I've been playing MTG for 15 years and every time I watch one of your videos, I still learn something something new. I've been playing with ultra-high power groups and decks for so long that I had forgotten that i don't need to use the best of the best cards to have a spicy brew. I checked out your Radha brew a few minutes ago and tested it out on archidekt because i wanted to *see* the land count in action and was floored when i realized you pull lands out of the deck itself so quickly that you never really feel that 41 land count.
i learned nothing .. this video was kind of a nothing burger even and you should not play more lands "lands let you cast spells" ok dude, all the information was soooo basic and the conclusion to play more lands is dubious. maybe if you played magic for 15 weeks this is exciting stuff..
@@resy-t9382 Who doesn't struggle at deck building? Unless you just pull your deck off the Internet. But do you then just know how to play it automatically? No, I've had to coach these players to play their deck correctly (and not accidentally cheat). The point of these videos is that a lot of us cut lands to put in more interesting things and it isn't because of being bad at deck building, it's because we're greedy gamblers, lol. In other words, we enjoy the higher risk leading to higher reward. I actually play the deck and alter the counts based on what works most for how I want it to play. In other words, everyone can keep learning about deck building so that we can build more interesting decks that are consistently fun to play as well as competitive. It's a much harder task in 100 card Singleton than in any other format
Imagine wasting a decade and a half playing the game in the worst manner when its meant to be casual I pity you, life sucks when all you do is meta game
While his logic was flawed, it's hard to argue with results. Assuming he was also playing enough draw engines to make up for the increase flood potential this probably led to more fun and consistent decks overall even if with better applications of math and testing he probably could have got similar or better results with less . Most people in my experience don't play enough lands.
@sethstephens4777 There is zero reason. Running the hypergeometric distribution gives you exact figures of how often you'll draw x lands by x turn. Adding lands into it because it makes you feel good to flood rather than starve is top tier confirmation bias, and that's why most of you couldn't play in competitive formats even if you could afford it
recently, I've been forceably cutting cards to get all my decks up to 38-40 lands, and even for my low mana value decks, it has been worth it. I hate so much how well it helps adding more lands lol
@Lazydino59 the problem with MDFCs is that they are two less good versions of what you actually want. If I'm putting it in as land, I don't want it coming in tapped. If it's taking up one of my spell slots, like, say, removal, I can get better removal than any MDFC. Which is just going to get me to cut either of them to be replaced with the better version of what I'm primarily using them for.
@@jasonritner9662you are trying to use both sides of the card simultaneously in your example when it is in fact one card. It's a tapped land when you need a land. If you dont need lands, it's an inefficient spell. That's not such a bad thing.
That's because there's no correct number of lands to have since it depends on the context of the individual deck. I have Syr Ginger eggs deck with 32 lands that both has a super low curve and draws enough lands because of the eggs. I also have a 3 color Omnath landfall deck with 55 lands because it's built in a way where those lands either generate value to get to my win condition or turn into my backup win condition.
@@Albinamo I don't have it online. It's pretty much all the eggs that I could stuff in the deck, artifact synergies, artifact recursion, a few pieces of creature protection, some colorless rocks, and utility lands. It wins through commander damage and Commander's Plate is potentially the most powerful card in the deck because it gives Syr Ginger protection from removal and makes it almost unblockable.
Your Radha deck is sick, and absolutely inspired me to make a Kellan deck with the same principle. The high land count is absolutely vital, and this video does an excellent job of showing why. Well done as usual Sergeant Snail!
@@51gunner Keruga is absolutely the true king of the deck. Kellan does his job and does it well, but all in service of the Primordial Hippo! And @deadstones1 I see what you're going for there, 100% a rad strategy but choosing Keruga (the aforementioned hippo) forces you to only run spells with mana value 3 or greater
if the biggest takeaway of the video is that he wrote a word wrong that says alot about the video.. also you guys cant also be sonic fans, thats just ideal and perfect stereotype
@@petrseghman4283 oh it was intended alright, makes it even worse imo, you werent being rude, i was! because this video is clearly overrated and i am jealous because he can get such a great feedback with such a bad video, so SOMEBODY has to try to humble this essay kid
As a new player ten years ago, once I understood the problems of flooding/screw I instantly thought that the cycling lands were severely underrated. Ten years later and I've never regretted jamming as many as possible in my decks.
I'm personally not a fan of the tapland aspect. That being said, I'll max out on surveil lands in my decks with fetches for similar selection reasons. Plus they can dig for lands in the early game.
@@nothing4mepls973 if your cycle lands dont have to compete with better lands ok but you refuse to play fetches? how much is your insight even worth at that point
I love MDFC's and Utility Lands. My Lumra deck has only 15 basics and the rest of the 46 lands are utility lands; which is nuts in mono-green. When I have a hand of only lands, that might include ramp (myriad landscape), or removal (blast zone), or card draw (war room). Card types dont matter so long as they do the things you need.
I love the idea that I can make my own decks, enjoy brainstorming what cards can go into what deck, get excited about new cards relevant to my decks, but there is so much to consider to make a deck an actual functioning deck that does what you would like it to do, I feel unable to put together cards myself to construct it. Always feel like whatever I cobble together is lacking, then I research and I feel I learn, but this cycle never stops and everything feels unsatisfactory. Learned so much about manabases and land counts that I need to restructure/retool all of my decks to make sure they are playable with new logic. Hopefully this is a painpoint that alienates the sense of disfunction with my builds.
Honestly, as someone playing EDH for a decade now, I'm pretty sure much of this is just an issue of modern EDH philosophy being so far removed from how the format used to be. Casual rounds were normally truly casual with a bunch of house rules and shitty pet cards, with most decks being nigh unplayable by even modern precon standards. Made learning how to build a deck far easier and way less punishing.
@@Zakading Not to forget the FOMO mongering that is happening all over social media, with people almost starting lynch mobs when someone says that 3 cmc rocks are indeed perfectly playable and stuff like that, on top of all the power creeping, that feels more like power running nowadays. Definitely makes it way harder for new brewers to get into crafting whitout being overwhelemed by the sheer amount of "must have, auto include staple cards" being appraised on each corner.
honestly, for the decks you've already built, it's probably better for you just to apply these lens when you feel the need to address specific issues you encounter when playing them, rather than getting the anxious urge to tear it all down. you don't have to be too sweaty about it if all you really wanna do is rotate cards with friends and friendly strangers on a good afternoon
@@Zakading Time changes a lot, I have been into and out of magic since for over two decades now and what I cared about changes as I get older so its hard to say what was better ya know? I feel this though, even when commander wasn't a thing my friends and I played multiplayer games and it never worked well but it was fun.
Hey Snail - as a long-time Gates fan, I'm looking forward to Das Manifesto. One thing you probably won't cover, but that I realized while goldfishing a new Gates build recently: Baldur's Gate and Modern Horizons have made them the opposite of what they used to be. You can now play a two-color Maze's End deck where most of your Gates have colorless identity and come in untapped - the antithesis of what a Guildgate should be. And Sage of the Maze is a truly bonkers card as the icing on the cake. On the one hand, it's cool to see Gates be powerful and flexible, but the feeling I have more of is "look how they massacred my boy's identity." Anyway, off of my soapbox. Looking forward to the rest of this video and especially the next, as always.
@@MisterWebb The original gates gave you the upside of good mana fixing (as duals) at the price of speed (entering play tapped). To play their dedicated win-con, you needed to play 10 uniquely-named ones, necessitating being in all colors. Now, there are a whopping 8 gates with colorless identities: Baldur's, Basilisk, Gond, Heap, Talon, Planar Nexus, Gateway Plaza, and Thran Portal. Out of these, 6 come into play untapped, and one makes all the others come into play untapped too. This reverses the formula - they mostly aren't great fixing but there's no loss of speed. So the original functionality is turned on its head, but the flavor is completely lost. Now you only need to play one color pair to get to more than 10; e.g. Simic gives you its namesake gate, plus Sea and Manor - that's 11, and you can make it an Omo deck as a bonus. Your Maze's End win is doable with only a single guild in attendance! Heck, in mono-black you have the Black Gate of Mordor allowing mono-black maze's end (even if it's not especially good). To me, that's a huge flavor fail. Edit: and Sage of the Maze is just a nutty card. Even with 0 gates it's a hyperefficient dork - but it also makes every one of your gates tap for 2 - and in a dedicated gates deck it can pull a massive board swing out of nowhere. I've goldfished it into 50 damage on turn 5 with minimal effort. That's just... the epitome of MH3C to me, giving the archetype cards that are busted rather than cards that fit their spirit.
