how many lands are enough?

[Inkeyes22]

I tend to keep it close to 38, unless there is a significant reason. I do build in some mana sinks in case I get flooded, but overall I would rather draw an extra land or two versus have nothing to do the whole game 'cause I got stuck at 3 lands.

[BaronCappuccino]

I start from 40 and work down, because 40 in Commander is 36 in 60-card Magic, and a traditional standard to work from. My typical deck runs from 36-39. My current deck ran 39, but because the deck's average CMC is 2.25, a friend suggested I could trim the land down to 37 and I did.

[pokken]

I usually start at 37 lands and then figure out how many <= 3 cmc ramp and draw spells I have. Ramp and draw spells of 4+ cmc are closer to winconditions than ramp since their goal is to get you to your wincons or casting bombs rather than smooth out your gameplay and get you to your mid game early.

I prioritize hitting land drops very highly as like others have said, having a nongame is worse than flooding most of the time as an experience.

Generally speaking I will cut some lands if I have a big cantrip / cheap draw suite, going as low as 34-35, and go higher if my deck plays things that give extra land drops or make use of them.

If you just go 37 +/- 2 you won't be far off, but you'll also be missing the experience of playing 45-50 lands with Exploration effects, which is itself a pretty unique thing. I love the consistency of my 40+ land decks...at one point I had 55 in Gitrog and it was perfectly playable.

[ZenN]

If you just go 37 +/- 2 you won't be far off, but you'll also be missing the experience of playing 45-50 lands with Exploration effects, which is itself a pretty unique thing. I love the consistency of my 40+ land decks...at one point I had 55 in Gitrog and it was perfectly playable.

The biggest thing for that is making sure you have a lot of mana sinks for when you inevitably flood. If your commander is itself a mana sink then you're totally fine. Golos, Tireless Pilgrim can totally get away with playing 45-50 lands.

[Dragoon]

If you just go 37 +/- 2 you won't be far off, but you'll also be missing the experience of playing 45-50 lands with Exploration effects, which is itself a pretty unique thing. I love the consistency of my 40+ land decks...at one point I had 55 in Gitrog and it was perfectly playable.

The biggest thing for that is making sure you have a lot of mana sinks for when you inevitably flood. If your commander is itself a mana sink then you're totally fine. Golos, Tireless Pilgrim can totally get away with playing 45-50 lands.

You still need to be careful with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim though, you don't want to hit 2+ lands with its ability*. Kenrith, the Returned King would probably be a better example I think.

*Unless you easily have more land drops available (such as with the already mentioned Exploration) and lands are an integrate part of your strategy.

[ZenN]

You still need to be careful with Golos, Tireless Pilgrim though, you don't want to hit 2+ lands with its ability*. Kenrith, the Returned King would probably be a better example I think.

*Unless you easily have more land drops available (such as with the already mentioned Exploration) and lands are an integrate part of your strategy.

That is entirely reasonable. Thrasios, Triton Hero would also be a good example.

[pokken]

Beyond mana outlets, land heavy decks also go well with guys who can turn the land drops into cards (Tatyova, korvold, windgrace, borborygmos, angry omnath, soggy omnath).

And also Azusa and Mina/Denn are special cases that by virtue of being extra land drops in the command zone allow you to replace lots of your ramp with lands to improve consistency.

[DirkGently]

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I also made a quick table for easy reference.

Lands Run	Opening Hand Average	Odds to Have 1 or 0 Lands	Odds to Have 2+ Lands	Odds to Have 3+ Lands	Average After 4 Cards Drawn
30	2.10	32.06%	67.94%	35.00%	3.30

I wanted to riff on this for a bit because I see people bust out tables like this when these sorts of questions get asked, and I think they're misguided. You can plug in all the numbers and say "well, I want to make sure I hit 4 consecutive land drops", but then what? You look at the table and see where it says you'll have slightly more than 50% chance for that to happen? Or where the EV # lands is exactly 4? Neither of those things is any guarantor that you'll hit 4 drops even close to reliably. 49% chance of failure is still a lot of failure.

