This mulligan is LAUGHABLE with Serum Powder , any Leyline, all the stuff that involves having a card in your starting hand.
Its also INSANELY broken in vintage with any kind of combo deck its just stupidly better to assemble the hand you need.
Even just putting a creature on the bottom for stuff like Oath of Druids is a thing.
With sideboard hate cards as 4x in a deck, you will be almost guaranteed to find a copy in your mulligans down to like 3, its a whooping 7 cards per mulligan and without shuffling them, you get the almost cycle through your entire deck (especially in 40 cards Limited, 7x6 = 42 , but in Limited, you really dont want to go down to 2 anyway; different story in constructed if you auto-win with stuff like a black leyline, or heavy hitting hate cards like Stony Silence , Rest in Peace).
Theres simply no way this works fine outside of Limited and to a lesser extend in standard (as standard is quite the grind fest of 1-for-1 trades till someone sticks something).
----
For any other format this will be more of an advantage to get at least a somewhat reasonable playable hand if you have to mulligan to 6 and especially 5 and lower ; the vast majority of the time you have to find your 2nd or 3rd land to get the hand playable, and the scry just barely helps with that, but you only get to see the card if you keep the questionable hand, so its a very unsatisfying gamble.
Starting with -X cards is tremendously worse for decks that have to trade 1-for-1 or grind an opponent down, but for a combo deck that just needs to find its pieces, the quantity of cards is almost irrelevant, all that matters is to find the combo pieces and at least a critical mass of lands to cast them.
----
As it is, this simply cannot ever be allowed in older formats, it just doesnt work and produces a lot more problems than its trying to solve (with the amount of fetchlands the cards on "bottom" will quickly end up randomly in the deck anyway).
Removing the shuffling from mulligans is the only reasonable plus, or just keep drawing 7 till you keep, THEN shuffle the library again if you used any mulligan, to start with some kind of random library at least.
Random thought: Do you think if the new mulligan rule gets permanently implemented (and consequently not tying scry directly to mulliganing), there will be a chance that scry gets replaced by the generally superior surveil? Surveil allows for a lot more gameplay options.
Because Surveil is generally more powerful, I don't think it will phase Scry out. Scry is a really neat quarter-mana-cost effect to toss onto cards to sweeten the pot. Surveil plays into the graveyard, which means any future block with grave support would need to be more wary of using it, and if it had replaced Scry, that could make costing cards difficult in development.
Random thought: Do you think if the new mulligan rule gets permanently implemented (and consequently not tying scry directly to mulliganing), there will be a chance that scry gets replaced by the generally superior surveil? Surveil allows for a lot more gameplay options.
Surveil being more powerful is a huge reason why it will never replace scry, alongside the other reason of scry being evergreen and surveil not. The goal of tinkering with mulligan rules is to reduce variance, particularly regarding "non-games" and other feel-bad scenarios where the game ends before it ever begins. Surveil doesn't do more to achieve this goal than scry does, and it comes with a potentially significant addition of starting the game with a card in the graveyard, which benefits some decks more than others.
I don't think he was suggesting we do Vancouver Mulligans with Surveil instead of Scry, he's saying, if we do away with Vancouver Mulligan in favor of London, would Scry be completely phased out from the game in favor of Surveil.
I don't think he was suggesting we do Vancouver Mulligans with Surveil instead of Scry, he's saying, if we do away with Vancouver Mulligan in favor of London, would Scry be completely phased out from the game in favor of Surveil.
Oh, right. My point still stands, minus the bit about starting with a card in the graveyard. Lopsidedness and all that.
They can't fix the game with mulligan rules changes at this point. Heck, they can't even get hand fixing to work in Arena for goodness sakes.
The jackpot hand That shot is what I run into so many times when I run anything and I feel like they are doing this mulligan change just to favor arena.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Why everyone thinks that you don't shuffle between mulligans? MaRo confirmed you still shuffle, it's non Partial Paris.