@@WWASHD It's normal for players of old decks to feel alienated by support that simultaneously increases power level and changes identity. Yugioh in particular tends to do that a lot, taking decks with clear thematic weaknesses and fixing the weakness instead of doubling down on strengths. One deck in particular, Lightsworn, was a strong meta deck with a lot of powerful cards that had the "cost" of self-mill at the end of every turn, combined with one medium sized guy who summoned himself when milled and some effects that required you to have a lot of Lightsworn monsters (every Yugioh deck is tribal) in your graveyard. The thing was, the self mill was actually fast enough that if you developed a board and then got stalled out for even a few turns you would just mill yourself and lose the game. Didn't come up much, but it was always in your mind as an alternate win condition against the deck if things went bad. Fast forward a few years and Lightsworn's powerful cards are no longer powerful, so Konami decides to give them some legacy support. First thing they do? Give them an effect that says "You can shuffle any number of Lightsworn monsters from your grave into your deck, then gain life based on the number shuffled". Did very little to boost the playability of the deck because their cards still just didn't have the raw power they used to. So, time for more support. Now they get a bunch of cards based around banishing (exiling) Lightsworn from your grave. Might as well be an entirely different deck by this point. Another deck I liked was a slow deck with nearly infinite resources whose cards shuffled back into the deck when destroyed, far too slow to be meta. Two waves of support later it's a very fast swarm deck. I haven't played it since. It's gotten to the point where I'd begun hoping my favorite deck (ten years old at this point, can't function in modern Yugioh) would never get support so it wouldn't be changed into something unrecognizable. New support has been announced, and I'm simultaneously excited for the deck to be playable again and worried I won't like it. We'll see how it goes.
Hey man, I've been sick for the last month or so, and every time I think I'm starting to feel better, I go back to work and immediately get laid out again. I don't know if you're relying on this channel to pay rent, but if you're not, please take all the time you need. Yeah, it'll fuck up your metrics in the short term, but your niche on youtube is extremely secure. No one else is putting out MtG theory videos with anything close to this level of insight and lucidity. Take care of yourself.
Hey Snail! Thank you so much for making these videos. Just played my Temur 10th Doc and Susan foreman deck based on your Radha list for the first time and won two games back to back.
This video is super well done, I enjoy the focus on testing and understanding what the land count is doing. My partner runs a 42 land Atla Nest Tender list cause "Missing the land just means the deck loses" and it doesn't really care about what's in hand, just that there's something to hatch eggs. On the flip side I have a very tight Errant and Giada list running low 30s lands. It curves out at 3 with very few 4 mana cards. It's a scary deck to consider the curve of cause every land you add, decreases the chance that Errant and Giada het to play from the top. But every missed land drop prevents it from essembling a wide board of flying lords.
If your Errant and Giada deck runs pretty well now, that’s impressive to hear how it runs with low 30s lands. My Galea is still high 30s lands while wanting to cast as many auras and equipment (which if cast that way, can auto-equip to one of my creatures!). My solution has been many lands that ETB or have outlets to draw, scry, surveil or search my library for a basic land (to shuffle the library). I hope that this helps and let me know if you want the deck list.
Your Radha deck is what inspired me to brew several decks with Susan Foreman in the command zone, my favorite of which being Susan + The Sixth Doctor. Susan on 2, 4 mana ramp on 3, and we play enough lands to have a land drop on 4 so that we can play the Sixth Doctor and hold up 1 mana for protection (we play many 1-cost protection spells to make sure we untap with the doc). After that, the deck is filled with big historic bombs that threaten to end the game when copied, such as Koma, God-Pharaoh's Statue, Old Gnawbone, 8 mana Ugin, Karn's Temporal Sundering, etc. It's a blast to play and very frequently becomes archenemy.
The tricky part is going to be looking at my decks and deciding which cards I want to cut for lands. Going forward, I'm probably going to start building decks by adding lands first so that I'm attached to them.
Instead of building front to back, you build bottom to top. Start with your commander and 2-5 key cards. Then add enough lands to draw into consistently. Then you add the rest of your deck in a way that fits into your land and draws probability. Whether you go higher or lower on the overall land spectrum depends on your commander and key cards@WWASHD
My strategy is to find payoff cards with the least amount of support and cut those, since they're the most likely to be dead cards and also more likely to be higher mana value, which lowers my curve when I cut.
@WWASHD If you're not on a budget, then Fetches, Shocks, Surveil lands and 2 basics per colour plus Demolition Field goes a long way. Then you fill in with MDFC'S, LotR landcyclers and running down through the list of duals until you hit 40 lands. Once you've got the rest of the deck sorted, adjust the dual land count accordingly.
Shoulda been the Combo Coefficient! Excellent video! Every point was well said and needs to be echoed in more groups. Treasure generation also is a huge thing that can affect land base, but even in those heavy treasure-making decks I still like to keep it in the 36-38 range. Frank Karsten's article on optimal commander landbases is a tool I reference as a starting point when building any deck from scratch.
I basicaly use Frank Karsten's formula but I expanded the categories for substraction where it makes sense. For example I count bounce lands and lord of the rings cyclers as tapped mdfcs (0.38). Good rule of thumb is also thinking about which cards draw or ramp when you have only two mana avelaible. This is why catch up ramp that you play on 3 like Knight of the White Orchid is also in the 0.28 category with cards like Three Visits.
The importance of deck churn and deck speed can't be overstated in the land count "debate", and I say this as someone with a chronic addiction to run fewer lands than necessary.
Ran the equation mentioned on the only deck of mine that wasn't an altered precon, the equation gave me 38.09 (average mana cost of 3.92, 20 ramp/draw spells that cost 3 or less), this was very close to the 39 land count I had settled on myself after playtesting a lot and making the changes I felt necessary. You're right that you really need to take the goals and playstyle of the deck into account when deciding on these things. I also run many cycle lands and cycle cards since the deck has a cycling theme (thanks for showing my Astral Slide btw, I run Astral Drift and Escape Protocol but I wasn't aware of slide) which I know helps me both hit my land drops every turn or get out of a mana-flood situation. Cheers, Snail
I just got into a big discussion from a recent video that claimed to just have a math answer for all/most EDH decks, love that this one had a lot of nuance to the understanding of land count. Ability to find land and wish to play lands really are huge parts of it, even in low curve decks I've found myself on high land counts before just because of how they didn't really have the ability to find lands (mono red najeela for example was on 38 because honestly how are we going to find land #4 in mono red if not by putting it in our deck?)
Stop coping. "b-b-but it's not all decks!" no, but it's 99% of all decks. Are you really going to tell me that the average commander zoomer isn't playing a 6 drop commander with an average cmc of 5.5 with 32 lands? Get real
I love this video. I've built a big mana glarb deck and I've got shy of 45 lands in the deck. I'm able to deal with land flood or drought using glarb's ability to filter the top cards of my deck combined with a bunch of extra land so cards and effects. It's really fun to play 4 lands in a turn and see people go crazy at having 10 lands turn 5
Premium stuff as always. I find myself to rely on your videos to hone my deckbuilding skills, if nothing else just to have a more skilled perspective on the subject Great job
Yeah you did a Patreon review on my deck and that was the major issue with it you pointed out, so I feel like I contributed to this. I have in fact added more lands since!
Such a good thought to not just ask, what's too little lands, but also what's too many! Just these questions alone immediately make it obvious how there's a range to functional landcounts and that choosing a number within that range is so much more complex than just minimizing it.
My lowest land count is 33. It’s mono green with selvala as the commander. This was a fun video and will influence part of my deck building moving forward. I don’t imagine it’ll change a ton since I like the cantrip type draw that plays early but a big part of that is guaranteeing land drops so maybe I’ll rebalance that. Thank you for the new perspective.
I completely re-tooled my Yurlok deck using your Radha approach. I have a 4-mana ramp spell in the command zone, 18 2-mana ramp spells, and a bunch of dumb beaters removal and draw. Sooo much better (and more fun) than the traditional group slug build.
Okay this video came out at a perfect time for me. I just got back from my first time playing my Ashling, Flame Dancer deck, and it made me realize that I need fewer lands and more card draw than I expected. I was running 40 mountains and I figured I would need that many to hit my big storm turns, but in reality, I often NEED the top card of my library to be an instant or sorcery so that I can dig deep enough in my deck to find my win con cards like Grape Shot and Mizzix's Mastery. I also desperately need to add more cantrips.
Just 2 days ago I learned of your videos via Sams (Rhystic Studies) newsletter, but didn't watch the one he recommended because I already watch to much magic stuff😅 Then just now UA-cam showed me this video. There's few things I love more than fine tuning a decks mana base so I had to watch it. I should have trusted Sams recommendation, this was great!
I settled on 40 lands for my $30 budget WUBRG Azlask deck and since then haven’t run a deck below 40 lands. It feels so nice to worry less about land drops and I haven’t had a problem with getting flooded
i built a UG "snail-radha"-esque deck with Susan Foreman and The Fourth Doctor and it has been a lot of fun. i run 41 lands, but because of the high average mana value and the draw from the doctor i rarely feel flooded.
This reminds me of the time I shoved the Landscapes into my 4 color Omnath deck by cutting basic lands... then later in games realizing I had ran out of basic lands in the deck, which lead me into adding graveyard recursion to recover lands, only to realize I now ran out of basic lands to fetch even faster. Should have started cutting pet cards and added those extra basics looooong ago! Of course my landfall matters decks deserves over 40 lands, I was just too blind to see it.
