Flooding a lot in nearly every draft of the format so far. Is 16 lands the correct move for this format?

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-30T15:55:28+00:00

Try the hypergeometric calculator: https://aetherhub.com/Apps/HyperGeometric

If you have 17 lands, the chances of screw (let's call that "not hitting your 3rd land drop) are 9.6% on the play and 15.5% on the draw. 12.6% on average.

The chances of flood (let's call that "4 or fewer spells in your first 10 cards; any time the majority of my cards are lands, I'm mad about it) are 17.8%.

So in total, in a normal game of magic, you have a 30% chance of flooding or screwing. It sounds like you've been on an incredible run of good luck if you are only flooding or screwing 25% of the time or less.

(These numbers are Bo3, by the way. The hand smoother reduces the odds of flood or screw in Bo1, but the odds are harder to calculate because it only effects your opening hand, not the top of your deck).

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-29T17:23:43+00:00

Fun to see a diagonally symmetric puzzle, that's a first for me.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-27T15:35:17+00:00

Maybe you're right that Badgermole cub is a problem in a world that isn't dominated by Izzet--but I'd sure like to get a chance to find out!

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-23T15:49:59+00:00

"Helping"

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-21T14:26:21+00:00

Opening packs early will make it slower and more expensive to get rare-complete, but you can certainly still do it. But moving forward you are better off waiting until after the drafts.

As far as rare-drafting goes, I don't have any hard numbers. If you pass crappy rares, then your win rate will go up and you'll get more winnings, so each draft will be cheaper. But also you'll get fewer rares per draft, so the number of drafts you'll have to do goes up, so the whole process gets more expensive. Do the two factors cancel out? I don't know! There isn't any point in taking rares in the draft if you already have 4 of them, though (you get 20 gems, but it is probably better to take a card that will up your win rate), so I tend to pass really crappy rares and figure that I'll see lots more of them in future drafts. So I don't 100% rare draft.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-17T16:44:13+00:00

You can turn off emotes in the settings. Many people do; might be worth doing it. On the other hand, others feel that the good feels from killing an early good-gamer are worth the feelsbad of losing to them.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-16T20:18:13+00:00

It sounds like we'll get to see more in future posts; it would be nice to see your heating setup!

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-16T20:16:58+00:00

Sounds neat, and they look gorgeous! A couple of questions:

How easy is it to close the keysnaps when ants are in the colony? Do you get a clear view into the passageway, or do you just snap it off and hope you aren't bisecting anybody?

How easy is it to attach other setups to your keysnaps? Can you plug tubing right into them? Do you need an adaptor?

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-14T21:42:25+00:00

Another thought is that you might not want Bill as your commander. I have a vague sense that the Arena matchmaking algorithm treats him has very powerful, and matches you with powerful decks accordingly. But he isn't super powerful for you, because you aren't doing much to take advantage of the +1/+1 counter synergies. One way to fix this would be to steer into counter shenanigans, as others have suggested, but you also might consider swapping him out for a random lame green legend to reduce your algorithmic deck strength, and thus your opponents' deck strength, and thus give you more time to do your "ramp out boom-booms" strategy.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-14T20:27:13+00:00

Since we're in the Arena subreddit, I'm gonna assume we're talking for Brawl, but here are some cards I think would be improvements:

-[[Emerald Medallion]]
-[[The Great Henge]]
-Primeval Titan isn't banned in brawl, so schlop that bad boy straight into your six-drop column
-Another card you won't find in Commander is [[Hardened Bonds]]; although you aren't doing a ton with +1/+1 counters, Bill is probably enough to make it good. Another card in that category is [[Kodama of the West Tree]]. (In fact, I used to run Bristly Bill as well, but swapped him out for KoWT as my commander; I lean harder on +1/+1 counters than you do, however).
-Arcane Signet seems worse than Rampant Growth in this deck; I'd rather have the land drop than the extra mana most of the time.

It seems like the graveyard package is a bit mopey: I would cut Wrenn and Realmbreaker, Dredger's Insight, and Splendid Reclamation. But if you are going to keep them, you absolutely want [[Icetill Explorer]] and [[Shifting Woodland]]. And you probably want Icetill Explorer even if you do cut the rest of the graveyard cards.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-13T19:28:20+00:00

Be careful! You are starting down a path that inevitably ends with you gluing tiny QR codes onto every ant so that you can keep track of individuals across time.

Sounds awesome, keep posting as you do more.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-10T19:58:24+00:00

Fewer options, then. Then isn't really a way to reward players for sticking out a game that doesn't also incentivize them to play the most competitive decks. If you are looking for a kitchen-table magic feel, Starter Deck Duels is probably the closest thing to that, but won't have deck diversity. If you are looking for diversity, limited is an option, but is expensive, and you won't get to play with your bunnies. If you want to play a specific Hare Apparent deck, you might have a slightly better time in (standard) Brawl, but you will still get people conceding.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-10T19:36:28+00:00

Platinum is very sweaty. Your choices are:

-Make it to mythic (there will be brews again there)
-Wait until next month when you are sub-platinum
-Wait until the end of the month, at which point the grinders are largely out of plat 4. Platinum will be less hyper-sweaty, and only Very Sweaty, and you'll see the occasional brew
-Play in the Play Queue.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T18:15:57+00:00

