Winning the Wrong Way

About a week ago a new deck called Monogreen Tron started making waves in the 'Modern' format of Magic: The Gathering. What is interesting about this deck is that at first glance it looks to be playing the wrong number of lands. Earlier decks based around the Tron strategy (playing the Urza's lands to generate large amounts of mana) had run around 25 lands, while this deck was only playing 18. The deck works because it has 12 cards that can find a land, 8 cards that can draw a new card for only one mana, and 4 cards that can generate mana. In reality it only has 10 cards with which it can actually win the game and the rest of the deck is devoted to getting the correct lands in play.

This made me thing back to when I first started playing. I had quite a bit of success early on playing 'Limited' format decks with the 'wrong number of lands'. I built my decks with 16 creatures, 16 lands, and 8 other spells. It wasn't until later that I learnt that 17-18 lands is considered the correct number because having the extra land or two helps to make the deck more consistent. By running fewer lands your deck is more likely to have mana problems, but in the event that it doesn't you have one more threat that your opponent so actually have a more powerful deck. Actually some players suggest that if you have an unfavourable match up (the concept of the metagame was described in an earlier post) then you should remove a land to increase the threat density of your deck, and vice versa.

Another misconception that some early players have is that it's okay to keep a hand with 6 or 7 lands in it. Their logic being that the chance of drawing another is low so they'll be fine. In reality you need to consider what actually happens if you do draw another land? The short of it is your opponent gets a free turn. Also you have no control over the order that your non-land cards arrive in, which can often mean that you do nothing besides play lands for the first four turns even though you are drawing non-land cards. This results in your opponent developing their board position and applying pressure while you do nothing.

In truth, the correct answer to how many lands you should play and what hands you should mulligan come down to what's in your deck. A deck that doesn't need large amounts of mana can easily cope with fewer lands. However, when building a deck there is no point in cutting a land to make room for a low impact card, every card you play needs to help you win in some way. Finally there is a deck called 38 Lands which will quite happily keep a six land hand, just as long as they are the right six lands.