Let's start with the taplands. These are generally not good enough for competitive play. If you need them as a budget option, you do you, but they should very rarely be seen in competitive decks - at most as a 1-2 of for decks with very intensive costs in two colors.
The checklands and shocklands have strong synergy, like the Amonkhet cycling cycle had with the checklands. Most of the numbers for building manabases are already pretty easy to derive from the current format, and I'll go over them in a minute, but the first thing to focus in on is the differences between the cycling cycle and the shocklands. The shocklands can come into play untapped and cannot be cycled. This implies two things:
(1) If the spells exist to create it, the mana supports a faster format. Curve considerations will be more important because your opponents are not going to miss a beat from stumbling on tapped lands very often. The checklands will almost always enter untapped and the shocklands will always enter untapped if your opponent needs them to do so.
(2) You have fewer ways to mitigate mana flood in the later game. Decks that played cycle lands typically played one more land than they normally would for the same cmc/curve profile. You will probably see about one fewer land than before, or if people continue to play the same land counts, good mana sinks will be a higher priority than before, since you don't have mana sinks built into your lands.
This article was written with mana fixing in mind, but we can adapt the numbers for shocks/checks analysis. After all, the hypergeometric distribution used to get those numbers is just as valid for finding certain colors at a certain time as it is for finding certain land types at a certain time.
The relevant table in list form - using 90% as the threshold of reliability:
You need 14 lands of a specific subtype for your checkland to enter untapped on turn 2. (You will need to find and play the correct land on turn 1 to accomplish this, so we use the number for finding 1 source of colored mana on turn 1, since we must find 1 source of a land type to play on turn 1.)
You need 13 lands of the right type for your checkland to enter untapped on turn 3.
12 for turn 4.
10 for turn 5.
You'll find that some successful tournament decks last season cheated on these numbers a bit or used certain spells (notably Attune with Aether, before it was banned) to fix their land counts and curve out properly. You can cheat on these numbers to a small extent if you must, since the price of a land entering tapped is lower than the price of not having the appropriate colors of mana to cast your spells on time (as the original numbers were calculated). Still, wherever realistically feasible, it's best to maximize your odds of satisfying time-sensitive gameplay requirements when building decks, because that way you have fewer losses due to the bad side of variance hitting you.
Two-Color Decks
Two-color decks are in an interesting bind. If your two colors form one of the five color pairs represented in Guilds of Ravnica's guilds, you're in luck: you get a playset of shocklands and a playset of checklands, meaning that you can pretty reliably play most spells in your two colors without having to resort to taplands, and your lands will virtually always enter untapped. (You can only ever have lands entering tapped if you keep a hand of all checklands, which is an extremely unlikely hand to have.)
However, there are several incentives to be in color pairings not represented by the five guilds in the upcoming set. For example:
Many of Ixalan's tribal themes were built into color combinations not represented by these guilds. The merfolk use UG, the vampires use BW, and the dinosaurs are based on GR (though dip into white). Pirates use UBR, but should be fine for fixing since that tricolor combination has two shocklands (see 3-color decks for more details). Dinosaurs have two shocklands, but both are white, which is a tertiary color in the tribe if not excluded; the default dinosaur deck is GR. These tribes suffer, since most of them look to be fairly aggressive, run somewhat low land counts, and use all their mana each turn, but they may have to dip into taplands to get consistent colored mana.
There are some multicolor cards returning which belong to a combination not supported by the shocklands. The most important example is Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, since there's no UW shockland to support him.
For these examples, you have a couple of options.
For the tribal decks in particular, using Unclaimed Territory may be necessary to get proper fixing without losing too much tempo. Your options as far as noncreature spells go will be limited if you go this route, but fortunately, these decks don't tend to rely very much on noncreature spells in general and have relaxed mana requirements for them.
For playing generically good cards like Teferi, you may need to splash one of his two colors as a third color in your base-two-color deck (see below).
If neither of those will do, then you will simply have to be conservative with your mana requirements. If you play a 24-land GR deck with no special lands like Unclaimed Territory, then you will have four duals and 20 basics, which if evenly split gives you 14 sources of each color -- reliable to cast early spells of either color -- or which can be distributed unevenly to support spells with 2-cost requirements (for example, a UW deck could focus on white to cast Lyra Dawnbringer reliably, by playing 12 Plains, 8 Islands, and 4 Glacial Fortress, and could splash blue for something like Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage with 12 blue sources.
