As was announced today, the London mulligan is coming to all tournament formats of Magic with the release of M20 next month. While the RC and CAG haven't made any announcements about the London mulligan coming to Commander, it's more likely than not that our format will follow suit. Do y'all foresee any issues with the mulligan in Commander specifically or have any general issues with it? What are your thoughts?
I have been excited for the London Mulligan to make it to EDH since it was announced it was being tested a few months ago. I do think there is likely to be some decks that get a bit stronger (some people mentioned Grenzo, Dungeon Warden in particular) but I think, overall, this represents a positive for the format. There have been plenty of times where I don't want to go to 6 and I almost never went down to 5 because it was too much of a detriment to get 5 random cards and still not know if I can get a good hand to start with. Being at 6 cards or fewer is still likely going to be enough to deter people from fishing for combos too aggressively with the new mulligan while giving others a better opportunity to actually participate in the game.
It is basically a much weaker Partial Paris because we can only bottom cards when going below seven in the first place and only a very limited number.
Sure, combo decks could theoretically find their pieces more often, but if they mulligan too much then they are down too many cards if that plan fails.
I can't really say I'm a fan. I much prefer Vancouver. It still gives some saving grace to not being punishing in EDH without any of the hand-sculpt aspects of Partial Paris or London, where you get to choose what you want to keep rather than it being a random element.
Having played with it and gone back to playing without it I think London is a better mulligan. Mulligans are less of a downside and will make for better games.
The edge it gives to combo and the ability to trim lands is a minor concern.
Love it. Loveitloveitloveitloveit. It decreases the number of non-games due to mulliganing. That has always been my least favorite part of the game. Especially in casual, getting stuck with an unplayable hand while watching others play the game just feels bad. Please let us have it? ^^
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As an EDH player that sill plays with Partial Paris because I believe that having a playable starting hand without sacrifing slots for mana leads to a better gameplay and experience for casual play, I'm glad that they are taking this new mulligan, maybe it will be the time even I will use it, but need to see how it plays first.
I think it's acceptable. The loss of the starting hand size is an acceptable equalizer since it punishes you for finding the perfect opening hands. It would make me concerned about early Timetwisters (since that Power 9 card is still unbanned for some reason). Sure, it increases the viability of fast combo decks in being able to get the best hands possible, but it also effects EVERY opponent's ability to find a good starting hand. I hope that it causes a shift towards more interaction since the threat of early combo (for a cEDH playgroup, mind you) now becomes statistically more common. Either way, if it encourages a higher volume of games, I'm ok with that.
Back in march we used one of our rare EDH weekends to play test the London Mulligan.
From friday evening to sunday evening we accumulated 33 hours of EDH and with the new version we had close to zero non-games. It was around the time i started working on my Grenzo, Dungeon Warden list and obviously that deck went nuts - but not to a point where it worked uncontrolably well and jumped a few tiers.
Overall the London Mulligan enhances already great decks by a tad but helps decks with lean land counts, high curves and shaky deck building a lot more. I think so called cEDH will adjust in some way and casual pods will be thankful to have it.
Given the play testing in march and the feedback in our playgroup since the statement i'm optimistic we'll make it our staple mulligan.
I don't think many people really get what sort of decks it will help. Sure combo will be a bit stronger, but control decks will be the main winners. and like usual, aggro decks will be the main losers with this.
But what i do like most about the new mulligan rule is that for 99% of EDH players (i.e. players who play mostly just for funsies, don't go on the internet to chat EDH and/or have casual under $50 decks), it's going to reduce the number of non-games significantly. Though i'm not a massive proponent for mass-sweeping changes to the game, this, i feel is a step in the right direction. We want to enable the vast majority of players to have more interesting games more often than sculpt the rules for the 1% cEDH players. highly invested EDH players, 'competitive tiered' or not, are probably mature enough to be able to decide what mulligan rules work best for them.
For groups who have a problem with combo/prison decks that are going to break the new mulligan rules, i'd suggest those groups house-rule a different mulligan solution that works for them.
