I bet I'm not the first person to think of this, but I recently came up with a house rule which has been working really well to prevent mana screw (stuck on too few lands / drawing nothing but lands). I've played with this rules in a couple of cube drafts as well, and it worked great. Here's the deal:
Special draw:
If a player would draw a card, that player may instead chose to special draw. To special draw, the player chooses "land" or "nonland" and reveals cards from the top of his or her library until he or she reveals a card of the chosen type. That player puts that into their hand, then removes the rest of the cards from the game.
In other words, it's abundance for both players all the time, but the cards are exiled instead of going on the bottom of the deck
This rule has been very popular at my house for three reasons:
1. Most obviously, it practically eliminates manna screw. Your deck needs 4 lands to work? No worries- you'll get to 4 lands on turn 4, every game. Your hand empty while you're sitting on 7 lands? Also okay- you may be in topdeck mode, but you'll always draw something to play.
2. It creates an interesting trade-off between choosing to control your draw and giving away information to your opponent. When I first introduced this rule, I thought people would be using special draws every turn, despite having to exile-mill themselves. As it turns out, it's been a fairly even split between regular and special draws, because people don't want the other guy to know what's in their hand.
3. It makes mill cards more relevant, especially in drafts. In a normal game of magic, a player will almost never lose because they ran out of cards. 60 card decks, reduced by 1 card per turn, are the reason that most mill cards don't see much use outside of draft. But just like a smaller deck size makes mill more relevant in drafts, this rule has a similar effect by encouraging players to mill themselves to get better draws.
I'm a big fan of the special draw. In fact, I'd just like to spitball a crazy idea here: what would happen if WoTC changed to rules of the actual game to include this? I'm sure there would be some crazy constructed decks that could abuse it, but I think it would be a breath of fresh air for drafts, where you can't always put 4 brainstorm in your blue deck to make sure you hit your second land.
Special draw:
If a player would draw a card, that player may instead chose to special draw. To special draw, the player chooses "land" or "nonland" and reveals cards from the top of his or her library until he or she reveals a card of the chosen type. That player puts that into their hand, then removes the rest of the cards from the game.
Both the "land" or "nonland" modes of your special draw rule seem like they could be powerful in constructed, and I would imagine there would be a lesser reason for players to conduct their "normal draw" or to mulligan.
I certainly think it would be interesting and sweet to build casual decks utilizing the special draw rule. Some simple ideas off the top:
In fact, I'd just like to spitball a crazy idea here: what would happen if WoTC changed to rules of the actual game to include this? I'm sure there would be some crazy constructed decks that could abuse it, but I think it would be a breath of fresh air for drafts, where you can't always put 4 brainstorm in your blue deck to make sure you hit your second land.
Since some decks in existing constructed formats can potentially abuse your special draw rule better than others, it would be difficult for WoTC to adopt it without considerable revisions to their banned & restricted list.
Above beat me to it. I was going to post a 0-land Lab Man list, but I guess the idea is already out there: getting to exile your whole library for free seems too broken. Especially when there are cards that care about what is in exile (e.g. Misthollow Griffin in Food Chain combo, Riftsweeper, Warden of the Beyond). Similarly, getting to say always hit a land the first 2-3 turns and then always hit a spell seems way too broken for burn and tempo decks.
If you want to avoid manascrew, why not just:
-build good mana curves
-use sleeves and pile shuffle (most IRL manaclumping is due to insufficient randomization of deck, otherwise probability of really bad manascrew is low... i.e. it will happen once in a while but not often)
-play variance-reducing cards like Ponder and Preordain and scrylands
-use sleeves and pile shuffle (most IRL manaclumping is due to insufficient randomization of deck, otherwise probability of really bad manascrew is low... i.e. it will happen once in a while but not often)
-play variance-reducing cards like Ponder and Preordain and scrylands
I've been playing magic for about 10 years, so believe me, I know how to do all three of those things. They do the reduce the odds of manascrew, but it still happens. Indeed, in my experience it is perfectly normal for a shuffled deck to have large clumps of lands and nonlands. Moreover, in drafts, the first option (build a manacurve) is more difficult, and the third option (ponder effects) is sometimes impossible. And why should I need to be playing blue in order for my deck run smoothly anyway?
While I've loved MtG ever since I started playing, I've always seen manascrew as genuine problem with the game. Even in the most well-manacurved, shuffled, stuffed-full-of-ponder-effects decks, you can still just randomly lose because you draw all or none of your lands. It's not enough to say it doesn't happen that often. What would people think of Windows 7 if it was known to randomly crash on startup, even if it didn't happen that often?
It would totally change the game, and possibly not for the better. The game has been developed accounting for mana screw for years now.
It would certainly be a major change, but the game has survived other major changes and turned out better for it. I can think of at least two fairly big ones:
-Change from old rules to 6th edition rules (included removal of "interrupt" type).
-Recent change of rules involving combat (requires blockers to be declared in order; combat damage no longer uses the stack).
In both of these cases, a lot of cards and strategies were either weakened or obsoleted by the rules changes, but they were good changes anyway. My opinion is that the introduction of the special draw would be similar.
Indeed, in my experience it is perfectly normal for a shuffled deck to have large clumps of lands and nonlands.
Define "perfectly normal". Clumps happen sometimes, but the probability of large clumps occuring due to random chance is low.
For example, if you keep a 7-card opener with 2 lands in a 60-card deck with 24 lands, the probability of not seeing a 3rd land in the next 5 draws is 5.9% (only once in every 17 games). Given you kept a 2-lander or better, 94% of the time you will have at least 3 mana by your 5th draw. 70% of the time you should hit at least 4 lands by your 5th draw.
Lategame, once you have 6/24 lands in play and have already played about 8 nonlands, the probability of drawing nothing but lands for the next 5 turns (i.e. manaflooding into oblivion) is 0.6% (about once in every 167 games). This has definitely happened to be me before, and it is frustrating, but this sort of thing should be quite rare.
If players are seeing those sorts of clumps much more often than that, they may not be adequately randomizing their decks.
It's not enough to say it doesn't happen that often. What would people think of Windows 7 if it was known to randomly crash on startup, even if it didn't happen that often?
These are fundamentally different things. On the one hand, we have a system that has to be designed to consistently support other applications/functionality in a wide range of situations, because systems depend on it to perform consistently the exact same way each time. On the other, we have a game of chance, like Poker or Yahtzee.
