Vintage Adept Q&A #16: The Cornerstone

[Demonic Attorney]

The first one is related to deckbuilding, and especially building a mana base (for Tezzeret decks, but any generic advice would be invaluable). What are the metagame considerations when building your deck mana base ? How do you evaluate off-color Moxen and utility lands that happen to give colorless (or off-color) mana ? How many fetch lands are enough, and how do you choose them ?

[Demonic Attorney]

This answer presumes little to no familiarity with Vintage deckbuilding, so as to provide the most information possible to someone new to the format.  For those of you who are more experienced with Vintage, please forgive the occasional statements of the obvious.

Size Does Matter

The most general rule of thumb I can provide is that Vintage decks, depending on the factors below, should have, at a minimum, 21 mana sources and, at maximum, 26 (more if you count rituals).

I think the following considerations are relevant to the size of your manabase:

1.  The presence of mana denial decks in your metagame.

2.  The mana cost of your deck's big plays.

3.  Your access to efficient card draw and selection.

Jeff Carpenter, aka "Harlequin," once said that the manabase is the most neglected aspect of a deck.  For the most part, I agree.  I think that players tend to focus more on their spells than their mana, because spells have a much more visible effect on games.  It's easier to remember how awesome that Misdirection on your opponent's Ancestral was than it is to keep in mind that you were one mana short of playing Will with Drain backup for the win in another game.  Also, players tend to write off deficiencies in their manabase to bad draws.  

Metagame considerations
Players' focus on their manabases is directly correlated with how well-represented mana denial decks are in their metagame.  In other words, Fish and Stax force players to think about their manabases-- and punish those who don't.  But without that incentive, I've noticed players (myself included) cut corners and skimp on lands to accommodate more spells.

So building a manabase is, I think first and foremost, metagame-dependent.  As a general rule, in a field dominated by blue-based control, ritual-based combo, or other decks that don't attack my lands, I think smaller is better.  Especially now, when good card advantage and selection mechanisms are hard to find, you don't want to topdeck an Underground Sea when you're hoping for an answer to your opponent's Tezzeret, or use Sensei's Divining Top into land, Mox, Mana Crypt when you're digging for that extra counter in a control battle.  

For example, in today's Shop-heavy metagame, I run an Oath deck with 24 sources.  Ordinarily that would be a lot of mana to support an engine that only needs 1G to work, but I need to keep in mind the high number of Sphere effects and Wastelands that I have to be prepared to encounter over and over again.  As a matter of fact, for the first time ever in my Vintage career, I'm running a basic Forest in my Oath deck right now, to ensure I'm able to play my main threat, Oath of Druids, in the face of multiple Waste effects.  

By contrast, in 2008's Gush-centered metagame, my Oath deck had fewer sources.  22, I think.  Without Spheres and Wastelands to worry about, my primary focus was drawing into as much business as possible, to keep pace with other control and combo decks who were trying to do the same thing.

Supporting your engine

That being said, don't go crazy.  While you do want to build your deck in such a way as to avoid flooding yourself, you also want to make sure your manabase is going to allow you to reliably play your threats.  For a good example of the problems you might face if you short-change your manabase, look at my Top 8 report from Waterbury in January 2007.  I cut corners on my manabase to enable more counters, tricks, and threats.  So, because I didn't encounter the problem of flooding out or drawing lands when hoping for gas, I dominated the blue-based control and ritual-based combo matches that I played throughout the day.  But on the other hand, look at my losses.  Every single game I dropped in the tournament, including my Top 8 match loss, was attributable to being mana-shorted.  

Gifts was a pretty demanding deck in terms of mana cost.  Gifts Ungiven costs 3U, and sometimes I needed 5, or even 7 mana to leverage Gifts into a win with followup plays like Recoup -> Will with Drain backup.  Unless I could hit that critical threshold of at least 4 mana to play my threats, my deck didn't work.  While the Gifts era of 2007 didn't feature a large complement of mana denial decks, encouraging me to skimp on my mana, Wastelands weren't completely absent.  And sometimes all it took to knock me off my feet was a single well-timed Waste.  If I had drawn even one more land in game 3 of my Top 8 match, I'm confident I would have won.  But I misbuilt my mana, and paid for it with a loss.  

Conversely, look at Oath.  As noted above, its primary line of play costs half as much mana as Gifts.  Look my decklist for ELD's Mox XI.  I ran a much smaller manabase, because my plays weren't nearly as mana-intensive as Gifts Ungiven.

