hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3401.txt

Episode: 3401
Title: HPR3401: Mana hacks
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3401/hpr3401.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 22:45:25

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3401 for Mundi, the 16th of August 2021.
Tid's show is entitled, Monuhacks and is part of the series' tabletop gaming it is hosted by Clot 2
and is about 32 minutes long and carries a clean flag. The summary is, Clot 2m uses about Monuh ramping
in Magic the Gathering. This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hey everybody, thanks for listening to Hacker Public Radio. I am on a walk and I figured I
continue a talk that I had started on a different walk about Magic the Gathering.
Well, I shouldn't say finished because they're really independent of one another, these two episodes,
but in the previous one that made me think to do this when I was talking about different
card rolls, like the different rolls that a card can play in Magic the Gathering and how to
satisfy those rolls with specific cards or specific kinds of cards. And at the end of that,
when I thought of talking about the resource, the main resource in Magic the Gathering, which is
mana and mana in the game, is essentially a currency system to prevent players from playing all
of the cards they want to play. Without the mana system, you could conceive of a combination of
cards that would enable a player to just play their entire deck, essentially, and probably you
just never stop playing. It would be an endless turn or whatever this scenario might be.
Too many cards for one turn anyway. So a currency system ensures that even though they have
seven cards in their hand, a player can't really play any more than whatever they can afford.
And the way that the currency is generated is that the player puts a land card on the table
in front of them, provided that they have drawn a land card from their draw deck or their library
in Magic the Gathering terminology. You can play one land per turn. This action is colloquially
called a land drop. And ideally, you would be making one land drop per turn. No fewer than that.
Because if you do fewer than that, then you're going to fall behind the ideal state.
The ideal state, barring any exception, would be that you have as much available mana as
there have, as the number of turns, there has been in the game so far. So for instance,
on the second turn, you'd have two mana. On the third turn, you'd have three mana, the fourth
turn, you'd have four mana. Seventh turn, you'd have seven mana. Because every turn you're putting down
a land card and every turn you're able to tap the land card, tap meaning turn the card over
sideways, tap the land card to produce one mana of that color, of whatever color the land is.
And that mana becomes sort of a floating currency that you have during that turn,
and you can spend that mana on playing the cards that ostensibly are going to actually
win you the game and that it really make the game happen. So you might be summoning creatures
that cost a certain number of mana or you might be casting a spell that costs some number of mana
and so on. What some people realized after a while, after 30 years of magic, the gathering
existing in 25, over 25,000 cards being produced, unique cards, card types being produced.
People started to realize that there are advantages to, well, I shouldn't say they only
realized it after 30 years. I mean, people have been realizing this throughout the game. But
over the course of the lifespan of the game, there have been developed some hacks around
the rigid scheduling of land slash mana availability. I'm going to put them into three categories.
These aren't mutually exclusive categories. There is some overlap and it's probably not all
the categories I wouldn't imagine. I'm speaking mostly based on my own experience,
the cards that I happen to have purchased from under the table at a local game store,
like the disc cards that nobody else wanted. So I'm going off of a really
motley collection of Magic the Gathering cards. I mean, I've looked some up to online. I've seen
someone in Magic Games being played. So I am speaking a little bit outside my immediate
availability. But largely, this is just kind of my take on it. I'm assuming there's a bunch of
other takes on this and I buy no means an expert or an authority. But I figured why not talk about
it. It's a fun topic for me, maybe for some of you. So the three hacks that I can identify
around mana availability. And these are broadly in the philosophy of mana ramp. That's what they
call it in the, again, another term from Magic the Gathering people who talk about this stuff.
When they talk about this, they talk about mana ramp. And the idea behind these hacks is to make
more mana available to you above and beyond what sort of naturally you should have by the rules
of the game. The expectation is to have as much mana as you have as the number of turns
that have passed just because that would be that's the natural flow of it, right? Play a land,
get a mana, play a land, get a mana, play a land, get a mana. But you can only play a land once
per turn. So you're only accruing one mana source per turn. These hacks get around that in some way.
And so they call that a mana ramp because you're kind of ramping up the the amount of mana you have.
So by turn, let's say you need three mana to play some card that you have in your hand.
You're just itching to play. You only have, it's only a second turn. You've only got two lands.
Well, what if there was a card that you could play that would make it so that you could then have
three mana available on turn two. What would that look like? Well, like I say, three categories. One,
not not unusual exclusive. One, adding mana outside of a land drop. So normally when you play a land,
that's a new source of mana. You can tap that land and whatever other land you have untapped on the
table currently. And everything untapped at the beginning of your turn. So typically you have,
you know, the land that you've accrued up to this point plus the one that you've just dropped.
