How Not to Lose – Part One (2024)

How Not to Lose –Part One

Pete Jahn

Whenever I play – online or in real life – I see way toomany people buildings decks that are designed to lose. It’s not just bad card choices or lack ofsymmetry. It is a deliberate cripplingof the deck by leaving out the simplest, cheapest and easiest-to-obtain cardsin the game – lands.

It keeps happening.At the last Friday Night Magic, I got paired against a kid who missedhis third and fourth land drops, and discarded cards like CoalhaulerSwine. I killed him quickly. We talked mana for a bit, and he sided inmore land for game two, which helped (albeit not enough.)

Kids like this argue that they want to play all their funcards, so they cut back on lands. Look –the point is to play the cards. Not look-at-the-card-in-your-hand, and notdiscard-the-card, but play thecard.

Playing a card means announcing the spell and paying itsmana cost. That takes lands.

The basic rule of thumb is that you play 17-18 lands in a 40card deck, and 24 lands in a 60 card deck.If you are playing more than a couple cards with mana costs of five or higher,increase the number of lands.

Let’s do the math. Assumethat the critical cards in your 40 card deck cost four mana, and you want tomake sure you can cast them on turn four.That means you have to hit your first four land drops. If you are playing first, that means you needto have four lands in your first 10 cards – your initial seven plus the cardsyou draw on turns two, three and four.To make sure you draw four lands in ten cards, you need to play at least40 % lands. In a forty card deck, thatmeans at least 16 land cards. If your important cards are five drops, andyou want to play them on turn five, you need five lands in your first elevencards – or 45% land. That means you needslightly over 18 lands in your deck.

With 17 lands in your 40 card deck, you have a 42.5% chanceof a randomly drawn card being a land.

Math geek note: Actually, that is an oversimplification. Since you should mulligan no land hands,etc., the odds of randomly drawn cards being lands are slightly below thatamount because of mulligans, but close enough.The math gets messy – especially if you are trying to calculate the oddsof hitting your land drops, assuming you play first and have a set number oflands in your deck.

Let’s look at probabilities in a bit more depth.

Math geek note: I am using the Hypergeometirc Distribution tocalculate the odds of drawing exactly X lands in Y cards, then summing the oddsof drawing X, X+1, X+2, etc. lands to get the odds of drawing at least X landsin your opening Y cards.

In a forty card deck, with 16 lands, your odds of hittingyour land drops if you are playing first are:

first land drop: 97%

first two land drops: 91%

first three land drops:80%

first four land drops:64%

first five land drops:47%

first six land drops:31%

In a forty card deck, with 17 lands, your odds of hittingyour land drops if you are playing first are:

first land drop: 97%

first two land drops: 93%

first three land drops:84%

That is a nice, flat curve. I was playing 16 lands, and had two 1cccreatures that could produce mana. Thatmeant that I was likely to play at least one threat every turn for the firstfew turns. It also means that I would bevery unlikely to have cards in hand that I could not cast – for instance, aCraws Wurm when I did not have six mana.

I count cheap (less than threecasting cost) mana creatures and spells as half a land. This deck had three: Birds, Elves and RampantGrowth. The curve is very flat – only 6cards that cost more than three mana. However, Blaze is a mana intensive finisherand I really wanted to hit all my land drops, so I played, in effect, 17.5lands.

I should also note that cardslike RampantGrowth and Kodama’sReach have a different effect on mana.They can find land early, but by pulling lands out of the deck, theyactually reduce the odds of finding a land later on. This can be relevant. If you are hoping to draw land, you mightwant to consider not sacrificing cards like Sakura Tribe Elder until after youdraw for the turn. Leaving that land inthe deck does make it slightly more likely that you can draw it – but you haveto weigh that against having the fetched land untap.

You might also want to considerthe effect of cards like Rampant Growth on your chances of drawing lands ifyour deck revolves around big monsters.For example, if you are running a deck built around Spined, Craw andScaled Wurms, Rampant Growth and SakuraTribe Elders may be considered mana acceleration but should not replacelands. Elves and Birds of Paradise,which do not remove lands from the deck, should be counted as half a land.

To complicate all of the above,consider what happens if you run two colors.All the same calculations apply – but with respect to each color. For example, in considering whether I couldcast the Trained Armadon, I had to consider both whether I would get to threemana (about 90% chance), and whether I could get the double green to do so. I ran 9 Forests, 6 Swamps and one Mountainfor the Blaze, which, together with the Birds and Elf meant that I had a 75-80%chance of having double green on turn three.Running only 6 Swamps meant that I had a 50% chance of having drawn twoof them for Nekrataal starting about turn ten, but since Nekrataal isreally a removal spell, waiting for that long is not really that bad – and theBirds or Rampant Growth can speed that up.

In the deep, dark past, runningtwo colored deck was very difficult. Forexample, in Masques Block the only land fetchers were Land Grant, SilvergladeElemental and Skyshroud Claim, and those three only fetched Forests. To get extra colors, you had to draw thelands, or play some marginal artifacts.

