By KingOfTheDepths
This article will take you through how to build mana bases for the Noble format. Mana is an intrinsic part of Magic gameplay, and it is critical to design a mana base that can cast your spells. If you cannot cast spells, you cannot win the game.
The cards you can play are limited by the mana you can generate to cast them— both in terms of mana pips, and total mana value. It’s a well-known fact of Magic that the player that most efficiently spends their mana over the course of the game is often the player that will win that game. So you are very incentivized to maximize your mana value and “curve out.”
Disclaimer: many of these recommended counts may feel either "one fewer" or "one more" than what players prefer from playtesting. This is natural! Some players prefer an extremely consistent early game, and some players prefer to draw less lands late game. Feel free to play one or two less or more or less lands from what this article recommends, guilt-free. Ultimately, the impact of a single land on gameplay will often be negligible.
In order to frame this discussion, we are going to talk about idealized, mathematical land counts to have a consistent early game. There are several tools you can use to evaluate your mana, which will be referenced throughout this article. The best by-far of these is the hypergeometric calculator. I personally like to use this one: Hypergeometric Distribution Probability Calculator (stattrek.com), but any calculator will do. Hypergeometric calculators provide probability distributions of finding a certain subset of a population, given a sample size. When using a hypergeometric calculator, you always want to be greater than 85% to hit for early-game plays, and greater than 75% for late-game plays; and you want to correctly factor in a deck's ability to cantrip or free spells into your equations.
If you are looking for something simpler, simply looking at your pip counts and overall deck mana value is definitely informative. Both of these latter functions are fully provided by Moxfield.
For the purposes of this article, single-color utility lands will be treated identically to basic lands of that color, as they perform the same purpose for fixing and ramping; even though they frequently have downsides like forcing the user to pay life to get colored mana.
First things first: How many lands?
The number of lands in your deck is a fairly straightforward formula that is determined by the mana value of the spells you want to cast on-curve. It can sometimes be offset by the number of cantripping effects in your deck.
For multicolor decks, you must assess each color the deck needs to produce individually, in addition to its total mana count requirements. Fortunately, the same general ratios will apply.
Let’s open with an obvious question: how many lands do you need to run in order to hit a land on turn one? The minimum requirement for 85% success is 14. To briefly talk through the entries: 60-card deck, 14 lands, 7 card opening hand, and needing 1 success. Look at the bottom number on the calculator, which shows the probability of drawing more than 1.
This is the exact formula that Legacy Delver uses! It has 14 blue/red lands (and 4 wastelands, but those don't cast Delver spells).
For playing a 2-mana spell on turn 2, the magic number is 21:
And for playing a 3-mana spell on turn 3, the magic number is 26:
Of course, most control decks don't run nearly this many lands. You can dramatically reduce mana requirements for any given deck using either cards that "cantrip" or re-draw, or even better, the Legacy cantrip suite that offers multiple cards worth of selection.
If you consider seeing three extra cards by Turn 3, those numbers are quite different:
Assuming we run enough cantrips, we can run as few as 20 lands and still reliably hit 3 lands on turn 3.
Ultimately, this is what our decks' mana bases are going to be built around: what turn you want to curve out to, and are you running cantripping effects to help find those lands.
A caveat on cantrips as fixing: cantrips can only help you find land drops if you can reliably cast those cantrips. A deck made of mostly black sources can't use Preordain for extra dig, as it probably can't cast Preordain on turns 1 or 2 with enough consistency. You can't stick preordain in any deck that isn't base-blue and expect it to reliably find mana for you.
The other way to "cheat" land count requirements is with ramp spells like Llanowar Elves, Lotus Petal, etc.. These effects can let you run less than the required land count by acting as an additional mana source. Note that, like cantrips, it has to be your "core" color for this effect to work, as Llanowar Elves won't really perform in a blue deck. This is why Green Stompy decks that want to curve out to 3-drops are usually on 23-24 lands only, not the full required 26.
For splashing colors, I run a fairly simple formula: 12+ sources for a splash you want to cast by turn 2, and 10+ for a splash you want to cast Turn 3. These numbers can, again, be reduced by cantrips - but I would in fact recommend against it, as you don't want to need to cantrip before casting a removal spell in most circumstances, especially when playing with tapped lands.
Note that for 10 sources for the third splash color, we’re a little under 85% - so if you want to hit it more reliably, run more!
How to Count Different Mana Sources:
Basic lands and lands that tap for a single color are easiest: 4 basic swamps in a deck would count as 4 black sources.
