103.4b In a multiplayer game, the first time a player takes a mulligan, he or she draws a new hand of as many cards as he or she had before. Subsequent hands decrease by one card as normal.
It's a rule and like it or not I'm going to abide by it. Anyways, this got me thinking about how frequently I could find a specific 4-of in my deck assuming that I mulled to it. Turns out the answer is 63% probability of seeing it in a grip of 7 and it further increases to 77% if you're willing to go down to 6. Since I'm personally fine with that but at the same time I don't feel comfortable dropping down to 5 that's basically where I stopped calculating. Just to be clear I'm referring to the idea of blindly mulling to 1 specific card in your deck assuming a 7-7-6 mulligan pattern (i.e. like you can do in multiplayer).Now obviously that number is somewhat inflated. You can look at a 7 card hand with X alongside 6 other spells or even 6 lands. You may very well draw X but that doesn't mean that you can always keep the hand. In that sense this isn't perfect math or anything and I'm not trying to pretend like it is. The only concept that I'm trying to express here is that if you're willing to blindly mull to 6 for a card then, statistically speaking, you have a very good chance of seeing it in say 3 out of 4 games. Let's not worry too much about the exact math because that's less important than the overall concept.
This piqued my interest to say the least. I'm not really interested in building combo decks to abuse this rule because they ruin casual magic metas in my opinion. I did still want to find some way to abuse this little factoid however. What cards can you mull to in order to win games? After trying a few things out I realized that no one card is really going to get you a win. Rather, you need an entire sequence of powerful plays in order to consistent go deep and take home the W. How, then, can you abuse lenient mulligan rules to consistently nut-draw your opponents into oblivion?
As many of you probably already know by now I'm a big proponent of running ramp in my decks. I typically assume that Sol Ring is banned (it is for me) but its little brother Worn Powerstone is still a big game. The way I see it is that it's 6 mana on turn 4 (hence 6 on 4) which is pretty freaking ridiculous if you ask me. That's mana for Titans, big spells, 4 drop + 2 drop, draw spell + protective body, etc. And like, that mana isn't going anywhere. Assuming a bit of draw and time you'll quickly ramp up to 7, 8 and 9 where other players will just be getting up to 6. In a world of Primordials and Insurrections that's fairly significant. Before moving on I want to quickly state that I am not cutting lands to make room for these ramp spells. I still run ~25 or so in my decks with 6+ drops. Cutting lands for ramp is nonsensical and defeats the purpose of adding them in my opinion. You may as well just run lands at that point. Where ramp truly shines are in games where you make the vast majority of your early-to-midgame land drops (i.e the first 4 to 6) in addition to the ramp itself in order to enact ridiculous sequences of nut draws that will absolutely God-crush the table. It's not about any one card but rather an entire sequence of powerful plays fueled by ramp in a deck that has few-if-any marginal cards and effects period.
Since you've obviously figured it out already I'll just come out and say that lately I've been playing 4x Worn Powerstone in the vast majority of my Constructed decks and blindly mulling as low as 6 for them. I'm also building my decks accordingly and emphasizing 5+ drops as much as possible. I still typically run some number of 2 drops because I have 0 intention of committing threats to the board on turns 1 or 3 and I'm not really looking for other 3 drops (unless I would run them anyways for power-level reasons) because they'll basically always lose out to the ramp spell on turn 3. A good way to visualize my decks of late is a playset or so of 2 drops, 4-6 Powerstones (running some number of Coalition Relics to act as weaker versions of the card) and then pure 5+ drops. Instead of having a nice CMC bell-curve I just have something straight from a Timmy's wet dream. All big stuff all the time. There's nothing like good old turn 4 Life's Finale into Sepulchral Primordial on 5 and Rise of the Dark Realms shortly after on 7 or 8 while chaining Syphon Minds as needed (in the same way that other people chain Sphinx's Revelations). The graveyards tend to fill so fast that Wight of Precinct Six and Avatar of Woe become sick "2 drops" to use on my Syphon Mind turns because I'm basically just casting haymakers otherwise. You get the idea. While Coalition Relic can only act as a Worn Powerstone every other turn that's A) good enough the vast majority of the time and B) acceptable given that the Relic also acts a color fixer which is certainly relevant in some decks. I still tend to max out on the Powerstones myself but I wouldn't fault anyone for using Relics in 3+ color decks.
For what it's worth I jot down some quick numbers for people to see. This is basically just your probably of keeping an opening 6-7 cards (assuming one free mulligan) given X ramp spells in your deck (X being 4, 5 or 6 in this example).
4 ramp spells, 2 cracks at 7: 63% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
4 ramp spells, mull to 6: 77% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
5 ramp spells, 2 cracks at 7: 72% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
5 ramp spells, mull to 6: 84% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
6 ramp spells, 2 cracks at 7: 79% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
6 ramp spells, mull to 6: 89% chance of starting with a ramp spell.
