I think my favorite part of working on a deck long-term (which I do pretty rarely, but sometimes it does happen) is fine-tuning the lands, especially the utility lands. I love utility lands because they feel like freerolls in your deck - you have to play lands anyway, and with the kind of fixing available (especially for a dual/fetch base) you can easily run a decent number of colorless lands without compromising your fixing significantly. So why not get some value out of cards that would otherwise be a dead draw? Sometimes they can be not just better than a blank, but actually a very powerful tool even at the point where extra mana has become pretty irrelevant.
Anyway, right now I'm looking with a microscope at my Phelddagrif list (as usual) and looking at all the possible lands, and thinking about what actually makes a good, useful utility land. For reference, here are the ones I consider unimpeachably excellent for that deck, but this is a general MCD so you don't need to worry about my POV for talking about the cards, just thought I'd give some info for those curious.
arch of orazca - draws cards at a decent rate while not attracting much attention and requiring very little, arguably one of the best value engines in the deck. path of ancestry - fixing land that's decent already, but then also gives multiple scrys over the course of the game. arcane lighthouse - silver bullet for voltron, narset, etc that would otherwise require specific cards, pretty easy include for as much removal as I run strip mine - stand in for any LD lands, of which there are many. Strip mine is arguably the best but they're all kind of a muchness. Still, gotta have at least one. kor haven - maybe my favorite, or second behind arch. Steers so many attacks elsewhere for a minimal cost, and synergizes amazingly with board wipes forcing people to go wide into them. mystifying maze - the same but generally worse. But bad kor haven is still great. okina, temple to the grandfathers - speeds up a win by at least 1 turn pretty easily and costs basically nothing. scavenger grounds - all the grave hate you need, in a land slot. Like arcane lighthouse, I love having silver bullets hidden in my manabase.
Anyway, so the utility lands I actually want to talk about, starting with...
tolaria west - this is a card that I've auto-included a lot over the years, and I find myself wondering why. sylvan scrying gets played only occasionally by me, in Phelddagrif and elsewhere, but that's a cheaper version of the same effect. And, especially for a multicolor control deck like Phelddagrif, tapping double blue while still keeping up my best responses (usually counters) can be a tall order even for a great manabase. Of course, tolaria west can just be played as a land, which is a very relevant mode if it's the only land in your hand on turn 3, but then I could probably cast sylvan scrying and be happier in most cases, and I probably wouldn't keep a 2 lander with TW anyway so if TW was a scrying I could probably cast the scrying. So I'm torn - on one hand, if you're already doing a lot of work in your lands, having this to search up your silver bullets or best late-game value can be really strong, on the other hand it's pretty clunky anytime before turn 8 or so.
Vesuva - I've generally liked running thespian's stage in the deck, since you can use that as a fixing land early if needed, and then copy whatever crazy value land you like late-game, whether yours or someone else's. Vesuva I find a lot trickier because, while it's more efficient, if it's my last land on turn 3 it's probably coming down as a tapped basic, or at best dual, and frequently that can be true until pretty late. I do like that it can be a legitimate fixer by copying an enemy land on an early turn, but it always feels a little weak. Maybe it's more feel-bads than is-bads, though.
hashep oasis/shefet dunes/cycling deserts/etc - I initially dismissed desert synergy as being a bit too weak for my deck and EDH in general, but I'm reconsidering. In terms of sacrifice, especially the hashep oasis cycle costs basically nothing, as a half-a-pain-land it likely won't cost more than a few life total over the course of the game, if that. they enter untapped and can always tap for colorless. The bonus from oasis in particular is pretty decent for speeding up commander damage kills, especially on my little 4-power beater, but the main reason to run them is as backups for scavenger grounds, which is easily the easiest-to-play grave hate tool around imo. The cycling deserts are a little harder to justify, as they're otherwise strictly worse than other cycling lands (3 cycles of cycling lands, in fact), but really, unless you're cycling through LFTL or something, is it going to matter that much for most decks? By the point you're cycling lands you probably have plenty of mana anyway, and it gives you extra fodder for the scavenger grounds.
mikokoro, center of the sea - this is one I haven't looked at seriously for a long time, but I think it has some political application, specifically if the game has gone archenemy and you need someone to find an answer to one specific player. If it's 3v1, then you're drawing 3 cards for the cost of 1, kind of. Obviously this sort of effect can also be bad, which is why howling mine is not my cup of tea, but being able to activate it only when necessary solves that issue, plus of course not costing a whole card of value, and the upside is definitely real when you need it.
soldevi excavations - no one plays this card but it's kind of interesting. Probably not justifiable in 3-color since the island restriction is too risky and the upside is too low, but it's not a terrible rate I guess. Although really, considering the cost of scrying is essentially the same for isolated watchtower, and the risk of failure is significantly lower, it's probably just a worse card. And it's not like watchtower is very good either.
isolated watchtower - I mean, right? It's probably not that good? Maybe if you have a bunch of basics. My good decks usually run only a couple unless they're mono-colored though. A scry is still a scry, but then you need to be behind on lands too. Idk man, seems like a lot to jump through and pretty dead if people aren't playing ramp.
My quick whatsit: Tolaria West I mostly go to if it can find me a powerful 0 drop as well (e.g. tormod's crypt, mana crypt sometimes, etc.). I don't usually play it unless I have both lands and 0 drops that I want. That splice draw spell is pretty cool if you're playing an arcane deck too.
I love Vesuva, but only in a deck with cabal coffers Maybe another lands deck but too many lands I want are legendary (cradle, nykthos, etc.). It's cool as a second maze of ith sometimes in my frog deck too. Two mazes can really lock a game out sometimes. I rarely have space for this, only in my lands deck.
I don't like any of the deserts except Scavenging grounds, but I don't build a lot of decks that can tolerate tapped lands or sacrificing lands for small benefits at expensive mana costs. The mana costs on most of the deserts are way too high for me, and the cycling ones I think are pretty weak in general.
Mikokoro I could see in group hug decks but I rarely want to spend 3 mana to draw a card in EDH.
I would never play Soldevi Excavations but I'm really gun shy about playing something that is gonna get me double stripmined. Maybe in a deck with lots of crucible effects.
My general philosophy is to play 3-4 colorless only lands at most in a 2 color deck and 1-2 in 3 color decks unless I have tons of filtration (e.g. I think I run 3 in my grixis deck that runs so many cantrips and the good black tutors). Similarly I try to keep the ETB tapped lands very low (not more than 2-3 in most decks).
I tend to run fairly fetch heavy manabases (3-5 in 2 color decks and 5-8 in 3) so I place a premium on basics as most of my decks can reuse those fetches one way or another (playing crucible or sun titan or similar). That's just my manabase style though I guess.
I try to get as close to 20 basics in a 2 color deck and 12+ in a 3 color deck as I can. Both my Inalla and Tuvasa decks have 15 which is huge for a 3 color deck, but managed through careful color focus and lots of fetchlands.
Your Pheld deck looks extremely vulnerable to blood mooning. Which seems fine I guess, just not where I would want to be. Your spell slection is pretty light on pips mostly, not super greedy, but the lack of any color fixing amp and minimal filtering makes me inclined against playing quite so many utility lands.
You do run a ton of fetches, and a very strong selection of duals, so that's probably why it works. 9 fetches is a crapload.
I am notoriously conservative about manabases, though, so it might just be me, but I don't see anything in your mana base that I would want to swap out for those lands before I'd add a few basics.
Tolaria is probably the best of them, because you play so many utility lands, but man it sure is a lot of mana and it's another ETB tapped guy in your list which is not ideal if you have to play it.
Your deck has soooo many reactive elements that I'd really like to see you cut a couple etb tapped lands. I got my INalla deck down to I think 2 (tar pit and temple of deceit) and it's been very good to me.
This is kind of an interesting topic from my perspective since, unlike most players, I tend to despise flexibility in cards, and that puts utility lands in a rather odd place for me. Here's an internal monologue on how I would assess Tolaria West:
Why would I play Tolaria West? Is it because it's a land? No, because Tolaria West is terrible at being a land; it's usually a worse Island. As such, the only reason I'd want to play Tolaria West is if I transmute it. How good is Tolaria West when I transmute it? That depends on the deck. At 1UU, the price is fair. It lines up with others tutors like Fabricate and Call the Gatewatch, but if I don't play any 0 mana cards that are worth spending 1UU to search for, then this is obviously terrible, and I shouldn't be playing it. The fact that Tolaria West can sometimes be played as a land isn't worth much because that's the floor of the card. I'm not playing Tolaria West because it can be played as a land. I'm playing it for other reasons, so every time I play Tolaria West as a land, that's a strike against it because it's terrible at being a land, and I could have played some other card in Tolaria West's place that is actually good at being a land instead. As such, for Tolaria West to be good, I need to rarely play it as a land, AND it's transmute effect needs to be better than any other card I could comparatively play with that ability. Just because Tolaria West is a tapped Island at worst doesn't mean other cards aren't better than it.
This whole thought process is something I've touched on before in the Brawl forum. Because it's pertinent to the conversation (and because the post there was probably read by all of two people, it being the Brawl forum and all), I'm going to shamelessly quote myself here.
So, I think I've already said my bit when it comes to Slice in Twain, but I don't think it would hurt much for me to elaborate either.
When I look at a card like Slice in Twain, what I ask myself is, "Why exactly do I want to play this card? Is it because it destroys artifacts and enchantments, or is it because it draws a card?" The answer to that question is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments. You can tell this is true because if you took off the "draw a card" clause, you would still consider the card, but if you took off the Disenchant clause, you wouldn't. That's because the Disenchant clause is the primary purpose of Slice in Twain and drawing the card is just extra. As such, the reason I would want to play Slice in Twain is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments and not because it draws cards.
Understanding this, I now ask myself, "Okay, if the reason I want to play Slice in Twain is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments, are there any other cards that are better at destroying artifacts and enchantments than Slice in Twain? If so, I should probably consider those cards first." Indeed, there just so happens to be other cards that are better at destroying artifacts and enchantments than Slice in Twain. Naturalize, for one, does exactly the same effect at the cost of 2 less mana. The fact that Naturalize doesn't draw a card isn't important here because the reason I would play Slice in Twain isn't because I care about it drawing cards; it's because I care about it destroying artifacts and enchantments. And If I happened to care about Slice in Twain drawing cards, I would compare it to something that draws cards instead.
In essence, this is ultimately what I care about when it comes to Magic cards: I want my cards to be good at doing whatever it is I put them in my deck to do. It's their rates that matter most, not their flexibility. Here's a hypothetical to illustrate my point:
Slice into Too Many Pieces3GG Instant
Destroy target artifact or enchantment. Draw a card. You gain 2 life. Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. It gains reach until end of turn.
The argument here isn't about whether or not Slice into Too Many Pieces is costed appropriately. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn't. The argument here is about why I might want to play a given card in question. If it's because there's a particular effect on the card that I want, it needs to be able to compete with every other card with that effect for me to want to play with it. The card that does that effect "best" is usually the one I'm going to choose to play. That is, after all, why I'm playing the card in the first place, because it does whatever particular effect I want it to do at the best rate possible. The fact that some cards also do other things is more than often detrimental because it usually makes those particular cards worse at performing its desired effect (usually by increasing the card's casting cost). If any one card does two different effects I might want, I'll almost always just find two different cards that do each of those individual effects better than the one card.
In the case of Slice in Twain, I'm definitely going to play Naturalize before it if I'm looking for Disenchant effects. Slice in Twain just exists in this grey area where it's too poor at being a Naturalize for its cost and too poor at being card advantage for its cost for it to ever be playable in my eyes.
Tolaria West - Only if I have good (usually non-land) targets. Which generally means Mana Crypt and a couple of utility things like Tormod's Crypt. Maybe a Pact of Negation, but I don't have enough of those lying around. Basically, if I'm running a Trinket Mage package, this is a more restrictive second copy with an alternative mode as a tapland instead of a small body.
Vesuva - Only if I have very good non-legendary lands to copy. I'm not going to want to simply have this as some colour fixing, so I'm talking about Cabal Coffers and...well, mainly Cabal Coffers.
Utility deserts - Not so keep on the cycling ones unless I have a Life From the Loam package, as they ETB tapped, but the mono-colour ones are actually cards I feel I should consider more. A few points of damage over a game is not much (and they do still produce colourless), and even if the abilites aren't crazy, they're almost free to include.
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea - "Group hug" effects where you can control the timing are significantly less bad than other ones, so it's not a bad effect to have. There's really just the opportunity cost of it being a colourless land. It also hasn't been the cheapest card to buy, so I've never actually had one.
Soldevi Excavations - I often play it in mono-blue. I don't play is in multicolour decks. I've found it to be a nice little tool in a draw-go deck where I've often an extra bit of mana if I didn't need to use interaction.
Isloated Watchtower - I play it in some non-green mono-coloured decks, depends on how many other colourless lands I have and how colour heavy my spells are. Similar to the previous, the ability is certainly nice to have - it's not a huge impact, but there's not much cost to having the option - and there's usually at least one player who's ahead on lands.
My quick whatsit: Tolaria West I mostly go to if it can find me a powerful 0 drop as well (e.g. tormod's crypt, mana crypt sometimes, etc.). I don't usually play it unless I have both lands and 0 drops that I want. That splice draw spell is pretty cool if you're playing an arcane deck too.
I love Vesuva, but only in a deck with cabal coffers Maybe another lands deck but too many lands I want are legendary (cradle, nykthos, etc.). It's cool as a second maze of ith sometimes in my frog deck too. Two mazes can really lock a game out sometimes. I rarely have space for this, only in my lands deck.
I don't like any of the deserts except Scavenging grounds, but I don't build a lot of decks that can tolerate tapped lands or sacrificing lands for small benefits at expensive mana costs. The mana costs on most of the deserts are way too high for me, and the cycling ones I think are pretty weak in general.