Numbers won't tell you how to build a deck. You have to know what your deck is doing. Sure, you want to hit 4 land drops consecutively, most decks do. But how bad is it if you fail? Do you definitely lose the game? Or do you still have other proactive plays to make? What if you flood out a bit, is your commander a mana sink which makes that less of a problem? Or are you dead in the water without some gas? These considerations are way more important than arbitrarily deciding "well, I guess 51% is good enough".

I could see a table like this, especially in the hands of a professional fine-tuning a deck for a competitive format having some merit, but for an average Joe making a commander deck, I think it's far more likely to mislead rather than inform. You can't just build a magic deck by plugging in numbers, it's not that simple. What you probably REALLY want is something like: "of the games I lose because of mana problems, I lose an equal number to mana screw as to mana flood". That's probably what you're actually shooting for,(although even that is oversimplified). And there's no way to figure out that with a calculator. You need to think about what your deck is doing, make an estimate, then test it over and over until you have a significant sample size. And when you build your next deck, maybe your estimate will be more accurate.

[Feyd_Ruin]

I wanted to riff on this for a bit because I see people bust out tables like this when these sorts of questions get asked, and I think they're misguided.

I don't disagree with what you said, but I still absolutely find them helpful at times. Used properly, they are a very powerful resource — it's when they're used improperly that you run into the issues you said.

Figuring out the exact percentage that you can drop a first turn Delver of Secrets that flips on 2nd turn — and figure out how much adding Brainstorm increases it can be very important. Especially if you're wanting to know the impact Brainstorm will have on that when you're running monoblue and don't have shuffle effects for Brainstorm to be most effective. I've done this exact problem, and when you factor in all the variables, it's actually quite amazing how much Brainstorm increases it by. I love math, and I'm great at probabilities, but sometimes seeing the raw numbers is still surprising.

If you're trying to figure out how reliably you can draw into your combo without running search, the math could easily tell you that search is/isn't necessary, etc. A 4&4 combo only has a 35% change at natural draw by 5th turn, while an 8&8 has a 72%. The rate of natural draw directly impacts the slots used for dig/search, and again — sometimes seeing the numbers helps.

For lands, your starting count is always a rough guess. Math can make that guess more educated. You should absolutely always playtest over and over to see how the deck plays and adjust the land count, color ratios, etc. But having a good shot from the hip can save you alot of time instead of a random stab in the dark.

Poker is a game of bluffs, reads, and tells. That's 99% of the game, but only because everyone at the higher levels already knows the mathematical probabilities. If you don't know the odds of the flop being in your favor, you're not playing a game, you're just gambling on luck. Magic has infinitely more interaction, but familiarizing yourself with odds and chances is still just as important. And sometimes you need to do the math or consult a table to realize things into actual numbers.

[pokken]

Numbers won't tell you how to build a deck.

Umm...the history of magic disagrees with this statement pretty emphatically. Not only can the things that cards do be reduced to math pretty easily (e.g. 1-for-1, 2-for-1, tempo, etc) the very first good decks exploited the hypergeometric probability concepts in the extreme. The foundational concepts of turbo xerox ( and mana curves (sligh) are basically pure math.

There is obviously a lot more to it, but if you just want to build a good deck you'll get a lot closer with math than without

And there's no way to figure out that with a calculator. You need to think about what your deck is doing, make an estimate, then test it over and over until you have a significant sample size.

It takes *hundreds* of games to get a significant sample size. You need to apply the math first to have any prayer of coming to something worth testing.

My guess is you are applying the mathematical principles of how many of something you need to see intuitively, but it doesn't change that those principles are there and critical.

[DirkGently]

I don't disagree with what you said, but I still absolutely find them helpful at times. Used properly, they are a very powerful resource — it's when they're used improperly that you run into the issues you said.

In broad questions like "is 15 lands enough?" or "can I reasonably expect to draw a combo with 2 pieces and no tutors by turn 3?" sure. To get more precise answers - like "should I be running 35 or 36 lands?" I think you'd need to know a lot more than anyone will reasonably be able to know. Granted, such answers are fairly impossible to get a definitive answer with or without a table.

As far as land count goes, I don't think a table can tell you anything an experienced player doesn't already intuitively know in a general sense, and it can't tell you anything useful in a more precise sense.

