I understand right now that this article will stir up some negative feedback and/or controversy. I also understand that my views on mulligans are not going to be the same as the majority of people out there and because of this I have a lot of work ahead of me. If nothing else, I urge you to follow along here with an open mind, as even if you eventually disagree with my methodology, information is still valuable, even if this teaches you what not to do. Also, due to the fact that I will be fighting off of my back foot here, if something seems unclear, please note it in the comments and I will try my best to elaborate, but hopefully that won’t be necessary.
When Paulo posted an article (or like 10) about mulliganing here, I offered to help out when asked of course. The feedback towards his article was very positive but quite a few people wanted to take a closer look at my mulligan philosophy in particular, so that is what I plan to lay forth today. Mulliganing, like everything in Magic, is a vital skill that can directly lead to wins and losses. That said, I feel the popular analysis of mulligans has gone a bit overboard and actually begun to work against making correct decisions. I hold a fairly unique view that is due in large part to my “rogue” nature of creating my own set of rules and restrictions. It is not that I do not respect the popular views, but I do not always feel they are correct, at least anymore.
Prior to the M10 rules changes actual took effect but were still made public, everyone was up in arms about how the game was being dumbed down. In essence, the argument was that taking away damage on the stack led to less decisions and thus less skill towards the game as a whole. Now that we have had time to play with the new rules, many people think that taking away damage on the stack ADDED to the overall skill and decision process of the game. You see, the old rules, while appearing to add more decision trees, ultimately resulted in the same line of play over and over again. While learning to stack damage may have been a vital skill when it first was released, after years of doing just that, the act turned from skill to habit, and games reflected this. Players would know how to snap-call damage on the stack and also to how to play around it from the opposite side of the table. The game had become simpler once a small rule was nearly universally followed.
Transition over to mulligans and I believe we are in the same boat. People understand that mulliganing is a vital skill and that most professional players claim it is an area where many people need to improve. Because of this however, some blanket rules have taken a hold of mulligans that lead players to throw the hand away too quickly. Most one-landers get shipped back without a second thought for example, primarily due to the fact that the general consensus tells us that one-landers are bad. But if this has become the rule with few exceptions, are we not walking ourselves into a corner where damage still stacks? Have we not taken a skill intensive technique and removed skill from it by blanketing hands that are mulligans or not?
LSV’s ‘loose’ Keeps
I hold some unique views on mulligans, but they are not so unique that I never see others use them. LSV for example, keeps many of the same hands I would during his draft segments, with things like one-landers on the draw. Here is an actual hand kept by LSV during a recent Saga draft on the draw, game 2:
It is easy to look back in hindsight and claim that you would have kept this, but for many or even most players, this is simply not the case. Yet in my eyes, this hand is not even close to a mulligan despite having the initial appearance of sketchiness. Players have stopped analyzing their hands in a full context and have instead started to keep hands analyzed in a vacuum. But because we are told that good players mulligan, and that mulliganing is a skill people lack, we feel justified when we OVER-MULLIGAN. Yes I said it, and even all capitalized and stuff. People over-mulligan hands due to the stigma telling people that good players mulligan and therefore justifying every mulligan someone may make, but this is clearly not the case.
While it is true that players should mulligan speculative hands, the definition of a speculative hand is so misunderstood which leads players down a path where they follow a set of rules. Anytime you have specific parameters in Magic, you are bound to be in trouble, as there are too many unique situations and scenarios to accommodate them all correctly. Just as you cannot say that you should always block an opponent’s bear with your bear, you cannot claim that mulliganing every 1 land hand on the play is correct. Every mulligan decision should be taken in full context, as without assessing everything, you may reach an ill-informed decision.
Bant Keeps
Whether I am on the play or draw is probably the biggest factor for me when I decide to keep a hand. Hands on the draw are typically much more forgiving due to the entire extra turn you are granted by the top of your deck. Most of the “questionable” hands as documented by others toward me have been on the draw where I don’t think they are that big of a deal. In Oakland during the top 8, I was up against Zoo, in game 3, on the draw, and had already mulliganed to 6. I debated it for a while, but ultimately kept this hand:
On the play I would never keep such a hand, but on the draw it provided me with all of the tools I needed to beat Zoo, with the exception of any one land, of which I turned to the top of my deck. I of course mised a Temple Garden for my first turn and blew my opponent out as he didn’t even have a one drop (This is something I will talk about later). There is a ton of contextual clues that led me to keep this hand, but let’s begin with being on the draw. (And no, I am not being results-oriented here, but an example was needed.)
