Mana Screw

Last time I talked about Type II mana screw. Now let's move to the tough part, Type I. And as always we are talking limited. Constructed is dumb and mulling properly requires too many inputs.

So let's take a look at that hand Sam Pardee called a screw job. To be fair he could be talking about not drawing the land that he needed as opposed to the opening hand. But for the moment we are just gonna focus on the decision to mull or not to mull. Here is the 7 that pardee had.

His deck mained 25 lands and he drew one in the opener. Certainly this hand is below the expected value of lands for a random 7. I haven't crunched the numbers in like 7 years so I don't quite remember what the EV is.

Here is his analysis of the hand, "This is definitely a very risky keep, but I think that the upside is very high as well. If I draw the first Island on the first turn, I expect to win the game a vast majority of the time, while if I miss and hit on the second turn, I still think I'm probably going to be in good shape. As it turns out, I missed my second land for several turns and died to some random creatures."

Fair enough. He is way better than me. If you click through to the article and scroll down there is a huge nerd who ran the 'odds' and agrees with Sam. Usually I am pretty afraid of something like this because I could simply not draw a land and loose. But this is constructed so he probably doesn't even need that Island, I don't know.

Type I Mana Screws

SnapMull:  Zero or Seven lands or Six lands. Nothing you can do. You simply aren't winning with that. Even if you got a perfect curve in your hand do not play it.

TheTease: Basically the hand that Pardee had. You got some early action and not enough lands. I haven't done the math. I really need to. That's sort of the theme of this article.

ToughCall: Two land or five lands. It's not really a screw. You see this kind of distribution a ton. It depends on what's in your hand.