First, Hit Your Land Drops (draft essay)

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Hey folks, I wanted to share this hopefully brief and useful essay I've had percolating in my head for a while about ramp in commander. Love to hear your points, but hopefully the various caveats are enough to make it clear that this is not saying ramp is bad or whatever.

I am kind of the "deck help" guy for my community and one of the most common things I see is decks with just really unfocused ramp and a low land count; the traditional precon pile of sol ring, 4 signets, a thran dynamo and a cultivate or something, and maybe an armillary sphere. But somewhere along the line they added a bunch of expensive spells and cut some lands, and now it's a disaster.

I'll also add that if your games end on turn 5 this is not for you. :)




First, Hit Your Land Drops

A recurring theme in games over the years is explosive ramp followed by missed land drops and flameout. This has caused a drastic change in philosophy on how to construct decks, in stark contrast to the received wisdom of the current cheap ramp spell renaissance. Unless it is core to the deck's strategy, the primary focus of a deck's mana engine should be on consistently hitting land drops.

Mana creatures and rocks are high risk, high reward strategies that reward attempting to win in the mid-game by taking advantage of being ahead of curve. These approaches are often vulnerable to late game strategies such as mass removal and are at high risk of flaming out as a result. It is inherent in these strategies that they will miss land drops in the mid game more often than a deck with a higher count of lands and on-curve card advantage and selection. Many decks are constructed without considering whether this level of risk is appropriate to their strategy, and would benefit from shifting focus.

The tools that facilitate hitting land drops can improve general consistency in a deck. Most card selection spells, card draw spells, and tutors can find game winning or saving plays just as easily as find lands to play. Effects focused on finding lands can help fix mana as well or better than mana artifacts and creatures. The consistency of always being on curve as opposed to sometimes ahead or behind can also be desirable depending on the mana cost distribution within a deck. This consistency is often more valuable to a deck's strategy than playing ahead of curve.

Being consistently on curve can create tempo advantages in the early and mid game. Having untapped lands to cast reactive spells in the early turns as opposed to tapping out for ramp is often very powerful; it can enable cheap reactive spells to beat ramp payoffs, for example. Further, it can allow cheap card selection and advantage spells to set up end game plays earlier, particularly by deploying cheap spells that generate resources over time. These spells are often in conflict with low cost ramp, and some decks can generate a strong advantage by playing board impacting spells on curve instead of ramping.

Not all of these factors will apply to every deck. Some decks' ramp approach is part of the core strategy, and other decks naturally hit their land drops as part of their strategy. Many decks, however, ramp as an afterthought and often stumble due to drawing too many ramp spells and not enough payoffs, or vice versa. These decks with an incoherent ramp approach often benefit from refocusing on ramp with card advantage and card selection as opposed to explosive early ramp.
Last edited by pokken 4 years ago, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by TheMagicWord » 4 years ago

This seems like such an obvious idea but is really great seeing it spelled out like this. I think a few of my decks might suffer from this and can definitely think of decks in my playgroup which are way too focused on being ahead of the curve which can lead to easy blowouts against them.
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Post by toctheyounger » 4 years ago

It's also worth mentioning that the more land drops you hit the better your draw selection gets, and incrementally so. You touched on it briefly, it's worth mentioning overtly. It's something that pays dividends for me in mono white, a notoriously poorly thought of slice of the pie. I regularly outramp the table with Bruna, and it means I can hang on through a lot, and means that I have answers when I need them as well as a much higher density of threats mid to end game.

This is the sort of thing a lot of brewers need to read, very well done.
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

toctheyounger wrote:
4 years ago
It's something that pays dividends for me in mono white, a notoriously poorly thought of slice of the pie.
White's ability to consistently hit its land drops is probably the most underrated aspect of the color in EDH. Cards like:
Are always high on my list of cards to play. I wish they'd print more. Was really nice to see birth get printed :)

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Post by Dragoon » 4 years ago

Yeah, I tend to favor hitting land drops more than ramp in any deck that intends to run the long game anyway. In those decks, there's no need to rush, you just need regularity. On top of the white goodies already mentioned, I'd also like to mention Thaumatic Compass and Journeyer's Kite for reactive decks, and Thawing Glaciers for most of the others.

Boreas Charger is also a nice card, giving you ramp and land drops all at once :)

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Dragoon wrote:
4 years ago
Yeah, I tend to favor hitting land drops more than ramp in any deck that intends to run the long game anyway. In those decks, there's no need to rush, you just need regularity. On top of the white goodies already mentioned, I'd also like to mention Thaumatic Compass and Journeyer's Kite for reactive decks, and Thawing Glaciers for most of the others.

Boreas Charger is also a nice card, giving you ramp and land drops all at once :)
You can probably see from my Golos decks that I am a big fan of compass and glaciers :) I usually prefer armillary sphere before kite just for efficiency. Compass gets a pass cos it flips.