On the draw I have 22 lands that are live, as well as 3 more Path to Exiles that I would be fine drawing. That amounts to 25 good draws out of a remaining 53. Now while I am not the type to start breaking everything down into numbers, having some semblance of what your projected outs are is important to help make these decisions. For convenience sake, we will assume I have a 50% chance to draw a live card in 1 draw step and therefore (roughly) a 75% chance at drawing a live card in 2 draw steps. It is at this point however, where one must consider that if they do draw a live card, the chances of victory are very high. Due to the Path to Exile, even missing on the live card until draw step 3 grants you a very good chance at winning, since you have 2 additional spells to work with at this point as well. Given this, you now must consider the option of mulliganing to 5.
First of all, let us not kid ourselves in assuming that every 5 card hand is going to be good, as there are certainly chances that our 5 card hand is also a mulligan, or also in the same situation as our 6 card hand but with 1 card less. Obviously if every time you mulliganed to 5 you were guaranteed a solid hand, mulliganing would be correct more often. But since that is not the case, and there is some chance we just have a bad hand, that must be taken into consideration. Even if we do have a keepable hand, are the chances of victory for that hand approaching 87.5% like our other hand likely does?
Now we must shift our context from simply being on the draw to looking at the matchup at hand. You are playing Bant against Zoo and are on the draw. In this scenario, you are looking to 1 for 1 your opponent until more powerful cards, like Rhox War Monk, Umezawa’s Jitte, or Jace, the Mind Sculptor come online. Because of this, going down to 5 means one fewer 1 for 1 even if you do have a decent hand. Another thing to take into account is that in our hand is one of the few 2 for 1’s available to us in the early game in Engineered Explosives. While we need another land to set it off, we can still get value out of it by giving ourselves time if our opponent plays multiple 1-drops. You cannot allow a deck which intends to win the damage front also take a lead in the card advantage front or else winning becomes exponentially harder.
I will not act as if there is no risk involved in keeping hands like the above, but there is also risk in mulliganing. It is up to the player to weigh the pros and cons and decide for himself, but there should be no hard and fast rules that dictate that decision. A similar situation came up in Paulo’s mulligan article where players had to decide to keep or throw back this hand on the draw against Zoo.
Nearly everyone else claimed it was an easy mulligan but I just can’t agree. What more can you ask of a hand than a almost sure shot of 87.5% to win against Zoo? Remember, if you aren’t hitting your lands for the first few turns, you are drawing spells, which means once you do hit your land, you have 7 cards to work with. Obviously drawing a land on turn 1 is ideal, but this hand can literally miss for 2 turns and still absolutely destroy Zoo.
Their first two threats are irrelevant, as you are not ramping Zoo into something scary with your Path to Exiles. Afterward a Goyf plays cleanup with a Bant Charm backup in the not too distant future. Sure, there is some chance that your going to draw 3 straight spells and lose the game. This is probably around 10% since the remaining 2.5% can be mitigated by the opponent having a loose draw as well and your Path’s clearing a.. well.. path while you dig some more. But if we mulligan, can we assume a better than 87.5% chance at victory? Do we not have a bigger chance at losing than 10% considering the variance in the opening 6 combined with the variance in cards off the top of our deck?
Just because a hand is not ideal does not mean it is worthy of a mulligan. When you keep a hand like the one above, but with a second land over Vendilion Clique, you are still needing some certain cards off the top of your deck. Assuming the probability is in your favor, why not keep a hand that will 100% be better than any 6 card hand so long as you draw a land in the next 2 draw steps and will likely be better if you draw your land in the 3rd draw step. Obviously you can mulligan here and open up the nuts and “prove” me wrong, but you are just as likely to end up with a no lander and be forced to mulligan once again.
Obviously we are not looking to keep blatantly bad hands, like no landers or 1 land and a bunch of 4-drops, but the math supports our mulliganing here. In the above scenario though, your hand is not bad by any means, it just needs some help, and that help is more likely than not, by a significant margin. Without doing the proper analysis, you end up relying on probability once again with a new hand.
One thing I avoided mentioning during the first example hand was that my opponent tanked on the play before keeping his 7. Now while I don’t suggest you rely on “reads” of body language or anything like that, if you are torn between decisions, take advantage of the fact that your opponent is human. This was not Magic Online and I watched my opponent’s face as he decided to keep. From this, the only thing I could tell was that his hand was marginal. I extrapolated that he either had no 1-drop, or it was a wimpy 2/3 and not a Wild Nacatl, or he was stuck on 1 land as well. Obviously the latter is worse for me if I have to Path, but when I opened my 6 card hand up, I could not just forget about the information my opponent handed over to me. In true results oriented fashion (in before the forum posters) my opponent whiffed on his one-drop and my hand became amazing.
