Edh deck how many lands

If you play a couple of mana accelerators in a game just to have your payoff spell countered, you will find that to be a losing strategy. Casual EDH is more about speed than efficiency, where competitive 1v1 is more about value, efficiency, and consistency.

If you look at recent deck lists from Commander Leagues on Magic Online, you can observe a few points regarding mana bases.

My pick for the best fixing lands in the format. Combined with ABU duals and shocklands, these provide immediate and unconditional fixing. Paying 1 life is even less of a cost with a starting life total of For 2-color fixers nothing beats the originals. They are pricey, but there is no perfect replacement for them. Expect to see them frequently. Second only to original dual lands, shocklands also have the upside of coming into play untapped. The importance of casting your spells on time cannot be understated and 2 life has even less impact than in life formats.

As for how many to include, 4-color decks should play 10 fetchlands, 6 dual lands, and 6 shocklands. Wasteland is one of the strongest lands in the deck because it can answer any problematic land the opponent plays. Its ability to be recurred can also win games on its own, and the opportunity cost is minimal.

Cavern of Souls is the most powerful single land in the format at this time. A surprise Cavern on a turn where the opponent left up mana to counter your general can even waste a whole turn from the opponent. Additionally, the recent banning of Strip Mine has made it all the more likely that your Cavern will stick around for the whole game.

Ancient Tomb is excellent for decks with easy mana requirements and 30 life makes the cost less acute. Still, against some generals you will need to watch how many times you tap this land for mana as the damage can rack up with fetchlands, Mana Confluence , Sylvan Library , and attacks from the opponent.

When it comes to mana rocks a lot of players use a ratio of two rocks per one land. So if you originally ran 40 lands but you have 10 rocks, you can comfortably drop about 5 lands. This is just a suggestion to help guide you. This is my favorite reason to run tons of lands. Mana sinks are generally some sort of activated effect or big -cost spell that you can dump a ton of mana into for powerful results.

Decks that have these are going to run tons of lands, comfortably playing the 39 to 42 area without a care in the world. It might even win them the game. Ancient Tomb Illustration by Howard Lyon.

Building a 5-color Commander deck is a doozy. All other cards aside, your land base is super important. Run one of each basic in decks like this at the very least. Ultimately, needing more lands actually still falls to your curve.

If your spells are big or you have a lot of expensive activated abilities, bump it up to 40 or so. This is an interesting thing to consider. Arena has a hand-smoothing algorithm that has influenced players to play fewer lands or to change up the combination of what lands they play in the past. And you can still find lists with 40 lands without looking too hard.

Commander and Historic Brawl by association both have a ton of lands to pick from. Utility lands are always valuable to have and tons of mana for the late game is also valued. All right, time for the warning on the box. Now you need to recognize the responsibility that comes with it. Throw in the lands you need. Yes EDH is a slower format, but having to come from behind and catchup to your opponents does put you at a disadvantage when they play spells and you can't. Land isn't the only source of mana you can have in your deck - Elves can get by on less actual mana than some other deck types because so many elves themselves can tap for mana, both accelerating your deck and making more land coming less desirable or useful.

Creatures are, however, easy to destroy, particularly as many of the mana producing ones have low toughness like Birds of Paradise or Llanowar Elves. Artifacts that produce mana are common too, there's no single card in more EDH decks than Sol Ring , some of the moxes and medallions can be pretty helpful too. These like creatures are easier to destroy than lands, and aren't a replacement for them. The medallions lose some of that usefulness pretty quickly as more colors are added, it's not usually worth 5 slots in a deck, but fit very nicely into a deck with only one or two colors.

Paying the cost of a card isn't the only way to play it, and if your deck uses one of these strategies you won't need as many land on the field at once.

Jodah, Archmage Eternal makes every spell you cast able to be played for , Kaalia of the Vast lets you cheat in Angels, Demons and Dragons whenever she attacks, and there's always cards like Elvish Piper and Quicksilver Amulet.

Reanimator is another option, getting cards in your graveyard so you can Reanimate them later using cheaper spells and abilities reduces the cost to actually play a deck, and thus the land base you need to build up. How are you planning to play your game? Aggro isn't the strongest in EDH but there are ways to make it work, and that needs to have a lot of mana, fast. Control too needs to get it's mana base stable and early so it can afford to hold those counter and removal spells to use when things start happening.

Other decks can afford to build up a bit slower, unless it's forced EDH is a slow format after all, the faster you want to act in the game, the more land you likely need to do it. There's no one solution, generally you'll want somewhere between a third and half of your deck to make mana, and most of that will likely be from land. Even if you are running Elves with mana rocks, you need the land first to play the elves, to play the Sol Ring, before the non land mana engine takes over, and you can't rely on drawing enough land to start your game if you're running only 20 in the deck.

It depends on your deck, and the pace you want to play. Are you trying to turn combo out the table, are you trying to use politics and hug the table only to backstab your allies an route to victory, or are you a power gamer trying to drop the fattest fatties and smash your way to victory. Plenty of strategies in edh and as such it is color identity of your commander dependent, cmc of your cards dependent, and desired pace dependent.

In a trying to combo out asap deck I run limited lands around 24 lands with mana rocks galore and then tutor and my 2 or 3 ways to combo out. The rest of the deck is removal so if my strategy slips to turn 4 or 5 I'm able to defend myself from table politics.

If I'm just casually playing I run about 40ish lands and some rocks as land destruction is a thing aforementioned in the thread.

So for decks in between these extremes you have to just kind of play it by ear. Still pretty decent odds if you ask the average Magic player. Do lots of play testing to see if these numbers work for your Commander. Do also check out our review of several deck building websites to see what suits you best. In this screenshot of the Moxfield deck builder, they compute the chance of playing cards on curve, for each Mana Value.

Not shown is also a opening hand simulator where you can test how many times you are hitting those Lands. Do check out the Games Haven channel for box openings and Commander gameplay videos! After playing from Tempest to Urza's Saga block, Ted took a 20 year break from the game before returning to the classic Plane of Dominaria in His favourite formats are Commander, Draft, and, grudgingly, Standard.

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