"Mull to 6" displays a willingness to blindly mull to as low as 6 for a ramp spell using the 7-7-6 multiplayer rules. I stopped at 6 ramp spells because ~25 lands and ~4-6 ramp spells means ~30 sources of mana which is about as much as I'd ever feel comfortable running, especially if I'm planning to mulligan in some % of my games. I also know that you can't run 6x Worn Powerstone but Coalition Relic is typically good enough and you could always run things like Thran Dynamo or Mind Stone too. It may not be 6 mana on turn 4 but it's probably good enough because your deck probably isn't just 6+ drops anyways.
For what it's worth the number that "feels" the best to me is 5. 5 ramp spells in 25 land decks. 30 sources of mana means tons of land drops, tons of haymakers, tons of lategame, tons of consistency, etc. It's slightly awkward, sure, but it just feels better than 4 and 6 in my personal (albeit limited) experience. That being said I'm prone to being lazy and just rolling with 4 Powerstones for simplicity's sake but I mean I think that the ideal number is probably slightly higher.
Some of you are probably sold on the concept already but others are probably sitting there thinking "yeah but what happens if you miss?" Bluntly put I never sit down at 4+ player table and expect to win every game. My games tend to feature 7+ players and it would be foolish of me to expect anything remotely close to a winning record. I'm sure that some of you are big fish in small ponds who can boast such feats but that's largely due to the incompetency of your opposition and not your own skill. Beating bad players with shallow card pools isn't exactly difficult after all. Random tangent aside the point is that once your level of competition reaches a certain threshold then the idea of consistently winning flies out of the window. Knowing this I'm typically fine with employing strategies and tactics that are inherently risky because I personally believe that they still increase your overall win %. Let's use my "mull to 6 for Powerstone" example. The probably of seeing it, as we discussed earlier, is 77%. Let's pretend that 7% of those hands are unkeepable (random number chosen for simplicity's sake). Let's just pretend that 70% of the time we'll have a solid hand of 6-7 cards with a Powerstone. I will take having a very strong hand 70% of the time and a very weak hand 30% of the time over a medium-strengthed hand 100% of the time in a winner-take-all format. Second is little more than the first loser and so I don't see the point in playing for anything other than the top prize. I respect my opponents enough to know that a "reasonable" hand isn't going to cut it and that I'll have a very weak record if that's the only thing that I strive to achieve in my opening grip. My overall win % will probably hover close to 1/N where N is the number of players. That obviously shifts up and down based on your relative skill and the depth of your card pool but it's still a decent approximation. That doesn't cut it for me. Even if it means having to lose in a spectacular fashion a decent % of the time (which isn't a guarantee by any means mind you) I'll take it if it means that a big % of the time I'm in there with a good chance to take the whole thing down. This won't get you a winning record or anything but I mean you should be able to muster something significantly higher than 1/N (adjusted for skill and card quality of course).
The other primary weaknesses of this strategy tends to concern public perception. Simply put I don't live in a world where people slam removal on mana rocks. It might be objectively correct to do so but I mean people who run things like Oblivion Ring tend to save them for permanents that threaten them in obvious ways. I'm not saying that mana rocks aren't threats or anything but rather that they're not always perceived as obvious ones. Not enough of a threat to warrant removal anyways. The strategy that I'm proposing does, in fact, look quite foolish if everyone is packing a bunch of versatile removal that they're willing to expend. This hasn't been my personal experience but I could certainly envision a meta where it does. The other problem of perception that could arise involves people banding together against any would-be rampers. My personal experiences lead me to believe that the people playing marginal, ulta-early game threats aren't prone to targeting the people playing draw/ramp spells over people doing actual nothing. When people do attack it's either A) at random or using some predetermined order (clockwise, highest life total, etc.) or B) someone who they hold a grudge against (i.e. a rival). What people are doing seems to rarely be a significant factor in the decision-making process. It matters for some % of the players at the table, that much is clear, but I mean the people who recognize that draw and ramp are good typically aren't people with a whack of early-game threats in their lists to begin with (for obvious reasons). That is, the people who would target you probably can't because they're probably smart enough to also be drawing and ramping their way to victory. What this means is that, in practice, this type of strategy is usually fairly safe to enact. The players who can punish you probably won't (not with any consistency anyways) and the players who would probably can't. With these 2 general rules of thumb in mind I feel quite confident in employing this gambit. While your meta could very easily differ, I'm not suggesting otherwise, I'm sure that there's a good % of you who has one similar to my own.
Since I've only known about the mulligan rule for a few months I haven't had that long to test this but I've tried in both Cube and Constructed games since to reasonable finishes. It's obviously different in Cube because your ramp tends to be 2 CMC stuff and at best you get 1 Powerstone but the core concept remains the same. Mulling for ramp and building your decks accordingly is still a powerful and effective way to ensure a strong showing in the vast majority of your games.
Comments, criticisms, concerns, outbursts?
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