Great, everything’s still here. It’s been a while. Since my
last post, I’ve started playing Magic: the Gathering again and, well, not had a
great deal of time for much else. Turns out grad school is quite the time sink.
Anyway, I wrote this based on a lively Discord discussion of some of my less
orthodox deckbuilding decisions and figured it might be useful for someone.
The fetch-shock manabase is one of the cornerstone elements
of the Modern format, offering incredible consistency for 3+ color decks with
the added benefit of reducing the number of lands in your deck in proportion to
how many you already have, reducing the chance of severe mana flood. It is not,
however, without its downsides; fetchlands and shocklands chip away at your
life total, making you more vulnerable to aggressive decks, and it can be quite
complicated to build optimally.
Over the last year, I’ve gradually developed a process for
evaluating my fetch-shock manabases, as I couldn’t find an existing resource
that accounted for all of the factors I wanted to incorporate. I draw heavily
on the articles of unrivaled MtG statistician Frank Karsten as a baseline; though
a couple of his assumptions aren’t ideal for our purposes (he doesn't account for the London mulligan, and many Modern decks may mulligan a 5-land
hand which he classifies as a keep), the net effect likely isn’t more than +/- 1 color or land and I’m not
sufficiently motivated right now to break out Python and recalculate them all
myself. I’ll talk through the process first, and then give an example using my
favorite Modern deck, Mardu Pyromancer.
Step 1: How Many Lands?
First, determine the number of lands your deck ought to be
playing. This is critical—drawing too few or too many lands is a sure recipe
for a quick defeat. If you play an existing archetype, this number is probably
fairly well established. If not, calculate the average CMC of cards in your
deck and refer to the table in Frank Karsten’s How Many Lands...? as a baseline. Keep in
mind that filter and draw effects, such as Serum Visions, can count as lands (or
some fraction of one) when you need them to, insulating you against both mana
flood and mana screw.
Step 2: How Many Colored Sources?
Next, look over the cards in your deck and focus on any that
you need to be able to cast early or that have strict color requirements. Refer
to the table in Frank Karsten’s How Many Colored Sources...? and construct a list of the color
requirements to cast various spells or combinations of spells on-curve, being
sure to note the additional recommendations for gold cards and draw/filter
spells if relevant.
Step 3: What Kinds of Lands?
Total the highest color source requirements for each color,
and compare it to your target number of lands. More than likely, your total
sources are more than twice the total number of lands in your deck; this is why
you need fetchlands (or lands that produce any color, but those often come with
drawbacks or restrictions that are incompatible with most decks). Your next
step is to work out the number of fetches, number of duals, and number of
basics (or single-color utility lands) required to meet your needs. Filter and
draw effects also help here, though some are harder to quantify than others.
There are numerous mathematically valid solutions to this,
but we can introduce some additional constraints to help. Almost all decks want
some number of basic lands to provide insulation against Blood Moon, Path to
Exile, and similar cards, and to have fetch targets that come into play
untapped at minimal cost to your life total. There are also a limited number of
dual lands that are viable in any given deck due to conditionally entering
tapped or, once again, adversely impacting your life total. Finally, there is a
practical limit to the number of fetchlands you can run; as a general rule, you
should avoid having more fetchlands than valid targets.
In the end, most decks will have somewhere in the vicinity
of 7-10 fetchlands, 3-5 shocklands, about 5 basics, and a small number of other
dual or utility lands.
Step 4: Land Selection
Time to pick out some actual lands! At this stage, I like to
set up a spreadsheet with each of the lands in consideration, with boxes to
total relevant information like untapped turn 1 sources of a color (possibly
subdivided by how much life they cost), total sources of a color, total numbers
of basic land types (for checklands or ELD Castles), and so on. You can then
easily tinker with land numbers without stopping every time to recount colors
and such. This is also the point to consider factors that are difficult to
quantify, like whether certain dual-land color combinations are more useful for
your deck than others.
And that’s it! Don’t be afraid to circle back to step 3 or 4
and tweak your numbers if you’re struggling with self-inflicted life loss or if
some other aspect of the manabase doesn’t feel quite right, and make sure to
revisit your assumptions whenever you add new cards to the deck.
