General When Is Fixing Too Good?

[Grillo_Parlante]

It sounds like a tangle of potential issues, which we should probably first tease out:

1. Over density of raw lands for 2-3 drafters
2. Over density of types of specific fixing for 2-3 drafters
3. Underdrafted guilds
4. Format Specific Considerations

I also will do 3 person drafts with my cube, though I have no ULD. I think you have 50 pieces of land based mana fixing in the main cube, so about 12.4%. I have 42 at 360, so 11.6%. I think we are fine here, at least on paper.

Strategically, for me, the bouncelands and scry lands are very powerful, but the gainlands take on more of a supporting role. I think we are mostly fine here as well, though you can decide if that second line of shock lands is boring/redundent, or if the scry lands are superfluous. If you are seeing a certain land type making up the chaff in your boosters, that is probably part of the issue.

If you see certain color combinations disproportionately making up the back of a pack, than you might just not have demand for those color lands. This is a little hard to track with 2-3 player drafts, so try to stay attentive of this when doing larger drafts, or just notice patterns over repeated smaller drafts.

The last is a little vague, but its just sort of the strategic value that your drafters are placing on specific lands, or fixing in general (how are they building mana bases?). For example, you have a fair number of colorless producing utility lands in your ULD, which naturally conflicts with running greedy mana bases. This could be encouraging people to value 2 color decks more, which can more efficiently utilize those lands. This would naturally result in less demand for color fixing, and make the (however reasonable) selection that you are providing, redundant. You might want to look over some of the completed decks, looking for draft patterns that might be causing people to draft less fixing.

 

[RavebornMuse]

It sounds like a tangle of potential issues, which we should probably first tease out:

1. Over density of raw lands for 2-3 drafters
2. Over density of types of specific fixing for 2-3 drafters
3. Underdrafted guilds
4. Format Specific Considerations

I also will do 3 person drafts with my cube, though I have no ULD. I think you have 50 pieces of land based mana fixing in the main cube, so about 12.4%. I have 42 at 360, so 11.6%. I think we are fine here, at least on paper.

Strategically, for me, the bouncelands and scry lands are very powerful, but the gainlands take on more of a supporting role. I think we are mostly fine here as well, though you can decide if that second line of shock lands is boring/redundent, or if the scry lands are superfluous. If you are seeing a certain land type making up the chaff in your boosters, that is probably part of the issue.

If you see certain color combinations disproportionately making up the back of a pack, than you might just not have demand for those color lands. This is a little hard to track with 2-3 player drafts, so try to stay attentive of this when doing larger drafts, or just notice patterns over repeated smaller drafts.

The last is a little vague, but its just sort of the strategic value that your drafters are placing on specific lands, or fixing in general (how are they building mana bases?). For example, you have a fair number of colorless producing utility lands in your ULD, which naturally conflicts with running greedy mana bases. This could be encouraging people to value 2 color decks more, which can more efficiently utilize those lands. This would naturally result in less demand for color fixing, and make the (however reasonable) selection that you are providing, redundant. You might want to look over some of the completed decks, looking for draft patterns that might be causing people to draft less fixing.

As always, a wonderful post, Grillo, and words well-appreciated.
1. This was kind of my line of thinking; drafting 50 fixing lands, that are normally fought over by 8 players, is much less tense at 2-3. This was where I was expecting the issue to be.
2. The shocks are definitely left in the packs most often, temples never; they're highly valued over here (which makes me really happy), even off-colour for the scry. I hadn't thought of this, but this is a good point to consider.
3. Underdrafted guilds is something I've kept a close eye out for, and it's definitely anything with a in it that sees less attention. Green renovations is one of my top priorities on my current overhaul, because green is unpopular, except as a support colour. As far as underdrafted guilds, Gruul is my top culprit; the rest see pretty fair use (with a few combos being a tad more popular). Again, though, I blame that more on my green section, which I'm working on.
4. I hadn't considered this at all! I DO think that the wealth of good colourless ULD options is probably helping to push 2-3 colour decks more. This is a good point. (I'd like to note that I prefer my format this way; 2c-3c is, imho, a lot more interesting to sit across from than 4c-5c)

After Grillo's post, I'm inclined to think that cutting the second cycle of shocks is the clear answer, since they're usually what's lingering at the end of packs, and that makes sense: you can use an off-colour fetch, you can use a scry land anywhere, manlands might be worth a splash, whereas shocks kinda just belong where they belong... But that still brings us back to the question of what to do with the manlands.