Personally, I always find it's a bit of a bummer to make space for lands in any commander deck. When I make a deck I compile a bunch of cards I think are cool or combo well, and I always have to drop a good portion of them, which is shocking considering it's a 99 card deck.... The culprit? Lands. At least 35 cards of the deck have to be lands, and at least 10 cards "have" to be ramp cards, which leaves 55 cards for the main deck. Which sounds like a lot but a lot still has to be left out of the deck, and it feels bad. The temptation to remover lands from these decks is real, but it leads to not having land. No matter how well lands are implemented, they are always a problem, I would honestly prefer "conjuring" land from nowhere but that's unrealistic and is an unfair nerf to cards that interact with lands in the hand/deck/graveyard/exile. It's... frustrating.
One thing you might want to consider is running cycling lands (i.e. drifting meadow, lonely sandbar, and canyon slough). Any 2 color deck can run 5 of these, which means you effectively have the same odds of mana screw as a 40 land deck and the same odds of mana flood as a 35 land deck.
So I just watched the land video from a year ago, just in time to watch this now today, 17 hours after. What are the odds? Lol thank you for helping me with my weakest point in magic.
I am one of those people who made my own version of your Rada deck, and I didn't even realize I cut lands. I cut the nonbasics I didn't have and guess I just never replace a few of them. Wild. Time to make some cuts.
I like how I only got to watch this the very day I've tested the hand calculator at "Exactly: 0" to know how often I have to mulligan no land hands to then assess if the deck is able to operate with smaller hands.
I've played a couple games with your Radha deck and loved it! Couldn't resist slipping in an Apex Devastator and Call Forth the Tempest, (yet to see if that was a good decision) but going off this video perhaps I want to double down on cascade by thinning the pool of cards and replacing them with even more lands....
I like to do the math and put enough sources of mana that I have 80% probability to do something important on the right turn. For instance, 37 lands give 80% chance to have 3 lands on turn 3. Same for ramp, you can calculate how many ramp spells you need. If your commander is 5 mana value and you want to always ramp on turn 3 to play it on turn 4, you can calculate the exact probabilities to have a rock or extra land on the table at the right turn. Also works for other important cards for your game plan, you may want to draw at least 2 removals or counterspells before turn 4 for a control deck, get a board wipe on turn X just before you play your commander, get a draw engine by turn Y, get an overrun style effect before turn Z etc... You choose 3 or 4 conditions like that, calculate the probabilities, put enough cards of those types (which will take most of your deck), and then fill the gaps with synergistic cards. It makes decks incredibly consistent at what they do and makes the deckbuilding much easier
Totally on board with this take. Not so long ago, I saw a video from Sam Black where he also explained why we should play more lands and less mana rocks / ramp in some decks, that the more or less default of 37 + at least 10 ramp that some templates are adamant about is wrong for most commanders. He also insisted is more important to play a land each turn than to ramp. Since then I play more lands, less mana rocks, more early card advantage and more mana sinks and my decks seem to run smoother. Take care, Snail. We miss you, but dont force yourself
1:40 I have a general principle of starting with 32 non MDFC in a deck and then upping it as needed for the deck's curve and needs. i also tend to run bounce lands as a way of returning MDFC I want to hand. so lairs, the guild bounces, and such. i find 32 works for the really low-to-the-ground decks i tend to build. but recently ive been branching out for those decks and modifying my land base style to fit. originally i only ran 32 lands but my experiment with a high-cost deck in sharks tribal helped me see the value of MDFC and bounce lands and adding the tach to all my decks made them more consistent.
I like to combine the 8x8 rule with this because it means you can use one of the 8 groups as a relief valve for your lands. And it works out great, too, because the system treats 35 lands as automatic, meaning 35 + 8 = 43, which is about where I think most control decks want to be. And because of MDFCs, you can just put a bunch of MDFCs in that 8th spot and cut/swap as needed.
i think trinket mage did a video that went over optimal land count (overall with math and % chance to have x lands by turn x) and it was very good, i used it and havent had land issues but was noticing flooding in stuff like my rabbit deck. this will be a good useful watch to see about how many lands i can cut to help speed up the deck in the mid game where i would be topdecking a rabbit but have 6 many i could burn
I built a first doctor/susan foreman big mana deck and used your radha deck for inspiration. The first thing i tried to do was cut lands, down to my usual 38, and then i tested and found out exactly why you had as many as you do. Ended up bumping it to 40 for basically the exact reasons you described, and my only reason for not doing 41 is that i have two commanders and one is a tutor so it throws the ratio off lol
I just got into Magic extremely recently (naturally gravitated towards Green/blue) and am currently playing with my first deck, and sitting on a MK3 within 3 days of play testing. I created a Landfall deck, aesi as my commander. I’m sitting around 40-42 lands and its consistently winning early despite my intent for it to be more late game. Its also auto decked me via Collector Collusi and its transformed into “I have my entire deck played and accessible for 1 turn before I risk blowing up and losing”
Another underrated way to sneak in half a land are the Ixalan DFC lands, sure you gotta do a little work to get em but they are all pretty good if you count them as half a land. (and don't load up on them too much, two or 3 of them at most) and usually the weaker the front half is, the easier it is to flip around, like Path of Mettle isn't much to look at on the front side (aside from nuking someone's Llanowar Elf occasionally) but the flip effect is a fairly low bar and the backside is incredibly effective as a mana sink.
One deck I made was a Bolas Planeswalker deck. It has an astonishing 29 lands but it works. It has a lot of artefact ramp, artefacts matter and Mana cheating to still go for the big and color intensive Planeswalker. I'm very happy, how the deck feels and performs.
Great video as usual. I think there's a lot of old "conventions" or assumptions that people should be willing to question or evaluate. Instead of accepting. I'm often surprised by edh players who don't build with consideration to the play pattern of their deck. Not just mana curve, but what the deck wants/ should be doing each turn. Taking actions early isn't inherently powerful or cEDH. Every deck can make use of early turns. For set up. For slowing down faster decks. Etc. I have an inverse Maelstrom wanderer deck. And even starting at 41 lands, i moved up to 50+ because hitting every land drop was so important. Being able to cast that first spell was worth more than having multiple uncastables in hand.
One of my favorite decks has 45 lands. I have never drawn more than two lands in the first five mulligans. Until December last year, this was actually _one_ land, until I drew a second land for the first time in my most recent match. I'm running 37 lands and funny rocks from now on, as the amount of lands clearly doesn't matter. I will live with this curse.
One thing that helped me psychologically make the jump to more lands was to run more utility lands that still tapped for mana. MDFC’s, Channel lands, and lands that just plain do other things help me increase my overall count, without making me feel as though I need to cut staples. Nothing better than a twofer!
I have 45 lands in tatyova. Its amazing how everytime i cut a card for a land, it feels better to play. Obviously its land focused, but i still take that learning to my other decks. It feels really good to cast spells consistently
Honestly whenever I build a deck I play it like two or three times then add 2-3 lands/MDFC’s. Any less than 38ish lands you lack the consistency to play the game unless you are a hyper-efficient and tuned deck. But every deck is different, but most players are not great deck builders and get greedy and haven’t heard of hypergeometric calculators and don’t understand statistics and end up mana screwed far too often
I'm much the same, except I count the LotR land landcyclers as MDFC's too. Lorien Revealed is especially cracked as a Draw Spell/Tapland/Noxious revival split card.
@@simonteesdale9752 I also count those lands as MDFCs but how is Lorien Revealed a Noxious Revival? The cycle of LOTR lands is completely cracked though I still play them even when they virtually have no text other than the land Cycling ability; just being able to fetch a dual land and put a card in the graveyard is almost always useful. Their "tapland" mode is so much better than an actual tapland since you can pay the 1 at instant speed (you don't have to decide between interaction or a tapland until before your next turn)
@@jayjayhooksch1 You can islandcycle for Mystic Sanctuary. Troll can also fetch Witch's cottage. Both also have the very funny line of fetching the Sanctuary/Cottage and then using that to put the cycler on top to guarantee another land drop.
You can also replace some of your lands with land cycling cards. Sometimes you lose a little tempo but when you are flooding something like abundant harvest or traverse the ulvenwald become powerful top decks.
when i played Arena regularly, my pride and joy was a Kethis brawl deck that ran 43 of god's own lands. now i think that was probably slightly too many, but with a pretty high curve, and the commander being a 3 mana removal lightningrod that can recur your whole graveyard, the deck got a whole lot of mileage out of consistently hitting land drops. can't imagine going below 40. The KND legendary lands took some of the edge off, for sure.
Everything in my deckbuilding process changed the moment I realized that (single-mana-producing) mana rocks only contribute as ramp until the next time you miss a land drop, at which point you're caught back up to where you'd be if you just played a land. Sometimes that's still worth it! But a lot of the time it's not.
I used to play casually like 8 years ago, a friend got into the game just now and I went to the card store to get a box deck. The guy at the store told me the 'land base' could use upgrading and I realized I had some learning to do 😂
Okay, all the edh youtubers have to be in a discord and planned all this (or some big content creator made a video I missed that was bad???) How have like 4 different EDH channels made land base videos in the last week?
I've really been enjoying more lands in all my decks recently. As an example, I pushed my Kadena morph deck from 35 to 39 lands and I've noticed from testing just that slight increase has reduced missing a land drop between turn 3-4 significantly. I always feel like I'll have Kadena on curve and once my draw engine gets going be able to have a land drop every turn following.
once again making my 40 basic land Temur Sabertooth PDH deck feel validated, it really does reach a point it can replay the same creature that ramps on etb like 4 times in a turn just to have ridiculous amounts of mana
I saw somebody's vid about how decks should have 43 lands and i built a few test decks to check that land count and even in really low to the ground decks it's really good. Ive also been looking into using a bunch more spirited companion type cards and both changes are positive.