You're talking about the difference between stochastic and deterministic processes. The deterministic process should be designed to perform the same way all the time, because that's its function. A stochastic process has a random component, and fundamentally will not or should not perform the same way each time. There will be variance. If Magic players actually want to play a game without a chance component, they should be playing something with fixed game parameters and zero randomization, e.g. Chess or Checkers.
I think what you really mean is that some players want less of an influence of randomization in the game and have it run more deterministically (whereas your analogy would imply they want something completely deterministic, so maybe not what you meant). That may be true, but that would fundamentally represent a very different game mechanic (e.g. like Hearthstone, where you don't have to draw mana).
Reducing the variance of a core game mechanic fundamentally changes the mechanics of the game in a much bigger way than simply taking combat damage off the stack. It would be a much more major change and have significant ramifications, leading to completely different games, probably different strengths of archetypes, and likely some degenerate interactions with existing cards. It would break the game, simply because 10000+ cards have been designed under the premise of a very different game mechanic.
I suppose you could make house rules to avoid people making degenerate Constructed decks, but I think it would still radically change the game beyond just avoiding manascrew.
Moreover, in drafts, the first option (build a manacurve) is more difficult, and the third option (ponder effects) is sometimes impossible. And why should I need to be playing blue in order for my deck run smoothly anyway?
Ponder is an example. But there are other ways to reduce variance: playing lower variance cards (i.e. cards that are less conditionally good), avoiding win-more cards, playing multiple cards that fill a similar role at similar spots on the mana curve, playing cards that let you search for cards or manipulate top cards, etc. Point is, there are many ways to reduce your deck's variance and make it more resilient to manascrew, even in draft. This is the reason why some players consistently win at Limited. It's not just because they are made of horseshoes.
FTW1987, my problem is not with variance per se. Of course I understand that in a card game utilizing randomly shuffled cards, there will be variance. And often that variance is fun- it makes for different games every time. The problem is not that manascrew causes variance. The problem is that the variance caused by manascrew often makes the game unplayable when it happens. It "crashes" the game, to go back to my windows analogy. You correctly point out that this analogy is not perfectly parallel, but I only used it to illustrate one point: Just like we would consider it a problem if Windows 7 occasionally failed to function, so we should consider it a problem if the rules of magic cause it to occasionally fail to function- i.e, when you have to restart a casual game because either or your opponent got manascrewed.
That brings me to an important point. Those statistics you provided are only for one player. But I'm not only concerned with losing due to manascrew- I don't want to win by it either! Thus your probabilities need to be squared to account for the fact that my opponent can get manascrewed just as easily as I can. (So the statement "70% of the time you should hit at least 4 lands by your 5th draw" becomes "49% of the time both players should hit at least 4 lands by their 5th draw").
Now I acknowledge that the game has been designed with this flaw in mind from the outset, so changing the rules on this point would indeed be a major change. But I think you over-exaggerate when you say "it would break the game". Don't knock it till you try it! I have played many games with this rule around casual tables, and my experience has been that it makes for ordinary games of magic in which both players get to see their decks do what they were designed to do more often. The games seem more vibrant and interactive to me. Also, I am not sure too many degenerate constructed decks would come out of this rule. I'm genuinely curious about this- none of the decks that have been posted in this thread to abuse the special draw rule strike me as more degenerate than, say, a legacy dredge deck. Certainly they wouldn't be unbeatable in standard.
If you make a rule that removes all that variance, you also remove the good variance. I suspect the game would become a lot more straightforward if this variance was eliminated. As in dumbed down. Both players will try to execute their deck's game plan while ignoring the other player as much as possible. Two goldfishes racing to combo off, never forced into a position where they clearly have to start interacting.
I disagree. Unless we're talking about two degenerate combo decks, I see no reason to think that the special draw leads to "ignoring the other player as much as possible." In the context of two ordinary magic decks (here I'm thinking the lines of a block deck or standard deck), both players will have plenty of cards that interact with each other, including creatures that attack and block. Attacking and blocking -arguably the most interactive parts of the game- require just as many decisions with the special draw as without.
Weird things would happen to the mana curve. If I was assured 4 lands every game, I would cut everything that didn't cost either 2 or 4 mana and I'd be casting either two 2-drops or one 4-drop every turn for the rest of the game. I'm not going to "take a turn off" to get a 5th land. 1-drops are just bad 2-drops, and 3-drops are just bad 4-drops. The only reason I'd run 2-drops at all is so that I'd have something to do on turns 2 and 3, and I can still play two of them in one turn later. Maybe, if I was feeling adventurous, I might move to a 3drop/6-drop deck. Actually, I'd probably just run all 1-drops and 2-drops since I'm guaranteed not to have to draw that 3rd land ever. Imagine a meta where everybody plays Burn.
This last objection is just hopelessly oversimplified. There are tons of reasons that you would want 3 and 5 drops in your deck while you played with the special draw. Here are just a few, all of which I have seen in my own experience of playing games with this rule:
-your deck contains nonland ramp cards (llanowar elves, mana rocks, etc) which will cause the amount of mana you can produce to increase even if you choose "nonland" every turn.
-your deck contains lands that come into play tapped (trilands, manlands, etc). If you have 3 lands in play, and the only land in your hand comes into play tapped, you will need to draw another land if you want to try and play your 4 drop on turn 4. But then you've got an extra land- so much for staying on 4 the whole game.
-your deck contains any cards or abilities that cost 1. Playing a 3 drop on turn 4 isn't so bad if means leaving mana open for lightning bolt.
-For some strange reason, you want to play a good card that costs 3 on turn 3. Do you really mean to tell me that the special draw rule means I shouldn't put Woolly Thoctar in my zoo deck?
-Finally, continuously using the special draw gives away information to your opponent and exile mills you. If you decide that you want to stay on 4 lands the whole game, that's fine, but you pay a price for that. If you are up against a control deck that can stall you out (and which has all the advantages of the special draw going for it as well) you may very well run out of cards if you continuously mill yourself for a nonland every turn.
The problem is that the variance caused by manascrew often makes the game unplayable when it happens. It "crashes" the game, to go back to my windows analogy. You correctly point out that this analogy is not perfectly parallel, but I only used it to illustrate one point: Just like we would consider it a problem if Windows 7 occasionally failed to function, so we should consider it a problem if the rules of magic cause it to occasionally fail to function- i.e, when you have to restart a casual game because either or your opponent got manascrewed.
