Frank Karsten's article: optimal land/ramp count for Commander

[The Golgari Guy]

Here is the link to the article:

https://strategy.channelfireball.com/all-strategy/home/whats-an-optimal-mana-curve-and-land-ramp-count-for-commander/

Salient points:

"In recent years, I have seen various deck building templates that recommend around 36 lands in Commander. Indeed, the typical land count on EDHREC, according to a recent article by Magic Data Science, is 36. This would translate to 14.5 lands in 40-card decks or 21.8 lands in 60-card decks. Many Limited or Standard players would quickly recognize those numbers as a bad idea.

For Commander, based on the results of my simulations, my general advice would be to start with 42 lands plus a Sol Ring, then cut a land for every two or three additional mana rocks you add. You could also cut a land for every three or four cheap cantrips, such as Ponder or Brainstorm, and cut a land for every three or four mana dorks, such as Llanowar Elves or Birds of Paradise. But in general, for medium-power midrange Commander decks, try not to go below 37 lands. Missing your third or fourth land drop sucks, and you will stumble on lands far too often if you play fewer than 37 lands."

Curious to hear what people think about Karsten's analysis, and whether you follow similar heuristics when building your decks (and if not, what is the reason).

Personally, I find that my deckbuilding heuristic is not far from what suggested by Karsten. I never go below 37 lands (apart from some exceptional cases), and I usually play at least 10 ramp spells, most of which are 1- and 2-mana. I should specify that I count MDFCs as lands, as they are basically taplands that can be cast as spells later in the game.

[Iwama]

Hello The Golgari Guy,

I would like to aggree with you; even that I am not play and own many decks at this time; I never went under 38 Lands in a commander deck.
My own thoughts are different from the idea to cut lands for mana rocks - I prefer to play ramp spells over mana rocks. They (the lands) are much less vulnerable then artifacts. Important is that I am NOT playing in a cEDH enviroment, therefore it is not necessary to have mana fast in the beginning of the game (just to mention: of course it IS important and necessary but there is no need to panic if your spell 'just' let you search for a tapped land for turn 2 or 3).
I just like to have at least 40 lands in my decks nowadays so it is more unlikely that I will miss a land drop in the first 3-4 turns.

Let me know what you are thinking in this case about ramp spells and mana rocks.

[robort]

Thanks to MustaKotka this was all ready done. Preliminary results for ideal number of lands and ramp in a deck (warning: math) https://deckstats.net/forum/index.php?language=english-utf8&topic=65097.msg200391;topicseen#new

With using Mustakota's method and Frank's method we can see some difference for example. Frank suggests for a 2 drop Commander with 42 lands, and 1 sol-ring. Plugging those numbers into Mustakota's Graph one can clearly see that there is an 81.5% chance of having a keepable hand within 3 mulligans. However Frank does point out that there is also 9 1 drops as well with 0 2 drops. We'll take those 9 and turn them into rocks with suggest sol-ring giving a total of 10. Increasing our percentage chance to 87.7 of having a keepable hand.

However Frank then goes on to say in this part of the article Insight #3: The ideal number of mana rocks depends on your Commander " If you take my idealized decks as an indication, then Commander decks with fewer than 38 lands and more than nine mana rocks may be better off by cutting a mana rock and adding a land. This may produce a better balance between ramping ahead and making your land drops."
Using this theory of 38 and 9 there is a 88.6 percent chance of having a keepable hand. However based upon the suggestion lets cut just say 1 rock and add one land. Making it 39 and 8 which then gives us a 88.2 percent chance of having a keepable hand. Granted .4 percent isn't significant but lets just say it the numbers become 40 and 7. Those percentage numbers now drop down to 87.5 and even at a 1.1% change from the initial 88.6 it is significant in the long run.

Then Frank goes on to say "Second, the model I used in this article resulted in 17 lands for 40-card decks and 26 lands for 60-card decks, which perfectly matched successful tournament decks. This adds credibility to the results." Commander and limited formats are totally 2 different beasts and comparing apples to oranges just isn't going to cut it.

[Aetherium Slinky]

I left this comment on the article itself but I'll post it here for your convenience:

Your numbers seem to disagree a bit with my analysis as 36 lands is something I found to be a reliable number with adequate amounts of ramp. (See [my reddit] post for details.)

