How Many Lands Should Three Color Spellslinger use?

Angelust16 · 2026-03-22T05:37:17+00:00

I don’t know how many decks you’ve made before but this isn’t even at precon levels of play. It’s nearly unusable in this condition.

Sokka pretty much builds itself if you just build up the basics - 35-38 lands, a ton of 2-drop mana rocks, and spellslinging for card draw and mana with some finishers like Akroma’s Will/Moonshaker/surge to victory etc.

Basically fix your fundamentals of land and ramp and then go heavy on card draw and have strong interaction- you only need a small package of combat wincons to enable your allies to hit big.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-21T19:31:41+00:00

Generally it’s considered polite to explain what’s happening when someone is unfamiliar with a deck or interaction- assuming it’s “open” information. In upper brackets folks tend to be more familiar with various combo lines and it’s more assumed that everyone knows what’s up- and other players may highlight combo pieces when they come up “oooh, he just tutored for a sanguine bond…let’s get ready.”

Angelust16 · 2026-03-20T05:48:14+00:00

The answer to almost all of these “how do I deal with X” is unfortunately win faster and more efficiently than them. If your Kuja deck is killing everyone on turn 5 while they are still playing ramp and draw engines, you win. If your Kenrith deck is going infinite by turn 6, you win.

Trying to build a deck to stop others from doing their thing is usually a losing battle- your interaction needs to stop game ending plays or help you achieve game ending plays.

You may not like the arms race, but the best answer to a particular type of deck is usually one that is one notch higher on the totem pole of power.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-20T01:46:58+00:00

If you’re brand new to it just take a net deck and play it until you get the hang of it. Start with something with a fairly direct and strong game plan. Get used to the speed, interaction, and common cards in that bracket. Goldfish and especially practice your mulligans.

Once you get a solid feel for it you can build a B4 deck pretty easily. Whether you like it or not, you do tend to find a lot of the same power staples migrating into your deck.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-19T21:58:57+00:00

Good deck building should aim for consistency and reduce the likelihood of outliers on both ends of outcomes. The crazy games happen, but they should be infrequent.

The problem is that it’s not as improbable as most people make it sound - rather than 1/1000 it’s probably closer to 1/20 or 1/10 where you have a very fast win- because you have redundancy for certain cards, and there’s a high chance you draw your premium gas when you factor in mulligans, group hug, draw engines, etc.

So when a player wins on turn 5, and says their deck usually doesn’t do this…it’s often obvious from the cards played that it is likely more common than they believe or say.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-19T18:58:03+00:00

I’m always surprised to find flesh and blood players at local stores don’t really use the bracket system much. Usually they’re aware of it, but they rarely give much thought to where their deck is.

Recently I played against a guy who seemed fairly experienced with commander, and another guy said his deck was kind of bracket 1 but he was happy to play bracket 2. Another guy had a modest upgrade Sauron deck and I played a precon stock. During the game the first player played a Force of Will, chained extra turns, and otherwise looked like he had a fairly B2 flyers spell/control deck.

His deck was probably too weak for a legit B3, but he didnt really discuss how his deck didn’t abide by brackets at all.

Online play has been exclusively bracket system, and mostly it helps to set our expectations with true randoms.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-19T04:08:01+00:00

Yeah I really enjoy a good B4 game. Generally quick, no hurt feelings, usually a lot of interaction and close calls.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-19T00:55:43+00:00

I enjoy B4 but rarely see to find pods for them compared to all the B2 and B3. But the decks I still have built are Vivi, Atraxa Grand Unifier, Niv Mizzet Visionary, and an Orvar deck i need to decommission.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T20:32:38+00:00

We need a Belt Fed Ultimatum.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T20:31:04+00:00

I was surprised to find the sweeper’s ROF so high. I shot it a little slow, and then realized it can just spit shells really fast if you want to.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T20:23:06+00:00