I guess this is where our opinions differ. Yes, there are situations where you are stuck on 1 land for 10 turns and the game becomes completely unfun, and in those cases the manascrew completely crashes the game. But the other situations (e.g. the more common cases like not having 4 lands by turn 5), while potentially frustrating and slightly disadvantaging, should not crash the game. There's extremely terrible manascrew, and there's simply missing some of your land drops due to luck. IMO, simply missing a few land drops should not crash the game. Most decks should be able to play around that. They certainly do in competitive constructed. As Xyx mentioned, that sort of variability adds some excitement to the game. IMO only the extremely terrible manascrews actually crash the game in practice, and those cases are also much less likely to happen (to either player).
However, there are some casual players who design decks loaded full of 5-drops and 6-drops who get frustrated when they stall on their 3rd or 4th land drop and can't play their fatties. I've seen it happen plenty of times, and I'm sure most of you have. They complain about luck, get frustrated, and don't enjoy playing their high curve deck. For them, maybe even that simple mana variance crashes the game. But there's no reason it has to crash the game. They don't have to design decks that depend on curving out each of its land drops. They could build a lower curve, or they could use mana ramp to help hit 5+ mana more consistently. The game already has tools to address those types of problems.
But I think you over-exaggerate when you say "it would break the game". Don't knock it till you try it!
As I said before, I don't doubt that it can work in a casual meta with house rules (or a common understanding) to prevent degenerate abuse of it. However, without special rules and/or bannings, it's quite easy to make very degenerate or OP decks.
A simple 10-land burn deck may seem harmless on the surface, but it basically means that ANY deck that can't either win before turn 4 or put up a lot of disruption is obsolete. Slower aggro decks and midrange decks become obsolete, since they would lose 99% of the time to Burn unless they can somehow gain enough life to survive a few more turns. Burn's biggest drawback is lack of consistency, and that keeps it in check. In spite of that, it has still won major tournaments. Without the risk of manaflooding/manascrew and always being able to draw a burn spell at will, never running out of gas, the deck's very existence basically means "Magic ends after 4 turns". That in itself warps the surrounding format.
Also, Brainstorm... When you can replace each with a "special draw", it becomes truly bonkers. And consider how often T1 Delver blind flips when you barely have any lands in your deck. And how well 1-drop tempo decks work when you can just choose to draw spells for the rest of the game. Such decks really don't need Brainstorm and Delver getting any better.
If you want, I can post some OP lists and degenerate combo lists that could go rampant with "special draw". They would be significantly more powerful than their current incarnations, and not just because of avoiding manascrew.
In short, the problem with this rule is that it doesn't JUST avoid extreme manascrew. It also reduces variance of manadrawing a little too much, to the point where it allows other cards and decks to run like clockwork a little too consistently. Letting non-interactive combo decks run even more consistently takes the fun and excitement out of Magic.
Xyx, perhaps instead of "ordinary deck" I should have said "made of ordinary cards". If you're telling me that some vintage or legacy decks could abuse this rule, you might very well be right. But can it be "abused to the max" in say, M15 block? Or in the current standard? It certainly can't be in the sense of building a degenerate combo around it. I also take note of the fact that neither you nor any other poster has raised an objection to using the rule in limited. Now you still seem to think the rule can be abused with ordinary cards by using a specialized manacurve, but I don't think you've adequately answered any of my reasons to play off-curve cards. For the sake of brevity I'll only address 3:
-In regard to ramp cards, you replied "why would I want to play any of that?". For the same reason anyone wants to play ramp cards: to play bigger spells and creatures faster. If you're trying to say that the special draw rule somehow makes playing Izzet signet on turn 2 into Jace the Mindsculptor on turn 3 a bad play, well then I just have to disagree with you. The risk of getting a signet when I say "nonland" is a price I would be perfectly willing to pay in order to get my planeswalker out faster.
-in regards to my point about lands that come into play tapped, you replied that you'd be okay with simply not being able to play your 4 drop on turn 4. This seems to be an admission of my point: here is a situation where having a 3 drop in your deck would be appropriate. You imply that a 3 drop would only be useful on turn 3, but this is obviously false. What's wrong with playing a 2 drop and a 3 drop on turn 5? If you reply that it's bad because I had to draw an extra land that could have been spell, I would reply by saying that some lands (i.e, manlands such as raging ravine, which coincidentally requires 5 mana total) perform just as useful functions for a deck as spells do.
-regarding 1-drops, you seem to admit that there are lots of situations where you would put them in a deck, including a deck with 3-drops, so I think my point here stands. You say that "all things being equal, the deck that consistently taps out will beat the deck that does not." I agree with you, but that "all things being equal" clause is extremely broad. If my deck is W/U control deck, and yours is a R/G agro deck, all things are not equal. You may not care about getting more than 4 mana, and so you design your curve accordingly. I see no problem with that. But I see no reason to think that in my control deck, playing a 5-cost sweeper like hallowed burial becomes a bad idea just because I need more lands to play it.
Charlbelcher wouldn't be that bad. You don't "special draw" past lands on the reveal. You couldn't even "special draw" to exile your library, as you need cards left for Belcher to deal damage. So you naturally need to have many spells but 0 lands left in your deck. I guess you could play 1-land Belcher and always have that land in hand, but Legacy Belcher already does that anyway without this rule. Meh.
Regardless of your opener, thanks to "special draw", 100% of the time by 3 draws you will have 3 Island in play and those 3 spells in hand. That means you are guaranteed a turn 3 win (or turn 4 on the play in 1v1) 100% of the time unless the opponent can beat your one counterspell (e.g. has 2 counters, or 2 removal spells, or wins faster). The fact that this sort of deck exists and is SO easy and cheap to build makes the game degenerate. Anyone can play this. The cards are easy to acquire and there is no skill to pilot it. This is an example of how the special draw rule reduces variance by TOO MUCH, enabling this sort of degeneracy.
For the opponent, playing Magic then becomes like playing an Arcade game that times out after 3 turns unless you find a rare powerup. He has to retool his deck so that it can consistently stop the Lab Maniac just in case someone in the playgroup or at an FNM happens to play that deck. That, in turn, limits deck design space and severely cuts down the fun factor of the game. Aggro is dead. Much midrange is dead. Slower combo is dead. Everyone would play some sort of aggro-control with multiple pieces of cheap disruption.
Also note that this is just an example I pulled out of my head. If this rule were put into place, the format would develop and dedicated combo players would fine-tune even more degenerate lists, even for Modern, and maybe even in some Standard formats. Casual would certainly be wrecked unless there was some sort of "gentleman's agreement" to not play any of the many possible degenerate decks.
