Mana flood

Mana flood refers to the condition of having too many lands (either in play or in hand) and not enough spells. Mana flood can be the result of an opening hand with too many lands, several consecutive land draws, or a combination of the two. A hand with too many lands, for example five, is often best mulliganed for a better distribution, and some casual variants of the mulligan are more forgiving of such draws.

A strategic endgame true of Magic but not of many other card game resource systems is that the resources necessary in deckbuilding far outnumber the resources necessary in play - a deck must play a lot more lands than they ultimately require in play as only a fraction of the library is ever seen per game. As such, in an extended game each player will draw more mana than necessary, and it is up to the deckbuilder to have taken this into account. The formulation of this is the basis of the fundamental deck archetypes of aggro and control.

See also

• Mana screw: not having enough mana or not having the right color of mana to play the spells in your hand.