General Too Many Lands

[vennythekid]

This seems backwards to me. I find that I'm forced to slam any applicable shock and try to wheel the fetches, because if I miss out on my Watery Grave then all these Ux fetches do nothing.

This isn't right either.
In a N deck, Nx fetchlands can do many things outside of fixing mana. They synergize with Brainstorms, Top of Library manipulations, and landfall triggers. They fuel delve and thin decks of lands. They can power Tarmogoyfs, Deathrite Shaman, Grim Lavamancer, and Delirium.

 

[Dom Harvey]

They do something, but not enough that you would spend a Cube slot on them - especially one devoted to manafixing, which is already stretched too thin.

I like the fetch-shock setup but it feels awful when you pick up fetches in the hope of supporting your manabase but the only shocks coming round aren't useful for you.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I think a 2:1 fetchables:fetches ratio isn't the worst idea in the world.

 

[Mad Prophet]

This isn't right either.
In a N deck, Nx fetchlands can do many things outside of fixing mana. They synergize with Brainstorms, Top of Library manipulations, and landfall triggers. They fuel delve and thin decks of lands. They can power Tarmogoyfs, Deathrite Shaman, Grim Lavamancer, and Delirium.

This is a good point.

They do something, but not enough that you would spend a Cube slot on them - especially one devoted to manafixing, which is already stretched too thin.

I like the fetch-shock setup but it feels awful when you pick up fetches in the hope of supporting your manabase but the only shocks coming round aren't useful for you.

This is better, but I think the problem isn't that the fixing is spread too thin. The problem is that the fixing is so powerful as to become a necessity. If basics are Way less powerful than the fixing lands, of course it gets "spread too thin". Fixing should be good and it should be present. But there's a happy medium, and shocks/ABU duals are not it.

 

[Mad Prophet]

45 lands among 8 players comes to 5.5 lands per drafter. Scale that to a 60-card deck and you're looking at the equivalent of like, 8 non-basics for a constructed deck. Fewer if any of those lands end up in sideboards.

I don't know how aggressively you're talking about trimming your land section, but you're going to notice the difference between 45 and 25 lands far more than the difference between 315 spells and 335 spells. Marginally increased design space, "in theory". In practice, less fixing means fewer colors played, and less room for sweet multicolor brews. If you're limiting your players to two-color decks based on a paucity of fixing, you're going to give your format a reduction in deck-diversity.

Emphasis mine.

This is a very convincing argument, but I question some key components of it:​

1oneone​

​

Marginal spell utility​

​

"you're going to notice the difference between 45 and 25 lands far more than the difference between 315 spells and 335 spells"​

​

This assumes that the marginal value of a new spell in your cube goes down as the spell density goes up. But I propose that the opposite is true. When well selected, each new spell drastically increases the number of draftable card interactions. If you have 16 tunics and 12 bicornes then you have 192 outfits. But if you add 3 cloaks, the effect is multiplicative and you now have 576 outfits. The key here is to select cloaks for your cube; cards that interact in as many ways as possible with all the dark corners of your cube. I realize that this analogy is a little flawed*, as there are always? going to be 23 spells in your deck, so a new addition will necessitate a cut, where a land would not. This brings me to my next point:​

​

2twotwo​

ULD is a workaround​

​

Interestingly, I think the utility land draft is an attempt to solve some of the problems I've highlighted, but it identifies utility lands as the draft parasites rather than the true culprit:​

The dual land.​

The ULD attempts to bridge the gap between the lack of room in a draft for narrow utility lands, and the abundance of room in an average deck for the same. As it turns out though, shocklands are also pretty narrow. But rather than getting some sweet Riptide Laboratory action going, drafting duals is just the cost of doing business. I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of fixing land draft worked as a low design-work solution to the "dual lands are like gold cards" dilemma.​

​

​

3threethree​

​

Not enough fixing to go around? Cut your dual lands.​

​

You'll note that I'm not calling for less fixing, necessarily; though my implementation certainly shakes out that way. With the help of You Fine People I have come to see that my crusade is actually all about the dual land. They are simply an incredibly inefficient form of fixing as far as the draft is concerned. Missing out on a particular shockland can completely devastate your chances at a competitive deck. Furthermore, they don't compete for the same slots as spells. This means that a powerful land is far more important to your deck than a powerful spell. Even the perfect spell is hard-pressed to beat the marginal utility of a shockland over a basic.​