Should I toss them into the ULD? I certainly don't want to have, say, Simic, be completely without a shockland just because it has Lumbering Falls. Either those colours with manlands will have extra fixing in the main, or easy picks in the ULD... Neither seem very preferable. Nor does it seem wise to cut temples in those colours for manlands, because temples are super cool. Maybe this is a problem without an actual solution. I really would like to cut some lands from my cube though..

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

How many manlands does your cube really want? While they are undeniably sweet, they fill a niche role for control or midrange decks in attrition wars, and you probably only actually need a fairly small set of them. I would hazard to guess that any 360-400ish cube would be perfectly comfortable topping out at 3-5. Generic ones such as mutavault or mishra's factory would be best in the maincube, and it might be a really great idea that we all should be doing fine to break singleton on mutavaults, which work well with any incidental tribal synergies you have, while also filling that role. Than maybe 1-2 in the ULD for G/B/x decks or U/x control?

I think this is another question of defining what the format really wants from those cards, and adjusting density to fit that need.

 

[ahadabans]

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum with this debate. I used to run the 11-12% fixing ratio and found it too light. I know this is something that the community feels is well established and all, but I just don't agree with it. The concept of having to choose fixing over cards that go in your deck sounds good on paper but losing games to mana problems or passing cards you need to take fixing just so you can play your 3 color splash deck feels like a lose/lose to me from a fun standpoint. It may add complexity and depth to the draft, but at what cost?

Is there a limited environment with crap fixing that was fun to draft? Was there ever one with too much fixing that sucked because it had too much fixing? I'm not the expert as I haven't done any limited drafting in 10 years, but I'm guessing the answer to both of these questions is no (or yes with a fat asterisk). But please correct me if I'm wrong on this point.

In our cube at least, most decks are 2 colors with a 3rd splash (card or two in the splash). There's a great article which I will link below for those who want to dig into the numbers, but long story short I really think you need at least 6 fixing lands to have that 3rd splash and not be flirting with mana inconsistencies. So I now run 6 full cycles at 450, and that doesn't include the vivids or things like City of Brass, etc. My 2 cents... there's already enough challenge reading what colors people are in. Adding a fixing famine to the equation can only lead to bad games of Magic. Maybe I'm just a care bear drafter though.

As far as there being too much fixing... honestly... this to me indicates other problems. Consider every constructed format in existence. They all have access to nearly limitless fixing (between 4 copies and access to multiple cycles in most cases - functionally you can run as much as you want). Are they all dominated by 4/5 color decks (are any)? I get that wasteland plays a critical role in some of them keeping the non-basic masters honest - fair enough - but I think people forget that there is a cost associated with running a fixing land (all except the original duals). They either cost you life or ETB tapped generally - both are not insignificant costs and have to be factored into the equation. Unless you have zero pressure on you, you can't take 2-3 life from your lands every turn of the game and you can't always afford more than one or two ETB tapped lands either, so even if you had infinite access to these types of lands could you really in actuality run as many as you wanted?

In my mind, having abundant fixing doesn't make 4/5 color decks the dominate strategy, non-land card choices in the cube are what's doing that. If the only thing keeping the 4/5 color deck from 3-0 every draft is insufficient fixing, you probably have too many generic splashable good stuff cards in your cube. I'd probably start there.

Here's that mana article BTW. Worth reading even if you disagree completely with my conclusions. It's focused on numbers primarily.
http://www.channelfireball.com/arti...do-you-need-to-consistently-cast-your-spells/

FWIW the dude who does this blog (http://mtgcube.blogspot.com) posted his cube list not too long ago and I was surprised to find he's running 120 non-basics at 554 (didn't count them but that's got to be 10 fixing cycles!), so that's about double what the average cube runs and more than I'm currently running. I've never seen him mention in his blog any issue with 4/5 color decks dominating his meta.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

hmm...lets see here,

I count about 70 fixing lands at 450, so about 15%. I don't know how to calculate how significant that 3-4% increase is on draft dynamics though*. The thing that makes me sort of pause, is that you have a slower more durdly format, so it seems strange that your drafters would be having problems hitting their colors.

