“Mull to Six.”
“…I guess I’ll keep this.”
“Mull to Five.”
“Mull to Four.”
“Yea, sure. Thanks deck.”
I talked with my second round opponent afterwards. He was
on Esper Spirits, but the black splash that the deck normally takes – solely
for Lingering Souls flashback – had been expanded outwards to a full-on three
color deck. He had added Hero of Bladehold, Dungeon Geists, and a number of
black removal spells. I shook my head.
“No wonder,” I said, “You’re playing three colors.”
He shrugged. “Finkel did it. It’s basically the same
list.”
“Not exactly.”
“Besides, you’re playing three colors too!” He gestured
down at my deck for the day, Naya Aggro.
“Not exactly.” I repeated.
One of the most important and least cared about aspects
of deck building is your land base. Especially now, in an era of
colorless-activation lands, enemy color fixing, and alternate-color flashbacks,
access to mana has rarely been more important – and never have the players been
more ambitious with trying to make it work.
Unfortunately, ambition often leads its way to taking
mulligans all the way into oblivion. Where
do things go wrong? Usually right from the start. Let’s take a look at some of
the common problems.
Play All The Colors!
Let’s say we have a nice, mono-blue Standard deck. This doesn’t really exist in
standard, but it’s the baseline from which we’ll work. This deck REALLY wants
to play a Delver of Secrets on turn 1, and follow it up with a mana leak on
turn two. Say we want to also cast Dissipate on T3, and Snapcaster Mage into
Mana Leak again on T4. Assuming a land base with 23 or 24 Islands, what’s the
chances of us getting the correct lands? That’s right. It’s pretty good
assuming you keep a hand with more than one land.
On the other hand, we’ll take a deck such as Solar Flare
from Innistrad’s debut. This deck had a notoriously horrendous land base, and
part of that was its need to heavily play three colors. Here's a sample mana base from one of the first events it was legal in:
4 Island
5 Plains
2 Swamp
So, in this deck, we need to hit the following mana
considerations:
T1: Nothing. The deck did not play any 1-drops. This is,
perhaps the only reason the deck could function. The addition of a 1-mana spell
would strain the lands even more dramatically.
T2: We need {U} for Think Twice or Mana Leak, or {B} for
Doom Blade. A single UB dual land, or two basics should cover this without
difficulty.
T3: Here’s where things get tricky. We want {B}{B} for
Liliana of the Veil, but also {W} for Timely Reinforcements. Both are critical
to our safety. We also need {W} for Oblivion Ring, {U} for Forbidden Alchemy,
and {B} for Tribute to Hunger.
T4: By this point, we would prefer to have {W}{W}
available for our three Day of Judgment, but we also need to consider
Snapcaster Mage at this point, requiring severe colors to flash back anything,
potentially even {U}{U} for a flashback Mana Leak.
T5+: Eventually, we are planning on utilizing all of our
colors in the late game for Elesh Norn, Sun Titan, Unburial Rites, a variety of
Counterspells, as well as Snapcaster Mages and their affiliated flashbacks.
To avoid falling behind in tempo, we also want our lands
to come into play untapped. When this Solar Flare mana base was published,
there was no Evolving Wilds in the format to fix your colors.
Quick, thought experiment time: Find me four lands in sequence that give you
{U} and {B} on turn 2, {B}{B} or {W} on turn 3, and then {U}{U},{ B}{B}, or
{W}{W} on turn 4, using the above land list.
I don’t doubt that it’s possible. My first impression is
to lead with Seachrome Coast, then Swamp, followed by Isolated Chapel, and then
any untapped land on the fourth turn.
See, not that difficult, right? It only required me to draw the
singleton Seachrome, and one of two Swamps.
Are there other solutions? Absolutely. There’s probably a
ton of permutations that would allow it, but the fact that it takes time to
work out the correct line of play for your lands should tell us something: There’s
a reasonable chance that, with a deck like this, we’re not going to have our ideal land drops. If you’ve
played magic for any length of time, that should scare you. Note that the above
mana base doesn’t include any colorless sources, which only make colors more
difficult to get on a regular basis. There is a lot of power in those colorless
activation lands. Kibler has raved more than once about the power of Gavony
Township, Moorland Haunt is a mainstay of the most dominant deck since
Caw-Blade, and Vault of the Archangel is bolstering the Tokens deck to
nearly-unraceable status.
What do you do in this deck with a Think Twice and a
Liliana, your mana sources being Isolated Chapel, Glacial Fortress, and
Darkslick Shores?
Worse yet, that mana base was Top 8 at a 500+ person
event, so we can infer that it was one of the best possible versions of an
Esper land base back then.
Mono-Green Aggro looks a ton more stable from that angle.
It seems really easy to just play a Forest every turn. Does this mean we should
just cut our losses and play Mono-colored decks all the time? Absolutely not!
Two color decks can be very nearly as consistent, and a third color splash
isn’t difficult if you keep an eye on your double-colored costs and colorless
sources. The goal, then, is to get as much power into the deck while keeping it
consistent.
For a common current example, adding Blue to a
White-based creature strategy, at the moment, is relatively painless. Merely
add the eight U/W lands available, plus 2-3 Moorland Haunts, and you gain an
incredible amount of power (Being able to recur 3-6 spirits every game) for
relatively little cost. (With only 2 sources that don’t make white, how often
won’t you be able to case Mirran Crusader on T3 for {W}{W}{1}?)
Can You Afford
That, Son?
It may be a less common problem, but every so often,
you’ll see a Red Deck, running 21 lands, and expecting to play Urabrask, or
Inferno Titan. Even just adding those as singletons, you commit your deck to
being able to drop a fifth or sixth land when reasonably, you won’t be able to.