Figuring out the exact percentage that you can drop a first turn Delver of Secrets that flips on 2nd turn — and figure out how much adding Brainstorm increases it can be very important. Especially if you're wanting to know the impact Brainstorm will have on that when you're running monoblue and don't have shuffle effects for Brainstorm to be most effective. I've done this exact problem, and when you factor in all the variables, it's actually quite amazing how much Brainstorm increases it by. I love math, and I'm great at probabilities, but sometimes seeing the raw numbers is still surprising.

This is a totally different question, though. For more specific questions probabilities can totally be useful, no question. I also use them when determining how useful a card within the deck. Assuming you're taking into account the probability that brainstorm can put instants/sorceries on top of your deck, it's probably a huge increase in your % to flip, which could easily make delver not worth it without, and worth it with, brainstorm.

When you're talking about lands, you're either talking is 2 different cases: the broad sense of "should I be running 30 lands or 40 lands" and the more specific "should I be running 35 or 36 lands".

The former is pretty similar to your delver example, you're going to see some big differences in probability and it's probably going to be pretty obvious which of those two choices is superior for your deck. But also anyone who's played the game for any length of time shouldn't need a chart to know what sort of deck they're playing.

For the latter, you can see "ok, I have a 49% chance of hitting 4 lands on turn 4 with 35 lands, and 50% chance with 36 lands" (or whatever) but that doesn't really tell you anything particularly useful. The minor percentage effect is going to be dwarfed by the particulars of what your deck wants to do, which can't be easily accounted for.

If you're trying to figure out how reliably you can draw into your combo without running search, the math could easily tell you that search is/isn't necessary, etc. A 4&4 combo only has a 35% change at natural draw by 5th turn, while an 8&8 has a 72%. The rate of natural draw directly impacts the slots used for dig/search, and again — sometimes seeing the numbers helps.

ok again, we're talking about things with a huge impact, not tiny 1% increments like with specific land count.

For lands, your starting count is always a rough guess. Math can make that guess more educated. You should absolutely always playtest over and over to see how the deck plays and adjust the land count, color ratios, etc. But having a good shot from the hip can save you alot of time instead of a random stab in the dark.

If you're brand new to magic, sure.

For anyone who has the slightest idea what they're doing, I can't see a chart like that being at all helpful. And I'd assume most people on here have built enough decks and played enough games to be able to ballpark the correct number of lands within a reasonable margin of error, beyond which the chart will not be useful.

Poker is a game of bluffs, reads, and tells. That's 99% of the game, but only because everyone at the higher levels already knows the mathematical probabilities. If you don't know the odds of the flop being in your favor, you're not playing a game, you're just gambling on luck. Magic has infinitely more interaction, but familiarizing yourself with odds and chances is still just as important. And sometimes you need to do the math or consult a table to realize things into actual numbers.

I'm constantly calculating odds of hitting a land/nonland in limited. Or trying to calculate how many winning topdecks I have, and how hard I should try to have one more turn in a game of commander, etc. I'm afraid I don't see how that relates to fine-tuning within deck construction, though. I know I probably don't want to draw a land on turn 10. Do you want a 35% or 37% chance to topdeck a land T1? Yeah, idk either.

Umm...the history of magic disagrees with this statement pretty emphatically. Not only can the things that cards do be reduced to math pretty easily (e.g. 1-for-1, 2-for-1, tempo, etc) the very first good decks exploited the hypergeometric probability concepts in the extreme.

I have no idea what 2-for-1s have to do with what we're talking about.

The original decks to use the concept of a mana curve, which as I recall was the original sligh deck, were (1) in the hands a professional, which I explicitly called out in my post, and (2) a much simpler deck than virtually any commander deck. If you want to make a 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop, 4-drop, aggro deck in commander - and you really knew what you were doing - then yeah, you could probably use math to maximize your chances of doing that.

Is that a thing you're trying to do very often?

It takes *hundreds* of games to get a significant sample size. You need to apply the math first to have any prayer of coming to something worth testing.

"A prayer"? I've never done any probability math when it comes to lands and it hasn't hurt me a bit.