I do think this is kind of true though on some level, and is most easily reflected in our traditional aversion to cards. We've kind of adapted our formats, in a sense, to accommodate a 11-12% number by minimizing color intensity at certain points of the game.

*Edit: 120 fixing lands at 554 is 21.6%, which I think provides some useful context.

 

[ahadabans]

Yeah, the article was really eye opening when I first read it. If you did a light splash to play doom blade let's say, you'd still need 7 mana sources to reliably cast it by turn 4 (9 by T2). If you ran let's say Mardu with black as your third color, even if you ran exclusively cards with only one colored cost in all three colors (not easy to do honestly - check how many double colored cards we are all running), you'd likely want 10/9/7 to not be sitting on cards in your hand. Even with 2 fetches and 4 duals, you can get close but you can't actually get that breakout. And that's with 6 non-basics! God forbid you want to run a CC card in that mess.

There's a thread that recently had a lot of exchanges about mana screw/flood. It's clearly something that crops up a lot in cube. My meta being a little slower is still very susceptible to this problem (where you have cards in your hand you can't play and that impacts the outcome of the game). And I think the numbers from that article illustrate why this happens. I'm not sure running 20% fixing is the solution (though maybe I guess?), but the 11-13% number clearly seems wrong to me. I'm guessing that number just stuck from the early days of cube before anyone really applied statistics to this and where just running "the best 50 lands!" and what not. It's like how early cubes were short on 1 and 2 drops with ass mana curves (this problem we fixed over time). Mana never really got addressed I don't think. We've been working with mana bases that are much closer to limited mana than constructed, but the card pool and power level is closer to constructed not limited. I think this has added a lot of negative variance, something that is becoming a bigger issue as cubes get tighter and more powerful.

EDIT: Regarding my cube specifically, as we are drafting in modules now the fixing lands tend to be more appropriate (for lack of a better word). When we did a random selection of the whole cube, inevitably you'd see a WB fixing land and no one would be in that color combination so it would just wheel and no one would run it. With modules, that is a lot less likely since the lands in each module support the primary color combinations. But I don't have a ton of data on this yet, as the module thing is relatively new.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I feel I kinda solved this problem in another way in my cube. You probably know by know that I run a three-color cube, so you would expect lots of fixing, but I actually run only 50 in a 450 cube. Because I only support five guilds though, each of the supported two-color combinations still has 2 fetches, 2 shocks, 2 fastlands with basic land types, and a manland (some custom). Each three-color combination has three lands. So, plenty of fixing per guild, but still a relatively low density. Problem is of course that this solution is only usable in specific cubes and not generally applicable. You simply can't use this method if you want to support all ten color combinations...

What probably also helps is that I have cut every CC drop from my cube.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I wouldn't say mana never got addressed. Things are wayyy better with 25 fetchlands than with 10, and I am supplementing with Mirage fetchlands. I feel pretty good about the density of fixing in the environment, even though I'm on about 6.5 fixers per drafter.

 

[Chris Taylor]

I wouldn't say mana never got addressed. Things are wayyy better with 25 fetchlands than with 10, and I am supplementing with Mirage fetchlands. I feel pretty good about the density of fixing in the environment, even though I'm on about 6.5 fixers per drafter.

The mirage fetchlands in your ULD aren't "Shoddyfetch of Choice", they're just all in there?

 

[RavebornMuse]

How many manlands does your cube really want? While they are undeniably sweet, they fill a niche role for control or midrange decks in attrition wars, and you probably only actually need a fairly small set of them. I would hazard to guess that any 360-400ish cube would be perfectly comfortable topping out at 3-5. Generic ones such as mutavault or mishra's factory would be best in the maincube, and it might be a really great idea that we all should be doing fine to break singleton on mutavaults, which work well with any incidental tribal synergies you have, while also filling that role. Than maybe 1-2 in the ULD for G/B/x decks or U/x control?