Mikokoro I could see in group hug decks but I rarely want to spend 3 mana to draw a card in EDH.
I would never play Soldevi Excavations but I'm really gun shy about playing something that is gonna get me double stripmined. Maybe in a deck with lots of crucible effects.
My general philosophy is to play 3-4 colorless only lands at most in a 2 color deck and 1-2 in 3 color decks unless I have tons of filtration (e.g. I think I run 3 in my grixis deck that runs so many cantrips and the good black tutors). Similarly I try to keep the ETB tapped lands very low (not more than 2-3 in most decks).
I tend to run fairly fetch heavy manabases (3-5 in 2 color decks and 5-8 in 3) so I place a premium on basics as most of my decks can reuse those fetches one way or another (playing crucible or sun titan or similar). That's just my manabase style though I guess.
I try to get as close to 20 basics in a 2 color deck and 12+ in a 3 color deck as I can. Both my Inalla and Tuvasa decks have 15 which is huge for a 3 color deck, but managed through careful color focus and lots of fetchlands.
Your Pheld deck looks extremely vulnerable to blood mooning. Which seems fine I guess, just not where I would want to be. Your spell slection is pretty light on pips mostly, not super greedy, but the lack of any color fixing amp and minimal filtering makes me inclined against playing quite so many utility lands.
You do run a ton of fetches, and a very strong selection of duals, so that's probably why it works. 9 fetches is a crapload.
I am notoriously conservative about manabases, though, so it might just be me, but I don't see anything in your mana base that I would want to swap out for those lands before I'd add a few basics.
Tolaria is probably the best of them, because you play so many utility lands, but man it sure is a lot of mana and it's another ETB tapped guy in your list which is not ideal if you have to play it.
Your deck has soooo many reactive elements that I'd really like to see you cut a couple etb tapped lands. I got my INalla deck down to I think 2 (tar pit and temple of deceit) and it's been very good to me.
That's certainly true (being able to search for 0 drops) but the deck doesn't currently play any. Pact of negation is conceivable, but we generally don't tap out so there's not a lot of call for it unless we're trying to bait someone. Mana crypt probably isn't (despite being the most powerful card in the format, Phelddagrif is one of the few decks where I think it's actively bad). Looking through the list I don't see any other 0-drops I'd consider playing (tormod's crypt is kiiind of close but too narrow imo, and we can already hit scavenger grounds so there's not much point).
Vesuva definitely won't have a high ceiling in Phelddagrif since it can't copy any of the really scary lands, but idk that that means it's a bad card. Maybe being an etbt exotic orchard/reflecting pool of sorts at worst, and a copy of arch/haven/spires of orazca in the late-game is enough to justify the inclusion. I'm not totally sure.
The main reason to play hashep oasis and co is for sacking to scavenger grounds. It might seem sort of unlikely that I'll get both of them at once, but part of the goal here is to consolidate a lot of utility options into my lands, so that any tutors for them become really versatile. So I'm hoping that scavenger grounds is found in most games against any graveyard-based decks.
I don't think mikokoro needs to be in group hug to be good (also I'm not sure the phrase has much meaning, since group hug is less a strategy and more a collection of cards with similar functions). I think that's where you'd want to play it if you were trying to activate it every turn. But the strategy of the card ought to be to activate it only if you either must topdeck something now or lose, or ideally one of multiple people must topdeck something now or they all lose (i.e. someone's trying to combo off). In that circumstance it's quite good, of course. Maybe not good enough to justify a colorless land, but that's the question.
I don't necessarily think soldevi excavations is worth strip mining outside of 1v1 or at least 3-player, but it's probably still too weak. If you could sac any land I think it might be playable, though.
Man, that's a really low number of colorless lands to run in a 2-color deck especially. I don't get why you'd be so conservative unless your commander was niv-mizzet, parun or something. Especially for a land-heavy deck like Phelddagrif, I generally think to myself "how many lands would be a 'normal' number to run", which is probably around 35. So if I'm running 45 or whatever, then if 10 of those were colorless, I'd still have the fixing capacity of a 35 land deck, with some extra cards that also happen to be lands.
Etbts I think it's generally worth having at least a couple as long as they have good value. Almost any game you'll have windows where you don't need all your mana, and having the option to get value for your land play that turn is a good way to capitalize on that. Not that I'd go nuts, probably no more than 5 for most decks, but 5 is enough that you'll only see 1 per game usually.
9 is the correct number of fetches to play in a 3-color deck. 7 is the correct number to play in a 2-color deck. This is pretty solved. They're the best fixing lands that exist in the format, up to and imo including command tower since they have advantages command tower doesn't. 9 isn't "a crapload", it's just "correct".
If I am reusing them then I have some incentive to make sure they have a large number of targets, but in this case I'm only using them once, and if god forbid I draw a fetch with no targets at the end of a long game it probably doesn't really matter at that point anyway. Between duals and shocks that's 9 flexible targets, add in a smattering of basics and you're looking at enough targets for basically any reasonable-length game.
My deck definitely has some weaknesses to blood moon (or ruination), but I do have a fair amount of enchantment removal and quite a few counters. Ideally I'd have a response. If it comes down T3 it might be too early for me to have a good answer, but I usually try to size up a table in the first few turns and decide if I think it's likely someone is running BM or other nonbasic hate. Generally the answer is no, but if it's yes then I can fetch a basic or two, which make it tolerable to operate under BM. Ruination is a different story, but in the same circumstances ruination is recoverable from, and a late ruination should basically always be countered. B2B is much weaker than either against me since I usually have all my mana untapped. But honestly despite my diligence about nonbasic hate, I see it very, very rarely and tbh I don't think cards like BM are very good, except maybe in very high-powered games. It seems wrong to restrict the value I get from lands just to slightly reduce the impact of a couple cards that almost never get played, and which I can play around in most cases.
I only count 4 etbt lands in the nonbudget decklist (which means basically nothing anyway, the decklists are more examples than anything although I've been playing something close to the budget version recently as my collection is in transit atm), that seems pretty conservative to me. Especially since TW rarely gets played as a land. I think of my decks Phelddagrif is one of the ones that is most amenable to etbt lands. I'm basically never doing proactive things, so having 1 fewer mana on a turn, at basically any point, is almost always fine. If I found myself in a cEDH group I'd consider trimming down the greed but honestly in most places I've played I don't "need" to cast anything whatsoever until like turn 6 at the earliest, if it's any earlier it's usually like 1 removal spell to disable some dishpit who brought a cEDH deck to a casual game.
This is kind of an interesting topic from my perspective since, unlike most players, I tend to despise flexibility in cards, and that puts utility lands in a rather odd place for me. Here's an internal monologue on how I would assess Tolaria West:
Why would I play Tolaria West? Is it because it's a land? No, because Tolaria West is terrible at being a land; it's usually a worse Island. As such, the only reason I'd want to play Tolaria West is if I transmute it. How good is Tolaria West when I transmute it? That depends on the deck. At 1UU, the price is fair. It lines up with others tutors like Fabricate and Call the Gatewatch, but if I don't play any 0 mana cards that are worth spending 1UU to search for, then this is obviously terrible, and I shouldn't be playing it. The fact that Tolaria West can sometimes be played as a land isn't worth much because that's the floor of the card. I'm not playing Tolaria West because it can be played as a land. I'm playing it for other reasons, so every time I play Tolaria West as a land, that's a strike against it because it's terrible at being a land, and I could have played some other card in Tolaria West's place that is actually good at being a land instead. As such, for Tolaria West to be good, I need to rarely play it as a land, AND it's transmute effect needs to be better than any other card I could comparatively play with that ability. Just because Tolaria West is a tapped Island at worst doesn't mean other cards aren't better than it.
This whole thought process is something I've touched on before in the Brawl forum. Because it's pertinent to the conversation (and because the post there was probably read by all of two people, it being the Brawl forum and all), I'm going to shamelessly quote myself here.
So, I think I've already said my bit when it comes to Slice in Twain, but I don't think it would hurt much for me to elaborate either.
When I look at a card like Slice in Twain, what I ask myself is, "Why exactly do I want to play this card? Is it because it destroys artifacts and enchantments, or is it because it draws a card?" The answer to that question is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments. You can tell this is true because if you took off the "draw a card" clause, you would still consider the card, but if you took off the Disenchant clause, you wouldn't. That's because the Disenchant clause is the primary purpose of Slice in Twain and drawing the card is just extra. As such, the reason I would want to play Slice in Twain is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments and not because it draws cards.
Understanding this, I now ask myself, "Okay, if the reason I want to play Slice in Twain is because it destroys artifacts and enchantments, are there any other cards that are better at destroying artifacts and enchantments than Slice in Twain? If so, I should probably consider those cards first." Indeed, there just so happens to be other cards that are better at destroying artifacts and enchantments than Slice in Twain. Naturalize, for one, does exactly the same effect at the cost of 2 less mana. The fact that Naturalize doesn't draw a card isn't important here because the reason I would play Slice in Twain isn't because I care about it drawing cards; it's because I care about it destroying artifacts and enchantments. And If I happened to care about Slice in Twain drawing cards, I would compare it to something that draws cards instead.
In essence, this is ultimately what I care about when it comes to Magic cards: I want my cards to be good at doing whatever it is I put them in my deck to do. It's their rates that matter most, not their flexibility. Here's a hypothetical to illustrate my point:
Slice into Too Many Pieces3GG Instant
Destroy target artifact or enchantment. Draw a card. You gain 2 life. Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature. It gains reach until end of turn.
The argument here isn't about whether or not Slice into Too Many Pieces is costed appropriately. Perhaps it is. Perhaps it isn't. The argument here is about why I might want to play a given card in question. If it's because there's a particular effect on the card that I want, it needs to be able to compete with every other card with that effect for me to want to play with it. The card that does that effect "best" is usually the one I'm going to choose to play. That is, after all, why I'm playing the card in the first place, because it does whatever particular effect I want it to do at the best rate possible. The fact that some cards also do other things is more than often detrimental because it usually makes those particular cards worse at performing its desired effect (usually by increasing the card's casting cost). If any one card does two different effects I might want, I'll almost always just find two different cards that do each of those individual effects better than the one card.
In the case of Slice in Twain, I'm definitely going to play Naturalize before it if I'm looking for Disenchant effects. Slice in Twain just exists in this grey area where it's too poor at being a Naturalize for its cost and too poor at being card advantage for its cost for it to ever be playable in my eyes.
I would argue that TW is actually a pretty good island turn 1 since I basically never need mana on turn 1 (unless there's some serious cEDH stuff and I want to keep up rapid hybridization or whatever). I mean, think about the scale from "totally not a land" to "a totally reasonable card that's only a land". In the circumstance where you're stuck on 2 or 3 or whatever, the difference between an untapped blue land and a tapped blue land is perhaps significant, but the difference between drawing an etbt land or another uncastable nonland is huuuuuge. In terms of "how much is this a land?" I'd say an etbt mono-color land like TW is probably like 80% of the value of a fully-fledged land. That first turn can matter a lot, but after that turn TW is usually every bit as good as a regular island in most circumstances. As far as how good the tutor is, I think it's significantly worse than sylvan scrying for my deck during the early and midgame. By late-game it may not matter and be basically the same. Depending on meta I can maybe get away with a t3 transmute too. I think it's probably around 70% of the value of a sylvan scrying. If these numbers seem made up and arbitrary it's because they are.
I would not play a card that was, say, 50% island value or 50% sylvan scrying value (or some other combo that adds to 100%) but flexible cards generally aren't costed like that. You do pay a premium, but it's usually a reasonable amount. But I would bet that you aren't as squeamish about flexiblity as you think you are. Do you like vindicate, beast within, anguished unmaking, or even naturalize? In all those cases you're paying a premium for flexibility, but it ensures that it does the thing you need right now. It's just that you maybe aren't considering this because they're similar effects, whereas something like warrant // warden has very different effects, but in both cases you're paying extra for the flexibility. Trying to compare any single mode for those cards, of course there will be better options, but flexibility has value, especially in a format like commander. But you don't need to focus on commander to see the strength of flexibility, in (real) competitive formats flexible cards are played frequently, because the tradeoff is often worth it.
As far as slice in twain, I think what I'd want to consider are the play patterns of the deck. So for example, in which circumstances do I want to cast a disenchant effect, and in those circumstances is an extra 2 (or 3) mana going to be a burden? How valuable is the card, am I frequently running out of gas because my deck is excessively tempo-focused, or do I usually have a full grip anyway? When I want to cast disenchant specifically, is that a time when I'm likely to want the extra card? Do I want to be able to hold up mana to cast it during someone else's turn right after they play an artifact or enchantment, or is it ok to wait until my turn to untap to cast a disenchant? These sorts of questions. If I need early responses to fast combo then there's no question that naturalize is better. If games are taking an eternity and value is paramount, then slice in twain is better. I don't think there's a reasonable way to evaluate these two cards against each other in a total vacuum. I would probably trend toward naturalize but there are definitely circumstances where it's the other way around.
In the case of Slice in Twain, I'm definitely going to play Naturalize before it if I'm looking for Disenchant effects. Slice in Twain just exists in this grey area where it's too poor at being a Naturalize for its cost and too poor at being card advantage for its cost for it to ever be playable in my eyes.
I feel this is a fairly bad argument. I am certain that if slice in twain cost 3 instead of 4 that lots of people would play it, even though everything you said remainds true. Heck it reminds true at GG where it would be played in most every format. A better reason why it is not good enough is as follows: the effect destroy target artifact or enchantment is worth 1G. Adding cantrip to a card is typically costed at 2. Hence, the card would be average at a cost of 3G. Its cost is worse than that. Hence bad.
Also, you example card: the effect gain 2 life is not worth much (lets say the difference between a colored and an uncolored mana to be nice), the add a counter to target creature is bad, in that it is required. Thus, the card is still slightly below average but a bit better than Slice in Twain. Note that even average cards isnt good enough to be played.
