Beating A Dead Draw
The hot topic in the Internet right now seems to be debating the various qualities of card advantage, real and virtual. You've read up on it, and are pretty confident you've got it covered. However, right now you're throwing away a massive amount of card advantage, and you don't even know it. How did that happen? Lands. You have to include them. You can't cast very many spells without them. And yet, you hate drawing the darn things. Every deck has a certain quantity of mana it needs to hit to function properly. Once you've done so, the last thing you want to do is draw more mana sources. This is a fundamental deckbuilding dilemma faced by every Magic player.

We all remember the old-school 1/3 creatures, 1/3 spells, 1/3 land formula we first learned. Combined with a newbie's propensity for fat critters, we quickly discovered that we never seemed to have enough mana available. So we learned to add more, cutting (with difficulty) our beloved Craw Wurms. In time, we also started experimenting with varying the numbers of mana sources based on how many colors we needed and how expensive our spells were. We also figured out ways to"cheat" by using utility lands like Mishra's Factories, Wastelands, and cycling lands to minimize the risk of dead draws.

What's that?

Dead draws?

Doesn't that sound a lot like the discussions about card advantage? Yup. Simply put, once you've reached the amount of mana you need to cast your spells, any additional lands are essentially dead draws. Thus, they equal card disadvantage. Now, it's not a pure sort like that discussed by Geordie Tait. You still have the cards in hand. You can still play them and have a permanent. But by drawing a land that you can't effectively use, that's just as bad as drawing Terror versus MBC. This falls under rules 3b and 3c of Oscar Tan's T.H.E.F.U.C.C.

I see you. You, nodding your head, saying that you already know all this. I know you do. This is just background. Here's where it gets interesting.

Cycling a Barren Moor turn 1 is pretty basic. You've traded a card in hand for another card in hand. No net change in cards. What happens when you cycle Barren Moor on turn 10, though? Geordie Tait's theory says that you net +0 cards. I disagree. You really net +1 card here, because the Barren Moor is probably a dead card. Playing it normally puts a useless permanent on the table. By cycling the Moor, you recover the draw step that you missed.

Here's another example. Blocking an incoming Grizzly Bears with a Wild Mongrel, and discarding a Forest to save the Mongrel. Trading a Forest for a Bear is card parity, right? But if the Forest was useless to you at this point in the game, then you are really gaining a card. You have removed a resource of your opponents without using any resources of your own. Therefore, it's -1 card for your opponent.

Excess Mana
So how much mana is excess? For many aggro decks, once you can cast the most expensive spell in your deck, you're set. Rarely do you need to cast two Craw Wurms per turn. U/G Madness, for example, needed just four mana to cast every threat it drew. Type 1 Sligh can get by just fine with three Mountains. Fish really only wants four land, enough to cast threats and still counterspell things. Yet with an average of twenty-two mana sources, that means that these decks play with a large number of dead cards.

However, when you look at those decks in detail, you'll notice something interesting. All of them have ways to convert the dead draws of excess land into card or tempo advantage. U/G Madness can discard land to Mongrel, Aquamoeba, or Waterfront Bouncer to kill creatures, deal extra damage, or bounce opposing dudes. Sligh runs Mishra's Factories and Wastelands, and can gain tempo with Fireblast. Fish uses lands to fuel alternate casting costs of Daze and Thwart, and often runs Faerie Conclaves and Mishra's Factories.

What about control? Control decks tend to be very mana hungry. Missing early land drops are fatal, so you are forced to run with large numbers of mana sources, often twenty-six to twenty-eight. Now, nearly half your draws are land. Control decks require card-drawing to be successful for this very reason. Otherwise, the lower land ratio of aggro decks will outpace the draw power of control. But how many lands are enough? Control very often wants to cast several spells a turn, such as an end of turn Fact or Fiction, plus the ability to counter twice. That's eight mana, minimum.

So what is control's solution? Use the land. Spells like Stroke of Genius, Decree of Justice, Mutilate, and Starstorm get better with more mana available. With each additional land fueling card advantage engines like this, you can prevent your land from being dead. However, control also has other engines to use. Compulsion is the canonical example. Giving all your cards a cycling cost of 1U is a powerful effect, doubly so when you are recouping dead draws. Brainstorm, Frantic Search, and similar cards mirror the effect by trading dead cards in hand for action on the top of the library.

Some deckbuilders take this concept to an extreme. Zvi, for example. (Raise your hand if this surprises you.) His Turbo-land deck takes all the normal disadvantages of lands and dumps them on their heads. When half the cards in your deck are free cantrip mana producers, then you are simply playing with different rules than the rest of us. Let's look at Oscar Tan's four fundamental restrictions of the game:

How many of those does Turbo-land break? Yup, all of them. It draws several cards a turn, thanks to Horn of Greed. It plays several lands a turn, thanks to Exploration. And when it starts recursing Time Warp, then it gets to untap and attack several times in a row, breaking restrictions 2 and 4. In other words, there is no such thing as excess land for this deck. Facing this deck is like someone driving a truck through you living room. Trust me on this.

Homework
Do me a favor. Break out your favorite deck and thumb through it. Think back to games you've played where you topdecked a land one turn away from death. Now start thinking about ways you can turn those dead cards around. Compulsion. Merfolk Looters. Mongrels. Psychatogs. Spellshapers. Fireblast.

Now pay attention to your ratio of lands to spells. The more lands you play, the more consistent your early mana development. The downside is the quantity of gas that you can draw in the late game. Cycling lands can strike a balance, by slowing your early development slightly, but allowing you to trade dead draws for cards in the late game. Is your deck fast enough to not care? Are you sure?

What kinds of lands are you running? Is it just a pile of basic lands? If so, there are is range of utility lands available that turn late game lands into useful tools. Powerful Type One effects like Strip Mine, Wasteland, and Factories make you happy to rip another land on turn 10. In Standard, can your color requirements allow you to squeeze in a Stalking Stones or two? Finding ways to run these cards increases your card quality from dead draws to win conditions, and that translates directly into card advantage.

Tying it Together
The key to deck building is to maximize the synergy between your cards. In an ideal world, you can build your deck so that every topdeck is a good one, and every card you draw helps you win. Of course, that's not going to happen in practice, but with any luck, this article can give you some methods for getting closer to that state.

This year, may all your topdecks be savage.

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Justin Sexton
Jsexton on MTGO, and just about everywhere else
Justin dot sexton at comcast dot net