By the way.. has anyone actually tested the new mulligan rules in actual games/goldfished games? I don't have any cEDH decks, but for my most competitive EDH deck, it really doesn't change all that much. It makes mulliganning less 'heavy' a cost (which is good - no reason to unnecessarily tax players for 'bad' mulligan decisions, right?), and enables players to be more aggressive with their mulls.
Commander will be adopting the London Mulligan (bit.ly/314vgT7) at the same time as other formats, with the standard first-mulligan-is-free for games with more than two players (CR103.4c).
I dislike the change from a design perspective, but I like it from a pragmatic one. While it can be abused by combo decks, the vast majority of players don't play in cEDH environments and will likely only see the positives to the change.
Not a fan. Would rather they keep Vancouver Mulligan.
It was a great move to switch from partial Paris to Vancouver to remove hand sculpting, now we have another hand sculpt, and removing cards from the game before the game starts.
My first impression is that I like the London mulligan. I don’t like the idea of it being combined with the typical multiplayer policy of “first mulligan is free”.
Back when Partial Paris was a thing, I did a lot of number crunching on different mulligan rules. In reality, Partial Paris was not the boogeyman that it was made out to be, since sculpting around a two-card combo was generally I’ll-advised. It mostly just improved the overall speed and importance of the early turns — though fewer games overall started with Sol Ring than with the “regular” mulligan rule.
I expect the London will do a good job of reducing instances of mana screw etc. I also fear that a “Free London” mulligan policy will greatly increase the number of games involving one or more players screaming out of the gate with fast mana, if they have a commander that rewards such aggressive mulligans (e.g. Urza), which may exacerbate any power discrepancies between decks at the same table.
The “Free London” mulligan is perhaps not as bad as the abomination that was “Free Partial Paris”, but I think the extra card might make it about on par with regular Partial Paris in terms of overall strength.
Back when Partial Paris was a thing, I did a lot of number crunching on different mulligan rules. In reality, Partial Paris was not the boogeyman that it was made out to be, since sculpting around a two-card combo was generally I’ll-advised. It mostly just improved the overall speed and importance of the early turns — though fewer games overall started with Sol Ring than with the “regular” mulligan rule.
What data did you use to determine 1st turn Sol Ring was less prevalent with PP?
Another thing PP allowed was shorting lands. People were often running ~30 because you could look at 10+ cards to get 3 lands.
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I think the London mulligan has the same problem all the other Wizards official mulligans have had: too much shuffling! My favorite aspect of partial paris was shuffling no more than twice to start a game.
Since they changed the mulligan system away from partial paris, my preferred mulligan has been stubbornly refusing to mulligan even with questionable hands, but in the situation of totally unplayable hand, I tend to do full hand mulligans the way partial paris did it, set cards aside face down reduce by 1 each time until I'm happy and then shuffle everything back in at once. It's not much less breakable than partial paris was if you're digging for 1 card specifically, but it's so ergonomic that I wish it was official.
The London mulligan seems both fair and good for eliminating non-games, but it's extremely not ergonomic. Imagine a mulligan to 5. You shuffle your deck and consider whether the hand is keepable like any other system. If it isn't, you shuffle all over again, and then have to deliberate on whether any of the 7 possible 6-card hands are keepable. If they aren't, you shuffle completely a third time so that you can deliberate on whether any of the 21 possible 5-card hands are keepable. And now that you've finally found one you like, you decide which order to put the other two cards on the bottom of your library. And then the final step is conceding and going home because your hands and brain are worn out from 3 full randomizations and 30 micro-decisions and you no longer feel like playing a high effort game like magic and would rather just watch Netflix for 4 hours straight until you pass out on the couch.
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What data did you use to determine 1st turn Sol Ring was less prevalent with PP?
I used math. Excel does Hypergeometric distributions, and I calculated the likelihood of your opening hand containing Sol Ring or Mana Crypt with either method, assuming you were intentionally going to six or five just to find it. I also took a stab at calculating if the hand was "playable" or not, which I assumed meant containing at least 2 lands. The spreadsheets were on my old computer so I don't have it in front of me, but I could recreate it if you think it would be useful to the discussion.
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
So that's the reason for my hesitancy. Feel free to double-check my numbers because I'm just as fallible as anyone.