Like, seriusly, your argument applies to most every tutor and suggests that you would never play any because they are too weak! (This might be a strawman, but I fail to see why it is not fair critic)
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I would argue that TW is actually a pretty good island turn 1 since I basically never need mana on turn 1 (unless there's some serious cEDH stuff and I want to keep up rapid hybridization or whatever).
For what it's worth, I wasn't evaluating Tolaria West in the context of your deck. I was just looking at the card on its own.
I mean, think about the scale from "totally not a land" to "a totally reasonable card that's only a land". In the circumstance where you're stuck on 2 or 3 or whatever, the difference between an untapped blue land and a tapped blue land is perhaps significant, but the difference between drawing an etbt land or another uncastable nonland is huuuuuge.
I agree. Maybe it's just that I don't particularly care if I get boned in these kinds of situations since Magic is random anyway. Sometimes I'm going to draw too many lands, and sometimes I'm not going to draw enough lands. Playing versatile cards doesn't not make that true, and it isn't as though playing some card over Tolaria West, be it a land or a spell, is going to affect those chances anyway since you're always just going to play whatever ratio of lands to spells is most appropriate for your deck regardless.
But I would bet that you aren't as squeamish about flexiblity as you think you are. Do you like vindicate, beast within, anguished unmaking, or even naturalize? In all those cases you're paying a premium for flexibility, but it ensures that it does the thing you need right now. It's just that you maybe aren't considering this because they're similar effects, whereas something like warrant // warden has very different effects, but in both cases you're paying extra for the flexibility. Trying to compare any single mode for those cards, of course there will be better options, but flexibility has value, especially in a format like commander. But you don't need to focus on commander to see the strength of flexibility, in (real) competitive formats flexible cards are played frequently, because the tradeoff is often worth it.
I'll admit, what constitutes the "minimum possible effect" for any given card I might care about is somewhat arbitrary. Vindicate, Beast Within, and Anguished Unmaking are all cards I certainly love, but I've always thought of these cards as also being the minimum possible effect (in this case, something that destroys any one card, whatever it happens to be). The minimum possible effect isn't anything tangible in my mind. It's just in how the effect is framed. So, when you say that maybe I'm not so squeamish about playing flexible cards, I suppose that is true. It just sounds to me like we're arguing more over semantics than anything else. That, or me using the word "flexibility" earlier was a grievous error on my part as a writer.
As far as slice in twain, I think what I'd want to consider are the play patterns of the deck. So for example, in which circumstances do I want to cast a disenchant effect, and in those circumstances is an extra 2 (or 3) mana going to be a burden? How valuable is the card, am I frequently running out of gas because my deck is excessively tempo-focused, or do I usually have a full grip anyway? When I want to cast disenchant specifically, is that a time when I'm likely to want the extra card? Do I want to be able to hold up mana to cast it during someone else's turn right after they play an artifact or enchantment, or is it ok to wait until my turn to untap to cast a disenchant? These sorts of questions. If I need early responses to fast combo then there's no question that naturalize is better. If games are taking an eternity and value is paramount, then slice in twain is better. I don't think there's a reasonable way to evaluate these two cards against each other in a total vacuum. I would probably trend toward naturalize but there are definitely circumstances where it's the other way around.
I think you're asking the right questions here. The way you're looking at Slice in Twain is the way I think anyone ought to look at a card when they're trying to decide if they should play it or not. The only problem I have here (if you can even call this a problem) is that this way of looking at cards is completely contextual. What you're saying (and this is true) is that Slice in Twain's value as a card can't be compared to Naturalize. The two cards are different, and because they are different, one isn't definitively better than the other. It doesn't matter how similar they might be. The fact that they are different alone means that there will be contexts where Naturalize is better and there will be contexts where Slice in Twain is better. I find this to be seriously unhelpful when discussing the worth of cards.
I think maybe it would help if I explained my philosophy behind comparing cards a bit more. See, cards are certainly different. We definitely agree on that. But something worth mentioning is that we also have values; there are certain qualities we see in cards that we care about because we associate these qualities with winning. For example, mana costs are one thing we care about, and cards with cheaper mana costs are preferential to cards with more expensive mana costs provided that these cards are identical in every other way.
Now, in a world where all cards are different and where all cards' worth can only be determined by context, the seemingly uncontroversial statement I made above, that cheaper mana costs are preferential to more expensive mana costs, still isn't always true. There will still be instances where, despite two cards being identical except for cost (like Lightning Bolt and Lightning Strike), the more expensive card will be better. I believe the takeaway from this is: just because Lightning Strike sometimes happens to be better than Lightning Bolt doesn't mean we shouldn't not perceive Lightning Bolt as being a better card. We can correctly attribute why Lightning Bolt is a "better" card than Lightning Strike even though we also understand that the worth of each card entirely depends on context. If we didn't do that, it would be impossible to assess any card. As humans, we aren't able to reliably determine the worth of every possible card in every possible context, and attempting to do so would be madness.
So, when I say that Slice in Twain is a worse Naturalize than Naturalize is, it's under a sort of commonly presumed context. I just tend to believe that, when talking about cards, we usually just discuss them with this commonly presumed context in mind. (Although maybe that's not particularly helpful in this thread if what you're looking for is specific advice regarding the worth of particular utility lands in your distinct Phelddagrif deck.)
I feel this is a fairly bad argument. I am certain that if slice in twain cost 3 instead of 4 that lots of people would play it, even though everything you said remainds true.
I mean, sure. Maybe other players would play Slice in Twain more if it cost 2G. That wouldn't really change for me though. What I care about is the rate I'm getting.
I want an effect (in this case, Naturalize), and I want that effect as cheaply as possible. The fact that Slice in Twain draws a card is irrelevant. It's not part of the effect I value, and it negatively affects the rate I pay for it. Is it useful to draw cards? Sure, but that's not the reason I'm playing Naturalize. You could replace the "draw a card" part with any sort of useful effect here, and it wouldn't matter because, so long as it negatively affects the rate for the effect I want, I'm going to play something else. If what I wanted was to draw cards, I would just find a different card that had a good rate on that.
Also, you example card: the effect gain 2 life is not worth much (lets say the difference between a colored and an uncolored mana to be nice), the add a counter to target creature is bad, in that it is required. Thus, the card is still slightly below average but a bit better than Slice in Twain. Note that even average cards isnt good enough to be played.
I think you're missing the point of the example here. The point of Slice into Too Many Pieces was to show that adding useful riders to a card doesn't necessarily make it more valuable if it makes the reason you're playing the card more expensive. In my example, it doesn't really matter what riders I chose. I just chose things that were all worse than Naturalize because if any of them were better than the Naturalize part of the effect then the Naturalize part might be misconstrued as a rider instead of the most valuable part of the card.
Like, seriusly, your argument applies to most every tutor and suggests that you would never play any because they are too weak! (This might be a strawman, but I fail to see why it is not fair critic)
Sorry, you lost me here. How does my argument apply to tutors?
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Re: # of fetches
I tend to be a little more conservative in fetches than the strictly best to cut down on shuffling. With 9/7 fetches you are always drawing one, which is good, but in addition to drawing one you often draw 2, 3, or 4 and that adds up to a lot more shuffling. So I err on the side of more fetches than most people but not the full boat just for convenience reasons.
ETB tapped lands
With 4 your chance of drawing >=1 in your opening 10 is 35%
With 2, it's 19%
1 in 3 games or 1 in 5 games. And in your opening 10 that almost always means you're forced to play it. So I try to aim for 2. Just my preference. 0 would be better
Re: Colorless sources
With 9 colorless sources in your deck your chances of drawing >=2 in your opening 10 cards become around 22%. This is is pretty regularly and it can make your hand very light on colors. It end to highly prioritize being able to cast my spells without drawing into colored sources.
I get that I'm more conservative than most but these cards add up to a lot of awkward hands in my experience.
If you look at CEDH decks as an example (since one of your points of reference is 9 fetches = solved), they typically run 30-ish lands and almost no colorless sources, in addition to a bunch of color producing accelerants. Your manabase doesn't run that many more color producing mana sources than CEDH Teferi (mono blue), for reference.
(which has 26 color producing lands and 6 or so mana producing accelerants for a total of 32, vs. your 32 or so in the budgetless build -- and this is a mono blue deck with an artifact theme, and a crapload of cantrips)
Obviously it's not a CEDH Deck but it may help some perspective on my color caution
He's saying it applies to tutors because tutors are, in essence, flexibility at the cost of efficiency. Demonic tutor is every card in your deck, except costing 1B more (in an installment plan, granted).
I'm personally interested in these lands for Phelddagrif but I'm sure most people don't care about that particular context. So I'm happy with any discussion of the cards (or even other utility lands I suppose). But I think many decks wouldn't have a difficult time playing TW as a tapped land on one, although it's much more likely to be a stumbling block for decks running sol ring and mana vault and other powerful T1 plays.
I strongly disagree with your argument that versatile cards doesn't change the odds of mana screw or flood. A big part of the reason to run 45 lands with many utility lands in Phelddagrif is that it gives you late-game power while lowering your risk of mana screw. If the deck was rebuilt with a reasonable balance of more potent, nonland versions of those effects - rest in peace instead of scavenger grounds, mind's eye instead of arch of orazca, etc - you'd have to accept a significantly higher chance of mana screw, but at the benefit of having more powerful/efficient versions of those effects (ofc Phelddagrif is a special snowflake that doesn't WANT more powerful versions of those effects, which is why the balance is what it is). Generally-speaking, the point of flexible cards is to ensure you aren't flooded or screwed on ANY particular axis. Demystify is more efficient than disenchant at removing enchantments, but having disenchant means you won't be "screwed" on artifact removal when you need it, or "flooded" on enchantment removal when you don't. And the same is even more true of anguished unmaking. For almost any effect you want, there's a more efficient version that does the precise thing you want better, but flexibility is valuable because it gives you the reliability of having the effect you want more often, and having effects you can't use less often. Tapping for mana just happens to be one of the effects that you want the most often, so a card doing that dramatically improves its chances of being useful.
I think I left out something important about the slice in twain comparison - the reason I think it's hard to say which is better in a vacuum is because they're basically both pretty close in efficiency (as compared to bolt vs strike where bolt is obviously better in 99.9% of cases). Slice in twain is probably a little bit worse, but they're close enough that I think there are very reasonable places where I'd want to play either (as in, play in my deck, not just to have in hand during a game - of course there are many cards that are good to have in hand in very specific situations, but aren't reliably useful enough to put into a deck). But, at least outside a cEDH situation where tempo is incredibly important, I think you'd be wrong not to play a 2G or god forbid a GG version of slice in twain over naturalize. I generally agree that, especially for answers, being able to do the specific thing is of utmost importance, but that doesn't mean any additional effect that's less impactful than the main effect is automatically worthless.
Disenchant is a somewhat misleading example, I think, because in the situation where you want to cast it, you're usually not concerned with value because you're trying to break up a combo or at least destroy something extremely powerful, so value is significantly less important than ensuring you're able to cast it. But maybe something a little less urgent, something like baleful strix. Nobody ever seriously played tidehollow strix outside limited (afaik), despite costing the same and even having an extra power. But baleful strix has seen tons of competitive play because, even though the main thing it does is be a deathtouch flyer, getting a free card out of it significantly raises the value of the card.
Tolaria West is great. To me its like a sorcery speed crop rotation for a higher cost but +0 card advantage instead of -1.
Vesuva is wonderful even if the deck barely runs any utility lands as it can become a 2nd copy of a dual land or gate for mana fixing.
Amonkhet/Hour deserts, to me, are a mixed bag. I personally find the "Desert of the [trait]" to be clunkers when it comes to consistency and speed of plays, usually resulting in me debating on replacing those with the cycle lands such as Tranquil Thicket from onslaught. The mono pain deserts on the other hand I find to be much more useful for the plays they can provide. Now my favorite of these is ones like Scavenger Grounds and Endless Sands for their utility purposes.
Re: # of fetches
I tend to be a little more conservative in fetches than the strictly best to cut down on shuffling. With 9/7 fetches you are always drawing one, which is good, but in addition to drawing one you often draw 2, 3, or 4 and that adds up to a lot more shuffling. So I err on the side of more fetches than most people but not the full boat just for convenience reasons.
ETB tapped lands
With 4 your chance of drawing >=1 in your opening 10 is 35%
With 2, it's 19%
1 in 3 games or 1 in 5 games. And in your opening 10 that almost always means you're forced to play it. So I try to aim for 2. Just my preference. 0 would be better
Re: Colorless sources
With 9 colorless sources in your deck your chances of drawing >=2 in your opening 10 cards become around 22%. This is is pretty regularly and it can make your hand very light on colors. It end to highly prioritize being able to cast my spells without drawing into colored sources.
I get that I'm more conservative than most but these cards add up to a lot of awkward hands in my experience.
If you look at CEDH decks as an example (since one of your points of reference is 9 fetches = solved), they typically run 30-ish lands and almost no colorless sources, in addition to a bunch of color producing accelerants. Your manabase doesn't run that many more color producing mana sources than CEDH Teferi (mono blue), for reference.
(which has 26 color producing lands and 6 or so mana producing accelerants for a total of 32, vs. your 32 or so in the budgetless build -- and this is a mono blue deck with an artifact theme, and a crapload of cantrips)
Obviously it's not a CEDH Deck but it may help some perspective on my color caution
I don't see fetches as being a problem shuffling-wise. Just say you're fetching X and then use the mana and pass the turn, then search and shuffle. Plus with duals they're easy to find as the only white-bordered cards (usually)(unless you have a/b duals because you're crazy). Tutors like demo can take a while because you often want to cast the card the same turn, although I still don't think I'd water down my deck just because of that.
