Dual land and mana creature?
General forum
Posted on Aug. 5, 2012, 4:38 p.m. by shinobigarth
something i'm trying to figure out about the mana base.
once you determine how many landsmana sources you need, how do you factor dual lands and mana creatures into it?
for example, if you have 4 Llanowar Elves, can you then take out 4 Forests, or 2 Forests or what? and a Sun Petal Grove, can you count that as 1 Plains and 1 Forest? i'd just like to know the general idea for factoring stuff like that.
rckclimber777 says... #3
It really depends on what your average CMC is. If you're running delver for instance most of your cards are 3 or less so you can run significantly fewer lands. Many of those decks only run 19 lands. Always look at the purpose of your deck. If your win con is big creatures with large CMCs then you'll want more lands. If you are running an aggro deck like Gobos then fewer lands are fine, I typically only run 20 lands for gobos.
As far as mana producing creatures goes, it certainly helps you lower the number of lands you're running, but at the same time be careful as creatures are easier to get rid of and can really hinder you if your main win con is big creatures.
There is no set formula and I actually rarely run more than 23 lands. Best thing to do. Build the deck, playtest tons of times, keep track of the times that you're mana-flooded/mana-starved, the times that you don't have the right color mana or the time that your mana dorks are getting killed off and thus slowing you down.
ouroborobelisk says... #2
You should always (and I do mean ALWAY) have 2/5ths of your deck as lands. That being said, you could cut back a few lands if you are running, lets say: 4X Llanowar Elves 4X Arbor Elf 4X Birds of Paradise and 4X card:Avacyn's Pilgrims down to about 20 lands, but as a general rule you want to run about 23 to 25 lands. As far as multi-lands like Sunpetal Grove you still use the same number of lands, but now you can adjust what lands you are playing, so instead of 12X Forest s and 13X Plains now you can run maybe 4X Sunpetal Grove 10X Forest s and 11X Plains . I hope that helps.
Remember 2/5ths lands.
August 5, 2012 10:34 p.m.