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"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again"
Really dislike this idea. Im all for exploring new solutions to what is perceived as a problem with the current mulligan, but imo the answer is not to replace it with something that lends itself to abuse and a certain style of deck. The bigger the card pool, the more room for abuse.
Really dislike this idea. Im all for exploring new solutions to what is perceived as a problem with the current mulligan, but imo the answer is not to replace it with something that lends itself to abuse and a certain style of deck. The bigger the card pool, the more room for abuse.
Maybe Mulligan N = Scry N? Such as if its first Mulligan then Scry 1, second is Scry 2, etc.
Really dislike this idea. Im all for exploring new solutions to what is perceived as a problem with the current mulligan, but imo the answer is not to replace it with something that lends itself to abuse and a certain style of deck. The bigger the card pool, the more room for abuse.
Maybe Mulligan N = Scry N? Such as if its first Mulligan then Scry 1, second is Scry 2, etc.
it does not solve the "non-start" hands.
if you mull down to 5 and draw a 1 land/4 spell hand scrying 2 instead of 1 it will not help your game (more so if you see 2 non land cards that you put to bottom), the real problem with "non playable" hands is that the more you mulligan the less is the chance to have a starting hand.
this method lessen this problem by giving you the same land/spell ratio in each mulligan BUT then you have to sacrifice some cards that you can chose. at this point you can start playing but with the classic disadvantage of having less resources
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"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again"
so any actual feedback from the pros on this? did it play well?
This hasn't been tested yet. The article states this is for the second Mythic Championship, in London in April. This weekend was Mythic Championship I in Cleveland.
The new mulligan rule very much feels like it is designed to make Best of One more reliable and more predictable.
That's what I said. This sounds like they are trying to keep the game in paper the same online and are letting the online game shape the original.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Really dislike this idea. Im all for exploring new solutions to what is perceived as a problem with the current mulligan, but imo the answer is not to replace it with something that lends itself to abuse and a certain style of deck. The bigger the card pool, the more room for abuse.
Maybe Mulligan N = Scry N? Such as if its first Mulligan then Scry 1, second is Scry 2, etc.
it does not solve the "non-start" hands.
if you mull down to 5 and draw a 1 land/4 spell hand scrying 2 instead of 1 it will not help your game (more so if you see 2 non land cards that you put to bottom), the real problem with "non playable" hands is that the more you mulligan the less is the chance to have a starting hand.
this method lessen this problem by giving you the same land/spell ratio in each mulligan BUT then you have to sacrifice some cards that you can chose. at this point you can start playing but with the classic disadvantage of having less resources
Yep, the London Mulligan gives players far more agency to pick and choose the progressively smaller starting hand after each mulligan, while still strongly restricting their raw resources the more mulligans they take.
Terrible starting hands that cycle into worse and worse hands when mulliganing precisely when you are correctly mulliganing is a real problem. One of the major issues Magic has due to land cards taking up space within the library. That fundamental mechanic--protestations to the contrary by people like MaRo attempting to justify it notwithstanding--dramatically increases the luck-based effects of variance at quite the expense to skill.
Yes, good players can mitigate a bad starting hand with skillful use of the smaller number of resources they start with.
But there's not a whole lot anyone can do when you enter a mulligan death-spiral out of your control. If you draw a 1 land hand with insufficient low-cost cards to mitigate it, mulligan, then draw a 6-land hand, mulligan, then draw another 1-land hand, you are, in fact, mulliganing correctly, and the situation continues to get worse and worse in a manner out of your control.
The scry mulligan, and even a scry N mulligan does exactly nothing to mitigate this aspect of mulliganing. It still forces players to throw away hands that could have been reasonable had they seen the other N cards up-front. Often because of the lack of even a single additional land. You didn't get to make a properly informed decision. You had to take a luck-based chance that the scry would itself pay off enough. You had to make a choice at a decision point to commit to an opening hand before the "informed" part comes into play. That's not an informed decision; it's just a leap of faith with a little bit of control after the jump. By forcing a commitment before the "informed" aspect of the decision point comes into effect, you're barely mitigating the fundamental issue, to begin with.
