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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

This game mechanic (mana burn) was removed when the rules were refactored across the past 20 years. Mana (edit:) simply disappears at the end of each stage.

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dusts off DCI card

Mana Burn is gone, yes, in terms of doing damage, but players' mana pools still empty after each phase.

He's not talking about mana burn, that was never really a problem except for extremely niche combo decks. He's talking about when you draw lands/mana producers for 5 turns in a row after starting with a heavy mana hand. That is "mana flooding".

Oh, that's either an issue of an unbalanced deck, or insufficient randomization.

My best decks started with the "rule of 1/3", and added/trimmed 1-2 lands to optimize. The "rule of 1/3" is that 1/3 of the deck should be lands, for best land draw. So a 60 card deck would start with 20 lands, and maybe swap 1-2 forests for elves in an elf deck.

And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.

20 lands is a little low and is only appropriate if you have a very aggressive deck, with very few cards costing 3 or more mana.

Conventional wisdom suggests going for around 40% lands. So 24ish lands for 60 card decks, 17ish for a 40 card deck.

My "blue bertha" decks were 40% to 45% lands. They were usually 100+ cards and consisted almost exclusively of 6+ casting cost creatures. These were only used for fun, mostly for other players to test their new decks against, never in any competition.

Having more than 35% lands leads to the very mana flooding complained about in the root comment.

For a more detailed analysis on land percentages I'd refer to Frank Karsten (scroll down to the conclusion if you want just the numbers):

https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-many-lands-do-y...

With 35% lands (21/60) you are likely to end up mana-screwed (not enough lands) unless you build your deck to match the low land count. For a generic rule of thumb I think it is better to recommend a bit more lands than that.

That's for a 52 card deck. The numbers would be different for decks of smaller and larger sizes.

No, it's a fundamental part of the game which forces a high level of variance. That is what OP was complaining about. Even the best decks are prone to mana flooding or screwing. Your brilliant "1/3" strategy is literally the first thing beginners learn about deckbuilding, and doesn't change the high variance of each game.

>And from a recent card randomizing thread, it takes 7 "riffles" to fully randomize a deck.

I don't think you understand what "randomize" means. It doesn't mean "you get proportional hands", it means that the state isn't predictable. It is still subject to variation in the amount of mana you draw.

Seriously, you are reciting trivially basic concepts, that everyone is aware of, and completely ignoring and/or misunderstanding what is being said and the real situation.

No, mana still disappear at the end of every stage. What it doesn't do anymore is life loss (i.e. mana burn).

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