Or, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Five-Color Goodstuff Piles.”
In a game of Magic, there are many ways to lose the game. You can of course scoop. You can get beat down by a more proactive deck. You can get out-attritioned by a more reactive deck. You can fail to disrupt/beat down a combo deck before they win.
You can also get mana screwed or flooded.
As cube designers, one of our goals (generally speaking) is to maximize the fun of our players and ourselves via the MTG Cube medium. To generalize further, I would posit that most of us prefer “good games,” in other words, interactive games in which both players have agency regarding their own lines of play as well as the final outcome.
While “losing by failing to interact with combo” is a relevant discussion on these lines, not all cubes even support combo.
But virtually every cube ever existed supports the basic game infrastructure of playing lands to produce mana and cast spells.
This is the argument I want to submit to you today: a better manabase results in better games, and you, a cube designer, should probably be running a better manabase.
Why? Let’s go back to the ways to lose the game. Losing to beats, a value engine, or even a combo is by no means a “bad game.” Your decisions, all the way back to “should i mull this hand?” at the die roll, and maybe even back to “should i take that Thoughtseize/Counterspell/Swords to Plowshares over that cool bomb?” in the draft, very likely affected whether you lost that game.
But how often has a game lost to mana screw or mana flood felt like a good game?
Let’s think about how our manabase affects the likelihood of mana screw/flood occurring, but first, I want to ensure we are all speaking the same language. Going forward in this article, I’ll refer to 3 types of mana-related “failure modes:”
-COLOR SCREW, in which the color screwed player cannot access/produce all the colors of mana needed for their deck to function, resulting in a game loss with uncastable cards stuck in hand. (NOTE: i do not regard what constitutes a core color vs. a splash color to be relevant here, if you lost because you couldn’t make colors to cast what you had in hand and needed to cast, you’re color screwed.)
-MANA SCREW, in which the mana screwed player cannot access a large enough quantity of mana needed for their deck to function, resulting (again) in a game loss with uncastable cards stuck in hand.
-MANA FLOOD, in which the mana flooded player cannot access a sufficient number of their nonland cards for their deck to function, resulting in a game loss.
The scope of this argument will include COLOR SCREW and MANA FLOOD, but not MANA SCREW- maybe a good discussion for a second thread!
First let’s address the problem of COLOR SCREW. This can be easily addressed simply by including more/better fixing lands in our cubes, for example, going up from two cycles of duals to four, or upgrading our duals from Temples to Shocks/Fetches.
Having more lands that produce multiple colors is immensely helpful for gaining access to our deck’s colors. For example, if I have 9 Plains and 7 Islands and 2 Swamps in my deck, that’s how many white and blue and black sources i have in my deck. If however, I have 4 Hallowed Fountains and 4 Godless Shrines and 4 Underground Seas and 3 Plains and 2 Islands in my deck, I now have 11 White sources, 10 Blue sources, and 8 Black sources! (This gets even wilder once fetches get involved.)
One useful and simple way to look at this quantitatively as a cube architect is to divide the number of fixing lands in our cubes by the number of players drafting it. My personal number here is 50 fixers divided amongst 4 players for an average of 12+ per player. (the distribution is 20 fetch/20 dual/10 creaturelands.)
your target may be different based on your design goals, but i encourage you to look critically both at your numbers and your goals. ask yourself, “is my reasoning behind limiting my fixing providing more benefit for my environment and players’ experience than the malus brought to my environment and players’ experience by the increased risk of color screw?”
Be honest with yourself.
Second, let’s address the problem of MANA FLOOD. This is also a fairly simple problem to mitigate through manabase architecture: just run more fetches!
Jason Waddell has actually posted a video demonstrating how this works in deck construction, which I will link here:
…but to summarize, having more fetches in a deck will not significantly increase your MANA SCREWED games, but will significantly reduce your MANA FLOODED games by removing “excess” lands from your deck. In addition, if you’ve crafted your manabase such that your duals are fetchable, the amount of color screw you’re preventing goes down immensely once fetches enter the scene.
One caveat here: in terms of actual utility, fetches have an upper bound roughly equal to the number of fetchable lands in a player’s deck, so it is important to keep this in mind when crafting a mana base. a good basic heuristic is to have at least as many, and usually a few more, fetchable duals than fetches.
To conclude, we have seen that:
1) Mana screw, color screw, and mana flood are the most consistently negative play experiences compared to other sources of games lost.
2) Increasing the quantity and quality of our fixing lands will reduce the amount of color screw our players experience.
3) Increasing the quantity of our fetch lands (within the bounds of actual utility) will reduce the amount of mana flood our players experience.
Regardless of budget (we all have access to sharpies or printers after all), we have the power to improve the play experience of our cube drafters by improving our mana bases. Don’t fear the fixers!