I think this is another question of defining what the format really wants from those cards, and adjusting density to fit that need.

Well, I currently run WB, UG, and WG manlands, and I'm expecting the incoming manlands from Oath to probably be good enough to run, which would bring me to 5 at least, perhaps 6. They're easy picks here, and I think part of the reason for that is because they can dodge sorcery speed removal, of which a portion of my removal is. I suppose I should just toss them in the ULD, though; you're right, they're really filling a niche role, and not every deck is looking for them. I just hate to give away fixing when there's so much going underused in the main, but, maybe cutting a cycle of shocks will up the competition. And, as ahadabans raised, maybe the extra fixing won't be a bad thing.

In my mind, having abundant fixing doesn't make 4/5 color decks the dominate strategy, non-land card choices in the cube are what's doing that. If the only thing keeping the 4/5 color deck from 3-0 every draft is insufficient fixing, you probably have too many generic splashable good stuff cards in your cube. I'd probably start there.

This stands out to me. I'd like to stress that I don't think 4c/5c decks are necessarily the end result of abundant fixing, but it's moreso my opinion that abundant fixing enables those sorts of decks (as in, you won't see 4c-5c show up successfully with no fixing, but you can see it with even 10% of the cube being fixing). It's essentially my opinion that if you give average people access to the tools for evil (easy access to good mana), I would expect some of them to go evil routinely (4c-5c control). I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I suppose the fact that 4c-5c decks are so rare in my cube probably reflects one, or both, of the following:
1) my very careful craftsmanship; informed largely by the wonderful people here at Riptide, I think I've done well to incentivize 2c-3c decks built around a plan rather than tolerate goodstuff; players get excited and engaged by the opportunities in each colour line and their potential for combination, and draft accordingly, following the typical (?) retail strategy of looking for themes and pursuing them, rather than the powermax strategy of looking for areas of abuse and capitalizing on them. I foster this look-for-themes approach by pausing after each pack with new drafters/after a big update and telling everyone to check their picks and consider what they're drafting, which has resulted in pretty decent decks even from those fresh to cubing.
2) my drafters are sweet cinnamon rolls (present rotten piece of birthday cake aside) and are not the funthirsty sort to try to draft a 4c-5c degenerate deck routinely

Considering ahadabans' post though, I think there's a good point to it in that more fixing isn't necessarily going to result in 4c-5c, but rather, it depends on what your environment tolerates/encourages. Considering this, maybe I'll just throw a cycle of painlands in the ULD. They're clearly inferior to the main cube options, but they'd help decks reach for that third colour a little easier. To avoid degeneracy, I'd probably make them cost 2 picks each (so you could get 2 a draft in my 5-pick paradigm). Has anyone else tried putting a "less-good" cycle of fixing in their ULD? I think I've seen it mentioned a few times, but I can't recall the results.

 

[Jason Waddell]

The mirage fetchlands in your ULD aren't "Shoddyfetch of Choice", they're just all in there?

Yep, running the full cycle.

 

[FlowerSunRain]

Yeah, it is super environment dependent. Both my friend and I run separate piles for lands and the effects on our drafts are very different. His "retail limited bomb" format tends towards trying to play 4 color, because the environment is relatively slow and running all of the best 4 drops and removal you can is usually a winning strategy. In my cube, people still splash, but there is plenty of aggression and a lot less "midrange friendly good stuff", so fetch-shocking yourself twice a game is a pretty steep cost. Most people prefer to stick with more conservative color schemes (letting them take a few less painful lands like the glacial fortress cycle instead of all shocks and fetches) and take advantage of the colorless tapping utility lands that support their deck.

 

[Aoret]

Past Work
I'm abbreviating this (really great) post to comment on a small piece of it:

...
This stands out to me. I'd like to stress that I don't think 4c/5c decks are necessarily the end result of abundant fixing, but it's moreso my opinion that abundant fixing enables those sorts of decks (as in, you won't see 4c-5c show up successfully with no fixing, but you can see it with even 10% of the cube being fixing). It's essentially my opinion that if you give average people access to the tools for evil (easy access to good mana), I would expect some of them to go evil routinely (4c-5c control)
...