Three-Color Decks
I'll cut right to the case and tell you which shards/wedges you can play and which ones you can't, and why. These are the playable combinations:
Why? These are the five 3-color combinations with more than one set of shocklands in them.
Three-color decks in Standard after all of the bans relied heavily upon playing two different cycling lands to get enough of the land types needed to support all of their checklands. For example, Esper Control (which is already somewhat conservative, being a UB deck splashing Teferi) plays all eight cycle lands in most lists, and Bant Nexus (which is also somewhat conservative, typically base-UG splashing white and also containing Gift of Paradise to fix colors) plays all eight, or close to all eight, as well. Three-color decks with only one cycling dual simply don't exist, or where they do crop up, are splashing as lightly as possible for the third color and are essentially two-color decks.
Obviously it's possible to support three colors with only one set of shocklands, but you generally have to be extremely careful with how lightly you splash. Most of you simply won't be so careful and will try to play an Esper deck with Settle the Wreckage, the new Cancel variant and Vraska's Contempt and then pull your hair out wondering why all your lands always enter tapped and why you never seem to have your colors lined up. There's a reason bud!
Alright, you read patiently to this point, here's your reward. Some sample manabases:
We have fourteen red sources, enough to cast any red spell that requires only one red mana. We have eighteen green sources, enough for any green spell that requires two green mana. This deck shouldn't try to play 1RR or even 2RR cards like Rekindling Phoenix. If you want to play Phoenix, you have to give up Ripjaw Raptor, and you should play 10 Mountain and 6 Forest.
Notice that we have sixteen lands that are either Forest or Mountain, so our Rootbound Crags should reliably enter untapped almost all the time.
If you keep your red splash to being Dinosaur spells only, then you can replace Timber Gorge with Unclaimed Territory, which means that you don't have to play four tapped lands.
I didn't have to play Tranquil Expanse here, if I were to be more conservative with my mana costs. But I wanted to demonstrate how you might be able to play dual cost cards of both colors in a two-color deck. If I didn't need to play Thrashing Brontodon and specifically didn't need two green mana until turn 4, then I could cut both Expanses for Plains and be completely fine. As it stands, we have nineteen green sources, enough for Brontodon on-curve, and sixteen white sources, enough for Lyra on-curve.
Notice that we have 19 lands which are either Forest or Plains or both, so our Temple Gardens are good to go.
The idea of this type of deck is that we are based around UB, and we have decided that Nicol Bolas is strong enough to be worth splashing for. We have one Mountain to cover against opponents with Field of Ruin trying to cut us off of red, but otherwise all of our red sources come from our dual lands. This maximizes our consistency since we get to play a lot of basic lands, maximizing our odds of our checklands entering untapped and our odds of curving out.
We have seventeen black sources, sixteen blue sources, and nine red sources. Nine red sources is a little low, but if our only red cards aren't being played until turns 4-5 and only require one red mana, we can get away with it (especially if we only play a few of them, like 3-4 copies of Nicol Bolas and maybe one copy of the new Ral planeswalker that costs 3UR). Our primary colors are blue and black, and we will have one mana of each type by turn 1-2, and two mana of each type around turn 4-5. If we need to play more intense mana costs (say, the new Cancel with surveil 1, which costs 1UU), then we can rearrange our lands to have fewer Dragonskull Summits and Swamps and more Islands and perhaps some copies of Sulfur Falls. We'll have to cut basics, which comes at a price, though.
Right now, our Dragonskull Summmits have fourteen lands of type Swamp or Mountain, which means they will be good to go by turn 2, and we have seventeen lands of type Swamp or Island for our Drowned Catacombs.
First of all, we aren't actually playing Cancel, but the new Cancel with surveil 1. Same mana cost so same example though.
You will notice that we have no basic Plains in the deck. This is because we are already cheating a little bit on mana requirements to make this manabase work in absence of the appropriate shocklands. Since we are probably playing a control deck that will see a lot of cards in successful games, we can afford to be a little bit vulnerable to Field of Ruin; we will eventually draw another white source. (Plus, with Search for Azcanta in our deck, our opponent would be crazy to burn Field on trying to color screw us, since it's their only out to a flipped Azcanta!)
We are still cheating though, as I said before. We have eight white sources, which is sufficient for a splashed Teferi. But we only have eighteen blue sources and sixteen black sources, when we normally would want 19 and 17. Not a big deal, but a relevant thing to remember when tuning a deck; consistency is important!