Putting a scry-like effect up-front, on the other hand, keeps the same resource restriction (of your starting hand size), while strongly mitigating potential mulligan death-spirals out of your control due to variance. The kind of variance-based death spiral that can easily effectively cause an entirely luck-based auto-loss out of the control of the player at the very start of the game. You get to be informed before committing to a choice at that decision point. That is, imho, the correct order. Get informed first, then commit second. Not commit first, then get informed second.
Moreover, this mulligan is symmetrical in older formats. Yes, combo players get to dig more for combo pieces. Well, opposing players simultaneously get to dig more for answers to combos. So it reduces variance in favor of skill to mulligan to the best starting position on both sides of the table in that regard, as well.
Starting hand land screw or land flood due to variance is easily one of the worst, most frustrating gameplay experiences consistently seen in and complained about within Magic at effectively all levels of play. Yes, pros and plenty of others--especially when understanding the statistics--can just laugh it off most of the time. But many a player have rage or exhaustion quit the game over this very issue.
Some of the statistical breakdowns attempting to defend how healthy the resource distribution is, and how low variance's effects actually are, are simply astonishing to use as an actual defense. When your statistical breakdown to defend the health of the game shows that only 69% of games have a healthy resource distribution, while a whopping 31% have unhealthy resource distributions, that does not a defense make; that is, imho, a profound refutation of the healthy levels of variance in the game. More than one-in-four games played has an unhealthy distribution of resources that cost one player the game!? That is absurdly high. The London mulligan should mitigate such severe levels of variance-screw quite a bit, in healthy ways that push a significantly larger number of games to fall within the healthy resource distribution range.
Suffice it to say, I like this mulligan rule an awful lot. It strongly mitigates one of the worst aspects of Magic's fundamental mechanics. And does so in a way that favors skillful and informed choices made at a critical decision point in the game.
Well people have been asking how bad is it for vintage and we now have our answer. Dredge has an approximate 99.05% chance of starting with Bazaar of Baghdad in hand by using the London Mulligan and also Serum Powder.
Well people have been asking how bad is it for vintage and we now have our answer. Dredge has an approximate 99.05% chance of starting with Bazaar of Baghdad in hand by using the London Mulligan and also Serum Powder.
Well, according to this link here, it has over a 96% chance of getting Bazaar in the opener right now. Assuming both the code you linked to and the calculation I linked to are accurate, you are talking about roughly a 3% increase in getting to a Bazaar. In Vintage. In the end, I don't think it really matters nor does it significantly change the format since every other deck gets to mulligan aggressively for their hate.
I rarely ever win a game in modern when taking a double mulligan. Very much looking forward to this new mulligan rule being implemented.
Why are people worried about vintage? This could be a huge advantage to fair decks in modern. Right now the best decks to overcome a mulligan are ancient stirrings decks.
People are really underestimating how bad it feels to put cards on the bottom of your library. Mulliganing to 5 still equates to getting hit by a free mind rot effect. This isn't going to put combo over the top.
Hitting a critical land count even after mulliganing is important in order to have playable games. There is more variance in smaller formats where hand fixing is less present and weaker. (Notably limited, but also probably standard.)
If a mulligan rule is changed, IMO it should be changed in all formats simultaneously to the new thing being implemented, not just standard or just limited.
Would people be on board with a mulligan rule change if it meant there were likely bans in large formats like modern/legacy/vintage?
