Magic the Gathering

Theory

Magic the Classroom – Mull it over

By Dan Eckstein ⋅ February 3, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

The very first and maybe most impor­tant deci­sion is a game of Magic is the Mul­li­gan. (Well after decid­ing to play or draw). This aspect of the game is both daunt­ing and pow­er­ful and I truly believe that it is the dif­fer­ence between play­ing at the Pro level and the PTQ level of the game. You just can’t con­sis­tently get the blue envelop unless you know when to mul­li­gan. At least that what I tell myself so I can sleep at night.

Many of us (myself included) are just afraid of the mul­li­gan. At its most basic level it is total card dis­ad­van­tage but really, so is going first. Yet at least 90% of us will choose to go first if we win the die roll. I think get­ting over that fear is the first step to truly being able to uti­lize the power of the Mulligan.

Imag­ine if you were play­ing Texas Hold’em Poker. You’re down on your “luck” and are forced to go all in to meet the big blind. You look at you open­ing 2 cards and see a 2 and a 7 in dif­fer­ent suits. At that point your odds of win­ning are the worst pos­si­ble. If a poker player could mul­li­gan like we do many would rather have just one card than keep this hand. Yet there are sit­u­a­tions where we look at the same abysmal odds of win­ning and yet keep the hand we were dealt.

For today’s class I am going to run over some through some sce­nar­ios of open­ing hands and their mul­li­gan poten­tial. Before we can do that we need to cover some ground rules. First I will only be talk­ing about Lim­ited envi­ron­ment. Maybe in a future class I can expand on Con­structed but the added com­plex­ity is more than one class can cover. Sec­ond we will be using a 40 card deck with 18 lands as our main exam­ple. While I under­stand that many play­ers believe in more or less of a land count we will go with just the 18 to keep it simple.

Num­ber of Lands

While the num­ber of lands we have isn’t the only fac­tor in a mul­li­gan deci­sion it is the first thing we should con­sider. Let’s look at the num­bers for a sec­ond. Using the above assump­tions we can deter­mine the fol­low­ing per­cent­ages for our mul­li­gan hands.

• Zero lands – 1.9%
• One land – 12.3%
• Two Land – 29.2%
• Three Land – 32.7%
• Four Land – 18.4%
• Five Land – 4.9%
• Six Land – 0.5%

I per­son­ally like to know that I will have a land drop for at least the first 3 turns in Lim­ited but with a Mul­li­ganed hand I find 2 suf­fi­cient. That means that if I take a mul­li­gan I have an 85.8% chance of see­ing ade­quate land count out of my new grip.

With those num­bers in mind I ALWAYS mul­li­gan a 0 or 1 Land hand in lim­ited. I have an 80 plus chance of com­ing out bet­ter by vis­it­ing Paris so why not. It’s the two land hand that presents the first issue. If I ship back a two lan­der that means that 2 lands isn’t enough for the deck I’m play­ing. Tak­ing that into account I only have a 56.6% of com­ing up with more lands under the Paris Mul­li­gan. With the odds only being slightly in my favor I really have to look at the non­land cards. In this sce­nario I try to let Math decide. I’ll add up the cast­ing cost of the spells in the deck and quickly com­pute the aver­age. This is rel­a­tively sim­ple since you’ll be divid­ing by 5. If the aver­age CC comes out more than 3 I start strongly con­sid­er­ing the mul­li­gan. In fact with a CC of more than 3 I will ship unless I have a sig­nif­i­cantly strong early play to coun­ter­bal­ance the prob­a­ble wait that I will have look­ing for the addi­tional mana to play my higher cast­ing cost spells.

3 and 4 land hands fall into the prob­a­ble keeper hands unless some other fac­tor presents itself. Using the same num­bers to base our deci­sion it would be fool­ish to ship back a 3 or 4 land hand. If the land count in these hands is insuf­fi­cient chances are that any hand from this deck would be insuf­fi­cient. Of course there are mana color issues but we’ll address those later.

Num­ber of Spells

As our land count goes our spell count goes down. While hav­ing not enough lands makes a spell unable to be used hav­ing not enough spells make a land totally use­less. I try to keep my mana curve at a level that would me to play a major­ity of my deck with 5 or less lands in play. Cards with heav­ier mana require­ment only make my deck if they absolutely are game chang­ers. There­fore I don’t want to see a hand with only two spells as I have already seen all the land I will really need but basi­cally have no action to fol­low it. I’ve had other play­ers say the a 5 lan­der is okay to keep since you have an increased chance of draw­ing gas since so much of your remain­ing deck is “gas.” Even if your chances of draw­ing a non-land goes up to 60% means that our next 5 draws will be 3 spells and 2 lands. So by turn 5 we’ve seen 5 spells and 7 lands still highly unbal­anced. I equate a land heavy hand to being in top deck mode from the first turn. Look­ing for a lucky draw is no way to con­sis­tently win this game.