The bigger issue is that we have much lower counts of lands with the right land typing for our checklands than in other examples. Our Drowned Catacombs are fine, at fourteen lands of type Swamp or Island, thanks to the high number of basics. But our Glacial Fortresses are counting on just ten sources, since we have no basic Plains, and our Isolated Chapels are counting on a mere nine. This means our checklands will fairly frequently enter tapped, costing us crucial tempo in a format where the manabases are designed for high-tempo decks. Furthermore, most control decks play some number of utility lands, notably Field of Ruin; we don't get this luxury because our mana would just be too bad otherwise. And, as a final warning, we can't play any cards that require white mana if we need to play them before turn 4; we simply have far too few sources for that to work. Realistically, we may have to consider cutting Teferi or finding a way not to need 1UU on turn 3 and 2BB on turn 4, none of which are great options for us.
What's the lesson here? Be conservative with your mana costs, especially if you don't have multiple shocklands to smooth out your curve!
I hope this helps you out as you brew. One of the most frustrating aspects of brewing is messing up your mana and not knowing whether the spells you are so interested in playing are any good, since you end up with a bunch of non-games due to bad mana. Follow this guide and even if your mana bases don't come out perfectly, they should at least be functional enough for you to spend the bulk of your time figuring out whether your spells are good, which is the real fun in brewing. Don't get bogged down by the logistics. Happy brewing!
I played standard last time we had this and it was excellent (RTR-Inn), it is very good for enabling 3 colour decks and not the redicilous 4-5 we had in Khans+ BFZ. We will get the other shocks soon so don't worry fans of the other colour combos.
This is good, it doesn't take into account ramps though, but I suppose that is another discussion.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"To keep things 100, anything I state is an opinion and not intended to be a fact. Any and all suggestions I give are a 100% opinion. If you need further clarification take the conversation to a PM. I am not in the business of assuming things. I'm only interested in 1 business and that business serves 2 things, Cold L's and Hot Dub's."
This is good, it doesn't take into account ramps though, but I suppose that is another discussion.
Kind of. The adjustments for ramp spells are pretty straightforward to make, though a bit complicated to explain in writing. They're related enough that they should be discussed here. Good catch.
If your ramp spell involves tutoring a land of a particular type (e.g. Grow from the Ashes which gets any basic land type), then you may count each copy as a full source of any color of mana, and a full source of any basic land type for your checklands. That means a deck with four Grow from the Ashes can play four fewer lands of appropriate basic types if it wants. Just be aware that since you can't play Grow from the Ashes until turn 3, you can't count it toward your needs on turns 2-3 for checklands entering untapped. (Which means using this to cheat on sources for checklands is unlikely to work out well, but you can use this to cheat on color counts.)
If your ramp spell involves putting a permanent into play which taps for mana (e.g. Dragon's Hoard), then you can count each copy as a full source of any color of mana, but unless the permanent somehow also has the appropriate basic land type, you can't count it for checklands. Be careful when cutting lands to accommodate these types of cards, because you don't want to go too low on your land types for checklands.
If your ramp spell is Gift of Paradise or otherwise enchants a land, then how you count it will vary depending on the enchantment in question, but you can typically treat it like a permanent which taps for mana. The key difference is that in the case of Gift specifically, Gift makes your land tap for two mana of any one color, meaning it fixes for an amount greater than one source of every color. (Example: a Bant deck playing Settle the Wreckage can cast it off of Forest, Forest, Island if one of the Forests has Gift on it.) I would count it as roughly 1.5 sources each; Karsten used this approximation for similar cards in the past and I find it's a good enough heuristic.
Fetchlands like Grow from the Ashes can be counted as 1 source and acts like a checkland.
Mana Dorks like Llanowar Elves would count for .5 mana source while Dragon's Hoard and Manalith would count for full mana source.
And Gift of Paradise which taps land and adds any color would count for 1.5.
I believe Frank mentions in the article that for cantrips like Opt / Anticipate. These can be treated as .25 which would explain reasoning for lower counts on burn decks.
I guess I'll also note the case for when we need to cast cards that have a double mana requirement on Turn 2/3/4/5
His chart states you need about
20 on Turn 2
19 on Turn 3
18 on Turn 4
16 on Turn 5
Since those are the most important turns.
He also notes for Cards that have splashed color requirements need roughly 9 mana if they come out Turn 5.
So to estimate what he states.