That number of land you can tap and now you have that much mana. So there's a hack where you could
maybe acquire mana outside of that system, outside of the land drop system. Second category. Adding
mana, more mana for less, for less cost. I'll explain that in a little bit. And then the third
is adding mana over time. So normally mana only lasts till the end of your turn. Like whatever you've
used up, you've used up. And on your next turn, you untapped everything and you start fresh with
zero mana essentially. It's not common for you to acquire more mana than you sort of can afford
because you're usually pretty, pretty in control of how much mana you're getting. So it would be
a little bit rare for you to acquire a bunch from mana that you just couldn't spin that turn.
You just wouldn't tap the thing, the resources that would give you that mana. But I mean, it probably
happens. There's probably ways for it to happen. Okay, so those are the three categories.
And now I will discuss a couple examples of those. So I guess one of them would be the
first one. Adding mana outside of your land drop procedure. What would that look like?
Well, there is a card and it's not just a specific card because I don't want to get that into detail.
But I mean, I'm going to name the card, but there are other cards that do similar things. So these
are just kind of like, I'm giving broad overviews. And once again, the cards that I'm mentioning
are really just out of my, my own, you know, sort of collection of cards. And those cost like, you
know, 50 cents each. So at the most. So I mean, on the resale, if I were to sell them, they would cost
about 50 cents each. I got it for even less. So wasn't, this is, these are not prime examples
of these categories, but they are affordable examples. So for me, that's a feature. I like that.
So anyway, this one card that I happened to cross is called Avicence Pilgrim.
And it costs one mana, one green mana, to play this, to cast this card.
And it is a creature. It's an Avicence Pilgrim creature. It's a person who worships Avicence,
a god in the world of, of the magic, the gathering setting or one of them. And normally,
a creature wouldn't do anything to do with mana. That's not really the creature's purview.
That's the land. That's what land is for. It provides mana. But for whatever reason, this
particularly holy devout person, if you tap this creature that you put on the board for just one
mana, you could tap this creature every turn of your, any time on your turn, every turn that you
have, as long as that creature is alive on your board, in your battlefield. And it adds one white
mana to your mana pool. So the, the, the, the exchange rate is, is not bad. I mean, it's one for
one. It kind of seems kind of weird. You're paying one mana. And, and the benefit that you get is
one mana. But if you think about it, you know, procedurally, then you realize, well, that's,
that's one mana that I've been able to acquire without, without a land drop. I've been able to
spend one, I've been able to spend one mana on my turn to get a mana production facility on my
battlefield. And so you could be, you know, turn two, you might now have, after if you've played
Avicence Pilgrim for just one green mana, you've now got one, two, three mana sources when you
really ought to only have two. So you've ramped your mana production. Now that particular card,
of course, is a little bit specialized. It assumes that you are playing a deck of cards built
from at least green and white cards. Or like cards that cost green and white mana.
So if you're not, that would probably be less than ideal. But there are cards like this is my
point. It doesn't have to be this specific one. There are other cards similar to this that will
give you some sort of unexpected, something outside of a land. Because once again, you can only play
one land per turn. So anything that enables you to get around that restriction means that you can
potentially have more mana available to you aside from the restriction that you can only play
one mana, one land, one mana producing land per turn. Well, one land, which happens to produce mana.
You can play one of those per turn according to the rules. So a creature being able to play that
that could be beneficial. Okay, so I think that's the ad, well, no, actually, sorry, there's another one.
This one, and this has a bunch of these available as well. There's a card
a cycle of cards, actually, the Signet cards from some guilds of Ravnica. There's specifically the
one that I happened to have is Azorius Signet. And it is, it costs two mana, colorless mana. So
whatever kind of mana you have, it's been two, put this artifact on your battlefield.
And anytime you pay one mana and tap this artifact, you are allowed to add a white and a blue mana.
Now the way I'm reading that, that says to me, you pay one. Oh, oops, this is a wrong category then.
Okay, well, great. So the Azorius Signet is a great example of the next category, which was ad
mana for less. So in this case, you're paying two mana to put the thing out on the board. You pay
one to tap it and you get both white and blue mana. So again, it's kind of specific to the deck.
You would want to be playing a deck that would benefit from white and blue mana. So you'd probably
be playing a white and blue deck. But you're still, you're tapping the card, you're paying one mana
every time you do it. And you're getting two mana, two mana's into your deck. Now there was
that initial investment of two mana granted. So, you know, you have to use this a couple of times
for it to sort of pay for itself as it were. But I mean, after one, two, three, one, two, three, four,
after two uses, it's paid for itself. And you're now producing more mana than you have any right to be
producing at that point in the game. So again, that's kind of a combination really, I guess, of the
second, the first and the second, because that is outside of the land drop. And it is also getting
more mana for less than it actually costs. Okay, I guess, again, to zip back right up to that
first category, adding mana out of a land drop. This is, this, this, this may sort of suit.
