Post by Soulless One on Feb 9, 2019 18:02:17 GMT
How many lands should I use in my deck ?
How many of each colors ?
My deck has lots of strong cards but I keep flooding useless mana or getting screwed in general with my lands!
I'm sure you had some or all of these problems, right?
So let's try to fix this for good then.
This is a key point for any deck, the mana curve. Your deck can gave lots of powerful cards but there's no use for it if you can't play these cards, either by missing the mana of the required color or simply by lacking mana. Let's then simply outline what to do to define how many Lands a deck needs to run well.
Well, get your deck, get a calculator and get to work.
Quantity of land.
This is a crucial point for Deck Building, how much lands does a deck need to work well? 20, 23 or 30 lands? It all depends on the strategy applied and the mana rate of your deck.
Let's start from an extremely basic principle:
any deck, be it beat-down, be it control or be it combo, need at least 1 land for every 2 cards (1/3 of the deck, rounded up). Thus, a deck of 60 cards needs AT LEAST 20 lands to play. Disregarding incredible exceptions, this is the least acceptable land for a deck.
From there, make a simple sum, start adding the Converted Mana Cost from your cards and divide them by the number of cards on your deck (disregarding the Lands).
That way you'll get an average of the converted Mana from your deck. Round the result to the nearest integer and add up to 1/3 of the land your deck already has.
For example, a GW Wins (Green/White Wins) programmed to have 60 cards has an average Converted Mana Cost of 2.7 (which rounded to the nearest integer is 3), so the ideal for this deck is to use 23 Lands (20 of the minimum plus 3 of the average).
Key words: Deck size = DS; Minimum of lands= ML; Converted Mana Cost = CMC; Ideal Quantity of Lands = IQL:
DS = 60
ML= 20
CMC = 2.7 (3)
IQL= ML + CMC
IQL= 23
-----------------------------------------
FINALLY THE MANA CURVE
Knowing how much land you will be using on the deck, now you just need to know how many mana-generating lands you need.
The math remains simple:
Add, Card by Card, the number of specific mana of a color, of its cost of invocation, disregarding the colorless manas. Count on the gold cards only the specific mana of a color, on the hybrid cards (such as Grull Guild Mage) count the manas once for each color.
At the end of this sum you'll get a high number, write down and go to the other color. In possession of these numbers you have an extremely simple account, just divide the number obtained by the amount of land you own and round the number to the nearest integer.
When you have the results of each color, just write them down, you'll need this set of lands, that is, so many lands for so many lands, until you close the number of lands on the deck.
For example, a GW Glare with 24 lands has the sum of its mana costs of 44 Greens and 24 Whites. Dividing them by the amount of lands on the deck we find a simple set of 2 green land and 1 white land . Soon I need 2 green mana sources for each source of white mana. That simple!
Key words: Total Lands = TL; Specific Mana of Each Color (SMG for green); (SMW for withe)
Mana Source (GMS for green); (WMS for Withe)
TL= 24
SMG = 44
SMW = 24
GMS= SMG/TL
GMS = 2
WMS= SMW/TL
WMS= 1
If you use multi-colored lands (Temple Garden or Selesnya Shrine), add them to "special sets" and separate them from basic lands.
In such cases, give preference to the type of mana you have less, so you ensure that the mana-producing lands for various colors work for all the colors you need besides ensuring that the colors that you have fewer cards are also met.
If you want to go even further and make your mana curve just perfect, then consider adding your special abilities costs instead of just your mana cost if your activation cost is greater than your summoning cost in colorful manas.
-----------------------------------------
Special Cases
Of course there are cases in the Mana Curve, the most common is to use cards that aren't lands but which also produce mana (such as Birds of Paradise, Skeleton Gruul, Silhana of Stars, etc), or who search for land (such as the Elder of the Sakura Tribe, Kodama Reach or Long Search). In this case, for every 6 cards of this type you can deduct 1 land.
So a deck with 24 lands (as in the case of GW Glare that uses 4 Forest Elves and 4 Llanowar Elves) this one needs only 23 lands.
But why such a large amount to deduce only one land? Well, these cards can serve as mana acceleration, but tey're still Spells and do not count as Lands, so they need Lands in play to be played as well.
Imagine yourself in the situation of an initial hand with 3 Llanowar Elves, but no green mana! The hand is good, but the mulligan is almost right!
Another special case is the use of mana-generating artifacts costing 0 (such as Chrome Mox for example), in this specific case you can deduct one Land for each 1 of these cards if you are brave and your deck is too fast or if you're a little wiser, deduct only 1 land for every 2 or 3 of those cards.
Now that you know how to correct the mana curve of your deck, just pick it up, correct its mana and you'll see that it will never let you down.
And good luck in your games!
PS: if you're looking for a more analytical approach, mip found this link, this guy made a really awesome honey calculating putting it into graphs
www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-many-lands-do-you-need-to-consistently-hit-your-land-drops/
How many of each colors ?