Two-color lands like the Guildgates or the Artifact Duals count as one source of each color they tap for, but one source total. A deck with 4 mountains, 4 islands, and 4 Izzet Guildgate has 8 red sources, 8 blue sources, and 12 total mana sources.
Slow fetches count as both colors they can fetch for, but do not count for a third color, even if they can technically be fetched.
Gemstone Mine and City of Brass both count as one source of any color.
The newer gates, which let you select a color on ETB, count as 1 mana of any color; but only within a 2- or 3-color deck, and the primary color the gate taps for should be one your deck is interested in using.
Gond Gate only counts as 1 source of your primary color, as you can expect to have that color in play on Turn 1 into Gond Gate Turn 2; but it only counts as colored mana if there are 11+ gates in your deck other than Gond Gate to reliably have a non-gond-gate gate in your hand on Turn 3 when the gate is deployed.
Arcum's Astrolabe counts as a source of any color, but only if your deck has 14+ snow lands to reliably deploy it.
Elves and other "mana dorks" count as mana sources, but should not be a determining factor in calculating your total land count, because you still need to spend mana to cast the elf. I never recommend going lower than 14 lands!
Single-Use artifact fixing like Chromatic Sphere should not be counted as a colored source. Permanent fixing like Bonder's Ornament may be counted.
The notable exception to the Single-Use artifact rule is Lotus Petal, which may be counted as a colored source in aggressive decks.
Ancient Tomb only counts as one colorless source, even though it adds two mana; because you still need to draw lands, and if you run 4 less lands because on Ancient Tomb, you won't draw your lands often enough.
Spells that cost colored mana and add mana (i.e. Manamorphose) only count as a colored source if the color of that spell is your decks' primary color; but I recommend not counting these spells as fixing in general.
Single-Color Decks:
Single-color decks have the easiest mana requirements, and the simplest mana bases, which allows players to lean into the effects of utility lands. It is possible, of course, to run too many utility lands and therefore have mana trouble.
Let's start by considering a classic deck, Noble Death and Taxes, which is a mono-white aggressive creature prison strategy that loves the card Wasteland. What does the Death and Taxes "curve" look like? Let's ignore Aether Vial for now, and treat it as any other 1-mana spell. How many total lands does Death and Taxes need to run?
If your answer is that "Death and Taxes wants to curve out to 3-drops", then the deck needs to be on 26 lands, per the formula above. This is, of course, an enormous amount of lands, leads to poor gameplay, and high variance of flood and screw; but Death and Taxes does not run any cantripping effects, and therefore it would be more or less mandatory to run the full 26.
If your answer is "Death and Taxes wants to curve out to 2-drops", then the deck needs to be on 21 lands; but at 21 lands, it cannot reliably cast its 3-drops, and will have games where you draw a grip full of 3-mana spells and cannot cast them.
The correct answer is probably somewhere in-between, when you consider the effects of cards like Vial and Wasteland! Most of my builds are on 22 or 23, as I tend to prefer lower curve builds.
How many utility lands that don't tap for white (like wasteland) can you run?
Assuming none of the cards in your deck require double-white pips, the simple answer is that you need 14 white sources to guarantee a white mana on turn 1. If ALL of your 2-drops cost two white pips, then you need two white sources by turn 2, and therefore you need the full 21 white sources in your deck. However, if only 3 of your 14 total 2-drops cost two white pips, you will be reliably casting your spells with somewhere in the range of 18-19 white sources.
In the end, my Death and Taxes build is on 22 lands, 18 of which are white sources. 23 is probably "correct", but I am happy to lean on Aether Vial to avoid flooding late game, and to play a more aggressive strategy. Higher curve builds of the deck would prefer to play more lands to support their 3-mana spells.
Let's look at a second example just to be thorough: Mono Blue Tinker.
Tinker decks want to be casting Tinker as early as possible, but by Turn 3 at the latest. They run some number of ramp effects to power out Tinker early, as well as some card selection and ancient tombs. What is the correct number of lands?
Of course, this question is build-specific. How many ramp spells are there in the deck? How many redraw effects like Baubles or Cantrips? Assuming there are a high number of effects like Baubles, Chromatic Stars, etc.. the answer should be somewhere around 20 lands. In decks like this, Tinker is often functionally a 2-mana spell due to ancient tombs, lotus petals, etc..and artifact decks almost always include a significant number of redraws.
How many blue sources? Again, this is specific to the build, but the answer is either 14 (because you want a blue mana on turn 1) or 12 (because you want a blue mana on turn 2, treating it like a "splash" color to colorless). You can potentially run less blue sources with a high density of effects like chromatic stars, lotus petals, etc..