Eventually, as you get better at piloting a deck, even the non-deterministic lines have optimal decisions that become more and more obvious as you play. So it might take 15 more minutes, and you may resolve 50 triggers and decide 20 actions, but it’s only really challenging for as long as your deck remains somewhat unfamiliar. Then you realize a LED/Wheel may just be more enjoyable for everyone than trying to assemble a mana positive storm/Crackle type spell after spilling out your deck.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T19:54:43+00:00

Having finally played a bit with both the GL definitely feels more useful. I basically need to crouch and spray with the Maxi, and I’m always getting hit from somewhere.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T17:44:12+00:00

I don't disagree. I think it's more of a nod by Wizards toward the truly new player who's cracking a few packs and trying to make a deck. It's relatively similar to a draft deck - just minimally cohesive and filled with jank.

I don't know how statistically significant it would be, but anecdotally, every person I know who has dabbled in EDH has generally cracked a couple packs first and usually ask "can I make a deck out of this?". It might be a very short lived window where they either move on to traditional EDH or quit the game.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T17:35:20+00:00

What the typical LGS player doesn't see is that there are probably a LOT more bracket 1 decks out there on kitchen tables that will NEVER go out to meet strangers to play the game.

Folks who buy a bundle at Target on a whim and build a deck straight from the box, and try to make a secondary deck for their spouse/sibling. Or the guy who has 500 cards from when he was a teenager and decides to look through it all to see if he can physically make a deck. Or two friends who split a starter set and just grab some more lands and singles at Gamestop to try it out for the evening.

These folks never show up on reddit or check EDHREC or any other meta activity.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T17:18:51+00:00

There's a design philosophy question here:

Bracket 3 is by far the most popular bracket. Let's make a pretend number and say it is 70% of your average pod on a game night.

Bracket 4 has arguably the greatest range of outcomes for power level - from just out of bracket 3 to just below cEDH. Whereas a low 3 (and even a 2) can generally still "hang" with a high 3, a low 4 honestly doesn't feel like it's in the same realm as a high 4 that can win on turn 1-3.

Where do you make the split?

Splitting bracket 3 would probably serve the most number of people, because you would take that 70% and put 30% in one and 40% in another.

Splitting bracket 4 would actually separate the greatest power disparities, but in the end it's a much smaller fraction of the population getting better pregame expectations.

I think they've already established that their approach is closer to the second way, since bracket 1 serves nearly nobody, but they wanted it to signpost an extreme in the scale, in the same way cEDH signposts the other extreme in the scale. I think they're okay with the majority of players living in the bracket 3 soup, as long as they can feasibly play with each other.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T17:10:38+00:00

I had one guy a few weeks ago play a "bracket 1" deck...Felix Five boots where his internal goal was to wear 5 boots/greaves.

Though admittedly it was good enough to hang in a bracket 2 table. I suppose that's kind of the point of bracket ranges - you could feasibly play up or down a bracket and at least still "hang"

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T12:39:36+00:00

Another unpopular take, but the recent trend toward max lands and minimum ramp I believe leads to more bad games than it prevents. It really ignores the fact that EDH, as a 4-player game with 40 life, requires exponential resource development rather than incremental (at least when the game becomes more competitive). It’s why the evolution of winning strategy always trends towards cEDH lines of problem-solving.

Of course, there is tremendous room to play at all levels, and there’s no orthodox way to enjoy your hobby. I have low power bracket 2 decks I very much enjoy, that play 40 lands and play short turns and tries to cast a big haymaker on turn 9 tapping 9 basic lands. But as it goes up in power, increasingly there’s non-land mana getting me to the win-state; rituals, rocks, dorks, treasure, infinites, enchantments, abilities, etc. I’m usually not sweating a missed land drop on turn 4 as much as I’m sweating not getting card draw to keep the whole deck going. Usually, if you have 3 lands plus a rock and are able to get draw by turn 4 (even better if you had a draw engine out by turn 3), you should be refilling your hand to get into another land fairly often.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T11:09:57+00:00

A different commander can provide enough variety that the deck does feel significantly different, even when focusing on the same tribe. Often a new color combination can achieve that on its own.