My deck has lots of strong cards but I keep flooding useless mana or getting screwed in general with my lands!
I'm sure you had some or all of these problems, right?
So let's try to fix this for good then.
This is a key point for any deck, the mana curve. Your deck can gave lots of powerful cards but there's no use for it if you can't play these cards, either by missing the mana of the required color or simply by lacking mana. Let's then simply outline what to do to define how many Lands a deck needs to run well.
Well, get your deck, get a calculator and get to work.
Quantity of land.
This is a crucial point for Deck Building, how much lands does a deck need to work well? 20, 23 or 30 lands? It all depends on the strategy applied and the mana rate of your deck.
Let's start from an extremely basic principle:
any deck, be it beat-down, be it control or be it combo, need at least 1 land for every 2 cards (1/3 of the deck, rounded up). Thus, a deck of 60 cards needs AT LEAST 20 lands to play. Disregarding incredible exceptions, this is the least acceptable land for a deck.
From there, make a simple sum, start adding the Converted Mana Cost from your cards and divide them by the number of cards on your deck (disregarding the Lands).
That way you'll get an average of the converted Mana from your deck. Round the result to the nearest integer and add up to 1/3 of the land your deck already has.
For example, a GW Wins (Green/White Wins) programmed to have 60 cards has an average Converted Mana Cost of 2.7 (which rounded to the nearest integer is 3), so the ideal for this deck is to use 23 Lands (20 of the minimum plus 3 of the average).
Key words: Deck size = DS; Minimum of lands= ML; Converted Mana Cost = CMC; Ideal Quantity of Lands = IQL:
DS = 60
ML= 20
CMC = 2.7 (3)
IQL= ML + CMC
IQL= 23
-----------------------------------------
FINALLY THE MANA CURVE
Knowing how much land you will be using on the deck, now you just need to know how many mana-generating lands you need.
The math remains simple:
Add, Card by Card, the number of specific mana of a color, of its cost of invocation, disregarding the colorless manas. Count on the gold cards only the specific mana of a color, on the hybrid cards (such as Grull Guild Mage) count the manas once for each color.
At the end of this sum you'll get a high number, write down and go to the other color. In possession of these numbers you have an extremely simple account, just divide the number obtained by the amount of land you own and round the number to the nearest integer.
When you have the results of each color, just write them down, you'll need this set of lands, that is, so many lands for so many lands, until you close the number of lands on the deck.
For example, a GW Glare with 24 lands has the sum of its mana costs of 44 Greens and 24 Whites. Dividing them by the amount of lands on the deck we find a simple set of 2 green land and 1 white land . Soon I need 2 green mana sources for each source of white mana. That simple!
Key words: Total Lands = TL; Specific Mana of Each Color (SMG for green); (SMW for withe)
Mana Source (GMS for green); (WMS for Withe)
TL= 24
SMG = 44
SMW = 24
GMS= SMG/TL
GMS = 2
WMS= SMW/TL
WMS= 1
If you use multi-colored lands (Temple Garden or Selesnya Shrine), add them to "special sets" and separate them from basic lands.
In such cases, give preference to the type of mana you have less, so you ensure that the mana-producing lands for various colors work for all the colors you need besides ensuring that the colors that you have fewer cards are also met.
If you want to go even further and make your mana curve just perfect, then consider adding your special abilities costs instead of just your mana cost if your activation cost is greater than your summoning cost in colorful manas.
-----------------------------------------
Special Cases
Of course there are cases in the Mana Curve, the most common is to use cards that aren't lands but which also produce mana (such as Birds of Paradise, Skeleton Gruul, Silhana of Stars, etc), or who search for land (such as the Elder of the Sakura Tribe, Kodama Reach or Long Search). In this case, for every 6 cards of this type you can deduct 1 land.
So a deck with 24 lands (as in the case of GW Glare that uses 4 Forest Elves and 4 Llanowar Elves) this one needs only 23 lands.
But why such a large amount to deduce only one land? Well, these cards can serve as mana acceleration, but tey're still Spells and do not count as Lands, so they need Lands in play to be played as well.
Imagine yourself in the situation of an initial hand with 3 Llanowar Elves, but no green mana! The hand is good, but the mulligan is almost right!
Another special case is the use of mana-generating artifacts costing 0 (such as Chrome Mox for example), in this specific case you can deduct one Land for each 1 of these cards if you are brave and your deck is too fast or if you're a little wiser, deduct only 1 land for every 2 or 3 of those cards.
Now that you know how to correct the mana curve of your deck, just pick it up, correct its mana and you'll see that it will never let you down.
And good luck in your games!
PS: if you're looking for a more analytical approach, mip found this link, this guy made a really awesome honey calculating putting it into graphs
www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-many-lands-do-you-need-to-consistently-hit-your-land-drops/