Table Manners #5: Turned Up to 11

Posted on July 5, 2011 by ZonkotheSane

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  1. I don’t think you should mulligan good hands just because your deck can do better. Sure it can, but can do worse as well. It is entirely possible that you mulligan into a 1-land hand, and then your 5 card will never be better than your starting seven in any of these games.

  3. @milegy

    Of course my deck could do worse as well as better. The question is, which is more likely? Or, to be more accurate, will mulliganing be likely to produce a more capable hand than simply keeping? In the case of R1G1, I believe the risk of drawing an undesirably quantity of mana sources (which are, in a way, dead cards) outweighed the possibility of producing a lesser quality hand, even after the second mulligan.

    Some decks do mulligan better than others. That is an inherent advantage to any build that wants to draw first, as mine did. As you can see, that particular deck was also quite comfortable with two-land hands, as long as one of those lands was a Forest. To contrast, most other multi-color decks require a specific mix of mana sources to function, and thus simply can’t afford to throw away even poor hands if they contain three kinds of lands. I didn’t have that restriction.