At the beginning of each game of Magic, you have to shuffle your deck into a random order. (In a tournament, overhand shuffling and pile shuffling is not sufficient). Your deck will play out better or worse depending on what order the cards end up in. A consistent deck is one that doesn’t greatly vary in power due to the random ordering of the cards.
It’s not possible to make a deck 100% consistent unless your deck is 60 Islands. True randomness means there is a chance, however slight, that you will shuffle all your lands to the top of your library or the bottom of your library. Everyone loses to bad luck sometimes. The main benefit of a consistent deck is that you’re less likely to lose due to mana screw, color screw, mana flood, or getting too many of combo piece “A” and none of combo piece “B”. The downside is that you are less likely to pull a win out of nowhere due to a ‘god draw’, and also some people find it less fun when the deck plays out exactly the same every game.

Generic tips

One thing you can do in-game to improve consistency is learn to mulligan well. You are more likely to get mana screwed if you keep a hand with 1 land and hope to draw more than if you mull down to 6 or even 5. If your deck is highly dependant on a particular combo piece (like vintage dredge needing Bazaar of Baghdad) then it might be the right choice to keep mulling until you get that card in your opening hand.

One of the main generic pieces of advice to design a consistent deck is to keep the deck at 60 cards and use 4 copies of the cards you want to draw most, if not 4 copies of every card. The chance of drawing a particular card on any given draw is equal to the number of copies of that card in your library divided by the total number of cards in your library – that’s why decks of more than 60 cards are less consistent.

For similar reasons, anything that helps you draw cards faster (proper card draw spells like Divination or even cantrips like Prophetic Prism) is going to make your deck more consistent. Even better are cards that let you manipulate the top cards of your library like Preordain. But if you really need to find a specific card, why search the top two cards of your library instead of the whole thing? There really is no substitute for a card that lets you do this such as Diabolic Tutor. (Reason why people hardly ever actually use Diabolic Tutor is because they don’t want to have to pay four mana extra for their card).

Rather than draw cards faster, you could also play a deck that tries to make the game go longer (like a defensive deck) and then you will have more chance of eventually drawing all your different cards. However this also makes the opponent’s deck more consistent since they get just as many draw steps as you.

Color fixing

One thing that new players often don’t grasp at first is what’s so great about dual lands like Sunpetal Grove. I will illustrate with an example. You could play a green and white deck with 12 forests and 12 plains. However there is some chance that you will keep drawing forests and then not be able to play your white cards, or vice versa. But say if you used 10 forests, 10 plains and 4 Sunpetal Groves, then there is still some chance you won’t draw into any sources of white mana, but its not as likely since you now have 14 sources of white mana in your deck instead of 12. And you have done this without compromising your green either.

Similar to the dual lands is the fetch lands like Windswept Heath. Hopefully by the time you use the ability of your heath, you already know which color of mana you need more of. But sometimes these lands don’t work as well as the dual lands because you need more of both of your colors. Like if you have one forest, one plains and one heath, and in hand you have a card costing 1gg and another card costing 1ww, then you would have to choose which one you really want to cast and hope to draw the other color of mana soon. But with a dual land you would be able to cast either of them this turn and the other next turn even if you don’t draw a land. Fetch lands work best when you don’t have double-color or triple-color costs in both of your colors.

In fact the above advice is good for consistency regardless of what kind of lands you are using. It’s much easier to play Mana Leak andSquadron Hawk in the same deck than it is to play Plated Seastrider and White Knight in the same deck. The difficulty of casting a card when you want to is not just the amount of colored mana symbols in its cost though, it also depends on the converted mana cost of the card. Volition Reins has three blue symbols, but hopefully by the time you get up to 6 mana you have three blue sources. However if you were using Leatherback Baloth, you don’t want 3 out of the first 6 to be green, you ideally want 3 out of the first 3 to be green so you can get it out early while it’s still a relevant threat. That puts more of a strain on your mana base.

The most consistent color combination of all is just to use a single color deck, since then you never have to worry about getting the wrong colors. This can be a decent choice if there’s hardly any mana fixing in the format, even though it gives you less options for your maindeck. The flip side of this is that the more colors you use, the less consistent the deck becomes. You can usually balance three colors just by using a bunch of dual lands, but for four or five colors you need to look at other options. There are some lands that can ‘dual’ or fetch for all five colors like Rupture Spire and Terramorphic Expanse. There are also maindeck cards that can help fix your colors like Sphere of the Suns. A lot of cards that help you fix your colors are green, like Cultivate. Remember not to rely on your green cards to get you green mana though, since if you don’t have any then you won’t be able to cast them. Instead, try using mostly green-producing lands with a few of the other colors, and rely on your spells to get your other colors.

Mana flood = Mana Screw?

If you have played many games of Magic you have no doubt experienced situations where you got too many lands or too few lands, referred to as mana flood and mana screw, which can be very annoying ways to lose games. These seem like opposite problems, but you can usually use the same tools to fix them. There are tools in almost every set if you keep an eye out for them. They are usually cards that you can use in one way if you have too much mana, and use in another way if you don’t have enough mana. You should take both ways of using them into account when deciding how many lands to use in your deck.

One example is cards with activated abilities, like Selesnya Guildmage. If you are low on mana you can just use it as a 2/2 creature for 2 mana, but if you get too much mana then you can use it to make saprolings and buff them up. Creatures with the level up ability, like Knight of Cliffhaven, are also good for this purpose.

Then there are cards that let you do something with your excess lands, usually by sacrificing them or discarding them. Spellshapers like Undertaker can be good for this, since they can also discard your high costing cards for useful effects if you have too little mana. Goblin Trenches is nice because as well as getting rid of excess lands it might sometimes be the best play to even sacrifice lands you might need later in order to get more goblins (this can be risky though).

One of the most common techniques used is when the lands themselves have abilities that let you use them in different ways. Cycling lands like Blasted Landscape can be discarded for a new land if you draw them while you already have enough lands (though if the land is already on the battlefield there’s not much you can do with it). Gargoyle Castle can be turned into a creature whether you drew and played it early when you needed it for mana or whether you draw it after you already have too many lands. Dread Statuary helps out in pretty much the same way as other cards with activated abilities do. Emeria, the Sky Ruin works as a regular land but if you ever get so flooded as to end up with seven plains then it will give you a benefit to make up for it. If you know your opponent uses discard spells, you can save up regular lands in your hand as a buffer so you don’t have to discard your ‘real’ cards.

So that’s what you can do to get rid of excess lands – but how does it help avoid mana screw? Simple, if you are using any of these techniques then you should be less afraid to add more lands to your deck. Like maybe instead of using 24 normal lands, you use 22 normal lands and 4 Dread Statuary for a total of 26. And that means you’re less likely to get mana screwed.

There are also cards that proactively prevent mana screw. One of my favorites back in the day was Fiery Fall. If I looked like getting stuck on two lands then I would discard it to find a third land. But if I drew it later in the game then I could just cast it as a burn spell. The problem with using too many of this kind of card and not much land, though, is that you have to get to at least 2 mana to be able to use it. If you get stuck on one land then not even Fiery Fall can help you. Similarly you might use a Plague Myr in your deck, which normally would be an attacker but can also act like a land if you’re mana screwed. The danger of relying on creatures too much though is that the opponent is likely to have a way to kill them and then you’re back on square one.

-Tony Youssef (aka Flopfoot)