In a game of Magic, there are many ways to lose the game. You can of course scoop. You can get beat down by a more proactive deck. You can get out-attritioned by a more reactive deck. You can fail to disrupt/beat down a combo deck before they win.
You can also get mana screwed or flooded.
As cube designers, one of our goals (generally speaking) is to maximize the fun of our players and ourselves via the MTG Cube medium. To generalize further, I would posit that most of us prefer “good games,” in other words, interactive games in which both players have agency regarding their own lines of play as well as the final outcome.
While “losing by failing to interact with combo” is a relevant discussion on these lines, not all cubes even support combo.
But virtually every cube ever existed supports the basic game infrastructure of playing lands to produce mana and cast spells.
This is the argument I want to submit to you today: a better manabase results in better games, and you, a cube designer, should probably be running a better manabase.
Why? Let’s go back to the ways to lose the game. Losing to beats, a value engine, or even a combo is by no means a “bad game.” Your decisions, all the way back to “should i mull this hand?” at the die roll, and maybe even back to “should i take that Thoughtseize/Counterspell/Swords to Plowshares over that cool bomb?” in the draft, very likely affected whether you lost that game.
But how often has a game lost to mana screw or mana flood felt like a good game?
Let’s think about how our manabase affects the likelihood of mana screw/flood occurring, but first, I want to ensure we are all speaking the same language. Going forward in this article, I’ll refer to 3 types of mana-related “failure modes:”
-COLOR SCREW, in which the color screwed player cannot access/produce all the colors of mana needed for their deck to function, resulting in a game loss with uncastable cards stuck in hand. (NOTE: i do not regard what constitutes a core color vs. a splash color to be relevant here, if you lost because you couldn’t make colors to cast what you had in hand and needed to cast, you’re color screwed.)
-MANA SCREW, in which the mana screwed player cannot access a large enough quantity of mana needed for their deck to function, resulting (again) in a game loss with uncastable cards stuck in hand.
-MANA FLOOD, in which the mana flooded player cannot access a sufficient number of their nonland cards for their deck to function, resulting in a game loss.
The scope of this argument will include COLOR SCREW and MANA FLOOD, but not MANA SCREW- maybe a good discussion for a second thread!
First let’s address the problem of COLOR SCREW. This can be easily addressed simply by including more/better fixing lands in our cubes, for example, going up from two cycles of duals to four, or upgrading our duals from Temples to Shocks/Fetches.
Having more lands that produce multiple colors is immensely helpful for gaining access to our deck’s colors. For example, if I have 9 Plains and 7 Islands and 2 Swamps in my deck, that’s how many white and blue and black sources i have in my deck. If however, I have 4 Hallowed Fountains and 4 Godless Shrines and 4 Underground Seas and 3 Plains and 2 Islands in my deck, I now have 11 White sources, 10 Blue sources, and 8 Black sources! (This gets even wilder once fetches get involved.)
One useful and simple way to look at this quantitatively as a cube architect is to divide the number of fixing lands in our cubes by the number of players drafting it. My personal number here is 50 fixers divided amongst 4 players for an average of 12+ per player. (the distribution is 20 fetch/20 dual/10 creaturelands.)
your target may be different based on your design goals, but i encourage you to look critically both at your numbers and your goals. ask yourself, “is my reasoning behind limiting my fixing providing more benefit for my environment and players’ experience than the malus brought to my environment and players’ experience by the increased risk of color screw?”
Be honest with yourself.
Second, let’s address the problem of MANA FLOOD. This is also a fairly simple problem to mitigate through manabase architecture: just run more fetches!
Jason Waddell has actually posted a video demonstrating how this works in deck construction, which I will link here:
…but to summarize, having more fetches in a deck will not significantly increase your MANA SCREWED games, but will significantly reduce your MANA FLOODED games by removing “excess” lands from your deck. In addition, if you’ve crafted your manabase such that your duals are fetchable, the amount of color screw you’re preventing goes down immensely once fetches enter the scene.
One caveat here: in terms of actual utility, fetches have an upper bound roughly equal to the number of fetchable lands in a player’s deck, so it is important to keep this in mind when crafting a mana base. a good basic heuristic is to have at least as many, and usually a few more, fetchable duals than fetches.
To conclude, we have seen that:
1) Mana screw, color screw, and mana flood are the most consistently negative play experiences compared to other sources of games lost.
2) Increasing the quantity and quality of our fixing lands will reduce the amount of color screw our players experience.
3) Increasing the quantity of our fetch lands (within the bounds of actual utility) will reduce the amount of mana flood our players experience.
Regardless of budget (we all have access to sharpies or printers after all), we have the power to improve the play experience of our cube drafters by improving our mana bases. Don’t fear the fixers!
