Mana fixing
Mana fixing refers to the process of ensuring that the correct lands or sources of mana are involved in deckbuilding to guarantee casting the spells in one's deck. A mana fixer, by extension, is the individual card that assists with this aspect.
Description
A deck for a starting player is usually one or two-colored, and for them, the set of basic lands will usually suffice. However, as decks become more complex and colorful, a player may need to branch out into different sources, such as nonbasic lands, artifacts, or certain creatures. For instance, a Birds of Paradise can be used to ensure that a player has access to a color other than the green that was used to play the spell to begin with.[1][2][3][4]
Mana fixers are typically defined by being able to generate or find sources of different colored mana, the latter done by searching for basic land types. Each land, hence, adds an extra source of color, and each nonland adds two or more. The cost paid for this flexibility is often the need to enter tapped, but life payments or being a finite resource can also be applied as a balancing factor. If they are spells, the mana spent on the spell is also a factor, as would summoning sickness on mana creatures. Originally, two-color fixers were scarce, and three-color or higher fixers were nearly unheard of, but as R&D began to lean against deliberate difficulty in casting spells, two-color fixing began seeing common and uncommon rarity, and R&D developed balanced five-color fixing.
Constructed
In Constructed, players may not have access to the full breadth of the format, as the most powerful of nonbasic lands are rare or mythic. As such, they may only have simpler methods of fixing their mana, and as such would have a finite budget both financially and in deck space to put in mana fixing. The more nonland fixers are put in, the less space for spells a player would have, and the risk of mana flooding increases.
At the highest level of competition, even two-color decks will run twelve dual lands to give the highest chance of not losing to basic color problems; decks with more colors would run 20 or more mana fixers in their mana base on the premise that if their deck casts its spells, they would win, and running more than the standard 24 lands supports that premise. On the other end of the spectrum, a deck that needs to cast its spells efficiently would consider cutting down on colors, as the second or third fixing variant may involve always entering tapped, making them undesirable. Some of this can be seen in the format of Pro Tour Dominaria, where the red-black decks had to dip into tertiary fixers like Aether Hub as the second red-black dual land in the format already always entered tapped and the third was the gainland cycle, with not enough power in potential black spells to tilt away from the red-heavy payoffs.
Limited
For the Limited player, the basic lands are on the low end of acceptable, so fixing is also important there. However, each pick taken to improve fixing is at the cost of a spell. Mana fixing is also the basis of splashing a color, which is when a player adds a small number of mana sources to facilitate a small number of spells. As a conventional 9-8 mana base is already unreliable, a player would need three or four mana fixing cards to splash consistently. As the deck size is smaller than in Constructed, the number of fixers needed for reliability is lower.
One of the most common forms of Limited mana fixing is the generic basic fetch land, often Evolving Wilds. It provides a source of as many basic land types as one wishes to play, but as a player adds more off-color basics, the fewer main color sources are left. For example, a mana base with one Plains, one Swamp and one Evolving Wilds means a split of fourteen for the main two colors: on paper, it's two sources for each splash and eight for each main, but the earlier it is drawn it will remove a source for each other color, as it may need to find the main colors rather than the splashes. This also does not consider problems with discarding or milling. This is partially why the common dual land cycle and Manalith variant are more important for decks with three or four colors.
See also
References
- ↑ Mark Rosewater (March 23, 2009). "Mana with All the Fixin's". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
- ↑ Devin Low (May 25, 2007). "The Dark Side of Mana Fixers". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-04-29.
- ↑ Tom LaPille (March 27, 2009). "Fixing the Environment". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-04-29.
- ↑ Sam Stoddard (July 5, 2013). "Standard Mana Fixing". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast. Archived from the original on 2021-04-29.