You are allowed to use more information than just what you hear everyone talk about constantly. There is a human interaction to this game and to always ignore it is a mistake. Along this same line of reasoning, while it did not occur in my example, if an opponent mulligans on the play, you can use that to aid your decision making process as well.
Obviously some hands increase in value slightly if an opponent mulligans. The general trend is to mulligan a hand that you would otherwise mulligan regardless of an opponent’s mulligan behavior, but some specific cards change this. Thoughtseize effects for example, become much more potent with a smaller hand size from the opponent. A hand of 5 lands, Dark Confidant and Thoughtseize may seem weak on the draw, but if an opponent has already mulliganed, you should at least take the time to reevaluate your options. Again, we are primarily concerned with breaking the stereotypical mold of mulligans, so it is not actually about whether you end up mulliganing, but what you do en route to do so.
If you run through all of the data and still feel it is right to mulligan, by all means, go right ahead. But do not rely on too many shortcuts to get you there. Falling into predictable patterns only harms us when we apply them to such a fluid game. You may be criticized initially for some “different” techniques and thoughts, but ultimately, if those behaviors lead to more wins and a better understanding of the game, who cares about the appearance of them on the surface? Mulliganing is important, but this does not translate into mulliganing more. Mulligan smart and you will begin to see a difference between the two. Thanks for reading.
Conley Woods
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So is THIS why you always win with your wacky decks and nobody else can? =)
Excellent read =)
What I gathered from this article: really think about your hands before mulliganing, don’t just auto-mull. I like this advice a lot. I find mulliganing to be one of the parts of magic i have the hardest time with. Although, for me personally, I often keep hands that are questionable rather than mull. I am always afraid I’ll get something worse. But experience is slowly helping me to get better.
What’s the smallest hand you remember keeping that you actually won with? Just curious.
Good article, so much more than “1 land” has to be taken into consideration. The math is obviously important, but also considersidations such as:
How does my deck play if I miss a land drop?
How does my hand play if I miss a land drop?
How important is my early game vs my opponent (if their deck is known) if I miss a land?
How well does my deck mulligan?
the second and 4th questions are particularly important, i think. Something Jund has to face all of the time on the play is whether you keep the two land land. this is heavily dependant on the contents in your hand as the deck doesnt mulligan well.
One rule I generally go by (although it shouldnt by any means always be followed) is to take a look at your hand and remove the “worst” card from it (probably the most expensive). If that hand minus that card would be keepable on a mulligan, then keep the hand. If you would not keep that hand on a mulligan, than toss it. This doesnt take into account aggressive mulligans but as a general game 1 type of rule i find it works.
@ jethro
After reading this article twice, I would say yes. At least now, players can use this type of mulligan style when when they use conley’s deck brews.
Great article, but this looks suspiciously not like a game play video =P.
I kept a 7 hand with just one land a week ago. With Jund. On the draw.
I had a lavaclaw reaches, 2 lightning Bolts, a Putrid Leech and a Terminate, and two deadish cards., my opponent already mulled to 6 and was playing allies.
definitely a keep to me, but many said I should have mulled it (won the game).
I agree with this article. Mulliganing is always something I’ve sort of doubted myself on because pretty much everyone says you should mull aggressively. I’m an 1800ish player on mtgo, so I know I’m at least decent at the game, and I think I win more games by keeping questionable hands than trying to mull into something better. I think unintentional deck stacking might have something to do with people’s tendencies to overmulligan in real life… if you have your lands spread evenly throughout your deck, it’s likely you’re always going to get something with a correct balance of lands and spells. On mtgo, I believe someone is much less likely to get an optimal hand, so you need to work with what you have.
There is a definite trend in Magic psychology at the moment where people will Mulligan a good speculator purely on the basis that their friends will think they are bad if the don’t draw the land or whatever it is they needed so instead they Mulligan to 5 or 4 or whatever it is so that they can just say “I Mulled to x, nothing I could do frowns”. It seems that we are at a point where it is better to have the appearance of being good rather than actually being good or at least your best. Although to be fair we have probably been there for 15 years.
While Paulo’s mulligan decisions are very structured but there is no way that they can be blamed for the phenomenon unless it is just a pure misapplication of his theories. His mulligan decisions are generally just good EV calls that tend towards being fairly conservative (of course he can just gain back a card in a lot of situations by outplaying someone which isn’t necessarily a liberty that everyone can take when throwing one back) but I know for a fact he will keep the right one-lander when it is the right call.