To perfectly fine tune a single deck would be nearly impossible, whether you're using math or experience or anything else - though I would argue only experience could give you the correct answer, unless you can create some sort of program to run a bunch of games for you.

You're unlikely to ever test a single deck enough to have a definitive answer on the correct number of lands, but every deck you build and play gives you more data points which can build your general knowledge and help you make more precise estimates in the future.

My guess is you are applying the mathematical principles of how many of something you need to see intuitively, but it doesn't change that those principles are there and critical.

A lion doesn't need to know the equation for gravity to pounce on a gazelle. Nor would it even be helpful. If you were trying to write a computer program to do it, that didn't know anything about gazelles or pouncing, sure, gravity would be useful, but we're not trying to figure out the number of lands from nothing here. Most people know roughly what they're doing. We're already lions. What we need isn't the equation for gravity, what we need is field experience getting out there and grabbing gazelle's.

[pokken]

A lion doesn't need to know the equation for gravity to pounce on a gazelle. Nor would it even be helpful. If you were trying to write a computer program to do it, that didn't know anything about gazelles or pouncing, sure, gravity would be useful, but we're not trying to figure out the number of lands from nothing here. Most people know roughly what they're doing.

You're right we're not trying to figure it out from nothing...we all use the foundational probability math people have done historically in magic to arrive at the baseline and then the turbo xerox adjustments.

It's far more analogous to public education than genetic disposition to hunting.

You may not look at the table of probability but you have it internalized. And lots of people do not.

I think most people just put 37 or 38 lands in their decks and don't look at their curve at all, based on my experience talking to people about their decks. They could all benefit from reading the various Karsten articles on probability in magic imho, and would almost surely find their decks are designed poorly in this respect.

Of the small percentage of people who do actually think about their curve when picking a count of lands, I doubt all that many think about things like how cantrips and draw spells affect their curves. Most just jam 10 ramp spells and call it a day

[DirkGently]

You're right we're not trying to figure it out from nothing...we all use the foundational probability math people have done historically in magic to arrive at the baseline and then the turbo xerox adjustments.

It's far more analogous to public education than genetic disposition to hunting.

You may not look at the table of probability but you have it internalized. And lots of people do not.

I think most people just put 37 or 38 lands in their decks and don't look at their curve at all, based on my experience talking to people about their decks. They could all benefit from reading the various Karsten articles on probability in magic imho, and would almost surely find their decks are designed poorly in this respect.

Of the small percentage of people who do actually think about their curve when picking a count of lands, I doubt all that many think about things like how cantrips and draw spells affect their curves. Most just jam 10 ramp spells and call it a day

Of course it's helpful to give new players a baseline like 38. While I think that sort of number has mostly been arrived at through the combined trial and error of millions of players over the years, there have certain been contributions from people using math as in the sligh example. Though I think the game is too complicated these days to use those sorts of methods.

Whatever the correct number of lands is for a given deck, assuming such a thing is possible, I think if you went and looked at the table it wouldn't be clear why that was the correct number. I don't think it has useful predictive power in that sense. I also don't think I use any such probabilities when deciding land counts. For example, Phelddagrif runs a lot more lands than an average deck - but it didn't always. That number isn't because I decided I need a high probability to hit a certain land drop or whatever, it's because I played the deck a lot and realized that it was a deck that handled flood quite well and handled screw very badly. That knowledge was vastly more useful than any table of probabilities could ever hope to be.

I don't think giving new players a table is really going to help them. I think it's just going to give them a false sense that some number is "correct" because it gives them the maximum chance to start with 3 lands, or a 51% chance to have 4 on turn 4, or whatever. I'd say tell them 38 or whatever is a good number to start, and if they get more experienced and want a more nuanced take you can start to explain curves and having a plan and everything else that makes deck construction such a great part of the game.

[pokken]

I think you could easily understand why Pheld needs more lands. It runs like no ramp right? So think about the traditional 27 land control shell in standard. Those decks are like running 45 lands in commander and they have tons of draw spells too.

The pros who design those decks look at exactly the thing you're talking about...they can't win if they miss a land drop on 1-5 and they plot their numbers accordingly.