Note that 20 lands, 14 blue lands, and 4 ancient tombs leaves room for 2 utility lands!
Two-Color Decks:
Two-color deck construction in Noble is dictated by the mana base, which informs what cards you are able to run, and at which points on the curve. Because the fixing in the format is primarily through tapped lands (and the 8x untapped 5-color lands), 2-color decks have to pick a "primary" color to fill out their early curve, assuming they want to deploy spells on turns 1 and 2; but can have a secondary color of spells for the late-game.
We will perform assessments similar to the 1-color deck assessment above; but will focus on each color separately.
Let's look at a classic archetype, Izzet Blitz. Blitz typically wants to curve out into a Sprite Dragon, and doesn't really care if it hits the third land, so let's start with the assumption that it wants two lands on turn 2. Our regular formula tells us that Blitz wants 21 lands.
But wait! Blitz is a deck that runs a large number of free spells, plus Dragon's Rage Channeler which can provide card selection. I would consider this to mean that 12x of the cards in the deck provide a "second look" at a land on the first turn, which means that you will see 9-10 cards by Turn 2, instead of the standard 8.
Gitaxian Probe also affects the math here. As the card is a zero-mana re-draw every time you see it, you can consider it to effectively reduce the size of your deck to 56 cards. The same is not true of Baubles, as they do not redraw until the next turn!
We're going to start with overall land count.
Here's what those look like in the old Hypergeometric Calculator:
As 17 falls just a little short, we want 17-18 overall lands.
Next, how many sources of each color?
For red mana, Blitz absolutely must have a red source on turn 1 to deploy a turn 1 threat. This means that 17 red sources is absolutely mandatory, which means that almost all of our lands, with the exception of maybe one, mustbe able to tap for red.
For Blue mana, we want to reliably have a blue source on turn 2 to deploy our Sprite Dragon, so let's look at what happens on turn 2:
This is indicating that we need at least 10 blue sources.
So in summary, the deck wants at least 17 lands, 17 red sources, and 10 blue sources. The mana base I opted for was 4 City of Brass, 4 Gemstone Mine, 1 Evolving Wilds, 1 Volatile Fjord, 1 Island, and 7 mountains. That gives us 11 total blue sources (if you count the Ash Barrens, which I do) and 17 red sources, which matches the counts found by the calculator. So the mana for Blitz is good, maybe even a little heavy on the blue!
Let's look at another infamous archetype, Blue/Black Control. Blue/Black control is a deck built around Mana Drain, Baleful Strix, and powerful sweeper Cry of the Carnarium. It is also infamously a Mystic Sanctuary deck, which puts additional strain on the mana base. Let's look at how many sources it needs to run in order to effectively cast its spells!
First off, total number of lands. Blue/Black control is on a total of 8x cheap spells that cantrip (Strix and Preordain), which I will assume means the deck will on average see 1x redraw before the third turn. I will also assume the deck wants to curve out to 3 mana in order to cast Cry on-curve. This means that they will see a total of 10 cards by the third turn, and want roughly 24 total lands:
The deck is on only a handful of two-drops, including Strix, Mana Drain, and Founding the Third Path. Of these, Mana Drain is the most mana-intensive. We already know from the first section of this document that the deck needs a total of 21 blue sources in order to cast mana drain on-curve.
The 3-mana play that Blue/Black control wants to curve out into is Cry of the Carnarium, which costs 3 mana but has two black pips. In order to hit the 85% margin, the deck needs to run 17 black sources.
This is a lot of tension in the mana base! 24 lands, but 21 are blue and 17 are black. If we assume 3 basic swamps and 7 basic islands, we now have 14 lands left, all of which need to tap for both blue and black in order to make the deck work. 8x tapped duals, 4x slow-fetches, and 2x Ash Barrens is one solution. Another solution is to swap some number of swamps for dual lands like City of Brass, which gives you more untapped sources…generally speaking, we want at least 10 in order to find an untapped sources on turn 3 so that we can cast our 3-drops on the third turn, per our forumulas for splashing earlier on in this article!
My recommended mana base for this deck would be, for 24 total lands:
2 mystic sanctuary
5 basic islands
4 slow-fetches
5 tapped duals
2 ash barrens
2 city of brass
3 basic swamp
1 evolving wilds
2+5+4+5+2+2+1 = 21 blue sources
4+5+2+2+3+1 = 17 black sources
And 10 of these tap for colored mana and enter untapped, and limits the number of lands in the deck that don't feed mystic sanctuary. The other build I discussed above, with no city of brass, is of course more reliable at activating Sanctuary, but also only runs 8-9x untapped lands, which is undesirable for many reasons.
