You can cut a land if you’ll be on the draw. As I’ve written before, it’s best to push those decision until after sideboard, when you know what you need in the matchup. Playing your best cards is step one, but at some point you don’t really know which spell is your 23rd-best or whatever. How? You can play better cards, get value out of lands, make your deck consistent, harness synergy intelligently, and control the length of the game in your favor. You want to play a deck with a higher effective power level than your opponent. Think more broadly about the goal of all competitive Magic formats. If you’re Andrew Cuneo, play nineteen lands.
Don’t trim down to fifteen lands unless you’re sure. And that’s the point I want to make: when you can’t decide between sixteen or seventeen lands, play seventeen. I played fifteen in my undefeated Esper control Sealed deck at Grand Prix Toronto, though I probably should have played sixteen. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong to play sixteen lands in your Limited deck. Maybe that will change some day, but I doubt it.
That only works in the context of people playing too few lands, but that’s been true for essentially all of Magic’s history. I am beginning to believe that every Limited deck would be improved by replacing the worst spell with an additional land. I went out of my way on Sunday to play more lands than the general consensus so I could cast my spells on time. (It being the end of the season probably helped.) But why was I the most prepared? What knowledge did I harness to get the probabilities working fully in my favor? Theory As I surveyed the room and talked to my friends before the tournament started, I felt that I was the most prepared player in the room. That qualified me for the November RPTQ, in the final week of the qualifier season.
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