"To keep things 100, anything I state is an opinion and not intended to be a fact. Any and all suggestions I give are a 100% opinion. If you need further clarification take the conversation to a PM. I am not in the business of assuming things. I'm only interested in 1 business and that business serves 2 things, Cold L's and Hot Dub's."
Fetchlands like Grow from the Ashes can be counted as 1 source and acts like a checkland.
Mana Dorks like Llanowar Elves would count for .5 mana source while Dragon's Hoard and Manalith would count for full mana source.
And Gift of Paradise which taps land and adds any color would count for 1.5.
I believe Frank mentions in the article that for cantrips like Opt / Anticipate. These can be treated as .25 which would explain reasoning for lower counts on burn decks.
I guess I'll also note the case for when we need to cast cards that have a double mana requirement on Turn 2/3/4/5
His chart states you need about
20 on Turn 2
19 on Turn 3
18 on Turn 4
16 on Turn 5
Since those are the most important turns.
(complicated tangent incoming)
All correct, though you should note that Gift is being counted "extra" because it specifically makes the land enchanted tap for two mana of any one color. Something like Unbridled Growth should only be counted as one source because it only makes one mana of any color. Also, be careful as to how you account sources like Unbridled Growth. If you have only ten lands that make green mana, then counting Unbridled Growth as a green source to get to the requisite 14 green sources to cast Unbridled Growth, or Attune with Aether (RIP), etc. is circular and faulty, since you already must have the green source to cast Growth in the first place. You may, however, count Growth as green sources for the purposes of casting, say, a 2GG spell like Bristling Hydra, since you could cast Hydra off of Forest, Plains, Plains, Island by enchanting a non-Forest land with Growth.
(/tangent)
And yes, the double mana requirements are important. I left them out of the initial post because I wanted to focus on the shockland/checkland interactions, which need only one land of the appropriate type. But when constructing any manabase you must take those requirements into account for making sure you can actually cast your spells.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
minuteshours ago (this took a while to write lol!) that five of the ten iconic shocklands will be reprinted in Guilds of Ravnica: Sacred Foundry, Watery Grave, Overgrown Tomb, Steam Vents, and Temple Garden.After Kaladesh and Amonkhet rotate, we will be left with three types of dual lands in Standard:
Let's start with the taplands. These are generally not good enough for competitive play. If you need them as a budget option, you do you, but they should very rarely be seen in competitive decks - at most as a 1-2 of for decks with very intensive costs in two colors.
The checklands and shocklands have strong synergy, like the Amonkhet cycling cycle had with the checklands. Most of the numbers for building manabases are already pretty easy to derive from the current format, and I'll go over them in a minute, but the first thing to focus in on is the differences between the cycling cycle and the shocklands. The shocklands can come into play untapped and cannot be cycled. This implies two things:
(1) If the spells exist to create it, the mana supports a faster format. Curve considerations will be more important because your opponents are not going to miss a beat from stumbling on tapped lands very often. The checklands will almost always enter untapped and the shocklands will always enter untapped if your opponent needs them to do so.
(2) You have fewer ways to mitigate mana flood in the later game. Decks that played cycle lands typically played one more land than they normally would for the same cmc/curve profile. You will probably see about one fewer land than before, or if people continue to play the same land counts, good mana sinks will be a higher priority than before, since you don't have mana sinks built into your lands.
Now some numbers. Thanks to Frank Karsten, writing for Channel Fireball: How many sources of mana do you need to cast your spells?
This article was written with mana fixing in mind, but we can adapt the numbers for shocks/checks analysis. After all, the hypergeometric distribution used to get those numbers is just as valid for finding certain colors at a certain time as it is for finding certain land types at a certain time.
The relevant table in list form - using 90% as the threshold of reliability:
You'll find that some successful tournament decks last season cheated on these numbers a bit or used certain spells (notably Attune with Aether, before it was banned) to fix their land counts and curve out properly. You can cheat on these numbers to a small extent if you must, since the price of a land entering tapped is lower than the price of not having the appropriate colors of mana to cast your spells on time (as the original numbers were calculated). Still, wherever realistically feasible, it's best to maximize your odds of satisfying time-sensitive gameplay requirements when building decks, because that way you have fewer losses due to the bad side of variance hitting you.
Two-Color Decks
Two-color decks are in an interesting bind. If your two colors form one of the five color pairs represented in Guilds of Ravnica's guilds, you're in luck: you get a playset of shocklands and a playset of checklands, meaning that you can pretty reliably play most spells in your two colors without having to resort to taplands, and your lands will virtually always enter untapped. (You can only ever have lands entering tapped if you keep a hand of all checklands, which is an extremely unlikely hand to have.)