Three-Color Decks:
Three-Color lists are often tricky to analyze. Because they have three colors, spells all along the curve that have various colored mana costs, and typically higher curves overall, they required 5+ unique calculations to solve.
Let's start by looking at one of the most mana-intensive decks in the format, Jeskai Gates Control. Jeskai Gates is a Counterbalance, Mana Drain, and Narset deck that relies on Gates Ablaze, Swords to Plowshares, and Prismatic Ending to control the board. These are intensive mana requirements, so the deck will need an intensive mana base to support it!
Let's start with the easy number: total mana count. Gates Control runs Preordain, Sensei's Top, Expressive Iteration, and Brainstorm, so it is safe to assume that we will see at least two to three extra cards prior to turn 3. Conservatively assuming two, this means the deck wants a minimum of 22 lands:
So let's start with 22 lands as the base assumption! Now, to look at individual colors.
For the specific colors, we can use the guides from the first section of this document. We want to cast Counterbalance, a UU spells, on Turn 2, which means we want 21 blue sources.
We want to cast Swords to Plowshares or Prismatic Ending in the early game if needed, which means we want 14 white sources to guarantee one on Turn 1.
Finally, we want to cast Gates Ablaze by turn 3, which means we need 10-11 Red sources (I would lean towards 11).
So to recap: 22 lands total, 21 blue lands, 14 white lands, and 11 red lands.
Gates Ablaze requires a Gates mana base, so we will assume 4x Sea Gate, 4x Citadel Gate, and 4x Cliffgate. As these gates select a second color to tap for on ETB, we can apply these counts towards all three colors. This gives us 12 sources of each color, which conveniently meets our red mana requirement by itself, so we will not need further red sources.
We want two additional white sources, and a whopping 10 additional blue sources.
An easy include is Gond Gate; which is a tricky card to use correctly, but I think it is maximized by considering it early game to be an untapped source of your most common color, which in this deck, is blue.
Adding 1 plains and 5 island gets us to 10 untapped sources, as well as up to 13 white sources and 21 blue sources. We're one short on the count for white, which is justifiable using all of the selection the deck has to offer; but also, slower control decks like this can run into real issues using City of Brass as a consistent mana source without a means to sac it, and I think it is OK to lean on your Gond Gates in most matchups.
Let's look at another classic example, Abzan Grace. Grace is a black/white deck with a light green splash which seeks to win the game by resolving the spell Abiding Grace, which costs 2W. It generally doesn't have any cantrips outside of a few Skullclamp, which should make mana evaluation fairly straightforward!
Total mana count: even though the deck is all 1-drops, we want to at least curve into double-spelling on Turn 2. That means we're looking at 21 lands. The main early curve spells of the deck are both black and white, but none cost more than a single mana, which means 14 white and 14 black sources. We also want to activate Ravenous Squirrel and certain Sideboard cards by the third turn, which means 10 green sources as well.
Because of the relatively low color requirements, Grace can afford to run a mana base that’s relatively light on fixing. 4x Triomes, 4x City of Brass, and 2x Ash Barrens provide adequate fixing for green, as well as the majority of the sources for all four colors. The remainder can easily be filled out with basics and artifact lands - at least 1x Forest, 1x Artifact White, 1x Artifact Red, and the remaining lands can be 4x basic Swamps and 4x basic Plains, for a total of 21 lands.
Let’s look at a stock build:
I would say this list needs 1x additional Plains.
4+ Color Decks:
The logic behind 5c is straightforward: you have to be on either the tribal lands, or artifact mana, for fixing. Let’s look at an example using tribal lands, 5X Rocco Elves:
This deck also runs mana elves to help smooth out the early game curve and provide fixing. Across Ancient Ziggarat, Secluded Courtyard, and Unclaimed Territory, there are 12x 5 color tribal sources available. That means that for perfect fixing of on-tribe creatures, you only need 2x more sources of any color. Birchlore Rangers effectively provides an additional 4x sources, and are castable from any land in the deck, which means that for the purposes of this article, there are 16x sources for blue, white, red, and black. There are 23 green sources if you count the elves!
Special Considerations - 2-Color Decks in Enemy Colors
Noble has a clear imbalance in mana base construction between allied color pairs (Blue-White, Blue-Black, White-Green, Red-Green, and Red-Black) and enemy color pairs (Blue-Red, Blue-Green, Black-White, Black-Green, White-Red). Allied color pairs have access to both the Slow Fetches like Bad River, and the Shadowlands like Port Town, and there is no equivalent option for the Enemy pairs.