Optimizing Mardu Pyromancer
Step 1: Calculating the average CMC of Mardu Pyromancer
requires some creativity, as the deck runs Lingering Souls, which has a CMC of
3 but flashbacks for 2, and Bedlam Reveler, which can cost anywhere from 2 to 8
mana depending on the number of instants and sorceries in the graveyard. I
decide to split the difference on Lingering Souls (it often winds up discarded
rather than cast for 3) and look at near-optimal cases for Reveler of costing 2
or 3. This gives an average CMC for the deck of somewhere between 2 and 2.1,
for which Frank’s article recommends either 22 or 23 lands. Looking through his
descriptions, however, and we find ourselves in an awkward spot. While
Pyromancer plays a great deal of cheap interaction for the early turns, the
reality is that it needs to land its 3-drops (Seasoned Pyromancer, Lingering
Souls, Blood Moon) to advance its gameplan. At the same time, the 4th
and beyond lands are far less important. This is part of why Ransack the Lab is
such a critical component in recent versions of Mardu Pyromancer—it practically
guarantees the ability to find a 3rd land in time, remains useful
later in the game when you want to dig for Bedlam Reveler or key sideboard
cards, and keeps the actual land count low to minimize dead draws in grindy
midrange matchups. Since we now have the London mulligan, we’ll settle on 22
lands, which with the help of 3x Ransack will perform closer to 25 lands in the
early game at the cost of sometimes taking a turn off to cast the Ransack.
Step 2: The key considerations for Pyromancer’s mana are
turn 1 B and/or R for discard and removal (14 sources each excluding taplands,
and a few extra for consistency wouldn’t hurt), 1RR on turn 3 for Seasoned
Pyromancer (18 red sources), 2W on turn 3 at least some of the time for
Lingering Souls as well as several 1BW sideboard cards (about 11 white
sources), and maybe either BB or 1BB on curve for combinations of Ransack the
Lab, Fatal Push, and Thoughtseize/Inquisition or Ashiok out of the sideboard
(18-20 black sources). Total colored sources = 47 (18 red, 18 black, and 11
white).
Step 3/4: As a Blood Moon deck, Pyromancer requires a
reasonable number of basics. At the same time, we need to squeeze 47+ colored
sources out of 22 lands. We have some help from 3 copies of Ransack the Lab, which
I’ll approximate as one red and one black source--we want to avoid using
Ransack for mana fixing when possible, and we can’t count on hitting a white
source off of it. I already know I want to include 1-2 copies of Castle
Embereth which means we need a reasonable number (13 or 14) of mountains so we
can reliably play the Castle untapped by turn 2 or 3. I’m also interested in
how many ways we have the option of a turn 1 black source that costs 1 or less
life to mitigate the life loss associated with Thoughtseize.
Starting with 5 basics and 1 Castle as a minimum, that
leaves 39 colored sources across 16 lands, which works out best to either 8
fetchlands and 8 dual-color lands, or 9 fetchlands, 6 dual-color lands, and 1
additional basic or Castle (both with one extra colored source). After some
brief tinkering, I find that gives us three reasonable solutions, summarized in
the table below.
Build A: The standard. Older versions of the deck often ran
Godless Shrine + Mountain over Sacred Foundry + Swamp, but this configuration
is more compatible with Blood Moon and with the color requirements of the deck—it
most often wants combinations of black with either red or white. It has plenty
of low-pain turn 1 black sources, and a reasonable number of mountains
considering that there’s only a single Castle.
Build B: This version fits in the second castle at a slight
cost to the reliability of early BB. On the upside, it has an extra white
source over our original requirements and an extra mountain over Build A,
meaning the Castles ought to come in untapped quite reliably. The extra fetchland
makes for an easier time maneuvering around Blood Moon, and can also help out with
the revolt trigger on Fatal Push.
Build C: The awkward middle ground between A and B. Here, we
fit in the second Castle but also maintain the color balance of build A. This
unfortunately introduces a significant vulnerability in white sources—if the
one copy of Sacred Foundry ends up in the graveyard (say, off of Ransack the
Lab)—it represents the loss of not one, but five white sources as there are no
other white-producing targets for Bloodstained Mire. As a result, even though
the numbers look good, I would not recommend running this configuration.
Build A and Build B are closely matched, with the
differences mostly coming down to personal preference and the exact color distribution
of the rest of the deck. Personally, I favor Build B; I’m quite fond of Castle Embereth,
and don’t feel that being down a black source has significantly impacted the
way games play out.