RM makes an excellent point here re: incentivizing 2-color and dis-incentivizing 5-color via life loss. I know I've been harping on this a lot but I feel more and more strongly that LD lands are another important tool to have at your disposal. I don't think it's right for every format (though there are options to choose from at various power levels), but I do think it's an important knob to be aware of. I've experimented heavily with all three methods and my findings were basically:

1. Incentivizing 2-color is the most difficult route to take IMO. It's the "softest" type of suggestion you can use, since players can still go off the path if you don't strike a really excellent power level balance. (Note that this deviates from the usual draft tenet of power level imbalance not mattering a ton because competition can smooth out a metagame)
2. Making good mana cost more life works, but it makes control a bit worse.

Option 3 is LD, which I'll talk about more at length because I don't think anyone has done so here yet:

The Good
Adding in more LD lands works great to discourage 5 color while also leaving it as a (risky) fringe archetype, but if you're using wasteland, it absolutely presses curves lower and speeds up your format. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that it makes control worse; in fact I run better control decks now than I did before. LD also solves the aforementioned concerns about manlands.

The Bad
You can end up with non-games if drafters keep loose hands or go too HAM on duals. I mitigated this by making a point to explain to my drafters the changes I'd made to the format and warned them about the dangers of getting wastelanded. The looser ULD lands definitely get a lot worse. I was able to stomach this because it gave me fewer concerns about the more powerful ULD lands; now they're seen as high-risk high-reward cards and nobody is butt-hurt when they get kessig wolf ran out of a game.

Overall, I feel like the omnipresent LD in my cube adds/deepens a couple of dimensions that I couldn't get any other way. 5-color and utility land-heavy decks become exciting strategies that look awesome and flashy win they win, but can be punished by players who build lean, consistent decks. This is not unlike dedicated ramp archetypes which feel broken when they win, but are actually somewhat inconsistent, risky, and probably just worse than normal decks. I like that they're possible for the same reason that I keep ramp around: sometimes you're just in a fun mood and want to do something wacky. All of this adds tons of extra texture to my environment, which is why I'm so happy with it.

Exercises For The Reader
Since I know a lot of y'all aren't as keen to hop on the proxy train as I am, I'd urge you guys to up your wasteland counts for a draft or two and see how things feel. The only tips I'd give are that you should probably press your curves lower if you try this, and that you definitely want to warn drafters who may not be familiar with the card and how dangerous it is.

I'm also very curious to know what the weaker LD options would do. It's possible that going any weaker than wasteland isn't powerful enough to keep 5-color at bay, but I'm not sure. In particular tectonic edge is of interest because it purports to punish greedy manabases while leaving curves somewhat more intact (which may or may not be desirable... I still think FSR is right about lower curves being better for the game)

 

[ahadabans]

Can someone post a sample mana base from one of these dominate 5 color decks? I'd really like to see it. Because I'm honestly skeptical that you can build a consistent 5 color mana base in cube even if you relied heavily on green and grabbed every single fixing land you saw (and how are you doing this AND also grabbing all the best cards from each color???). I would never even attempt a deck like this TBH. I've never even tried playing a 4 color deck in cube before as it just sucks too much to not be able to play the cards in your hand due to mana problems (and is that 4th splash REALLY worth trying to find 5+ mana sources for that color... really??). I'm often hesitant to run 3 colors (but tend to be pretty conservative when it comes to mana).

Is it possible that some of the success of these decks is based on fortunate draws and/or poor competition? Cube decks I find often play very different match to match and even game to game. In fact, I've taken "highly successful" decks I've built and played them the next day or a week later in testing and had them lose so badly I completely did a 180 on my opinion of the deck. There's just a lot of variance in Magic and especially in largely singleton lists (unless you are just building 2power1drop.dec all the time I guess). To be fair, I tend to build fairly bizarre decks so consistency is not where my decks generally excel.