They aren't playing 500 games to figure this out they already know itll be 25 26 or 27 bases on the curve and critical turn.

Bottom line I think you're right that you can't give them a single table...but with a few paragraphs and a few good tables and a basic tutorial on how to use a hypergeometric calculator I think most people can seriously improve their deck building.

[DirkGently]

I think you could easily understand why Pheld needs more lands. It runs like no ramp right? So think about the traditional 27 land control shell in standard. Those decks are like running 45 lands in commander and they have tons of draw spells too.

It doesn't run (hardly) any ramp, true, although I would say the reason it wants a high land count is significantly different than in any standard deck.

The pros who design those decks look at exactly the thing you're talking about...they can't win if they miss a land drop on 1-5 and they plot their numbers accordingly.

They aren't playing 500 games to figure this out they already know itll be 25 26 or 27 bases on the curve and critical turn.

Sure, but that's based on experience (theirs and others) about how many lands is reasonable for that sort of deck.

I doubt anyone is looking at a table, looking at some specific metric (maximize chance to draw precisely X lands on turn Y, some % chance to draw X lands, whatever) and using that as mathematical proof that that's the correct number of lands. They could maybe use it as a general indicator, but again, anyone who knows what they're doing is way past needing that sort of table for any kind of general indication.

It's not impossible that some pros are designing decks using a calculator, but even if they are, it's because they know a hell of a lot more than some new player getting a table thrown at them, and they start from a VERY precise knowledge of what their deck is doing. That's always step 1.

Bottom line I think you're right that you can't give them a single table...but with a few paragraphs and a few good tables and a basic tutorial on how to use a hypergeometric calculator I think most people can seriously improve their deck building.

I think that would be vastly overcomplicating the process, and making it far less useful. The most important things to focus on is your deck's plan, curve, play patterns, etc. Knowing how you want your deck to perform, you should be able to say "this is a deck that will want a high/low/medium land count", maybe with more precision than that depending on your experience. Then you'd want to be aware that a "normal" land count is usually 34-40 or so, with 40-44 being high, 45+ being very high, 30-33 being low, and 29- being very low. Something along those lines. Then you don't need any big silly tables. And if you find that flooding/screw is a bigger problem then you'd initially considered, you revise.

I really dislike these sorts of tables in particular because I think it's really easy for new players to get thrown off, simply because magic is a game with a lot of variance. For example, feyd says 37 is correct because you'll average 4 lands in 11 cards. But you can look at 37 lands and see you still have a 35% chance to draw fewer than 4 lands...that's a pretty big chance, and a new player could look at that and think "eek, I don't want to get mana screwed in 35% of games, that's unacceptable" and end up going overboard on lands. Or see that 18% of the time you'll end up with 6+ lands and worry too much about flood, etc. Taking the EV is probably the safest metric since it's less prone to catastrophizing, but it's still a very crude tool to find something very precise (I mean, it doesn't even take into account things like draw and ramp, which are critical in an actual game), and I think it gives people undue confidence that they've found some objective truth about optimization when in reality it is, at best, a first step in the process, and one easily circumvented by collaborative knowledge. And I also think it takes the emphasis away from a more holistic approach to deck construction, which is far more important and leads to better understanding of the game, whereas tables just lead to overconfidence.

I'm pretty sure when I picked my screen name I wasn't thinking about holism at all, but it does seem to be the thing I keep railing on about.

[Inkeyes22]

So, it seems like this discussion is somewhat moot. Even if you did get it to a perfect mana ratio a new set will come out, our you will pick up an upgrade etc. and unless it is Nekrataal to Ravenous Chupacabra type of adjustment, you are likely messing with your ratios even if it is a tiny fraction.

[Treamayne]

So, it seems like this discussion is somewhat moot. Even if you did get it to a perfect mana ratio a new set will come out, our you will pick up an upgrade etc. and unless it is Nekrataal to Ravenous Chupacabra type of adjustment, you are likely messing with your ratios even if it is a tiny fraction.

That's what I like about my Excel sheet, fairly easy to see if small changes affect ratios; or check how larger changes affect them without getting into detailed probabilities. More than enough info for a casual build...