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Sure, combo decks could theoretically find their pieces more often, but if they mulligan too much then they are down too many cards if that plan fails.
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The rule is fine and no one uses it to dig for specific combo pieces.
It's fine.
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From friday evening to sunday evening we accumulated 33 hours of EDH and with the new version we had close to zero non-games. It was around the time i started working on my Grenzo, Dungeon Warden list and obviously that deck went nuts - but not to a point where it worked uncontrolably well and jumped a few tiers.
Overall the London Mulligan enhances already great decks by a tad but helps decks with lean land counts, high curves and shaky deck building a lot more. I think so called cEDH will adjust in some way and casual pods will be thankful to have it.
Given the play testing in march and the feedback in our playgroup since the statement i'm optimistic we'll make it our staple mulligan.
But what i do like most about the new mulligan rule is that for 99% of EDH players (i.e. players who play mostly just for funsies, don't go on the internet to chat EDH and/or have casual under $50 decks), it's going to reduce the number of non-games significantly. Though i'm not a massive proponent for mass-sweeping changes to the game, this, i feel is a step in the right direction. We want to enable the vast majority of players to have more interesting games more often than sculpt the rules for the 1% cEDH players. highly invested EDH players, 'competitive tiered' or not, are probably mature enough to be able to decide what mulligan rules work best for them.
For groups who have a problem with combo/prison decks that are going to break the new mulligan rules, i'd suggest those groups house-rule a different mulligan solution that works for them.
By the way.. has anyone actually tested the new mulligan rules in actual games/goldfished games? I don't have any cEDH decks, but for my most competitive EDH deck, it really doesn't change all that much. It makes mulliganning less 'heavy' a cost (which is good - no reason to unnecessarily tax players for 'bad' mulligan decisions, right?), and enables players to be more aggressive with their mulls.
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It was a great move to switch from partial Paris to Vancouver to remove hand sculpting, now we have another hand sculpt, and removing cards from the game before the game starts.
Back when Partial Paris was a thing, I did a lot of number crunching on different mulligan rules. In reality, Partial Paris was not the boogeyman that it was made out to be, since sculpting around a two-card combo was generally I’ll-advised. It mostly just improved the overall speed and importance of the early turns — though fewer games overall started with Sol Ring than with the “regular” mulligan rule.
I expect the London will do a good job of reducing instances of mana screw etc. I also fear that a “Free London” mulligan policy will greatly increase the number of games involving one or more players screaming out of the gate with fast mana, if they have a commander that rewards such aggressive mulligans (e.g. Urza), which may exacerbate any power discrepancies between decks at the same table.
The “Free London” mulligan is perhaps not as bad as the abomination that was “Free Partial Paris”, but I think the extra card might make it about on par with regular Partial Paris in terms of overall strength.
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Another thing PP allowed was shorting lands. People were often running ~30 because you could look at 10+ cards to get 3 lands.
Since they changed the mulligan system away from partial paris, my preferred mulligan has been stubbornly refusing to mulligan even with questionable hands, but in the situation of totally unplayable hand, I tend to do full hand mulligans the way partial paris did it, set cards aside face down reduce by 1 each time until I'm happy and then shuffle everything back in at once. It's not much less breakable than partial paris was if you're digging for 1 card specifically, but it's so ergonomic that I wish it was official.
The London mulligan seems both fair and good for eliminating non-games, but it's extremely not ergonomic. Imagine a mulligan to 5. You shuffle your deck and consider whether the hand is keepable like any other system. If it isn't, you shuffle all over again, and then have to deliberate on whether any of the 7 possible 6-card hands are keepable. If they aren't, you shuffle completely a third time so that you can deliberate on whether any of the 21 possible 5-card hands are keepable. And now that you've finally found one you like, you decide which order to put the other two cards on the bottom of your library. And then the final step is conceding and going home because your hands and brain are worn out from 3 full randomizations and 30 micro-decisions and you no longer feel like playing a high effort game like magic and would rather just watch Netflix for 4 hours straight until you pass out on the couch.
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
So that's the reason for my hesitancy. Feel free to double-check my numbers because I'm just as fallible as anyone.
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