Anyway, I think some amount of LD is good for most formats though - so on board with Aoret and others here. It's simply another (healthy) answer to a powerful mechanic in much the same way edicts are great (essential even) against shroud/hexproof creatures or evasion is good against walls or sweepers are good against tokens, etc. The more of those types of dynamics you can build into cube the better IMO.

Manlands in particular are pretty hard to deal with when games go long I think, but between a healthy amount of aggression at the table and instant speed removal, I believe they can be managed with minimal LD. I wonder though, are guys finding manlands more oppressive to control decks (maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong perspective)? Because I can't imagine them being an issue for an aggressive deck (where the better control manlands don't come online before the aggressive player should be winning the game anyway). I think a potential difference for me though is the fact that even control decks are running a lot of creatures in our cube, so it's not that often that aggro or midrange can animate a manland and swing freely at the control player (and them have no answer to that).

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

Typically what we see here are excessive splashes. You might have a core two color deck splashing up to three colors, or a three color deck splashing up to two more colors.

The most common catalyst for this is something like lingering souls: its a cheap opportunity cost to grab a fetchable shock to splash black.

Anyways, I was doing some thought experiments on this, and to get up to karsten's cube mana fixing numbers (21%) you would have to run something like 72 (!) color producing lands at 360. Usually, I like to have 10 or so slots for utility lands, so that pushes us to around 80-82 lands

I'm not really sure what to think about that. On one hand, I think our higher power formats have very badly wanted to see a seizable increase in fetchlands (and x4 fetch rows brings us to legacy like density). On the other hand, thats a lot of cube space to devote to lands, in a list size that I already feel is cramped for space.

 

[Ferritovore]

I got the 10 painlands and the 10 bouncelands for my cube. Should I proxy fetchlands and make my pain/bouncelands count as Island Mountains like shocks do? Or would that make them even better than shocks are?

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

About manlands, they are supposed to shine in top deck wars or as finishers for control. Modern jund (for example) is perfectly happy with grinding both decks down to nothing, before sending the ravines in for the kill, while both players are top decking.

I don't think you need too many to fill that role, but they are nice because you can efficently squeeze them in as dual lands. They are also much easier to interact with than other utility lands, which is nice.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I have won with my fair share of 4-color cube decks but their win percentage is always a function of the number of inexperienced drafters at the table. The color dynamics reach a good equilibrium with better drafters, so I don't really see it as something you need to explicitly design against too much. In practice I think Wastelands serve more to buy aggro time than they do to punish color greed, but that's certainly an element.

Ferret: making cards that are better than shocks isn't really a problem, because it's a closed environment, it's more of a question of how you want your lands to function.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I got the 10 painlands and the 10 bouncelands for my cube. Should I proxy fetchlands and make my pain/bouncelands count as Island Mountains like shocks do? Or would that make them even better than shocks are?

Keep in mind that giving, say, Adarkar Wastes the Plains basic land type will, per the comprehensive rules, give it the ability to tap for white mana. Painless. Kinda defeats the idea of a pain land really

It would work for the karoos, although they'll look kinda funky if you spell them out...

Azorius Chancery
Land - Plains Island
When ~ enters the battlefield, return a land you control to its owner's hand.
: Add , or to your mana pool.

Huh... Wonder what I'll choose?

 

[ahadabans]

Typically what we see here are excessive splashes. You might have a core two color deck splashing up to three colors, or a three color deck splashing up to two more colors.

The most common catalyst for this is something like lingering souls: its a cheap opportunity cost to grab a fetchable shock to splash black.

Anyways, I was doing some thought experiments on this, and to get up to karsten's cube mana fixing numbers (21%) you would have to run something like 72 (!) color producing lands at 360. Usually, I like to have 10 or so slots for utility lands, so that pushes us to around 80-82 lands

I'm not really sure what to think about that. On one hand, I think our higher power formats have very badly wanted to see a seizable increase in fetchlands (and x4 fetch rows brings us to legacy like density). On the other hand, thats a lot of cube space to devote to lands, in a list size that I already feel is cramped for space.