Etbt I think is highly dependent on the deck. At least in the case of my Phelddagrif, I see very few problems with it. Of course decks wishing to play a lot of 1-drops, for example, are going to feel differently. But it's not like you're FORCED to play it t1, maybe you have a t1 play but not a t2, or your t2 or t3 play don't use all your mana. You have to have a perfect curve hand to be unable to play an etbt land without hurting your tempo, which is usually pretty unlikely. I think the bigger risk is that you'll topdeck it when you have 4 lands and want to cast a 5-drop. As long as you have other lands in hand that don't etbt, etbt lands are rarely a problem, since you just need a 1-mana gap at any point to play it without tempo loss.
One thing you aren't considering that is important RE: colorless sources is that in, for example, my Phelddagrif build, I'm running 45 lands. Compare to, say, your Ephara build that has 37(I think? Labeling card counts is nice for primers imo) lands, that means even if I'm running 8 colorless sources, that still puts me on the same par as a deck with that number of lands, fixing-wise. Having more lands means you can work less hard on fixing and still get the same results. Not to say that every deck should run a ton of lands, but that, if you're already planning on running a large land base, that you should probably run more utility lands (some of which will be colorless) to ensure you don't run out of gas when a high percentage of your deck is lands.
I think I count 6 totally-colorless lands in my budget Phelddagrif build, with a few more that are colorless but can get colors (i.e. blighted woodland). The budgetless has fewer lands AND has 8 colorless lands, BUT it also has 9 rainbow lands from the fetches, so the color count for, say, blue is still 25, which is more than a lot of 2-color deck manabases have for their colors. Could be higher, yes, and I'm always happy to cut a utility land I'm not using, but it's still a pretty solid number imo. In fact I count (I believe) only 21 blue-producing lands in your Ephara deck, for example, and I'm assuming you get by just fine with that (Budget grif also has 21).
I don't bring up 9 fetches as a cEDH thing. I don't think you need to be playing cEDH to want to have a reliable manabase. Having a perfectly optimized manabase doesn't mean you have to play, well, anything in particular, and I think there's value in optimizing manabases even for decks that aren't competitive at all. If you want to do something, do it well, even if that something is jank. And the first step in doing something well is having the right mana.
Of course cEDH has a very different value system than most normal EDH decks. arch of orazca is way too slow to be useful in most cEDH decks, for example. But it's extremely good in Phelddagrif. There aren't many utility lands that give utility immediately, most of them take repeated activations to justify their spot, which just isn't happening in cEDH. Fixing, on the other hand, is useful immediately It's just a different meta, is all. I understand why they want to primarily maximize fixing but that doesn't make it necessary here. Also, at 26 color-producing lands that's barely more more blue lands in a mono-colored deck than my (3-color) Phelddagrif builds do anyway, but I suppose that's besides the point.
I used to swear by Tolaria West but I've cut it in almost every deck that ever played it. It never feels good to draw. Early game it's just a tapped Island, midgame do you really want to spend 3 mana to fetch a 0 drop?, late game the thing you'd search for is useless. MAYBE I'd play it in Dimir if I really wanted to run Coffers, but I don't have UB deck right now. If you really want to fetch a land Expedition Map is better.
DG-
Sorry, I was looking at your budgetless build with 41 lands and 9 colorless.
My Ephara build runs 37 lands...but it runs:
land tax
weathered wayfarer
tithe
and 4 mana rocks that make colors
32 lands that produce colored mana
There are only 21 some blue lands, but +3 fixers and +3 mana rocks that always make blue And the deck has a very low blue commitment relative to white. So closer to 27.
And that's before considering the card draw element, or the distribution of cards.
But if we're talking about the budget build then I'd have to re-look at that.
In the budget build, you're running so high on lands that I think it's reasonably fine. That said I just don't understand the construction of the deck well enough to speak to it I don't think. The land count is very high, and the value count is a little low, so I have to assume it's something to do with the sheer volume of reactive spells you're playing that you play all those lands instead of filtering spells.
I really struggle to imagine that arch of orazca is going to be better than, say, Mystic Remora? Or even Ponder.
I feel like you could probably shave 2-3 flex lands and add some more card draw, but I'm probably really misunderstanding how the deck works. Sorry
Not trying to be preachy at all just trying to give you my perspective on the way flex lands fit into a manabase Which honestly probably isn't that helpful I guess since it's so intrinsically tied to how a deck functions, and I just don't get this one
He's saying it applies to tutors because tutors are, in essence, flexibility at the cost of efficiency. Demonic tutor is every card in your deck, except costing 1B more (in an installment plan, granted).
I'm starting to think I may have explained everything in a really misleading way.
I'm not sure this will be helpful, but to reiterate, what I care most about is rate. If the effect that I want is "put a card from my deck into my hand," then what I'm probably looking for is the card that does that as efficiently as possible. You can interpret what the effect is however you like. Maybe the effect I want is Naturalize plus draw a card. I don't know why I'd want that specific effect, but if that's the effect I want, I want it at the best possible rate.
But I think many decks wouldn't have a difficult time playing TW as a tapped land on one, although it's much more likely to be a stumbling block for decks running sol ring and mana vault and other powerful T1 plays.
I'm with you that most decks won't have a problem playing Tolaria West on turn 1, Sol Ring or not. The problem with lands that enter play tapped is that you can't really control when you draw them though, and lands that enter play tapped tend to get significantly worse after the first few turns of the game. Sometimes you luck out, and you can find a way to weave them into your curve without losing any tempo, but that isn't always the case.
I strongly disagree with your argument that versatile cards doesn't change the odds of mana screw or flood. A big part of the reason to run 45 lands with many utility lands in Phelddagrif is that it gives you late-game power while lowering your risk of mana screw. If the deck was rebuilt with a reasonable balance of more potent, nonland versions of those effects - rest in peace instead of scavenger grounds, mind's eye instead of arch of orazca, etc - you'd have to accept a significantly higher chance of mana screw, but at the benefit of having more powerful/efficient versions of those effects (ofc Phelddagrif is a special snowflake that doesn't WANT more powerful versions of those effects, which is why the balance is what it is).
Sorry, but I'm afraid I don't follow. Why would you remove lands to make room for spells? Aren't you going to play a set number of lands to begin with? Like, say 45 is the "sweet spot" where that's the perfect balance of lands to spells for your deck, 46 being slightly too many, and 44 being, on average, slightly too few. Given those 45 lands, some of those are going to be utility lands because although you need a high enough density of land to ensure that you draw plenty of them each game, you don't need all 45 of those lands to be Command Tower; you're comfortable accepting some tiny amount of color screw and/or tempo loss because utility lands can be powerful, and it's worthwhile trading a small amount of consistency for a potentially larger amount of power.
Now, having said all that, the idea that you would trade out Scavenger Grounds for Rest in Peace or Arch of Orazca for Mind's Eye doesn't make sense to me. Like, I get that maybe you wouldn't want to include Scavenger Grounds if you already decided you were going to play Rest in Peace because maybe that's too much graveyard hate, and you think you could benefit more by playing some other utility land instead, but that's exactly it; you'd be playing some other utility land instead of Scavenger Grounds. You wouldn't mess with that 45 number because exchanging Scavenger Grounds for Rest in Peace would now leave you with slightly too few land. So, I don't see how you've reached the conclusion you have.
Generally-speaking, the point of flexible cards is to ensure you aren't flooded or screwed on ANY particular axis. Demystify is more efficient than disenchant at removing enchantments, but having disenchant means you won't be "screwed" on artifact removal when you need it, or "flooded" on enchantment removal when you don't. And the same is even more true of anguished unmaking. For almost any effect you want, there's a more efficient version that does the precise thing you want better, but flexibility is valuable because it gives you the reliability of having the effect you want more often, and having effects you can't use less often. Tapping for mana just happens to be one of the effects that you want the most often, so a card doing that dramatically improves its chances of being useful.
Again, I agree with a lot you're saying here, but I'm still trying to make sense of it all since I don't really see how you've reached the conclusion you have.
Say deck 'A' has 10 removal spells and 10 card draw spells. So, 20 cards total. Say deck 'B' has 10 removal spells and 10 card draw spells just like deck 'A' does except all the removal spells in deck 'B' also double as card draw and vice-versa, so deck 'B' only has 10 cards total. Deck 'A' and deck 'B' are each playing the same number of removal spells and card draw spells, so the chance you draw any one kind of particular effect is the same even though the spells in deck 'B' are more versatile. To increase the probability of drawing more removal, you would need to increase the total number of removal spells you were playing.
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Versatility is a really tough thing in EDH. I see the appeal. For my part I usually will not play cantrip spells that are inefficient mana-wise. Dismiss for example is just not a card I would put in a deck. But a lot of that comes from the way I build, I tend to want very efficient consistent card drawing engines at the core of my deck (tuvasa, gitrog, ephara) -- or to play a high ratio of strong draw spells (Inalla). With that kind of design efficiency in cards is usually more important than drawing a card with an effect.
(This is not intrinsically wrong)
But this Pheldagrif deck is really instant heavy and focused on playing reactive spells politically, and a lot of its value comes from being able to leave up mana and react and refill its hand with reactive stuff.
I think that's why painfully slow cards like Arch of Orazca seem pretty good in it. It's almost always keeping mana up to do something reactive and being able to use that becomes efficient. Similarly getting a card when it has to react is good. It also seems to want to play a very slow game which rewards those types of endgame lands.
I'm not sure how I feel about the construction but in the context of the deck I think I understand those types of cards.
I used to swear by Tolaria West but I've cut it in almost every deck that ever played it. It never feels good to draw. Early game it's just a tapped Island, midgame do you really want to spend 3 mana to fetch a 0 drop?, late game the thing you'd search for is useless. MAYBE I'd play it in Dimir if I really wanted to run Coffers, but I don't have UB deck right now. If you really want to fetch a land Expedition Map is better.
Better in the colorless sense for its ability to be run outside of blue deck, but also has the downsides. Map can be countered for being cast, affected by a stony silence, stopped by nevermore/meddling mage, more vulnerable to discard effects because of it being a nonland, or being forced to etbt by kismet/frozen aether/root maze. It also can't tutor for 0-mana spells.
A Tolaria West can only be stopped by a pithing needle effect or by countering the transmute ability. Its only downside is the UU in total cost paid for its effect rather than 2 but for the effective payment of 3 mana like map. Sure it etbt as a land and is the equivalent of an island, but not even expedition map doubles as a mana source.
[
Also it can tutor for: lots of cards
Now you tell me, would I want to ever have the option for tutoring for just a 0-drop with such options avaible?
Well, this kinda goes to the core of the versatility argument. There are a lot of cool things it can get but there's an opportunity cost of an ETB tapped land, being sorcery speed, and being fairly inefficient.
Most of those things can be tutored for with one of the variety of 1-2 CMC tutors, many of which are instant speed. Or can spread their cost for multiple turns (e.g. map). Or can be tutored for with Trinket mage, or count as an artifact for purposes, or can be recycled.
Putting a land back in your hand is quite a bit more difficult than putting a spell back in your hand, so using TW as an engine is pretty hard vs. something like Vampiric Tutor.
All things being equal I always find myself cutting Tolaria West unless I have really important cards that are core to my gameplan that it can get, that my color combination struggles to find. I think it's somewhat more niche than you have suggested. But that's just my opinion of course.
I play TW in Kefnet, the Mindful. It can tutor Scavenger Grounds, Strip Mine, Mana Crypt and Pact of Negation. Very few other targets, but since Kefnet lets me pick it up late game to transmute I think it is worth it. Also worth mentioning that if you play delve spells it adds to your graveyard.
I've never played Vesuva, but it can be great if there are a lot of high powered lands in your meta, or even cards like Legion's Landing and Itlimoc, Cradle of the sun. If you don't have good targets from your opponents it better be an extra Cabal Coffers or something else high value.
Some deserts are better than others. Scavenger Grounds should be in most decks, in my opinion. I play the red and black 'pain' lands in Rakdos, Lord of Riots to help me cast Kozilek, The Great Distortion. Have not played any of the others and I think only the black pain land is marginally playable outside of a monocolor deck. The cycling lands are weaker than the other two cycles 99% of the time. Don't think it is worth running extra deserts to be able to activate Scavenger Grounds multiple times. Unless you have other benefits to running deserts I would stay away from it.
Mikokoro I play sometimes in decks that make way more mana than my opponents. If you have the mana to cast the extra spells but your opponents don't, you are going to benefit more.
we're kind of splitting hairs here and I'm sure neither of us can really be certain where the optimal number of sources for each color is, short of playing the deck a near-infinite number of times. The important thing here is that we're playing *roughly* the same number of sources for each color (and again, mine is a 3-color deck so it's not exactly a fair comparison). It's totally possible I should be playing a few more colored sources, but the point is that we're in the same ballpark and you clearly don't think YOU'RE short on colored sources.
(also FWIW I've never played a list exactly identical to the budgetless build - I generally prefer to focus on the structure and strategy of the deck, rather than specific cards, when trying to help people build it. The main reason either list exists is for convention, my actual played list changes constantly. So it's not really worth worrying too much about a fixing or a utility land in such fine-grained detail)
Treasure cruise is a solid card for the deck but hey, you only get so many slots and it's a dead draw early game. Mystic Remora I think plays badly with what the deck is trying to do politically, and in terms of its usual play pattern. You'll have to take my word for it that Arch is significantly better than either the majority of the time.
As far as versatility, of course every deck has to weigh the considerations of flexibility with cost, value, etc. I'm not saying that one way or the other is necessarily better, just trying to get the shape of where playing X vs Y is correct. Arch being better than remora in my build doesn't say much about other lists that are doing different things.
@ArrogantAxolotl
I think his point is that you never want the effect "search for a card", what you REALLY want is just to draw the card you were planning to search for. When you want creature removal you want to draw creature removal, when you want an overrun you want to draw an overrun. Drawing one when you wanted the other is bad. Drawing a tutor means you're effective drawing BOTH...but at a less efficient cost. Demonic tutor is like a split card of every card in your deck, with the cost + 1B.