Basically, once you only have one nonland card left in your deck and 3 Islands in play, you drop Helm and spin Tops infinitely to generate infinite Storm and then Brain Freeze @ 10000000000 for U (if Helm is last card left, spin one top first to draw it, then play it and go infinite). Also goes off on turn 3-4 every time. Doesn't have protection, though it's not vulnerable to creature removal. Basically, just banning Lab Man doesn't fix anything.
Hopefully it's now clear why Island is much more broken than Forest.
In short, the problem with this rule is that it doesn't JUST avoid extreme manascrew. It also reduces variance of manadrawing a little too much, to the point where it allows other cards and decks to run like clockwork a little too consistently. Letting non-interactive combo decks run even more consistently takes the fun and excitement out of Magic.
I think this is a legit concern, but it might not be as bad as you think. Burn is a topic that's come up a number of times in this thread, the concern being that it would become unbeatable without disruption or hate. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I can think of several types of decks are unbeatable without disruption or hate. I'm thinking of dredge and affinity specifically. Do you think this rule would make burn even more unbeatable than those?
At the end of the day though, even if this rule wouldn't work for constructed, I think it would be great for limited. In that environment, there aren't going to be any degenerate combos to worry about, and the price of exile milling yourself really carries a sting in a 40-card deck.
In short, the problem with this rule is that it doesn't JUST avoid extreme manascrew. It also reduces variance of manadrawing a little too much, to the point where it allows other cards and decks to run like clockwork a little too consistently. Letting non-interactive combo decks run even more consistently takes the fun and excitement out of Magic.
I think this is a legit concern, but it might not be as bad as you think. Burn is a topic that's come up a number of times in this thread, the concern being that it would become unbeatable without disruption or hate. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I can think of several types of decks are unbeatable without disruption or hate. I'm thinking of dredge and affinity specifically. Do you think this rule would make burn even more unbeatable than those?
It's not that Burn would be unbeatable. Combo decks could easily beat Burn. And Dredge and Affinity are very beatable. They're not even the best decks in Legacy or most degenerate combos (Affinity is tier 2 or worse). The issue is that Burn would reach such a high consistency level that it would make other aggro and midrange strategies obsolete, reducing format diversity (even in a casual meta). If your goal is to win with damage and you're not running and counters, discard, combo pieces or lock pieces, pretty much any other aggressive strategy becomes a worse version of Burn, so then why play anything else? Before, the reason to play other aggro was that at least then you have creatures on the board so you have consistent damage output even if you topdeck lands. But if Burn can get gas forever, it can guarantee consistent damage output and generally just gets there first. So you'd either play Burn, or something disruptive, or combo. It's also so easy to build that it's more likely to turn up in just casual metas. Also, Dredge is significantly less scary after sideboarding, whereas Burn somewhat harder to truly hate out.
Anyway, it's not that I think Burn would be unbeatable. I think its new consistency would just warp formats, even casual ones. Mental Misstep was not unbeatable but still warped Legacy. Formats can be warped not just by strategies that are unbeatable but by strategies that either force you to play it or play around it. Loss of diversity is a big blow.
Actually, the deck that I'd be much more afraid of being unbeatable is UR Delver. 9-land UR Delver with extra burn spells throw in would be scary, scary good. It would crush pretty much everything.
Regardless of your opener, thanks to "special draw", 100% of the time by 3 draws you will have 3 Island in play and those 3 spells in hand. That means you are guaranteed a turn 3 win (or turn 4 on the play in 1v1) 100% of the time unless the opponent can beat your one counterspell (e.g. has 2 counters, or 2 removal spells, or wins faster). The fact that this sort of deck exists and is SO easy and cheap to build makes the game degenerate. Anyone can play this. The cards are easy to acquire and there is no skill to pilot it. This is an example of how the special draw rule reduces variance by TOO MUCH, enabling this sort of degeneracy.
lol, I guess you can't get much more degenerate than that! Thanks for sharing those interesting ways to abuse the special draw rule as stated above. That gives me some good ideas for possible modifications to it. One idea would be something like, in order to utilize a special draw in a constructed deck, your deck must contain at least 20 and no more than 40 lands. This strikes me as just as reasonable as the 4-of rule. For another thing, maybe cost of using a special draw should be slightly higher. For example, to special draw, first you have to exile mill the top 3 cards of your deck, or something like that.
Missing land drops is part of the balance of the game. If you remove that possibility then low mana cost stuff becomes much worse and high mana cos stuff becomes much better.
A 5 mana cost creature is balanced around the fact that you will likely miss a land drop along the way. You either need mana accel, card advantage, or luck to play it on turn 5.
A 2 mana cost creature is balanced around the fact that you won't have difficulty casting it. Its safer to run more of these.
Your rule fundamentally alters how magic would be played.
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I was the guy playing the relentless rats deck back during mirrodin and kamigawa blocks. Yes, cranial extraction was used on me. No, I didn't win much. Yes, I do have a relentless rats edh deck. No, it doesn't win much either...
For another thing, maybe cost of using a special draw should be slightly higher. For example, to special draw, first you have to exile mill the top 3 cards of your deck, or something like that.
An existing card with a similar effect & cost is Demonic Consultation. Note that this card is restricted in Vintage and banned in Legacy so this might let you roughly gauge the power level of the special draw rule.
For another thing, maybe cost of using a special draw should be slightly higher. For example, to special draw, first you have to exile mill the top 3 cards of your deck, or something like that.
An existing card with a similar effect & cost is Demonic Consultation. Note that this card is restricted in Vintage and banned in Legacy so this might let you roughly gauge the power level of the special draw rule.
Its a tutor, which is absolutely not the same as this "special" rule.
However in general any of such rules will totally work in a casual world.
Anybody should know it only exists to avoid any mana problems and such make a game potentially more fun and avoid the annoying parts.
If someone wants to "abuse" the rule, they kinda violate the point of the rule.
The biggest bad part of mana screw is to produce "no-games" , so the player is totally unable to play any cards or seriously crippled, just by bad luck.
A single use to get a needed land would most of the time be totally enough.
If someone has a such a bad hand that they need the effect "multiple" times to find a land, they probably had a completly unplayable hand and should just mulligan (in casual without any penalty at all).
The biggest bad part of mana screw is to produce "no-games" , so the player is totally unable to play any cards or seriously crippled, just by bad luck.
