Pattern Recognition #369 - Mana Fixing and You

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

5 June 2025

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Hello and welcome back! Sorry again about last week, but work was way too much work and I still have to do that. This series doesn't pay the bills, sad to say. I do it for love of the game more than anything else!

Anyway, this week is going to be a bit more in the abstract than anything else, and I'm going to talk a bit about Mana Fixing And You, which is hilarious because I mistyped the file name when making this update, and I wrote "Man Fixing and You", and, well, yeah.

So, with that bit of humor out of the way, let's get down to the subject at hand, shall we?

Mana Fixing is a concept that I've delved into a bit more deeply in the past. I've talked about mana rocks, Fetch lands and even mana dorks on occasion. But I never really felt that I was able to roll all those concepts together into a single unified whole in terms of explaining what it is and why it it needed - and when it is not.

So to begin with, allow me to explain what Mana Fixing is for all those new people out there who are new to Magic. Fixing is the part of deck design where you look at your mana base and you try to ensure that you can cast the spells you want, when you want. However, this isn't always as easy as is appears. And in fact, one of the reasons why the lands of a deck are the single most expensive part in it is because of how good they can fix your deck and make it work when you want and when you want.

So let's start building from the ground up here. There are different types of 'fixing' in the game, and as you're going to see, a lot of this overlaps with 'acceleration' - that being simply adding more mana to your mana pool at a rate of greater than one land per turn. Because when you can push out more sources of mana, by association, you can put out more sources of the colours you want.

But I won't talk about acceleration, save as a side-gig to the main event here. No, I'm talking about fixing.

If you're running a mono-coloured deck, you've never had to worry about fixing your mana. You've always had what you wanted, and the color pips in the cards you want to cast didn't matter because that's the only thing you're running. This is the biggest advantage to mono-color decks in the game. That they have the easiest and simplest mana base to work with and their only concern is having enough.

It's when you get to two colors and more that things get interesting.

But from there, what does it mean that you need to be able to fix your colors in multi-colored decks? how do you know you need cards that do this, and how many do you need?

Well, I have my own preferred method of doing this, and it's something that others also do - or do not. If you have your own method of determining mana bases, please, tell us in the comments at the bottom!

Anyway, my method of mana-basing is called Weighted Proportion. What I do is I first lay all my cards down on the table, aligned by mana value. So all the MV cards in one column, all the MV cards in the next and so on and so forth. Then what I would do is start to count up all the actual mana symbols on my cards of the cards I wish to cast, sorted by the colour pip involved. So for example, a Dawn Elemental would count as 4 , while Piston-Fist Cyclops would count two each of and .

Now, the casting part is important because, well, if you have a card in your deck that you have no intent of ever casting - such as cheating Omniscience our from the graveyard with Abuelo's Awakening or Valgavoth, Terror Eater with Back on Track, or Broodheart Engine or Coiling Rebirth or Defossilize.

Oh yeah, that's Stadard by the way. Anyhow, the notion is that if you're not planning on paying the actual casting cost of the spell to do it, don't count it at this point. On the other side of things, if there's an additional mana-based cost, such as with kickers or the like - Into the Roil is one I know off the top of my head, then you should allocate it to the larger mana value pile. Better to be overprepared than not.

Cards that have no colored mana value, or have an MV of don't need to be counted.

Then, once you have the numbers, determine what proportion each color of mana has to the total number of mana pips you have. For those who have forgotten the relevant formula, each colour will need sources equal to (The Number of Mana Pips For that Color * The Total number of lands in your deck) / (The Total number of Pips). This will give you a rough estimation for each color of the number of mna sources for each color. Due to rounding, you may be off by one or two at the end. That's OK.

Now, that's just Proportional. You determine the relative relations of mana in your decks and you add basics to match. But what I do is Weighted, which is where the established mana curve is laid out before me and I have a look at the deck. Here, I check to see what color(s) are predominant in the MV and slots, and I adjust my numbers in the favor of that primary color. This way, I shift the odds a little in my favor of ensuring that I will likely have a better chance of getting my needed color in the first vital turns of a game.

In a way, this is how Arena tries to help you out when you have multiple colours in a deck. With the emphasis on the 'Try', naturally.

However, there is a basic assumption being made a this point that needs to be addressed. That being that each and every land and mana source you put into the deck at this point only produces a single type of mana. Which needs to be not the case, which is where mana fixing actually starts to come in.

Once you know how much of each color of mana you need, it's time to consider fixing.

At its most basic, color fixing occurs when you replace a single source of a single type of mana with a source that not only provides that type of mana, but also an additional type at the same time. Replacing Forest with Yavimaya Coast for example.

Now, in two color decks, this is pretty easy to deal with. Replace and upgrade your mana sources in equal measure. So after moving from a Forest to the Coast, replace an Island with a Botanical Sanctum! Now you've added a little bit of redundancy and if you draw one of those cards, you've set yourself ahead on what colors are available to you than if you had just rolled out with a single basic land!

