Practice · tempo

Say which turn you can actually count on casting each card — not the turn its mana cost claims. Four of the ten are cards; the rest ask which of two costs you would rather own, which of two you can cast first, and three questions, drawn from a pool of four, about the whole deck: how many of your spells you really cast, what being on the draw is worth, what a land more or less — or a little cheap ramp — does to a cost, and where on the curve your next card belongs.

What sets a casting speed

• Up to five mana, the cost is the turn. You can expect to lay a land every turn up to about the fifth, so each extra mana delays a spell by exactly one turn. A four-mana spell is a turn-four spell.
• Past five, the arithmetic breaks. After the fifth land you are drawing lands at roughly 40% a turn, so each further mana costs two turns or three rather than one. Six mana is there half the time on turn 7, seven on turn 10, eight on turn 12.
• When a cost needs three or more mana of one colour, the total amount stops mattering. A cost needing three of one colour waits for three sources of it, which is turn 6 in the colour you have nine sources of, and turn 7 in the one you have eight of — whether the total is three mana or five. So the dearer version of such a cost is the better card: the same wait, a bigger effect. Two of one colour costs you nothing at all (turn 1); four of one colour is turn 10, which is why it is almost never worth paying.
• Past eight mana the chapter stops, and the calculator answers. The mana calculator works out, for any cost, the turn you hold that many lands half the time: nine mana on turn 14, ten on turn 17, twelve on turn 22, with seventeen lands in forty cards on the play. That is why such a card is unplayable in limited — not because it is forbidden, but because the game ends first. A number you can check says it better than a verdict.
• Every card here is in one of your two main colours, and every answer is one the chapter puts a number on. Costs it deliberately leaves open — two coloured mana symbols on a cheap spell, or a cost spread across colours — are not asked about.

This exercise practises Mana, and every answer here can be opened on the mana calculator.