The thing about the excessive splash though is I don't agree it's a cheap opportunity cost. You are hurting your mana by including a single swamp in a deck that otherwise doesn't need swamps. And even if it's fetchable, your odds of being able to flashback lingering souls in a game is a lot lower than people probably realize. Anyone consistently flashing that back with a single fetchland and single swamp is getting really really lucky. And not running an extra plain (because you made it a swamp) also means that 1WW spell has a higher chance of getting delayed a turn or two while you wait for that extra white source, potentially costing you fatal tempo. In short, there's a very real cost here that I don't think drafters are understanding. I don't believe most decks get better by forcing the swamp to flashback lingering souls if that is the 4th color and you are running no other black cards. Just my take on this.


On the topic of increasing land density... There's a lot of focus in the forums on mana curves in cube - rightly so - and all that awareness made me look deeper at the distribution of cards in my cube (not just non-land cards but non-basic lands too). That article I linked above, I found after the fact and it confirmed at least for me some of the challenges I was seeing with mana inconsistencies, but the QUANTITY of lands I feel we should be running I believe you can arrive at doing a completely different exercise.

Consider this scenario...

What if you took your 360 card cube and made X decks out of it. Use every single card in the cube when you do this, and use each card only once. This is a giant pain in the ass, but you might find it useful to both identify gaps in CMC (where you have too many or not enough) and as a way to find cards that really fit in less places that you thought they did (because you will have a hard time finding a deck you are happy running those cards - and if you can't even place that card in a specific deck and be happy about it, what are the odds anyone is drafting it and putting it in a deck?).

So if you did this, what would you wind up with? Keeping numbers simple, let's say each deck is 24 non-land cards and 16 lands (I know it's usually 23/17 but those numbers don't divide well so go with it). So that means we have 30 cards from the 360 per deck (plus 10 basics) per deck, or 12 decks (30 x 12 = 360). How many non-basics does each of those decks generally want? 6 feels like a good number to me (and you can even argue more than that). OK. 12 x 6 = 72. That is how many non-basics you'd need to support this exercise - 72. Not far off from the numbers you just listed and I think more than most of us are running. I think the main point is that non-basic lands are more desirable than the average cube supports and we may benefit from running more of them over some non-land cards (especially fixing).

You can apply that same logic to your 1 drops, 2 drops, etc and you may get equally surprising results (I know I did). Assuming a generic meta consisting of roughly 1/3 aggro/midrange/control, how many one drops would you need to support that? For one drops, at least 6/5/4 (and probably more than that but let's go with this for now because it's a round number). That's 15 / 3 * 12 = 60. So 60 1CC cards at 360. I think most of us are probably pretty close to that, again because of all the focus on the forums regarding lower curves. Well, here's some math showing why this approach makes sense. And honestly, you can probably go more than 60 1CC cards at 360, especially if you are really trying to push the 8 one drop flavor of aggro.

When I did this exercise and adjusted my ratios accordingly, it absolutely made drafts much better. Prior to this, guys were frequently ending up with gaps - not enough 1 drops in particular - and running whatever they could find to fill gaps (or more often just durdling until they could cast stuff because they drafted 3 one drops and 6 five drops). That is a less common now.

 

[Grillo_Parlante]

The thing about the excessive splash though is I don't agree it's a cheap opportunity cost. You are hurting your mana by including a single swamp in a deck that otherwise doesn't need swamps. And even if it's fetchable, your odds of being able to flashback lingering souls in a game is a lot lower than people probably realize. Anyone consistently flashing that back with a single fetchland and single swamp is getting really really lucky. And not running an extra plain (because you made it a swamp) also means that 1WW spell has a higher chance of getting delayed a turn or two while you wait for that extra white source, potentially costing you fatal tempo. In short, there's a very real cost here that I don't think drafters are understanding. I don't believe most decks get better by forcing the swamp to flashback lingering souls if that is the 4th color and you are running no other black cards. Just my take on this.

Its more like you run a shock in place of a basic. So, you were going to run, lets say, six plains and six islands anyways, but you drop a couple basics for a godless shrine, or watery grave. You run lingering souls on the basis its fine as is, but if you manage to flash it back, thats just gravy. I find that flashback cards really encourage that kind of splashing, and people will end up in two color decks, splashing a third or four color, or a three color deck splashing a fourth.