Of course, there are a couple caveats here. Becuase of course there are. Never remove lands to add mana rocks. Taking out a Command Tower to put in Arcane Signet is the height of folly. Keep both. Mana acceleration is on top of your fixing, not in place of. Rocks and Dorks are not a replacement for lands. If anything, add more lands!

Another thing to look at is your Fetch Lands. From the lowly Terramorphic Expanse to the mighty Fabled Passage, what these cards represent is potential in terms of fixing. As long as you're willing to wait the turn for things to untap (mostly). If you put fetches in, there are cases to be made to have them substitute for your primary or your secondary colored lands, but what I like to do is pair them up with another utility land that doesn't add colored mana directly - like say, Evolving Wilds or Alchemist's Refuge. Don't go overboard with these, as my preference is to have no more than 10% of my lands utility in nature. Anyway, what I was getting at is that those sorts of fetch lands allow you to pick and choose what color you need in the moment, rather than hoping that the card that the Fetch replaced was the right color in the first place.

But when you get to three or more colors, things get ... wonky. And not in the fun way. You see, as you add more colors, the mana pips that are in the upper-right corner of your cards start to be less and less of a valid metric to examine your deck by.

This is because it's easy to build a deck that is only a certain amount of colours (including 1!) and then just ... splash an additional color or two into it. I did this for a few months with my Red Deck Winds deck on Arena where I splashed in to run Boros Charm and Lightning Helix. And to do that, I changed out 8 of my Mountains for four Battlefield Forge and four Sunbillow Verge. I had disproportionate sources of , but that was because I knew that all my sources could also generate , and I knew that when I needed that color, I would need it. And I wasn't willing to give up a source to do that.

Having 20 lands and an average MV closer to 1 than 2 will do that.

And if you want another example, look a bit more closely at the Mardu Bounce deck I showcased last month. It's not a Mardu/ deck. It's a deck that happens to have 4 of a copy of a single spell in it. It's not a Three Color deck, it's Two colors with a splash of a third, and that affected how I set up my mana base, as well as the inclusion of the Mardu Devotee to ensure that I have that color when I wanted. And even then, it doesn't always happen. Every source of also provides one of my primary colors, and the deck works!

There is a deckbuilding notation that I see used when you add an additional color to a deck like this. You put the added letter code into parenthesis at the end, like this: WB(r) for the Mardu Bounce or R(w) for the RDW with a splash of

A curious thing about this is that when I looked at decks with more colors. They tend to actually be two or three major colors that splash the excess. I even looked at my old Horde of Notions decklist and it barely had or it it, being mostly Naya in nature with the splash for Mulldrifter, Shriekmaw and Night Incarnate. Oh, and the Commander itself. A deck that was technically WUBRG, but was more GWR(ub) in nature.

So you really need to pay attention to your requirements before you start putting in lands.

This is, of course, a problem. Sure, all but the newest players are swimming in Thornwood Falls, but decks that are singleton, or require decent redundancy can quickly find themselves lacking in options for improved lands bases. Or unable to keep up with being able to afford them. Something that I have been able to get away with by buying cards over the course of 25+ years. But new players? Not so much. One of the reasons why I like some of the more recent Commander Precons for providing good (but not excellent) mana bases.

And into this gap steps .

What, you thought I was going to talk about Rocks? Not at this point. No, is the colour of searching your library for basic lands and putting them into play. Things like Wood Elves through Bushwhack all let you get the lands you need to get the colour(s) you want.

But unlike lands, these are all .

Decks with this colour in them, especially ones that are aggressively multi-coloured, tend to run heavy on this color simply because of this utility to it. They can fix your mana as an inherent quality, rather than just depending on your pre-existing mana base. It's an entire color of Fetch Lands! And Avacyn's Pilgrim, Elves of Deep Shadow and Noble Hierarch to stretch out into different colors as well.

And yes, there are Rocks. But rocks are in addition to your mana fixing. Not in place of it. You cast Simic Signet to make sure you have access to those two colours, even if you paid into it to cast it.

At its core, Mana Fixing is about adding redundancy to your mana pool. You can't get away with just a deck full of basics any more (unless mono colored), and so your understanding of your mana base and how you can best augment and optimize it can do wonders for your deck design and theory work when it comes to filling out the rest of your deck.

There may come a point when you have too much mana fixing. But that's why a lot of utility fixing can have secondary effects, like card draw or sacrificing for other effects. The Monument cycle from Dragonstorm is a great recent example of this - Temur Monument for example. It fixes without acceleration, and can be cracked later on to give you a nice creature!

I know I don't feel like I really talked about the subject, and honestly in the reread, this feels a little rambly. It's a big subject with a lot of context and a lot of detail to go into it. But I figure, hey, why not talk about it a little and point out that it's nothing new, and it's something that can be shared with between new and old players.

Urza, I'm old. I remember when all at once was supposed to be hard. Not easy. But that's what I get for being in this game for as long as I have.

Thank you all for watching and reading, and I'll see you all next week!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!