Your Choice of Lands Doesnt Matter
THE PREMISE
When you choose the lands in your Magic: the Gathering deck, the decision is dictated almost entirely by budget. Once the financial investment has been made to acquire the most powerful lands in the format, the only reason to deviate from those is logistical; using budget lands so you don’t have to resleeve them or swap them between decks is a quality of life option, there is no decision being made there. The conclusion here is that manabases are a solved concept, and the minutiae of tactical reasoning for choosing some lands over others is such a marginal increase in value to be practically pointless and not worth the average player's time to consider.
BUT WHAT ABOUT X, Y, AND Z?
But what about competitive environments like my favorite eternal format? Well, it matters slightly more, and also somehow slightly less. In competitive environments, choosing the best possible options for lands both restricts your options to the best fixing, meaning depending on the format, you are obligated to include original Dual Lands, Shock Lands, and Fetch Lands. But, having more options also means there is room for experimenting with utility lands, especially ones that can come into play untapped and can be fetched, such as Mystic Sanctuary, or lands that don’t make mana at all, like Bazaar of Baghdad.
But even with those specific callouts, these tend to be the exceptions to the rule that there is no reason to play with objectively worse lands if they aren’t part of your strategy; you need a very good reason to play a utility land over one that just produces mana and can be retrieved from the deck. In fact, Magic has made recent additions to the roster of lands available that actually make land choices somewhat more important: Surveil Lands, and MDFC Lands.
THE EXCEPTIONS
These have made perhaps the largest shift in mana bases across multiple formats in recent memory, with appearances in Standard, Modern, Legacy, and, of course, Commander. Surveil lands especially have shown that Surveil as a mechanic is one of the most powerful card selection effects the game has ever seen, and having this effect on a fetchable land has proven to be well worth including at least one of these in several strategies like Breach, Dredge, and Reanimator to name a few.
Modal Double Faced Lands have also reduced the need to ‘make room’ for lands by introducing a choice: eat a lighting bolt for an untapped land, or get a spell. The number of times these lands can also enter tapped to avoid the damage provides another opportunity for player skill to show through, and multicolor lands that enter tapped simply replace other kinds of tapped lands in casual decks. Overall, I think reducing the burden that lands place on the game has been a massively positive choice by the design team
Especially in singleton formats, there is practically no downside to including all the OG Duals, Shocks, and Fetches in your color combo, so choosing to include specific lands for these effects has become an actual choice, as the number of ‘practically always untapped’ lands has hit critical mass. In many Commander decks, there will be 2 colors that heavily outweigh the others you might have access to, further reducing the need to include staples like the Battlebond Lands. When you reach the point of using hypergeometric calculators to calculate your mana base, the threshold for casual players has already long passed, and time would often be better spent elsewhere to improve gameplay.
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR BREWING?
Variance in mana has been understood by the Wizards design team for a long time, and I think that choice in lands is a tough thing to design for, as making multi-color more difficult to sequence and play is an important part of both the limited environment, and more curated formats like Pioneer. While Surveil Lands and MDFCs both massively improved the landscape of choice and player skill, I think future developments will be slow and safe, and focusing on the nonlands in your deck, and technical skills like mulligans, turn order, and meta knowledge will be the key to enjoying magic and improving as a player.
My personal choice for adding lands to my commander decks is using the Moxfield Package feature. I have designed packages for each color combo to quickly add optimal lands to any new brew, with rules for how to adjust as needed, and it has cut down on the time it takes to manually build a deck by a huge margin. My recommendation going forward is to copy these packages from my Ko-Fi page, and use them to template your decks, and stop worrying about making choices that mostly don’t matter, and focus on the real meat and potatoes of your decks.