I guess, like I say, these categories are not mutually exclusive. So a lot of these examples are kind
of crossing over into other, nobody's staying in their lane. There's a card called Evolving Wildes,
which I picked up like, I don't know, tin of, because I just saw that there were a lot of them,
sorry, I was like, I'll just take these. These seem like good sort of flexible lands to have. And
indeed, they are in a weird way. The Evolving Wildes give you, I think they provide, I think they
provide colorless mana if you tap them, I think. Either way, when you sacrifice them, when you discard
on purpose an Evolving Wild, you can then go get a land from your deck, I think, yeah,
and put it into your hand. Or maybe it's right onto the battlefield, I don't remember which one.
It seems like a one-for-one trade, and it seems like an odd way to sort of delay the satisfaction
of getting a land. But functionally, what it does is it sort of acts as a very flexible proxy
for some land that you that you'll need. So in other words, if you're playing two or three color
deck, rather than putting only some number of red and some number of blue land into your deck,
you can put some Evolving Wildes in there, and then when you hit any Evolving Wild,
when you sacrifice it, you can go back into your deck and just hunt down the color that you need
right now for your hand. So there's flexibility there, and it also has the somewhat unusual
property of thinning out your deck, which, once again, you might think that seems like a negative,
but it's actually, it can be a positive because a deck with less variety is more predictable.
So if you want to make it so that your deck meets the minimum deck number requirement,
or I guess the deck number requirement, which in a normal game is 60 cards, in some formats,
it's like a hundred. Well, a hundred different cards, 60 different cards, that's a lot of variety,
and it kind of means that when you're drawing, you have very little sort of, we have no way of
predicting what you're going to draw, whereas if you know that you have a bunch of you have four
Evolving Wilds in your deck, which would be the most that you could have, that's four cards that
you basically don't have to worry about. They're four cards that point back to a land,
and not just any land, but if you're playing more than one color in your deck, it's pointing back
to whatever land you happen to need at that moment, or I mean, as long as that's in your deck. So
anyway, that's a flexible card. It makes, I mean, it is a land, so it is within your land,
you have to drop it at some point, but you can make it work for you at a later time,
more specifically to what you actually, what your deck is, you can respond to how your deck is
acting by using an Evolving Wild. It's not a killer card or anything, but it's something I thought
I should mention. Okay, adding, speaking of adding mana for less and adding it out of the land,
out of the, out of the land drop process, there is a card called Soul Ring, which is nice,
because it's an artifact, so it's not going to be during your land drop. It only costs one mana
in the first place, and when you tap it, you get two colorless mana in return. So that is,
like right out of the playbook of that second category, adding more mana for less cost.
That Soul Ring, I think, definitely qualifies for that. And then there's another one,
I guess, this is, I guess, solidly in the add mana out of the land drop. This is not a great card,
but I happen to have it, and it's one that I've kind of relied on. It's quite expensive,
it's five, expensive in mana. It's dirt cheap in terms of money. Nobody wants this. It's a meteorite
card. When it enters the battlefield, it does like two damage to your opponent, but I guess more
importantly, you can tap it for any color of mana that you want. So it's an all-purpose mana
production facility. It only gives you one, but it's of any color. So once again, if you're playing
a multi-color deck, you can tap the meteorite and produce whatever you need in that moment.
The downside is, I guess, that it's five mana to play it in the first place. So you have to
use this thing five times in order for it to pay for itself. But in the decks that I've been playing,
mana availability has not been a problem. I tend to put a lot of land in my decks,
and so probably to my detriment, ultimately. But I do just like to have it there. I like to have
the mana available when I need it, and so that's what I do. And so paying five, especially if I
have some other card that's giving me additional mana, five is relatively, I mean, that's affordable
in a lot of cases. So that's a thing that gives you mana outside of a land to drop.
All right, that's all of that stuff. And then there's the adding mana over time,
which is an interesting mechanic. I have two instances of it myself. I think there are probably,
well, I know there are others. There are probably almost certainly far better versions of these,
but the ones that I know of and the ones that I can speak to because I have them and have played with
them is the majoring network, which has this interesting mechanic, where it is a land. So it is
not outside of a land drop. You're going to have to play it as a land at some point. So it eats up,
you know, it stays within the rules in that sense. When you tap it, it gives you one colorless mana,
which is fine. Colorless mana is a useful thing. I usually have, I try to keep a fair amount of
colorless mana in my deck because it's just, it's generic and easy to get, probably not easy to get,
but it's generic and flexible a little bit because a lot of cards need like at least one generic.