And charger is very good, requires a bit of setup but fun card.

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Post by toctheyounger » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
toctheyounger wrote:
4 years ago
It's something that pays dividends for me in mono white, a notoriously poorly thought of slice of the pie.
White's ability to consistently hit its land drops is probably the most underrated aspect of the color in EDH. Cards like:
Are always high on my list of cards to play. I wish they'd print more. Was really nice to see birth get printed :)
Yep, 100% agree. White does just fine. That's not even including things like Wayfarer's Bauble and Armillary Sphere which are easy Sun Titan/Sevinne's Reclamation targets too.
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Post by Rumpy5897 » 4 years ago

This is actually a great point, although it feels like a bit of a tangential benefit to "run card advantage". The fizzled ramp explosions you mention sound like the result of barfed hands without a refuel. Drawing cards means seeing cards, means seeing lands, means hitting lands, means having mana to draw cards, rinse, repeat. Most of my decks hit their land drops pretty consistently, and the only thing three of them do to help with this is be anywhere from quite to extremely draw-happy. The only deck that runs explicit land drop tech is Daxos, due to the fact the shell's draw light and goes for things like Spirit of the Labyrinth to abuse having a command zone mana sink as people are throttled on options. Still, going for the obnoxiously expensive fetchland plus Crucible setup notably improved gameplay, as the deck stopped fearing for its rocks so hard. It's also good that you bring up using tutors on lands.

Something that should be mentioned in the final write-up is the innate resilience of lands due to MLD being stigmatised. Dudes die, rocks die, lands are forever. I'd also promote the white list you made to the main body, as that's a colour that famously struggles with conventional card advantage.
 
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Post by DirkGently » 4 years ago

One of the big mistakes I see people making when constructing decks is "2 mana rocks equals a land", meaning for 2 ramp spells they can cut a land. This often results in missing land drops and spending turns casting mana rocks just to keep up with other players who are just playing lands and doing something more proactive with their turn.

If anything, I think it's the opposite. If you're a deck that needs ramp, then it ought to be all the more important to you to hit your land drops as well. For a deck like Kaervek, that relies extensively on mana ramp, I'm also running 38 lands, because consistently hitting your land drops is the best way to increase your mana. That, and aggressively tutoring for mana crypt.
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Post by darrenhabib » 4 years ago

I will say that metas are a big deal to do with how you configure your lands versus artifact/land ramp.

Does your play group play a lot of symmetrical draw cards like Wheel of Fortune, Timetwister and Windfall?
Once you get into the cEDH realm, then almost every deck at the table has a number of these so you can often expect filling up your hand again.
With the limit of one land per turn, you are going to be a little punished for limiting yourself to not including a fairly low land count and having a decent amount of ramp.

Also my paper group has Winter Orb in almost every deck (seriously annoying lol), so the meta has been skewed towards cheap artifact mana to compete when it invariably hits the table from at least one player.

Now pokken did mention this idea is not for "games end on turn 5" which my suggestions revolve around decks that will try to end the game quickly
or slow them to a halt via stax if possible.

I've definitely been guilty of simply cutting lands in favor of spells, realistically probably making the decks less consistent. And honestly some of this is just due to creating primers on MTGNexus here and wanting to show off particular cards for interactions.
I could almost add another land and cut a spell to all my decks and it'll probably be correct.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Rumpy5897 wrote:
4 years ago
This is actually a great point, although it feels like a bit of a tangential benefit to "run card advantage". The fizzled ramp explosions you mention sound like the result of barfed hands without a refuel. Drawing cards means seeing cards, means seeing lands, means hitting lands, means having mana to draw cards, rinse, repeat. Most of my decks hit their land drops pretty consistently, and the only thing three of them do to help with this is be anywhere from quite to extremely draw-happy. The only deck that runs explicit land drop tech is Daxos, due to the fact the shell's draw light and goes for things like Spirit of the Labyrinth to abuse having a command zone mana sink as people are throttled on options. Still, going for the obnoxiously expensive fetchland plus Crucible setup notably improved gameplay, as the deck stopped fearing for its rocks so hard. It's also good that you bring up using tutors on lands.

Something that should be mentioned in the final write-up is the innate resilience of lands due to MLD being stigmatised. Dudes die, rocks die, lands are forever. I'd also promote the white list you made to the main body, as that's a colour that famously struggles with conventional card advantage.
Paragraph 2 highlights the difference in resiliency, or so I hope. If the high risk part isn't clear I could add a blurb about that.

Card draw is definitely the most common and also oddly neglected method of fixing the ramp fizzling issues, and I discuss it briefly. I think it warrants its own entire essay to be honest. Card draw is a thing people do incoherently more than probably anything except ramp, I think. The most common mistake I see is not spacing it out on the curve but also being reliant on very top heavy or fragile sources of card draw.

