First, Hit Your Land Drops (draft essay)

[TheGildedGoose]

I'm not sure I get the implication I like lots of things that are pretty bad. That essay covers a lot of the ways in which it's pretty bad as well.

It was a jocular point-counterpoint.

Lands is one of those archetypes that doesn't have a home. It's too weak for cEDH because it's slow, but it's too strong for casual because of the narrow attack surface and inevitability it presents. Why do you think it's mostly pretty bad?

[pokken]

Lands is one of those archetypes that doesn't have a home. It's too weak for cEDH because it's slow, but it's too strong for casual because of the narrow attack surface and inevitability it presents. Why do you think it's mostly pretty bad?

I think you nailed it but I think it's even worse than 'too weak for cedh, too strong for casual.'

Even in mid-high powered casual it struggles to fit enough interaction to also have win conditions so I think most people's perspective is colored by watching the lands player go off with tons of triggers and stuff...then still losing Land drop style ramping is one of those high ceiling styles where people remember the time you went off with azusa and crucible and played a bajillion lands, but they forget all the times you played all your lands on turn 2 and then fizzled.

It's pretty hard to find a place where the archetype is not just a fish out of water. it kinda reminds me of Tron and Scapeshift in modern where it's almost playing a different game than everyone else. Ships passing in the night problem.

From a deck design perspective it really struggles from not having the critical mass of Exploration effects at the 1-2 cmc slot like most other archetypes, and when this is combined with needing to play so many lands to make things work, the card disadvantage nature of land drop ramp, you get pretty swingy behavior.

[BaronCappuccino]

Up your land count to 42. Your grandma was right all along.

https://articles.starcitygames.com/magi ... 4376972917

[pokken]

Up your land count to 42. Your grandma was right all along.

https://articles.starcitygames.com/magi ... 4376972917

I generally agree that ~42 is the right "starting point" I think you really have to think about cheap card draw cantrips and land search effects as reducing that number. It's too easy to flood if you don't.

I appreciate that other people are talking about this but I wish they would include some nuance and deeper concepts. "Stop cutting lands" needs to come with real reasons why not, and an understanding of sequencing and velocity.

Article was kinda...basic

[BaronCappuccino]

Up your land count to 42. Your grandma was right all along.

https://articles.starcitygames.com/magi ... 4376972917

I generally agree that ~42 is the right "starting point" I think you really have to think about cheap card draw cantrips and land search effects as reducing that number. It's too easy to flood if you don't.

I appreciate that other people are talking about this but I wish they would include some nuance and deeper concepts. "Stop cutting lands" needs to come with real reasons why not, and an understanding of sequencing and velocity.

Article was kinda...basic

You're right - it really requires a total package. Without the ability to play more than one land per turn, I don't know that I'd want 42. The relationship between land, ramp and draw is a highly choreographed performance. My Baeloth//Giants deck started with 46 land, an admittedly high count by any standard, but none of my ramp allowed me to play extra. Extra land in the hand did nobody any good. I also ran very little draw. The results were clunky. There's an art to having enough draw to make having enough land to satisfy your ramp package work for you. I'm not entirely confident I'm as good as I'll ever get, but I'm confident I'm good enough, and my land count settled at 39. Because my goal is to use ramp to trivialise the commander tax as an alternative to stocking my voltron deck with clunky protection, I might end up going back up to 42 and doing more tests. It's an art, not a science.

[PrimevalCommander]

Up your land count to 42. Your grandma was right all along.

https://articles.starcitygames.com/magi ... 4376972917

This articles whole argument: Standard decks play 45% lands. Lands are needed to cast spells. Commander decks should play 45% lands so they can cast spells. The end...

Didn't even use any good data analysis to show percentage of games where we hit our first 5 land drops so we can accelerate through turn 6 on-curve. Plenty of people on this very site running actual data analytics to provide useful information on land count compared to this fluff piece on lands being good for casting spells. And basic lands are better that non-basics because ETB untapped and don't get hit by non basic hate. Pay no attention to the relevant abilities or multiple colors they provide

PS: Wizards doesn't think lands are needed to cast spells anyway. **points at Deflecting Swat, Force of Vigor and Solitude card cycles all from the last couple years.

[BaronCappuccino]

A 1st hand anecdote of marginal value--

Over time, my Baeloth//Giants deck, which began at 46 lands, trimmed and trimmed in favor of more ramp, more draw (mostly just those) and more answers. Rather than cut my so-called "win-more" cards - my double combats and damage multipliers - I cut my basics. At my worst, I dipped down to 38, and the playability suffered for it. I'm back up to 43 lands again and all's well again.

[pokken]

Over time, my Baeloth//Giants deck, which began at 46 lands, trimmed and trimmed in favor of more ramp

The important lesson here is:
1) If you cut lands for ramp spells, you are just spending mana to hit your land drops once you start missing them. T2 rampant growth into t3 miss land drop is just -2 mana.
2) Draw spells need to be able to be cast with just the mana you draw, so curve and sequencing of these spells is clutch.

When you get down around ~38 lands, you *need* some number of <3 cmc draw spells most of the time, because some number of games you are going to be forced to keep 2 landers that hope for a 3rd.

WIth your commanders costing 5 and 6 respectively, you really need to ramp so I think 38 is pretty defensible personally, but you need quite a lot of 1-3 cmc draw spells to make that work. Stuff like Faithless Looting and Sylvan Library are usually clutch.

With a 5 cmc commander, I'd definitely be on Cultivate effects personally since they do both CA and ramp.