Access to card draw and selection

The last factor I consider when building a manabase is access to card draw and selection.  I remember reading somewhere, though I can't recall exactly where, that a good rule of thumb is that 2 card draw spells are equal to 1 mana source in determining the size of your manabase.  Obviously this rule has its limits, since a deck with 60 draw spells in it won't function like a deck with 30 lands.  Also, I think how far the rule goes depends on the power level of your draw spells.  Brainstorm was one of the best unrestricted draw spells that format has ever seen, and I'd be very comfortable counting 2 Brainstorms as a land under most circumstances.  By contrast, Fact or Fiction, Gifts Ungiven, and Skeletal Scrying all take a significant amount of mana to get off the ground, and so you probably can't rely on them to get your manabase going.  Similarly, weaker cantrips like Opt or Sleight of Hand have limited reach and won't find more mana for you as reliably as Brainstorm can.

This card draw = 1/2 land philosophy really cemented my smaller manabase during the Gush era.  I had Brainstorm, Ponder, and Gush to dig into extra lands.  My threats were fairly cheap.  And the metagame, by and large, didn't focus on attacking my manabase.

The Content of Your Colorbase

So far we've only talked about the size of your manabase.  What about access to colors?  Fetchlands fundamentally changed this equation back in the days of Onslaught.  Before then, ensuring access to all your colors was a precarious balancing act between duals, pain lands, and 5-color lands with drawbacks like City of Brass and Gemstone Mine.  Now, you can count your fetchlands as 5-color sources, and that's a huge advantage.  Because of that, I usually run more fetchlands than the average deck in the metagame.  In the Slaver era, I used 5 where most decks had 4, and in the Gifts era, I was using 6 where my teammates had 5.  (Side note:  Your fetchlands' value goes up further depending on the number of ways you have to manipulate the top cards of your library.  If you have lots of Brainstorms, Scroll Racks, Ponders, Sensei's Tops, etc., you'll want more fetchlands for that reason alone).

I build my color base off my primary colors.  Almost all the time, those are 1) blue and 2) black.  I imagine most other Vintage players approach things the same way; that's why you see fetchland configurations in Tezzeret that can all get Islands.  In some ritual-based combo decks, the color scheme flips around, with black as your primary color and blue being secondary.  In those decks, all their fetchlands can find Swamps.  So from there, you run usually 3, sometimes 4 dual lands that give you access to your primary colors.  Now, between your fetchlands and your duals, you have 8-10 lands that give you access to both of your primary colors.  If you add in Lotus and on-color Moxes, you'll have about a 1:6 chance of drawing sources that give you access to either of your primary colors.  That's usually enough for me.

From here, I round out the lands with some combination of basics and duals giving me access to splash colors.  This varies according to the variables above, that determine the size of my manabase.  Most importantly, do I expect a lot of Wastelands?  If so, I'm going with at least 3 basics, maybe more.  Almost all the time, the basics will be in my heaviest primary color only, so they can drive my engine.  Make sure your duals accessing splash colors build off your primary colors, so your fetchlands can find them.  

Colorblindness

Off-color Moxes are generally included.  The only time they aren't is when the overwhelming majority of the important spells in my deck don't need colorless mana.  This is very rare, but examples of decks that don't need off-color Moxes are Doomsday, with many spells that only require black mana, and some varieties of Fish that rely on only-colored mana to play creatures like Qasali Pridemage, True Believer, Meddling Mage, Gaddock Teeg, etc.  Decks with Null Rods (I generally don't play these) might want to cut off-color Moxes unless they really need the acceleration.  The demand for colorless mana also determines whether other colorless-producing artifacts, like Crypt, Vault, and on occasion, Grim Monolith, get included.

Off-color lands are a bit harder to gauge.  I tend to decide whether or not to include them based on the usefulness of their non-mana effect.  For example, Library of Alexandria is very good in a heavy-control metagame, and not so good in a combo-heavy metagame.  I generally don't include more than 1 or 2 of such colorless lands in my deck if it needs to support double on-color spells early on, like Mana Drain.

[Rico Suave]

Demonic Attorney has a very informative post.  Instead of just repeating all of his points, I want to try and highlight some specific cases.

Tolarian Academy

Most Tezz decks will already be running a full suite of Moxen along with Black Lotus, Mana Crypt, and Sol Ring.  Naturally these decks also run Vault/Key, so there are 10 artifacts in the deck to power up Academy.  I've heard people test with this configuration and say that too often Academy is just an Island that can be Wastelanded.  On the other hand, by adding 2 Sensei's Divining Top to the same deck, now there are 20% more artifacts than before. 

It may not make a world of difference, but it is a subtle improvement that may result in running a card that you otherwise might not have.  If running Academy, it might help to squeeze out every bit of usefulness from the card that you can.

