GP Toronto: the mulligan

Round 9

In game 1, your U/R opponent played the following cards:

T2 Vaporkin
T3 Vaporkin
T4 Triton Fortune Hunter + Dragon Mantle
T5 Omenspeaker
T6 Shipbreaker Kraken
T7 Nimbus Naiad

You lost to a huge flying Shipbreaker Kraken.

Here is your deck, for reference:

You sideboarded in Shredding Winds and took out Lagonna Band-Elder.

You chose to play for game 2, and your opening hand is this:

Do you keep or mulligan?



At first glance, it looks fine. Lands and spells, right?

Going a bit deeper, it's slow, Really slow. You don't have a whole lot of action you can draw into before turn 4, so maybe you should mulligan.

Deeper than that, will 6 cards really be better than this on average?

How often does your deck produce an acceptable 6 card hand that gets started earlier than this one?

Do the cards your opponent played in game 1 affect your decision? In what way? Does being on the play matter?

I asked a lot of people, pro players whose opinions I respect, what they would do with this hand. The opinions were split down the middle. It seemed like nobody could agree on what to do with this hand. It's certainly a very close decision.

As for my decision, I kept, without thinking much about it. I tend to err on the side of not mulliganing, especially in limited, since it's my opinion that the value of an individual card in limited is way higher than it is in constructed.

As expected, my first play was Staunch-Hearted Warriors on turn 4, which met a Stymied Hopes from my opponent. His turn 4 play was Vaporkin and Arena Athlete. I played Nessian Asp on turn 5. I took 4 from my opponent's creatures after he triggered Athlete, and he played a Triton Fortune Hunter. I put Nylea's Emissary on my Asp on turn 6 and attacked him down to 13. He attacked back for 6 and played Wavecrash Triton.

I made a slight mistake this turn, based on poor communication between my opponent and I. I attacked with my bestowed Asp. My opponent said "So it's 7?" I took this to mean that he wasn't blocking, and activated the monstrous ability. He then decided to block and threw the Wavecrash Triton in front of it. Kind of cheesy, but technically he never said he wasn't blocking, so the error fell on me. It didn't make a difference, though. On his next turn he untapped and played Portent of Betrayal and killed me.

I had six draw steps that game and every single one was a land. That's obviously rotten luck, but my draw steps didn't matter that much past the first few turns, since I had cards to play. There isn't much I could have drawn to beat the Portent, since I would have been dead to my own Asp even if I didn't monstrify it.

I think that is the best argument for mulliganing hands like this (and similar ones with 5 lands and 2 spells, unless the spells are really strong). All it takes is a miniature land pocket and you just fall so far behind. I've noticed that, in this format especially, almost every single mana issue I have is too much mana. I feel like that's the reason these super low land aggro decks have been popping up, because the format just doesn't demand that much mana to operate.

I still don't know what's right though. I suspect that with this deck, that particular hand is probably so close to the equilibrium point where you can't gain much of an edge either way.