The differences are mostly due to the approach: your analysis starts with the average MVs and the assumption of not missing the fourth land drop whereas mine looks at ideal starting hands and deduces how to get those most reliably. My analysis assumes a mode of 3 for the mana values of the spells in the deck and it doesn’t take the commander mana cost into account as that is making assumptions about the importance of the commander in the deck. Not all decks want to rush their commander onto the battlefield – I feel like it’s unfair to assume that. After all majority of the game play revolves around the 99 unless the deck pivots heavily around the commander (combo piece or a value enabler like Orvar). In my experience people will often even delay casting their commander for the purposes of not drawing heat or baiting out removal with it.

It also looks like your available mana target is 4 where mine was closer to 3. This makes a huge difference for the late game – your analysis attempts to keep mana production up until the end of the game where mine attempts to cut it off at some point in favour of more gas. Might be a difference in philosophy and principle and as such a matter of subjective opinion. I don’t personally see why I need to have late game land drops be frequent. I’d rather draw a draw spell or just straight up gas.

Speaking of drawing: neither analysis looks at the effect of draw spells. I assume heavy draw will lower the number of lands required since you’ll over-draw lands seeing that you can only play one per turn and the rest are just useless cards in your hand.

In essence I think we've got some degree of disagreement in the construction philosophy where I prefer more gas and Karsten prefers more mana. Our approaches are also wildly different but I'm happy to see that the results still do line up pretty well.

[anjinsan]

There was a lot more discussion and analysis on MustaKotka's thread, but some point I think worth thinking about:

1 - the Commander's CMC may or may not be that relevant. Not everyone always wants to play their Commander on curve. Also, you have another 99 cards there that you want to play, so even if you do care about playing your Commander on curve, do you care more than you care about playing all your other cards on curse?

2 - a fairly standard 60-card Standard deck land count is ~24, which means 40 in EDH. 40 therefore seems like a pretty decent baseline, to be modified up or down according to some factors. However, most of these factors encourage it to be lower.

3 - I don't think those ratios are right. Ramping but missing land drops is essentially a waste of effort, but in most cases it's not actually worse. Playing two lands and a 2-mana rock (and missing your third land) means you can't play anything else T2 but is otherwise exactly the same as playing three lands - so often a two-land/one-rock hand is marginally better than a three-land hand. Therefore, you can probably pretty much just swap lands for rocks on a 1:1 ratio at least for the first few rocks. Maybe ten rocks is only worth, say, 8 lands, whatever. Ignoring colour, Sol Ring and Mana Crypt are probably worth more than a land. This should be balanced though against the fact that in EDH people typically want more ramp than in Standard, which pushes the numbers back up. Dorks are definitely less than a land, but don't feel like they're 1/4 of a land.

4 - everyone always seems to ignore mana flood - possibly because it's really hard to quantify. I've had games where I've drawn like eight lands and a Wayfarer's Bauble out of ten cards in a deck with like 32 lands or whatever. That basically loses you the game. If you only focus on being able to hit early drops and play things on curve, the right answer is like 70 lands 30 ramp or something ridiculous (yeah this is kind of saying "gas vs mana"). This also feeds into

5 - EDH has a better mulligan rule (first is free) and, certainly in casual games, is actually more forgiving of missing a drop anyway. Therefore, taking a bigger risk by cutting lands actually seems more sensible because you can cover that a bit by mulliganning, whilst then enjoying a tighter deck later - which matters, because a 100-card deck is less reliable already than a 60-card deck.

For these reasons I frequently find myself going below 35 lands, something which I'm always a bit leery of... but honestly it seems like I flood with lands way more often than I miss land drops.

[Slyvester12]

I agree with MustaKotka and anjinsan. The first thought I had when looking at the article was "Wow, what a good way to flood every game." I can't stand mana flooding. I tend to play a ton of ramp/rocks/dorks because I like having plenty of mana and I try to run commanders with mana sink abilities like Ezuri, Renegade Leader or Scion of the Ur-Dragon in case I do have excess mana, but lands just feel bad. There's nothing worse than playing a draw spell, needing something to keep you in the game and coming up with a basic. I would 100% rather get mana screwed in a small number of games than flood occasionally. And once I hit around 10-20 available mana (depending on the deck), I never want to see another land. If there were a consistent way to remove EVERY land from my deck once I have a certain number, I would take it in a heartbeat. Outside of playing into a land destruction deck--which is exceedingly rare nowadays--drawing lands later in the game is always a letdown.

[ApothecaryGeist]

If there were a consistent way to remove EVERY land from my deck once I have a certain number, I would take it in a heartbeat.