I made a similar deck similar to your Radha deck using Ruby, Daring Tracker and I don't know if you are open to suggestions but I found dense foliage to be a very useful card for the deck. It is called Dense foliage. A three cost enchantment that makes creatures unable to be targeted by spells. Since my deck doesn't run anything that targets a creature while on the stack it doesn't actually affect me. As well as a singular boardwipe in Collision of realms. It shuffles every creature into the deck then everyone who shuffled a creatures reveals from top until they get a creature. Since I run 30 six/seven cost creatures it almost always ends with me getting the most out of it.
My Varina, the Lich Queen EDH deck runs more mana sources than non-mana sources, and it still adds on by running things like Dreamscape Artist and Deep Gnome Terramancer. Why? Two reasons he touched on, one reason he didn't. Varina has my favorite mana sink, exile cards from graveyard, make zombies at instant speed. She also has a very strong card selection engine and a very efficient way to dump tons of cards into the graveyard, by attacking with those zombies. Therefore, having a lot of lands and rocks means I'll usually have her out a turn or two early, she'll usually come into play with some cards in the graveyard to work with already, and she can discard lands to her ability without compromising her land drops later and still maximize her zombie-making ability. Having consistent land drops means she can make more zombies every round, which improves her card selection. The third reason he didn't touch on: Land Tax. Land tax in any deck that says "Discard, Then Draw" or "Draw, Then Discard" regularly allows you to boost *way ahead* in actual card advantage by turning usually lackluster or forgettable card selection options into very efficient options by ditching extraneous, nigh-guaranteed basic lands that fill your hand every turn. The only downside to Land Tax is that if you run very few lands, you'll get fewer pulls from the deck, which shorts your effective card advantage from land tax long term. If you've got a consistent looting outlet, high land counts are an outstanding thing to have, and access to Land Tax turns that up to 11.
I'd be quite interested to hear you go into more detail about the deck testing process. As a new player I'd like to have an idea of whether my deck sucks or not before I start spending money on it or not but I'm not sure what the best way to do that is
Something you can do before buying a deck would be to use the playtesting feature available in deckbuilding websites such as Archidekt. You can run through the first 5-6 turns of the game, see if you're able to hit all your land drops and get set up for a solid gameplan, and then rinse and repeat. I'll usually run at least 10-15 playtests like that, sometimes more if a deck's needed land count is trickier to estimate.
A very interesting takeaway is how this can be applied to how mdfc count towards your land count. If you only ask what's the minimum amount of lands you can run, they _will_ count for your entire landdrop, just like a basic would, so it's the unchanged. If you however also ask what's the max landcount, it becomes quite apparent how this number just increased, given that you have more to spend your mana on. Thus counting them as .5 of a land seems sensible, given how the optimal landcount is likely inbetween.
Frank Carson actualy expands on thus in his article. Mdfcs can't count for a full land since you also want to use them as spells. Better way of looking at it is 0.38 for tapped mfcs (also bounce lands and lotr cyclers!) and 0.74 for untapped mdfcs. This ofcourse adds mana value of your mdfcs to the total value of your deck. So in the average their spell counter part counts.
Nice video. My go-to unless it doesn't work is: - 12 draw - 12 ramp - 12 removal/stax - 32 land People play way too little draw imo. The draw can be lowered if the deck has a lot of tutors and the curve is low. You said that playing a higher curve hells makes more land work. Well, of course it does. And a lower land count helps with a lower curve. Or, just have more cards in your hand.
MH3 MDFC's have been a godsend to me In a lot of my decks the first cut I make most of the time is swapping cards that don't worl great ASAP with a MDFC land and that has helped my decks run smoother.
Putting this video out right now is interesting, given that I have had this argument often recently and even referenced and linked your previous videos in my arguments. Players simply don't like running lands. I had one guy tell me screw was better than flood, somehow entirely oblivious to the fact that his 8th card was always available. My take is that soft mulligan rules allow players to cheat their mana bases and thus makes players 'think' they have enough.
I feel higher land counts are really nice for decks, that are untested and fresh off the drawing board. Less nonlands to work with means you're forced to focus on your essential necessities much more and I personally think that feeling out when you have too many lands is alot easier than feeling out when you have too few of them. Plus, it makes your deck alot more malleable for when you find some new tech that isn't just straight up replacing another utility in your deck or when you forgot to include some really important card, because cutting a land from 43 to 42 for example is alot easier a decision than cutting from 36 to 35. It's all relative to how your curve looks, of course, but I think that like your estimated curve +3-5 gives the deck good wiggle-room during the testing phase.
just got to the part about Cantrip coefficient, and it reminds me of my Flubs deck... which involves as many mana neutral and mana positive cards as possible. I run almost every single 0 cost spell just to churn into the next 0 cost spell, and win with an empty library effect. for this reason, I run 25 lands, purely because I don't want, or need more than 3 lands in an entire game. this allows me to more aggressively mulligan until I have 3 lands in hand because I only care about getting my commander out early and just going topdeck mode for the rest of the game
For me the absolute lowest land count ever is 30. That was with an elves commander, where the average cost was about 2.2 AND the most expensive card was a single craterhoof behemoth. Everything else was like 4 max, but that was also all my card draw (beast whisperer and the likes). Normally the lowest I will ever go with lands is 35. Did this work? Yes. but only, cause I had several manadorks, played several multi faced cards with lands on the back (so the land count was virtually higher! And just as tip: USE THEM!) and I played enough manarocks that it worked. Nearly all of those rocks had some additional effects. And one thing that people most often forget was: I did NOT intend to play more than one card after like turn 3. It was a delicat balance, but it worked. To my point now: people sometimes just forget, that if your average manacost in the deck is like 2 but you want to play several cards per turn you need lands/mana in "2 steps". So 2 mana is good, 3 mana is 1 "wasted". And you need to get to 2X mana consistently to be able to cast X of your spells per turn on average. Furthermore you need the carddraw to support that. I really like your analysis with the "card draw, cascade" and ESPECIALLY the "zero sum mulligan" part at ~7:30 +. People I often play with are cutting lands without thinking about it. With Multifaced cards right now its much easier to pull that of. But the entire "land count discussion" is 100% not that clear cut :D
Bro loves coining terms
Nobody can stop me from coining new terms for things that don't need to have terms
I coin this concept a "Salubrism" @@salubrioussnail
You could call it "Toiming"
Snail can do dat tho😮
Snail will snail. Snail does what Snail does. Snail has become powerful.
If you cast ramp but didn't play a land for turn, you didn't ramp. You paid for your land drop.
Two land ramp cards do exist
I needed to see this
@@derekeastman7771miss land drop, play rampant growth, put land onto battlefield, same amount of lands as everyone else.
@@arthurboyle7982 miss land drop, play explosive vegetation, put two lands onto battlefield, lands+1
is what he meant :)
@@derekeastman7771 Very true, but in that situation you've still just essentially paid twice what you should have
bonus reason: you get to play more pretty full art basics
This is also part of why I love 2 color decks
Based
Or full text basics
@@AM-we1es I spent $50 dollars on that Secret Lair drop and it was the best purchase ever. I read them out loud every time.
new deck rule: basic singleton. no two copies of a land may have the same art
I've been playing MTG for 15 years and every time I watch one of your videos, I still learn something something new. I've been playing with ultra-high power groups and decks for so long that I had forgotten that i don't need to use the best of the best cards to have a spicy brew. I checked out your Radha brew a few minutes ago and tested it out on archidekt because i wanted to *see* the land count in action and was floored when i realized you pull lands out of the deck itself so quickly that you never really feel that 41 land count.
i learned nothing .. this video was kind of a nothing burger even and you should not play more lands "lands let you cast spells" ok dude, all the information was soooo basic and the conclusion to play more lands is dubious. maybe if you played magic for 15 weeks this is exciting stuff..
@@henkdachief i find "run more lands and better card draw" is that one tip for players who players who struggle at deck building.
@@resy-t9382 Who doesn't struggle at deck building? Unless you just pull your deck off the Internet. But do you then just know how to play it automatically? No, I've had to coach these players to play their deck correctly (and not accidentally cheat). The point of these videos is that a lot of us cut lands to put in more interesting things and it isn't because of being bad at deck building, it's because we're greedy gamblers, lol. In other words, we enjoy the higher risk leading to higher reward. I actually play the deck and alter the counts based on what works most for how I want it to play. In other words, everyone can keep learning about deck building so that we can build more interesting decks that are consistently fun to play as well as competitive. It's a much harder task in 100 card Singleton than in any other format
@@henkdachief Finally someone who says it lol. The video is not bad, its just recycled information you can find in dozens of videos on YT.
Imagine wasting a decade and a half playing the game in the worst manner when its meant to be casual
I pity you, life sucks when all you do is meta game
Get well soon snail!! Dont push yourself too hard!!!!