The cost of running a tapped land is always going to depend on the deck, so I definitely wouldn't recommend them for all decks. Phelddagrif in particular, since I very very rarely have need to play something on curve, is a particularly good place to run tapped lands imo. The odds of drawing an etbt land when I needed a non-etbt land are pretty miniscule.
I think we're approaching deckbuilding from different angles. I never have some set-in-stone number of lands I intend to play, it's always a balancing act of value vs reliability - fewer lands means higher value, more lands means more reliability. My budget Phelddagrif build skews hard towards reliability because I think the deck can do quite well with a very low amount of value (that's kind of the main thing the deck DOES). But I think most control builds would reduce the number of lands and add more high-impact, high-efficiency cards like Rest in peace, consecrated sphinx, etc, and I think from the perspective of building a straightforward control deck those would be good decisions, replacing, say, Arch with Con Sphinx. I don't think it would suddenly be too short on lands, but it would probably be a few percent more likely to get stuck on mana. That would probably be worth it for the opportunity to play a bomb like Con Sphinx for that deck, though. So yes, I think you absolutely can cut lands for spells and vice versa. There's no "right" amount of lands for a deck - or if there is, it'd would require a million simulations to figure out. It's mostly a matter of how much you want to risk running out of value versus risking getting mana-screwed.
Your last paragraph is kind of confusing. You've got a deck with 10 AB spells and one with 10 A and 10 B spells. Ok, so then the first deck could...run 5 more A and 5 more B and have better odds of drawing either? Dedicate the 10 extra slots to some other effect? You only have the "same odds of drawing the right spell" if you're putting blanks into those remaining 10 slots.
[
Also it can tutor for: lots of cards
Now you tell me, would I want to ever have the option for tutoring for just a 0-drop with such options avaible?
Well, this kinda goes to the core of the versatility argument. There are a lot of cool things it can get but there's an opportunity cost of an ETB tapped land, being sorcery speed, and being fairly inefficient.
Most of those things can be tutored for with one of the variety of 1-2 CMC tutors, many of which are instant speed. Or can spread their cost for multiple turns (e.g. map). Or can be tutored for with Trinket mage, or count as an artifact for purposes, or can be recycled.
Putting a land back in your hand is quite a bit more difficult than putting a spell back in your hand, so using TW as an engine is pretty hard vs. something like Vampiric Tutor.
All things being equal I always find myself cutting Tolaria West unless I have really important cards that are core to my gameplan that it can get, that my color combination struggles to find. I think it's somewhat more niche than you have suggested. But that's just my opinion of course.
Vampiric is great but it places the searched card on top of the deck instead of the hand which is a fairly big difference in a reason to search for a card as the searched card is now eating your normal draw.
Trinket Mage I will give you is a step up as its useful for the artifacts.
It being a sorcery-speed card isn't that big of a determent unless the other tutors it is competing with are
1)Instant-speed
2)Places the searched card into the hand
3)Equal or cheaper in the mana spent.
One of my favorite utility lands is Alchemist's Refuge - in fact, I've often called it the best card in my five color superfriends deck and have lost count of how many games it has won. It's almost always the first card I tutor with Tempt with Discovery. This is Vedalken Orrery or Leyline of Anticipation on a land. Granted, you have to use two mana and tap it, but instant speed board wipes, end of turn set up, and just being able to respond at instant speed is fantastic. I run this in several of my UG decks and its weaker cousin Winding Canyons in some decks with other color identities.
Tolaria West is a 3 Mana, uncounterable tutor for the utility land you need most at the time, the 0 cost artifact you need most at the time, or the color fixing land you need. That is takes up a land slot matters as well. While you want to use it's spell mode, as it's land mode is an etb tapped island, the fact that it can be used as a land that makes colored Mana means that it makes more hands playable. Sometimes you don't have a first turn play and your land tutor in hand being Tolaria West rather than Expedition Map or Sylvan Scrying means you have enough land to keep the hand. If you are in green or black it's value decreases somewhat as there are more spells available that tutor for lands more effectively, but it still has value there. In OPs case, whether or not it's worthwhile depends on the answer to the question of how often he uses the tutor mode and feels that it's a good play.
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One of my favorite utility lands is Alchemist's Refuge - in fact, I've often called it the best card in my five color superfriends deck and have lost count of how many games it has won. It's almost always the first card I tutor with Tempt with Discovery. This is Vedalken Orrery or Leyline of Anticipation on a land. Granted, you have to use two mana and tap it, but instant speed board wipes, end of turn set up, and just being able to respond at instant speed is fantastic. I run this in several of my UG decks and its weaker cousin Winding Canyons in some decks with other color identities.
I kind of intentionally left out alchemist's refuge because my deck has a very weird relationship with that card which didn't really seem applicable to a more general discussion. My deck absolutely adores doing things at instant speed. But for that reason, outside of land, the deck is almost entirely instants, with a few (very low-cmc) enchantments and maybe 1-2 (similarly cheap) artifacts, no planeswalkers, and no creatures outside of the commander. The only thing that gets any value (other than the commander) are those board wipes that aren't instants already. Turning board wipes into instants is quite nice, but it really only benefits a tiny handful of the cards in my deck. So it's this sort of weird place where it's simultaneously everything my deck wants to do, while not actually doing hardly anything because my deck already does the thing without it.
It's always sort of teetered on the brink of getting cut for me. I don't think it's a bad card - it's an effect I really like - but it's sort of an uncomfortable fit for the deck.
Tolaria West is a 3 Mana, uncounterable tutor for the utility land you need most at the time, the 0 cost artifact you need most at the time, or the color fixing land you need. That is takes up a land slot matters as well. While you want to use it's spell mode, as it's land mode is an etb tapped island, the fact that it can be used as a land that makes colored Mana means that it makes more hands playable. Sometimes you don't have a first turn play and your land tutor in hand being Tolaria West rather than Expedition Map or Sylvan Scrying means you have enough land to keep the hand. If you are in green or black it's value decreases somewhat as there are more spells available that tutor for lands more effectively, but it still has value there. In OPs case, whether or not it's worthwhile depends on the answer to the question of how often he uses the tutor mode and feels that it's a good play.
TW operates great on either end of the spectrum - super early with a mana-light hand it's usually an island with no real downside. Super late the cost is pretty irrelevant and getting my best utility land is awesome. In the middle, though, that cost always feels real clunky.
I think the real question for me, personally, is whether the option to play it for a blue in mana-light hands justifies its spot over sylvan scrying/expo map (or maybe I should run all of them).
I think his point is that you never want the effect "search for a card", what you REALLY want is just to draw the card you were planning to search for. When you want creature removal you want to draw creature removal, when you want an overrun you want to draw an overrun. Drawing one when you wanted the other is bad. Drawing a tutor means you're effective drawing BOTH...but at a less efficient cost. Demonic tutor is like a split card of every card in your deck, with the cost + 1B.
Sure, you could describe Demonic Tutor this way. I don't think that changes that "search for a card" is an effect certain decks want though. For example, let's say you're some kind of combo deck. Maybe you play multiple combos, but one combo you play is Dark Depths + Vampire Hexmage. Now, say you want to increase the probability of drawing certain cards for your combo. One way you could do this is by including more cards in your deck with the same effect, but for something like Dark Depths and Vampire Hexmage, that isn't exactly the case. There's functionally only one Dark Depths, and while other counter removing cards like AEther Snap exist, they're still worse than using Demonic Tutor to find Vampire Hexmage.
Alternatively, say you play a card like Mana Crypt in your deck. You don't even need to treat Demonic Tutor as a tutor effect in order to want to play it since, if you treat Demonic Tutor as a ramp spell, Mana Crypt is still bonkers when it costs 1B, and you'd want to play that anyway. The fact that Demonic Tutor is also versatile needn't even factor into that decision if you look at it from that perspective.
The cost of running a tapped land is always going to depend on the deck, so I definitely wouldn't recommend them for all decks. Phelddagrif in particular, since I very very rarely have need to play something on curve, is a particularly good place to run tapped lands imo. The odds of drawing an etbt land when I needed a non-etbt land are pretty miniscule.
I don't think there are many decks where I would advocate ETBTapped lands even when this is true though. The opportunity cost of playing only lands that enter the battlefield untapped is just so low. Having said that, I do think a lot of decks can get away with playing an extremely small number of ETBTapped lands because ETBTapped lands get better the more lands you play that don't enter tapped since that increases the likelihood that you won't get stuck playing an ETBTapped land on a turn you don't want to.
I think we're approaching deckbuilding from different angles. I never have some set-in-stone number of lands I intend to play, it's always a balancing act of value vs reliability - fewer lands means higher value, more lands means more reliability. My budget Phelddagrif build skews hard towards reliability because I think the deck can do quite well with a very low amount of value (that's kind of the main thing the deck DOES). But I think most control builds would reduce the number of lands and add more high-impact, high-efficiency cards like Rest in peace, consecrated sphinx, etc, and I think from the perspective of building a straightforward control deck those would be good decisions, replacing, say, Arch with Con Sphinx. I don't think it would suddenly be too short on lands, but it would probably be a few percent more likely to get stuck on mana. That would probably be worth it for the opportunity to play a bomb like Con Sphinx for that deck, though. So yes, I think you absolutely can cut lands for spells and vice versa. There's no "right" amount of lands for a deck - or if there is, it'd would require a million simulations to figure out. It's mostly a matter of how much you want to risk running out of value versus risking getting mana-screwed.
Yeah, it certainly looks like we're approaching deckbuilding from different angles. I'm not sure I agree that there isn't a "right" number of lands for any given deck though. I feel fairly certain there is, and I don't think you need a million simulations to figure it out either. In fact, I think most players naturally stumble across this number heuristically. Have you ever seen a table like this one from Dawnglare? It uses a kind of math called hypergeometric distribution to calculate the probabilities of making a land drop by turn X.
Normally, when building decks, I think a lot of players, myself included, tend to trust heuristics when it comes to the number of lands they play; they just sort of get a feel for the right number, and they can generally tell when they stray away from it. What's interesting to note is that that heuristic is going to vary for different people. Some players, given the exact same list, are going to feel that, on average, they draw too many lands. Some will feel like they draw too few. The equilibrium for any given player, depending on the deck they're playing (a deck with a lower curve will obviously want fewer lands, a deck with a higher curve will want more lands, etc.), can be described by the table I've linked you. Essentially, each player has a baked in preference for the number of lands they want to play. That preference is certainly going to fluctuate depending upon things like the aforementioned mana curve as well as things like the number of Ponder-esque cantrips played, but when you factor all of those things in, you can definitely say that player X ought to play Y number of lands because that is what they most prefer. (The number of lands you ought to play if you want to maximize your win rate is another subject entirely.)
Your last paragraph is kind of confusing. You've got a deck with 10 AB spells and one with 10 A and 10 B spells. Ok, so then the first deck could...run 5 more A and 5 more B and have better odds of drawing either? Dedicate the 10 extra slots to some other effect? You only have the "same odds of drawing the right spell" if you're putting blanks into those remaining 10 slots.
If the deck with 10 AB spells ran 5 extra A spells and 5 extra B spells, yes, they certainly would have better odds of drawing both A and B compared to the other deck. This isn't a fair comparison though. You could totally flip the situation around and say that the deck with 10 A spells and 10 B spells is just going to play 10 more of each, and that deck would then have the better odds of drawing an A spell or a B spell. The number of cards you use here doesn't matter. What matters is if a deck can achieve the correct ratio of one kind of effect that it wants to another. Provided a deck reaches that number, the versatility of their spells doesn't matter.
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Anyway, right now I'm looking with a microscope at my Phelddagrif list (as usual) and looking at all the possible lands, and thinking about what actually makes a good, useful utility land. For reference, here are the ones I consider unimpeachably excellent for that deck, but this is a general MCD so you don't need to worry about my POV for talking about the cards, just thought I'd give some info for those curious.
path of ancestry - fixing land that's decent already, but then also gives multiple scrys over the course of the game.
arcane lighthouse - silver bullet for voltron, narset, etc that would otherwise require specific cards, pretty easy include for as much removal as I run
strip mine - stand in for any LD lands, of which there are many. Strip mine is arguably the best but they're all kind of a muchness. Still, gotta have at least one.
kor haven - maybe my favorite, or second behind arch. Steers so many attacks elsewhere for a minimal cost, and synergizes amazingly with board wipes forcing people to go wide into them.
mystifying maze - the same but generally worse. But bad kor haven is still great.
okina, temple to the grandfathers - speeds up a win by at least 1 turn pretty easily and costs basically nothing.
scavenger grounds - all the grave hate you need, in a land slot. Like arcane lighthouse, I love having silver bullets hidden in my manabase.
Anyway, so the utility lands I actually want to talk about, starting with...
tolaria west - this is a card that I've auto-included a lot over the years, and I find myself wondering why. sylvan scrying gets played only occasionally by me, in Phelddagrif and elsewhere, but that's a cheaper version of the same effect. And, especially for a multicolor control deck like Phelddagrif, tapping double blue while still keeping up my best responses (usually counters) can be a tall order even for a great manabase. Of course, tolaria west can just be played as a land, which is a very relevant mode if it's the only land in your hand on turn 3, but then I could probably cast sylvan scrying and be happier in most cases, and I probably wouldn't keep a 2 lander with TW anyway so if TW was a scrying I could probably cast the scrying. So I'm torn - on one hand, if you're already doing a lot of work in your lands, having this to search up your silver bullets or best late-game value can be really strong, on the other hand it's pretty clunky anytime before turn 8 or so.
