re not sure if you ever resolved the issue to satisfaction. Still – the deck’s core is an extremely powerful engine. (Well, three engines…) and you know that a reasonable hand will get you there. Your decklist sits on the counter next to you, and you peer at it.

The deck works off of three separate engines. The first is the Heartless Summoning engine that makes all of your spells undercosted and allows you to accelerate out your midrange creatures. The second is the Grand Architect Engine that lets you generate an impossibly high amount of mana and cast a single enormous creature – often with a game-winning effect. Finally, there’s the Havengul Lich plan, which often involves reanimating your dead creatures for immense additional value, but can also be used in combination with Perilous Myr and Heartless Summoning to deal 2 damage for 1 mana, until your mana sources run out (or, more likely, your opponent and everything he cares about is dead.)

Round 1

Your first foe extends his hand. “Good luck man.” You nod and smile, extending your own greeting. You finish randomizing your deck and pass it back before picking up your own and drawing your first seven. You are on the draw.

The hidden card is an island

Do you keep this hand?

This doesn’t seem bad at all. You have an early play in Perilous Myr, and by drawing only a single mana source in the first three turns, you’ve got access to both Architects and Treasure Mage, allowing you to have something powerful in play by Turn 5. You have a redundant Architect in case the first is killed. You have, in short, a game plan.

Most people have learned to mulligan if they don’t have a reasonable number of lands-to-spells. People know that “Six Lands and a Vapor Snag” is not a good hand. Just like they know that you shouldn’t (generally) keep One-Land-Hands. Both situations just put you so far behind if you don’t draw exactly what you need in a timely manner. When looking at a hand, determine if you can clearly see the line of play that leads to a win.

For this hand, we can see that we’re going to attempt to stall the field with Perilous Myr until we draw a land of any sort. Then we will cast Grand Architect and Treasure Mage, searching for an appropriate threat depending on our opponent’s deck. This could be a Platinum Empirion, or a Steel Hellkite, a Wurmcoil Engine, etc. Havengul Lich exists in the hand as a very late-game option, but we may not even have to use it.

Seems like a coherent plan, in my book. Luckily, our opponent agrees, and gets stuck on two lands in both games and never casts a spell. Our Empirion runs over him and loses. It must be nice to have good opening hands.

Round 2

You’re feeling great. Your first hand was awesome and you won. You must be great at this game. Unfortunately, you lose the first game after he reanimates an Elesh Norn on turn 3. Frites is a scary deck and does that sometimes. You sideboard for a moment and get ready for the second game. Draw your seven:

Do you keep this hand?

No. You do not. I don’t think this honestly even merits discussion. There are no lands in this hand, and it’s clogged with expensive spells. You’ll need to draw two lands to even be in the game at all, and more than likely still lose because this hand has no coherent plan at all.

Let’s just consider this for a minute. You are running a 60 card deck, including 23 lands. You have drawn 7 cards, none of which are lands, leaving 23 of 53 in your deck. That gives you a 43% chance to draw a land. That’s not so bad! Nearly half!

Stop. Consider that that’s a 57% chance to instantly lose the game on the spot. If you get the first land, you still need to hit the 42% chance for the second land (22 of 52.) Combine those, and we’ll get a nice round 18% chance of hitting your first two lands in your first two turns. You have a worse than one in five chance of even getting to cast a spell by turn two. The spell is a combo piece, and does not directly let you survive. I cannot state how bad this hand is. Standard is not a format where you can durdle around and wait for land drops. That happens in Limited – sometimes, if you’re very lucky.

I suppose this is Karma for the first match…

You mulligan the hand away and keep a good six, barely able to come back and win the game. Game three begins and you draw your opening hand:

This hand has lands and spells we can cast with those lands. It must be keepable, right?

Let’s consult our guiding principle here – what is the plan to win the game if this is our opening hand?

We’re going to play some lands, then cast spellskite, protecting ourselves with Doom Blade and our 0/4 blocker until….something else happens, because we’re pretty much out of plays here. We have no way to cast Myr Superion in our hand, Metamorph can’t copy anything that’s relevant to our side – so we’re restricted to being a 3 mana copy of whatever they’re doing, and Wurmcoil Engine needs four lands to even touch the battlefield.

Yes, the hand could develop well, with a Heartless Summoning or a Grand Architect and a land, but we cannot count on that.

Round 3:

After your crushing defeat to the Frites player, you come to round 3, the final round in the shootout. You’re out of the prize standings, but you’re still in it for the honor and the glory and the planeswalker points. You sit down and pull your opening hand:

This should be a clear keep. You have mana, you have a clear line of play that is extremely powerful, putting a 5/6 into play on turn 3, backed up by Grand Architect – and with a Treasure Mage to follow the next turn. If you draw into something with Ponder, all the better. This hand seems resilient, and hard to deal with. I would keep it under almost any circumstances. You are a good player, and do the same, earning victory in the first game.

But now sideboards come into play. You agonize over the decision for a bit before shuffling up and presenting your deck. When you draw your opening seven though, you nearly cry out in joy!

Sometimes, things just fall into place for you. This hand has a great plan, capable of defending itself with Heartless Summoning and Perilous Myr. It has an aggressive stance with Grand Architect and Treasure Mage to find a significant threat. It has both colors of mana you’ll need to win the game, and a sufficient number of them to cast the majority of your deck. This is the best hand you could hope for.

 A great general rule for magic is that the chances of you drawing whatever you need are about half as good as you actually think they are. You cannot rely on luck to win a game, match, or tournament. You may get lucky, but you can’t rely on it to bail you out. The best way to get lucky is to make good decisions.

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I’ll leave you with this last image – a puzzle of sorts. These are all hands from an actual tournament played by my friend Marshall last weekend. They were given to me without context of what he did and did not keep. I know he eventually took second place, losing in the finals of the tournament to a Delver deck.

This last hand is a question to all of you. You are on the draw against a Naya Pod list and you see the following seven:

Do you keep? Talk about it in the comments, or over on Reddit. On Thursday, it's Tournament Preparation time, and we'll have a spicy Legacy Decklist that I'll be bringing over to GP Atlanta!