I'm not sure what you did with your deck but that's my two pence

[NZB2323]

So if you start with 42 lands and go by the old 8x8 rule where you have 8 draw spells and 8 ramp spells, is 35 the right number?

[PrimevalCommander]

So if you start with 42 lands and go by the old 8x8 rule where you have 8 draw spells and 8 ramp spells, is 35 the right number?

Negative. Typical rule of thumb is 2x ramp for every 1x land removed. So you would drop down to 38 lands and should probably hold firm there until the deck tells you if you have enough ramp to accommodate that land count. 36 lands is really the floor unless you know you have a very low curve or extremely high amount of card draw to compensate.

I'm usually at 36 lands with ~10 ways to either ramp directly, or get lands to hand. With 8 ramp, I'm probably at 38 lands unless my deck has a low mana curve. Once I'm at 10 ramp, I'm adding more draw so I can find those cards. I think going above 10 ramp is a bit overkill and adding more card draw is a better investment if there are additional deck slots. See quote below for more first hand accounts.

An EDHRecCast episode converted my thought process towards solving as many deck problems as possible with more draw. Historically, if I wasn't seeing enough mana, I added more mana - same with removal and anything else. Now I add more draw. It really has worked wonders. I think switching to resilient ramp in tandem with running a much more robust [draw] package has made my deck feel like it does what I expect every game.

[TheGildedGoose]

So if you start with 42 lands and go by the old 8x8 rule where you have 8 draw spells and 8 ramp spells, is 35 the right number?

Negative. Typical rule of thumb is 2x ramp for every 1x land removed. So you would drop down to 38 lands and should probably hold firm there until the deck tells you if you have enough ramp to accommodate that land count. 36 lands is really the floor unless you know you have a very low curve or extremely high amount of card draw to compensate.

8x8 and this rule of thumb are both outdated ideas. 8x8 tends to work out okay as a starting point because it encourages people to play interaction and card draw, but different decks have different needs. One deck may want 12 spot removal spells, another may only want 4. When you have to do that much modification to the chassis, I would argue the original chassis is flawed. As for that rule of thumb, I think your land count and non-fast ramp shouldn't correlate that much. Missing a land drop before your critical turn is a major feel bad, and while ramping into it is strong, if you do miss that land drop, you're effectively hitting your critical turn on curve, sure, but you're also down tempo (and, sort, of, a card). I would argue that you should be cutting more lands for running cheap cantrips than for ramp spells.

My preferred rudimentary starting place for lands is to look at my curve, multiply it by 2 to use a placeholder for my critical turn, then use a hypergeometric calculator to find the number of lands I should run to consistently have that many lands by that turn. For example, if your curve is at, say, 2.5, I'd start with 41 lands to have a ~61% chance to have that many lands to be able to cast two spells on turn 5. There are, of course, many, many factors that affect this count in the end, but I rarely go more than 2-3 lands in any direction (admittedly usually down once I tune the deck) if the curve doesn't significantly change.

[PrimevalCommander]

8x8 and this rule of thumb are both outdated ideas. 8x8 tends to work out okay as a starting point because it encourages people to play interaction and card draw, but different decks have different needs. One deck may want 12 spot removal spells, another may only want 4. When you have to do that much modification to the chassis, I would argue the original chassis is flawed. As for that rule of thumb, I think your land count and non-fast ramp shouldn't correlate that much. Missing a land drop before your critical turn is a major feel bad, and while ramping into it is strong, if you do miss that land drop, you're effectively hitting your critical turn on curve, sure, but you're also down tempo (and, sort, of, a card). I would argue that you should be cutting more lands for running cheap cantrips than for ramp spells.

Bolded for emphasis. I think that is the entire point of those two ideas. Never meant to be gospel for every build style, but if you are new to building decks, you know some of those things are required. I fully agree that some decks want more or less of each, and have decks that represent the extremes of those ideas. But generally I'm going to have some minimum amount of Ramp, Draw, Removal, so getting a habit formed of looking for those things in your deck is a good way to simplify deck construction to someone who might be overwhelmed by the variation between different deck archetypes. This is sort of what I'm doing with my brother who is learning magic, but complex deckbuilding is outside his experience level right now. All decks get a selection of Ramp, Draw, Removal depending on the final theme and stragety of the deck, but it's all there.

Draw has been an ever increasing priority in my decklist. And the more cards that get printed, the more synergy I can pack into my draw suite and increase the ceiling of those cards. This makes the card draw slot much more exciting than it was to me 5+ years ago. I love when my draw cards actually add to the plan of the deck instead of being stand-alone spells just there for the inclusion of the words "draw a card". Also helps hit those ever important land drops, which I agree should be prioritized more over traditional ramp than it is today.

[Moxnix]

I think these kinds of rules are better for novice players advanced ones will always playtest the deck many times to figure out what works best. I think there is a lot of variance based on meta deck type power level etc. some decks I have would rather miss land drops than have extras in hand some the exact opposite. If the raw power level of cards like mana crypt was not so high I'm not sure I would run any ramp in some of builds. Since this games inception however the guy who has more cards in any format is the Favorite to win. I feel like the free mulligan and the general power level difference in individual cards makes it so you have to mull away playable hands for ones that curve out anyway. If you have cmc 0-3 plays and you draw none of them a 4 land hand is still a mulligan its too slow. Its night as day using my decks for 1:1 with no free mull and FFA with one i feel like i legit want 6+ more lands for 1:1 due to how mulligans and the nature of 1:1 vs ffa works practically.