In the two forum-drafts we've done, fixing has been in extremely short supply for my seats, and I've had to limit myself to two-color decks. Both of which 3-0'd​

This is a textbook case of the type of thinking that lead to the ubiquity of powermaxing. The fact that fixing is in such short supply means there should be less, not more. Every play-group is different, but in my limited experience, people slam lands because its good and slam spells because they love sweet spells. It's our job as cube designers to make sure that the good thing and the sweet thing overlap as much as possible.

Spoiler: *footnote

*A better analogy might be combinations, but the effect is similar. 310 choose 23 is about 10% of 348 choose 23. Both numbers are astronomically large mind you, but I would still hesitate to call this increase marginal.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The challenge is that with a 360 cube, you have to automatically devote 40 slots to a fetch->shock framework. You'll want some manlands; so that really should be the 10 zendikar manlands (though I suppose we can pick and choose, maybe devote 5 slots here). Than we probably want some form of land based LD, either tech edge or wasteland, so thats another 2-3 slots called for. At that point we're either over 50 or within a few cards of it, with no real space for utility lands.

The 50 land cap is just too tight when 80% of land slots are spoken for off the bat, and you still have to achieve a lot in those last 10 slots.

Compare that with bouncelands, where the core package is 20 cards, and I still have 30 slots to do whatever I want with.

That being said, when a format is built to certain specs. you have to respect those specs. as it defines what the format does or doesn't want. The core structure of a shock->fetch format, is 40 slots devoted to fetch->shock. You can change that, but at that point you have a very different format, and have to make hundreds of obnoxious little tweaks across the cube, which will probably either make for an overall worse experience, or result in a completely different format.

Is running a second draft to provide utility lands ideal? No, but thats the workaround, and I have no brilliant ideas on how to restructure that style of format without diluting what it was built to be. The only thing I might try is go down 10 shocks/or fetch, run 10 manlands in that slot, than devote the last 10 slots purely to colorless producing utility lands, than see if I can get away with cutting the ULD.

Anything outside of that fetch-shock scenario shouldn't be a problem, because you aren't committed to anything, you can design whatever fixing restraints you want, and than that can define the way the rest of the format develops.

 

[James Stevenson]

Awkward idea: monocolored duals, that is, cards just for drafting that say "blue dual of choice", etc. You could run just 10 of these, and it might still alliviate the difficulty of drafting the duals you need.

 

[Chriskool]

Awkward idea: monocolored duals, that is, cards just for drafting that say "blue dual of choice", etc. You could run just 10 of these, and it might still alliviate the difficulty of drafting the duals you need.

I was thinking of the implications of something similar. For example, two-color decks splashing a third would have 3n picks to get their third color (where 'n' is how many groups of 5 of these you included). I haven't *reallllly* thought about it, but it seems interesting. Sadly, the logistical cost is probably noticeably higher than normal cubing (and a lot of mtg players seems barely seem willing to pay any time investment).

 

[Jason Waddell]

Okay, I see an interesting argument here. Say I'm in an deck. I will take a Steam Vents over Ral Zarek pretty much every time, unless I already have something like a Volcanic Island. The cost of missing out of an on-color dual is too large. And I think I've just accepted that as good drafting practice.

I do like the tradeoff of the number of colors that you can play in a format, and how that affects individual spell quality vs. deck consistency. I've 3 - 0'd with conservative decks, hyper greedy decks, and everything in between. I think it's fun to read the signals, and the reputations of the players around you, and try to find your niche and react accordingly.

Largely I've seen this problem as a capital non-issue, but agree that "auto-picks" are somewhat undesirable, in the same way that auto-picking moxes is undesirable. I don't think it's the same extreme, especially when it comes to P1P1 settings (where I almost never pick shocklands). Rather, in a P3P1 situation, if I am lacking, I will take an on-color shockland over literally anything else.

