Keep Or Mulligan: Innistrad: Crimson Vow Edition

My answer: Mulligan

This hand might look like a hand that’s curving out (you have a one, a two, and two threes, and a creature-land on top of that), but none of your early cards do anything and you won’t be able to cast Valorous Stance early on anyway. Mono-White Aggro❄ has a ton of one-drops and two-drops and it needs them; you can’t start playing the game on Turn 3.

My answer: Keep

This type of hand is always very tricky to keep in the dark, because you could be playing versus an aggro deck (in which case it’s a good hand) or you could be playing against a control deck (in which case it’s a bad hand). In moments like those, it pays to understand how your deck is built, because it’s usually going to reflect what’s important in the metagame.

In the case of Brad’s deck, I feel like it’s clearly built towards beating creatures. It has Cinderclasm and Battle of Frost and Fire. It has Abrade, Fading Hope, Demon Bolt, Prismari Command, and four copies of Spikefield Hazard. Further, it has no maindeck counterspells and even shaves one Divide by Zero. For you to play a deck like this, you have to expect an aggro field, which means you expect this hand will be good. If you don’t like this hand in the dark, then you’ve probably misbuilt your deck for the field you expect to play against. 

If you mulligan this hand, I think you run the risk of ending in the exact same spot, but with one fewer card — there’s so much removal in the deck that we’re bound to end up with some. And, what’s worse, without knowing what the opponent is playing, we’re not going to know what to put back — you might end up with the decision to send back either Abrade or Galvanic Iteration, and then how do you choose that if you don’t know your opponent? You’re likely going to gamble that they’re aggro (given what you believed about the metagame to construct your deck like this) and will therefore bin the Galvanic Iteration, ending up in a similar situation.

My answer: Keep

This hand isn’t great. It’s got a lot of mana sources, and your creature that adds mana is the worst of them all. That said, you do have a very powerful play at your disposal in Turn 3 Esika’s Chariot. Being on the play, this can dodge Divide by Zero and can randomly run away with the game against decks like the mirror or potentially Mono-White Aggro❄. 

Is it dangerous? Yeah, it certainly is. You could get your Chariot Duressed. They could cast Thalia, Guardian of Thraben to delay you for a turn. They could Spikefield Hazard your Tangled Florahedron. You could simply draw two more lands and have the Chariot not be enough. A bunch of things can go wrong.

But you’re also going to draw more cards over the course of the game, so even though this hand as-is is all-in on Chariot, there’s no guarantee that this will remain so over the course of the game (and in fact the likelihood is that it won’t). The Turn 3 Chariot might win you the game on the spot by itself, but it also might not need to do that. If Mono-Green Aggro❄ were a traditional aggro deck (say, Mono-Red Aggro), then this hand would not be a keep, but it actually has a ton of mana sinks, so your extra lands might even find a use later in the game (plus you already have a creature-land). Because of this, I’d keep.

My answer: Mulligan

I think this hand is pretty close, but ultimately I’d mulligan. The upside is enormous if you hit well, but you have to truly hit well – you need a way to discard your two Arclight Phoenixes and also a way to bring them back. If you’re lucky, you could go Dragon’s Rage Channeler into Sprite Dragon into Faithless Looting + two spells, which will bring back the two Phoenixes, which is obviously a great start, but you could also not draw the Faithless Looting and end Turn 3 with two or three power on the battlefield. If we’re gonna sculpt the top of our deck, we might as well sculpt our six-card hand instead.

Overall, I think we can do better than this hand in the mirror, though if this were Game 1 of some other matchup where Arclight Phoenix was the most important thing by far and where you had time to deploy them, I’d be inclined to keep. These Historic renditions of the Izzet Phoenix deck aren’t as reliant on the Phoenix, however, so I don’t feel like you need to keep a bad hand because you have access to two of them in the hopes you’ll get there; you can win games without ever bringing Phoenix back, so there’s no need to risk it.

My answer: Mulligan

This hand has some very appealing cards (Turn 2 Smoldering Egg followed by Expressive Iterations to turn it on), and if it had both your colors of mana I’d certainly keep it, but I think keeping a hand without red mana here is too risky, as there’s a reasonable chance you just lose the game without casting a single spell. Smoldering Egg is very good versus Mono-Green if you’re on the play, but if you can’t cast it on Turn 2 it becomes a lot worse.

Another thing to consider with this hand is that, even if you hit immediately, it’s still somewhat awkward because of your lands. You’re going to play one of them on Turn 1, then say you hit Mountain and you play that on Turn 2, then on Turn 3 you can cast Iteration (and presumably a land off that), which means on Turn 4 or 5 you’re going to end up playing a tapped land (because whichever one you didn’t play on Turn 1 is now going to enter the battlefield tapped). I’d certainly keep if I were promised a red land Turn 2, but the fact that there’s awkwardness even if you hit makes the hand a bit worse. In the end, though, even if these were two Islands I would not keep the hand, because the red mana is far too important and you can’t afford to stumble.

My answer: Mulligan

This hand doesn’t really do anything, and this is a matchup where you have to pressure them — two damage a turn won’t cut it. Some of the time you’ll draw out of it and the hand will actually become good, but I think your odds are much better with a six-card hand.

Even if it weren’t a matchup where you need to pressure them, I’d still be very uncomfortable with keeping a hand like this because it’s just got too much air in it. For me to keep this hand, it would have to be against a deck where I know Cauldron Familiar will be a good blocker and likely one where the lifegain matters (some sort of Mono-Red deck for example), but that’s the opposite of the Izzet Epiphany matchup. Because of this, I would also not keep this hand in the dark (but even less so against a combo deck like Epiphany).