People being concerned about the whole easy to keep the needed cards for competitive decks business
Well your both correct and incorrect
Because you got to bare in mind you also have to keep the lands/mana rocks and combo pieces without having to place atleast one or more on the bottom and also that it could be exsepnsive costing combo
Anything with an "initial hand matters" mechanic (e.g., leylines and chancellors) is going to be ridic with these new rules.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
People being concerned about the whole easy to keep the needed cards for competitive decks business
Well your both correct and incorrect
Because you got to bare in mind you also have to keep the lands/mana rocks and combo pieces without having to place atleast one or more on the bottom and also that it could be exsepnsive costing combo
Anything with an "initial hand matters" mechanic (e.g., leylines and chancellors) is going to be ridic with these new rules.
Well besides the stuff with “opening hand” in the ability it’s easier to save those
My group and I are going to test out this rule this weekend. Here's hoping it is a benefit. It's mostly Modern and maybe a couple Standard decks that we run, though; none of us play Legacy or anything. But should be worth testing out.
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Its also INSANELY broken in vintage with any kind of combo deck its just stupidly better to assemble the hand you need.
Even just putting a creature on the bottom for stuff like Oath of Druids is a thing.
With sideboard hate cards as 4x in a deck, you will be almost guaranteed to find a copy in your mulligans down to like 3, its a whooping 7 cards per mulligan and without shuffling them, you get the almost cycle through your entire deck (especially in 40 cards Limited, 7x6 = 42 , but in Limited, you really dont want to go down to 2 anyway; different story in constructed if you auto-win with stuff like a black leyline, or heavy hitting hate cards like Stony Silence , Rest in Peace).
Theres simply no way this works fine outside of Limited and to a lesser extend in standard (as standard is quite the grind fest of 1-for-1 trades till someone sticks something).
----
For any other format this will be more of an advantage to get at least a somewhat reasonable playable hand if you have to mulligan to 6 and especially 5 and lower ; the vast majority of the time you have to find your 2nd or 3rd land to get the hand playable, and the scry just barely helps with that, but you only get to see the card if you keep the questionable hand, so its a very unsatisfying gamble.
Starting with -X cards is tremendously worse for decks that have to trade 1-for-1 or grind an opponent down, but for a combo deck that just needs to find its pieces, the quantity of cards is almost irrelevant, all that matters is to find the combo pieces and at least a critical mass of lands to cast them.
----
As it is, this simply cannot ever be allowed in older formats, it just doesnt work and produces a lot more problems than its trying to solve (with the amount of fetchlands the cards on "bottom" will quickly end up randomly in the deck anyway).
Removing the shuffling from mulligans is the only reasonable plus, or just keep drawing 7 till you keep, THEN shuffle the library again if you used any mulligan, to start with some kind of random library at least.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
Oh, right. My point still stands, minus the bit about starting with a card in the graveyard. Lopsidedness and all that.
The jackpot hand That shot is what I run into so many times when I run anything and I feel like they are doing this mulligan change just to favor arena.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
it does not solve the "non-start" hands.
if you mull down to 5 and draw a 1 land/4 spell hand scrying 2 instead of 1 it will not help your game (more so if you see 2 non land cards that you put to bottom), the real problem with "non playable" hands is that the more you mulligan the less is the chance to have a starting hand.
this method lessen this problem by giving you the same land/spell ratio in each mulligan BUT then you have to sacrifice some cards that you can chose. at this point you can start playing but with the classic disadvantage of having less resources
This hasn't been tested yet. The article states this is for the second Mythic Championship, in London in April. This weekend was Mythic Championship I in Cleveland.
That's what I said. This sounds like they are trying to keep the game in paper the same online and are letting the online game shape the original.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Yep, the London Mulligan gives players far more agency to pick and choose the progressively smaller starting hand after each mulligan, while still strongly restricting their raw resources the more mulligans they take.
Terrible starting hands that cycle into worse and worse hands when mulliganing precisely when you are correctly mulliganing is a real problem. One of the major issues Magic has due to land cards taking up space within the library. That fundamental mechanic--protestations to the contrary by people like MaRo attempting to justify it notwithstanding--dramatically increases the luck-based effects of variance at quite the expense to skill.