Yes, more expensive cards are more powerful, as a general
rule, but it’s critical for you to understand how often you can hit those
relative land numbers. I could link a bunch of charts, explaining with
statistical precision how land drops work over turns, given varying numbers of
lands in your deck, but all those charts never did anything for me. Personally,
I use the following guidelines:
Quick and Dirty (23-): Only do this if your mana
curve tops out at 3 or less. I hesitate to suggest it even then. This rule can
be bent for some older decks who work extremely efficiently, such as Legacy
Burn, but as a general rule, you should not go below 23.
The Sweet Spot (23): Twenty Three seems to be a
great number for a large number of decks, especially of the aggressive
persuasion. It allows you to consistently hit three mana on time, and very
often, get your fourth land drop without much delay. I would hesitate before
playing 5-drops though.
Midrange(24-25): For those of us who like our five
slot, you may want to consider adding an extra land or two. Also consider this
if you have a number of colorless sources – things like Moorland Haunt, Gavony
Township, or Kessig Wolf Run. As of late, I have been favoring this option more
often than not, because of the power of the lands currently available to us
from Innistrad Block, as well as Inkmoth Nexus.
The Top Shelf (26+): With 26 or more lands, you’ll
be able to reach 6-drops consistently, but you open yourself up to an entirely
different can of worms. At this point, you’ve gone from 1/3 of your deck
containing lands up to nearly half. This means that your late game top-decks
will be blanks more often than not. Generally, this many lands is the realm of
controlling decks with good card drawing and filtering, to allow them the
ability to throw bad ones back, and keep drawing gas.
Again, all of these are suggestions – not hard and fast
rules. Add more lands if your play
testing reveals you always wanting more after your turn. Remove some if you top
deck land too much, and find yourself light on gas in the later game. I cannot
overstate the importance of testing to discover this. I’ve built aggro decks
that have had enough Flashback and Card advantage that I never found myself
needing more spells – but always wanting another land, even if my curve ended
at four.
Remember, it’s a lot easier to lose games to mana screw
than mana flood. When in doubt, err on the side of additional lands, and try to
make those lands as powerful as possible.
Tight Play
All of this planning should lead us somewhere – to having
a deck that has a consistent mana base and plays out well the majority of the
time. However, even the most lovingly crafted creation is subject to the whims
of fate. You will get bad hands. Even a deck with 45 lands will sometimes draw
none of them. Even a deck with 5 lands will occasionally draw them all. Some
would say that this is just variance, but in actuality, it’s another chance to
prove your skill.
The ability to accurately assess an opening hand’s playability
is one of the most critical skills that you can cultivate as a Magic player.
Proper mulliganing skill is far more complex than can be
covered as a subtopic in an already long article, but it does dovetail
significantly with your deck building and your mana base. The Proper
construction of a deck will allow for two things: Less frequent mulligans, and
less impactful mulligans.
The first half of that seems fairly intuitive. A deck
with a proper curve and a reasonable land base should be more likely to draw a
solid hand than a five color monstrosity that runs nothing except one-mana
cantrips and seven-mana bombs. The second half, however, is a little more
ephemeral. What does it mean to have less-impactful mulligans?
For an example, I offer Caw-Blade during the height of
its power. Because of the deck’s natural card advantage engine in Preordain,
Squadron Hawks, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Caw Blade was afforded an almost
unparalleled ability to mulligan without penalty. When you can effectively draw
three cards on your second turn by playing a creature or Brainstorm for free
(literally, without even spending a card), you can regain a great deal of the
threat density that you lose by tossing back your first hand. In standard now,
we have a number of options that permit this same effect. We can play cards
like Faithless Looting, which can fix land-starved or land-flooded hands. Cards
with flashback, like Lingering Souls, provide additional options without
costing us extra cards. Snapcaster Mage provides similar benefit. A mulligan to
six isn’t as damaging to Delver as it might be otherwise, because they have
such card selection and recursion – they can often make up the difference.
It is this effect that allows a Wolf-Run Ramp deck to
mulligan to five, and keep a hand with two basics, two ramp spells, and a
titan. Because of the inherent power in the cards being used (Especially the
titans), and the strong central core tenants of the deck (Ramp into a titan,
which finds me the tools to win the game), the loss of a card or two from their
opening hand, while not ideal, is not as crushing as it would be to a poorly
constructed deck. In short, a good deck’s plan is hard to derail.
Compare that with UB control at the moment, which has an
extremely sturdy landbase, but even a mulligan to six leaves them with their
back against the wall. As your cards outnumber theirs, the resolution of a
single threat could very well put the game away.
So, next time you’ve built a shiny new homebrewed deck and
you toss a land base together, stop and look again. Lay out your lands and ask
yourself: Could these do more? Are these doing enough? How often will this
cause mulligans, and is the power increase worth the corresponding loss of a
card to more common mulligans?
Moreover, is the way that I constructed this deck costing
me games?
My guess is that by making this an active part of your
deck building, you’ll find that you have a much firmer footing in games, and
your deck will seem to guide itself towards your top 8, rather than fighting
you all the way to the 0-2 bracket.
The exercise for this week is simple: Take a deck that
you own, and post your land base. Why did you choose those lands? Why those
numbers? Do you have any colorless non-basics? How critical are they to your
overall plan? Analyze your land base in as much detail as you’d like, and post
the results either here in the comments, or on reddit.
-----
Thursday will be a departure from the normal tournament
report format since I didn’t play in anything last weekend. Instead, we will
delve a little deeper into my preparation for any given event, with an eye
towards what I’ll be playing this Saturday at the World Magic Cup Qualifier in
College Park, Maryland! Tune in to see how I’m preparing for the event – and the
PTQ the next day.
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