The biggest consideration when building a deck, of cours, "spaed"
3:15
Clerly
Off course
Ovbiously
nartullay
As might be excepted
One time I had a guy tell me he always puts 3 extra lands in his decks because he was "just bad at drawing lands"
guy was cooking tbh
Some people just have dog water luck, dude was willing to take all the help he could get lol
While his logic was flawed, it's hard to argue with results. Assuming he was also playing enough draw engines to make up for the increase flood potential this probably led to more fun and consistent decks overall even if with better applications of math and testing he probably could have got similar or better results with less . Most people in my experience don't play enough lands.
@imnotacat5299 there is no such thing as luck .
@sethstephens4777 There is zero reason. Running the hypergeometric distribution gives you exact figures of how often you'll draw x lands by x turn. Adding lands into it because it makes you feel good to flood rather than starve is top tier confirmation bias, and that's why most of you couldn't play in competitive formats even if you could afford it
recently, I've been forceably cutting cards to get all my decks up to 38-40 lands, and even for my low mana value decks, it has been worth it. I hate so much how well it helps adding more lands lol
I'm at 36 and sometimes I honestly suffer from mana screw
@@WWASHDjoin the 38 side brother, just add 2 MDFC’s
@Lazydino59 the problem with MDFCs is that they are two less good versions of what you actually want. If I'm putting it in as land, I don't want it coming in tapped. If it's taking up one of my spell slots, like, say, removal, I can get better removal than any MDFC. Which is just going to get me to cut either of them to be replaced with the better version of what I'm primarily using them for.
@@jasonritner9662 the good MDFCs enter untapped if you pay 3 life, which is very achievable.
@@jasonritner9662you are trying to use both sides of the card simultaneously in your example when it is in fact one card. It's a tapped land when you need a land. If you dont need lands, it's an inefficient spell. That's not such a bad thing.
This is the most balanced and reasonable land count take ive seen on this site so far
That's because there's no correct number of lands to have since it depends on the context of the individual deck. I have Syr Ginger eggs deck with 32 lands that both has a super low curve and draws enough lands because of the eggs. I also have a 3 color Omnath landfall deck with 55 lands because it's built in a way where those lands either generate value to get to my win condition or turn into my backup win condition.
@@chasm9557can i get a link to that syr ginger list pls sounds sick
@@Albinamo I don't have it online. It's pretty much all the eggs that I could stuff in the deck, artifact synergies, artifact recursion, a few pieces of creature protection, some colorless rocks, and utility lands. It wins through commander damage and Commander's Plate is potentially the most powerful card in the deck because it gives Syr Ginger protection from removal and makes it almost unblockable.
Your Radha deck is sick, and absolutely inspired me to make a Kellan deck with the same principle. The high land count is absolutely vital, and this video does an excellent job of showing why. Well done as usual Sergeant Snail!
Got a list?
Kellan fans, rejoice! I love my Kellan deck & the Emergency Draw Hippo stapled to the side of it.
@@51gunner Add liquimetal torque/coating and your hippo will be an absolute menace at the table. Coating can even blow up LANDS.
@@deadstones1 Could you explain that one? My emergency draw hippo is Kergua - he draws cards and I start with him.
@@51gunner Keruga is absolutely the true king of the deck. Kellan does his job and does it well, but all in service of the Primordial Hippo! And @deadstones1 I see what you're going for there, 100% a rad strategy but choosing Keruga (the aforementioned hippo) forces you to only run spells with mana value 3 or greater
I. Am. Spaed.
Gotta go faest
No, you are Brian.
if the biggest takeaway of the video is that he wrote a word wrong that says alot about the video.. also you guys cant also be sonic fans, thats just ideal and perfect stereotype
@@henkdachief I am pretty certain that it was intended. I found it super fun and didnt mean to sound rude. Wake up! SPAED IS THE NEW SPEED!
@@petrseghman4283 oh it was intended alright, makes it even worse imo, you werent being rude, i was! because this video is clearly overrated and i am jealous because he can get such a great feedback with such a bad video, so SOMEBODY has to try to humble this essay kid
BABE WAKE UP! SNAIL IS FEELING BETTER AND POSTED
As a new player ten years ago, once I understood the problems of flooding/screw I instantly thought that the cycling lands were severely underrated. Ten years later and I've never regretted jamming as many as possible in my decks.
I'm personally not a fan of the tapland aspect.
That being said, I'll max out on surveil lands in my decks with fetches for similar selection reasons. Plus they can dig for lands in the early game.
@simonteesdale9752 I'm budget. I've never seen a fetch and I never will.
@@nothing4mepls973 if your cycle lands dont have to compete with better lands ok but you refuse to play fetches? how much is your insight even worth at that point
@@henkdachief insight*
@@nothing4mepls973 changed it
I love MDFC's and Utility Lands. My Lumra deck has only 15 basics and the rest of the 46 lands are utility lands; which is nuts in mono-green. When I have a hand of only lands, that might include ramp (myriad landscape), or removal (blast zone), or card draw (war room). Card types dont matter so long as they do the things you need.
Every video you post becomes the topic of conversation at work.
I love the idea that I can make my own decks, enjoy brainstorming what cards can go into what deck, get excited about new cards relevant to my decks, but there is so much to consider to make a deck an actual functioning deck that does what you would like it to do, I feel unable to put together cards myself to construct it. Always feel like whatever I cobble together is lacking, then I research and I feel I learn, but this cycle never stops and everything feels unsatisfactory. Learned so much about manabases and land counts that I need to restructure/retool all of my decks to make sure they are playable with new logic. Hopefully this is a painpoint that alienates the sense of disfunction with my builds.
Sounds like you're getting better in parallel with your standards increasing. Don't worry - those are two good things!
Honestly, as someone playing EDH for a decade now, I'm pretty sure much of this is just an issue of modern EDH philosophy being so far removed from how the format used to be. Casual rounds were normally truly casual with a bunch of house rules and shitty pet cards, with most decks being nigh unplayable by even modern precon standards. Made learning how to build a deck far easier and way less punishing.
@@Zakading Not to forget the FOMO mongering that is happening all over social media, with people almost starting lynch mobs when someone says that 3 cmc rocks are indeed perfectly playable and stuff like that, on top of all the power creeping, that feels more like power running nowadays. Definitely makes it way harder for new brewers to get into crafting whitout being overwhelemed by the sheer amount of "must have, auto include staple cards" being appraised on each corner.
honestly, for the decks you've already built, it's probably better for you just to apply these lens when you feel the need to address specific issues you encounter when playing them, rather than getting the anxious urge to tear it all down. you don't have to be too sweaty about it if all you really wanna do is rotate cards with friends and friendly strangers on a good afternoon
@@Zakading Time changes a lot, I have been into and out of magic since for over two decades now and what I cared about changes as I get older so its hard to say what was better ya know? I feel this though, even when commander wasn't a thing my friends and I played multiplayer games and it never worked well but it was fun.
Hey Snail - as a long-time Gates fan, I'm looking forward to Das Manifesto. One thing you probably won't cover, but that I realized while goldfishing a new Gates build recently: Baldur's Gate and Modern Horizons have made them the opposite of what they used to be. You can now play a two-color Maze's End deck where most of your Gates have colorless identity and come in untapped - the antithesis of what a Guildgate should be. And Sage of the Maze is a truly bonkers card as the icing on the cake. On the one hand, it's cool to see Gates be powerful and flexible, but the feeling I have more of is "look how they massacred my boy's identity."
Anyway, off of my soapbox. Looking forward to the rest of this video and especially the next, as always.
Your boy Is finally playable, be happy
_ Would you be so kind as to elaborate further?
@@MisterWebb The original gates gave you the upside of good mana fixing (as duals) at the price of speed (entering play tapped). To play their dedicated win-con, you needed to play 10 uniquely-named ones, necessitating being in all colors. Now, there are a whopping 8 gates with colorless identities: Baldur's, Basilisk, Gond, Heap, Talon, Planar Nexus, Gateway Plaza, and Thran Portal. Out of these, 6 come into play untapped, and one makes all the others come into play untapped too. This reverses the formula - they mostly aren't great fixing but there's no loss of speed.
So the original functionality is turned on its head, but the flavor is completely lost. Now you only need to play one color pair to get to more than 10; e.g. Simic gives you its namesake gate, plus Sea and Manor - that's 11, and you can make it an Omo deck as a bonus. Your Maze's End win is doable with only a single guild in attendance! Heck, in mono-black you have the Black Gate of Mordor allowing mono-black maze's end (even if it's not especially good). To me, that's a huge flavor fail.
Edit: and Sage of the Maze is just a nutty card. Even with 0 gates it's a hyperefficient dork - but it also makes every one of your gates tap for 2 - and in a dedicated gates deck it can pull a massive board swing out of nowhere. I've goldfished it into 50 damage on turn 5 with minimal effort. That's just... the epitome of MH3C to me, giving the archetype cards that are busted rather than cards that fit their spirit.
@@WWASHD It's normal for players of old decks to feel alienated by support that simultaneously increases power level and changes identity. Yugioh in particular tends to do that a lot, taking decks with clear thematic weaknesses and fixing the weakness instead of doubling down on strengths. One deck in particular, Lightsworn, was a strong meta deck with a lot of powerful cards that had the "cost" of self-mill at the end of every turn, combined with one medium sized guy who summoned himself when milled and some effects that required you to have a lot of Lightsworn monsters (every Yugioh deck is tribal) in your graveyard. The thing was, the self mill was actually fast enough that if you developed a board and then got stalled out for even a few turns you would just mill yourself and lose the game. Didn't come up much, but it was always in your mind as an alternate win condition against the deck if things went bad.