Of course like the hands that have only 1 or no spells at all are auto mul­li­gans. The lone excep­tion is if that one card is biggest bomb in the for­mat and you know it won’t be answered by your oppo­nent. Imag­ine hav­ing no action for three turns because you kept 6 land hand with an Abyssal Per­se­cu­tor. You finally reach turn 4 and drop his ever cool­ness on the bat­tle­field. Your oppo­nent untaps and plays an Iona’s Judg­ment. Glad you kept that hand now? Basi­cally 6 or 7 lands is a total ship.

Color require­ments

Assum­ing that our opener has passed with an appro­pri­ate num­ber of lands and spells we now need to assess the col­ors of those lands and spells. Since we are talk­ing about Lim­ited today we know that most decks are mul­ti­col­ored. Because of this we need to assess weather or not to keep a hand based on color. Ide­ally we would have at one of each type of land in our 3 or 4 lands. Some­times this just doesn’t hap­pen. That is when you have to make a choice. Basi­cally you’re ham­stringed. Hav­ing only 1 type of mana in a 2 color deck is like try­ing to win a run­ning race with only 1 of your legs. Well maybe that’s a lit­tle harsh because there is still hope. Like I men­tioned above you can look at the next 5 turns. You have strong odds of get­ting at least 2 lands in those turns and a major­ity of your remain­ing lands are the color you’re miss­ing. As long as you need only one of those miss­ing lands and you have some play in your “strong” color I would keep. I actu­ally did this exact thing at the World­wake Pre­re­lease. I had a hand with 3 Swamps in a blue/black deck. I kept the hand and won even though I had 3 cards with Blue mana costs in my opener. If the lands would have been Islands I would have shipped though. Still the same prob­lem but the dif­fer­ence was the rest of the deck. I knew my curve was early black wee­nie and removal and late blue fly­ers. All Islands meant no play while all Swamps meant I had time to hope for the draw. It was still risky and I actu­ally said about turn 6 that I should have mulled.

Dou­ble mana require­ments in cards may tip the scales as well. The hands that have only 1 of my 2 col­ors only have about a 50% chance of being kept any­way. If one of the remain­ing cards requires dou­ble mana of the miss­ing color I am more likely to reshuffle.

See­ing the win

This last cat­e­gory is prob­a­bly the hard­est to call espe­cially in lim­ited. When you look at your hand do you see a way to win? If the answer is yes then it’s a keeper but if you’re answered no or maybe then you really need to con­sider a fresh six. Basi­cally I looked a lim­ited cards in three cat­e­gories: Threats, Answers, and Facil­i­ta­tors. Threats are cards that apply pres­sure to your oppo­nent. Answers are ways to remove the pres­sure being applied to you by your oppo­nents. And Facil­i­ta­tors are cards that sup­ple­ment and improve your Threat and Answer capa­bil­ity. When you look at your opener you should see a good mix of these cards. See­ing all threats is good, see­ing all Answers is a lit­tle weaker, and hold­ing all Facil­i­ta­tors is very sad. Keep in mind there are cards that fall in mul­ti­ple cat­e­gories. You need to judge weather or not you have suf­fi­cient threat capa­bil­ity and/or ade­quate answers to jus­tify keep­ing you seven.

Hon­estly this last stage wrecks me on a reg­u­lar basis. I always feel that my deck will come through for me. So I am opti­mistic that I will come up with some­thing. In the end I have only myself to blame. It’s not because of the deck or the cards the loss falls squarely on me for not start­ing the race on time. In fact that is a really good anal­ogy. Not mul­li­gan­ing when the sit­u­a­tion requires it is like giv­ing your oppo­nent a head start.

On your mark. Get set. Go.

There’s the bell. Class dismissed.

Dan is a High School Teacher who does everything he can to squeeze Magic into his schedule. Between being a Father, Husband, and Coach it’s pretty hard. Articles by Dan focus on tips and lessons for beginners that he has learned while teaching his students how to play their best. As a player Dan has a propensity to go Crazy For Combos so occasionally these articles happen as well.

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