I still maintain that if you're going to use your "number of outfits" analogy, that increasing the breadth of color combinations people can play ("can I play a aggro deck?") does farrrrr more than if people are usually forced to play two-color decks. See full RTR Block draft vs RTRx3.

 

[sigh]

Maybe my original post was a little incorrectly angled

Picking an on color shock highly in later packs still makes them less picked overall than fetches, and thats an important part of the shock/fetch dynamic imo. It helps shocks wheel to the people who need them, especially with >1 of each.

Shockland of choice makes them super high picks no matter what, and I see it majorly messing with the dynamic, especially if they are used to reduce land count. Someone in 3 colors, or that knows they can be greedy if they focus on them, can scoop up every one they see to make a bomb manabase, which forces everyone else to pick them right away or else. That could lead to a lot swinger drafting based on pack distribution, and just seems meh.

Like the [something] of [color] idea, because that puts the utilization at about a fetchlands.

 

[Jason Waddell]

It's not really an idea that's gained any traction (but I still have fun using it), but part of the original motivation of the polycubing idea was that I could have different spells everytime but not fuck with my manabase. Shuffling up a 540 and having all your dual lands of a given color combination missing is a recipe for disaster.

 

[Mad Prophet]

Okay, I see an interesting argument here. Say I'm in an deck. I will take a Steam Vents over Ral Zarek pretty much every time, unless I already have something like a Volcanic Island. The cost of missing out of an on-color dual is too large. And I think I've just accepted that as good drafting practice

I do like the tradeoff of the number of colors that you can play in a format, and how that affects individual spell quality vs. deck consistency. I've 3 - 0'd with conservative decks, hyper greedy decks, and everything in between. I think it's fun to read the signals, and the reputations of the players around you, and try to find your niche and react accordingly.

I agree that this kind of decision making is a fun and engaging part of drafting, but i fail to see how abandoning the dual-land based fixing paradigm would diminish it.

I still maintain that if you're going to use your "number of outfits" analogy, that increasing the breadth of color combinations people can play ("can I play a aggro deck?") does farrrrr more than if people are usually forced to play two-color decks. See full RTR Block draft vs RTRx3.

I think this is yet another argument that actually supports cutting lands from your cube. First of all, if what you want is deck diversity, then supporting mono-color strategies will do far more work than supporting 4 color strategies. It seems pretty clear that the difference between a mono-black deck and a mono-green deck is far more significant than the difference between a deck and a deck. Furthermore, I think that weird many color brews are totally viable even in my first attempt at a no-duals cube. The option is still there to pick lands and fixers highly and try to take the most powerful cards. But now, instead of slotting into some colors as lands allow, your draft is again driven by sweet spells. To borrow a phrase, I find that spells make for much more powerful emotional spikes than (fixing)lands, and I want my drafters focus to be on spells as much as possible.


Honestly, it feels strange to be debating with Jason Waddell about the poison principle, but I really do feel like dual-lands are a parasitic vestige of the power-max era.
Sure, every deck desperately wants some particular shockland, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the shocklands in the cube are worthless for any given deck.
I'm not trying to say that narrow-but-powerful cards are bad in the abstract, but, as cube designers, there's only so much room for parasitic cards. And I for one want to put that parasitism somewhere else.

 

[vennythekid]

I'm not sure if you understand what the "poison principle" actually is. You're throwing it around to describe things that are certainly not parasitic.

A set of cards which violate the poison principle do so by adding value to a single, focused strategy while providing no value outside of that strategy. Dual lands do the exact opposite of this. They provide value to a wide variety of strategies by allowing drafters to explore mixing and matching new card and color combinations. Without availible fixing, those decks simply don't exist. If that's not something you want in your environment, that's a design choice, not a "poison principle" rule.

Likewise, Birthing Pod is not a parasitic card. It's a card that any creature strategy can pick up to generate value, either through toolbox style tutoring, generating value with recursive threats, abusing ETB value creatures, or assembling a key combo.

 

[Mad Prophet]

The poison principle was originally defined in terms of isolated deck archetypes and maybe it's a wild misappropriation to apply the same terminology to individual cards, but I think the same underlying principles are at work.
Dual lands in cube share an important property with the virulent slivers of the world. The number of decks they fit in is small, and their relative importance in the decks that can play them is extremely high.

