Mana, deckbuilding, and land stats

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Title: Mana, deckbuilding, and land stats

Date Posted: Sat Apr/18/15 at 10:43am

Boyachi

Posts: 1553
Joined: 02-Nov-11

This is a topic that has been bugging me since 2003, back when I spent a day working through what did and didn't work with my decks to conclude for every 3.7 cmc required a land.
Fast forward to 2012, where I was helping my GF build a deck and she kept on complaining about having too much land late game (then again, she WAS running on her cards having an average cmc of 5...so for her, I bumped it up to 5 cmc requiring a land. She didn't always get as great of a start, but there was no question that her late game was vastly improved.
Fast forward to now: I have been helping kids build decks and been sticking rather tight to the 5 cmc to a land rule for helping them with their mana ratio. As far as balancing types of land needed I know that I have that down to a science (count up the total number of each mana symbol and divide them over the total number of mana symbols). However something seemed off, like it could be improved. That 3.7 kept nagging me... I thought maybe it was just that the game had shifted from cheaper spells to cheaper creatures and that was the reason for the mana change.
Looking at the preliminary data of the championship decklists make me think otherwise. Aside from all of them running 60 card decks ( no surprise there) they are running 23-25 mana, averaging a 3.7 mana ratio.
...
I'm currently trying to figure out what this means. I'm more than confident that the mana curve has something to do with it but I don't have enough data to make a proper equation. Yet.

Has anyone delved into this already to see where it leads? I'm sure there is something...

Also, on a side note, a big problem is that I don't have the luxury of asking the champions about their decks. Reason being X casting costs and frequency of alternative casting costs. I know already to give a discount or count an extra land ( both?) for mana dorks, but without knowing the typical times they'd execute a Syncopate or Sphinx's Revelation, it leaves me guessing and I would like to have more exact numbers.

Date Posted: Sat Apr/18/15 at 12:11pm

terakhan

Posts: 636
Joined: 24-Mar-13

It depends on the deck more than some magical ratio, I think.
I had a deck based on Scrapyard Salvo and Slag Fiend. There were very few non-artifact cards, and all of the artifacts were double or triple duty in their role. Ichor Wellspring was two draws and a sacrifice tool for Shrapnel Blast or the other non-artifact spells. That deck ran a total of sixteen lands, and eight of them were artifacts that could be sacrificed. Scrapyard Salvo was the top of my mana curve, as well.

Date Posted: Sat Apr/18/15 at 8:14pm

Boyachi

Posts: 1553
Joined: 02-Nov-11

Here is what I found, and it is remarkably eye opening:
The average mana ratio out of eleven counts were 3.942342727....27 you get the idea. So basically, per every 4 cmc, there is a land.
The average cmc of each card was 2.78885... so 3.

These were Wizards of the Coast Championship and Grand prix decks by the way, so I sampled the best of the best.

For each 4 cmc a land, keep your average cmc below 3 if possible.
Remember that the next time you enter a tournament.

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