I'm just a filthy casual trying to get the mana right for my Boros Knights deck. It feels just a little off, maybe it's the tournament grounds and non-knight spells clashing(?). Could one of you fine people kindly help me out?



I know the deck needs cards like Acclaimed Contender, Icon of Ancestry, and Worthy Knight, but I don't have the wildcards to craft them (yet).
The plan is to replace the exile and card draw spells little by little. This is not meant to ever be a T1 deck or even go infinite. I just want to smash stuff

Have you checked with Frank Karsten's article?

Look at that table in the middle for a 60 card deck.

For example Fervent Champion costs one red mana and can also be cast with Tournament Grounds. The table says you want 14 sources for a high probability.

You have exactly 14 with 7 Mountains, 4 Shocks and 3 Tournament Grounds. You could check the remaining cards if you meet his demands.

I’m not a huge fan of the Karsten method (he doesn’t explain any of his math, and if remember correctly he runs some scenarios through a Monte Carlo style simulation instead of just getting discrete answers to a pretty simple mathematical question). There used to be a better site for this, but it’s gone. If I get some free time in the coming weeks I’ll recreate the calculations. They aren’t THAT bad, and I need the practice in any case. #nerd

Mine is Mardu so it may give you a little insight but not be exact. Trial and error but I think I finally have the manabase tuned in.

https://forum.nogoblinsallowed.com/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=25503#p659547

Awesome, thanks for all the replies

I'd recommend looking at this resource. This is the one I planned on remaking.

http://birdsofparadise-mtg.blogspot.com ... ities.html
http://birdsofparadise-mtg.blogspot.com ... ables.html

It's a LOT more useful, as it just gives you the flat probabilities for any draw.

Strongly recommended.

Looks like the difference is that your source doesn't only check the probability of having a viable source by t1 but the probability of having the t1 spell and no viable source. So yes, this should be more accurate.

The idea is, that while the odds of having 1 of 14 Mountains in the opening hand remain 90%, the odds of having Fervent Champion and no Mountain rise with the number of Fervent Champions in the deck.

Yeah, exactly right, and I've checked his math and he did it correctly. (This was a huge project for him to do, btw, the best way I can think of doing it requires a summation across 24 spreadsheets to get just one of his final results. Total pain in the butt).

But anyway, this tells you how well your deck will function generally speaking, because you can account for how long it will take to actually get to the card you need the mana for, etc... For example, If I'm running 8 red one drops I need at least 15 sources of red mana (that come into play untapped), for the deck to reliably be able to play them on turn 1. Armed with this info, building mana bases becomes a trivial matter of counting the lands you need based on the cards in your deck. It also tells you which types of combination will never work - for example you would probably never run a deck with 16 one drops 8 red and 8 blue, unless you had access to pure dual lands (or something very similar).

The way I use it, fwiw, is I count what I would need at each CMC, and then I simply run lands based on the highest requirement. There are similar calculations out there for minimum required mana for decks (e.g.: not accounting for colors), but I find that his method tends to require the same amounts of lands, but with a more direct fashion of determining the totals. It also explains why legacy decks can operate on lower mana counts - much better access to multicolored mana sources.

If you want to get really advanced with it, you can also use these charts to figure out how many tap lands you can get away with, but I think that starts to lose value, because all Standard decks have some inefficiencies relative to perfection, and going too far down the rabbit hole will cause you to make overly conservative decks.

Wow this post ended up being too long.

tldr; just use the dang tables, lol.

Pretty good stuff... this gives me an idea...

Imagine using spreadsheets and maths to build a manabase.

This post was brought to you by the "throw good duel lands and some basics into a deck and blame any colour screw on RNG" Gang

The math post was, in turn, brought to you by the ‘RNGeesus didn’t screw you, your deck is just bad’ crew.

Good duel lands will shoot you before your first draw

i try a large number of wild card but UHS-II memory cards is best