I will cede, however, that Birthing Pod was probably not a good example of a fun parasitic card. Something like Psychatog would have been a better example.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

To be true poison principle, a card has to exist on a completely isolated axis from the rest of a cube. The reason poison is the archetypal example of this principle, is because cards with poison or infect operate on a such an isolated axis: its an "all in on poison or these cards do nothing" mechanic. There is no half-way.

Now, there are whole categories of cards that display various degrees of narrowness, but are still perfectly playable, without being poison or parasitic. Sometimes these types of cards are even helpful or beneficial to a cube: e.g. most multi-color cards, archetype anchors, or build arounds often fall into this category. The poison principle is simply a way to describe an extreme of narrowness, where the card is so far removed from a cube's operating axis, as to become binary in its application, and thus bad for draft dynamics.

While shocklands may be described as narrow, and this might be a topic worth discussing, they don't actually fall into the realm of poison principle, or being parasitic in nature. They have broad applicability in enabling three color decks, off color splashes, as well as being the foundation for two color decks.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Here is something timely.

While this is, importantly enough, yet another example of LSV drafting a *gasp* true simic deck.

More importantly, at 3:34 in the draft video, he talks about fixing in cube.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

To be somewhat more specific, for those that don't want to click on the link: he suggests you want to be 5/5 or 5/6 with circa 5 dual lands. To make that even achievable with 8 players, you need around 40 fixing duals in your format. For those of us running 360 cards, thats a pretty traditional layout.

And this is just to make 2 color and 2.5 color decks function consistently.

 

[Mad Prophet]

To be somewhat more specific, for those that don't want to click on the link: he suggests you want to be 5/5 or 5/6 with circa 5 dual lands. To make that even achievable with 8 players, you need around 40 fixing duals in your format. For those of us running 360 cards, thats a pretty traditional layout.

And this is just to make 2 color and 2.5 color decks function consistently.

If you ran 20 lands instead, he'd say you need a 2.5/2.5 or 2.5/3 circa 2.5 dual lands. All LSV is saying here is that picking up anything less than your share of the dual lands is unacceptable. Unfortunately, no matter how many dual lands you play in your cube, some of them end up in sideboards. This means that some drafter now has "less than his/her share" of the duals. Narrow cards like Overgrown Tomb can create draft inefficiencies by ending up in the not-relevant sideboard of player A, when in fact player B was in desperate need of said card. This is a bummer for player B because now he has worse-than-the-field fixing. Even worse, this can cause a cascade where B is unable to use the Windswept Heath he picked in anticipation of an Overgrown Tomb.

 

[Kirblinx]

I don't really have much to say on this land issue, but I have to say this to the Mad Prophet:
Your use of fonts is both amazing and disturbing. All at the same time!

Continue being awesome

 

[Rasmus Källqvist]

I honestly don't understand why there's such an opposition to fixing? Is this really actually a problem that's arisen when you've sat down and played and people have complained "dude! you're cube is just all lands and not enough cool cards"?

 

[James Stevenson]

I honestly don't understand why there's such an opposition to fixing? Is this really actually a problem that's arisen when you've sat down and played and people have complained "dude! you're cube is just all lands and not enough cool cards"?

We've never had complaint about lack of playables, that's for sure. I did have one guy who hated the abundance of fixing because it was too easy to splash all over the place and win with a totally incoherent 4-color deck.
On the other hand, I know that I often wish I had more space for jank in the cube. With respect to this problem, I lean towards building a wacky UED, rather than cutting lands. Not that I've tried either of these - I haven't cubed in over a year.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I agree that this kind of decision making is a fun and engaging part of drafting, but i fail to see how abandoning the dual-land based fixing paradigm would diminish it.