Vesuva - I've generally liked running thespian's stage in the deck, since you can use that as a fixing land early if needed, and then copy whatever crazy value land you like late-game, whether yours or someone else's. Vesuva I find a lot trickier because, while it's more efficient, if it's my last land on turn 3 it's probably coming down as a tapped basic, or at best dual, and frequently that can be true until pretty late. I do like that it can be a legitimate fixer by copying an enemy land on an early turn, but it always feels a little weak. Maybe it's more feel-bads than is-bads, though.
hashep oasis/shefet dunes/cycling deserts/etc - I initially dismissed desert synergy as being a bit too weak for my deck and EDH in general, but I'm reconsidering. In terms of sacrifice, especially the hashep oasis cycle costs basically nothing, as a half-a-pain-land it likely won't cost more than a few life total over the course of the game, if that. they enter untapped and can always tap for colorless. The bonus from oasis in particular is pretty decent for speeding up commander damage kills, especially on my little 4-power beater, but the main reason to run them is as backups for scavenger grounds, which is easily the easiest-to-play grave hate tool around imo. The cycling deserts are a little harder to justify, as they're otherwise strictly worse than other cycling lands (3 cycles of cycling lands, in fact), but really, unless you're cycling through LFTL or something, is it going to matter that much for most decks? By the point you're cycling lands you probably have plenty of mana anyway, and it gives you extra fodder for the scavenger grounds.
mikokoro, center of the sea - this is one I haven't looked at seriously for a long time, but I think it has some political application, specifically if the game has gone archenemy and you need someone to find an answer to one specific player. If it's 3v1, then you're drawing 3 cards for the cost of 1, kind of. Obviously this sort of effect can also be bad, which is why howling mine is not my cup of tea, but being able to activate it only when necessary solves that issue, plus of course not costing a whole card of value, and the upside is definitely real when you need it.
soldevi excavations - no one plays this card but it's kind of interesting. Probably not justifiable in 3-color since the island restriction is too risky and the upside is too low, but it's not a terrible rate I guess. Although really, considering the cost of scrying is essentially the same for isolated watchtower, and the risk of failure is significantly lower, it's probably just a worse card. And it's not like watchtower is very good either.
isolated watchtower - I mean, right? It's probably not that good? Maybe if you have a bunch of basics. My good decks usually run only a couple unless they're mono-colored though. A scry is still a scry, but then you need to be behind on lands too. Idk man, seems like a lot to jump through and pretty dead if people aren't playing ramp.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Tolaria West I mostly go to if it can find me a powerful 0 drop as well (e.g. tormod's crypt, mana crypt sometimes, etc.). I don't usually play it unless I have both lands and 0 drops that I want. That splice draw spell is pretty cool if you're playing an arcane deck too.
I love Vesuva, but only in a deck with cabal coffers Maybe another lands deck but too many lands I want are legendary (cradle, nykthos, etc.). It's cool as a second maze of ith sometimes in my frog deck too. Two mazes can really lock a game out sometimes. I rarely have space for this, only in my lands deck.
I don't like any of the deserts except Scavenging grounds, but I don't build a lot of decks that can tolerate tapped lands or sacrificing lands for small benefits at expensive mana costs. The mana costs on most of the deserts are way too high for me, and the cycling ones I think are pretty weak in general.
Mikokoro I could see in group hug decks but I rarely want to spend 3 mana to draw a card in EDH.
I would never play Soldevi Excavations but I'm really gun shy about playing something that is gonna get me double stripmined. Maybe in a deck with lots of crucible effects.
My general philosophy is to play 3-4 colorless only lands at most in a 2 color deck and 1-2 in 3 color decks unless I have tons of filtration (e.g. I think I run 3 in my grixis deck that runs so many cantrips and the good black tutors). Similarly I try to keep the ETB tapped lands very low (not more than 2-3 in most decks).
I tend to run fairly fetch heavy manabases (3-5 in 2 color decks and 5-8 in 3) so I place a premium on basics as most of my decks can reuse those fetches one way or another (playing crucible or sun titan or similar). That's just my manabase style though I guess.
I try to get as close to 20 basics in a 2 color deck and 12+ in a 3 color deck as I can. Both my Inalla and Tuvasa decks have 15 which is huge for a 3 color deck, but managed through careful color focus and lots of fetchlands.
Your Pheld deck looks extremely vulnerable to blood mooning. Which seems fine I guess, just not where I would want to be. Your spell slection is pretty light on pips mostly, not super greedy, but the lack of any color fixing amp and minimal filtering makes me inclined against playing quite so many utility lands.
You do run a ton of fetches, and a very strong selection of duals, so that's probably why it works. 9 fetches is a crapload.
I am notoriously conservative about manabases, though, so it might just be me, but I don't see anything in your mana base that I would want to swap out for those lands before I'd add a few basics.
Tolaria is probably the best of them, because you play so many utility lands, but man it sure is a lot of mana and it's another ETB tapped guy in your list which is not ideal if you have to play it.
Your deck has soooo many reactive elements that I'd really like to see you cut a couple etb tapped lands. I got my INalla deck down to I think 2 (tar pit and temple of deceit) and it's been very good to me.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
Why would I play Tolaria West? Is it because it's a land? No, because Tolaria West is terrible at being a land; it's usually a worse Island. As such, the only reason I'd want to play Tolaria West is if I transmute it. How good is Tolaria West when I transmute it? That depends on the deck. At 1UU, the price is fair. It lines up with others tutors like Fabricate and Call the Gatewatch, but if I don't play any 0 mana cards that are worth spending 1UU to search for, then this is obviously terrible, and I shouldn't be playing it. The fact that Tolaria West can sometimes be played as a land isn't worth much because that's the floor of the card. I'm not playing Tolaria West because it can be played as a land. I'm playing it for other reasons, so every time I play Tolaria West as a land, that's a strike against it because it's terrible at being a land, and I could have played some other card in Tolaria West's place that is actually good at being a land instead. As such, for Tolaria West to be good, I need to rarely play it as a land, AND it's transmute effect needs to be better than any other card I could comparatively play with that ability. Just because Tolaria West is a tapped Island at worst doesn't mean other cards aren't better than it.
This whole thought process is something I've touched on before in the Brawl forum. Because it's pertinent to the conversation (and because the post there was probably read by all of two people, it being the Brawl forum and all), I'm going to shamelessly quote myself here.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Vesuva - Only if I have very good non-legendary lands to copy. I'm not going to want to simply have this as some colour fixing, so I'm talking about Cabal Coffers and...well, mainly Cabal Coffers.
Utility deserts - Not so keep on the cycling ones unless I have a Life From the Loam package, as they ETB tapped, but the mono-colour ones are actually cards I feel I should consider more. A few points of damage over a game is not much (and they do still produce colourless), and even if the abilites aren't crazy, they're almost free to include.
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea - "Group hug" effects where you can control the timing are significantly less bad than other ones, so it's not a bad effect to have. There's really just the opportunity cost of it being a colourless land. It also hasn't been the cheapest card to buy, so I've never actually had one.
Soldevi Excavations - I often play it in mono-blue. I don't play is in multicolour decks. I've found it to be a nice little tool in a draw-go deck where I've often an extra bit of mana if I didn't need to use interaction.
Isloated Watchtower - I play it in some non-green mono-coloured decks, depends on how many other colourless lands I have and how colour heavy my spells are. Similar to the previous, the ability is certainly nice to have - it's not a huge impact, but there's not much cost to having the option - and there's usually at least one player who's ahead on lands.
Vesuva definitely won't have a high ceiling in Phelddagrif since it can't copy any of the really scary lands, but idk that that means it's a bad card. Maybe being an etbt exotic orchard/reflecting pool of sorts at worst, and a copy of arch/haven/spires of orazca in the late-game is enough to justify the inclusion. I'm not totally sure.
The main reason to play hashep oasis and co is for sacking to scavenger grounds. It might seem sort of unlikely that I'll get both of them at once, but part of the goal here is to consolidate a lot of utility options into my lands, so that any tutors for them become really versatile. So I'm hoping that scavenger grounds is found in most games against any graveyard-based decks.
I don't think mikokoro needs to be in group hug to be good (also I'm not sure the phrase has much meaning, since group hug is less a strategy and more a collection of cards with similar functions). I think that's where you'd want to play it if you were trying to activate it every turn. But the strategy of the card ought to be to activate it only if you either must topdeck something now or lose, or ideally one of multiple people must topdeck something now or they all lose (i.e. someone's trying to combo off). In that circumstance it's quite good, of course. Maybe not good enough to justify a colorless land, but that's the question.
I don't necessarily think soldevi excavations is worth strip mining outside of 1v1 or at least 3-player, but it's probably still too weak. If you could sac any land I think it might be playable, though.
Man, that's a really low number of colorless lands to run in a 2-color deck especially. I don't get why you'd be so conservative unless your commander was niv-mizzet, parun or something. Especially for a land-heavy deck like Phelddagrif, I generally think to myself "how many lands would be a 'normal' number to run", which is probably around 35. So if I'm running 45 or whatever, then if 10 of those were colorless, I'd still have the fixing capacity of a 35 land deck, with some extra cards that also happen to be lands.
Etbts I think it's generally worth having at least a couple as long as they have good value. Almost any game you'll have windows where you don't need all your mana, and having the option to get value for your land play that turn is a good way to capitalize on that. Not that I'd go nuts, probably no more than 5 for most decks, but 5 is enough that you'll only see 1 per game usually.
9 is the correct number of fetches to play in a 3-color deck. 7 is the correct number to play in a 2-color deck. This is pretty solved. They're the best fixing lands that exist in the format, up to and imo including command tower since they have advantages command tower doesn't. 9 isn't "a crapload", it's just "correct".
If I am reusing them then I have some incentive to make sure they have a large number of targets, but in this case I'm only using them once, and if god forbid I draw a fetch with no targets at the end of a long game it probably doesn't really matter at that point anyway. Between duals and shocks that's 9 flexible targets, add in a smattering of basics and you're looking at enough targets for basically any reasonable-length game.
My deck definitely has some weaknesses to blood moon (or ruination), but I do have a fair amount of enchantment removal and quite a few counters. Ideally I'd have a response. If it comes down T3 it might be too early for me to have a good answer, but I usually try to size up a table in the first few turns and decide if I think it's likely someone is running BM or other nonbasic hate. Generally the answer is no, but if it's yes then I can fetch a basic or two, which make it tolerable to operate under BM. Ruination is a different story, but in the same circumstances ruination is recoverable from, and a late ruination should basically always be countered. B2B is much weaker than either against me since I usually have all my mana untapped. But honestly despite my diligence about nonbasic hate, I see it very, very rarely and tbh I don't think cards like BM are very good, except maybe in very high-powered games. It seems wrong to restrict the value I get from lands just to slightly reduce the impact of a couple cards that almost never get played, and which I can play around in most cases.
I only count 4 etbt lands in the nonbudget decklist (which means basically nothing anyway, the decklists are more examples than anything although I've been playing something close to the budget version recently as my collection is in transit atm), that seems pretty conservative to me. Especially since TW rarely gets played as a land. I think of my decks Phelddagrif is one of the ones that is most amenable to etbt lands. I'm basically never doing proactive things, so having 1 fewer mana on a turn, at basically any point, is almost always fine. If I found myself in a cEDH group I'd consider trimming down the greed but honestly in most places I've played I don't "need" to cast anything whatsoever until like turn 6 at the earliest, if it's any earlier it's usually like 1 removal spell to disable some dishpit who brought a cEDH deck to a casual game.
I would argue that TW is actually a pretty good island turn 1 since I basically never need mana on turn 1 (unless there's some serious cEDH stuff and I want to keep up rapid hybridization or whatever). I mean, think about the scale from "totally not a land" to "a totally reasonable card that's only a land". In the circumstance where you're stuck on 2 or 3 or whatever, the difference between an untapped blue land and a tapped blue land is perhaps significant, but the difference between drawing an etbt land or another uncastable nonland is huuuuuge. In terms of "how much is this a land?" I'd say an etbt mono-color land like TW is probably like 80% of the value of a fully-fledged land. That first turn can matter a lot, but after that turn TW is usually every bit as good as a regular island in most circumstances. As far as how good the tutor is, I think it's significantly worse than sylvan scrying for my deck during the early and midgame. By late-game it may not matter and be basically the same. Depending on meta I can maybe get away with a t3 transmute too. I think it's probably around 70% of the value of a sylvan scrying. If these numbers seem made up and arbitrary it's because they are.
I would not play a card that was, say, 50% island value or 50% sylvan scrying value (or some other combo that adds to 100%) but flexible cards generally aren't costed like that. You do pay a premium, but it's usually a reasonable amount. But I would bet that you aren't as squeamish about flexiblity as you think you are. Do you like vindicate, beast within, anguished unmaking, or even naturalize? In all those cases you're paying a premium for flexibility, but it ensures that it does the thing you need right now. It's just that you maybe aren't considering this because they're similar effects, whereas something like warrant // warden has very different effects, but in both cases you're paying extra for the flexibility. Trying to compare any single mode for those cards, of course there will be better options, but flexibility has value, especially in a format like commander. But you don't need to focus on commander to see the strength of flexibility, in (real) competitive formats flexible cards are played frequently, because the tradeoff is often worth it.
As far as slice in twain, I think what I'd want to consider are the play patterns of the deck. So for example, in which circumstances do I want to cast a disenchant effect, and in those circumstances is an extra 2 (or 3) mana going to be a burden? How valuable is the card, am I frequently running out of gas because my deck is excessively tempo-focused, or do I usually have a full grip anyway? When I want to cast disenchant specifically, is that a time when I'm likely to want the extra card? Do I want to be able to hold up mana to cast it during someone else's turn right after they play an artifact or enchantment, or is it ok to wait until my turn to untap to cast a disenchant? These sorts of questions. If I need early responses to fast combo then there's no question that naturalize is better. If games are taking an eternity and value is paramount, then slice in twain is better. I don't think there's a reasonable way to evaluate these two cards against each other in a total vacuum. I would probably trend toward naturalize but there are definitely circumstances where it's the other way around.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
I feel this is a fairly bad argument. I am certain that if slice in twain cost 3 instead of 4 that lots of people would play it, even though everything you said remainds true. Heck it reminds true at GG where it would be played in most every format. A better reason why it is not good enough is as follows: the effect destroy target artifact or enchantment is worth 1G. Adding cantrip to a card is typically costed at 2. Hence, the card would be average at a cost of 3G. Its cost is worse than that. Hence bad.