Yes, good players can mitigate a bad starting hand with skillful use of the smaller number of resources they start with.
But there's not a whole lot anyone can do when you enter a mulligan death-spiral out of your control. If you draw a 1 land hand with insufficient low-cost cards to mitigate it, mulligan, then draw a 6-land hand, mulligan, then draw another 1-land hand, you are, in fact, mulliganing correctly, and the situation continues to get worse and worse in a manner out of your control.
The scry mulligan, and even a scry N mulligan does exactly nothing to mitigate this aspect of mulliganing. It still forces players to throw away hands that could have been reasonable had they seen the other N cards up-front. Often because of the lack of even a single additional land. You didn't get to make a properly informed decision. You had to take a luck-based chance that the scry would itself pay off enough. You had to make a choice at a decision point to commit to an opening hand before the "informed" part comes into play. That's not an informed decision; it's just a leap of faith with a little bit of control after the jump. By forcing a commitment before the "informed" aspect of the decision point comes into effect, you're barely mitigating the fundamental issue, to begin with.
Putting a scry-like effect up-front, on the other hand, keeps the same resource restriction (of your starting hand size), while strongly mitigating potential mulligan death-spirals out of your control due to variance. The kind of variance-based death spiral that can easily effectively cause an entirely luck-based auto-loss out of the control of the player at the very start of the game. You get to be informed before committing to a choice at that decision point. That is, imho, the correct order. Get informed first, then commit second. Not commit first, then get informed second.
Moreover, this mulligan is symmetrical in older formats. Yes, combo players get to dig more for combo pieces. Well, opposing players simultaneously get to dig more for answers to combos. So it reduces variance in favor of skill to mulligan to the best starting position on both sides of the table in that regard, as well.
Starting hand land screw or land flood due to variance is easily one of the worst, most frustrating gameplay experiences consistently seen in and complained about within Magic at effectively all levels of play. Yes, pros and plenty of others--especially when understanding the statistics--can just laugh it off most of the time. But many a player have rage or exhaustion quit the game over this very issue.
Some of the statistical breakdowns attempting to defend how healthy the resource distribution is, and how low variance's effects actually are, are simply astonishing to use as an actual defense. When your statistical breakdown to defend the health of the game shows that only 69% of games have a healthy resource distribution, while a whopping 31% have unhealthy resource distributions, that does not a defense make; that is, imho, a profound refutation of the healthy levels of variance in the game. More than one-in-four games played has an unhealthy distribution of resources that cost one player the game!? That is absurdly high. The London mulligan should mitigate such severe levels of variance-screw quite a bit, in healthy ways that push a significantly larger number of games to fall within the healthy resource distribution range.
Suffice it to say, I like this mulligan rule an awful lot. It strongly mitigates one of the worst aspects of Magic's fundamental mechanics. And does so in a way that favors skillful and informed choices made at a critical decision point in the game.
Link for those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/auovpx/i_wrote_code_to_determine_how_to_mulligan_with/
Why are people worried about vintage? This could be a huge advantage to fair decks in modern. Right now the best decks to overcome a mulligan are ancient stirrings decks.
People are really underestimating how bad it feels to put cards on the bottom of your library. Mulliganing to 5 still equates to getting hit by a free mind rot effect. This isn't going to put combo over the top.
If a mulligan rule is changed, IMO it should be changed in all formats simultaneously to the new thing being implemented, not just standard or just limited.
Would people be on board with a mulligan rule change if it meant there were likely bans in large formats like modern/legacy/vintage?
Older Magic as a Board Game: Panglacial Wurm , Mill
Anything with an "initial hand matters" mechanic (e.g., leylines and chancellors) is going to be ridic with these new rules.
On phasing:
Well besides the stuff with “opening hand” in the ability it’s easier to save those
But you know what mean.
Pleasure and pain
Scorpion stings
Pretty things
and the flames of Phoenix wings
—Michelle Schaper