I think most of the more prolific deckbuilders here are probably not the ones just slamming a sylvan library and a harmonize in a deck and calling it a day, but you'd be surprised how often you go through some dude's deck and they're like oh I was thinking of adding one more card draw spell and they have 3 and they're all recurring insight / rishkar's expertise type stuff.

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Post by Rumpy5897 » 4 years ago

Huh, how'd I miss that? My bad. You already have that in there then.

Yeah, draw's a bit of a boring necessary evil, but it makes decks work on multiple levels. This unfortunately tends to add another layer of ubiquity to builds, as any given strategy has a certain subset of the staple draw spells that work best there. Ah well.
 
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Rumpy5897 wrote:
4 years ago
Huh, how'd I miss that? My bad. You already have that in there then.

Yeah, draw's a bit of a boring necessary evil, but it makes decks work on multiple levels. This unfortunately tends to add another layer of ubiquity to builds, as any given strategy has a certain subset of the staple draw spells that work best there. Ah well.
One of my favorite thing about deckbuilding in commander is the number of opportunities to completely subvert that though too. Ephara for example - I play like 5 card selection staples, and then the rest of just dumb Ephara creatures and such.

My Maelstrom Wanderer deck has basically one card advantage staple (maybe library and loam?) and the rest is drawing cards off land drops and wanderer.

It's pretty hard to get me to play a commander that doesn't generate CA these days though -- I just am greedy for the chicken wings of slots to play more interesting stuff.

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Post by Rorseph » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Unless it is core to the deck's strategy, the primary focus of a deck's mana engine should be on consistently hitting land drops.
This is so very true. My Aurelia deck's "ramp" package is mostly your standard white cards that put lands in your hand and a couple of mana rocks and it does its thing very well.
pokken wrote:
4 years ago
The consistency of always being on curve as opposed to sometimes ahead or behind can also be desirable depending on the mana cost distribution within a deck.
This is another underrated truism of deck building: it's better to have a curve that skews closer to 1 CMC than 3 CMC. This was a hard lesson for me to learn for EDH since there are so many great cards for the format at 3 CMC. But I'd always end up with a clogged hand because I could only do one or two things per turn cycle until well into the mid game. Having the ability to hold open mana for reactive plays is as necessary as playing more removal period. :cool:
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Post by Inkeyes22 » 4 years ago

So I rebuilt a deck that I had from memory (curse not having access to the forums on the official site!) and then I started tweaking it. I ended up with 39 lands and 8 artifact ramp spells. Now I know that sounds like a lot, and it probably is too many, but I would rather flood than get mana screwed. I am playing on Saturday and my commander costs 6 and has an artifact sub theme. I really have been thinking of adding another draw spell and cutting a land, but I really want to avoid getting mana screwed. One thought was mulligan rules can greatly affect what the right number of lands you should run as well. I know most just follow whatever tournament Magic does (London Mulligan) or some people will follow the partial-Paris etc. but how do you think this affects the number you should run?

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Inkeyes22 wrote:
4 years ago
So I rebuilt a deck that I had from memory (curse not having access to the forums on the official site!) and then I started tweaking it. I ended up with 39 lands and 8 artifact ramp spells. Now I know that sounds like a lot, and it probably is too many, but I would rather flood than get mana screwed. I am playing on Saturday and my commander costs 6 and has an artifact sub theme. I really have been thinking of adding another draw spell and cutting a land, but I really want to avoid getting mana screwed. One thought was mulligan rules can greatly affect what the right number of lands you should run as well. I know most just follow whatever tournament Magic does (London Mulligan) or some people will follow the partial-Paris etc. but how do you think this affects the number you should run?
I always design for london.

I don't think you can plot a land+ramp layout without knowing the cards in the deck. But in a typical high power artifact ramp deck (for me) I will be playing ~35 lands, ~15 ramp spells. Draw spells are dependent on how much the commander draws and the color profile.

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Post by Rumpy5897 » 4 years ago

Assuming you ever intend to play your deck outside whatever hermetic group may be house-ruling partial Paris, you should build with official mulligan rules in mind. Also, ramp totals etc. are quite dependent on your curve.

Just to once again double back to this whole card advantage thing, I also realised that all my draw-happy lists also have 10+ ramp spells each, and two of the three have a ~2.0 average CMC. That said, the clunkertown Ghired with ~3.5 average CMC still jams 10+ ramp and 10 draw.