Also, you example card: the effect gain 2 life is not worth much (lets say the difference between a colored and an uncolored mana to be nice), the add a counter to target creature is bad, in that it is required. Thus, the card is still slightly below average but a bit better than Slice in Twain. Note that even average cards isnt good enough to be played.
Like, seriusly, your argument applies to most every tutor and suggests that you would never play any because they are too weak! (This might be a strawman, but I fail to see why it is not fair critic)
I agree. Maybe it's just that I don't particularly care if I get boned in these kinds of situations since Magic is random anyway. Sometimes I'm going to draw too many lands, and sometimes I'm not going to draw enough lands. Playing versatile cards doesn't not make that true, and it isn't as though playing some card over Tolaria West, be it a land or a spell, is going to affect those chances anyway since you're always just going to play whatever ratio of lands to spells is most appropriate for your deck regardless.
I'll admit, what constitutes the "minimum possible effect" for any given card I might care about is somewhat arbitrary. Vindicate, Beast Within, and Anguished Unmaking are all cards I certainly love, but I've always thought of these cards as also being the minimum possible effect (in this case, something that destroys any one card, whatever it happens to be). The minimum possible effect isn't anything tangible in my mind. It's just in how the effect is framed. So, when you say that maybe I'm not so squeamish about playing flexible cards, I suppose that is true. It just sounds to me like we're arguing more over semantics than anything else. That, or me using the word "flexibility" earlier was a grievous error on my part as a writer.
I think you're asking the right questions here. The way you're looking at Slice in Twain is the way I think anyone ought to look at a card when they're trying to decide if they should play it or not. The only problem I have here (if you can even call this a problem) is that this way of looking at cards is completely contextual. What you're saying (and this is true) is that Slice in Twain's value as a card can't be compared to Naturalize. The two cards are different, and because they are different, one isn't definitively better than the other. It doesn't matter how similar they might be. The fact that they are different alone means that there will be contexts where Naturalize is better and there will be contexts where Slice in Twain is better. I find this to be seriously unhelpful when discussing the worth of cards.
I think maybe it would help if I explained my philosophy behind comparing cards a bit more. See, cards are certainly different. We definitely agree on that. But something worth mentioning is that we also have values; there are certain qualities we see in cards that we care about because we associate these qualities with winning. For example, mana costs are one thing we care about, and cards with cheaper mana costs are preferential to cards with more expensive mana costs provided that these cards are identical in every other way.
Now, in a world where all cards are different and where all cards' worth can only be determined by context, the seemingly uncontroversial statement I made above, that cheaper mana costs are preferential to more expensive mana costs, still isn't always true. There will still be instances where, despite two cards being identical except for cost (like Lightning Bolt and Lightning Strike), the more expensive card will be better. I believe the takeaway from this is: just because Lightning Strike sometimes happens to be better than Lightning Bolt doesn't mean we shouldn't not perceive Lightning Bolt as being a better card. We can correctly attribute why Lightning Bolt is a "better" card than Lightning Strike even though we also understand that the worth of each card entirely depends on context. If we didn't do that, it would be impossible to assess any card. As humans, we aren't able to reliably determine the worth of every possible card in every possible context, and attempting to do so would be madness.
So, when I say that Slice in Twain is a worse Naturalize than Naturalize is, it's under a sort of commonly presumed context. I just tend to believe that, when talking about cards, we usually just discuss them with this commonly presumed context in mind. (Although maybe that's not particularly helpful in this thread if what you're looking for is specific advice regarding the worth of particular utility lands in your distinct Phelddagrif deck.)
I mean, sure. Maybe other players would play Slice in Twain more if it cost 2G. That wouldn't really change for me though. What I care about is the rate I'm getting.
I want an effect (in this case, Naturalize), and I want that effect as cheaply as possible. The fact that Slice in Twain draws a card is irrelevant. It's not part of the effect I value, and it negatively affects the rate I pay for it. Is it useful to draw cards? Sure, but that's not the reason I'm playing Naturalize. You could replace the "draw a card" part with any sort of useful effect here, and it wouldn't matter because, so long as it negatively affects the rate for the effect I want, I'm going to play something else. If what I wanted was to draw cards, I would just find a different card that had a good rate on that.
I think you're missing the point of the example here. The point of Slice into Too Many Pieces was to show that adding useful riders to a card doesn't necessarily make it more valuable if it makes the reason you're playing the card more expensive. In my example, it doesn't really matter what riders I chose. I just chose things that were all worse than Naturalize because if any of them were better than the Naturalize part of the effect then the Naturalize part might be misconstrued as a rider instead of the most valuable part of the card.
Sorry, you lost me here. How does my argument apply to tutors?
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I tend to be a little more conservative in fetches than the strictly best to cut down on shuffling. With 9/7 fetches you are always drawing one, which is good, but in addition to drawing one you often draw 2, 3, or 4 and that adds up to a lot more shuffling. So I err on the side of more fetches than most people but not the full boat just for convenience reasons.
ETB tapped lands
With 4 your chance of drawing >=1 in your opening 10 is 35%
With 2, it's 19%
1 in 3 games or 1 in 5 games. And in your opening 10 that almost always means you're forced to play it. So I try to aim for 2. Just my preference. 0 would be better
Re: Colorless sources
With 9 colorless sources in your deck your chances of drawing >=2 in your opening 10 cards become around 22%. This is is pretty regularly and it can make your hand very light on colors. It end to highly prioritize being able to cast my spells without drawing into colored sources.
I get that I'm more conservative than most but these cards add up to a lot of awkward hands in my experience.
If you look at CEDH decks as an example (since one of your points of reference is 9 fetches = solved), they typically run 30-ish lands and almost no colorless sources, in addition to a bunch of color producing accelerants. Your manabase doesn't run that many more color producing mana sources than CEDH Teferi (mono blue), for reference.
(which has 26 color producing lands and 6 or so mana producing accelerants for a total of 32, vs. your 32 or so in the budgetless build -- and this is a mono blue deck with an artifact theme, and a crapload of cantrips)
Obviously it's not a CEDH Deck but it may help some perspective on my color caution
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I'm personally interested in these lands for Phelddagrif but I'm sure most people don't care about that particular context. So I'm happy with any discussion of the cards (or even other utility lands I suppose). But I think many decks wouldn't have a difficult time playing TW as a tapped land on one, although it's much more likely to be a stumbling block for decks running sol ring and mana vault and other powerful T1 plays.
I strongly disagree with your argument that versatile cards doesn't change the odds of mana screw or flood. A big part of the reason to run 45 lands with many utility lands in Phelddagrif is that it gives you late-game power while lowering your risk of mana screw. If the deck was rebuilt with a reasonable balance of more potent, nonland versions of those effects - rest in peace instead of scavenger grounds, mind's eye instead of arch of orazca, etc - you'd have to accept a significantly higher chance of mana screw, but at the benefit of having more powerful/efficient versions of those effects (ofc Phelddagrif is a special snowflake that doesn't WANT more powerful versions of those effects, which is why the balance is what it is). Generally-speaking, the point of flexible cards is to ensure you aren't flooded or screwed on ANY particular axis. Demystify is more efficient than disenchant at removing enchantments, but having disenchant means you won't be "screwed" on artifact removal when you need it, or "flooded" on enchantment removal when you don't. And the same is even more true of anguished unmaking. For almost any effect you want, there's a more efficient version that does the precise thing you want better, but flexibility is valuable because it gives you the reliability of having the effect you want more often, and having effects you can't use less often. Tapping for mana just happens to be one of the effects that you want the most often, so a card doing that dramatically improves its chances of being useful.
I think I left out something important about the slice in twain comparison - the reason I think it's hard to say which is better in a vacuum is because they're basically both pretty close in efficiency (as compared to bolt vs strike where bolt is obviously better in 99.9% of cases). Slice in twain is probably a little bit worse, but they're close enough that I think there are very reasonable places where I'd want to play either (as in, play in my deck, not just to have in hand during a game - of course there are many cards that are good to have in hand in very specific situations, but aren't reliably useful enough to put into a deck). But, at least outside a cEDH situation where tempo is incredibly important, I think you'd be wrong not to play a 2G or god forbid a GG version of slice in twain over naturalize. I generally agree that, especially for answers, being able to do the specific thing is of utmost importance, but that doesn't mean any additional effect that's less impactful than the main effect is automatically worthless.
Disenchant is a somewhat misleading example, I think, because in the situation where you want to cast it, you're usually not concerned with value because you're trying to break up a combo or at least destroy something extremely powerful, so value is significantly less important than ensuring you're able to cast it. But maybe something a little less urgent, something like baleful strix. Nobody ever seriously played tidehollow strix outside limited (afaik), despite costing the same and even having an extra power. But baleful strix has seen tons of competitive play because, even though the main thing it does is be a deathtouch flyer, getting a free card out of it significantly raises the value of the card.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Vesuva is wonderful even if the deck barely runs any utility lands as it can become a 2nd copy of a dual land or gate for mana fixing.
Amonkhet/Hour deserts, to me, are a mixed bag. I personally find the "Desert of the [trait]" to be clunkers when it comes to consistency and speed of plays, usually resulting in me debating on replacing those with the cycle lands such as Tranquil Thicket from onslaught. The mono pain deserts on the other hand I find to be much more useful for the plays they can provide. Now my favorite of these is ones like Scavenger Grounds and Endless Sands for their utility purposes.
Mikokoro, Center of the Sea I personally find is great at being a kingmaker card.
Soldevi Excavations If you play Coral Atoll, you may want to consider upgrading to this (No ETBT, repeatable Scry 1 effect)
Isolated Watchtower I personally have only run this card in one deck, and that is in a Jace, Vryn's Prodigy combo deck.
Etbt I think is highly dependent on the deck. At least in the case of my Phelddagrif, I see very few problems with it. Of course decks wishing to play a lot of 1-drops, for example, are going to feel differently. But it's not like you're FORCED to play it t1, maybe you have a t1 play but not a t2, or your t2 or t3 play don't use all your mana. You have to have a perfect curve hand to be unable to play an etbt land without hurting your tempo, which is usually pretty unlikely. I think the bigger risk is that you'll topdeck it when you have 4 lands and want to cast a 5-drop. As long as you have other lands in hand that don't etbt, etbt lands are rarely a problem, since you just need a 1-mana gap at any point to play it without tempo loss.
One thing you aren't considering that is important RE: colorless sources is that in, for example, my Phelddagrif build, I'm running 45 lands. Compare to, say, your Ephara build that has 37(I think? Labeling card counts is nice for primers imo) lands, that means even if I'm running 8 colorless sources, that still puts me on the same par as a deck with that number of lands, fixing-wise. Having more lands means you can work less hard on fixing and still get the same results. Not to say that every deck should run a ton of lands, but that, if you're already planning on running a large land base, that you should probably run more utility lands (some of which will be colorless) to ensure you don't run out of gas when a high percentage of your deck is lands.
I think I count 6 totally-colorless lands in my budget Phelddagrif build, with a few more that are colorless but can get colors (i.e. blighted woodland). The budgetless has fewer lands AND has 8 colorless lands, BUT it also has 9 rainbow lands from the fetches, so the color count for, say, blue is still 25, which is more than a lot of 2-color deck manabases have for their colors. Could be higher, yes, and I'm always happy to cut a utility land I'm not using, but it's still a pretty solid number imo. In fact I count (I believe) only 21 blue-producing lands in your Ephara deck, for example, and I'm assuming you get by just fine with that (Budget grif also has 21).
I don't bring up 9 fetches as a cEDH thing. I don't think you need to be playing cEDH to want to have a reliable manabase. Having a perfectly optimized manabase doesn't mean you have to play, well, anything in particular, and I think there's value in optimizing manabases even for decks that aren't competitive at all. If you want to do something, do it well, even if that something is jank. And the first step in doing something well is having the right mana.
Of course cEDH has a very different value system than most normal EDH decks. arch of orazca is way too slow to be useful in most cEDH decks, for example. But it's extremely good in Phelddagrif. There aren't many utility lands that give utility immediately, most of them take repeated activations to justify their spot, which just isn't happening in cEDH. Fixing, on the other hand, is useful immediately It's just a different meta, is all. I understand why they want to primarily maximize fixing but that doesn't make it necessary here. Also, at 26 color-producing lands that's barely more more blue lands in a mono-colored deck than my (3-color) Phelddagrif builds do anyway, but I suppose that's besides the point.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Sorry, I was looking at your budgetless build with 41 lands and 9 colorless.
My Ephara build runs 37 lands...but it runs:
land tax
weathered wayfarer
tithe
and 4 mana rocks that make colors
32 lands that produce colored mana
There are only 21 some blue lands, but +3 fixers and +3 mana rocks that always make blue And the deck has a very low blue commitment relative to white. So closer to 27.
And that's before considering the card draw element, or the distribution of cards.
But if we're talking about the budget build then I'd have to re-look at that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In the budget build, you're running so high on lands that I think it's reasonably fine. That said I just don't understand the construction of the deck well enough to speak to it I don't think. The land count is very high, and the value count is a little low, so I have to assume it's something to do with the sheer volume of reactive spells you're playing that you play all those lands instead of filtering spells.
I really struggle to imagine that arch of orazca is going to be better than, say, Mystic Remora? Or even Ponder.
