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Insider: Modern Manabases

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One thing that I and my fellow writers have harped upon in the past is the idea that you should always invest in lands. They are often the safest and still quite lucrative targets. Normally this is in reference to Standard. Typically you see the last block's land base go up when the next block rotates in.

This week's article is going to focus on Modern manabases. There are a lot of players (myself included) who bet pretty hard on shocklands last year, assuming that they'd get the typical bump that the previous few blocks of lands had (Scars fastlands and Innistrad checklands). To make matters better (not sure if that's an actual saying or not), the existing PT schedule was going to have a brief window in which Modern and Standard PT seasons overlapped, implying that lands (like the shocklands) would be at maximum demand. Then WoTC moved the Modern PT schedule and we didn't really see any shockland movement.

Now they are out of Standard and while they didn't really drop in value much, they also didn't jump. So now a lot of speculators have a bunch of shocklands hoarded, waiting for a price increase and fearing a reprint. Our own forums actually have a long thread devoted to just this subject. We have quite a few differing opinions on the subject, ranging from "buy as many as you can" all the way to "no thanks".

Some people think to pick them up indiscriminately, others (like myself) believe that, barring a reprint, we'll see the shockland prices begin to diverge similar to what we see with the original dual lands or blue fetchlands vs non-blue fetchlands. RTR was recent enough that the "collectibility" factor regarding card prices shouldn't be a major problem, which means that demand will likely be driven almost exclusively by play.

If we can accept that rather safe assumption, the next step would be to determine how much play each land sees. First we need to establish a group of decklists. For this I used the MTGO results on MTGGoldfish, because they were readily available and easy to search.

The other reason I like this particular site for decklists was because it includes a useful statistic, Meta Percentage. The Meta Percentage indicates how much of the metagame the deck occupies. This is important because if a deck plays four of a land, but only occupies 1% of the metagame then that land has less demand than a deck that plays two of a land but occupies 12% of the metagame--as we're after the "overall" demand for a land from the whole playerbase.

There were a lot of similar decks listed, so I grouped all the blue-red Delver/Burn decks together, and the non-blue Burn decks in another category.

Meat and Potatoes

I gathered the data from almost all decks representing 1% or more of the 4-0 records in Daily Events, which together represented 76.29% of the MTGO metagame. While I can respect that the MTGO Modern metagame will differ from the paper one, I can't get the kind of paper information that I can from MTGO. (There also aren't a lot of data points for Modern post-Khans (which introduced the allied fetchlands, Treasure Cruise, Monastery Swiftspear, and Dig Through Time).

For each deck in the sample, I determined the lands it was running that fell into one of the categories below. I did include most lands that weren't in 100% of the lists, because I wanted the broadest picture, and despite the fact that not all the versions of the deck run said land, there was still a decent chance they did (nothing below 25% made the list).

With a lot of different decks and their land base accounted for, the last crucial piece of information was to factor in the deck's metagame percentage. I took each deck and multiplied the land column by the metagame percentage--non-normalized, by which I mean that I'm only accounting for the metagame as a known of 76.29% not the full 100%. Thus the overall data is not 100% exact (as the metagame never is 100% known).

I then summed up each land row to determine the likelihood that any given player would be playing said land in their deck. This is our final goal as the most-played lands will have the most demand.

