Hello everyone, I hope that all who attended the pre-release had a good time, had some good pulls and really enjoyed themselves. A few months ago during my absence I was away at college advancing my education. While there I had a math class and amazingly my Math Professor also played magic the gathering. Knowing how magic works he was actually able to teach me how to
balance mana without having to put your deck into this forum. This skill came in handy at my pre-release where I had minimum time to actually build my deck. Using this quick 5-minute process I was really able to help out a few people at the event so now I am going to help you all by sharing what I learned:
For this example I'll use my Abzan Deck that I played at the pre-release event that I attended.
https://deckstats.net/decks/24826/891480--pre-release-draft-build-old-fStep 1: Count the color devotion of all of your cards that are going to be in this deck (for example, 17 Green/11 Black/14 white). Once you have your total (42) this is the number you'll keep in mind for step 2 of this process.
Step 2: divide the number of devotion of each color by the accumulated devotion cost of your deck:
17/42= 0.404 = 40%
11/42= 0.261 = 26%
14/42 = 0.333 = 33%
Note; the percent values my vary due to rounding but it's the decimal values that will be most important.
Step 3: Know how many lands you want in your deck and
then multiply
that number by the decimal values of each of your devotion colors. It's best to have your deck be 1/3 of your deck and in my deck I like to run an average 24 lands. The land count may vary between decks but that's why it's important to know your land count before getting to this stage. For this deck I chose 25 lands so this is what I did:
25*0.404=10.1 = 10 Forests
25*0.261=6.5 = 7 Swamps
25*0.333=8.3 = 8
Plains When you have gotten your land count it should equal the number of lands that you want to have included in this deck. This is how you
balance mana by hand without a simulator. I'd recommend keeping a calculator with you so that not only can it help you with actual game values that change (ex. damage calculation, stat changes, changing life totals), but now you can
balance decks on the fly. Based on how you shuffle there is always the possibility that you may get mana flooded or
drought during some games. But as this is possible no matter the deck I would feel safe to say that this is a sure
fire way to
balance the ratio in any deck. If you ever feel that you getting too much mana or not enough mana adjust how much land that you have. Just don't
forget that when you take out or add cards to your deck, to avoid changing the values switch out cards that have the same devotion costs. Otherwise once you've decided what you want to switch and change around make sure you do this process again and it'll give you the corrected values. I hope that this all helps my young planeswalkers. May you all grow wise with your years and remember, the blind eternities is the limit