However, there are several incentives to be in color pairings not represented by the five guilds in the upcoming set. For example:
For these examples, you have a couple of options.
Three-Color Decks
I'll cut right to the case and tell you which shards/wedges you can play and which ones you can't, and why. These are the playable combinations:
WRU Jeskai
GWR Naya
WGB Abzan
GBU Sultai
RUB Grixis
Why? These are the five 3-color combinations with more than one set of shocklands in them.
Three-color decks in Standard after all of the bans relied heavily upon playing two different cycling lands to get enough of the land types needed to support all of their checklands. For example, Esper Control (which is already somewhat conservative, being a UB deck splashing Teferi) plays all eight cycle lands in most lists, and Bant Nexus (which is also somewhat conservative, typically base-UG splashing white and also containing Gift of Paradise to fix colors) plays all eight, or close to all eight, as well. Three-color decks with only one cycling dual simply don't exist, or where they do crop up, are splashing as lightly as possible for the third color and are essentially two-color decks.
Obviously it's possible to support three colors with only one set of shocklands, but you generally have to be extremely careful with how lightly you splash. Most of you simply won't be so careful and will try to play an Esper deck with Settle the Wreckage, the new Cancel variant and Vraska's Contempt and then pull your hair out wondering why all your lands always enter tapped and why you never seem to have your colors lined up. There's a reason bud!
Alright, you read patiently to this point, here's your reward. Some sample manabases:
1 Ripjaw Raptor
1 Lightning Strike
4 Timber Gorge
10 Forest
6 Mountain
We have fourteen red sources, enough to cast any red spell that requires only one red mana. We have eighteen green sources, enough for any green spell that requires two green mana. This deck shouldn't try to play 1RR or even 2RR cards like Rekindling Phoenix. If you want to play Phoenix, you have to give up Ripjaw Raptor, and you should play 10 Mountain and 6 Forest.
Notice that we have sixteen lands that are either Forest or Mountain, so our Rootbound Crags should reliably enter untapped almost all the time.
If you keep your red splash to being Dinosaur spells only, then you can replace Timber Gorge with Unclaimed Territory, which means that you don't have to play four tapped lands.
1 Thrashing Brontodon
4 Sunpetal Grove
2 Tranquil Expanse
9 Forest
6 Plains
I didn't have to play Tranquil Expanse here, if I were to be more conservative with my mana costs. But I wanted to demonstrate how you might be able to play dual cost cards of both colors in a two-color deck. If I didn't need to play Thrashing Brontodon and specifically didn't need two green mana until turn 4, then I could cut both Expanses for Plains and be completely fine. As it stands, we have nineteen green sources, enough for Brontodon on-curve, and sixteen white sources, enough for Lyra on-curve.
Notice that we have 19 lands which are either Forest or Plains or both, so our Temple Gardens are good to go.
1 Vraska's Contempt
1 Tezzeret, Artifice Master
4 Steam Vents
4 Dragonskull Summit
4 Drowned Catacomb
5 Swamp
4 Island
1 Mountain
The idea of this type of deck is that we are based around UB, and we have decided that Nicol Bolas is strong enough to be worth splashing for. We have one Mountain to cover against opponents with Field of Ruin trying to cut us off of red, but otherwise all of our red sources come from our dual lands. This maximizes our consistency since we get to play a lot of basic lands, maximizing our odds of our checklands entering untapped and our odds of curving out.
We have seventeen black sources, sixteen blue sources, and nine red sources. Nine red sources is a little low, but if our only red cards aren't being played until turns 4-5 and only require one red mana, we can get away with it (especially if we only play a few of them, like 3-4 copies of Nicol Bolas and maybe one copy of the new Ral planeswalker that costs 3UR). Our primary colors are blue and black, and we will have one mana of each type by turn 1-2, and two mana of each type around turn 4-5. If we need to play more intense mana costs (say, the new Cancel with surveil 1, which costs 1UU), then we can rearrange our lands to have fewer Dragonskull Summits and Swamps and more Islands and perhaps some copies of Sulfur Falls. We'll have to cut basics, which comes at a price, though.
Right now, our Dragonskull Summmits have fourteen lands of type Swamp or Mountain, which means they will be good to go by turn 2, and we have seventeen lands of type Swamp or Island for our Drowned Catacombs.
