By far mana is the most important element to your deck. Without it
you couldn't cast spells during the game.
Think about how many times this situation has happened to you. You
have a hand full of amazing cards but for some odd reason you can't draw
enough mana to play them. And what ends up happening? You lose.
While many of us may blame it on a bad luck of the draw, we should
really assess if our deck is loaded with the correct amount (and types) of
mana in the first place. Without a good mana base, a deck will never be
able to perform well.
One of the biggest mistakes we see players make is cutting out land
cards in order to add in more spells. Their logic goes something like this...
with more spells, there are more chances to win, right? Wrong.
Imagine running a deck with 60 amazing spells and o lands. Each
turn you would pull awesome cards, but wouldn't be able to cast them.
You'll lose every time.
On the flipside, some players have been guilty of putting too many
lands in their decks. The result? Round after round of pulling mana cards and never drawing a good spell. Which usually ends in a defeat. A good rule of thumb is that a little more than 1/3 of your deck should be land. So, in a 60 card deck it's usually best to have 24 land cards. If you're playing with a lot of mana acceleration cards, such as Elvish Mystic (a creature that can be tapped to add one green mana to your pool) you could get away with a little bit less land in your deck (2022.) But, for most decks we highly recommend playing with 24 land cards because this gives you the best odds of drawing enough lands to cast spells during the game.
Now, if you're playing a multi-colored deck it's veiy important that you include dual-colored lands. For example, if you're playing a blue/black colored deck with 24 lands, you should include Drowned Catacomb. This land card allows you to tap it for either blue or black mana. So, if you were playing 12 islands and 12 swamps, you should take out two of each type and replace them with four Drowned Catacomb. Using this card will help increase your chance of having the correct color of mana when you need it. Dual-lands come in combinations of all colors so vou can choose the right one for your needs. Another strategy to ensure you have the right land when you need it is to include Evolving Wilds into your deck. Evolving Wilds is a card that you can sacrifice to search your libraiy for a basic land card and put it onto the battlefield tapped. Evolving Wilds Land 命 Sacrifice Evolving Wilds? Search I your library for a basic land card and put it onto the battlefield tapped. Then shuffle your library. Every world is an organism, able to grow new lands. Some just do it faster than others. h 一*$2ven Bcllwlin ' ' At first glance. Evolving Wilds may seem pretty straight forward — swap it for a land card. However, it actually provides an additional advantage that most people don't realize. In the last chapter, we went into detail about how important it is to keep close to a 60 card deck because it improves your odds of pulling a particular card. So, combining that theoiy with the ability of Evolving Wilds means that for each instance you play of that card, you are really stripping your deck of two cards, resulting in improving your odds of pulling a spell that you need. Read that last sentence again. Given our previous example, if you replace two more islands and two more swamps with four Evolving Wilds here's what would happen. You would basically be playing with a 56 card deck. How? Because whenever you draw and play Evolving Wilds you immediately get to search for a basic land to play. It s kind of like a two・for-one card. So, if you have four in your deck, it's similar to only playing 56 cards. So, in a two-color deck (with equal amounts of colored spells) a good mana strategy⁷ would be this: 8 islands 8 swamps 4 Drowned Catacombs 4 Evolving Wilds 24 Lands Now, if you were playing a txvo-color deck and it didn't have equal amounts of colored spells, you would then have to adjust the ratio of islands to swamps. If you don't, then you would end up drawing too many of the wrong colored mana. For example, if you were playing with 36 spells (60 cards 一 24 lands) and only eight of them were blue, you could safely get away with playing only four islands and thirteen swamps in addition to Drowned Catacombs and Evolving Wilds. Here's how the math works: 8 (blue spells) -? 36 (total spells) = 22%. 16 (lands) x 22% = 3.52 fblue mana cards needed). Use that formula to figure out how many basic lands you should have of each color if your colored spells are uneven.
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