I can’t quite remember where I read from Ruel that the question for any opener is what is required for this hand to get you to your game plan. if you have to say I need consecutive draws that are very limited to get there its a mull
Conley-
If you keep that one lander and get there, you don’t win the game. You get to play magic. Your win % isn’t approaching 87.5%. Your getting to play magic % is approaching 87.5%
Obviously you don’t “Automatically” win the game, but Zoo is very unlikely to beat a hand with 3 removal spells, and 2 solid to insane creatures, along with whatever you top deck. If it is lands, thats a good thing, and then once you have some lands, you have a bunch of gamebreaking spells left in the tank,
The deck was designed to beat Zoo off of just those kinds of hands (albeit with another land or 2). Your lategame is so much more powerful than theirs that the 1 for 1s are going to get you there. So in that particular situation, drawing lands is basically winning the game. Apart from some bad luck of like 6 straight lands off the top and none of them being Treetop Village or Tolaria West
I was pretty sure I over mulliganed many a good hand before I read this article but I now have a framework with which to counter my old evaluations. Thanks. It also seems like you’re saying that people who think after a game where they kept a one lander, and lost, “I should always mulligan a one lander” are more result-oriented then you. Hope that makes sense and I agree, if that is what you are saying. Good read, always enjoyable.
fish
I really enjoyed this article. I feel like all of the points you brought up in your article gave a great contrast to PV’s earlier article, and I also liked seeing another point of view.
You brought up speculative hands, and said this:
“While it is true that players should mulligan speculative hands, the definition of a speculative hand is so misunderstood which leads players down a path where they follow a set of rules.”
What is your definition of a speculative hand, and why do you believe it’s misunderstood?
Thanks again for the awesome read.
-Nate
Still hate you Gabe, but thanks for reading my article ya old grouch! 🙂
I like Jethro’s point. If you only need one card (land or otherwise) to make your hand “87.5%”, then you are probably ok to keep it. Once you need two cards your chances go way down.
Where does the 87.5% come from?
Did you really feel the need to write an entire article trying to defend some awkward mulligan decisions? You could have just written, “I like trying to get there” and saved yourself a lot of work. The reason everyone else found those hands to be easy mulligans is because they like being able to actually play Magic and take advantage of their skills instead of needing to clear a hurdle they have 0 control over. Having a sweet 40-44% shot at hitting my out for the first few turns is hardly enthralling. Sometimes you take it, but you don’t if you can help it.
Also it would’ve been nice if you had done some retrospective on hands that aren’t your own deck. Some of the conclusions you had on the mainstream decks were just baffling and seemed far more interesting to dissect.
@anon
The thing is, if those hands actually get there you almost always win because you have so many spells to work with. Having less lands in your hand/deck is a form of card advantage because after a certain point lands are worth 0 cards. It’s not like if someone gets there they only have a 50% chance to win… they’re going to have a lot more spells to work with than the other guy. Also, it takes skill to make hands like that work… you have to be able to use the early spells to buy time until you can get whatever you need. It’s not like someone keeps a land light hand and just facerolls for a few turns while their opponent destroys them, they play what spells they do have to buy time or set themselves up for a way to win when they draw whatever they need.
@ Bob
No shit. You didn’t have to explain what those hands are since I already did so in my post.
“Also, it takes skill to make hands like that work”
No it doesn’t. The entire reason you keep hands like that is because they’re blatant game-winners if you do draw land. Casting Path on a one-drop isn’t a skill, even though people like to pretend everything they do in Magic now has a skill element attached.
excellent read
I am a new Magic player (playing WoW TCG before, which has a different set of thinking for Mulligan, because everything can be Mana and you only can Mulligan once, but to 7) and the Mulligan is probably the hardest thing for me to learn. I read a lot of articles for beginners and in an article from Jan Ruess I found a rule which fits to this article
“You have to ask yourself: Are (x-1) random cards from my deck giving me better odds to win as the x, which I currently have?”
for example, against Zoo a 1-lander with 2 Paths is way better than a 3-lander with 4 spells which don’t really help against Zoo.
thanks for the read
I was on the play with Jund against Grixis Control on game 2 after a lost game 1. I had:
Forest
Rootbound Crag
Great Sable Stag
Master of the Wild Hunt
3 cards with Black in cc.