1 Vraska's Contempt
1 Cancel
4 Isolated Chapel
4 Glacial Fortress
4 Drowned Catacomb
6 Island
4 Swamp
First of all, we aren't actually playing Cancel, but the new Cancel with surveil 1. Same mana cost so same example though.
You will notice that we have no basic Plains in the deck. This is because we are already cheating a little bit on mana requirements to make this manabase work in absence of the appropriate shocklands. Since we are probably playing a control deck that will see a lot of cards in successful games, we can afford to be a little bit vulnerable to Field of Ruin; we will eventually draw another white source. (Plus, with Search for Azcanta in our deck, our opponent would be crazy to burn Field on trying to color screw us, since it's their only out to a flipped Azcanta!)
We are still cheating though, as I said before. We have eight white sources, which is sufficient for a splashed Teferi. But we only have eighteen blue sources and sixteen black sources, when we normally would want 19 and 17. Not a big deal, but a relevant thing to remember when tuning a deck; consistency is important!
The bigger issue is that we have much lower counts of lands with the right land typing for our checklands than in other examples. Our Drowned Catacombs are fine, at fourteen lands of type Swamp or Island, thanks to the high number of basics. But our Glacial Fortresses are counting on just ten sources, since we have no basic Plains, and our Isolated Chapels are counting on a mere nine. This means our checklands will fairly frequently enter tapped, costing us crucial tempo in a format where the manabases are designed for high-tempo decks. Furthermore, most control decks play some number of utility lands, notably Field of Ruin; we don't get this luxury because our mana would just be too bad otherwise. And, as a final warning, we can't play any cards that require white mana if we need to play them before turn 4; we simply have far too few sources for that to work. Realistically, we may have to consider cutting Teferi or finding a way not to need 1UU on turn 3 and 2BB on turn 4, none of which are great options for us.
What's the lesson here? Be conservative with your mana costs, especially if you don't have multiple shocklands to smooth out your curve!
I hope this helps you out as you brew. One of the most frustrating aspects of brewing is messing up your mana and not knowing whether the spells you are so interested in playing are any good, since you end up with a bunch of non-games due to bad mana. Follow this guide and even if your mana bases don't come out perfectly, they should at least be functional enough for you to spend the bulk of your time figuring out whether your spells are good, which is the real fun in brewing. Don't get bogged down by the logistics. Happy brewing!
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
-Stay Frosty
Kind of. The adjustments for ramp spells are pretty straightforward to make, though a bit complicated to explain in writing. They're related enough that they should be discussed here. Good catch.
Fetchlands like Grow from the Ashes can be counted as 1 source and acts like a checkland.
Mana Dorks like Llanowar Elves would count for .5 mana source while Dragon's Hoard and Manalith would count for full mana source.
And Gift of Paradise which taps land and adds any color would count for 1.5.
I believe Frank mentions in the article that for cantrips like Opt / Anticipate. These can be treated as .25 which would explain reasoning for lower counts on burn decks.
I guess I'll also note the case for when we need to cast cards that have a double mana requirement on Turn 2/3/4/5
His chart states you need about
20 on Turn 2
19 on Turn 3
18 on Turn 4
16 on Turn 5
Since those are the most important turns.
He also notes for Cards that have splashed color requirements need roughly 9 mana if they come out Turn 5.
So to estimate what he states.
T3 12 mana
T4 11 mana
T5 9 mana
-Stay Frosty
(complicated tangent incoming)
All correct, though you should note that Gift is being counted "extra" because it specifically makes the land enchanted tap for two mana of any one color. Something like Unbridled Growth should only be counted as one source because it only makes one mana of any color. Also, be careful as to how you account sources like Unbridled Growth. If you have only ten lands that make green mana, then counting Unbridled Growth as a green source to get to the requisite 14 green sources to cast Unbridled Growth, or Attune with Aether (RIP), etc. is circular and faulty, since you already must have the green source to cast Growth in the first place. You may, however, count Growth as green sources for the purposes of casting, say, a 2GG spell like Bristling Hydra, since you could cast Hydra off of Forest, Plains, Plains, Island by enchanting a non-Forest land with Growth.
(/tangent)
And yes, the double mana requirements are important. I left them out of the initial post because I wanted to focus on the shockland/checkland interactions, which need only one land of the appropriate type. But when constructing any manabase you must take those requirements into account for making sure you can actually cast your spells.