For those who haven’t seen the announcement yet, there’s a new mulligan rule being tested at Mythic Championship II in London. You draw seven cards on each mulligan, then put a number of cards on the bottom equal to the number of times you mulliganed. So if you mulligan to five, you draw seven cards, put two on the bottom, and then either keep or mulligan to four (where you draw seven cards, put three on the bottom, and so on).
VTCLA brought up Tron on Twitter as one of the decks that’s helped by the new mulligan rule the most. Unlike most Modern decks, Tron can mulligan to four or five cards and still stand a reasonable shot at winning the game. When it’s able to filter all of the cards it doesn’t need out of its opening hand, it should become even more consistent. This makes it a good candidate to be broken by the new mulligan. I decided to put the “London mulligan” to the test by drawing twenty Tron hands using the new rule.
Disclaimer: I am not a Tron player and do not have extensive experience mulliganing with the deck. I generally tried to follow a rule of mulliganing any seven-card hand without a clear-path to turn three Tron and a payoff, and mulliganing any six-card hand without either turn three Tron or turn four Tron and a payoff. This is not how I would mulligan with Tron normally, but with a higher chance of drawing a good hand on four or five cards, I believe it is correct to mulligan more aggressively.
Another disclaimer: I don’t want to engage in a debate about Tron’s metagame positioning under the new mulligan rule, specifically about “Tron won’t be good because it’s bad against combo.” There are a lot of factors that could influence that and it’s far too early to tell whether this will hold true once people make adjustments to their decks for the new mulligan rule.
The cards on the right are the last cards that would have been drawn. So for the first hand, had it been a mulligan to four, I would have seen 2x Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine, and Chromatic Star, and seen the second Chromatic Star with the scry had I kept.
I used the maindeck of this list for all twenty hands, which I chose based on it being the first list I saw: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/1631342#online
With that, let’s get to the hands.
HAND 1
(7 cards) This looks like a fine seven-card hand. It has turn-three Tron, with Chromatic Spheres and Ancient Stirrings to find more gas. Turn-four Ulamog is not out of the question since there are two Towers. Though it doesn’t matter on seven cards, I believe this hand would be greatly helped by the new mulligan rule if it had come after a couple mulligans. It really wants to play turn-one Expedition Map, and that isn’t an option if it’s a five-card hand on the play or a four-card hand on the draw.
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HAND 2
(5 cards) The new mulligan rule doesn’t affect this hand much. I would probably put Stirrings and Scrying on the bottom, I guess? So I’m drawing a random card instead of Stirrings, which I probably don’t need that much. It would be much better if one of the Mines were a second Tower, but it still has turn-three Tron and is highly likely to drop Ulamog on turn five at the latest.
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HAND 3
(3 cards) This is the first hand which is massively improved by the new mulligan rule. Instead of starting off with a hand of Ulamog-Karn-Relic, scrying a Tron land to the top and not hitting Tron until my opponent has taken at least four turns, I get to start off with Karn and two Tron lands and potentially play turn three Karn on a mull to three.
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HAND 4
(7 cards) The best hand so far. This was a seven-card hand but under the new mulligan I would snap-keep this at anywhere from four to seven cards and throw away cards I don’t really need (Sylvan Scrying, the second Mine, and Wurmcoil Engine in that order). It’s perfectly fine at three too - all it needs is to draw into a payoff assuming keeping three Tron lands and shipping Karn to the bottom is the right choice.
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HAND 5
(5 cards) This is an okay hand, if not a stellar one. I think I put Star and Ballista on the bottom here to guarantee turn-four Tron with Karn as the payoff. Under the old mulligan rule, this hand probably actually works out better than under the new one, but only because there isn’t anything I actively don’t want in my hand.
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HAND 6
(5 cards) Forest and OStone go to the bottom, probably. Maybe keeping OStone and putting Wurmcoil Engine on the bottom is better. This would be a risky hand at best without seeing Stirrings and Tower on top of the deck, but under the new rule it becomes a snap-keep.
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HAND 7
(7 cards) This is a pretty similar situation to the previous hand. If this were a mulligan I probably ship Ghost Quarter and Ulamog to the bottom in that order.
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HAND 8
(6 cards) This is.... absurd. I would have to ask a Tron player what to put on the bottom (I would go with Ulamog but I wouldn’t be surprised by any answer other than Karn), but under the old mulligan rule, I have to decide whether to keep a six-card hand with two Tron pieces and no green sources, green spells, Maps, or Spheres to give me a shot at finding the third one. Having not played Tron much, I don’t instantly know the right answer. Under the new mulligan rule, it’s an easy keep.
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HAND 9
(6 cards) Another one where the new rule turns it into a non-decision. On six cards under the Vancouver mulligan, I don’t see Expedition Map, meaning I have a hand with only two lands and no immediate help to find Tron or even a third land. With Expedition Map in my opening hand and an Ancient Stirrings on the bottom of my deck, this hand becomes obviously great.