Fast forward a few years and Lightsworn's powerful cards are no longer powerful, so Konami decides to give them some legacy support. First thing they do? Give them an effect that says "You can shuffle any number of Lightsworn monsters from your grave into your deck, then gain life based on the number shuffled". Did very little to boost the playability of the deck because their cards still just didn't have the raw power they used to. So, time for more support. Now they get a bunch of cards based around banishing (exiling) Lightsworn from your grave. Might as well be an entirely different deck by this point.
Another deck I liked was a slow deck with nearly infinite resources whose cards shuffled back into the deck when destroyed, far too slow to be meta. Two waves of support later it's a very fast swarm deck. I haven't played it since.
It's gotten to the point where I'd begun hoping my favorite deck (ten years old at this point, can't function in modern Yugioh) would never get support so it wouldn't be changed into something unrecognizable. New support has been announced, and I'm simultaneously excited for the deck to be playable again and worried I won't like it. We'll see how it goes.
Exact same story with my deserts deck tbh
I just watched your lands video and it inspired me to up my land count across the board to 39. Happy to learn more about how it changes between decks.
40 and counting ❌️
30 and cutting ✅️
Bro is building a goblin charbelcher EDH deck.
Hey man, I've been sick for the last month or so, and every time I think I'm starting to feel better, I go back to work and immediately get laid out again. I don't know if you're relying on this channel to pay rent, but if you're not, please take all the time you need. Yeah, it'll fuck up your metrics in the short term, but your niche on youtube is extremely secure. No one else is putting out MtG theory videos with anything close to this level of insight and lucidity. Take care of yourself.
poor trinket mage. guy get tossed in the "no one" realm
Hey Snail! Thank you so much for making these videos. Just played my Temur 10th Doc and Susan foreman deck based on your Radha list for the first time and won two games back to back.
This video is super well done, I enjoy the focus on testing and understanding what the land count is doing.
My partner runs a 42 land Atla Nest Tender list cause "Missing the land just means the deck loses" and it doesn't really care about what's in hand, just that there's something to hatch eggs.
On the flip side I have a very tight Errant and Giada list running low 30s lands. It curves out at 3 with very few 4 mana cards.
It's a scary deck to consider the curve of cause every land you add, decreases the chance that Errant and Giada het to play from the top. But every missed land drop prevents it from essembling a wide board of flying lords.
If your Errant and Giada deck runs pretty well now, that’s impressive to hear how it runs with low 30s lands. My Galea is still high 30s lands while wanting to cast as many auras and equipment (which if cast that way, can auto-equip to one of my creatures!). My solution has been many lands that ETB or have outlets to draw, scry, surveil or search my library for a basic land (to shuffle the library). I hope that this helps and let me know if you want the deck list.
Snail can coin more terms, as a treat
Your Radha deck is what inspired me to brew several decks with Susan Foreman in the command zone, my favorite of which being Susan + The Sixth Doctor. Susan on 2, 4 mana ramp on 3, and we play enough lands to have a land drop on 4 so that we can play the Sixth Doctor and hold up 1 mana for protection (we play many 1-cost protection spells to make sure we untap with the doc). After that, the deck is filled with big historic bombs that threaten to end the game when copied, such as Koma, God-Pharaoh's Statue, Old Gnawbone, 8 mana Ugin, Karn's Temporal Sundering, etc. It's a blast to play and very frequently becomes archenemy.
yay Snail content! glad you are feeling better, now I'm looking forward to you getting back on the podcast with TTM and Elk
Glad to hear your deck building advice again snail, make sure to pace your recovery.
I never thought about large-scale draw allowing for higher land counts. Very good point!
The tricky part is going to be looking at my decks and deciding which cards I want to cut for lands. Going forward, I'm probably going to start building decks by adding lands first so that I'm attached to them.
But how can you put Lands without knowing Ur mana needs
@@WWASHD by building the deck? do you just go in blind with a pile of cards and figure out if it works after fnm?
Instead of building front to back, you build bottom to top. Start with your commander and 2-5 key cards. Then add enough lands to draw into consistently. Then you add the rest of your deck in a way that fits into your land and draws probability. Whether you go higher or lower on the overall land spectrum depends on your commander and key cards@WWASHD
My strategy is to find payoff cards with the least amount of support and cut those, since they're the most likely to be dead cards and also more likely to be higher mana value, which lowers my curve when I cut.
@WWASHD If you're not on a budget, then Fetches, Shocks, Surveil lands and 2 basics per colour plus Demolition Field goes a long way.
Then you fill in with MDFC'S, LotR landcyclers and running down through the list of duals until you hit 40 lands.
Once you've got the rest of the deck sorted, adjust the dual land count accordingly.
Unironically your absence has wrought a deep hole in my heart, looking forward to more videos!
Shoulda been the Combo Coefficient! Excellent video! Every point was well said and needs to be echoed in more groups. Treasure generation also is a huge thing that can affect land base, but even in those heavy treasure-making decks I still like to keep it in the 36-38 range.
Frank Karsten's article on optimal commander landbases is a tool I reference as a starting point when building any deck from scratch.
I'm new to MtG and was curious about how many lands I should put in my deck. This video was really helpful! Thank you!
This is next-level deck analysis! I learned a ton
THE SNAIL IS BACK FROM THE DEAD!!!
I basicaly use Frank Karsten's formula but I expanded the categories for substraction where it makes sense. For example I count bounce lands and lord of the rings cyclers as tapped mdfcs (0.38). Good rule of thumb is also thinking about which cards draw or ramp when you have only two mana avelaible. This is why catch up ramp that you play on 3 like Knight of the White Orchid is also in the 0.28 category with cards like Three Visits.
Transmute!!!!! Such a slept on mechanic!! 5:46
This has been so refreshing and fun to dig into, I LOVE HITTING MY LAND DROPS!!!
The importance of deck churn and deck speed can't be overstated in the land count "debate", and I say this as someone with a chronic addiction to run fewer lands than necessary.
welcome back! hope you feel increasingly better~♡
Ran the equation mentioned on the only deck of mine that wasn't an altered precon, the equation gave me 38.09 (average mana cost of 3.92, 20 ramp/draw spells that cost 3 or less), this was very close to the 39 land count I had settled on myself after playtesting a lot and making the changes I felt necessary. You're right that you really need to take the goals and playstyle of the deck into account when deciding on these things. I also run many cycle lands and cycle cards since the deck has a cycling theme (thanks for showing my Astral Slide btw, I run Astral Drift and Escape Protocol but I wasn't aware of slide) which I know helps me both hit my land drops every turn or get out of a mana-flood situation.
Cheers, Snail
I just got into a big discussion from a recent video that claimed to just have a math answer for all/most EDH decks, love that this one had a lot of nuance to the understanding of land count. Ability to find land and wish to play lands really are huge parts of it, even in low curve decks I've found myself on high land counts before just because of how they didn't really have the ability to find lands (mono red najeela for example was on 38 because honestly how are we going to find land #4 in mono red if not by putting it in our deck?)
Stop coping. "b-b-but it's not all decks!" no, but it's 99% of all decks. Are you really going to tell me that the average commander zoomer isn't playing a 6 drop commander with an average cmc of 5.5 with 32 lands?
Get real
I love this video. I've built a big mana glarb deck and I've got shy of 45 lands in the deck. I'm able to deal with land flood or drought using glarb's ability to filter the top cards of my deck combined with a bunch of extra land so cards and effects. It's really fun to play 4 lands in a turn and see people go crazy at having 10 lands turn 5
Premium stuff as always. I find myself to rely on your videos to hone my deckbuilding skills, if nothing else just to have a more skilled perspective on the subject
Great job
Yeah you did a Patreon review on my deck and that was the major issue with it you pointed out, so I feel like I contributed to this. I have in fact added more lands since!
Such a good thought to not just ask, what's too little lands, but also what's too many! Just these questions alone immediately make it obvious how there's a range to functional landcounts and that choosing a number within that range is so much more complex than just minimizing it.
My lowest land count is 33. It’s mono green with selvala as the commander. This was a fun video and will influence part of my deck building moving forward. I don’t imagine it’ll change a ton since I like the cantrip type draw that plays early but a big part of that is guaranteeing land drops so maybe I’ll rebalance that. Thank you for the new perspective.
the advice from 12:45 onward is solid gold, and I pity anyone who doesn't hear it/take it to heart. Could have been the focus of the vid, tbh.
Glad snail is salubrious enough to drop a vid. Keep feeling better!
I completely re-tooled my Yurlok deck using your Radha approach. I have a 4-mana ramp spell in the command zone, 18 2-mana ramp spells, and a bunch of dumb beaters removal and draw. Sooo much better (and more fun) than the traditional group slug build.