Lotus Petal

I know a lot of people are not fans of Lotus Petal.  However, Petal is a card that brings additional value to a lot of other cards.  By itself, the card gives you a colored mana source now that is not hindered by the land drop rules.  A number of cards are just better on the first turn than the second turn (duh).  Mana Drain is a great example, as is Oath of Druids.  Accelerating into Tezzeret a turn faster can be backbreaking too.  Being able to Duress or Spell Pierce on the first turn *and* cast that Ancestral can make a huge difference. 

There are some other cards that play well with Lotus Petal.  Tendrils of Agony does see play in Tezz decks, even the more controlling versions, and Petal is a great way to generate storm.    Gifts Ungiven is better with Lotus Petal, not just because the Petal will make Gifts cast a turn faster but also because you can find Lotus Petal with Gifts.  This is especially true when also running the storm kill. 

Ultimately, Petal provides tempo and the tempo itself can pay off any drawbacks of the card.  Let's use an example:

Imagine that you play Land, Lotus Petal, Dark Confidant.  Firstly the extra turn of Dark Confidant being in play makes up for any lost card advantage by using Petal.  Secondly, now your 2nd turn can be used casting other spells instead of Bob.  Third, you can sneak the Bob into play before your opponent could get another turn and a chance at a counterspell, or before the opponent could play his Spheres and mana denial  The Petal did more than just speed the deck up by a turn, it made the opponent's cards less useful. 

The more card draw you run the better Lotus Petal gets, specifically with draw that gives you cards immediately.  Timetwister, FoF, Skeletal Scrying, and a host of other cards that give you lots of resources greatly appreciate being able to translate those resources into mana quickly and efficiently. 

Lotus Petal does have its drawbacks, and it does not fit into every deck, but it is something that gets better if you play a number of spells that interact well with it. 

SB Lands

A couple decks will aggressively attack your mana, namely Workshops and Fish.  It can be frustrating when your deck works perfectly against the Tezz mirror only to have your mana base fall apart in the mana denial matches.  Then when you adjust your deck to have a lot of mana against their denial, suddenly you have too much mana in the Tezz mirror but run out of spells to play.

Striking a balance between mana:spells and having that number be correct in every match is nearly impossible.  One way to adjust your deck is to SB lands in or out of your deck. 

In playing Oath in my last few tournaments, I have run between 25-26 mana sources maindeck.  This is solid when facing Fish or Workshops, but can quickly lead to flooding against Tezz or combo.  One of my most frequent SB'ing plans is to board out 3 lands for 3 spells.  In this sense I had a strong game 1 against Workshops and Fish but had to fight much harder for some of the other matches.

On the other hand, SB'ing in lands is often the correct call too.  This is particularly true with combo decks which board in basic lands so they can survive against Workshops.  This plan opts to sacrifice its chances against Workshops, yet maintain its strength against the rest of the field without having a diluted deck.

If you feel that running land in your SB is awkward, I want to show you something:

http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=40451.0

In that top 8, you'll see 5 lands in the sideboards of just the blue decks.  Off color basics are frequently a wise idea in the SB too, especially if that off color is also the one containing most of your artifact removal against Workshops.  I've seen basic Forests and Mountains more than once. 

Strip Mine

I just wanted to highlight Strip Mine, as I feel it is a very good card.  I've won a lot more games with Strip Mine than I would expect from the card.  It randomly steals games from Dredge, it hits Workshops to make their Spheres hurt them, it is an answer to first turn Library in the Tezz mirror, it can be extremely useful shutting off Academy, it can color screw an opponent, and it punishes players for greedy mana bases and greedy opening hands where few other cards can punish them for that.  At worst, it produces mana. 

[voltron00x]

There have been some interesting articles and conversations at various points about the value of “goldfishing” a deck; in case you’re unfamiliar, this is when you shuffle up your deck and draw a hand, and play out turns (either an arbitrary number or until you “defeat” your imaginary opponent).  Goldfishing in Vintage is often of questionable value because the format is hyper-interactive – decks like Tezzeret, Oath of Druids, MUD, Stax, and Fish don’t really give you a good “feel” for how the deck plays unless there’s an actual opponent.  Vintage decks are designed, out of necessity, to interact and impact each other from the start of the game.  Cards like Null Rod, Chalice of the Void, Duress, Thoughtseize, Force of Will, Misdirection, Wasteland, Rishadan Port, and Spell Pierce are hard to evaluate when goldfishing.  There are some decks were goldfishing is valuable, of course, such as Dredge and ANT, or even decks like TPS to a degree (as it can be valuable to get a feel for when you can go for it as well as what your average win speed is when unopposed).  However, goldfishing MUD can actually be counter-productive as your beginning lines of play, and what hands you can keep, are highly dependant on your opponent.