You, but if you pay one mana and tap the majoring network, you add a little token to it. I just use
glass beads. You can use dice. You can use whatever. You add a token to it. And those token, those tokens
are mana storage tokens. And in the future, you can remove some number of tokens from this card,
and that will add some, that much mana to your pool. So over the course of several turns, you pay
one mana to load up this majoring network. And then later in the game, when you need
nine mana to pay for some fancy card or ten mana to pay for some fancy card or whatever, then
you can, well, ten, well, yeah, maybe not, I'm probably not saying. Anyway, when you need the mana,
you've got it stored up on this majoring network. You can tap it, remove those tokens,
deplete it, and use all that mana at once. There's a similar mechanic for pirate's prize,
which costs three generic mana and a blue. And when you play it, there's a mechanic where you can
create treasure tokens. And anytime you sacrifice a treasure token, you get one mana of any color.
Now it is a blue card, so there's a likelihood that you're going to be making blue mana out of it.
But I mean, if you're playing a multi-color deck, then you could, you could do that, or if you're,
you're playing something that needs more generic mana than you, then you have on the board,
sacrifice some treasure, and turn it into mana, generic mana, and then you can play whatever you
wanted to play. There are lots and lots of other cards that famously, and even infamously,
add mana outside of the normal process. And people tend to like those, because like I say,
mana is kind of the fuel that keeps your turn active, as long as you've got mana to spin,
and you've built your deck to fulfill those roles that I was talking about, such as
ensuring that you have cards that are going to let you draw more cards. Cards that are going to let you
rummage through your graveyard, or your deck. And well, I guess through your deck would be drawing
more cards, but rummaging through your graveyard to get back something that you had to discard at some
point, as long as you've got the cards to sort of chain together, and give yourself flexibility,
then getting a bunch of mana, and being able to spend it, and then get another card and spend it,
and then that'll get you another card from your graveyard, so you take that and you spend it,
you've got all the mana you need. Then you're just, you're chaining together way more cards
than normally you'd be able to, given how far into the game you are. So it can be a very, very powerful
and flexible trick. I guess I'll just really quickly go over the three categories again,
just so that we've restated them at the end. I'll put them in the show notes as well.
Add mana outside of the land drop. Add mana for less. Add mana over time. Those are the three
mana hacks that I know of. Those are the cards that I could find that kind of demonstrate those
principles. I happen to know that there are a lot of other cards out there. You know, for instance,
the Avicence Pilgrim, that's a green card that produces white mana, so it's very specific
to someone's strategy, but maybe not to yours, and maybe not to the cards that you happen to have.
But if you look online for, you know, the best mana ramp cards, or the most affordable mana ramp cards,
you'll get taken to lists that are often just put out by people, so they're not always perfect,
but there will be, you know, at least 10 cards that in some way manipulate mana supply.
And I'm saying 10 cards per color. So you're looking at, you know, 50 cards to sort of sort through,
and then probably another 20 for color less mana, so you're probably looking at like 70 cards
that you'll have to kind of sort through. And when I say sort through, you'll kind of want to look
through them and see what they do, see if they match sort of what your capabilities are,
type them into your local card supplier, wherever that whatever that might be,
and then see how much they are, that excludes a bunch of them for me, like I say,
I don't really spend any more than $2 on any single card, so, you know, I try to keep it around
30 to 70 cents, limits, limits me from probably entering any pro tournament with all those pro
tournaments that New Zealand is famous for holding. I'm kidding, of course. I don't want to play
pro tournaments and tournaments, and I don't think they exist in New Zealand, so. But yeah, I keep
it cheap, and I'm quite happily, quite happy to do so. So whatever into the spectrum that you're on
in terms of financial willingness to invest in a card game, you can just kind of let that be your
guide. There's lots and lots of choices out there, and as long once again, as long as you kind of know
the role that you want to fill, you can search, you can look around, and kind of figure out which cards
are capable of serving that purpose for you. And sometimes you do have to be a little bit flexible.
It took me like a good two years, I think, to really start to feel comfortable with color less mana.
It just didn't calculate for me for a long time. I just didn't understand why I would want
colorless mana, because that seemed so sort of specific to me. But looking at it again,
I realize that colorless mana is just as valuable as the colored mana, because a lot of cards actually
do require colorless mana. And anyway, I've started playing more artifacts, and most of those,
I think, at least in my experience, have been colorless. So it's a useful thing. So yeah, that's
what I've been doing, working on with magic. Thanks for going on this walk with me. I'll talk to you next time.
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