Okay this video came out at a perfect time for me. I just got back from my first time playing my Ashling, Flame Dancer deck, and it made me realize that I need fewer lands and more card draw than I expected. I was running 40 mountains and I figured I would need that many to hit my big storm turns, but in reality, I often NEED the top card of my library to be an instant or sorcery so that I can dig deep enough in my deck to find my win con cards like Grape Shot and Mizzix's Mastery. I also desperately need to add more cantrips.
Just 2 days ago I learned of your videos via Sams (Rhystic Studies) newsletter, but didn't watch the one he recommended because I already watch to much magic stuff😅
Then just now UA-cam showed me this video. There's few things I love more than fine tuning a decks mana base so I had to watch it.
I should have trusted Sams recommendation, this was great!
I settled on 40 lands for my $30 budget WUBRG Azlask deck and since then haven’t run a deck below 40 lands. It feels so nice to worry less about land drops and I haven’t had a problem with getting flooded
i built a UG "snail-radha"-esque deck with Susan Foreman and The Fourth Doctor and it has been a lot of fun. i run 41 lands, but because of the high average mana value and the draw from the doctor i rarely feel flooded.
This reminds me of the time I shoved the Landscapes into my 4 color Omnath deck by cutting basic lands... then later in games realizing I had ran out of basic lands in the deck, which lead me into adding graveyard recursion to recover lands, only to realize I now ran out of basic lands to fetch even faster. Should have started cutting pet cards and added those extra basics looooong ago! Of course my landfall matters decks deserves over 40 lands, I was just too blind to see it.
Personally, I always find it's a bit of a bummer to make space for lands in any commander deck. When I make a deck I compile a bunch of cards I think are cool or combo well, and I always have to drop a good portion of them, which is shocking considering it's a 99 card deck.... The culprit? Lands. At least 35 cards of the deck have to be lands, and at least 10 cards "have" to be ramp cards, which leaves 55 cards for the main deck. Which sounds like a lot but a lot still has to be left out of the deck, and it feels bad. The temptation to remover lands from these decks is real, but it leads to not having land. No matter how well lands are implemented, they are always a problem, I would honestly prefer "conjuring" land from nowhere but that's unrealistic and is an unfair nerf to cards that interact with lands in the hand/deck/graveyard/exile. It's... frustrating.
One of Magic's original design sins... I wish it had been designed so you mulch one spell per turn for a land in one of its colors instead.
One thing you might want to consider is running cycling lands (i.e. drifting meadow, lonely sandbar, and canyon slough). Any 2 color deck can run 5 of these, which means you effectively have the same odds of mana screw as a 40 land deck and the same odds of mana flood as a 35 land deck.
@@patrickweiss4788 That's actually really handy! I normally overlook these, but I'll be sure to try them out in the future.
So I just watched the land video from a year ago, just in time to watch this now today, 17 hours after. What are the odds? Lol thank you for helping me with my weakest point in magic.
Almost started thinking snail forgot the channel password. Welcome back!
Great video! I'll take your advice, and bump up my lands from 0 to 1 in my edh deck
I am one of those people who made my own version of your Rada deck, and I didn't even realize I cut lands. I cut the nonbasics I didn't have and guess I just never replace a few of them. Wild. Time to make some cuts.
I like how I only got to watch this the very day I've tested the hand calculator at "Exactly: 0" to know how often I have to mulligan no land hands to then assess if the deck is able to operate with smaller hands.
I've played a couple games with your Radha deck and loved it!
Couldn't resist slipping in an Apex Devastator and Call Forth the Tempest, (yet to see if that was a good decision) but going off this video perhaps I want to double down on cascade by thinning the pool of cards and replacing them with even more lands....
I like to do the math and put enough sources of mana that I have 80% probability to do something important on the right turn. For instance, 37 lands give 80% chance to have 3 lands on turn 3. Same for ramp, you can calculate how many ramp spells you need. If your commander is 5 mana value and you want to always ramp on turn 3 to play it on turn 4, you can calculate the exact probabilities to have a rock or extra land on the table at the right turn. Also works for other important cards for your game plan, you may want to draw at least 2 removals or counterspells before turn 4 for a control deck, get a board wipe on turn X just before you play your commander, get a draw engine by turn Y, get an overrun style effect before turn Z etc...
You choose 3 or 4 conditions like that, calculate the probabilities, put enough cards of those types (which will take most of your deck), and then fill the gaps with synergistic cards. It makes decks incredibly consistent at what they do and makes the deckbuilding much easier
Totally on board with this take. Not so long ago, I saw a video from Sam Black where he also explained why we should play more lands and less mana rocks / ramp in some decks, that the more or less default of 37 + at least 10 ramp that some templates are adamant about is wrong for most commanders. He also insisted is more important to play a land each turn than to ramp.
Since then I play more lands, less mana rocks, more early card advantage and more mana sinks and my decks seem to run smoother.
Take care, Snail. We miss you, but dont force yourself
1:40 I have a general principle of starting with 32 non MDFC in a deck and then upping it as needed for the deck's curve and needs. i also tend to run bounce lands as a way of returning MDFC I want to hand. so lairs, the guild bounces, and such. i find 32 works for the really low-to-the-ground decks i tend to build. but recently ive been branching out for those decks and modifying my land base style to fit. originally i only ran 32 lands but my experiment with a high-cost deck in sharks tribal helped me see the value of MDFC and bounce lands and adding the tach to all my decks made them more consistent.
Marvo both liking high land counts and lower land counts makes building a manabase for him a thought exercise
I like to combine the 8x8 rule with this because it means you can use one of the 8 groups as a relief valve for your lands. And it works out great, too, because the system treats 35 lands as automatic, meaning 35 + 8 = 43, which is about where I think most control decks want to be. And because of MDFCs, you can just put a bunch of MDFCs in that 8th spot and cut/swap as needed.
12:37 Oof.
That formula applied to my decks spat out some truly brutal truths.
i think trinket mage did a video that went over optimal land count (overall with math and % chance to have x lands by turn x) and it was very good, i used it and havent had land issues but was noticing flooding in stuff like my rabbit deck. this will be a good useful watch to see about how many lands i can cut to help speed up the deck in the mid game where i would be topdecking a rabbit but have 6 many i could burn
Good luck on the Ricola sponsor Snail.
I built a first doctor/susan foreman big mana deck and used your radha deck for inspiration. The first thing i tried to do was cut lands, down to my usual 38, and then i tested and found out exactly why you had as many as you do. Ended up bumping it to 40 for basically the exact reasons you described, and my only reason for not doing 41 is that i have two commanders and one is a tutor so it throws the ratio off lol
I just got into Magic extremely recently (naturally gravitated towards Green/blue) and am currently playing with my first deck, and sitting on a MK3 within 3 days of play testing. I created a Landfall deck, aesi as my commander. I’m sitting around 40-42 lands and its consistently winning early despite my intent for it to be more late game. Its also auto decked me via Collector Collusi and its transformed into “I have my entire deck played and accessible for 1 turn before I risk blowing up and losing”
Another underrated way to sneak in half a land are the Ixalan DFC lands, sure you gotta do a little work to get em but they are all pretty good if you count them as half a land. (and don't load up on them too much, two or 3 of them at most) and usually the weaker the front half is, the easier it is to flip around, like Path of Mettle isn't much to look at on the front side (aside from nuking someone's Llanowar Elf occasionally) but the flip effect is a fairly low bar and the backside is incredibly effective as a mana sink.
One deck I made was a Bolas Planeswalker deck. It has an astonishing 29 lands but it works. It has a lot of artefact ramp, artefacts matter and Mana cheating to still go for the big and color intensive Planeswalker. I'm very happy, how the deck feels and performs.
Great video as usual.
I think there's a lot of old "conventions" or assumptions that people should be willing to question or evaluate. Instead of accepting.
I'm often surprised by edh players who don't build with consideration to the play pattern of their deck.
Not just mana curve, but what the deck wants/ should be doing each turn.
Taking actions early isn't inherently powerful or cEDH. Every deck can make use of early turns. For set up. For slowing down faster decks. Etc.
I have an inverse Maelstrom wanderer deck. And even starting at 41 lands, i moved up to 50+ because hitting every land drop was so important. Being able to cast that first spell was worth more than having multiple uncastables in hand.
One of my favorite decks has 45 lands. I have never drawn more than two lands in the first five mulligans.
Until December last year, this was actually _one_ land, until I drew a second land for the first time in my most recent match.
I'm running 37 lands and funny rocks from now on, as the amount of lands clearly doesn't matter. I will live with this curse.
One thing that helped me psychologically make the jump to more lands was to run more utility lands that still tapped for mana.
MDFC’s, Channel lands, and lands that just plain do other things help me increase my overall count, without making me feel as though I need to cut staples.
Nothing better than a twofer!
I think this vid has encouraged me to build a greed pile deck around one of my favourite cards.
I have 45 lands in tatyova. Its amazing how everytime i cut a card for a land, it feels better to play.
Obviously its land focused, but i still take that learning to my other decks. It feels really good to cast spells consistently
Honestly whenever I build a deck I play it like two or three times then add 2-3 lands/MDFC’s. Any less than 38ish lands you lack the consistency to play the game unless you are a hyper-efficient and tuned deck. But every deck is different, but most players are not great deck builders and get greedy and haven’t heard of hypergeometric calculators and don’t understand statistics and end up mana screwed far too often
I'm much the same, except I count the LotR land landcyclers as MDFC's too.