Manascrew, most of the time, is just players playing their cards off curve or stalling 1-3 turns. While frustrating, that doesn't completely shut someone out of a game. The cases where a player is SO flooded/manascrewed that they can't play or do anything at all:
a) should already be fixed by Mulligans (or house rules for free mulligans), since you should only be keeping hands where you can actually play something (i.e. 2 lands and at least one relevant early drop)
b) can be fixed by better manacurve design (mulligans won't fix Craw Wurm.dec, but with adequate 1-,2- and 3-drops and manasinks a deck should be able to do stuff often even with few lands or too many)
c) have very low probability and should only happen once in a blue moon, not affecting the majority of games if people shuffle well (again, with a decent curve and land distribution, the chances of getting stuck drawing all lands or only cards you can't cast should be small)
You're talking abstractly about a "no-game" scenario where someone is completely shut out the game due to mana problems. It's difficult to be on the same page when discussing vague comparitive measures (e.g. "how many people is 'many' people?"), so it would be helpful to hear a concrete example.
Can you give a concrete scenario that is severe enough to completely screw someone out of a game but also happens often enough that a new rule is needed?
Can you give a concrete scenario that is severe enough to completely screw someone out of a game but also happens often enough that a new rule is needed?
Constructed in general has low-manacost cards that matter and most decks in legacy will operate with ~2 mana just fine, and they are allready "flooded" if they ever draw 4+ lands.
Also current standard offers the scry lands, which help tremendously for slower decks to find lands or avoid drawing "more" lands. These cards do a good job at that.
However, theres plenty of hands that have 2 lands and drops, but you will still not draw a 3rd land for a ton of turns, which results in a boring game, its not fun.
The best examples might be this kind of 2 land hand. They are often good enough to keep, especially if you have plays to make. But you still absolutely need that 3rd land, and while you will more often than not draw that 3rd land in time, it would help a lot to have some "guarantee" to get that land, which avoids this seriously crippled hands.
What deck that doesn't run some kind of mana acceleration is "seriously crippled" by hitting its 2 drops but stalling on a 3 drop?
What do you mean?
This rule strongly penalizes ramp decks or decks that play effect lands. Any aggro or even control deck achieves near perfect consistency under this. Decks with ramp still have to contend with variability in their nonland cards.
What deck that doesn't run some kind of mana acceleration is "seriously crippled" by hitting its 2 drops but stalling on a 3 drop?
What do you mean?
This rule strongly penalizes ramp decks or decks that play effect lands. Any aggro or even control deck achieves near perfect consistency under this. Decks with ramp still have to contend with variability in their nonland cards.
I'm talking about outside the rule. For now, assume the rule doesn't exist and was never mentioned. I was asking the OP to start from the basics and "identify the problem", i.e. point out situations that are problematic with the current game that he is trying to fix (more specific than generic "mana problems"). He said that one common problem is that a casual deck can mulligan to a reasonable 2-land hand but then never hit its 3rd mana. He claims that missing the 3rd land drop "seriously cripples" said deck, so he wants a rule that would guarantee said deck can hit the 3rd mana in a reasonable time so it doesn't become a "no game". I was just asking which deck is "seriously crippled" if it doesn't hit 3 lands early and doesn't also run cards (e.g. ramp) to help it do so. In other words, I don't think there is as big a problem with Magic as he is making it sound.
Of course his "fix" for the slow decks actually favors the aggro and combo decks even more than the midrange decks, but that's beside the point.
What deck that doesn't run some kind of mana acceleration is "seriously crippled" by hitting its 2 drops but stalling on a 3 drop?
What do you mean?
This rule strongly penalizes ramp decks or decks that play effect lands. Any aggro or even control deck achieves near perfect consistency under this. Decks with ramp still have to contend with variability in their nonland cards.
I'm talking about outside the rule. For now, assume the rule doesn't exist and was never mentioned. I was asking the OP to start from the basics and "identify the problem", i.e. point out situations that are problematic with the current game that he is trying to fix (more specific than generic "mana problems"). He said that one common problem is that a casual deck can mulligan to a reasonable 2-land hand but then never hit its 3rd mana. He claims that missing the 3rd land drop "seriously cripples" said deck, so he wants a rule that would guarantee said deck can hit the 3rd mana in a reasonable time so it doesn't become a "no game". I was just asking which deck is "seriously crippled" if it doesn't hit 3 lands early and doesn't also run cards (e.g. ramp) to help it do so. In other words, I don't think there is as big a problem with Magic as he is making it sound.
Of course his "fix" for the slow decks actually favors the aggro and combo decks even more than the midrange decks, but that's beside the point.
Thanks for the explaination.
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Special draw:
If a player would draw a card, that player may instead chose to special draw. To special draw, the player chooses "land" or "nonland" and reveals cards from the top of his or her library until he or she reveals a card of the chosen type. That player puts that into their hand, then removes the rest of the cards from the game.
In other words, it's abundance for both players all the time, but the cards are exiled instead of going on the bottom of the deck
This rule has been very popular at my house for three reasons:
1. Most obviously, it practically eliminates manna screw. Your deck needs 4 lands to work? No worries- you'll get to 4 lands on turn 4, every game. Your hand empty while you're sitting on 7 lands? Also okay- you may be in topdeck mode, but you'll always draw something to play.
2. It creates an interesting trade-off between choosing to control your draw and giving away information to your opponent. When I first introduced this rule, I thought people would be using special draws every turn, despite having to exile-mill themselves. As it turns out, it's been a fairly even split between regular and special draws, because people don't want the other guy to know what's in their hand.
3. It makes mill cards more relevant, especially in drafts. In a normal game of magic, a player will almost never lose because they ran out of cards. 60 card decks, reduced by 1 card per turn, are the reason that most mill cards don't see much use outside of draft. But just like a smaller deck size makes mill more relevant in drafts, this rule has a similar effect by encouraging players to mill themselves to get better draws.
I'm a big fan of the special draw. In fact, I'd just like to spitball a crazy idea here: what would happen if WoTC changed to rules of the actual game to include this? I'm sure there would be some crazy constructed decks that could abuse it, but I think it would be a breath of fresh air for drafts, where you can't always put 4 brainstorm in your blue deck to make sure you hit your second land.