[Slyvester12]

If there were a consistent way to remove EVERY land from my deck once I have a certain number, I would take it in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I was thinking about Mana Severance when I wrote that. If I could have a universal mechanic that let me play Mana Severance for 2 colorless anytime I wanted, I would use it almost every game.

[Aetherium Slinky]

If there were a consistent way to remove EVERY land from my deck once I have a certain number, I would take it in a heartbeat.

Yeah, I was thinking about Mana Severance when I wrote that. If I could have a universal mechanic that let me play Mana Severance for 2 colorless anytime I wanted, I would use it almost every game.

Sooo... Doomsday?

On a less serious note: Scouting Trek must be your nemesis.

[Landale]

On a less serious note: Scouting Trek must be your nemesis.

How did I not know that card was a thing? I want it for my Slogurk deck now, given the amount of self milling I run in it already.

That said, all the math stuff flies over my head here. I generally just start at 36, a couple rocks, and a few more ramp on top of that then just test and tweak. Some decks are as low as 30 some are as high as 40.

[anjinsan]

... but lands just feel bad.

I've often wondered if the whole lands mechanic, as integral as it is to Magic, isn't just bad game design. The number of games where I've just been stuck on like 3-4 lands for a bunch of turns and lost as a result is too high! 

I think later-game lands are a bit underrated, actually. I'd still rather have an extra mana per turn even fairly late in the game... but if you're doing well and drawing a lot, you often have more lands than you can play anyway, and if you're not then usually you need something more immediately-helpful than a land.

This is why I think Zendikar Rising's MDFC lands were so brilliant and I'm kind of surprised and a bit sad that they didn't just become evergreen. They almost felt like they would revolutionise the ways lands work in Magic. The Neon Channel lands are perhaps their spiritual successors. I also really like all the cycling lands for this reason. These all feel a bit un-pushed since they enter tapped but being able to trade a land for another card late-game for cheap is pretty great. I'm so glad they finally made the rest of the triomes, and I just with they'd do the rest of the bicycle lands.

[Aetherium Slinky]

... but lands just feel bad.

I've often wondered if the whole lands mechanic, as integral as it is to Magic, isn't just bad game design. The number of games where I've just been stuck on like 3-4 lands for a bunch of turns and lost as a result is too high! 

I think later-game lands are a bit underrated, actually. I'd still rather have an extra mana per turn even fairly late in the game... but if you're doing well and drawing a lot, you often have more lands than you can play anyway, and if you're not then usually you need something more immediately-helpful than a land.

This is why I think Zendikar Rising's MDFC lands were so brilliant and I'm kind of surprised and a bit sad that they didn't just become evergreen. They almost felt like they would revolutionise the ways lands work in Magic. The Neon Channel lands are perhaps their spiritual successors. I also really like all the cycling lands for this reason. These all feel a bit un-pushed since they enter tapped but being able to trade a land for another card late-game for cheap is pretty great. I'm so glad they finally made the rest of the triomes, and I just with they'd do the rest of the bicycle lands.

I play cycling lands in my draw heavy decks. And channel lands, too. The MDFCs feel a little clunky to me, they rarely have effects I absolutely need.

[anjinsan]

Need? Maybe not, but "useful" is good enough for me. Heck, at its worst Valakut Awakening is another cycling land for 3 mana. Bala Ged Recovery is pretty similar. I'm wondering if Hagra Mauling should make the cut more often; it just doesn't really feel good enough, but I could pretty much always use another kill spell.

The lands that just turn into boring, pretty vanilla creatures aren't exactly great in EDH, but that's more a format thing than anything.

[Slyvester12]

I honestly hate the MDFCs and don't intend to ever own any. They always feel like an excuse to run a ton of lands because some turn into costly spells that still often don't win the game. I would rather have my deck set up to get to the amount of mana I need for my combo or synergy quickly, then focus on having playable cards that don't take a while turn of mana unless they win the game.

(I realize MDFCs are objectively good. I just don't like them.)

Also, @anjinsan, if you're against lands as a mechanic, I believe the Force of Will TCG is supposed to be basically magic if you had a separate deck for lands.

[anjinsan]

Huh. I mean, lands are well built in to Magic and a big part of the game is about hitting land drops, colour fixing, etc. It just feels like decks have to be really built to draw and select and you can still get unlucky, which makes for more random games (and in a "feelbad" kinda way).

MDFCs are just one way of smoothing that out. I really like cards like [[Abundant Harvest]] and [[Dig Up]] for this exact same reason, as well as anything with landcycling. What would the game look like if every card were an MDFC or had landcycling, or even just cycling? There is Tectonic Reformation I guess.