That article is great but I think overestimates on a bit, and leads to some really problematic situations if fully followed. This is also a good time to talk about fetches. And to have fun over analyzing stuff that should be in the mana base thread. Here goes!
I drafted a theoretical Jund deck in a cube with only non-fetches (shocks, duals etc). I want green T1 for dorks, black T2 for Bob, and red later for spot removal and reach. 10 green, 9 black, 7 red (assuming all one mana symbol). My mana base ends up looking like:
That's
9 non-basics! At the minimum! For 8 drafters this cube would need 70 non basics to enable everyone to comfortably be three colors. Now, if the cube says na, sometimes ya gotta be two colors, that changes things. Two colors is only 2-3 nonbasics depending. Assuming half and half... cuz yeah: 3*4 + 9*4 =
48 (50)
Eight at 3 is only 24, if everyone goes XY, so this is between 70 and 24 theoretically.....
A good way to alleviate this is with 3 color lands (fetches). With equal access, two color is unaffected, but 3 color drops to 6 (see below). 3* 4 + 6*4 = 36 (40)! Yay
, fetches have reduced my nonbasic load by 25%! That's very significant. But lets be real. With 8 drafters, there's almost no way to stay out of each others hair. If two people want GW, there are only 8 or so to go between them, and someone can easily yank a windswept leaving 7. Now with three people in GW??? (say one abzan). Yikes. Basically the more fetches you have in your environment, up to the point that there are no longer enough fetchables for people, your manabase will be more robust and easier to make as your number requirements drop.
And lets talk about his
entirely arbitrary "definition" of consistently. 90%? "mostly a product of experience and intuition" Ah, very scientific of you Frank. If he had game playout data with his experience saying that 90% was where performance was maximized, I'd be ok. But think about it at the lowest end. You, at miminum, need to perform well 66% of the time. So why not pick that? Well, thats cutting it close... but what about consistently hit it 1 out of 5 games, 80%? Why 1 out 10 game flop? Especially for splash colors, it seems like 90% is very arbitrary and high. If you only have 2 of those cards, your entire hand shouldn't have that color... ever, so why such a high margin? A well constructed deck will have other things to do on Turn X
. Bringing the ridiculousness of the 2 mana symobls into this... one Courser of Kruphix and Yavimaya Elder in the deck immediately bumps the green requirements up to
13 sources, which makes the nonbasic count now 12 or 8, respectively non-fetch fetch. That's 85 or 60 lands required. Like, most of our cube decks just...
dont work according to his article. We've got 5 non-basics, 7 CC cards and we're like "yeah this deck was awesome, it performed strongly and got beat only by a sligh deck" etc etc. We should be falling far short.... but aren't? I dunno, seems sketchy.
TL;DR: I say go equal fetchables/fetches as the core of you fixing, and also maybe not follow articles letter by letter
? Who knows.
as well, because 10 seems a bit short?
