![manyland all types manyland all types](https://fontsrepo.com/file/weast-hood-free-font-3.jpg)
Musings – Can you cut a land on the draw?įor sure. The numbers won’t match exactly, but they’ll be close enough. Since typical Limited decks need their first 3 land drops, would like to hit their 4th land drop, but don’t necessarily need 5 lands by turn 5, the age-old standard of 17 lands indeed seems like a good number.įor Commander decks, the equivalent to 25 lands in a 60-card deck is 25 * 99/60 = 41.25 lands. This also makes sense because 25 * 40/60 = 17.5. The numbers for 17 lands in Limited are similar to the ones for 25 lands in Standard. How about Limited?Īll right, I can do that too. That’s still not super consistent, but I wouldn’t be comfortable going lower, and you can’t reach the 90% level of consistency that I liked for colored sources of mana without going up to 28 lands. The probability of hitting 4 lands by turn 4 is sufficient: 83.5% on the draw, 74.7% on the play.
![manyland all types manyland all types](https://img.youtube.com/vi/4sOUMn3tomQ/0.jpg)
According to the table, you will almost always (94.6% on the draw, 90.4% on the play) hit 3 lands by turn 3 under the prescribed mulligan rule, which means that you can almost always play a reasonable game of Magic. For such a deck, I’d say that 25 lands is probably the right number. This is only one way to represent mana flood, but it gives at least some indication.Ĭonsider a deck that needs at least 3 lands to function that would like to play Gideon, Ally of Zendikar on turn 4, and that contains several copies of Archangel Avacyn. The last column, “P(mana flood)” represents the probability of having drawn at least 8 lands by turn 7 when you are on the draw. opening hand” column indicates the expected size of your opening hand after all mulligans are said and done. The first couple of columns contain two percentages: The first refers to the probability when you are on the draw, and the second refers to the probability when you are on the play. This calculation is also fairly straightforward, but I need to be a little more careful in distinguishing all the cases.Ĭlick to enlarge. Then, for any opening hand I might keep, I asked, “what is the probability to find at least a certain number of lands after a certain number of draw steps?” For instance, finding at least 5 lands after 4 draw steps would represent the probability of hitting your first 5 land drops on the play. Naturally, the resulting probabilities over all opening hand sizes and all land counts sum up to one. These are basic hypergeometric probabilities, multiplied (for hands of 6 cards or fewer) by the probability of taking a mulligan down to that many cards under the above-described mulligan strategy. Given a 60-card deck with a given number of lands, I started by determining the probability of keeping any opening hand with a certain number of cards and a certain number of lands. But I decided to keep things simple by enforcing the same mulligan strategy for every type of deck-this makes it easier to compare the numbers for different land counts. You may want to keep that in mind when interpreting the eventual results.
![manyland all types manyland all types](https://64.media.tumblr.com/3562f6eb294e6b7f048b65e6047d1c87/tumblr_peebo3P7GE1ug5f19o1_400.gif)
There are some low-curve decks that might want to keep a 1-lander and/or mulligan a 5-lander, and there are some high-curve decks that might want to mulligan a 2-lander and/or keep a 6-lander. In my experience, this strategy is reasonable for a wide range of decks. After a mulligan, you always scry a land to the top and a spell to the bottom.You mulligan any 5-card hand with 0 or 5 lands.
![manyland all types manyland all types](https://i.redd.it/a6akolmvkad51.png)
You mulligan any 6-card hand with 0, 1, 5, or 6 lands.You mulligan any 7-card hand with 0, 1, 6, or 7 lands.To determine the probability of hitting your 4th land drop, I will assume the following mulligan strategy: In this article, I will use phrases like “hit your 4th land drop” to mean that you played lands on turns 1, 2, 3, and 4. Let’s get to it! Method 1: The Mulligan Rule I’ll conclude with a table that summarizes the main findings and recommendations. I sprinkled in some random thoughts and observations throughout. The second method is a linear regression between the number of lands and the average converted mana costs in recent top-performing decks. For example, I will determine the probability of hitting 4 lands by turn 4 under a certain mulligan strategy. The first approach is based on raw probability calculations. But how many lands does a 60-card deck actually need? In this article, I’ll run the numbers. I’ve seen decks with as few as 1 land and decks with as many as many as 42.