I “auto-mulled” because it was a two lander on the play, which I have learned to really dislike with Jund. However, because the Stag can only be answered by a lightning bolt from my opp. side, I guess I should have kept. High risk, high reward situation… Do you agree with this?
btw, I was forced to mulligan a second time (1 land on the play) en lost miserably with my 5 card hand.
Interesting read, Conley. Now let’s assume it is the first game in an Extended match-up you have no previous information about. How does this affect your decision to keep the ‘one plains hand’?
I am much less likely to keep without information on the opponent’s deck, but I would not rule it out altogether. Typically though, you have some idea of what the opponent is playing, even if it is only narrowed down to aggro, control or combo, that can often be enough information to bias a mulligan one way or the other.
@ Woot, it depends entirely on what those black cards werem if one is Leech and and none of them are more than 3 cmc, I would be inclined to keep. If they are Terminates and/or Bit blasts though, that makes the hand much worse (I would assume Terminates have come out at this point).
If for example they are Leech, Blightning x2, I think you have to keep, as you have some of the most powerful spells against them and are only missing 1 land to get there. It is not as though you expect them to come out of the gates with 1 drops
This article is actually quite good, but also features my single least favorite feature of Magic writing prominently: bullshit math.
The percentages are, quite frankly, wild-ass guesses (87.5% chance to win against Zoo? sign me up), and the draw-math is wrong.
So, for instance, 25 of 54 is ~46% (60 – 6 = 54)
hitting one of your “outs” in the first two draws is ~78%, but this is actually being very optimistic. Is a Hallowed Fountain really an “out”? It lets you pop your Explosives but not actually cast any spells in-hand.
There isn’t enough Magic getting played by people for there to ever be reasonably accurate win percentages of archetypes v. other archetypes, and there’s probably not even enough play with any particular deck list to have accurate stats against archetypes.
Because Magic is a very math-y game, most of the players are in some odd sense soothed by the presence of things that seem enough like math to be plausible.
Menendian and Chapin occasionally actually give us the math. Basically every other writer of the game doesn’t, because they never did it.
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I consider the first 2 hands as keepable but it’s very close and I would probably mull Conley’s hand but keep LSV’s one. The 3rd is an auto-mull for me.
what travis said
Why isn’t there any article on Rise of Eldrazi limited yet?
I was hoping to read some of that by now since the Spoiler is out there 100%…
Isn’t that more important right now?
Actually, now that I think more about it, I think my hand was:
Forest
Rootbound Crag
Great Sable Stag
2x Master of the Wild Hunt
Sprouting Thrinax
Broodmate Dragon
Masters and broodmate aren’t good against them: The masters more then likely get killed on sight, and by the time we cast Broodmate they’ll be in control and have a counter. Basically, any land let’s me cast the stag, and with a black source the thrinax comes online which is also quite good against them. Should have kept…
This is actually something I have done alot. I agree 100% with Conley on his mulligan strategy. You gotta take into account alot of things, like what your opponent is playing and what you need to actually win the matchup. Sometimes you actually can gain info game 1, as in what your opponent is playing, if they show cards while shuffling. This game is as much about skill as it is about gaining information from your opponent, in whatever ”legal” way possible.
This is where MTG can really be comparable to poker. Reading players body language, how they conduct themselves before the game, in game banter to gain info, and so much more. I find myself to be really good at reading people in general, and it helps alot. I never took Psych, or any college classes. I think some things people do are just obvious and can be exploited from it. I base my mulligan decisions on all the information gathered and also factor in hand strength. I think alot of people do not do this and probably can gain alot of benifit from it.
Conley, your next article should be about reading your opponent and the different ways to do so…..or if not you, then someone else that is also well versed in the matter.
Why wouldn’t you side out Masters vs Grix?
@Tuffy
I don’t remember the exact decision process, but my sideboard wasn’t tuned at all against Grixis, because I dind’t expect it that much. Therefore, I couldn’t side out all cards I would like to. Guess all I did was -2 terminate (leaving none) and -1 Bituminous Blast (leaving none) and +3 GSS.
Man I never mulligan and it works out for me pretty well. Gotta go for the ole “miser runner runner land draw ONE TIME” every now and then.
But seriously, people mulligan way too much. End of discussion.
@Joshua: do you have any idea what “Chalice for 1” can do to a zoo player?
I can’t help but thinking you are twisting some of what I say, and atacking an argument I did not really present.The way you say it, it looks like I auto mulligan a hand that has one land, but that is just not true. If anyone took the time to read the article I told them they should read, then they’ll see that I think mulligan is not an absolute concept – you mulligan with a certain deck, against a certain deck, on the play/draw, etc.
