Limited how many lands

Ultimately, the decision on how many lands to put in your deck is a trade-off between mana screws and mana floods. Calculating the probability of hitting 4 land drops by turn 4 is relatively easy—anyone with a basic knowledge of probability theory should be able to replicate my results with a simple spreadsheet or program—but adequately weighing the relative impact of mana screws and floods is more difficult.

It also depends on your deck and the format. My subjective judgment of saying that Unless you have tracked the results of thousands of games in a certain matchup, there is no scientific reason why Besides, there are plenty of factors that should influence your land counts as well, such as whether or not your deck contains additional sources of mana e. But no matter how many lands you play, mana screws and mana floods are part of the game.

Little bits of variance give weaker players a chance to beat better players, lead to games that play out differently every time, add excitement to draw steps, and make for interesting deck building decisions. But while a little bit of randomness is fun, too much randomness is not. Likewise, if random Aetherworks Marvel spins decide too many games, then players may feel that the game is out of their hands.

Besides cycling lands, creaturelands, or land-search effects with an alternative ability in the late game, there are plenty of other cards that help mitigate mana flood, and these are invaluable tools for any Constructed deck. It is somewhat surprising to me that in comparison, there seem to be fewer cards that mitigate mana screw.

To some extent, the above-mentioned cards help a little bit because they incentivize people to add more lands to their deck. But mana screws still happen from time to time, even with inflated land counts, and then there are not many cards that can help you. Just a random thought. Back to the math. For my second method of providing insight into the question of how many lands you need, I went over the last 3 Pro Tours Kaladesh , Aether Revolt , and Amonkhet.

I grabbed all Top 8 deck lists and all deck lists outside of the Top 8 that went or better in Standard. This yielded 78 deck lists in total. For each of these decks, I noted down the number of lands including, for this purpose, Attune with Aether and Traverse the Ulvenwald and the average converted mana cost of nonland cards.

Because nearly every one of these Standard deck had between 22 and 26 lands—with 24 the most common number by far, I then also added the Top 8 decks of the last 4 Modern Grand Prix events Kobe, Copenhagen, Vancouver, and Brisbane, for a total of 32 decks to get some decks with more extreme numbers of lands. My method also counted Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger as a card with converted mana cost 10, which is not completely fair either.

But with the time I had available, I was able to assemble a data set whose quality I would call sufficient. On a scatterplot for all decks, I plotted the best-fitting line for all the data points.

Specifically, I used the least squares approach from simple linear regression to minimize the sum of the squared distances between the fitted line and all the data points.

I got a reasonable R-squared value loosely speaking, a statistical measure of how close the data points are to the fitted line of 0. The fitted model, based on my data set, is that the number of lands in a deck is given by 16 plus 3. I would just go with a similar percentage: lands.

I agree with this answer, although you could drop it by one if you have 2 or more mana producing artifacts or land fetching effects. Oh, okay, if card Sealed is some strange new format I've never heard of, then my comment doesn't apply.

You'd be looking at the same ratio as a card deck: lands out of 30 cards? Show 6 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password.

Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Question feed. Accept all cookies Customize settings. Yes, Ugin is colourless and would trigger his sanctum. Then Shrine of the Forsaken Gods can be used to cast him….

Yes Rakdos Cackler and others with hybrid mana cost are multicolored regardless of how they are paid for. Hybrid mana symbols, monocolored hybrid mana symbols, and Phyrexian mana symbols do count toward your devotion to their colors.

The rule, though, applies only to mana symbols. Hybrid mana also known as half-half mana is a type of mana first introduced in Ravnica: City of Guilds. Each hybrid mana symbol represents a cost which can be paid with one of two colors. A mana symbol that represents a cost that can be paid either by spending colored mana or by paying life.

A Phyrexian mana symbol represents a cost that can be paid either with one mana of its color or by paying 2 life. Card games. How many lands should be in a modern deck? How many lands are limited? What does a good mana curve look like?