That is terrible, and it will make you lose games before they’ve even begun. I tend to stay away from lands that have a condition where they either entered tapped or untapped, and I straight up avoid lands that enter tapped. The Battlebond cycle, (Vault of Champions), is an exception because if you are playing commander, then they will enter untapped as you probably are playing multiplayer.
Beware of Colored Sources
However, in most cases, having at least two lands in your initial hand is the sweet spot for most decks to operate at a decent pace. On that premise, we can make some calculations to determine the correct number. Look what happens if you up your Commander land count to 40, or 24 in a 60-card deck. Your chances of hitting your first two drops are almost perfect – 99.8% – and your chances of hitting your fifth go up to over three out of five, or 63.8%. In cEDH, players do aggressively mulligan for their best cards. Now that I’ve started playing cEDH, my decks typically have lands.
If you want an optimal mana base, you need to have at least 8 to 12 dual lands. Each color needs to have at least lands producing mana in a 60 card deck. It all depends in how many lands you want and how much devotion each spell in your deck has. Since you don’t want to have too many lands, like 26 lands for example, you remove the necessity of having too many lands putting dual lands. I’m going to continue to advocate for 40 lands as a starting point in my regular columns, but I’d like to take a deeper dive into land counts for Commander here.
At some point in every MTG player’s time with the game, you’ll hit a time when you want to start building your own decks. Messing around the top tier competitive decks is always fun, but there’s a unique kind of pride in making your own creations work. It even includes cards like Hard Evidence, where you can spend 2 mana to create a Clue token and crack it to draw another card.
It is probably useful to count Ponder and Brainstorm as simple cantrips as well. Although, they enable card selection, without a way to shuffle you will still draw the same cards. The density of fetchlands is much lower in Commander. Even with ten fetchlands the probability to see one in the first ten cards (turn 3) is about 67%.
While I lack extensive experience with Vintage, I’ve found that due to the format’s access to powerful artifacts from the Power 9, it’s uncommon to see decks exceed the 18-land threshold. Vintage decks typically run an average of 14 to 16 lands, depending on their chosen strategy. Because of this 40% rule, a 60 card deck needs to have 24 lands. Notice here that it really depends on your deck total Mana value, since when you have small mana value spells, you don’t need 4 lands in turn 4, so can build your deck with 30% or less lands. This is not the world observed by more engaged players who attend stores or tweet about Magic. Before I got into cEDH, I claimed that most Commander decks should play over 40 lands, and specifically, that precons should have 40 or more lands rather than 38 to teach casual Commander players better deckbuilding heuristics.
On the other hand, my friend and fellow Commander writer on this very site, Stephen Johnson, is a player and deck-builder I really admire. He plays with players who are generally much more competitive than my group (often playing in cEDH games) and acknowledges he would much rather be mana screwed than mana flooded. Therefore, he tends to build with around 37 Lands, which puts him somewhere between 22 and 23 on Frank’s charts. Frank says that’s for Aggro decks, but Stephen often builds non-Aggro decks with more expensive Commanders and Control-style builds. But he’d rather run more action and run the risk of being mana screwed than run fewer fun cards and more land and get flooded.
Decks that draw a lot might run just enough to play all their cards properly but stay on the low side because they know they’ll draw as much as they’ll eventually need. These counts depend on multiple variables that I’ll dive into soon, but I’ll start by saying that these land counts complement your deck construction. In regard to your question of Silent Clearing and War Room – card draw wins games, and you can never have too much of it unless you kill yourself with it. I would definitely run Silent Clearing, and possibly War Room. FormOverFunction, I love seeing cards that punish nonbasic lands.
I will confess that until about a month ago, my Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow Commander deck ran 29 lands. I now run 32 lands because over the course of a year I found myself missing the mana I needed just a bit too often. It took me so long to figure that out because my deck does a lot of work for very little cost. Once I did change it, though, those three lands made a world of difference compared to my consistent bad experiences beforehand. Your color ratio of spells will usually feature one color more than another if you’re in a combo. Or one color in your deck might have a ton of spells that cost double or even triple of that color.
cEDH
He lives in combos edh Eau Claire, WI with his wife and son. He has been playing Magic so long he once traded away an Underground Sea for a Nightmare, and was so pleased with the deal he declined a trade-back the following week. Mulligan any 7 card hand with 2 lands and no way to get more. I built a budget Atraxa landbase to showcase what to do with the data. I did not test this deck, nor do I play an Atraxa deck.
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It’s also easy to overload on 4-drops and 5-drops, but if you’re deck is only designed to be playing one land per turn, you should really consider trimming a number of expensive cards from your deck. You could also be running a deck that doesn’t play a lot of mana rocks and want to make sure that you don’t miss out on mana. Some decks even base their strategy around lands, like the landfall ability, so they’ll stuff everything they can into their deck to make sure they don’t miss any triggers. You’ll also probably see a lot of fetch lands and the like in these builds. I’d say anything in the range is okay, but I think you need 2-3 more mana rocks/other ramp and 3-4 more card draw spells, depending on how many lands you end up with.
And you can still find lists with 40 lands without looking too hard. The main reason the hand-smoothing doesn’t change up the format is because of land variety. If your deck isn’t leaning into a particular strategy that necessarily cares about cards of a particular mana value, you want to aim for a lower overall curve. That doesn’t mean you can’t play expensive spells that cost 6+ mana, it just means you should avoid running too many without a clear plan on how you’re going to cast them. Draw engines and cantrips are super common in a lot of decks in Commander. You have a chance to draw lands when you draw cards, and you might draw a lot of lands if you’re drawing a lot of cards and have a lot of lands in your deck.