Updated calculator page: www.salubrioussnail.com/calculators

Being reminded of partial paris mulligans was one part "that scene in ratatouille where the critic remembers his childhood" and one part "vietnam war flashback"

Why don't I mulligan enough? Because I just can't be bothered to shuffle again.

Snail be cute, snail be smart. Snail teach you how to not fumble the start.

EDH: if your hands are big, mulligan more. If your hands are small, its not worth shuffling a 100 card sleeved deck.

Commander is the format of paying 2 for your third land drop

Math student: "When will I use any of this stuff"

F.I.R.E-era standard may have been a mess, but it taught me the value of aggressive mulligans. When your deck is 8 design mistakes, 28 generically decent cards, and 24 lands then you have to mulligan a lot to not get caught without your broken cards.

I hold fondly a memory of mulling down to a 2 card hand (2 lands) and top decking into the exactly right card for the first 6 turns of a the game in the old RTR/Theros standard, just barely losing to my opponents top deck master of waves.

My Grenzo, dungeon warden deck plays 28 lands and mulls super aggressively, since it actually wants to put creatures on the bottom. I played a game today where my mull to 4 was by far the best of all my hands, and I won the game with it lol.

“Can I mulligan my commander for another in my deck?”

One kinda Timmy solution of wanting to draw less lands and more gas is running high land counts but with 10+ mdfc/cycling lands. In a 2 color deck I like to run all available colored cycling lands (6/7 depending on if they have a cycling dual) Since they generally etb tapped you're generally playing behind curve more than you want to but I don't generally mind. Later in the game the bad cycling costs don't matter that much since you probably got more mana than you can spend anyways

I think the biggest cost to a mulligan for me is having to pick up my commander deck and shuffle it before I draw the next 7, especially when everyone else is keeping and I’m holding up the game. I can’t help but include this effort into my mulligan decisions 😅

Adequately entertaining anecdote about mulligans: a little while back, I was teaching my girlfriend how to play magic after I’d just picked up the “Deep clue sea” precon. We shuffled up, I explained the basics of a good hand to her (pretty poorly, might I add) and then looked at my own cards. A single land, but also a sol ring, two signets and a talisman (probably a result of incredibly poor shuffling). I decided to be greedy and was stuck on two lands for 8 turns while still managing to build up a board state. Great precon 10/10. Moral of the story: greed pays of and is fun remember to sin everyone!

I love you snail

My playgroup implemented a new house rule that works well for us. We start by drawing 12 instead of 7 and put the 5 extra cards on the bottom of our library, no mulligans allowed

Helpful as always. It's nice having a channel that explains a lot about deckbuilding and playing commander in a practical way, without assuming that the audience is completely new to card games. This is probably something better asked on your patreon, but I would love a video where you go through how you would build a control, midrange, and aggro leaning deck and what choices are made depending on the speed of a commander game. I often find that the grindiness and inconsistency (at least compared to other formats) make it difficult for me to find a rate that my decks want to play at or set goals for specific rounds, and some general deckbuilding guidance would be really appreciated!

This is the best MTG channel I've ever found, thanks.

Is it just me or does getting better at commander almost always involve "Play More Lands"

1:26 Best girl jumpscare.

wooo more calculations i will misuse(i will make low land decks and justify it with 60% chance to draw a playable hand after 3 mulligans)

It's kind of amazing that the london mulligan has existed for five years now and yet so many commander players don't know it yet

your videos are so good. i have played magic for a decade and your putting into words what my intuition has been doing for me :D thank you

I wish I had this video when I was first learning how to play Commander and Standard back in 2021. I remember going from not caring about the mulligan, seeing it as just another random 7 cards or worse (less!) in my practice on Arena. Then realizing my friends that always beat me were doing it SOMETIMES but very thoughtfully. Finally, learning more and more about strategy to understand that decks tend to perform differently and want different things early in a match versus later in the game. All together, it culminated in slowly figuring out some (hopefully most) of what is being said here! Thank you so much :)

I’m trying to teach my mom how to play magic, and the next thing I was gonna teach her is mulliganing, and what a good hand looks like. The fact that you made this video means that there is gonna be a video for the lesson now lmao Great vid!

This was really solid. I appreciate you backing up your thoughts with statistics. Awesome video.