I feel like you could probably shave 2-3 flex lands and add some more card draw, but I'm probably really misunderstanding how the deck works. Sorry
Not trying to be preachy at all just trying to give you my perspective on the way flex lands fit into a manabase Which honestly probably isn't that helpful I guess since it's so intrinsically tied to how a deck functions, and I just don't get this one
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I'm not sure this will be helpful, but to reiterate, what I care most about is rate. If the effect that I want is "put a card from my deck into my hand," then what I'm probably looking for is the card that does that as efficiently as possible. You can interpret what the effect is however you like. Maybe the effect I want is Naturalize plus draw a card. I don't know why I'd want that specific effect, but if that's the effect I want, I want it at the best possible rate.
I'm with you that most decks won't have a problem playing Tolaria West on turn 1, Sol Ring or not. The problem with lands that enter play tapped is that you can't really control when you draw them though, and lands that enter play tapped tend to get significantly worse after the first few turns of the game. Sometimes you luck out, and you can find a way to weave them into your curve without losing any tempo, but that isn't always the case.
Sorry, but I'm afraid I don't follow. Why would you remove lands to make room for spells? Aren't you going to play a set number of lands to begin with? Like, say 45 is the "sweet spot" where that's the perfect balance of lands to spells for your deck, 46 being slightly too many, and 44 being, on average, slightly too few. Given those 45 lands, some of those are going to be utility lands because although you need a high enough density of land to ensure that you draw plenty of them each game, you don't need all 45 of those lands to be Command Tower; you're comfortable accepting some tiny amount of color screw and/or tempo loss because utility lands can be powerful, and it's worthwhile trading a small amount of consistency for a potentially larger amount of power.
Now, having said all that, the idea that you would trade out Scavenger Grounds for Rest in Peace or Arch of Orazca for Mind's Eye doesn't make sense to me. Like, I get that maybe you wouldn't want to include Scavenger Grounds if you already decided you were going to play Rest in Peace because maybe that's too much graveyard hate, and you think you could benefit more by playing some other utility land instead, but that's exactly it; you'd be playing some other utility land instead of Scavenger Grounds. You wouldn't mess with that 45 number because exchanging Scavenger Grounds for Rest in Peace would now leave you with slightly too few land. So, I don't see how you've reached the conclusion you have.
Again, I agree with a lot you're saying here, but I'm still trying to make sense of it all since I don't really see how you've reached the conclusion you have.
Say deck 'A' has 10 removal spells and 10 card draw spells. So, 20 cards total. Say deck 'B' has 10 removal spells and 10 card draw spells just like deck 'A' does except all the removal spells in deck 'B' also double as card draw and vice-versa, so deck 'B' only has 10 cards total. Deck 'A' and deck 'B' are each playing the same number of removal spells and card draw spells, so the chance you draw any one kind of particular effect is the same even though the spells in deck 'B' are more versatile. To increase the probability of drawing more removal, you would need to increase the total number of removal spells you were playing.
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Versatility is a really tough thing in EDH. I see the appeal. For my part I usually will not play cantrip spells that are inefficient mana-wise. Dismiss for example is just not a card I would put in a deck. But a lot of that comes from the way I build, I tend to want very efficient consistent card drawing engines at the core of my deck (tuvasa, gitrog, ephara) -- or to play a high ratio of strong draw spells (Inalla). With that kind of design efficiency in cards is usually more important than drawing a card with an effect.
(This is not intrinsically wrong)
But this Pheldagrif deck is really instant heavy and focused on playing reactive spells politically, and a lot of its value comes from being able to leave up mana and react and refill its hand with reactive stuff.
I think that's why painfully slow cards like Arch of Orazca seem pretty good in it. It's almost always keeping mana up to do something reactive and being able to use that becomes efficient. Similarly getting a card when it has to react is good. It also seems to want to play a very slow game which rewards those types of endgame lands.
I'm not sure how I feel about the construction but in the context of the deck I think I understand those types of cards.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
A Tolaria West can only be stopped by a pithing needle effect or by countering the transmute ability. Its only downside is the UU in total cost paid for its effect rather than 2 but for the effective payment of 3 mana like map. Sure it etbt as a land and is the equivalent of an island, but not even expedition map doubles as a mana source.
Also it can tutor for:
- Chalice of the Void
- Lion's Eye Diamond
- Mox Amber
- Mox Diamond
- Zuran Orb
- Engineered Explosives
- Claws of Gix
- Chrome Mox
- Hangerback Walker
- Slaughter Pact
- Pact of Negation
- Pact of the Titan
- Summoner's Pact
- Intervention Pact
- Ancestral Vision
- Astral Cornucopia
- Chimeric Mass
- Endless One
- Hypergenesis
- Living End
- Lotus Bloom
- Orochi Hatchery
- Sigil of Distinction
- Walking Ballista
- Wheel of Fate
- Everflowing Chalice
- Jeweled Amulet
- Mishra's Bauble
- Memnite
- Ornithopter
- Tormod's Crypt
- Urza's Bauble
- Shield Sphere
- Phyrexian Walker
Now you tell me, would I want to ever have the option for tutoring for just a 0-drop with such options avaible?Well, this kinda goes to the core of the versatility argument. There are a lot of cool things it can get but there's an opportunity cost of an ETB tapped land, being sorcery speed, and being fairly inefficient.
Most of those things can be tutored for with one of the variety of 1-2 CMC tutors, many of which are instant speed. Or can spread their cost for multiple turns (e.g. map). Or can be tutored for with Trinket mage, or count as an artifact for purposes, or can be recycled.
Putting a land back in your hand is quite a bit more difficult than putting a spell back in your hand, so using TW as an engine is pretty hard vs. something like Vampiric Tutor.
All things being equal I always find myself cutting Tolaria West unless I have really important cards that are core to my gameplan that it can get, that my color combination struggles to find. I think it's somewhat more niche than you have suggested. But that's just my opinion of course.
UW Ephara Hatebears [Primer], GB Gitrog Lands, BRU Inalla Combo-Control, URG Maelstrom Wanderer Landfall
I've never played Vesuva, but it can be great if there are a lot of high powered lands in your meta, or even cards like Legion's Landing and Itlimoc, Cradle of the sun. If you don't have good targets from your opponents it better be an extra Cabal Coffers or something else high value.
Some deserts are better than others. Scavenger Grounds should be in most decks, in my opinion. I play the red and black 'pain' lands in Rakdos, Lord of Riots to help me cast Kozilek, The Great Distortion. Have not played any of the others and I think only the black pain land is marginally playable outside of a monocolor deck. The cycling lands are weaker than the other two cycles 99% of the time. Don't think it is worth running extra deserts to be able to activate Scavenger Grounds multiple times. Unless you have other benefits to running deserts I would stay away from it.
Mikokoro I play sometimes in decks that make way more mana than my opponents. If you have the mana to cast the extra spells but your opponents don't, you are going to benefit more.
Haven't played the other two lands.
8.RG Green Devotion Ramp/Combo 9.UR Draw Triggers 10.WUR Group stalling 11.WUR Voltron Spellslinger 12.WB Sacrificial Shenanigans
13.BR Creatureless Panharmonicon 14.BR Pingers and Eldrazi 15.URG Untapped Cascading
16.Reyhan, last of the Abzan's WUBG +1/+1 Counter Craziness 17.WUBRG Dragons aka Why did I make this?
Building: The Gitrog Monster lands, Glissa the Traitor stax, Muldrotha, the Gravetide Planeswalker Combo, Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix + Sidar Kondo of Jamuraa Clues, and Tribal Scarecrow Planeswalkers
we're kind of splitting hairs here and I'm sure neither of us can really be certain where the optimal number of sources for each color is, short of playing the deck a near-infinite number of times. The important thing here is that we're playing *roughly* the same number of sources for each color (and again, mine is a 3-color deck so it's not exactly a fair comparison). It's totally possible I should be playing a few more colored sources, but the point is that we're in the same ballpark and you clearly don't think YOU'RE short on colored sources.
(also FWIW I've never played a list exactly identical to the budgetless build - I generally prefer to focus on the structure and strategy of the deck, rather than specific cards, when trying to help people build it. The main reason either list exists is for convention, my actual played list changes constantly. So it's not really worth worrying too much about a fixing or a utility land in such fine-grained detail)
Treasure cruise is a solid card for the deck but hey, you only get so many slots and it's a dead draw early game. Mystic Remora I think plays badly with what the deck is trying to do politically, and in terms of its usual play pattern. You'll have to take my word for it that Arch is significantly better than either the majority of the time.
As far as versatility, of course every deck has to weigh the considerations of flexibility with cost, value, etc. I'm not saying that one way or the other is necessarily better, just trying to get the shape of where playing X vs Y is correct. Arch being better than remora in my build doesn't say much about other lists that are doing different things.
@ArrogantAxolotl
I think his point is that you never want the effect "search for a card", what you REALLY want is just to draw the card you were planning to search for. When you want creature removal you want to draw creature removal, when you want an overrun you want to draw an overrun. Drawing one when you wanted the other is bad. Drawing a tutor means you're effective drawing BOTH...but at a less efficient cost. Demonic tutor is like a split card of every card in your deck, with the cost + 1B.
The cost of running a tapped land is always going to depend on the deck, so I definitely wouldn't recommend them for all decks. Phelddagrif in particular, since I very very rarely have need to play something on curve, is a particularly good place to run tapped lands imo. The odds of drawing an etbt land when I needed a non-etbt land are pretty miniscule.
I think we're approaching deckbuilding from different angles. I never have some set-in-stone number of lands I intend to play, it's always a balancing act of value vs reliability - fewer lands means higher value, more lands means more reliability. My budget Phelddagrif build skews hard towards reliability because I think the deck can do quite well with a very low amount of value (that's kind of the main thing the deck DOES). But I think most control builds would reduce the number of lands and add more high-impact, high-efficiency cards like Rest in peace, consecrated sphinx, etc, and I think from the perspective of building a straightforward control deck those would be good decisions, replacing, say, Arch with Con Sphinx. I don't think it would suddenly be too short on lands, but it would probably be a few percent more likely to get stuck on mana. That would probably be worth it for the opportunity to play a bomb like Con Sphinx for that deck, though. So yes, I think you absolutely can cut lands for spells and vice versa. There's no "right" amount of lands for a deck - or if there is, it'd would require a million simulations to figure out. It's mostly a matter of how much you want to risk running out of value versus risking getting mana-screwed.
Your last paragraph is kind of confusing. You've got a deck with 10 AB spells and one with 10 A and 10 B spells. Ok, so then the first deck could...run 5 more A and 5 more B and have better odds of drawing either? Dedicate the 10 extra slots to some other effect? You only have the "same odds of drawing the right spell" if you're putting blanks into those remaining 10 slots.
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Trinket Mage I will give you is a step up as its useful for the artifacts.
It being a sorcery-speed card isn't that big of a determent unless the other tutors it is competing with are
1)Instant-speed
2)Places the searched card into the hand
3)Equal or cheaper in the mana spent.
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
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It's always sort of teetered on the brink of getting cut for me. I don't think it's a bad card - it's an effect I really like - but it's sort of an uncomfortable fit for the deck. TW operates great on either end of the spectrum - super early with a mana-light hand it's usually an island with no real downside. Super late the cost is pretty irrelevant and getting my best utility land is awesome. In the middle, though, that cost always feels real clunky.
I think the real question for me, personally, is whether the option to play it for a blue in mana-light hands justifies its spot over sylvan scrying/expo map (or maybe I should run all of them).
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
Alternatively, say you play a card like Mana Crypt in your deck. You don't even need to treat Demonic Tutor as a tutor effect in order to want to play it since, if you treat Demonic Tutor as a ramp spell, Mana Crypt is still bonkers when it costs 1B, and you'd want to play that anyway. The fact that Demonic Tutor is also versatile needn't even factor into that decision if you look at it from that perspective.
I don't think there are many decks where I would advocate ETBTapped lands even when this is true though. The opportunity cost of playing only lands that enter the battlefield untapped is just so low. Having said that, I do think a lot of decks can get away with playing an extremely small number of ETBTapped lands because ETBTapped lands get better the more lands you play that don't enter tapped since that increases the likelihood that you won't get stuck playing an ETBTapped land on a turn you don't want to.
Yeah, it certainly looks like we're approaching deckbuilding from different angles. I'm not sure I agree that there isn't a "right" number of lands for any given deck though. I feel fairly certain there is, and I don't think you need a million simulations to figure it out either. In fact, I think most players naturally stumble across this number heuristically. Have you ever seen a table like this one from Dawnglare? It uses a kind of math called hypergeometric distribution to calculate the probabilities of making a land drop by turn X.
Normally, when building decks, I think a lot of players, myself included, tend to trust heuristics when it comes to the number of lands they play; they just sort of get a feel for the right number, and they can generally tell when they stray away from it. What's interesting to note is that that heuristic is going to vary for different people. Some players, given the exact same list, are going to feel that, on average, they draw too many lands. Some will feel like they draw too few. The equilibrium for any given player, depending on the deck they're playing (a deck with a lower curve will obviously want fewer lands, a deck with a higher curve will want more lands, etc.), can be described by the table I've linked you. Essentially, each player has a baked in preference for the number of lands they want to play. That preference is certainly going to fluctuate depending upon things like the aforementioned mana curve as well as things like the number of Ponder-esque cantrips played, but when you factor all of those things in, you can definitely say that player X ought to play Y number of lands because that is what they most prefer. (The number of lands you ought to play if you want to maximize your win rate is another subject entirely.)
If the deck with 10 AB spells ran 5 extra A spells and 5 extra B spells, yes, they certainly would have better odds of drawing both A and B compared to the other deck. This isn't a fair comparison though. You could totally flip the situation around and say that the deck with 10 A spells and 10 B spells is just going to play 10 more of each, and that deck would then have the better odds of drawing an A spell or a B spell. The number of cards you use here doesn't matter. What matters is if a deck can achieve the correct ratio of one kind of effect that it wants to another. Provided a deck reaches that number, the versatility of their spells doesn't matter.
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