For example, in GP houston, I kept many one land, ponder hands. When I say DONT KEEP ONE LANDERS, it is obviously a basic guideline, not a hard rule. I take it you would be happy with saying “do not keep zero landers on the play”, but you would not mulligan lotus/mox/vault/key, etc.
So, in short, I agree with your point that there are not “hard rules”, but I disagree that I said there were 🙂
I agree with you that some people will mulligan because it is expected of them, but way more people will not mulligan hands they should. For example, in our last ptq, a friend of mine who has been playing for years said something like “I know sometimes I should mulligan, but I almost never do, because I hate starting with 6 cards… makes me feel like I’m losing the game already” – WAY more people have this kind of mindset than over mulliganing I think
Also, where did you get 87,5 win percentage from???
.
@wout: your hand is completely unkeepable to me.
I seriously doubt that Conley meant that out of 200 games he was assured of winning 175. If you really need to nerd rage about percentages then just substitute the phrase “almost assuredly going to win” anywhere he says 87.5%
Let me start my comment with the qualifier that I feel this whole article is pretty contentious and ill-conceived.
Regardless, if you’re going to present percentages, you need to do some actual math, even if the final result will still contain some conjecture because you have to determine your win percentage based on hitting the out (a green source) on a given turn. My generous estimate is that it’s about 85% on T1, 77.5% on T2, 60% on T3, and 10% T4 or later. There are plenty of situations where this hand loses to Zoo even if you hit your first out (a pretty common example is that their hand was 3 1-drops Bolt BantCharm 2 land, where they’re favored after the first exchange).
Your deck, as you have presented it, has seventeen green sources. This means you have a 32.07% chance of hitting the first green source on turn one, 22.2% of the first G being turn two, 15.84% chance of it being turn three, and 29.89% chance that it’s further away than three cards. Even with a 100% chance of winning when finding the out, you’d only be at about 70%, so your 87.5% is already ludicrous. Multiplying by the coefficients I provided (which are STILL generous), the actual chance of winning the game ~56.87%. Given more realistic coefficients it might be a couple percentage points lower.
Ironically, after all that math, I’d probably keep. Even with a deck designed to be pretty good against Zoo, the chances with a random 6 on the draw against their kept 7 does feel like less than 55%. It’s close enough that table feel would affect the decision; if I felt I had a reliable read that the opponent confidently kept, I would also keep. However, if I had a read in the other direction and felt my opponent’s hand was probably a little loose, or if I was playing against some overly lucky scrub known to keep loose hands, or even just if I was against someone whom I would expect to make minor play mistakes, I would mulligan to improve my chances of winning. It’s a VERY close decision; absolutely nothing like the clear certainty you laid out and backed up with ridiculous conjecture.
I really like you Conley; you’re smart and (usually) laid back and genial and a good conversationalist. But I can’t support this article. Usually your writing is extremely entertaining and not stuffed full of red herrings. I’m hoping you don’t mind the constructive criticism and can take it as a signal to get back to your more usual faire.
I do at least agree with you that all the suggestions out there to mulligan aggresively have led to an over-mulliganing trend. But making up some lies to back a rebuttal against one of the best players and writers in the entire Magic community is not the remedy.
Actually I started keeping so many more hands after watching LSVs draft videos (that guy is just so loose JKJK). As a result I started winning more! I always feel that PVs amazing mulligan decisions are great because the decks he was playing were generally faeries and Jund which can mulligan very aggressively and still do well (particularly faeries as a mull into blossom was worth so much). I’m glad someone is showing a contrasting opion (of course conley isnt just some rogue dude, many pros keep “loose” hands cough cough gfabs).
Also, I think that a lot of people mulligan hands because they want to feel like they got unlucky and thats why they lost. How many times have you heard “Yo man I got a 1 lander shipped to a 6 no action down to 5 just got rolled”
Would you keep
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Ponder
1 Everlasting Chalice
2 Rampant Growth
1 Jace, the Mindsculptor
1 Elspeth, Knight Errant
Also, you can keep a four-card hand and win! I have done it a couple of times in tournaments. Of course it depends on decks, match-up etc.
@PV and everyone else asking about where 87.5% came from: Conley’s assuming that because of the Path, he’s going to win the game if he doesn’t hit the live card until the 3rd draw step. Approx. probability of drawing a live card by the 3rd draw is, 1 – (0.5*0.5*0.5) = 0.875 or 87.5%. Quoted from Conley’s article:
“For convenience sake, we will assume I have a 50% chance to draw a live card in 1 draw step and therefore (roughly) a 75% chance at drawing a live card in 2 draw steps. It is at this point however, where one must consider that if we do draw a live card, the chances of victory are very high. Due to the Path to Exile, even missing on the live card until draw step 3 grants you a very good chance at winning…”
Great Article, Conley.
