Your Manabase Deserves Better

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Hitting your land drop every single turn is one of the most powerful things you can do in a game of Magic.

Seen plenty of commander lists where I'm like "Wow look at all these amazing spells this deck is running" and then I see the land count and I'm like "That explains it."

Going "base green" in your manabase can alleviate pip scarcity, i.e. filter/fix your mana, even on a budget. Non-green decks can use the talisman/signet cycles to do the same.

I remember hearing from some magic pro (might have been PVDDR?) that you can improve almost any decklist you find online by just swapping out two spells for two lands. You could probably bump that number up to four when it comes to commander decks.

In my opinion the best way to avoid feeling the pain of cutting cards for lands is to just decide your number of lands before the deck is made and don't let yourself change it until you've built the deck and played it enough to make a decision about if the land count needs to go up or down. I typically run less lands than the internet recommends, but I also tend to run a lot of ramp, and I've been slowly increasing my land counts over the years.

I do actually find I make the reverse statement a lot. Like, an opening hand with 4 lands, a premium 2 drop, and a 4 drop then 5 drop. I would feel like “hun this hand is neat, if I can draw something that I can play before turn 3 that would be great.”

Lands are once per turn zero drop mana rocks that your other cards rely on to work.

As much as I largely agree with your point about people being attached to certain cards, I do think "cursing the luck gods" happens just as much in the other direction, where someone instead read something about going with ~40 lands, did that, got flooded in the two games they played that month, and decided it was just a luck issue. I think that's why this sort of video is so incredible (as with the rest of your content); simple, concise, evidence-based reasoning does a lot to combat very human biases and fallacies. Really good video, especially as someone who's always agonizing about whether I've got too many or too little lands.

Some great points but I think it's a little too easy to discount mana curve. In your Meria deck there's 37 lands in a deck with average mana value of less than 3 using hypergeometric distribution we find that theres about an 80% chance of having 3 lands by turn 3. If we plug in 28 lands its still a 60% chance of hitting all the land drops you need to play the average of your deck which means with the one free mulligan you get it pretty consistently with an 84% chance, 94% if you commit the unthinkable of going to 6. In a deck with a low enough mana curve you don't need to play a lot of lands sense you can leverage your mulligan to help and with a high enough card quality going to 6 cards is far from the end of the world.

The most interesting thing to me about these videos is seeing all the solutions to my deck building problems I've experienced over the years boiled down into a very comprehensive video. Any points I've disagreed with are entirely opinion based. Hats off to the Snail for another excellent upload.

I just wanted to say that your Meria deck you've touted in various videos inspired me to make Thalia and The Gitrog Monster deck with a similair theme, and in testing, it looks like your deckbuilding ideas are really effective. Relating back to this video, the mana base is a thick 40, too, since Thalrog is so land-hungry, and I think the points you've made here and in your other vids about deckbuilding are valid.

Red decks can cheat code the high land count thing with the discard-draw effects it's filled with, plus a glorious 2-drop called Tectonic Reformation which lets you cycle lands that are in-hand. And if you aren't worried about speed, the new capenna fetches are really good as each one played reduces the lands-in-deck count by 2.

Every arena deck has both too many and too little lands at the same time. Truly a miracle

Your technical while grokable videos are exactly what newer players need and experienced players appreciate seeing put into words. Great work!

When people ask me how many lands they should run I always say "more than they think".

I came to the “more lands” realization recently since I’m most of my decks the limiter is almost always mana and not cards, and if I need cards I can look the the command zone. A majority of my decks run 40 lands minimum now

I started adding more lands, ramp and card draw to my decks several years ago, along with having enough lands that produce the right colors. That worked and in the mean time I have started putting in better and more synergistic other cards in my decks. Cutting back a tad on the lands where it is appropriate is something that I have learned recently.

10:45 an easy way to fix this issue with the article is to treat spells played later as if they had some extra generic mana to them. So for example, with counterspell, it costs UU, but I might treat it like its 3UU for the chart, or even 3UUU, so I think about being able to play a blue spell and hold up counterspell on a later turn.

Proxying i think should absolutely be encouraged more in play groups especially for lands. Unless a guy is proxying the power 9 into his deck i have no qualms with it. And depending on what power level is being played i still wouldnt mind. I proxy crack and shock lands for a 3 colour commander of mine (i didnt proxy the og dual lands because i felt its more fair for the good lands to actually have a cost)