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HAND 10
(4 cards) This hand is probably the biggest point in favor of the new mulligan rule out of the twenty. There is a level of decision making I hadn’t seen in the other hands in which cards to ship to the bottom, and there’s a real game here where there wouldn’t have been had I kept a hand of Forest, Mine, Ugin, Karn and not seen a way to find the third Tron land until after my opponent’s third turn at the earliest. The counterpoint to this is that based on the results of the other hands, I did get unlucky here in not finding a reasonable hand in four tries, and situations like this would happen less often than hard mulligan decisions happen with the Vancouver mulligan.
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HAND 11
(6 cards) This would be a solid six-card hand under either the old rule or the new rule. It becomes a bit more straightforward with the new rule since it gets to ship Buried Ruin to the bottom in favor of a random card.
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HAND 12
(3 cards) The first time I truly mulliganed into oblivion. I don’t know if there’s even a reasonable path to winning this game. This points to the mulligan strategy I took being too aggressive, since I shipped back a semi-reasonable six on the way to this.
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HAND 13
(5 cards) This would be pretty straightforward under the old rule and gets even more straightforward under the new one. I found Tron, I found the payoff, so instead of weighing factors like scrying the Star to the top or the bottom, I just ship the cards I don’t need to win the game, which I believe are obviously Star and the second Urza’s Mine.
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HAND 14
(6 cards) This isn’t more straightforward under the new rule but it is more consistent. Under the old rule, I’m stuck with two Forests in my hand which I don’t really need, and I don’t have as many chances to find a payoff. Under the new one, I just put a Forest on the bottom and get Stirrings in my opening hand and a random card as my first draw.
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HAND 15
(3 cards) The second mulligan to oblivion (ish). I’m starting to hit a theme of generally more interesting decisions when I go below five cards, and generally more non-decisions at five or six. I think I keep one Mine, Chromatic Star, and Wurmcoil Engine.
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HAND 16
(5 cards) This is pretty risky but I think it’s correct to keep and not go to four. I would put Stirrings and the second Mine on the bottom. There is real decision-making here, and the hand will lead to more of a real game than a hand with Stirrings, Scrying, two Tron lands, and Ulamog would have.
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HAND 17
(6 cards) Turn-four Tron, with a shot at turn three if I draw well. Either Ancient Stirrings or Sylvan Scrying gets shipped to the bottom - I probably just ship Stirrings to the bottom since it’s the obvious choice, and go run the numbers of Scrying later.
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HAND 18
(6 cards) This seems pretty good. If I find a Tower, I have turn three Tron. A somewhat tough mulligan decision becomes easy when I see the seventh card.
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HAND 19
(6 cards) I have turn-three Tron, so the Stirrings are just finding payoffs. I think I put the second Stirrings on the bottom. Again, this makes what would have been a risky mulligan decision an obvious one.
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HAND 20
(6 cards) I can’t see this hand leading to an interesting game - I have no agency in terms of what my payoff is, and the only real decision is what to fetch with Sanctum if it comes to that - but there’s at least one decision I have to weigh here, which is what to put on the bottom. I know I’m keeping Wurmcoil Engine and Power Plant because I obviously want them, and one of the Expedition Maps because I have to, but everything else is worth evaluating at first glance.
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CONCLUSION
I think this change is highly problematic in terms of its effect on Tron’s consistency. I mulliganed into oblivion twice, but that’s going to happen sometimes and I think it’s reasonable to assume that a better player would have kept at least one of those eight hands. These hands looked significantly more powerful on average than the Tron hands I see playing against the deck on Magic Online, where broken stuff like turn three Karn happens sometimes but other times the Tron player has to try and find a way to win with a hand that isn’t entirely cohesive.
I know I’ve already hammered home this point so hard that the nail is all over the floor in tiny pieces, but another part of the change I dislike is that it makes mulliganing easier. The decisions were generally straightforward and not deep, and there were some hands where it was completely obvious what to do. The hands I ended up keeping were for the most part extremely similar to each other - a quick route to turn-three or four Tron, and a payoff.
Based on this experiment, I believe that the new mulligan rule will have the desired effect of “smooth[ing] out opening hand decisions even more” but that it will also take away a lot of interesting decision-making and make games more homogenous, particularly in older formats with fast, consistent combo decks. Decks like Tron already have somewhat homogenous games. When your opening hand is basically the same set of cards every game with one or two unnecessary pieces thrown in, it only exacerbates that problem.
I’ll end by saying that although my feelings about the change in older formats are almost entirely negative, I’m open to it being a good thing in Standard and Limited. The biggest positive I took away was that low mulligans didn’t feel like they would just get run over. Having an actual shot at winning with most hands would feel good, especially in Limited where the change will mean that players who build good decks will get punished by mulligans less often.