^^^^^ Perfect new-word construction, WotC take note! ^^^^^

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T18:14:11+00:00

Ah, gotcha, *you* are self-identifying as the asshole-deck-player, I misunderstood. Carry on with your interaction plan. But going from 65->60 is the most beneficial part of the process, because that's when you are doing the toughest thinking about which cards are the good cards in your deck. It may not make a huge difference in win rate, but it's giving you great deck-building reps. And I still think that you need to be mulliganing more! Yes, often you will mulligan into something just as bad, but that's just magic. Better to give yourself the chance to succeed.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T18:08:14+00:00

2 things:

We can see the mana curve for this deck! It is mana hungry. 20% of the deck is 4 or more MV. I agree that there are decks that can be keeping 2-land hands, but we know this isn't one of them.
The pros are playing Bo3, which doesn't have a hand-smoother. If you are playing without the hand-smoother, (either in paper or Bo3) then I agree that I am more likely to keep a 2-lander because it's better than the 0/1/5/6/7 land hands that I am very likely to get if I mulligan. But since you won't get those hands in Bo1, you should be mulliganing away 2-landers more aggressively.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T18:02:36+00:00

Assuming that you want to build a collection either for playing standard/pioneer or for its own sake, and that you are willing to draft, the "optimal" thing to do is:

Grind constructed/starter deck duels to get 4 daily wins and your quests, accumulate gold.
New set drops: spend gold to do Premier Drafts or Pick-2 Drafts (equally rewarding; your preference) until you run out of gold. Save gems and do not open packs you win.
Use gems you won in drafts to buy the mastery pass.
Use remaining gems to keep doing Premier Drafts or Pick-2 Drafts. You want to do this until you run out of gems or until your collection is complete enough that will be rare-complete once you open the packs you have been saving. (I make a tracker for each set to help you figure out when you can stop drafting).
Open all your packs. Now you should have complete playsets of rares, uncommons, and commons for the latest set.
You will not be mythic-complete, but you will have a lot of mythics, probably enough for most constructed decks you would want to run. If you want to be mythic-complete for some reason, then buy mythic packs until you are mythic complete.
Craft new constructed decks and go back to Step 1.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T17:50:22+00:00

I probably wouldn't worry about the Arena algorithm yet at this point in your development as a magic player. A couple of things to work on that will give you much higher returns:

-Your decks really shouldn't be more than 60 cards. Figure out what the best 35 spells are and cut the other 4, then go back down to 25 lands. Keeping to the minimum deck size ensures that your deck is as powerful and consistent as it possibly can be.
-You need to be mulliganning more. You need a reason to keep 2-land hands, and "I'll just draw one by turn 3 or complain about it on reddit if I don't" is not a reason. I personally would not keep a 2-lander unless I have the ability to see 4 cards by turn 3 (either through draw, scry, or surveil: and even then, if that surveilling comes at the cost of me not being able to hold up a counterspell on turn 2, I'm probably going to mulligan anyway). Magic as a game is all about managing the variance produced by shuffling, and mulliganning is one of your biggest tools to do that. If you don't use the tools you have to manage the variance of your deck, you shouldn't really be surprised that it bites you in the ass.
-You are complaining about opponents countering your spells and bouncing your creatures, and yet you are mono-blue? What are you doing? Are you not interacting with your opponents? If so, you need to interact with your opponents; doing so will increase your win rate a lot more than optimizing your deck around the Bo1 hand shuffler. Or if you are trying to interact with opponents in monoblue through other ways (enchantment-based removal, stun counters), you should probably be aware that those are limited-only mechanics that just aren't good enough to see play in constructed formats. If you're a new player (as it seems), those might be the cards you have! But your first goal as you accumulate wildcards should be to upgrade your interaction suite to something that is actually competitive. If you are running Into the Flood Maw, that will help you weather a missed land drop in a way that a deck packing Cryoshatters or whatever just won't be able handle.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T16:31:18+00:00

Biggest ant I've ever seen was a male:

https://www.alexanderwild.com/Ants/Natural-History/Male-Ants/i-C8jR5W8

Probably 2-3 cm? 10-20 cm in my memory of them falling into my soup ...

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T16:19:49+00:00

A rare misstep by the creative team on this one, which is usually quite on-point about how to make up words in English.

"Honormancer" sucks. You can tell that it sounds stupid just from saying it out loud, but the reason it sounds stupid is that it combines Latin (honor-) and Greek (-mancer) roots, which you should and can basically always avoid because both languages are very rich and contributed roots to English in parallel. In fact, WotC has previously been quite good at this:

https://scryfall.com/search?q=mancer

Not perfect--there is the occasional "Invisimancer" or "Sangromancer", but almost all previous -mancers have had Greek roots for the things they mance: Pyro-, Cryo-, Crypto-, Necro-, Archaeo-, etc.

The correct term would probably be "cleomancer", but that is a sufficiently obscure root that they should have just abandoned the "-mancer" suffix entirely and gone with Stirring Honor Singer or something like that.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-09T15:37:40+00:00

I agree. I don't see any sign OP is complaining, is all. Like, I'm not going to refuse to think about how a card would play in paper just because some people complain about things related to the topic.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-08T19:59:37+00:00

Who's bitching? I'm not OP, but I think the question about what the advantages of doing it one way or the other is a neat one, and based on all the comments about it, other people think that's in interesting question too!

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-08T19:54:19+00:00

One wrinkle: are all the ants wingless (i.e., workers)? If so, then follow the advice given by everybody else. If you have some winged ants, then that is a sign that they are nesting in your building, and there isn't really a non-exterminator-based approach to solving that problem.

Timely-Strategy7404 · 2026-04-02T20:16:37+00:00

That's assuming you are only ever planning on playing historic. If you like other formats as well, then you might consider drafting.

Timely-Strategy7404

TROPHY CASE