Lorien Revealed is especially cracked as a Draw Spell/Tapland/Noxious revival split card.
@@simonteesdale9752 I also count those lands as MDFCs but how is Lorien Revealed a Noxious Revival?
The cycle of LOTR lands is completely cracked though I still play them even when they virtually have no text other than the land Cycling ability; just being able to fetch a dual land and put a card in the graveyard is almost always useful. Their "tapland" mode is so much better than an actual tapland since you can pay the 1 at instant speed (you don't have to decide between interaction or a tapland until before your next turn)
@@jayjayhooksch1 You can islandcycle for Mystic Sanctuary.
Troll can also fetch Witch's cottage.
Both also have the very funny line of fetching the Sanctuary/Cottage and then using that to put the cycler on top to guarantee another land drop.
You can also replace some of your lands with land cycling cards. Sometimes you lose a little tempo but when you are flooding something like abundant harvest or traverse the ulvenwald become powerful top decks.
when i played Arena regularly, my pride and joy was a Kethis brawl deck that ran 43 of god's own lands. now i think that was probably slightly too many, but with a pretty high curve, and the commander being a 3 mana removal lightningrod that can recur your whole graveyard, the deck got a whole lot of mileage out of consistently hitting land drops. can't imagine going below 40. The KND legendary lands took some of the edge off, for sure.
43 on high curve is perfect, keep it up!
Everything in my deckbuilding process changed the moment I realized that (single-mana-producing) mana rocks only contribute as ramp until the next time you miss a land drop, at which point you're caught back up to where you'd be if you just played a land.
Sometimes that's still worth it! But a lot of the time it's not.
I used to play casually like 8 years ago, a friend got into the game just now and I went to the card store to get a box deck. The guy at the store told me the 'land base' could use upgrading and I realized I had some learning to do 😂
Okay, all the edh youtubers have to be in a discord and planned all this (or some big content creator made a video I missed that was bad???) How have like 4 different EDH channels made land base videos in the last week?
Omg Snail is back! (Glad you're feeling better dude, please know you're worth the wait, so please get better.)
I like when he says "land counts" we get a preview of how long the guildgate video is going to be.
I've really been enjoying more lands in all my decks recently. As an example, I pushed my Kadena morph deck from 35 to 39 lands and I've noticed from testing just that slight increase has reduced missing a land drop between turn 3-4 significantly. I always feel like I'll have Kadena on curve and once my draw engine gets going be able to have a land drop every turn following.
once again making my 40 basic land Temur Sabertooth PDH deck feel validated, it really does reach a point it can replay the same creature that ramps on etb like 4 times in a turn just to have ridiculous amounts of mana
I saw somebody's vid about how decks should have 43 lands and i built a few test decks to check that land count and even in really low to the ground decks it's really good.
Ive also been looking into using a bunch more spirited companion type cards and both changes are positive.
I made a similar deck similar to your Radha deck using Ruby, Daring Tracker and I don't know if you are open to suggestions but I found dense foliage to be a very useful card for the deck. It is called Dense foliage. A three cost enchantment that makes creatures unable to be targeted by spells. Since my deck doesn't run anything that targets a creature while on the stack it doesn't actually affect me. As well as a singular boardwipe in Collision of realms. It shuffles every creature into the deck then everyone who shuffled a creatures reveals from top until they get a creature. Since I run 30 six/seven cost creatures it almost always ends with me getting the most out of it.
My Varina, the Lich Queen EDH deck runs more mana sources than non-mana sources, and it still adds on by running things like Dreamscape Artist and Deep Gnome Terramancer.
Why? Two reasons he touched on, one reason he didn't. Varina has my favorite mana sink, exile cards from graveyard, make zombies at instant speed. She also has a very strong card selection engine and a very efficient way to dump tons of cards into the graveyard, by attacking with those zombies. Therefore, having a lot of lands and rocks means I'll usually have her out a turn or two early, she'll usually come into play with some cards in the graveyard to work with already, and she can discard lands to her ability without compromising her land drops later and still maximize her zombie-making ability. Having consistent land drops means she can make more zombies every round, which improves her card selection.
The third reason he didn't touch on: Land Tax. Land tax in any deck that says "Discard, Then Draw" or "Draw, Then Discard" regularly allows you to boost *way ahead* in actual card advantage by turning usually lackluster or forgettable card selection options into very efficient options by ditching extraneous, nigh-guaranteed basic lands that fill your hand every turn. The only downside to Land Tax is that if you run very few lands, you'll get fewer pulls from the deck, which shorts your effective card advantage from land tax long term. If you've got a consistent looting outlet, high land counts are an outstanding thing to have, and access to Land Tax turns that up to 11.
🐌 rather just skip a turn than missing a land drop. iconic behavior
I'd be quite interested to hear you go into more detail about the deck testing process. As a new player I'd like to have an idea of whether my deck sucks or not before I start spending money on it or not but I'm not sure what the best way to do that is
Something you can do before buying a deck would be to use the playtesting feature available in deckbuilding websites such as Archidekt. You can run through the first 5-6 turns of the game, see if you're able to hit all your land drops and get set up for a solid gameplan, and then rinse and repeat. I'll usually run at least 10-15 playtests like that, sometimes more if a deck's needed land count is trickier to estimate.
A very interesting takeaway is how this can be applied to how mdfc count towards your land count.
If you only ask what's the minimum amount of lands you can run, they _will_ count for your entire landdrop, just like a basic would, so it's the unchanged.
If you however also ask what's the max landcount, it becomes quite apparent how this number just increased, given that you have more to spend your mana on.
Thus counting them as .5 of a land seems sensible, given how the optimal landcount is likely inbetween.
Frank Carson actualy expands on thus in his article. Mdfcs can't count for a full land since you also want to use them as spells. Better way of looking at it is 0.38 for tapped mfcs (also bounce lands and lotr cyclers!) and 0.74 for untapped mdfcs.
This ofcourse adds mana value of your mdfcs to the total value of your deck. So in the average their spell counter part counts.
THE KING RETURNS
Nice video. My go-to unless it doesn't work is:
- 12 draw
- 12 ramp
- 12 removal/stax
- 32 land
People play way too little draw imo. The draw can be lowered if the deck has a lot of tutors and the curve is low.
You said that playing a higher curve hells makes more land work. Well, of course it does. And a lower land count helps with a lower curve.
Or, just have more cards in your hand.
MH3 MDFC's have been a godsend to me
In a lot of my decks the first cut I make most of the time is swapping cards that don't worl great ASAP with a MDFC land and that has helped my decks run smoother.
Putting this video out right now is interesting, given that I have had this argument often recently and even referenced and linked your previous videos in my arguments.
Players simply don't like running lands. I had one guy tell me screw was better than flood, somehow entirely oblivious to the fact that his 8th card was always available. My take is that soft mulligan rules allow players to cheat their mana bases and thus makes players 'think' they have enough.
I feel higher land counts are really nice for decks, that are untested and fresh off the drawing board. Less nonlands to work with means you're forced to focus on your essential necessities much more and I personally think that feeling out when you have too many lands is alot easier than feeling out when you have too few of them. Plus, it makes your deck alot more malleable for when you find some new tech that isn't just straight up replacing another utility in your deck or when you forgot to include some really important card, because cutting a land from 43 to 42 for example is alot easier a decision than cutting from 36 to 35. It's all relative to how your curve looks, of course, but I think that like your estimated curve +3-5 gives the deck good wiggle-room during the testing phase.
just got to the part about Cantrip coefficient, and it reminds me of my Flubs deck... which involves as many mana neutral and mana positive cards as possible. I run almost every single 0 cost spell just to churn into the next 0 cost spell, and win with an empty library effect. for this reason, I run 25 lands, purely because I don't want, or need more than 3 lands in an entire game. this allows me to more aggressively mulligan until I have 3 lands in hand because I only care about getting my commander out early and just going topdeck mode for the rest of the game
For me the absolute lowest land count ever is 30. That was with an elves commander, where the average cost was about 2.2 AND the most expensive card was a single craterhoof behemoth. Everything else was like 4 max, but that was also all my card draw (beast whisperer and the likes). Normally the lowest I will ever go with lands is 35.
Did this work? Yes. but only, cause I had several manadorks, played several multi faced cards with lands on the back (so the land count was virtually higher! And just as tip: USE THEM!) and I played enough manarocks that it worked. Nearly all of those rocks had some additional effects.
And one thing that people most often forget was: I did NOT intend to play more than one card after like turn 3. It was a delicat balance, but it worked.
To my point now: people sometimes just forget, that if your average manacost in the deck is like 2 but you want to play several cards per turn you need lands/mana in "2 steps". So 2 mana is good, 3 mana is 1 "wasted". And you need to get to 2X mana consistently to be able to cast X of your spells per turn on average. Furthermore you need the carddraw to support that.
I really like your analysis with the "card draw, cascade" and ESPECIALLY the "zero sum mulligan" part at ~7:30 +. People I often play with are cutting lands without thinking about it. With Multifaced cards right now its much easier to pull that of. But the entire "land count discussion" is 100% not that clear cut :D