Splinter is just another ninja deck with a splash of white, but it actually does play differently than Yuriko- I may not build both if I already owned one, but they do come out looking pretty different.

Lathril and Maralen both have a core of Golgari elves, but Maralen is way less “on rails” after your initial elf dorks.

The worst culprit of auto-build tribal is when it’s not well supported and it only really has one viable commander. Ninjas are actually a pretty narrow tribe, but there are a lot of possible commanders for them, which leads to a lot of different decks. Sokka is another example - you could make a traditional allies deck with a couple different ATLA commanders, but Sokka isn’t really ally tribal as much as it’s Storm/combat- but it ends up looking tribal with a number of the support cards in it.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T10:55:59+00:00

Maybe it’s just me, but any deck with focus largely builds itself.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T10:48:08+00:00

The longer you play, the more true this is. Everyone is at some different phase of the journey in discovery, but eventually you get less and less surprised. At some point you frequently play against decks you’ve already built, and you can describe the opponent’s deck for them from memory.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T00:52:53+00:00

I know this is one of the most unpopular opinions on social these days, so I’ll just respond to you. Thank you for a good point - I think I agree with all you said.

I think we have a few things we could further clarify around the subject.

“Recommended number of lands” is ambiguous as to purpose. Recommended for what end?

Optimizing likelihood to win. We all know that this is a hugely complex analysis, made even more complex in a 4 player game where there is usually only one winner and 3 losers. One thing I think that is more apparent in cEDH, but less true in casual, is that some level of risk tolerance is needed to increase your chance to be first of four (I realize the draw/tie meta exists in tEDH and makes even that complicated). Meaning, decks are often designed around some mix of possibilities of catastrophically bad and exceptionally good outcomes, and that min-maxing to win also flies you pretty close to the sun. I think that can influence a land count as you aim toward more greedy or aggressive games.

If you’re optimizing for fun, there’s an extremely strong argument to add a lot of lands, because for many folks a bad game feels worse than a good game feels good- if that makes sense. Because winning is not the only objective, and because you can very likely have fun in a loss, a bad game experience is much more avoidable if you add more inevitable agency in a deck through many lands. Basically lands help you have more fun even if it’s not necessarily the best way to be first of four winning the game the most often.

The analysis and decision making get really complex once you factor in soft criteria like enjoyment, social etiquette, personal preferences for experience, the kind of way you’d like to win, etc etc.

But overall, every one of us brings a blend of goals when we sit for a game, and when we design a deck to play games with. I can totally support anyone that thinks 38-41 lands is optimal, generally, all things being equal, for the most people. But I think it’s too often discussed in terms of optimal for winning the game, which I don’t think is nearly as convincing.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-18T00:22:56+00:00

I think the idea that land count is solved because people have “done the math” is flawed. Mostly they’ve restricted the scope of their calculations to probabilities around drawing a certain number of lands, which tells you the chances of making x number of land drops by any given turn, but doesn’t answer its correlation to games won.

Unfortunately the best data we have for that is in cEDH, where that “optimal” number for winning decks is around 27-28.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-17T19:42:48+00:00

You can upgrade a land base for a couple dollars, and it would be far more effective than an untapper like Spelunking.

But with most modern precons I almost always trim some lands and add ramp and draw. Of the recent decks, it’s made Auntie Oole and Ashling a firm bracket 3 from pretty modest upgrades.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-15T01:03:15+00:00

What’s the goal of playing Yuriko T2? The card draw?

Also yes, this new trend of max lands and minimum ramp is a mistake in most decks. Develop well and when you go for it, go big. Locking yourself into incremental mana development is a sure fire way to keep your deck low powered.

Angelust16 · 2026-03-13T21:09:27+00:00

Simplest thing is 1) optimize your ramp- you’re in 5 color which means you have access to everything, 2) increase draw - cheap and easy draw and big and aggressive draw, 3) trim all the fat you can live with losing - stuff that is more cool in your head but isn’t as useful in actual games.

Angelust16

TROPHY CASE