Mana is both the key mechanic in Magic and the main problem with it. It’s the primary tool that Wizards uses to cost cards, and it helps provide a building tempo to the game, offering differing rewards to the player using a lot of low-cost cards and to the player willing to build up to more expensive cards. It’s also helpful for players learning to play the game with simple decks:

1. Play one land.
2. Check your hand to see if you have any cards with a cost that matches the land that you have in play.
3. If so, read those cards, and if appropriate, play one.

This is a simple formula for a player in the learning stages that can help by keeping that player from being overwhelmed with too many decisions. With a basic learning-style deck, the new player will often have at most one card he or she can play each turn based on mana. Let’s face it, though: Mana is also the biggest problem with Magic.

Mana-flood and mana-screw are the two biggest reasons that players become frustrated with Magic. It might be good for new players to be able to occasionally steal a game against a top player because of his opponent having mana problems, but it’s still way more of a defect than a feature. While the game would be less exciting and less compelling without any randomness, most players still want Magic to be primarily a game of skill. Consider those times when you most questioned whether you should continue being a Magic player. Most of those times, you’d just lost a frustrating game with painful mana problems—am I right?

While some other TCGs (VS, WoW, Epic, etc.) have tried to fix the problem of mana while maintaining as much of the coolness of Magic as possible, we’re not going to stop being Magic players anytime soon. So, what do we do? We make allowances for variance and build our decks to reduce it. Here are some questions you should ask:

• How much tolerance do I have for the frustration of mana problems? If I make a deck specifically to avoid those problems, and I still have them, will that be even worse?
• Is my deck with really solid mana going to win enough games when neither I nor my opponent has mana problems?
• Is my deck with really shaky mana going to win me enough games based on its power level to effectively compensate me for mana-based losses?

Too many players lose games due to mana problems and then just write it off in frustration as, “I got really unlucky; that was so unfair!” I have a couple thoughts for those players:

• Have you taken enough care ensuring that your deck has the correct mana? If you’re finding yourself unlucky frequently, perhaps you need to make some changes.
• If you have a couple games in which your mana seemed fine, it doesn’t mean that it is.
• Did you become frustrated with your bad mana draw and mentally check out, or did you do everything possible to stay focused and overcome your mana problems in an effort to win in spite of them?
• Do you have the right hobby? Mana problems are part of the deal if you’re going be a Magic player—learn to stay focused, and just win the next game.
• If you draw seven lands, don’t say, “See I told you fifteen lands were enough!” Similarly, the fact that you have a draw without any lands doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t playing with enough. Remember: As long as you’re playing with at least seven spells, it can happen.

I have a pretty low tolerance for mana problems. Nothing about Magic bothers me more. I can barely tolerate losing to someone whom I believe to be less skilled than myself. After eighteen years of Magic, though, I’ve learned to stay focused and to remain polite to my opponent after a painful loss. While mana problems determine the outcomes of many games, they rarely shape an entire tournament. If every match was determined by mana issues, you wouldn’t have players like Kai Budde, Jon Finkel, Conley Woods, and so on consistently dominating for long periods of time.

The time I spent ruminating about mana issues this week led me to try to make a Standard deck that goes to the greatest lengths possible to reduce mana problems and to win games in addition. This meant trying to avoid color screw, mana screw, and mana flood while also being able to use my mana effectively every turn. This is what I decided to run:

"Humans"

• Creatures (19)
• 4 Accorder Paladin
• 4 Champion of the Parish
• 4 Doomed Traveler
• 4 Elite Vanguard
• 3 Mikaeus, the Lunarch

• Spells (16)
• 4 Midnight Haunting
• 4 White Sun's Zenith
• 4 Honor of the Pure
• 4 Shrine of Loyal Legions

• Lands (25)
• 25 Plains

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Day of Judgment
• 4 Grand Abolisher
• 4 Timely Reinforcements
• 4 Oblivion Ring

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Obviously, color wouldn’t be an issue given that the deck is mono-colored and I’m playing with all Plains for my mana. I wasn’t worried about having too few lands since my girlfriend Rada has been running a fairly similar deck with only twenty lands, and she has been doing well with it. When she does have problems, it’s often because of having to mulligan zero-land hands or being mana-stalled early. By going up to twenty-five lands, I hoped to avoid those problems for the most part. Of course, by playing primarily 1- and 2-mana cards, I hoped to be able to be really effective in the early game and perhaps even prosper when somewhat mana-stalled. Now, I had to worry about mana-flood of course.

My hope was to take advantage of excess lands by sucking up mana with cards like Shrine, Zenith, and the Lunarch. The Shrine is a card I can play in the early game when my mana is tight, then activate later when I don’t have anything to do with my mana. Flexible casting-cost cards like Zenith and Lunarch are great for helping a deck avoid mana problems—they can be used to some effect when your mana is somewhat tight (especially Lunarch, which makes a fine 2-drop), but they’re also powerful ways to use a flood of land. If I make four Cats with a Zenith, it might give me the card advantage to overcome the disadvantage of drawing so many lands. The Zenith is especially good when I’m flooded—it goes back into my deck and increases the chance I will draw something useful next turn. To maximize my ability to avoid bad draws, I’m not playing any cards that are reactive (in my maindeck); every card can be drawn and immediately played. Even my creature-pump is a global enchantment that doesn’t need to be saved for just the right time. Seems good in theory, but what about in action?