I certainly think it would be interesting and sweet to build casual decks utilizing the special draw rule. Some simple ideas off the top:
If you want to avoid manascrew, why not just:
-build good mana curves
-use sleeves and pile shuffle (most IRL manaclumping is due to insufficient randomization of deck, otherwise probability of really bad manascrew is low... i.e. it will happen once in a while but not often)
-play variance-reducing cards like Ponder and Preordain and scrylands
I've been playing magic for about 10 years, so believe me, I know how to do all three of those things. They do the reduce the odds of manascrew, but it still happens. Indeed, in my experience it is perfectly normal for a shuffled deck to have large clumps of lands and nonlands. Moreover, in drafts, the first option (build a manacurve) is more difficult, and the third option (ponder effects) is sometimes impossible. And why should I need to be playing blue in order for my deck run smoothly anyway?
While I've loved MtG ever since I started playing, I've always seen manascrew as genuine problem with the game. Even in the most well-manacurved, shuffled, stuffed-full-of-ponder-effects decks, you can still just randomly lose because you draw all or none of your lands. It's not enough to say it doesn't happen that often. What would people think of Windows 7 if it was known to randomly crash on startup, even if it didn't happen that often?
It would certainly be a major change, but the game has survived other major changes and turned out better for it. I can think of at least two fairly big ones:
-Change from old rules to 6th edition rules (included removal of "interrupt" type).
-Recent change of rules involving combat (requires blockers to be declared in order; combat damage no longer uses the stack).
In both of these cases, a lot of cards and strategies were either weakened or obsoleted by the rules changes, but they were good changes anyway. My opinion is that the introduction of the special draw would be similar.
Define "perfectly normal". Clumps happen sometimes, but the probability of large clumps occuring due to random chance is low.
For example, if you keep a 7-card opener with 2 lands in a 60-card deck with 24 lands, the probability of not seeing a 3rd land in the next 5 draws is 5.9% (only once in every 17 games). Given you kept a 2-lander or better, 94% of the time you will have at least 3 mana by your 5th draw. 70% of the time you should hit at least 4 lands by your 5th draw.
Lategame, once you have 6/24 lands in play and have already played about 8 nonlands, the probability of drawing nothing but lands for the next 5 turns (i.e. manaflooding into oblivion) is 0.6% (about once in every 167 games). This has definitely happened to be me before, and it is frustrating, but this sort of thing should be quite rare.
If players are seeing those sorts of clumps much more often than that, they may not be adequately randomizing their decks.
These are fundamentally different things. On the one hand, we have a system that has to be designed to consistently support other applications/functionality in a wide range of situations, because systems depend on it to perform consistently the exact same way each time. On the other, we have a game of chance, like Poker or Yahtzee.
You're talking about the difference between stochastic and deterministic processes. The deterministic process should be designed to perform the same way all the time, because that's its function. A stochastic process has a random component, and fundamentally will not or should not perform the same way each time. There will be variance. If Magic players actually want to play a game without a chance component, they should be playing something with fixed game parameters and zero randomization, e.g. Chess or Checkers.
I think what you really mean is that some players want less of an influence of randomization in the game and have it run more deterministically (whereas your analogy would imply they want something completely deterministic, so maybe not what you meant). That may be true, but that would fundamentally represent a very different game mechanic (e.g. like Hearthstone, where you don't have to draw mana).
Reducing the variance of a core game mechanic fundamentally changes the mechanics of the game in a much bigger way than simply taking combat damage off the stack. It would be a much more major change and have significant ramifications, leading to completely different games, probably different strengths of archetypes, and likely some degenerate interactions with existing cards. It would break the game, simply because 10000+ cards have been designed under the premise of a very different game mechanic.
I suppose you could make house rules to avoid people making degenerate Constructed decks, but I think it would still radically change the game beyond just avoiding manascrew.
Ponder is an example. But there are other ways to reduce variance: playing lower variance cards (i.e. cards that are less conditionally good), avoiding win-more cards, playing multiple cards that fill a similar role at similar spots on the mana curve, playing cards that let you search for cards or manipulate top cards, etc. Point is, there are many ways to reduce your deck's variance and make it more resilient to manascrew, even in draft. This is the reason why some players consistently win at Limited. It's not just because they are made of horseshoes.
That brings me to an important point. Those statistics you provided are only for one player. But I'm not only concerned with losing due to manascrew- I don't want to win by it either! Thus your probabilities need to be squared to account for the fact that my opponent can get manascrewed just as easily as I can. (So the statement "70% of the time you should hit at least 4 lands by your 5th draw" becomes "49% of the time both players should hit at least 4 lands by their 5th draw").
Now I acknowledge that the game has been designed with this flaw in mind from the outset, so changing the rules on this point would indeed be a major change. But I think you over-exaggerate when you say "it would break the game". Don't knock it till you try it! I have played many games with this rule around casual tables, and my experience has been that it makes for ordinary games of magic in which both players get to see their decks do what they were designed to do more often. The games seem more vibrant and interactive to me. Also, I am not sure too many degenerate constructed decks would come out of this rule. I'm genuinely curious about this- none of the decks that have been posted in this thread to abuse the special draw rule strike me as more degenerate than, say, a legacy dredge deck. Certainly they wouldn't be unbeatable in standard.
I disagree. Unless we're talking about two degenerate combo decks, I see no reason to think that the special draw leads to "ignoring the other player as much as possible." In the context of two ordinary magic decks (here I'm thinking the lines of a block deck or standard deck), both players will have plenty of cards that interact with each other, including creatures that attack and block. Attacking and blocking -arguably the most interactive parts of the game- require just as many decisions with the special draw as without.
This last objection is just hopelessly oversimplified. There are tons of reasons that you would want 3 and 5 drops in your deck while you played with the special draw. Here are just a few, all of which I have seen in my own experience of playing games with this rule:
-your deck contains nonland ramp cards (llanowar elves, mana rocks, etc) which will cause the amount of mana you can produce to increase even if you choose "nonland" every turn.
-your deck contains lands that come into play tapped (trilands, manlands, etc). If you have 3 lands in play, and the only land in your hand comes into play tapped, you will need to draw another land if you want to try and play your 4 drop on turn 4. But then you've got an extra land- so much for staying on 4 the whole game.
-your deck contains any cards or abilities that cost 1. Playing a 3 drop on turn 4 isn't so bad if means leaving mana open for lightning bolt.
-For some strange reason, you want to play a good card that costs 3 on turn 3. Do you really mean to tell me that the special draw rule means I shouldn't put Woolly Thoctar in my zoo deck?
-Finally, continuously using the special draw gives away information to your opponent and exile mills you. If you decide that you want to stay on 4 lands the whole game, that's fine, but you pay a price for that. If you are up against a control deck that can stall you out (and which has all the advantages of the special draw going for it as well) you may very well run out of cards if you continuously mill yourself for a nonland every turn.
