A Jeskai Control deck with Think Twice and Serum Visions can probably get away with playing slightly fewer lands than a R/W Control deck with no card advantage or filtering (which is why the R/W Control decks plays four copies of Simian Spirit Guide). Of course, there are other factors at play. Once your average nonland CMC hits 2.5, you need AT LEAST 25 lands.As your average nonland CMC climbs towards 2.25, go up to 24 as it drops towards 1.75, you can consider going down to 22. If your average spell costs two mana, then 23 lands is the number. If the average nonland CMC of your deck is around 2.0, play 23 lands.Seventeen lands is about the lowest you'll ever go in a "normal" deck, with 16 being the absolute floor. It seems that, with an average CMC of about 1.0, you're probably best off running 19 lands, although there could be an argument for 18 in some builds. If the average nonland CMC of your deck is 1.5 or less, the starting point is 20 lands. As your average CMC ticks down toward 1 (or even less), you can drop more lands.However, from the above information, we can get three simple rules of thumb. Of course, the above chart doesn't include all of the decks in Modern because decks like Tron (which have lands that tap for multiple mana) or decks with a lot of nonland mana sources (more on this in a minute) complicate the calculations. Modern Decks DeckĪs you can see, the pattern is pretty consistent. Here's my breakdown of some common decks in Modern. But, what about other decks? I'll save you the trouble of going through and calculating the average CMC for a bunch of different lists. You'll also note that the Death's Shadow list is only playing 17 lands, which is on the extreme low end for "normal" decks. For Death's Shadow, the average converted mana cost is incredibly low (likely the lowest in all of Modern) at 0.76, meaning the average nonland card in the deck costs significantly less than one mana. In the case of our Death's Shadow list, the deck is playing 43 nonlands, so we can divide 33 (the total CMC) by 43 (the number of nonlands) to find the average converted mana cost of the nonland cards in the deck. Once you have the total CMC of the nonland cards in your deck, the next step is to divide this number by the number of nonland cards in your deck. For example, Become Immense technically has a CMC of six, but if you've ever played with or against Death's Shadow Aggro, you'll know that it is most often cast for one mana, so for the sake of our calculations, we count it as one CMC rather than six. While the number written on the top right hand corner is the CMC as far as the game rules are concerned, for figuring out how many lands we need in a deck, what we are actually looking for is how much it will cost us to cast the card. You probably noticed, looking at the numbers, that figuring out the converted mana cost of a card isn't always that straightforward. Using the above Death's Shadow list as an example, you'd get something like this: The first think you do is to count up the total converted mana costs of all the nonland cards in your deck. Let's use Death's Shadow Aggro as an example: However, assuming that you're building a fairly typical deck, there is a really simple way of figuring out about how many lands you should put in your deck. Instead, this will be more of a summary of the concepts and important points.įirst off, I should warn you that this example is fairly simplistic and there are plenty of exceptions to the rules we'll be talking about (think of decks like Belcher in Legacy that only play a single land). Note: I'm not sure I can do an actual transcript this week, because it won't make much sense without the video. So, for our Brewer's Minute this week, we are going to talk about two things: first, how to calculate the right number of lands for your deck then second, with the help of some real-world examples from Modern, some rules of thumb for adding lands to your deck!ĭon't forget: if you enjoy the series (and haven't already), make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube Channel! However, over the course of time, being a land or two short leads to endless frustration. I mean, when you are choosing between a sweet spell or creature and another boring old land, the nonland spell often seems like the right choice. This got me thinking about other decks we've played, and I realized that skimping on lands is one of the most common deck-building mistakes brewers make. As a result, we often found ourselves in a position where we had the win (in the form of Enduring Ideal) in hand but were a mana or two short of actually casting our game-winning spell. The problem with the deck was pretty simple: it was skimping on land. Last week on Much Abrew, we played an Enduring Ideal deck that was super sweet but also amazingly frustrating.
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