After acquiring the needed rares and assembling my deck, I signed up for a two-player queue online. My first match made my experiment look great. My opponent was playing a mono-green deck with Birds, Elves, Dungrove Elder, Thrun, Simulacrum, and Garruk. I’m sure he had some other cards, but that’s all I saw in two short games.

Game 1:

Turn one: Elite Vanguard

Turn two: Accorder Paladin

Turn three: Lunarch as a 2/2

Turn four: Champion of the Parish and another Paladin

Turn five: I had a Shrine and a Zenith in hand with four lands in play, but they were unneeded—I won that turn.

Game 2:

Turn one: Vanguard

Turn two: Paladin

Turn three: Midnight Haunting

Turn four: Honor of the Pure and another Paladin

Turn five: Another Haunting

Turn six: I had a Zenith in hand with six lands in play, but I won that turn. If he had managed to stabilize, I was looking forward to making a trio of 3/3s during the end of his turn and seeing if that would finish the job.

It was tempting to call my experiment a smashing success and end my research at that point. Just as variance can lead us to undesirable results, I know that it can do the same for good results. So, I kept my deck unchanged and entered again. This is when I started to encounter the W/U Delver phenomenon. After its success at Grand Prix: Orlando, Magic Online is suddenly flooded with it. I proceeded to play five matches in a row against different opponents, all of whom were playing various versions of W/U Delver. This, of course, was a much more challenging matchup than mono-green.

Things started out okay as I won my first game without ever making it to 3 mana—I drew a lot of 1-drops, and I was going first. Of course, after being so mana-stalled, I drew a seven-land hand and had to mulligan into a hand that was unable to handle the Delver deck going first. I lost Game 3 and the match as I drew multiple Shrines and multiple Zeniths while stalled at three lands. I blame that game loss more on poor sideboarding than mana problems, however. For the most part, Shrines and Zeniths are my worst cards in the matchup because they’re my slowest cards. I should have sideboarded them out in favor of Abolishers, Rings, or Reinforcements. The Day of Judgments aren’t the answer because of Moorland Haunt and Mana Leak.

I sideboarded better the next match, and I won 2–1. After losing an incredibly close third match to Delver 2–1, I realized that it was time for me to make major changes to my deck and sideboard. While some people might be happy going 2–2 with both of the losses being really close affairs, I don’t think that’s the right mentality for maximum success. Besides, I could tell my deck could be made much better for the metagame, so why settle for those results?

When more than half the field is the same deck, you need to focus your deck on beating that one while relying more on your sideboard to beat other decks. While taking out my mana-sink cards like Zenith, Shrine, and the Lunarch would leave me without much late-game, I found I had been sideboarding those cards out frequently, and I had won all three of the games in which I kept one-land hands (it helped knowing I was running twenty-five) and lost the games in which I flooded. So, I wanted to reduce my quantity of lands anyway. Here was my new version:

"Death to Delver! (Humans)"

• Creatures (25)
• 4 Accorder Paladin
• 4 Champion of the Parish
• 4 Elite Inquisitor
• 4 Elite Vanguard
• 4 Gideon's Lawkeeper
• 4 Grand Abolisher
• 1 Mikaeus, the Lunarch

• Spells (12)
• 4 Midnight Haunting
• 4 Honor of the Pure
• 4 Oblivion Ring

• Lands (23)
• 23 Plains

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Day of Judgment
• 4 Mortarpod
• 4 Timely Reinforcements
• 3 Revoke Existence

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The Lawkeepers were great against Illusions and Delvers. The Elite Inquisitors were good at dominating boards full of 2/2s . . . and even 3/3s if I had an Honor in play. The Abolishers meant I didn’t have to worry about Mana Leaks, Dissipates, and/or surprise Snapcasters and Vapor Snags. The Rings were good against Equipment, Lord of the Unreal, Delver, and so on. They were also nice because they didn’t feed Moorland Haunt. When I did play against Delver, I brought in Mortarpods and Reinforcements for Paladins and Vanguards. Thanks to Gut Shot and 1/1 Spirits, 1-toughness creatures aren’t great in the matchup. The Delver deck depends on tempo with a little late-game from the Haunts. By bringing in Mortarpods and Reinforcements, I can help remove tempo from those opponents and bend the game to my will. My creatures end up being big enough (especially if I drew Honor) that opposing creatures couldn’t compete. They end up doing a lot of chump-blocking with nontoken creatures while trying to race me with Spirits . . . which rarely works out well. After playing a couple more W/U Delver decks with good results, I beat an aggressive R/G deck with Wolf Runs and main-deck Sword of War and Peace (which I actually managed to outrace) 2–1 as well.

In many of the matches, I lost at least one game to drawing too many or too few lands, but I understand that no matter how I configure my decks, mana problems are going to happen. That doesn’t mean I should stop building decks with the best possible mana and mana curves, but you’re never completely safe. In the end, I decided proper metagaming trumped my desire for flood insurance. If you’re a tournament-oriented player like I am, though, you understand that it’s the results that matter, not the frustration along the way.