Last week, I ended with a set of sample opening hands for a Limited deck. If you haven't had a chance to look at those examples, you might want to figure out what you'd do before reading on.

Constructed decks are usually designed to accomplish a certain goal, and there are often cards that standout in accomplishing that end. In Constructed, you are likely going to have four copies of most of the "best" cards in your deck. If you are playing a The New Brotherhood deck, you might consider mulliganing just about any hand without that card in it. The Brotherhood doesn't have much in the way of searching this card out, so you must draw it naturally. In the versions I've seen, there is a huge difference between how well a deck does based on whether or not The New Brotherhood is drawn. In a Doom deck, you might want to mulligan hands without Dr. Doom: Diabolic Genius or Faces of Doom. Most of these issues assume you need to see the card relatively quickly. For example, if you are playing a deck around Gamma Bomb or Onslaught, you can generally hope to draw into that card without having to mulligan. In these cases, you are much better off mulliganing looking for cards that keep you alive to enable you to play the higher-costed cards. With practice, you are likely to become familiar with what opening hands lead to victory.

When it comes to Limited, you can't draw upon knowledge of how you mulligan with your deck. One exception to this is in a league setting, where you play your Sealed Pack deck against many opponents. Part of the allure of Limited is that each deck you make will have its own unique characteristics. Not only do you have to be familiar with what cards are generally strong in draft, but you also have to know what cards fulfill keys roles in your build. Part of knowing what is important for the smooth operation of your deck is becoming familiar with the characters in your deck and their costs.


The Hardest Characters to Get into Play are the Smallest

If you never mulligan, you are only seeing a third of your deck by turn 3. That isn't much of your deck to see in order to consistently get a 3-drop character into play on turn 3. It just gets worse when we are talking about 2- and 1-costed characters. Sure, you can play those characters when you draw them later, but you have to find the "time," and if you are up against bigger characters, it is an uphill battle. For that reason, most draws where you have characters that fill out the early parts of your game are highly desirable opening hands. You can hopefully draw into your higher-costed characters with the two cards per turn draw. For this reason, example C from last week represents the most coveted opening example hand I listed: Pyro; Advanced Hardware; Archangel; and Storm: Ororo Munroe. Even though that hand includes no plot twists to guarantee optimal use of your resource row, making use of all your resource points from turns 2 through 4 is a very exciting prospect.

In looking at example D from last week (Dragon Man, Tech Upgrade, Cover Fire, and Spiral), I'd recommend a mulligan, since you don't have any characters of cost 3 or less, and the characters you do have are not spectacular. While you have a nice balance of plot twists and characters, it isn't clear how well Cover Fire will work out, and Tech Upgrade is most effective when you're exhausting a small character on a turn you don't have initiative, and you have no guarantees of even seeing these small characters.

Example A (Iceman, Nimrod, Doomstadt, and The New Brotherhood) is an interesting one in that you do have a balance of characters, including a 3-drop, and cards useful for the resource row. However, there is a complete lack of synergy in these four cards, and it simply seems better to take you chances on a new hand. If Dr. Doom shows or some early Brotherhood characters do, the draw would becomes very satisfactory, so I could see keeping it in scenarios where you might be conservative in choosing to mulligan (see The Underdog below).


Lack of Redundancy, or "Where'd My Magneto Go?"

In Constructed, when you put one copy of a card on the bottom of your deck, there are most likely three other copies of that card lurking in your deck, and some others may be near the top. Your Constructed decks also have an optimized curve and card selection so that you can recover from poor initial starting hands. For example, cards like Signal Flare and Cerebro can quickly fill in the missing pieces. In Limited, your deck is likely to be less forgiving and you might draw a number of cards that you were reluctant to include in the deck in the first place. In a draft, you really want to be able to play with the first card(s) you selected from a pack. It isn't necessarily a situation where your deck revolves around certain opportunities presented by key cards in your Constructed deck, but rather that some cards, and especially characters, are real superheroes by themselves.

In Limited, you don't have the consistency and redundancy in cards generally present in Constructed. Furthermore deck size and the key words “on the bottom of his deck” present unique considerations for the mulligan in Limited. The cards you are mulliganing away are not going to see play in a Limited game unless you have a shuffling effect or an effect that is burning through your cards, like Mr. Fantastic: Reed Richards. In Limited, you have a 30-card deck. This impacts your odds of seeing a card of a certain role dramatically when you are knowingly putting cards of that class on the bottom of your deck. For example, let's say you have a Limited deck with three characters at a cost of 4, whereas you might have six characters of that cost in your Constructed deck (since it is 60 cards). If you have an opening hand of two 4-cost characters, and you choose to mulligan, you now only have 1 remaining in the next 26 cards in Limited, while you would have 4 in the next 56 cards in Constructed. Assuming my math is correct, your odds of seeing that one remaining 4-drop by turn 4 in Limited is about 46 percent, while the odds of seeing at least one is 62 percent in the Constructed example.

A decision on Example B from last week (Quicksilver: Pietro Maximoff, Rogue: Powerhouse, Thing: Ben Grimm, Blob) must bear this in mind. A mulligan means putting two of your four 3-costed characters on the bottom of your deck. This still leaves you with about a 62 percent chance of seeing one of the other two in your next ten cards, but that isn't very high for such an important part of the curve. Another argument in favor of keeping this hand is that the 3- and 4-costed characters have fairly hefty ATK and DEF values. However, you have your own set of problems if you keep this hand. You can play your choice of the 3-cost characters and then Blob. Part of the problem here, though, is that you have no plot twists to utilize, and Rogue requires an X-Men character in play. If you are keeping the hand, you only have four new cards to find Archangel along the curve, and if you draw Iceman or Storm, they are yet more characters competing for parts of the curve you already have covered. Due to the lack of plot twists and the difficulty in improving upon a kept hand, I think I'd mulligan it, although I believe this to be the most debatable and challenging of the examples.

The dilemma in mulliganing such hands becomes more pronounced when you have a smaller number of total cards of a given class in your deck. If Magneto: Master of Magnetism is your only 7-drop character in your Limited deck, can you really afford to put him on the bottom of your deck? If you for some reason decide to send him there, don't go asking around for him later. So as for example E from last week (Magneto: Master of Magnetism, Flying Kick, Dr. Doom: Victor Von Doom, Burn Rubber), I just can't see mulliganing, as the hand it contains your easier-to-play 6-drop and your only 7-drop. It is true that if you don't mulligan, you're going to need some luck getting a nice curve of characters on the board, especially for turn 3 (only a 65 percent chance of seeing at least one 3-drop character in the next six cards), but you can't just get rid of these two leaders. If you do find some characters, you have two nice plots twists for board control and for seeing later turns of the game. To contrast with Constructed, it is convenient that many cards providing you with consistency have the words “search your deck” and are followed by a shuffle. You do have one Tech Upgrade in our sample deck, but relying on that seems like a huge gamble.


The Underdog

If you are paired up against the next Pro Circuit Champion or are up against an exceptionally tough matchup for your particular deck, I'd argue you should be more aggressive in your decision to mulligan. Don't settle for a mediocre hand. Conversely, if you are a heavy favorite, you might consider playing a marginal hand rather than mulliganing into a dead-end hand. On the bright side of things, there aren't many hands that are completely uncompetitive. In Limited, you may have upwards of two-thirds of your deck composed of characters, and if this is the case, it is a real rarity for there to be nothing for you to do.


What the Readers Mulliganed

Thanks to the readers who chimed in on what hands they'd mulligan. It was a small sample size, but from five emails: