Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1362: Mana Curve

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

In this episode, I explain what a mana curve is and how they impact how we design Magic sets.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm talking about mana curves. Now, before, I have done a podcast on the mana system. I've done a podcast on mana costs. I've done podcasts on mana values. So one of the joys of doing a podcast for as long as I have

is you get to finally slice something. So today, it's all about the manor curves. talking about the manor curves, I will talk a little bit about all these other things, all these other manor-related things. But if you want more detail, I have whole podcast on them. So let's start a little bit with a mana system to get into what mana curves are and why they matter. I guess let me define mana curves real quickly before I get into that. So a manna curve has to do with having a selection of mana costs that allow you to go up over time.

So what does that mean? So when Richard first created the game of magic, there was a core problem to solve, which was he was making a trading card game, and he had what we call the queen problem, which is if you were picking your pieces in chess, why wouldn't you just play with 15 queens and a king? You need a king because that's the wing condition.

Why wouldn't you play with 15 queens? Why play with a pawn? Why play with, like, why play with a knight? Why play with any other pieces? I mean, a queen's just more efficient than them. Why wouldn't you just play with the best cards? And there are two solutions to that problem. One was the color pie,

meaning he chopped up the different abilities in different colors and the mana system. Now, the mana system did a couple things, one of which is it separates out the colors, so it's hard to play a lot of colors in the same deck. And since the color pie takes different abilities and spreads and throughout the color pie, you don't have access to everything,

normally when you play in any one deck because the restrictions of the mana system added to the color pie restrict that but there is another sorry because don't hate to myself um there was another important part to the mana system which was it makes cards have different value at different points in the game the idea is turn one a card with a manna value of one meaning a card that you can play on the the very first turn is very valuable because you can play it. And a card with a manna value of six is not valuable because you can't play it. So in turn one, the one drop is exactly what you need and want. And the six drop is not.

Later in the game, when you have a lot of manna into play, at least six, for example, the six drop is the better play than the one drop. So the idea is you want to put different cards in your deck because over time, different cards have different value at different. points of the game. This is what gets us to manor curve. So the idea is when I have one land in play, the most valuable thing I can do is play a spell that costs one mana or maybe activate something, but I want to spend my one mana. Mostly I want to spend cards that cost one mana, that have a mana value of one. Once I have two lands, I want to either, I want to spend two

manna value worth of cards. That could be spending one card that costs two or two cards that cost one. In general, one card that cost two is going to be better for you than two cards that cost one as a general rule. So what happens is on the first turn when I have one mana, I kind of want to play a one drop. On turn two, when hopefully I have two mana, I want to play a two drop. And then turn three, you know, once I have three mana, I want a three drop. Like I want to, I want to slowly increment up because as the game progresses, the more mana you will, you have the larger spells you can cast and the larger the spell, the larger the mana cost of the spell, the more powerful the spell gets to be. And that is a very

important part of the game that you want to to make a good deck. Whether this isn't limited, it's in constructed, you want to make a good curve for your deck. For example, when I play limited, when I'm building for limited, whether it be sealed or draft. Once I have my cards, what I tend to do is take all the cards and the colors I believe I'm playing and I actually order them in mana value, meaning I put all the one drops in a pile, all the two drops, the three drops, the four drops, the five drops, the six drops. And the reason for that is that in order to maximize what you're doing, you want your deck to have a mana curve. And what that means is you want to have usually one or two, one drops. You want to

to have anywhere from, you know, two to six, two drops, usually a little more than two. You want to have, like you want to have a bunch of two drops and three drops. You want some four drops and you just need a few five and six drops. It depends on your deck. If your deck's all about ramping, for example, you might want more higher end. And there are a bunch of tricks we do to help you get higher mana costs into your deck. And I will talk about that today. So the The idea essentially here is if I want to play a game of magic and I want to have the most efficient game I can, I want to make sure that I have a proper mana curve in my deck. And this is true no matter what format you play, that you want to make sure you have a mix,

so that at any one point in time you're maximizing your opportunity to do things. Depending on the decks, sometimes you don't have one drop, sometimes some decks that are really about aggro strategies don't have high drops. For example, there are definitely decks that have one, two, and three drops, and maybe only a handful of four drops. And no five drops, no six drops. And if you do that, you can just play less land in your deck. If you top out at four, well, you don't need quite as much land

as if you're going to top out at five or six or seven, for example. Also, some decks obviously have means to speed up their mana. Sort of a classic example, that would be Lano War elves. Lannerware elves cost one green mana. It's a one-one, but it can tap for a green mana. So in turn one, if you play a Lanawar Elves, on turn two, even though it's only turn two, I know, and assuming I have a second land, I now have access to drop three drops on turn two.

And so kind of what your mana curve is has a lot to do with the functionality of your deck and how soon you'll think you'll play certain things. If you have the ability to sort of play larger spells earlier, your deck might have more spells in them. Another thing that we tend to do, a very common trick we've done, we do this for limited, but it's true for some casual constructed, is at common, we will make big creatures, usually like six mana or more, that have the ability for what we call land cycling, which means that I have the ability to take this card, spend some mana,

discard the card, go into my deck, and find either a specific basis. or any basic land, depending on what the land cycling is. But the idea essentially is, here is a high drop creature. If I draw it early in the game, I can just get rid of it to go get more mana. And if I draw it late in the game, I can play it. But the nice thing about that is it allows you to get more large high man of value cost in your deck. The biggest problem is if I put too many five, six, seven drops in my deck, early in the game,

they clogged my hand. They don't do anything. And so we've spent a lot of time of energy finding ways to give you extra utility. Cycling is one of those things. Sometimes you can discard the card to generate an effective pay a certain amount of mana. Some of the times we do things like adventure where there's a secondary use before you get the first use. So there's a small spell I can cast so that I can later do that. Sometimes we do things where something like flashback where there's a small increment.

There's a small cost up front, but there's a secondary use later. Another common thing we do sometimes is spells that have costs that you can use in your graveyard to do things. In general, though, the idea is we want you to play sort of a proper curve. And that is something, I think, you know, the man-a-curve is something you learn as you play more magic. I think when you first start playing, you just grab cards and throw them into deck in. you know, your manna won't be as efficient as it needs to be. But as you start to learn, you start to realize, oh, well, I really kind of want to have a one drop in turn one.

I kind of want to have a two drop in turn two. I kind of want a three drop in turn three. Hopefully I have three mana. That part of learning about the, like, the mana system, one of the reasons I like the mana system a lot, like I said, there's a whole podcast on this, is there are a lot of ways to optimize it. Yes, random draw can, cause frustration. Sometimes you don't have

mana when you need it. And that inconsistency of mana, I think is a plus to the game. I think the idea that I don't always know exactly what I'm going to get just makes different things happen and makes different systems play out. The fact that you don't always get the mana on a known time.

Like, there are games where you do. I mean, I actually made a game or a part of a team that made a game called Dual Mafters, where the way Dual Mafters works is you can discard any card from your hand to essentially turn it into a land. You can think of it that way. Meaning, on turn one,

I take any card from my hand and put it face down and then it taps for, or I turned it upside down, and then it taps for whatever color it is, it taps for that color. And the idea is that you always know in turn one,

you'll have one manna, turn two, you'll have two mana, turn three, you'll three mana. And there's a consistency to it. I really enjoy it working on other games where I had a more consistent mana base, it made me appreciate the inconsistency of magic, the fact that I have to sort of roll with the punch of some of the times. And I think a lot of emergent gameplay comes from having to deal with a situation at hand,

which can be quite fun. But anyway, the thing about the mana system that I also think is very valuable is, the more you understand the mana system, the more you can optimize for it. And the two biggest ways you do that. One is just understanding the right amount of land to play. Like I said earlier, if you're playing a deck where you top out at a lower thing, you can play less land. If my most expensive card in my deck is four mana, I can just play less man. The reason I want to play less land is I get more spells in my deck if I play less land.

Or vice versa, you know, if I want to get more things out, I have the means by which to do that. You know, that I could put more land in my hand, especially if I have other ways to use land. It's a landfill deck or something in which playing lands has other utility. Maybe I want to have more lands. That's something I can do. The other big thing is the manna curve, is the idea that I want to maximize that I have what I need on the turn I need it. And that's really about learning how to play. And the reason they call it a mana curve is you want, most of your cards are two, three, and four mana.

That is the sweet spot of where you can cast things. And be aware, if you want... Once you get to five mana, obviously you can cast a five drop, but you can also cast a three drop and a two drop. Or on four men, you cast two, two drops. So having some mana at two and three is nice because even when you get to more mana, you can play multiple spells if you need to. And so the idea is if you play the right amount of mana and you have the right curve, mana curve in your deck, you just have a better experience. Your decks will play better and your decks will win more. you'll have more efficiency in what you're doing.

Okay, so now I bring this all up. Now that I understand why there is a manna curve, why you want a manna curve, that does mean that on the R&D end of things, on the design end, we very much have to think in terms of manacurve. So let me first talk about limited, then I will talk about constructed.

So in limited, we want to make sure that you have a decent mana curve. Well, how do we do that? The answer is, we build the manna curve into the actual file. So I've talked many times about set skeletons. I have all podcasts on set skeletons. The idea of a set skeleton says,

look, there's a base outline than a magic set has. Yes, each set will have variance. Things can deviate from the norm, but the skeleton is the norm. And one of the things the skeleton cares very much about is mana value. That if you've ever looked at a design skeleton,

each slot will... This is for a one drop. This is for a one-drop. two drop. This is for a two drop. This is for another two drop. This is for a two or three drop. This is for a three drop. This is for a three drop. It tells you slots of what can go there. And the idea is essentially when we're making a set. So the way to think of this is every color has roughly 50% creatures. White is a little more. Blue is a little less. But, you know, the order is most creatures to least creatures percentage wise is white, then green, then black,

than red than blue. White and green are a little more creature-oriented, red and blue or a little more spell-oriented. Even blue, which is the lowest, still has 50%. And they're not, they used to be wider apart from each other. They've gotten closer over time. If you want to think of all colors as being a 50%, it's roughly correct. And so the idea is when we make a set, the set has a certain number of cards. So at Common right now, I believe Commons 80-81 cards. So, so, you know, So let's take 80, divide by 5. 80 divided by 5 in my head, is 1 and 30 is 16. So 16 cards.

There often is lands, cycles of lands at common. We also put common dual ends. There might be some artifacts. So let's say there's 14 of each color, for example. If that is true, half of them roughly. So seven are creatures. So the idea is if I'm making, you know, seven to eight creatures, let's say, I probably want, oh, and different colors will have a

slightly different curve. White and red almost always have a one drop. They're the colors that are more about agro. Green can have a one drop. Blue can't. I mean, any of the colors can't have a one drop. It's not that they don't, they can't. And often, often, most colors have a one drop. We have some shaped like black, uh, black for a one woman's death touch. It's a very, very common shape we do at one drop in black. Um, so the idea is most colors, most of them will have a one drop, usually not more than one than one, red or white or the only ones would ever have more than one drop. Um, normally out of those, let's say seven cards, they'd have one one drop. They probably have two, two, three drops, um, a four drop and a five drop. And then the

extra drop depends on what you need, maybe an extra two, three or four. Um, but the The idea essentially is I have one on the ends and I have two in the middle, maybe three on one of them. But you can see it's a curve. That's where the term manor curve comes from. That you want to have your highest concentration around three. Once again, it depends on your deck and depends how you're doing it. So when we're building the sets, we're building limited. We want to make sure that we are building into the limited structure itself a curve.

And why do we do that? Because when you play limited, you're going to get cards, and we want to maximize the chance that you are able to build a good curve. Now, you don't get all the cards, so we might make a one drop. Maybe you don't get it. But, well, in sealed, you have a lot less control. It's what you open up. The good news is the way most sealed works is when you open up your sealed pack, you divide by the color.

A lot of building limited is putting things in a place. piles, by the way. The first thing you want to do is just put your cards. When I'm building sealed, I actually make ten piles. I make a pile for every color, one pile for its creatures, one pile for its spells. And then also I tend to do two more, for colorless artifacts or colorless cards, I guess. I do a creature pile and not. Often what I do is cards that are multi-collar. I put up, I put up above because usually there's not tons of those, and that tells me some directional things. But anyway, usually when I'm playing sealed,

I just figure out what two colors. I mean, I look at what spells I have, what are the rarest, uncommon, rarest mythics that I have, you know, what's my removal? I mean, there's some things I look for. But in general, one of the most important things, literally is just where do I have the most creatures? In limited play, you build a 40-card deck.

You want roughly about 16 creatures, seven spells. So I want to make sure I have 16 creatures. Now, given, I can use my colorless cards if I need to. So I have access to that. And we tend to make more hybrid these days. So I tend to put hybrid up above. And then when I realize what colors I'm in, I can pull down the hybrid. So let's say there's a hybrid white blue card.

And I decide, oh, I'm playing white. Well, then once I make my piles, I can pull down, I'm playing white and black, let's say. I can pull down my hybrid white blue card and just put it in my white pile and treat it like a white card. But you need to get to 16 creatures. So some of the times what will happen in sealed is you just don't get enough... Some colors, you don't get enough creatures to be able to really build what you need to build. And so you want to lean toward where your creatures are. You also need to care about your spells and removal.

I'm not saying it's solely your creatures, but that... It's important that you get to 16 creatures for limited usually. In constructed, you get to completely dictate everything. So construct is a different animal. If you want a curve for constructed, you can build a curve. That's just up to you. But we'll get to construction in a second. So in Limited, if we do a curve in every color, in sealed, you'll play in at least two colors,

maybe three. In draft, you can sometimes draft one color, usually draft two colors, maybe you splash a third or maybe play three depending. And if you're more advanced, maybe you're playing four or five. In many formats, that is possible. But the idea is I want to give you the tools. And when I'm building up my deck, like I said, once I know my colors, whether or not I drafted it or playing sealed. Once I know my colors, I want to sort of lay that out in curve order

to figure out, like, is my curve working correctly? And part of that is making sure that I don't have too many big spells, making sure I have enough spells in the middle. And by doing that in limited, by making sure that every color has things, it just ups the chance of you, the person playing and limited getting it. In draft, one of the things that you want to learn at draft as you get better is you need to think about your mana curve. That if I'm playing a certain deck and I don't have any two drops, there's a point where I really need to start prioritizing two drops. And once again, this is a little bit of a higher strategy thing,

but you really want to think about your curve when you're drafting because your deck will just be better if you have a good curve. And that means you want low drops, you want medium, you want high drops. You know, you want to really have the breadth of what you need your deck to do. and having things like I talked about earlier like land cyclers, things in which they can go in my deck and have the ability to be adaptable

to be bigger things when I need it, but it lets me get more big things into my deck. One of the important things about when you're playing is the reason you want some expensive cars is those are game finishers. Those are things that are hard to deal with. And that if you play a game with just one drop through four drops, let's say,

you're going to have a hard time winning in the end if you don't win quickly. Like the reason you don't play above four drops is you're planning to win very quickly. But if your game's going to go long enough that you can play five, six, and seven cards, those cards will dominate the game. Okay, let's talk constructed now.

So in constructed, limited, we want to make sure we balance things out so that people, when they're drafting or opening, there's a good chance that they can get what they need. That it exists. Like, our number one way to play limited is booster draft. If we make sure that in every color, we have a good curve,

at least there's a chance that you can draft it. Maybe you don't. obviously that's up to you. But at least if we provide it and it exists and you know what to prioritize, it's there for you to draft. Constructed is a different animal. Constructed, you choose exactly what goes in your deck.

So if you want to have a good curve, the reason you want to have a good curve is not that you can't choose to do it, it's that there are things that are empty. And this is where we get to construct it. So let's say we have a strategy. We want a certain archetype. Another reason we want to be very careful

about mana is we want to make sure that there are good spells for that deck at every mana cost, every mana value. Meaning, let's say we're trying to make a really good deck that has some synergy in blue-red. When we build that deck for constructed, one of the things we're looking for is, is there something to put at every mana value? Now, that doesn't have to be in the set that it's coming out in. in limited, the only set you're drafting off is that set. So we need to make sure that's there. But for constructed, what we're talking about is, are there constructed cars for that particular strategy, and are we making sure that we fill out the mana curve in that constructed strategy?

And that one of the most common things will happen, the reason play design does a lot of deck building is they're able to figure out when things are missing. Now, one of the things we like is I'll use standard as my example. Standard is best when all the things can come from different places. Obviously, the core of something can come from the set that has the theme. And more so, once upon a time, we try to spread the theme out between sets as much as we could. Nowadays, we're a little more willing to put the core of something within one set. Because we make single sets now and not blocks, it's okay to put a little more concentration.

just to make sure that the core elements you need are there. Not that you won't supplement with other sets, but that the core elements of what you need are in the set that's about that theme. But no matter what, and one of the reasons we build deck for constructed playtesting is you need to figure out whether strategies are missing something. And that one of the most common notes that will happen when we're building out new strategies is players are building and going, oh, I need a two drop. I don't have a good two drop.

I don't have a good three drop or whatever it is. And what that means is when they're trying to adjust cars in the file, we'll make notes about what constructed needs that have to do with man of value and constructed needs. This particular deck, that is this particular strategy, is missing something at this mana value. And that's one of the things, especially at a high, the way to think of it is most of the comments and the uncomments are designed more for limited play that constructed play. Not that they can't have a value in constructed play, but they're limited as the thing that's driving. the decisions about them, where rare and mythic rare are more about constructed play. And so those decisions. The key is, limited has a lower power level than constructed.

And once again, there's different constructors. But almost any limited format has a lower power level than almost any constructed. Constructed just is made up of a larger pool, the larger pool, a lot of how much the power level has to do with how many cars you've access to. So in common and uncommon, we're costing things for limited. and then at Rare and Mythic Rare, we're costing things for constructed. And when we're talking about that, so a lot of times when we're fixing things, it's not that it can't go at lower rarities.

And certain effects have a similar value between limited and constructed, but most of the time, cards that are costed for constructed are just more powerful than cards that are costing for limited because of the differential in the power level. So we'll do playtest, and we'll build specific decks, And then a lot of the notes are, you know, sometimes the things you need exist in the larger format. Oh, I need a three drop. Oh, there's a really strong three drop, four sets back.

That can be my third. And when I say, oh, three, you need more than one three drop and more than one two drop. But the idea essentially is I'm looking for things to fill out my curve. And then when things are missing from the curve, that's when we make notes and we try to make sure that the set that's coming out, especially if there's a theme that that set is sort of pushing as a new theme. we want to make sure that the things we're sitting at are sitting in the right places. One of the dangers that can happen if you don't do this is, oh, I make a new theme, there's all these cool cards for the theme,

and they're all sitting at the same mana value, meaning they can't all go in the same deck, and so they're kind of fighting each other. And then there's other things you need that are missing, and then, you know, if you want to construct a deck to work, you need to make sure that the mana... Like, if a theme just doesn't have a good mana curve, it really can keep the deck from being viable.

So that's another thing that's really important is we need to think about that. And in general, I mean, sort of the point of today is part of what we want for magic is we want there to be a learning curve, meaning we want you to play. And magic is fun. You should have fun from the very first time you play.

But one of the things that's cool about magic is it has strategy. And the more you play, the more you'll learn how to get better. And that's a really fun, that is something that's really, I think, a big part of any game is the idea that as I play the game, I start learning strategy. And then each game, I get better at that strategy. I learn more about that strategy. And it gives you something, like, it becomes a thing to do as you play is you start learning how to optimize.

Man of value is a really good example of that. You do not need to understand man of value to play magic. It is not crucial at all. But as you get better at magic, it's a very important part of the game. And it's something you need to learn to improve. Once you do that, we need to make sure that we, the people making the game, are maximizing your ability to care about that. If we didn't make a full range of manor curve in the sets,

you couldn't draft that way. If we didn't think about it for constructed decks, you couldn't build your decks that way. that a lot of what's going on is we want to make sure that we want to build into magic the tools to learn and the tools to improve and make sure that as you learn you need to do that we're giving you the tools to do that and that is a really important part of the man to curve from the design end of things is we have to understand how you'll use it so that we can build it in such a way that we're optimizing for your use and this is true in a lot of different places today I'm talking manna curve, but essentially we need to think about how you, the player, want to use it. And we need to understand how you will improve through time and then give you the tools to do that improvement. It'd be very mean to learn mana value matters and then not give you the tools to be able to take

advantage of that. And that is a lot of how we build sets now and that we want to build sets to maximize their structure so that you can have fun maximizing your builds for yourself. But anyway, guys, I'm now at work. So that is probably more than you needed to know about manna curves. Like I said, one of the things I like about this podcast is I like diving in deep. I like getting to the nitty gritty. Manna curve is something we're constantly thinking about.

Like when we're building limited files, like, oh, we need a three drop. Okay. Or, no, this wants to be a four drop. Okay, we need to move one of the four drops to the three drop. Like, just getting things in the right mana value and adjusting things around is such like a core part of how we design because on the end result it's very important for you to be able to play the game. And so, as the guy that talks to you all about how we make sets, I want to be clear of how important that is. But anyway, guys, I'm at work. And so we all know what that

means. It means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.