I guess this is where our opinions differ. Yes, there are situations where you are stuck on 1 land for 10 turns and the game becomes completely unfun, and in those cases the manascrew completely crashes the game. But the other situations (e.g. the more common cases like not having 4 lands by turn 5), while potentially frustrating and slightly disadvantaging, should not crash the game. There's extremely terrible manascrew, and there's simply missing some of your land drops due to luck. IMO, simply missing a few land drops should not crash the game. Most decks should be able to play around that. They certainly do in competitive constructed. As Xyx mentioned, that sort of variability adds some excitement to the game. IMO only the extremely terrible manascrews actually crash the game in practice, and those cases are also much less likely to happen (to either player).
However, there are some casual players who design decks loaded full of 5-drops and 6-drops who get frustrated when they stall on their 3rd or 4th land drop and can't play their fatties. I've seen it happen plenty of times, and I'm sure most of you have. They complain about luck, get frustrated, and don't enjoy playing their high curve deck. For them, maybe even that simple mana variance crashes the game. But there's no reason it has to crash the game. They don't have to design decks that depend on curving out each of its land drops. They could build a lower curve, or they could use mana ramp to help hit 5+ mana more consistently. The game already has tools to address those types of problems.
As I said before, I don't doubt that it can work in a casual meta with house rules (or a common understanding) to prevent degenerate abuse of it. However, without special rules and/or bannings, it's quite easy to make very degenerate or OP decks.
A simple 10-land burn deck may seem harmless on the surface, but it basically means that ANY deck that can't either win before turn 4 or put up a lot of disruption is obsolete. Slower aggro decks and midrange decks become obsolete, since they would lose 99% of the time to Burn unless they can somehow gain enough life to survive a few more turns. Burn's biggest drawback is lack of consistency, and that keeps it in check. In spite of that, it has still won major tournaments. Without the risk of manaflooding/manascrew and always being able to draw a burn spell at will, never running out of gas, the deck's very existence basically means "Magic ends after 4 turns". That in itself warps the surrounding format.
Also, Brainstorm... When you can replace each with a "special draw", it becomes truly bonkers. And consider how often T1 Delver blind flips when you barely have any lands in your deck. And how well 1-drop tempo decks work when you can just choose to draw spells for the rest of the game. Such decks really don't need Brainstorm and Delver getting any better.
If you want, I can post some OP lists and degenerate combo lists that could go rampant with "special draw". They would be significantly more powerful than their current incarnations, and not just because of avoiding manascrew.
In short, the problem with this rule is that it doesn't JUST avoid extreme manascrew. It also reduces variance of manadrawing a little too much, to the point where it allows other cards and decks to run like clockwork a little too consistently. Letting non-interactive combo decks run even more consistently takes the fun and excitement out of Magic.
-In regard to ramp cards, you replied "why would I want to play any of that?". For the same reason anyone wants to play ramp cards: to play bigger spells and creatures faster. If you're trying to say that the special draw rule somehow makes playing Izzet signet on turn 2 into Jace the Mindsculptor on turn 3 a bad play, well then I just have to disagree with you. The risk of getting a signet when I say "nonland" is a price I would be perfectly willing to pay in order to get my planeswalker out faster.
-in regards to my point about lands that come into play tapped, you replied that you'd be okay with simply not being able to play your 4 drop on turn 4. This seems to be an admission of my point: here is a situation where having a 3 drop in your deck would be appropriate. You imply that a 3 drop would only be useful on turn 3, but this is obviously false. What's wrong with playing a 2 drop and a 3 drop on turn 5? If you reply that it's bad because I had to draw an extra land that could have been spell, I would reply by saying that some lands (i.e, manlands such as raging ravine, which coincidentally requires 5 mana total) perform just as useful functions for a deck as spells do.
-regarding 1-drops, you seem to admit that there are lots of situations where you would put them in a deck, including a deck with 3-drops, so I think my point here stands. You say that "all things being equal, the deck that consistently taps out will beat the deck that does not." I agree with you, but that "all things being equal" clause is extremely broad. If my deck is W/U control deck, and yours is a R/G agro deck, all things are not equal. You may not care about getting more than 4 mana, and so you design your curve accordingly. I see no problem with that. But I see no reason to think that in my control deck, playing a 5-cost sweeper like hallowed burial becomes a bad idea just because I need more lands to play it.
Charlbelcher wouldn't be that bad. You don't "special draw" past lands on the reveal. You couldn't even "special draw" to exile your library, as you need cards left for Belcher to deal damage. So you naturally need to have many spells but 0 lands left in your deck. I guess you could play 1-land Belcher and always have that land in hand, but Legacy Belcher already does that anyway without this rule. Meh.
Lab Man becomes a little more stupid
1 Thwart
1 Gitaxian Probe
57 Island
Regardless of your opener, thanks to "special draw", 100% of the time by 3 draws you will have 3 Island in play and those 3 spells in hand. That means you are guaranteed a turn 3 win (or turn 4 on the play in 1v1) 100% of the time unless the opponent can beat your one counterspell (e.g. has 2 counters, or 2 removal spells, or wins faster). The fact that this sort of deck exists and is SO easy and cheap to build makes the game degenerate. Anyone can play this. The cards are easy to acquire and there is no skill to pilot it. This is an example of how the special draw rule reduces variance by TOO MUCH, enabling this sort of degeneracy.
For the opponent, playing Magic then becomes like playing an Arcade game that times out after 3 turns unless you find a rare powerup. He has to retool his deck so that it can consistently stop the Lab Maniac just in case someone in the playgroup or at an FNM happens to play that deck. That, in turn, limits deck design space and severely cuts down the fun factor of the game. Aggro is dead. Much midrange is dead. Slower combo is dead. Everyone would play some sort of aggro-control with multiple pieces of cheap disruption.
Also note that this is just an example I pulled out of my head. If this rule were put into place, the format would develop and dedicated combo players would fine-tune even more degenerate lists, even for Modern, and maybe even in some Standard formats. Casual would certainly be wrecked unless there was some sort of "gentleman's agreement" to not play any of the many possible degenerate decks.
2 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Brain Freeze
56 Island
Basically, once you only have one nonland card left in your deck and 3 Islands in play, you drop Helm and spin Tops infinitely to generate infinite Storm and then Brain Freeze @ 10000000000 for U (if Helm is last card left, spin one top first to draw it, then play it and go infinite). Also goes off on turn 3-4 every time. Doesn't have protection, though it's not vulnerable to creature removal. Basically, just banning Lab Man doesn't fix anything.