I think this is yet another argument that actually supports cutting lands from your cube. First of all, if what you want is deck diversity, then supporting mono-color strategies will do far more work than supporting 4 color strategies. It seems pretty clear that the difference between a mono-black deck and a mono-green deck is far more significant than the difference between a deck and a deck. Furthermore, I think that weird many color brews are totally viable even in my first attempt at a no-duals cube. The option is still there to pick lands and fixers highly and try to take the most powerful cards. But now, instead of slotting into some colors as lands allow, your draft is again driven by sweet spells. To borrow a phrase, I find that spells make for much more powerful emotional spikes than (fixing)lands, and I want my drafters focus to be on spells as much as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is, when you allow them to play multiple colors, they can find cool synergies that borrow from multiple colors. Like, say, Jeskai tokens splashing Abzan Ascendancy and Voice of Resurgence. Or some cool 4-color pod brews I've seen, that feel very unique.

I agree that mono-black is vastly different from mono-green, but my argument is more than, mono black in Draft 1 is not very different from mono black in Draft 2. See: modo mono-red decks.

It's true that shocklands and gold cards have differing demand than, say, mono-color cards. Generally the approach has been: if you see such cards wheeling incessantly, you have too many. Supply and demand. It's why I only have 3 gold spell slots per guild.

 

[sigh]

If you ran 20 lands instead, he'd say you need a 2.5/2.5 or 2.5/3 circa 2.5 dual lands. All LSV is saying here is that picking up anything less than your share of the dual lands is unacceptable. Unfortunately, no matter how many dual lands you play in your cube, some of them end up in sideboards. This means that some drafter now has "less than his/her share" of the duals. Narrow cards like Overgrown Tomb can create draft inefficiencies by ending up in the not-relevant sideboard of player A, when in fact player B was in desperate need of said card. This is a bummer for player B because now he has worse-than-the-field fixing. Even worse, this can cause a cascade where B is unable to use the Windswept Heath he picked in anticipation of an Overgrown Tomb.

no, he wouldn't say that. He says right before the sentence "something like 5/5, 5/6, and 5 duals", "If you drafted cube and your mana base is 9/8, you did not draft a good deck, it cannot by good" followed shortly later by "It's just really important to have good mana." This implies that his statement is absolute, not relatively based on how many lands there are in total in the cube (which most players, at least IRL, have no way of knowing anyway). If anything, he's just assuming that cubes have adequate lands in them for picking up in the manner he describes. This also seems to be couched in LSV's assumption on high power level = cube. So, if we aren't changing the power level of our nonlands, it seems like suddenly reducing land count below a well thought out number is just asking for bad times. If a format is set up to handle the different draft dynamic, sounds great, but you can't just ratchet a single dial down and expect other things to not go bonkers.

And having enough fixing makes sure that people have a sufficient amount even if <100% of lands make it into decks. The classic here at RTL is to double up on shocks and fetches, so you have a second chance later on to pick up the dual you need.

Do want to also bring up someone's point that 24 of the lands are "free" compared to retail draft, where you'd normally get a basic land. The remaining 16-24 or so lands are probably in about the same density as, say, gainlands were in Khans drafts. edit: just looked this up, and Khans drafts had about 1.76 pieces of fixing per pack (total between all card types), which is a draft total of 42 pieces. Interesting. My average draft has about 53, including dorks and rocks. Maybe this indicates a dial needs a tweak? But certainly not a drastic twist.

editedit: and that's not counting the fact that I can "hide" 24 of those fixers into the 15th slot, which retail draft doesn't usually utilize. that puts my "non-basic" fixing percentage well below Khans draft.


editeditedit: Upon taking another look, fixing across all cards types and rarities gives a final draft count of 51 fixers......seems like if you have draft format goals, you can't just ignore the manabase half of things

----------

All I know is that if one of my drafters wants to play a sweet and unique/unusual deck, I want to make sure they don't have a terrible time because their mana is shit. Lots of unique decks require unique splashing, and that player will maybe not try again if their plan utlra-fails just based on variance.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Is this really actually a problem that's arisen when you've sat down and played and people have complained "dude! you're cube is just all lands and not enough cool cards"?

Yes. I've actually had this complaint.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

I honestly don't understand why there's such an opposition to fixing? Is this really actually a problem that's arisen when you've sat down and played and people have complained "dude! you're cube is just all lands and not enough cool cards"?

It really isn't a problem. Sometimes drafters will just have pet peeves, which should be ignored. Most of our formats are probably running barely sufficient fixing as is, and giving in to this particular pet peeve is likely to just make a format overall worse.