So today I'm going to take you through a Self-Assessment I've turned into a kind of FAQ that I use every time I go to construct a mana base.
1. What Are You Trying To Accomplish?
The term "good mana base" is subjective, and even if it's not, the common, surly answer is that you want your deck to win. It's a common sense to ensure you can cast whatever spell you have at any given time. Still, some decks may have the need for more advanced utility/game plan tactics, and depend on serious color intensity from Turn 1 to the end of a game.
This first question serves to establish a dichotomy between two different kinds of mana bases- my non-elegant nicknames for them are "distracting" and "focused." Distracting isn't a bad term, per se. It's just meant to describe a very non-basic heavy mana base which employs many lands that tap for multiple colors, storage lands, bounce lands, man lands, disruptive lands like Strip Mine and Maze of Ith- basically anything that takes a thought about when to play it or activate an ability that isn't a mana ability.
Unlike "Distracting" mana bases, Focused mana bases are going to be literally all basics, next to zero lands that come into play tapped, and are honed so that you can play a 7-cost spell on turn seven, regardless of the required colored symbols. Focused mana bases will employ non-basics, but they will probably be leaning on Terramorphic Expanse and other fetchlands to ensure that spells will be cast.
While I lean more towards focused mana, playing 25+ basics and Terramorphic/Evolving Wilds in 90+ percent of my decks, mastering a blend of both will most often be the optimal mana base for a deck.
Even if you're not into labels, it's just good business to have a good vision with clear goals for your mana base. Most people find it's best to build from the ground up. This is just the opportunity to do it literally.
2. What Is The Optimum Number Of Lands To Play In A Deck?
I used to say, "Play 40. It's the magic number. It's the only number." While forty is a great benchmark for most decks, and I think it's the best place to work from if you build your mana base first, it's not always the right number for every deck. With 40, it's pretty much going ensure land plays until at least turn 6 or 7- which will hopefully allow you to see your deck in action during the Solitaire, sample draw stage of testing.
Here now, I think the better advice is to, "Count down from 40." There are several factors you can consider, and hopefully, they are all questions you can answer because you're amending your mana base after you've put your spells together. These are the factors I examine when determining land quantity:
-Draw Power/Library Manipulation.
-Average Converted Mana Cost of the Deck.
-Converted Mana Cost of the Highest Spell you can actually play (If you have an X spell, what's a satisfactory number you can put in there?)
-Converted Mana Cost of the Best Spells in your deck.
-Mana Rocks/Sources.
-Can You Get Infinite Mana? Is that the aim of the deck?
-You- Shuffle Mechanics, Luck Ratio, Personal playstyle.
Generally, I find that the optimum number is the first one that pops into my head when I ask myself this question. These days, the numbers I generate run from 36-42, with the former being a non-Azusa green deck with ramp spells galore, and fortified with all the card draw I can find, and the latter being a slower Wrexial UB deck fortified with control spells, and wants to be able to cast him at turn 10. I don't recommend trying this at home though, unless you've built a lot of decks and you've got a pretty good understanding of the last factor I listed above.
3. How Many Of Each?
This answer is pretty easy. Plug it into a Deckbuilder site, then sample draw. If you are a fellow Zoner, you may have noticed I like TappedOut.net a little too much. Having used a couple of other places, like TCG Player and Essential Magic, I'd be a fool if I told you the competition was superior. For other format variants, these alternatives are fine. For Commander, TappedOut really allows you to "build" the deck, using it as a tool throughout versus putting the deck together and posting it at the end.
For mana purposes, it is the best. There's a nice little circle graph in a circle graph once you put your deck in that demonstrates the ratio of mana symbols in your deck to the colors of mana you can tap for. It's a surefire, simple way to make sure you get it perfect.
Because science isn't always itself, be sure to give the deck a good shuffle and test (which you should be doing anyway) after you've got the numbers right. Sometimes you need more mana to cast a certain off-color spell in the deck, which is against the grains of efficiency, but necessary to strategy. So just be looking for little things like that so you can get it right. The more testing you do here, the more exact you can be.