I was playing Grixis against Mono-Red G2 and saw this opener:
Scalding Tarn
3x Bolt
Terminate
Flashfreeze
Calcite Snapper
Keep or no?
@ PV-
Sorry if you thought I was directing this at you, bc I wasn’t. I was more using the responses from your article as a reference. It wasn’t intended to be offensive in any way. Like I said in the article, I respect your guy’s mulliganing, but this was mainly just to clear my mulligan habits up. They came up not only in your article, but at Houston, and in Gavin’s article over on some other website, and I had a lot of requests to go over them in more detail. I didn’t mean to imply that you claimed there were rules. Sorry 🙂
@ All the people freaking out about percentages-
I clearly stated that the percentages were very rough and not intended to be the point of the article. Getting caught up on the fact because I did not take the time to figure out everything to the last decimal is missing the point entirely. 87.5 was just a nice rough and round number for hitting an out by turn 3. Not hitting a green source is still an out as you now have explosives to kill more dudes and buy you even more time, so yes, every land is an out so long as your willing to assume that isnt the only land you draw for the next 6 turns or something insane like that.
@ Wout
That hand is really bad.
@Conley: oh, ok, my bad 😛 it seemed to me that you were saying something like “PAULO (and other people) SAYS THIS, BUT I SAY THIS” when in fact, where this particular topic is concerned, we actually say the same thing.
My problem with 87% is that it is so high that I highly doubt you would have 87% chance of winning even if I let you choose your initial 7, let alone with those
Man, a lot of idiots post in these forums. What the hell is wrong with about 75% of you? (p.s. I figured that I should spell out that this is a joke because nobody noticed the ample disclaimers about “rough percentages.”)
The article is fine.
And learn to read before you post forum comments.
Put the 87,5% in context. Imagine instead that you got to keep an 8 card hand where you skip your first draw step on the draw. The 8th card is a land, lets say Temple Garden (Breeding Pool would be too good lol). You are likely to win that specific game WAY more than lose, at least 75% of the time. I am not saying the matchup in general is 75% or whatever, just that specific game. With so much removal and solid guys backing you up from the start, you are unlikely to lose. Because of this, I equated drawing a land to winning, because they are highly correlated in this example. Obviously it is not actually 100% but it is very much in your favor
Good read.
And for ppl that tought that conley dissed pv or anything like that. Dunno maybe u guys are just too close to this article and got bit offended by things that werent meant to be offensive by any way.
Cant say but of my own insight and i didint see this post that way at all.
@Matstaal
This is another strong example of the opponent’s deck affecting decision-making. That is a keep to me as well against allies because, really, all we want to do is keep killing guys until we win through CA.
It sounds to me like people were examining your keep out of context in this case. (Before you said ‘allies’ I was thinking you were wrong as well…)
Very good article. I already did this to some extent (considering my hand based on more than just land count) but its always nice to read someone else’s thought on the matter.
The people arguing about your percentages obviously missed the actual point of the article.
it’s a good subject for an article, but I wasn’t impressed. much of your language is vague, you don’t give all the information like the decklist, your math is wrong so far as I can till. the assumption that hitting land or even just a good card leads to victory is a bad thing to drill into peoples heads.
I think using constructed as the main example for mulligans is a bad choice that would be made better if more time was taking for explaining just how good those cards are in the bant on zoo matchup. I tend to be more loose with mulligans in limited where you tend to have a little more time and getting specific colors tends to be more likely(deck dependant of course). I agree that knowing when to keep speculative hands is important. but you aren’t giving good enough reasons and this will just lead to readers keeping hands they shouldn’t.
just show a decklist. I sincerely doubt in the bant examples any land would make you happy, but i have no clear way of verifying that. once you know what someone is playing the ballgame changes completely, because then you know what cards are important in a matchup, but not everyone knows the reasoning that a given card is important. generally speaking, you should mulligan if missing means you’ll be doing nothing, but this is offset by just how good a hand has the potential to become.
you have a very good point which is people shouldn’t automatically assume certain types of hands are automatic mulligans(or keeps for that matter), but I don’t think you properly go into the kind of thinking people should apply when making these choices, and I think that is important.
FFS, get a grip people. Learn to read the entire thing, not just jump to flaming the first time you can prove a number incorrect. You’re certainly displaying your intellect and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t spread that little tidbit of info around if I were you.