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Post by Inkeyes22 » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Inkeyes22 wrote:
4 years ago
So I rebuilt a deck that I had from memory (curse not having access to the forums on the official site!) and then I started tweaking it. I ended up with 39 lands and 8 artifact ramp spells. Now I know that sounds like a lot, and it probably is too many, but I would rather flood than get mana screwed. I am playing on Saturday and my commander costs 6 and has an artifact sub theme. I really have been thinking of adding another draw spell and cutting a land, but I really want to avoid getting mana screwed. One thought was mulligan rules can greatly affect what the right number of lands you should run as well. I know most just follow whatever tournament Magic does (London Mulligan) or some people will follow the partial-Paris etc. but how do you think this affects the number you should run?
I always design for london.

I don't think you can plot a land+ramp layout without knowing the cards in the deck. But in a typical high power artifact ramp deck (for me) I will be playing ~35 lands, ~15 ramp spells. Draw spells are dependent on how much the commander draws and the color profile.
Sorry, yeah more info is better. The Commander is Dakkon Blackblade, and the theme is Blacksmithing, i.e. I am trying to use Artifacts to handle issues. I also have a lot of swords including Blackblade Reforged to try to voltron and at the end maybe even one shot the last person. I do have some other creatures that would carry equipment well, such as Alela, Artful Provocateur, Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni and Massacre Girl. There are not a lot of creatures though, and most start at 4 cmc or higher.

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Post by hyalopterouslemur » 4 years ago

DirkGently wrote:
4 years ago
One of the big mistakes I see people making when constructing decks is "2 mana rocks equals a land", meaning for 2 ramp spells they can cut a land. This often results in missing land drops and spending turns casting mana rocks just to keep up with other players who are just playing lands and doing something more proactive with their turn.

If anything, I think it's the opposite. If you're a deck that needs ramp, then it ought to be all the more important to you to hit your land drops as well. For a deck like Kaervek, that relies extensively on mana ramp, I'm also running 38 lands, because consistently hitting your land drops is the best way to increase your mana. That, and aggressively tutoring for mana crypt.
This! So, so much. If you're playing ramp, there's a reason. (You have expensive cards, a commander you expect to die a lot, x-spells, or a mana sink which is critical to your strategy.) If you have mana rocks and mana dorks, same, but I can add "survive my own MLD" to the list of reasons to play this way.
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Post by Magiqmaster » 4 years ago

In my Zurgo deck, I have 11 mana rocks + 36 lands to ensure he charges out of the gates ASAP, and it works wonders. Initially, this was to ensure I get back on top after using some MLD spells, but I took those out after awhile (not because players complained, but rather because I didn't really need to use that option to win most games).

As for my other decks, I try to have at least 6 - 8 mana rocks / dorks and around 37 lands in average. This seems to really function, moreso after I realized that a much lower CMC curve (around 3,4) meant I don't just sit there while opponents take the lead.

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Post by BaronCappuccino » 4 years ago

Having gone mono red in various iterations this past year, from Grenzo to Krenko to Chandra to Torbran, I've found running all the looting instants and sorceries on top of a low end of ideal land count (36 land, 11 looter spells)-- I find I never flood or drought.

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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

BaronCappuccino wrote:
4 years ago
Having gone mono red in various iterations this past year, from Grenzo to Krenko to Chandra to Torbran, I've found running all the looting instants and sorceries on top of a low end of ideal land count (36 land, 11 looter spells)-- I find I never flood or drought.
I am not sure if it was you I stole this from but it has worked out great in mono red golos using a bunch of looting spells to make sure I get golos mana.

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Post by 3drinks » 4 years ago

When can we expect more chapters to this impressive thesis?

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Post by Dunharrow » 4 years ago

Aside from my 'competitive' decks and any obvious exceptions (Mina and Denn just want to play Nykthos 2 times per turn, so I don't need to hit any lands after I tutor it), I have started throwing a lot of 1-2 mana card draw spells into decks.

It started with my Phenax deck. I had a lot of big card draw spells (BSZ, for example), and I found I kept on getting stuck at 3-4 mana, or I would get to 5 and play one card per turn for the rest of the game. So I threw in some one mana cantrips - ponder, brainstorm, etc. I also threw in Chart a Course and Night's Whisper. Deck runs so much better now.

I started adopting this approach for many other decks and I have been pleased.

I also play Mind Stone instead of Thran Dynamo. Unless I have a high-cost general Dynamo is just not interesting to me.

My Marchesa, the Black Rose's most recent addition was Dusk Legion Zealot.

It is interesting that Ravnica Bounce Lands and Scrylands both help hit land drops, but are such slow lands that we hardly play them.


But yes, I believe decks need more 1 and 2 mana draw. Very worthwhile! They are good topdecks and good in the early game.
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

3drinks wrote:
4 years ago
When can we expect more chapters to this impressive thesis?
I usually stew on ideas for years, lol. I got inspired to finally put this one down after reading this article on writing:P

http://paulgraham.com/useful.html

I do think there's a lot that could be covered on how to ramp and curves and how to blend that with card draw but I think my thoughts on that are too scattered at this point.

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