Hopefully it's now clear why Island is much more broken than Forest.
I think this is a legit concern, but it might not be as bad as you think. Burn is a topic that's come up a number of times in this thread, the concern being that it would become unbeatable without disruption or hate. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I can think of several types of decks are unbeatable without disruption or hate. I'm thinking of dredge and affinity specifically. Do you think this rule would make burn even more unbeatable than those?
At the end of the day though, even if this rule wouldn't work for constructed, I think it would be great for limited. In that environment, there aren't going to be any degenerate combos to worry about, and the price of exile milling yourself really carries a sting in a 40-card deck.
It's not that Burn would be unbeatable. Combo decks could easily beat Burn. And Dredge and Affinity are very beatable. They're not even the best decks in Legacy or most degenerate combos (Affinity is tier 2 or worse). The issue is that Burn would reach such a high consistency level that it would make other aggro and midrange strategies obsolete, reducing format diversity (even in a casual meta). If your goal is to win with damage and you're not running and counters, discard, combo pieces or lock pieces, pretty much any other aggressive strategy becomes a worse version of Burn, so then why play anything else? Before, the reason to play other aggro was that at least then you have creatures on the board so you have consistent damage output even if you topdeck lands. But if Burn can get gas forever, it can guarantee consistent damage output and generally just gets there first. So you'd either play Burn, or something disruptive, or combo. It's also so easy to build that it's more likely to turn up in just casual metas. Also, Dredge is significantly less scary after sideboarding, whereas Burn somewhat harder to truly hate out.
Anyway, it's not that I think Burn would be unbeatable. I think its new consistency would just warp formats, even casual ones. Mental Misstep was not unbeatable but still warped Legacy. Formats can be warped not just by strategies that are unbeatable but by strategies that either force you to play it or play around it. Loss of diversity is a big blow.
Actually, the deck that I'd be much more afraid of being unbeatable is UR Delver. 9-land UR Delver with extra burn spells throw in would be scary, scary good. It would crush pretty much everything.
lol, I guess you can't get much more degenerate than that! Thanks for sharing those interesting ways to abuse the special draw rule as stated above. That gives me some good ideas for possible modifications to it. One idea would be something like, in order to utilize a special draw in a constructed deck, your deck must contain at least 20 and no more than 40 lands. This strikes me as just as reasonable as the 4-of rule. For another thing, maybe cost of using a special draw should be slightly higher. For example, to special draw, first you have to exile mill the top 3 cards of your deck, or something like that.
A 5 mana cost creature is balanced around the fact that you will likely miss a land drop along the way. You either need mana accel, card advantage, or luck to play it on turn 5.
A 2 mana cost creature is balanced around the fact that you won't have difficulty casting it. Its safer to run more of these.
Your rule fundamentally alters how magic would be played.
Its a tutor, which is absolutely not the same as this "special" rule.
However in general any of such rules will totally work in a casual world.
Anybody should know it only exists to avoid any mana problems and such make a game potentially more fun and avoid the annoying parts.
If someone wants to "abuse" the rule, they kinda violate the point of the rule.
The biggest bad part of mana screw is to produce "no-games" , so the player is totally unable to play any cards or seriously crippled, just by bad luck.
A single use to get a needed land would most of the time be totally enough.
If someone has a such a bad hand that they need the effect "multiple" times to find a land, they probably had a completly unplayable hand and should just mulligan (in casual without any penalty at all).
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Manascrew, most of the time, is just players playing their cards off curve or stalling 1-3 turns. While frustrating, that doesn't completely shut someone out of a game. The cases where a player is SO flooded/manascrewed that they can't play or do anything at all:
a) should already be fixed by Mulligans (or house rules for free mulligans), since you should only be keeping hands where you can actually play something (i.e. 2 lands and at least one relevant early drop)
b) can be fixed by better manacurve design (mulligans won't fix Craw Wurm.dec, but with adequate 1-,2- and 3-drops and manasinks a deck should be able to do stuff often even with few lands or too many)
c) have very low probability and should only happen once in a blue moon, not affecting the majority of games if people shuffle well (again, with a decent curve and land distribution, the chances of getting stuck drawing all lands or only cards you can't cast should be small)
You're talking abstractly about a "no-game" scenario where someone is completely shut out the game due to mana problems. It's difficult to be on the same page when discussing vague comparitive measures (e.g. "how many people is 'many' people?"), so it would be helpful to hear a concrete example.
Can you give a concrete scenario that is severe enough to completely screw someone out of a game but also happens often enough that a new rule is needed?
Constructed in general has low-manacost cards that matter and most decks in legacy will operate with ~2 mana just fine, and they are allready "flooded" if they ever draw 4+ lands.
Also current standard offers the scry lands, which help tremendously for slower decks to find lands or avoid drawing "more" lands. These cards do a good job at that.
However, theres plenty of hands that have 2 lands and drops, but you will still not draw a 3rd land for a ton of turns, which results in a boring game, its not fun.
The best examples might be this kind of 2 land hand. They are often good enough to keep, especially if you have plays to make. But you still absolutely need that 3rd land, and while you will more often than not draw that 3rd land in time, it would help a lot to have some "guarantee" to get that land, which avoids this seriously crippled hands.
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What do you mean?
This rule strongly penalizes ramp decks or decks that play effect lands. Any aggro or even control deck achieves near perfect consistency under this. Decks with ramp still have to contend with variability in their nonland cards.
I'm talking about outside the rule. For now, assume the rule doesn't exist and was never mentioned. I was asking the OP to start from the basics and "identify the problem", i.e. point out situations that are problematic with the current game that he is trying to fix (more specific than generic "mana problems"). He said that one common problem is that a casual deck can mulligan to a reasonable 2-land hand but then never hit its 3rd mana. He claims that missing the 3rd land drop "seriously cripples" said deck, so he wants a rule that would guarantee said deck can hit the 3rd mana in a reasonable time so it doesn't become a "no game". I was just asking which deck is "seriously crippled" if it doesn't hit 3 lands early and doesn't also run cards (e.g. ramp) to help it do so. In other words, I don't think there is as big a problem with Magic as he is making it sound.
Of course his "fix" for the slow decks actually favors the aggro and combo decks even more than the midrange decks, but that's beside the point.
Thanks for the explaination.