Having said all of that – I always, always, always goldfish my decks whenever I make any changes to them, including my Vintage decks, for one specific purpose: testing the manabase.  While I watch a TV show or a movie or whatever, I’ll shuffle and draw hand after hand after hand to make sure the mana base is stable and functional in and of itself.  This will help give at least a preliminary guide on whether the mana base as-is has too much mana, too little mana, is short of a specific color, or is over-loaded on off-color or colorless sources.  What you’re looking for are excessive mulligans, as well as hands that rely on cards like Brainstorm, Ponder, Top, Thirst, and Recall to “dig” for mana sources.  Hopefully once you’ve gotten a feel for the mana you started with and made some adjustments, you can start testing against live opponents.

In the current environment, I think most Vintage decks should err on the side of caution and include extra mana when possible.  There are a number of reasons for this.  One, mana denial decks (like Noble Fish and MUD) are popular at the moment.  A single Null Rod can devastate a hand that banks too hard on artifact mana, as can a preemptive Chalice on 0 or Karn, the Silver Golem.  Two, control vs. control mirrors tend to favor the player who has been able to develop a stronger mana base (although you can offset this by playing cards that do more for less mana investment, such as Misdirection, Mindbreak Trap, and REB).  If one player has four man and the other has seven, the player with seven mana is more likely to be the aggressor as they can attempt to resolve spells and have mana to push them through to resolution.  Similarly, if one player is needing to run out end-step spells or Top activations to dig for mana to stay in the game, the other player will have opportunity to resolve spells like Gifts or instant-speed tutors.  When combo decks are popular, you’ll often find the reverse is true, as you never want to be mana flooded against a combo deck; instead, you need a good supply of action spells (to race) or defensive spells (to make sure you survive).

I suppose the best thing I can suggest is when you are working on a deck, look at morphling and TMD for successful decks in that archetype and steal from their mana base when working on your own.  Avoid the tendency to cut lands when you can’t fit all the spells you want unless you’re able to test those changes.  Be careful when siding out mana sources, as this is often lazy sideboarding that can cost you games and I don’t recommend it.

[FlyFlySideOfFry]

I've noticed most of the discussion has been from the side of control mana bases so hopefully I can provide some help in terms of TPS mana bases.

TPS is the combo deck most known for the stable mana base that provided great results in the Trinisphere era. Being a slower combo deck with the fundamental turn being turn 3 it needs to hit all of its land drops. I've always said that lands in TPS feel like cheating because mana is that important. In this regard I don't count rituals as mana sources because doing so leads to thoughts such as "well I don't need a land on turn X that I combo off, I can draw into it with whatever bomb I resolve so I'll add in more rituals to cast bombs easier". This is wrong because you won't always go off on turn X, especially in today's metagame where mana denial is at a premium. However, this does not mean that you evaluate mana based on just your opening hand. In TPS you will constantly be sculpting your hand to go off so it will very often seem like you can count rituals as mana. Resist the urge to do so or if you must, put a large handicap on them such as 3 rituals=1 mana source. This is different when considering other combo decks such as Belcher which is literally all rituals or ANT, because of the resilience of TPS.

Due to the careful pace of the deck basic lands are very important no matter the metagame. TPS can very easily function solely on basic lands and if your metagame was literally 90%+ mana denial you could function with only 1 Underground Sea in your decklist. As such many TPS decklists run a higher amount of fetchlands because they are safer when determining what mana base you need to build in a game. It also makes running a high amount of basic lands very safe because you can rely on fetchlands to fix both colors. In general fetchlands are very good at allowing decklists to run more basic lands because they allow fixing of multiple colors solely on basics. As such I try to run an amount of fetchlands either equal to or higher than the amount of lands I can fetch out. Unlike pure control decks TPS can get away with doing so because of its speed. Blue is your main color despite being a combo deck so most if not all of your fetchlands should be capable of getting an Island.

As voltron said I would strongly suggest goldfishing constantly. Not only will this give you a feel for how and when to combo out but it will also let you get a sense of the remarkably stable mana base. Since TPS is built to fight through hate always test pretending your opponent has disruption such as spheres/duress/counters and this will help you understand how important the ability to cast your spells every turn is. Once you start testing against actual opponents this becomes much more apparent. In general you will be fetching basics whenever possible so when goldfishing or playtesting against non-mana-denial decks don't get too comfortable with dual lands because there is no bigger mistake than fetching a dual land blind and walking into wasteland when you could have easily run with a basic. This can often be true with most decks actually.

TPS sideboards will often contain additional basic lands unlike many other decks. Against mana denial decks things such as off-color moxen really lose their power and as such will often get sided out for lands. This can also apply to Cabal Ritual. This is once again proof of the power of lands in TPS. Being a combo deck it may be hard to do but don't be afraid to even bring out spells for lands in sideboarding if you think it is necessary.

Basically once you have chosen TPS as your combo deck always keep this in mind when considering the mana base: What good is a bomb if you are unable to use it?