Today, there are tons of easilyacquired land fetchers, mana accelerators and mana fixers. The green fetchers include Rampant Growth, Kodama’s Reach,ExplosiveVegetation, Wood Elves and DiligentFarmhand. The accelerators includeBirds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, Elves of Deep Shadow (coming soon), Werebear and Utopia Tree. If you are allergic to green, then try theMirrodin block Talismans, Star Compass, Chrome Mox, Wayfarer’sBauble, Journeyer’sKite or even the 7E Diamonds (e.g. Sky Diamond.)

The Odyssey block cards thatcycle for lands (e.g. TwistedAbomination) are also very useful – and will only get better once theRavnica dual lands are out. The Ravnicaduals count as both type of basic land, e.g. Overgrown Tomb is both a Swamp anda Forest, so it can be found with anything that searches for a Swamp (likeTwisted Abomination) or Forest (like WoodElves or ElvishAberration.) The Onslaughtfetchlands, like BloodstainedMire or WindsweptHeath, will also fetch an Overgrown Tomb.

(Yes, I’m sure about that.)

Observant readers might bewondering why, if there is all this great mana and color fixing out there,standard is currently dominated by mono-colored decks: decks like mono-greenTooth, Mono-Blue Control and Big Red. Good question. The short answer is that the mana fixers arethere – but they are too slow. Manacurve issues trump mana fixing issues.

On turn two and three you can befixing mana, to set up a great turn four.However, Tooth decks are setting up Tooth and Nail for a devastating Kiki-Jiki/ SunderingTitan. Mono-blue control decks havegot a handful of counters by then, and are drawing into the Urzatron to playbroken artifacts. Mono-red control isalready beating down with Arc Slogger anda fat little SlithFirewalker. The pure speed andbrokenness of the existing metagame means that multicolored decks have a hardtime in the current environment.However, the power of the multicolor Gifts Ungivendecks from Kamigawa block constructed show just how potent multicolored deckscan be, when they don’t have to worry about Sundering Titan.

A final note on mana curves: inrare circ*mstances, you can cheat on lands.Some of the classic Sligh (fast red burn) decks ran 16-20 lands. Those decks had a very flat mana curve – alot of one and two casting cost cards.The only card that cost more than three was Fireblast – and you couldcast that by sacrificing two mountains, instead.

The classic low land count decksare 2 land Belcher and Ten Land Stompy.Two land Belcher is a type one deck that gets its mana from Moxen andother artifacts, plus some land fetchers.It’s a combo deck, and doesn’t really count. Ten Land Stompy was an old (meaning before the1999 rotation) Extended deck. Here’s oneversion:

Stompy: Tobey Tamber -

8th Place

GP Kyoto

4 Elvish Spirit Guide

10 Forest

3 Bounty of the Hunt

4 Briar Shield

4 Land Grant

4 Rancor

3 Winter Orb

4 Elvish Lyrist

4 Quirion Ranger

4 River Boa

4 Rogue Elephant

4 Skyshroud Elite

4 Vine Dryad

4 Wild Dog

Sideboard

1 Bounty of the Hunt

4 Cursed Totem

4 Emerald Charm

4 Rushwood Legate

1 Rushwood Dryad

1 Winter orb

So how did the deck manage onjust ten lands? First of all, look atthe creatures. Vine Dryad is free tocast. The River Boa, which was acomplete beating back in those days, since blue was everywhere, costs two mana– and it is the most expensive creaturein the deck. (Well, technically,Elvish Spirit Guide is a creature, but it was only used as a mana source – ifit is in your hand, you can remove it from the game and get two green mana inyour pool.) Land Grant and Bounty of theHunt are free. Quirion Ranger lets youbounce (thereby untapping and getting two uses out of) Forests, which is a big plus under Winter Orb. As typically cast, here’s the mana curve:

0cc: 15

1cc: 28

2cc: 7

3cc or more: none

Moreover, if you add the 8 landfetchers / free mana cards, the deck really has 14-16 land equivalents.

Ten land Stompy can functionquite well with one land in play, and can even win games without ever drawing aland. For example, I remember a game Iwas playing Stompy, and did not have the draw.At the end of my opponent’s first turn, I played out two Vine Dryads(1/3 Forestwalk. You may play Vine Dryadany time you could play an instant. You may remove a green card in your handfrom the game rather than pay Vine Dryad’s mana cost.) After my draw, I removed Elvish Spirit Guidefrom my hand to get GG, then played a Rancor on each of my Vine Dryads, andswung for 6. I had one card in my hand –a Bounty of the Hunt. Next turn I drewanother green card, and won on turn three.I never drew or played a land.

You can’t really do thatnow. Cards like Shining Shoaldo have alternate casting costs, but there are neither enough of them norenough other super-cheap cards to make something like Stompy work – not tomention that nowadays Winter Orb costs four and comes attached to a littlewhite creature.

I have been testing for theupcoming state championships. The formatis Standard, with Ravnica. I have built somesmall, fast decks, filled with ultra-cheap creatures, but I have not gone below20 lands – and the 20 lands was a deck with Elves and Birds. In the current formats, you just cannot riskmana screw. The decks are too fast, andthey really punish you missing land drops.

So, rule one for how not to lose– get the mana right.

PRJ

judge n bailiff on MTGO

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