Mana curve how many lands

It is a deliberate crippling of the deck by leaving out the simplest, cheapest and easiest-to-obtain cards in the game — lands. It keeps happening. At the last Friday Night Magic, I got paired against a kid who missed his third and fourth land drops, and discarded cards like Coalhauler Swine. I killed him quickly. We talked mana for a bit, and he sided in more land for game two, which helped albeit not enough. Kids like this argue that they want to play all their fun cards, so they cut back on lands.

Look — the point is to play the cards. Not look-at-the-card-in-your-hand, and not discard-the-card, but play the card. Playing a card means announcing the spell and paying its mana cost. That takes lands. The basic rule of thumb is that you play lands in a 40 card 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.

Assume that the critical cards in your 40 card deck cost four mana, and you want to make 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 need to have four lands in your first 10 cards — your initial seven plus the cards you draw on turns two, three and four.

In a forty card deck, that means at least 16 land cards. That means you need slightly over 18 lands in your deck. With 17 lands in your 40 card deck, you have a Math geek note: Actually, that is an oversimplification. Since you should mulligan no land hands, etc. The math gets messy — especially if you are trying to calculate the odds of hitting your land drops, assuming you play first and have a set number of lands in your deck.

In a forty card deck, with 16 lands, your odds of hitting your land drops if you are playing first are:. In a forty card deck, with 17 lands, your odds of hitting your land drops if you are playing first are:. And if you are playing 18 land in your sealed deck and playing first, your odds of hitting your land drops are:. The mana curve describes the distribution of casting costs of the non-land cards in the deck.

The mana curve looks like this. The second number includes all the situational cards like Giant Growth that I would only cast when the time was right:. That is a nice, flat curve. I was playing 16 lands, and had two 1cc creatures that could produce mana.

Rather than leave one The Biblioplex in the sideboard, simply play both and cut a spell for the second one. There are eight black sources, seven green sources, two blue sources plus Cultivate , and two The Biblioplex es for a consistent late game mana sink.

Cards like Field Trip , Cultivate , Letter of Acceptance , and similar cards from non- Strixhaven sets do a good job at providing extra mana if you need it. Some reasons to consider the 19th land:. Evolving Wilds x3 Mountain Island x7 Swamp x8. As Reid Duke himself describes here in greater detail, this was an unusual decision that he attributed to his high mana curve, several mana sinks, solid density of card advantage, and light red splash.

An unnoted factor that works slightly in favor of a higher land count here is the three Evolving Wilds. This reduces the odds of you drawing another land next turn by roughly 2. One last example of a land Limited deck is this top 8 draft deck from Jaberwocki.

Even very controlling land decks can just be 18 lands plus several cards that draw or fetch lands for you Cultivate , Field Trip , Pop Quiz with access to Environmental Sciences , etc.

Why yes, they do! One section, in fact, to cleanly wrap things up. So, what are some reasons to play 15 or fewer lands? As always, the wonderful Frank Karsten has written an excellent piece examining the potential of very land-light Limited decks in great detail. One particularly damning thing to note is this chart:.

This table shows that with 7 Swamp and 7 Plains, you will have the required Plains to cast a turn-3 Territorial Hammerskull only So Well, there are two possibilities to consider, both of which reference relatively recent developments in Magic.

Both of these formats featured cycling as a primary mechanic, which was heavily featured in each color. Ikoria actually took this a step further by having cycling on so many different commons, meaning that decks focused on the cycling mechanic could play lots of cards that were effectively just blank cyclers. With so many cheap spells available, Ikoria allowed deckbuilders to reach levels of greed previously thought impossible.

Week 1 Ikoria frequently had players on 14 to 15 lands, but this eventually gave way to the land minimum you see here.

Anyway, enough examples. Let's wrap things up with a chart showing how many lands I believe you should play at each average nonland CMC. As I mentioned before, things are more complicated than this when you consider cantrips, card advantage, and such, but this should give you a good start for making sure you have the right number of lands in your deck. One last rule on the way out the door: if you are ever on the fence as far as the number of lands you should play, you'll have more success if you play one land too many than one land too few.

As such, if you are trying to decide between one final cool spell and one more land, pick the land—it will pay off in the long run! Anyway, that's all for today. Hopefully, these guidelines will be helpful in your brewing! Does Oath of Ajani have a place in Standard? If it does, where does it fit? Let's discuss! Mill is just too much fun not to play. TheAsianAvenger is going to attack what is essentially 60 life instead of 20! Brewer's Minute: How Many Lands?

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