This discrepancy has manifested itself in several notable ways. Blue-Green and Blue-Red control decks are less viable due to the poor mana, and they are forced to fix with tapped lands or city of brass. Red-white and red-blue aggro decks have to deal with poor mana or tapped lands; and Izzet Delver, which wants to run a mostly-Islands mana base, is almost absent from the meta despite its powerhouse spell suite, and Dimir Delver and Azorius Delver are the preferred options.
Special Considerations - Mystic Sanctuary
Mystic Sanctuary is getting its own section! It is debatably the most powerful utility lands in the format, but has severe mana restrictions surrounding its use, and most decks want to be able to "fetch" it into play at the right moment; typically on Turn 4.
Sanctuary's ability only triggers when its controller has three other islands in play, which means a mana base constructed almost entirely from islands, or lands that fetch islands. This is a simple consideration in a Mono-Blue deck: simply run only islands, sanctuaries, and slow fetches if the extra consistency at the loss of velocity is desired.
In two-color decks, the considerations for running Sanctuary are much steeper, and you are forced to run a large number of tapped duals and slow fetches. I would recommend not running Sanctuary in a deck with double-off-color pips, for example, like Crackling Drake; as hitting the density of non-blue mana sources while keeping Sanctuary in your deck is almost impossible. I would also not recommend running Slow Fetches with Sanctuary in a deck that is an enemy color pair (ie Izzet or Simic) as the slow fetch mana base doesn't support casting your spells. A slow fetch grabbing a tapped dual doesn't create mana until two turns after it's played, which is non-viable in any format.
I would not recommend running Sanctuary in 3-color decks whatsoever, as your mana base would be highly diluted and inconsistent. Consider an Esper mana base with Sanctuary and 22 lands. We'll make Blue Primary, White Secondary, and Black Tertiary:
3 Evolving Wilds
4 Glacial Floodplain
4 Ice Tunnel
3 Flood Plain
2 Bad River
2 Mystic Sanctuary
1 Plains
1 Swamp
4 Island
This has 24 lands, 22 blue sources, 11 White, and 10 Black; and only 6 lands that enter untapped. All that effort just to maximize on islands. This is not a functional 3-color mana base!
Special Considerations - Cleansing Wildfire
Cleansing Wildfire brings special considerations to deckbuilding, because it is able to fetch basic lands out of your deck, and requires you to run indestructible artifact duals in order to enable the card. It is also very much so targeted as a Turn 2 play for most decks that want to run it, for enabling splashy Turn 4's!
There are two main restrictions: You must play at least 12 artifact duals, and red must be the primary color of mana for your decklist.
You need to run 12 artifact duals to enable wildfire, because of the simple formulas presented at the beginning of this article. Less than 12, and you have a low chance of drawing one before Turn 2. 12 hits the 85% sweet spot. I usually do not go above 12 for risk of running too many tapped lands in my decklist, and inadvertently turning Cleansing Wildfire into a turn-3 play.
Red has to be your primary color, because of the other restrictions surrounding Cleansing Wildfire. You want to be playing a 21-land deck with Wildfire, because it is a 2-drop, and you won't have the chance to cantrip before Turn 1. At least 12 of your lands need to be the indestructible artifact duals, which means that you only have 9 other slots for lands, and some number of those lands need to be basics. For a 3-color build, a "normal" distribution is 4 of each on-color artifact dual, 2 "rainbow" lands like City of Brass, and then 4 basics of your primary color, 2 basics of your secondary color, and 1 basic of the tertiary color. Applied to a Grixis deck, this mana base looks like:
4 Drossforge Bridge
4 Mistvault Bridge
4 Silverbluff Bridge
4 Mountain
2 Island
1 Swamp
2 Ghost Quarter (which can fetch a mana of any color if you target your own bridge)
This means there are only 12 untapped red sources in the deck, which is your "primary" color, and your chief enabler for Cleansing Wildfire! As you need 12x red sources to enable casting it Turn 2, you are forced into playing Red as your primary color for your other spells as well, or you run the risk of not casting Wildfire on-curve. Note that this mana base also simply does not support other common fixing effects like Arcum's Astrolabe, as you simply do not have enough room for the 14x Snow lands that Astrolabe requires.
Conclusions
This article reviewed how to calculate your deck's total mana requirements, how to assess the number of sources you need of each color, and how different Noble-legal mana bases impact those calculations. It then walked through a number of example lists, and found them fairly close to the correct number of sources! Finally, we looked at some Noble-specific mana oddities.
It is my hope that you feel empowered with this information to make your own mana decisions going forward! Happy Brewing!
-KingOfTheDepths
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