Introduction

Draft, and especially cube are some of my favorite formats. They bring together both deck-building and skill to the forefront. To be good at draft you must be a good pilot, and a good designer. A key skill is to identify good cards as they pass by. During my first draft of Conspiracy a couple years ago I came across a card type never before seen the Conspiracy, two in particular changed my perspective on deck-building. These were the cards.

Advantageous proclamation is a pretty innocuous uncommon, how good could 5 less cards be right? But it makes you question your deck-building choices. We all know 15-17 lands, 14-17 creatures for our draft decks, but what do you do when you have 5 less cards? Backup plan on the other hand really got my head in a spin, drawing 2 opening hands, and chose one to keep. This could almost be seen like a free mulligan but with complications. Maybe your bomb rare is one hand, but the the hand has a better curve. Again this card makes you question your deck-building as it improves your odds of finding a good hand. Could you risk a low land strategy by combining these effects, and how much of an impact would this have?

Basic Draft Deck

With all this in mind lets try figure our how many lands you need to have in your deck so your odds of drawing a “good” hand using these conspiracies. Firstly we will use the standard 17 land deck as a baseline. Broadly speaking we will say a “good” hand has between 2 and 4 lands. This is an oversimplification as 2 lands and several 5 drops is probably not a very good hand. With that said land count is likely the first thing you look at when it comes to a keeping a hand, additionally this does not account for fixing so lets just assume all our lands are mana confluences. Firstly lets calculate the odds of a getting 2-4 lands with a standard 17 land, 40 card draft deck. There’s several fancy mathematical ways you can do this, however I opted for brute force using some code. As you can see from the table, at 17 lands our odds of drawing 2-4 lands in the opening hand reach their maximum. Less than 17 we end up getting too few lands, while going above 17 lands gives us too many lands. The graph also highlights this by showing as we add lands to our deck the odds of a 2-4 land increases, but after 17 lands our odds decrease as we begin to get flooded with lands.

Advantageous Proclamation

Now lets modify this, if we add advantageous proclamation into the mix how does that effect our odds. I expect the optimal number of lands to be less than 17, as our overall deck size is now increased. Looking at the graph we can see the peak, representing the best chance of drawing 2-4 lands can be seen at 15 lands. Advantageous proclamation cam give similar results to a 17 land deck by running as little as 15.

Backup Plan

Backup plan is an interesting card as it allows us to see 7 cards deeper and increase our odds of finding a good hand. With that let’s put a number on it, what is the optimal number of lands for such a setup? Looking at the figures we see a peak occur at 17 lands with a 95.31% chance of a 2-4 land hand. However going as low as 9 or 10 lands would yield similar odds of a good hand to that seen in a standard deck. Unlike the other graphs which feature a more sharp peak backup plan has almost a flat plateau at its peak. Notice too how between 15 and 19 lands there is only a change in ~1% of getting a good hand. Backup plan improves your consistency more than anything.

Backup Plan & Advantageous Proclamation

Now lets get silly. Let’s suppose you draft both of these conspiracies. How does that effect your land count? Looking at our data we can see a similar almost flat line appear at the top of the graph around the 14 land mark. A 95% chance of a 2-4 land opener. Almost guaranteed. And once again we see very low variance between 12 and 16 lands. Furthermore if you wanted to mimic the 79% odds seen with the default 17 land deck all you need to do is run as little as 8 lands. Now with that said 8 lands may not be wise as you eventually want to draw more lands to play your bombs but right now we are just looking at opening hands.

Conclusions

So what can we learn from this? We can really begin to push a draft deck to its limits with these cards. They improve the overall consistency of your players decks, and should be used with caution. These cards are great includes if you have a high power environment, or if you want to give a leg up to combo decks that want to find their pieces. From our final graph we can see each method of deck building side by side to give a fuller insight into how they compare to one another.

Appendix