Conley’s article is simply explaining his decision PROCESS, not trying to argue specific keeps/mulls or pound math into anyone’s head. The advice he offers is simply “know your deck, know your outs and THINK about what you need and the rough chance of drawing it,” as opposed to making decisions by rote. That’s it. All he’s saying is THINK. Are you really going to argue against that?
Conley makes some good points with the “I just need to draw green” things, as previously noted. One problem is, though, he doesn’t even say what sort of Zoo he’s up against. If he’s against one of those zoo decks that’s hoping to go for a ranger plan, he may be up a creek without a paddle (ramp them into a ranger with path, and get nacatled out). All of the cards (save possibly goyf) are 1 for 1s here, with the noble counting as mana… so I ask you, unless you pull the land(s) you need AND some card advantage, how are you beating all Zoo?
Also, the 50% isn’t even 50% when you count paths. It’s a gross overestimation to pull that 87.5 number from the air, as it should be: (22/53)+(1-22/53)(22/52)+(1-22/53)(2-22/52)(22/51)=81% chance (rounded up) of playing Magic. I say playing Magic, because you don’t auto win with a land turn three. I don’t even think you do with it on turn two. The only relative auto-win is the green making land turn one.
Oh wait- Conley wasn’t just counting the lands that make green. He put all the lands in his count. Look at the decklist from PV’s article, guys, this hand doesn’t win if you draw an island. It doesn’t win off a flooded grove. Nor does it win off the plains or the tolaria west. Treetop village really only counts if you drew it turn one. Really, the number of legitamite outs is more like 16, not 25, making your odds not very good at all.
Nice job getting there, Conley, and I think your article has a lot of good abstract points, but the math is just not where it needs to be to even pretend to be accurate. Your points are good, but the example is just not a good representation of what you’re saying.
Great article!!!
I got to admit you really opened up the Muliganing topic up for me ( I am a chronic over Muliganer).PV did a great job of opening up the topic but what you brought was a different expression of what seem to be the same/similar principles.
In PV’s article I was basicly feeling smug about making the ‘right’ call and then being some what confused by the ones I didn’t get. This mainly comes from being more ready to Muligan so seeing it from the otherside really opened my eyes to evaluating hands more intensively.
One last thing though where did you get 87.5% lol only joking
Ed
Again, is everyone just high? The deck has SEVENTEEN green sources. That isn’t even a 1/3 chance on each draw, much less 1/2…
I’m a bit confused as to how Explosives entered the conversation also, as they aren’t in the seven card hand which was presented and is being discussed. Regardless, my set of arguments stands. 87.5% is just completely insane and not even close, and the mulligan / not mulligan decision is EXTREMELY close and based on factors that can’t even be presented in this type of problem fashion. Pretty much, PV put forth the absolute perfect problem and Conley tried to make it seem like what should have been a close and carefully considered decision on the problem was right by a mile or something. It’s gross. =/
Explosives is in the first hand, so people were mixing them up. And stop getting caught up on the math as you are missing the point. The hand will take ANY land, not just a green one, although it is obviously better. Also, you are not counting other Paths being drawn…
In the article when you claim you have 22 outs for land, don’t you need something that produces a green source? would u consider the other plains in your deck as “live” cards given noble and goyf in hand? or does the engineered explosives on 2 make the plains live as well?
I know this is off topic, but I don’t know how else to contact you Conely. I have been playing your acid ramp deck on and off competitively, and I was wondering i you could adjust it according to Rise.
I have considered adding Oust over Lightning Bolt in the main. I was under 50% against Boss naya and had troubles beating RDW. I personally have 3 Celestial Purges side instead of your 3 Paths I think it was, as my meta is jund, vampires, naya and rdw. There is very little control in my meta, so I am not sure that I would even justify the Luminarchs.
I haven’t really sat down and scoured Rise for all of the cards I want from it yet, but I would like to see how you would change your deck, as I am not a good deck builder.
Thanks Conley. You could even be awesome and email me at [email protected]
I doubt anyone will read this at this point, but what I find amazing is that all of these people who are insisting that Conley doesn’t know what he is talking about actually DO NOT KNOW what Conley is talking about. You are taking what he said about the 87.5% and framing it in a limited context that fails to take into consideration the complete context of the article. You came across what APPEARS TO BE a percentage calculation and your mind immediately entered some sort of math mode, shutting out all sorts of relevant information. Ironically, the whole point of this article, the REAL point (which has little to do with a particular hand of magic or a mulligan decision ), is to warn against that sort of mentality as it is applied to Magic.
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