This weekend we revisit one of the most popular planes in the Multiverse with Tarkir: Dragonstorm! This plane has been a hit among players since the original Tarkir block came out a decade ago, largely due to dragons being a huge part of the set and the introduction of the three-color clans, which eventually became nomenclature for how we refer to those colors today. Here’s an overview of each clan and what they intend to do:
If you want to learn more about building your Sealed deck for Pre-release, you can check out this article. But for now, we will be discussing something a bit more advanced: how to build a good mana base. Since this is a three-color set, some players are definitely going to have a hard time avoiding messy mana bases. I’m going to show you a few principles I picked up along the way while listening to various content creators and MTG Pros share their thoughts on the matter. I will also be sharing some math which people who are smarter than me did (it’s mostly Hall of Famer Frank Karsten, every Magic player knows this), so if you want to double check their work, go for it.
1. 17 lands is the way to go.
Everyone’s been going back and forth about this, adding or subtracting lands from their deck based on one reason or another. But to consistently draw your lands, you need to have an equivalent of 17 lands in your deck. Maybe you have less because you’re using MDFCs, or a bit more because you need an extra mana source or are doing a heavier curve, these are all special circumstances. NORMALLY you would want to go with 17.
2. The 9-8 split is a terrible mana base.
Yes, it is one of the cleanest mana bases you can go with in Limited, but you have to come to terms with it being a bad mana base. This will never compete with any Constructed mana base, but it’s what you got. That being said, you need to look into improving this with a few dual lands or some mana fixing.
3. You can only have 2 tapped lands.
So how many dual lands can you put in? That depends. You can only afford to put 2 tapped lands without affecting your deck’s consistency, i.e. being able to maximize your mana every turn. Try to notice how many times you ended up casting a weaker spell or were forced to skip a turn because your land drop was tapped. Being able to cast spells on curve helps more than the extra fixing.
4. Ideally, you should be using a mono-colored deck.
Only a mono-colored deck would be able to pull off having a consistent mana base. But it rarely happens that you have enough playables in one color, hence we are forced to dip into another color. So we end up going at least 2-colored in Limited. What I’m getting at is despite the tendency to go 2-color, this shouldn’t be treated as an even split, but rather having one main color and another support color to go along with it.
5. You need 8 sources to support a 2-pip card.
For those of you who are new to this jargon, what we are referring to is the mana symbols on a card. A 2-pip card looks like this:
These cards are difficult to accommodate in the deck. Consider using that color as your main color. This also means that these are very difficult to splash as your third color.
6. You need 3-4 sources to support a one-card splash.
Sometimes we need to dip into a third color in order to play a ridiculously strong bomb. There’s a real cost to this and your mana base will be less consistent. So you better make sure that splash is worth it – something that can actually win you games on its own.
7. Don’t splash more than 4 cards.
Any more than this number and you would have to go up to 5 sources. Choose your splashes carefully.
8. Sometimes, going 4- or 5-color is the correct play.
Especially in sets with good fixing, consider going with more colors.
WRAPPING UP
There you have it – how to fix your mana base. Always remember that there are no hard and fast rules, and these should only serve as guidelines. Hope you get to play your favorite clan this weekend!
You can register using this link: Events | MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm Pre-release Event