In my play groups and LGS we keep it pretty casual, we do Sheldon Menery's "geese" mulligan (RIP) But it has to to be in good faith that the players aren't just sculpting their hands for an advantage

i play casual EDH at my LGS. and my play group started doing what we call the Renee-lligan. named after our friend renee. with the renee-lligan, you draw 10 cards with your opening hand, and put 3 cards back into the deck and shuffle. its pretty much our favorite way to mulligan, and we typically do not use this mulligan maliciously. the consensus is that with the 10 card hand it ensures that we get 2-3 lands in our opening hand, 2-3 one to three mana value spells and 1-2 four to five mana value spells in your opening hand. of course this mulligan can be used irresponsibly, but when everyone is on the same page and powerlevel, there arent really issues with it. we usually allow one more renee-lligan if there are less than 2 lands in the opening hand but if you choose to do it again, no matter what hand you draw afterward, you have to keep it. anytime someone has done the renee-lligan we have never had anyone locked out of the game or screwed out of lands. drawing ten cards in the opening hands seems nuts, especially if youre thinking "oh well sapphire i would just use this mulligan to just dig for the best tutors and mana rocks, this is stupid and no one should mulligan like this." and yeah there are assholes out there that would do that, but my city has started to adopt this mulligan. out of the 8 LGS in my city, 3 of them i am aware of use the renee-lligan at the moment. you just have to keep in mind that not everyone is an asshole. give it a try if you dont believe me

this is beautiful, love this type of analysis!

Easily the best channel for educational MTG content.

Looping this video until I can convince myself to goldfish mindfully

Thank you so much this is so useful omg. I’ve been playing for years and doing grew learning so much but never viewed the mulligan as a resource like this ❤🎉

Land counts and likelyhood of drawing land vs non-land cards is something that I find particularly interesting. I'm currently building a Borborygmos Enraged deck which puts a fun twist on it. Most decks want to draw as few lands as possible while hitting their land drop every turn. Borborygmos is the exact opposite. The fewer non-land cards you can get away with playing, the better. It will definitely be an interesting experience optimizing this compared to other decks!

Great video! I like how you back up your reasoning with numbers. Makes a lot of sense. I started mtg when mulliganning wasnt thought of as good (0/7) now with edh it's a strategy.

Awesome video!! I usually disregard mulligans, but this vid is gonna make me take them more seriously

This was a really cool video! I also came to a lot of similar conclusions about manabases and using Mulligans, althought mine was more heuristics based and feelings. You will feel very sad by pulling out cool cards you want to play but increasing your ability to play a good game from 70->80% will lead to you having more fun when you get to play the game instead of getting mana screwed and regretting it for 2 hours

Ah this is so in depth! I wish I had this when I started playing. Also going to share it with my LGS because everyone has their own opinion on how to mulligan 😂

Yeah, with cEDH, mulliganing properly is defimotely where i struggle most. Im new to it but boy do i feel like it's kicked my ass

You're amazing. I don't like edh but watch every one of your videos.

"It's literally impossible for a hand to have access to no good cards" *looks at my 0 land, 3.5 average CMC hand*

Really good video, I liked how you showed the math, very cool!

Great topic and explanation! I’ve had to think about mulligans in weird ways in my 4th Omnath landfall deck, versus my even CMC Muldrotha+Gyruda companion deck, vs my Henzie+Umori companion deck 😵‍💫

This video was very thought provoking. One of my favorite decks is a zabaz the glimmerwasp boros modular deck. This is making me think to start mulling more aggressively with that deck since usually all my turn ones are the same since zabaz costs 1 colorless. Might as well look for more interaction and combo pieces

One of my fave mtg channels atm

Excellent video!

Great video, and thanks for mentioning your Goreclaw deck. I had just thrown one together and comparing yours to mine turned me on to some cards I overlooked like Doomskar Warrior and helped give me confidence to include cards I thought were good like Vorapede that I didn't see elsewhere.

Some pretty fire content bro

One deck that isn’t super competitive but which has been a great learning experience in aggressive mulligans is Sram, Senior Edificer voltron. I don’t run as low as 28 lands, but when 40+% of my deck turns into cantrip permanents with a two-mana spell I have perpetual access to, I can mulligan pretty liberally without having to worry about mana shortage.