Actual heavy 4-5 color decks are pretty rare in both, as the mana isn't consistent enough for them, which I'm happy with.

I would be fine with increasing the number of color fixers, but 72 is so many. I could see doing 60, and than going to 65 or 70 lands total, but I'm not sure how to structure a 360 with that much space devoted to lands. Looking over the penny list, I seem to run very few double cost spells, in general, and almost none before 4cc. The only area where there is a density of double cost spells before 4cc are my white threes. You combine that with a lot of smoothing cantrips, and I think the mana base is pretty stable as is, for 2-3 color decks.

ideas?

 

[FlowerSunRain]

What if you took your 360 card cube and made X decks out of it. Use every single card in the cube when you do this, and use each card only once. This is a giant pain in the ass, but you might find it useful to both identify gaps in CMC (where you have too many or not enough) and as a way to find cards that really fit in less places that you thought they did (because you will have a hard time finding a deck you are happy running those cards - and if you can't even place that card in a specific deck and be happy about it, what are the odds anyone is drafting it and putting it in a deck?).

I'm going to try this and see what happens. I usually feel that SOMETHING is off in my cube's distributions, but I'm not really sure what it is. While this certainly isn't a foolproof way of finding out, it can't hurt.

 

[ahadabans]

I would be fine with increasing the number of color fixers, but 72 is so many. I could see doing 60, and than going to 65 or 70 lands total, but I'm not sure how to structure a 360 with that much space devoted to lands. Looking over the penny list, I seem to run very few double cost spells, in general, and almost none before 4cc. The only area where there is a density of double cost spells before 4cc are my white threes. You combine that with a lot of smoothing cantrips, and I think the mana base is pretty stable as is, for 2-3 color decks.

ideas?

Yeah, I'm completely with you on this. At 450, I'm now at 90 non-basics, and even that is a really tough pill to swallow. If I had to go up I'd revolt against myself. The fact is, non-basics are a lot less interesting to me than non-land cards, so cutting something cool like Dread Return or whatever for another UB dual just to hit some mythical fixing number is just more than I could stomach. I honestly have no idea how you guys run 360 cubes anymore. I've said this a few times now, but I have more cube quality cards NOT part of my cube at this point than I do in my cube. Everything I thumb through the boxes I see cards I wish I was running but don't have room for.

The Penny Pincher list is sweet though Grillo, and I honestly wouldn't mess with it too much unless you are seeing something in your drafts that make you think fixing needs to be tweaked, My list is higher power and not being able to play something on time can often be fatal if you are playing against a competitive deck (or even one that is curving out well). I also run a lot more double mana cost cards - probably too many TBH. Both of these are less of a problem in Penny Pincher and one of the huge benefits I see to a lower powered list. My next update is going to remove a few more of my higher power cards and push my power level even lower (while lowering the curve a bit too). I'll never get down to where Penny Pincher is at because I'm too attached to a number of these higher powered cards, but your design remains hugely inspirational and something I will continually try to work towards.

 

[Ferritovore]

I've said this a few times now, but I have more cube quality cards NOT part of my cube at this point than I do in my cube. Everything I thumb through the boxes I see cards I wish I was running but don't have room for.

Make two cubes that provide very different experiences!

 

[Jason Waddell]

Not sure if it's relevant to the conversation, but my last draft deck is an example of a two-color double splash deck:

Note that there was the cost of using picks on fixing to get the Tropical Island, Volcanic Island and Breeding Pool. Was a little surprised to get both UG lands, because there was most certainly someone at the table playing Sidisi, Brood Tyrant.

As far as the splashes themselves, playing red didn't make my blue any worse because the red was always coming off of a Volcanic Island or Sphere of the Suns. Whenever I cast Evasive Action it was for n = 4. I'm perfectly happy with this type of deck existing in the format. Not trying to be arrogant here, but I've never seen an inexperienced drafter able to pull this type of deck off, and I probably would have had to cut a splash or two if others were taking fixing more aggressively. I've had paper drafts where drafters cutting me from fixing forced me into one-color splash decks.