What's your record?

[DontMisunderstand]

For consecutive non-games resulting from improbable card sequences? I'm currently on 17 games in a row where a deck with a 93% chance of having playable mana by turn 8 didn't get there. 17 times in a row. It has never, ever been like this before. What the hell is going on? I feel like I'm going crazy here.

[Tom the Mime Artist]

In addition to the considerations other than land count for a mulligan, after game 1 you often mulligan very differently against different decks largely based on the old question - Who's the Beatdown? Since you were talking about historic, I'll use Izzet Wizards and three potential matchups as an example.

vs Mono Red Aggro - you're not the beatdown. You have better card advantage spells than them and if you survive the early game, you should win. Cheap removal to deal with threats is more important than early game creatures that will probably just eat a burn spell. Your sideboarding and mulliganing should reflect this. A 3 land, 4 creature hand is probably not keepable, a 3 land, 4 removal hand definitely is.

vs Mono Green Devotion - you're the beatdown. They have better long term card advantage and threats so you need to beat them before it matters. Utopia sprawl is hard to interact with to slow them down. They don't have any cheap interaction though so you can stack some creatures if you don't have early instants then a big turn with lots of cast triggers might be able to push through the defences, especially with a dreadhorde arcanist doubling up a spell. 3 lands, 4 creatures is keepable in this matchup but not ideal, hoping to draw at least some instant/sorcery by turn 3. 3 lands, 4 removal/interaction is not keepable, probably even if you have spell pierce/pithing needle from the sideboard.

vs Solemnity lock - a rare matchup which is probably the worst potential matchup and not common enough for dedicated sideboard slots. You have few outs - only an absurdly fast hand to beat out nine lives/phyrexain unlife or bouncing phyrexian unlife/solemnity with otawara, with spells and board state to max out counters on nine lives in the latter case. Before stirling grove gives more protection. You mulligan aggressively for a either the fast hand, otawara or multiple spells that let you dig. If you keep an average hand that would be fine in other match ups, you'll lose every time so you roll the dice and hope. Your land count is also lower than ideal in this match up because otawara shouldn't really be counted as a land here.

Also, the historic meta is almost certainly going to change after MH3 is released. Some of it won't be legal but the power level of what is will shake things up a bit.

[mwesthoff]

I've mulliganed away my only two tap lands only to get both of them back in the next hand more times than I can count. The shufflers a real GEM!

[Berserkr]

Man the bans are getting bad here lately, I just got done a 24 hour one over on the lotro discussions and all I said was I watched a show for free vs paying for it

[DontMisunderstand]

Originally posted by Tom the Mime Artist:

In addition to the considerations other than land count for a mulligan, after game 1 you often mulligan very differently against different decks largely based on the old question - Who's the Beatdown? Since you were talking about historic, I'll use Izzet Wizards and three potential matchups as an example.

vs Mono Red Aggro - you're not the beatdown. You have better card advantage spells than them and if you survive the early game, you should win. Cheap removal to deal with threats is more important than early game creatures that will probably just eat a burn spell. Your sideboarding and mulliganing should reflect this. A 3 land, 4 creature hand is probably not keepable, a 3 land, 4 removal hand definitely is.

vs Mono Green Devotion - you're the beatdown. They have better long term card advantage and threats so you need to beat them before it matters. Utopia sprawl is hard to interact with to slow them down. They don't have any cheap interaction though so you can stack some creatures if you don't have early instants then a big turn with lots of cast triggers might be able to push through the defences, especially with a dreadhorde arcanist doubling up a spell. 3 lands, 4 creatures is keepable in this matchup but not ideal, hoping to draw at least some instant/sorcery by turn 3. 3 lands, 4 removal/interaction is not keepable, probably even if you have spell pierce/pithing needle from the sideboard.

vs Solemnity lock - a rare matchup which is probably the worst potential matchup and not common enough for dedicated sideboard slots. You have few outs - only an absurdly fast hand to beat out nine lives/phyrexain unlife or bouncing phyrexian unlife/solemnity with otawara, with spells and board state to max out counters on nine lives in the latter case. Before stirling grove gives more protection. You mulligan aggressively for a either the fast hand, otawara or multiple spells that let you dig. If you keep an average hand that would be fine in other match ups, you'll lose every time so you roll the dice and hope. Your land count is also lower than ideal in this match up because otawara shouldn't really be counted as a land here.

Also, the historic meta is almost certainly going to change after MH3 is released. Some of it won't be legal but the power level of what is will shake things up a bit.

Best of 3 is statistically less likely to be decided by player skill, so I don't play it. And, as I mentioned before... I do consider other things in my mulligan decisions, it's just that none of those things actually matter more than whether it's possible to cast spells. Like I said before, sometimes I'll keep a risky 2 land hand. That 'sometimes' is putting in a lot of work, because it says there are reasons I won't and reasons I will. On the flip side, there are almost zero reasons I'd ever mulligan a 4 land hand, the other 3 cards would have to be both extremely bad AND at the top end of my mana curve... which wouldn't make it into the deck in the first place if they were. 3 land hands are much easier to snap-keep, but they're still not an automatic keep outside of mono-color decks. For example, if my dimir deck has 3 islands and 4 black spells in the opener, that'd be very risky to keep. Not necessarily unplayable, but I'd be risking the match on the 32-70% chance I get black mana in time to stabilize. Very obviously, mulligan decisions also change depending on whether I'm on the play or on the draw; you're at a massive disadvantage going first unless you curve out, while simultaneously being at an even larger disadvantage every mulligan you take.

Not sure why people are so insistent that I don't understand basic math here. It's annoying.