Great analysis of mulligans. It's an important skill to learn as it is a unique resource at your disposal that is part of the game, but easy to forget, because you never see it while you're actually playing, only during set up. Before the London Mulligan was instituted, I came up with my own personal mulligan in my circle for casual commander. We still use it to this day, as long as we're playing a casual deck without two card instant win combos. What we do is draw 3 hands of 7 side by side. Set them down in independent piles and look at each. Pick one that works and shuffle the others in. Often times we look at the first 7 before drawing the other two just in case it's worth keeping. I instituted this rule to save time, because the time it takes players to shuffle a 100 card deck adequately weigh the pros and cons of a hand and debate the validity of their mulligan is just too painfully long, especially when multiple shuffles are required. If you built your deck with even remotely close to enough lands, you are very likely to have a keepable hand in these 3. In some ways, this is like having one extra free mulligan. However without the shuffling, it's possible you have a hand that's all lands and one that's everything you want. In that way, it's not the same as just getting a free Mulligan where you shuffle and can still see the card you wanted to keep but had to shuffle in, because you had no lands. Understanding the gives and takes of this, I still think it's more than fair and it saves a lot of time. It tends to keep the games more interesting and focused on the game itself. But this is only a casual rule and falls apart when people start bringing Thoracle into the mix.

Great video, tons of useful analysis. I will say the quality of your mic made the video seem more "low quality" than it actually is. Just a tip for improving future videos, and keep up the great work!

I've been thinking a lot about mulligans recently, so this video was a fantastic watch. Sounds obvious, but my recent epiphany has been to be more critical with what my deck's actual gameplan is, and choosing mulligans focused on that. In my dredge/mill insect deck, hands with "decent enough cards plus Kodama's Reach" tend to fall flat if I don't quickly draw into a mill-enabler, compared to hands that have some built-in mill outlet. I've kept too many "fine" hands instead of great hands for *this* deck because of that initial "mulligans are the emergency button" mindset you alluded to.

I've heard a great piece of advice, which is "Imagine you only get to play with those starting cards, if you can do something with these, you should probably keep". However as i play more and more, it gets more complicated. I have a Sodar Jabari of Zhalfir deck and mulliganing is one of it's strengths thanks to commander's eminence, which lets me loot when i attack with a knight l. That lets me mulligan very aggressively, because i know that as long as i have a knight to play(one is in the command zone), i can see a ton of card.

Best theory channel

I play pretty casually and I've hit a point where as long as I have 2 or 3 land and 1 creature I can play with that amount of mana I call it good. It's a really, really good way to find out what your deck is bad at when you play with highly suboptimal hands. In other words: I boldly expect my decks to deliver greatness and, if they don't, I've learned why.

Incredible vid. Ty.

I play Sythis, Harvests Hand as my commander, so I draw a TON of cards. So I'm almost always able to draw at least one mana to stay on curve. So everything in this video is super relatable. I only run 32 lands cause I only need 2-3 to start popping off. And even if I have to mulligan a bunch, I'll just draw all the cards I need back.

I think the biggest part when you talk about their confidence in mulliganing, is not the confidence in mulliganing but their confidence in shuffling often for me after a couple of games all my lands end up bunched together and seeing a decent couple of xards and three lands ill keep not because i shouldnt mulligan (i should and i would on cockatrice) but vecause im scared of not getting any lands vecause ive got the feeling that theyre all at the bottom together

our house rule is you can mulligan if you have no lands else you play. it makes for more conservative decks built with plenty of lands and often around a couple of strategies that over 5 hands gets quite interesting tactically. We also run that that the first 2 games have no value and are to practice, then an optional 5 card changes before game 3 and score of games 3-5.

I think this video has reinforced my idea of running my Octavia deck with 30 lands only and trying to play even less. I've got around 20 pieces of filtering at 1 or 2 cmc. They filter lands by putting the "desirables" cards in the graveyard. This is exactly what Octavia want : you fill your GY with spells and keep the land in your hand. When Octavia's on the battlefield, you keep the playables and bin the lands.

A rule 0 that my group has is that we can mulligan 7 until another player says stop, then we're allowed 1 more if it's genuinely unplayable (e.g. 0 lands). That way it's more likely that everyone will have a good time with their first few turns, but doesn't let someone take the piss and spend 15 minutes finding their "perfect opener"

Good video!

Amazing vid

A great idea a friend of mine found, is to take a first hand of 10 and putting 3 at the bottom, the likelyhood of getting somthing unplayable with 10 cards is really low and that removes the 5th hand drawn making the start of the game shorter and more enjoyable.

My favourite mulligan is stil Lab Maniacs' one where he mulled to 3 cards, but managed to find a hand that BTFO'd another of them going all in on Oracle Consultation.

I think a deck with green can get away with having fewer lands. Ramp spells, mana dorks and fast mana help you greatly. The mulligan also helps a lot, by the reasons stated on the video. You have to be willing to make some sacrifices and sometimes things will go south, but if you get things going it's always so beautiful.