Shockland Demand Percentage
Steam Vents 0.99%
Hallowed Fountain 0.07%
Watery Grave 0.04%
Breeding Pool 0.18%
Sacred Foundry 0.03%
Stomping Ground 0.30%
Overgrown Tomb 0.22%
Godless Shrine 0.12%
Blood Crypt 0.01%
Temple Garden 0.20%
Fetchland
Misty Rainforest 1.07%
Scalding Tarn 1.68%
Verdant Catacombs 0.49%
Arid Mesa 0.78%
Marsh Flats 0.22%
Polluted Delta 0.88%
Flooded Strand 0.84%
Bloodstained Mire 0.51%
Windswept Heath 0.27%
Wooded Foothills 0.20%
Filter Lands
Twilight Mire 0.06%
Cascade Bluffs 0.06%
Mystic Gate 0.00%
Flooded Grove 0.06%
Graven Carns 0.00%
Fire-lit Thicket 0.00%
Fetid Heath 0.00%
Wooded Bastion 0.02%
Rugged Prairie 0.00%
Sunken Ruins 0.00%
Checklands
Hinterland Harbor 0.00%
Clifftop Retreat 0.00%
Isolated Chapel 0.00%
Sulfur Falls 0.51%
Woodland Cemetery 0.02%
Dragonskull Summit 0.00%
Drowned Catacomb 0.00%
Glacial Fortress 0.00%
Rootbound Crag 0.00%
Sunpetal Grove 0.00%
Manlands
Celestial Collonade 0.11%
Creeping Tarpit 0.05%
Stirring Wildwood 0.03%
Raging Ravine 0.05%
Lavaclaw Reaches 0.00%
Fastlands
Razorverge Thicket 0.27%
Blackcleave Cliffs 0.05%
Copperline Gorge 0.03%
Darkslick Shores 0.01%
Seachrome Coast 0.01%
Other
Horizon Canopy 0.08%
Mutavault 0.11%
Cavern of Souls 0.15%
Gavony Township 0.19%
Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle 0.12%
Blinkmoth Nexus 0.22%
Inkmoth Nexus 0.22%
Glimmervoid 0.22%
Gemstone Mine 0.12%
Grove of the Burnwillows 0.05%
Temple of Deceit 0.04%
Temple of Enlightenment 0.04%
Mana Confluence 0.03%

Here's what I glean from this data:

  • Steam Vents is by far the most-played shockland (well duh!), but Stomping Ground is number two on the list, followed by Overgrown Tomb and Temple Garden. These numbers indicate a couple of things; 1) that the Modern manabase has diverged from the Legacy one by a great deal (U/B and U/W aren't anywhere near as highly played as they are in Legacy), and 2) if you can trade shocks for shocks then target Steam Vents first and Stomping Ground or Overgrown Tomb second.
  • Similarly, Scalding Tarn is by far the most played fetchland. While the reprinting of the Khans fetches likely did drop demand somewhat, there is still plenty as Tarn is the most commonly played land on this list.
  • Wooded Foothills and Windswept Heath are actually the least played of the Khans fetchlands, and along with Marsh Flats occupy the bottom three "most commonly played" fetchlands.
  • None of the filter lands are actually played all that much, and yet quite a few have high price tags (Twilight Mire and Cascade Bluffs are the worst offenders); that being said I don't think their current price is really justified. I wouldn't invest in or trade for these.
  • With the exception of Sulfur Falls, none of the checklands are really played all that much either. This is a bit surprising to me as they are very good turn two onward, but the speed of the Modern metagame may be such that the playerbase feels that drawback is unacceptable. They also might have been pushed out by the introduction of the Khans fetchlands into the metagame.
  • The manlands seem to have pulled back in playability from the older metagame. As Celestial Colonnade used to be pretty prevalent, the falling out of the UWx control decks from the overall metagame has severely cut back the use of Colonnade and the reduction of Jund players has heavily reduced the desirability of Raging Ravine.
  • Razorverge Thicket is head and shoulders above all the other Scars fastlands, although it's still not all that heavily played.
  • In the other category the Affinity lands are the most played and the fact that they really don't go well in any other deck means that their desirability is going to be heavily limited to Affinity players only.

For those interested here was my metagame breakdown as of Oct 27 2014.

U/R Delver 19.60%
Melira Pod 6.42%
Scapeshift 6.08%
Merfolk 2.70%
Affinity 5.41%
Splinter Twin 2.70%
Amulet of Vigor 2.36%
Burn (Non-Blue Variants) 14.14%
Death and Taxes 2.70%
Gifts Control 2.70%
Junk 1.69%
RG Tron 1.35%
RUG Delver 1.35%
Jund 1.35%
WUR Control 2.03%
Ad Naseum 1.01%
GW Hexproof 2.02%
Ascendency Combo 0.68%

**It is important to note that burn (both blue and non-blue) is heavily represented online. I don't have enough data sources to indicate how this compares to the paper metagame, though I do imagine it's less drastic.**

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David Schumann

David started playing Magic in the days of Fifth Edition, with a hiatus between Judgment to Shards. He's been playing Commander since 2009 and Legacy since 2010.

View More By David Schumann

Posted in Finance, Free Insider, Modern

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