4. What About Nonbasics?
Other than Terramorphic/Evolving Wilds, an m10/Innistrad dual, a Shock land, and possibly a Lorwyn land, there aren't many lands I'm going to immediately sleeve up outside of basics. I've found that if you make your manabase this way, then put together your spells, then tweak the land as necessary, you're able to see what's going on, and adjust accordingly.
I really only have a few non-basic specific guidelines.
-Keep lands that enter the battlefield tapped to under four, no more than 7.
-Painlands are good, but they're better when you have ways to gain life. So if you use them, make sure you have ways to do that.
-Utility lands that only tap for colorless are easy to hide in mono-colored decks and artifact decks, but the only ones worth playing otherwise are the LD Squad- Tectonic Edge, Wasteland, and the Strip Mine. Of course there is a Mikokoro Exclusion Rule here too, but it's at your own risk. If you've got that much color intensity, chances are one of the colors you're playing has some draw power anyway. Again, I'd try to play as few lands that tap for colorless as possible.
5. Did You Accomplish Your Goal(s)?
This is a question to ask yourself after you've played 1-4 games with a deck, and you've got it either fresh in your mind, or you took some quality notes about the deck.
Naturally, the deck should win. Still, there's a lot to be said about having to do "too much" piloting with your mana base that you forget triggers on more important cards, or even vice versa. You're not trying to lose out on value, so don't.
A while back I had a conversation with my playgroup about cards that "make you look stupid" because they require more work for little-to-no value. Taurean Mauler is my best example. I was playing it in Animar last year, and ended up cutting it after realizing that I just didn't care enough about my opponent's spells to remember its trigger, so I cut it for Instigator Gang.
The same can be done with lands. Don't be afraid to get back to basics. If you're playing a storage land, either use it or cut it. Other than making it more of a target, and forgetting several triggers, there's no incentive to play these outside of Proliferate decks and Vorel. So stop putting the extra responsibility on yourself, and keep the mana simple.
One of the biggest things I look for after a few play-throughs is the pace of the mana. "Smooth" and "Rocky" are the two ways I like to examine land plays- Smooth being consistent land plays and the ability to cast the cards in your hand in the turn that they become available, and Rocky being the latter, with a bunch of tap land that gives you the feel bads and makes your deck look slow.
While there is a strategy to looking open and pitiful in multiplayer, the Smooth mana base is almost always better. This isn't to say Smooth mana bases can't or won't play tap-land. Chances are a good mana base probably is. The player just has enough basics to support a tap land on a random turn.
Recently, I've started using cycle lands to test my mana. If you run into more situations where you have to play the cycle land than use it to draw a card, chances are it's just better as a basic. If it isn't, then the mana base is probably pretty smooth.
After a few games is most often when people revisit the deckbuilding process to tweak. So make sure that you're also getting in the habit of reassessing your mana base and playing with the numbers of basic lands, at the very least. That way you won't run into trouble moving forward.
Pass Turn.
-UL
Here now, I think the better advice is to, "Count down from 40." There are several factors you can consider, and hopefully, they are all questions you can answer because you're amending your mana base after you've put your spells together. These are the factors I examine when determining land quantity:
-Draw Power/Library Manipulation.
-Average Converted Mana Cost of the Deck.
-Converted Mana Cost of the Highest Spell you can actually play (If you have an X spell, what's a satisfactory number you can put in there?)
-Converted Mana Cost of the Best Spells in your deck.
-Mana Rocks/Sources.
-Can You Get Infinite Mana? Is that the aim of the deck?
-You- Shuffle Mechanics, Luck Ratio, Personal playstyle.
Generally, I find that the optimum number is the first one that pops into my head when I ask myself this question. These days, the numbers I generate run from 36-42, with the former being a non-Azusa green deck with ramp spells galore, and fortified with all the card draw I can find, and the latter being a slower Wrexial UB deck fortified with control spells, and wants to be able to cast him at turn 10. I don't recommend trying this at home though, unless you've built a lot of decks and you've got a pretty good understanding of the last factor I listed above.