9:01 is something I wish you'd gone into a little more, knowing your opponents/matchups. Back when Eldrazi Ramp was in standard, I was on the draw in game 3 against Valakut. My 7 and 6 card hands had lands and spells, but they were too slow for the matchup. I knew from my testing that 5 card hands could be better than that. Then, sure enough, I drew up a 5 card hand that ended up going turn 3 Primeval Titan, turn 4 Primeval Titan, turn 5 Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre.

As for the 28 land deck. I have one deck that I run 28 lands in, my Urza LHA seck. Mono Blue, with AMPLE ramp. If I wait till T3 to cast Urza, I consider it casual and non-competitive. But that deck is specifically designed to function like that. Most other decks, even an Adrix and Nev deck will need 35 lands.

I find that in standard, running a 69-70 card deck with 24 lands seems to be the sweet spot for getting the deck strategy out on the board. It's a bit slow against aggro, but if you can slow your opponent's tempo, it works exceedingly well.

Hi, love the content. Would you link the card list of your glissa deck? I'm curious.

WOW WTF Chartooth Cougar is wild! I was trying to build a firebreathing deck for a bit due to Kargan Dragonlord getting way too much hate than it deserves.

I agree that Mulligans are an underutilized resource, but with how long shuffling 99 cards takes, I kinda wish it wasn't. Depending on the playgroup, it almost feels like part of the social contract to try and minimise the time spent mulliganning and keep whatever something playable, even when somewhat suboptimal, just to get into a game.

Like the part of citing mulligan tactics in commander. Not me mulliganing to six and five today just to FOW and Red blast kinnan at my table today 😂

my edh mulligan strat is always keep 3+ lands cards and flip anything else

Can you do a video on how to properly test?

On Arena, I have 2 Historical decks designed around mulligans. I only use 1 for the most part however because apparently to some players using Scute Swarm Mutation is a crime punishable by the death of me and my family. The other I have a general rule with the deck. If I dont open 1 of my search cards, I mulligan up to 3 times to try and get 1. I can do 4, but that means I will have a dead turn if I draw too many lands. Idealy, I try to get a search card and 3 land as that has the highest chance of a turn 4 Eldrazi as well as starting off the combo of the deck, which is to board sweep often with cards that bring back my creatures as well as cards that gain advantage when they enter or leave play. It took a lot of testing and fiddling around to get the deck just right to not only have every creature it may need, but to be able to safely mulligan frivolously to get a good hand. For the longest time, it was my favorite deck. But then I learned how to clone planeswalkers, then I learned to duplicate them, then I learned how to duplicate them and my opponents deck while cloning literally everything

I think I have still Parised more than London, even though I started in 2014 Fall and left summer 2017, came back summer 2021, and then left the standard scene probably some time in 2022? I was hitting hard in 2014+ Run.

I play Grenzo, Dungeon Keeper, we love a good London mullingan

As a general rule if I know that I can run with the 2 for a few turns and the rest is solid it’s usable however optimal hand is 3 lands and something I can play one turn 1 2 or 3 also all colors in the deck or all colors in the current hand for those lands

I think that the chance of drawing lands plays also a big role. With 40 lands in deck, there is a greater chance Ill get mana flooded, and in EDH its usually the case that you dont start with 7 cards + your commander, but 7 opening hand + commander + the 1st card you draw

Hey man, I really like your content and the way you build decks. I wasted wondering if you would buld a deck for me personally for whatever price you seem fit. I'd give you some parameters to work with.

There's a Gerry Thomson quote I paraphrase about how every single decklist he sees is easily improved by adding another land. Nobody ever really accounts for manascrew.

I never go with less than 36 lands in my deck. Usually 38 or 40. Having a higher chance of hitting land drops makes me happy

The changing of the mulligan rules was huge in 2019.

as soon as I saw the title/thumbnail I knew I had to watch it, I’m so bad at mulligans

