Calculator · wasted mana

How much of your mana never gets spent. Set the lands and the curve, and every figure below is dealt again — out to turn 15, because that is where a deck of cheap spells finally runs out of things to do with its mana.

What is being counted, and the rules it plays by

• Wasted mana in a turn is the mana you could produce minus the mana you spent. Seven lands with a five-drop and a two-drop cast waste nothing; seven lands and only a three-drop in hand waste four.
• You cast as soon as you can, dearest first, and as many spells a turn as the mana allows. That is the order that wastes the least, so every figure here is the best case — a real player does worse, never better.
• One land a turn, played from hand whenever you hold one. No mulligan, no card draw, no ramp, and nothing held back for a trick.
• It is dealt, not solved. How much you waste depends on the order the cards arrive in, so the page deals the deck thousands of times from a fixed shuffle and averages. The same deck always gives the same number.
• Colours are not in this, exactly as in the mana calculator: it counts how much mana you have, never whether it is the right colour.
• Least waste is not the best deck. The curve that wastes the least over fifteen turns has almost no cheap spells at all — and would lose to any fast start. Waste is one of the things a curve trades against, not the thing to minimise.

The other half of this arithmetic is the mana calculator, which answers when a single card can be cast; the drill that uses both is Casting Speed.