3. How Many Of Each?
This answer is pretty easy. Plug it into a Deckbuilder site, then sample draw. If you are a fellow Zoner, you may have noticed I like TappedOut.net a little too much. Having used a couple of other places, like TCG Player and Essential Magic, I'd be a fool if I told you the competition was superior. For other format variants, these alternatives are fine. For Commander, TappedOut really allows you to "build" the deck, using it as a tool throughout versus putting the deck together and posting it at the end.
For mana purposes, it is the best. There's a nice little circle graph in a circle graph once you put your deck in that demonstrates the ratio of mana symbols in your deck to the colors of mana you can tap for. It's a surefire, simple way to make sure you get it perfect.
Because science isn't always itself, be sure to give the deck a good shuffle and test (which you should be doing anyway) after you've got the numbers right. Sometimes you need more mana to cast a certain off-color spell in the deck, which is against the grains of efficiency, but necessary to strategy. So just be looking for little things like that so you can get it right. The more testing you do here, the more exact you can be.
4. What About Nonbasics?
Other than Terramorphic/Evolving Wilds, an m10/Innistrad dual, a Shock land, and possibly a Lorwyn land, there aren't many lands I'm going to immediately sleeve up outside of basics. I've found that if you make your manabase this way, then put together your spells, then tweak the land as necessary, you're able to see what's going on, and adjust accordingly.
I really only have a few non-basic specific guidelines.
-Keep lands that enter the battlefield tapped to under four, no more than 7.
-Painlands are good, but they're better when you have ways to gain life. So if you use them, make sure you have ways to do that.
-Utility lands that only tap for colorless are easy to hide in mono-colored decks and artifact decks, but the only ones worth playing otherwise are the LD Squad- Tectonic Edge, Wasteland, and the Strip Mine. Of course there is a Mikokoro Exclusion Rule here too, but it's at your own risk. If you've got that much color intensity, chances are one of the colors you're playing has some draw power anyway. Again, I'd try to play as few lands that tap for colorless as possible.
5. Did You Accomplish Your Goal(s)?
This is a question to ask yourself after you've played 1-4 games with a deck, and you've got it either fresh in your mind, or you took some quality notes about the deck.
Naturally, the deck should win. Still, there's a lot to be said about having to do "too much" piloting with your mana base that you forget triggers on more important cards, or even vice versa. You're not trying to lose out on value, so don't.
A while back I had a conversation with my playgroup about cards that "make you look stupid" because they require more work for little-to-no value. Taurean Mauler is my best example. I was playing it in Animar last year, and ended up cutting it after realizing that I just didn't care enough about my opponent's spells to remember its trigger, so I cut it for Instigator Gang.
The same can be done with lands. Don't be afraid to get back to basics. If you're playing a storage land, either use it or cut it. Other than making it more of a target, and forgetting several triggers, there's no incentive to play these outside of Proliferate decks and Vorel. So stop putting the extra responsibility on yourself, and keep the mana simple.
One of the biggest things I look for after a few play-throughs is the pace of the mana. "Smooth" and "Rocky" are the two ways I like to examine land plays- Smooth being consistent land plays and the ability to cast the cards in your hand in the turn that they become available, and Rocky being the latter, with a bunch of tap land that gives you the feel bads and makes your deck look slow.
While there is a strategy to looking open and pitiful in multiplayer, the Smooth mana base is almost always better. This isn't to say Smooth mana bases can't or won't play tap-land. Chances are a good mana base probably is. The player just has enough basics to support a tap land on a random turn.
Recently, I've started using cycle lands to test my mana. If you run into more situations where you have to play the cycle land than use it to draw a card, chances are it's just better as a basic. If it isn't, then the mana base is probably pretty smooth.
After a few games is most often when people revisit the deckbuilding process to tweak. So make sure that you're also getting in the habit of reassessing your mana base and playing with the numbers of basic lands, at the very least. That way you won't run into trouble moving forward.
Pass Turn.
-UL
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