Praise the snail

Funny that you upload a video about mullingans when I made a statistical analysis about all my decks in terms of how keepable are hands (percentage-wise). They all hover about 50%, that explains the free mulligan. I did it by combining all possible solutions in two standard probability equations, plug in x and y for your lands and ramp, ans combine: (PBL(2Lands)+PBL(3Lands)+PBL(4Lands)) × (PBR(1Ramp)+PBR(2Ramp)) Used Maple/WolframAlpha for that - not even gonna try by hand

hi snail, love the content. The math you present is not exact because drawing cards is done without replacement (ie. the order that you draw lands and no lands affects the probability for the next card) and ignoring the mulligans is not really useful. Since the direct calculations are annoying, what I would recommend instead if you know a little programming, is to instead simulate 10,000+ hands drawn one at a time without replacement with the conditionals that you keep the hand with 3-5 lands and mulligan (re-draw) hands that don't have the correct number of lands. Similarly I have a deck that really wants 5 lands by turn 5 so for example I can simulate 12 card hards as well out of the keepable hands. I hope I'm not understating the importance of not skipping the mulligan math. For example the conditional probability of getting to 5 lands on turn 5 with a 1-land start is horrid compared to a 3-land start Overall the goal is if you are able to accurately estimate the number of lands you will draw, you get to set the hard floor for a land count in your deck and you never have to worry about whether you have some wiggle room to cut a land ever again.

snail is the khan academy of the mtg community. thank you for teaching me how to git gud

my most played 60 card deck runs a very sharp curve where there's LOADS of awesome onedrops, some good 2-drops, and a couple of BIG 3 drops that influence all the others the deck is best at a minimum of 3 lands, but is playable with just 2 (granted I find both colors) (I run 18-20 lands, because drawing land every turn is certain death) I tend to mulligan a 1-land-hand because MtgA's shuffler is a bastard and I shuffle my physical decks well (mana weave at home, then shuffle, shuffle before every match, mana weave when you get home - keep your deck sharp, efficient and clean and it'll serve you well)

It's interesting how so much commander theory always comes back to lands, it's forced me to genuinely start thinking way too hard about my land base choices.

yo new snail

Strange things with mulligans is that frequently, I’ll end up with 2-5 cards that are the same after a shuffle and cut. It ends up being pretty frustrating. When I was building my new Duskana deck, I played around with 40 lands because although the deck is comprised of mostly 2/2’s they often cost 3+ and this was the first three color deck that felt like it needed more a variety of colors rather than favoring one over another. Iv ended up cutting lands to 36 and throwing in more 2/2’s because my same luck with shuffle/cut, has me flooded each while it’s not functioning as the aggro deck it’s supposed to, I’m at the point where the idea of it seemed fun but the luck of the draw has made it that it does not feel worth it. I also feel like an absolute brainlet looking up videos on how to properly shuffle a commander deck because of it

Would you be willing to post your formulas?

I love to have around 35 lands every time, but always gear every deck to ramp somehow. Dragons spam treasures and stuff like ramos, or slimefoot and squee have a bunch of mana dorks that dont need protecting, or in krenko no creature is more than 5 mana, so i really dont need a *ton* of mana. If I was just foot slogging it for more mana tho I'd get as close to 40 as i could.

I propose the mulligan to 10 variant. Draw 10, put 3 at the bottom in random order. That's it. Only exception: you show a hand with 1 or 0 lands. In that case, shuffle, draw 7, and play with that. Easier to play and to fix everyone

Great video I realize you aren’t talking about min maxing exactly but I want to mention in the comments here that taking a mull “every few games” is insane if you are trying to minmax. Using some back of the napkin math I estimate the % first sevens you ought to keep to be in the vicinity of 15%.. maybe 20% depending on the deck. 1) first mull is free = NO WAY we keep more than 50% 2) 3 opponents. No points for 2nd place. Keeping mid hands makes it more likely to be in a mid position in the game. Playing for 1st means looking for the high roll and being willing to gamble. 3) if you get a bad second seven you can try again and keep 6 4) there are a few cards that are dramatically better than the average card in your deck 5) you have a commander, changing a mull from 7 to 6 into more like a mull from 8 to 7. Keeping half of your first sevens would be preposterous if your goal were to win the max # of games possible. DONT KEEP AVERAGE 7’s!!

I don't believe it was mentioned here, but also keep in mind the multiple Mana Fixers that exist, chromatic lantern, prophetic prism, chromatic star, all of the different signets, etc. Having these mana-fixers available in a deck can make individual hands far more playable than they would be otherwise.

I wasn't a fan of the London mulligan. It gives advantage to combo decks. Now I like it because now I play combo. ;)

We have what we call the extra friendly Mulligan You draw 7 Then 7 again Then 6 6 again 5 and 5 ect. In our experience, this results in the most fun games where there is seldom someone that is totally mana screwed or flooded

My elf ball deck runs 26 lands piloted by Marwyn simply because puking out 1 drop elves after i get her out feeds into my mana pool. The way this deck is configured I’m almost guaranteed to get marwyn out on turn 2 which then turns my mana engine on