I'm just curious if anyone has figured out, or has a general idea, of how many of each converted mana cost spells you should have in a deck to make countertop effective in the format? My deck has the following (which I think may be too high):
0 CMC: 2
1 CMC: 13
2 CMC: 9
3 CMC: 5
4 CMC: 5
5 CMC: 5
Thanks
An easy guide is "don't build around Counterbalance"
Ideally, 12 or more in both the one and two drop slots, with only a handful (2 or 3) above that. 5s should basically just be Force, unless there's another good card played there.
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Land counts as your 0, so you should add those in. Otherwise, this does not look that hot. Too many 4s and not enough 2s.
Here's the distribtion in my Bant CT list which feels pretty close to the platonic ideal:
0: 19
1: 15
2: 16
3: 4
4: 2
5: 4
Honestly, I'd rather not have any 4s, but Jace TMS is strong.
Wouldn't it be better to have more 3s and 4s nowadays that the meta is shifting and more 3s and 4s are being played? Jace is very good at countering opposing Jaces for example..
Not really. The bulk of most decks is still in the 1-2 range, and adding too many 3-4 drops dilutes your ability to answer those. You're better off just using regular counters for those cards since there aren't very many of them even in the decks that use "a lot".
Honestly, it doesn't matter.
This is one of those questions where if you have to ask it you shouldn't worry about it yet. And by the time you can answer it completely you've already stopped caring about it. The best thing you can do is play a good deck, with good cards and a good mana curve, and just let the rest fall into place. Only in very rare circumstances would it be wise to play a sub-optimal card just to smooth your "counterbalance distribution" by a small percentage.
You see, there are so many factors that go into answering this question. Do you play E.Tutor? Spell Snare? These can simulate a deck that is playing more 2 drops than it really is. What do you really need to stop? You probably don't mind letting a Tarmogoyf resolve if you are holding Sower of Temptation or Moat, for example. Are you playing Dreadstill with Stifles and Wastelands? Then you probably don't care as much about 3 drops because your opponent is unlikely to cast them in the first place. Are you playing Counterspell? Well then you're less likely to need 3 drops there too. Playstyle can have a tremendous impact too, for example do you sandbag your Brainstorms as hard as I do? I doubt it.
This isn't to say it's bad to know what your deck's curve is. But you don't want to know it for the purposes of CB, you want to know your mana curve so your deck doesn't suck. Focus on what matters.
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Rico got it in one. Play good cards. Play strong synergies, but don't rape your deck to do it. I mean yeah, Thopter Sword would be more consistent at finding all its pieces if you ran 4 Foundry 4 Sword 4 E Tutor 4 Stoneforge etc. But while the combo defines the deck, it doesn't excuse building around it to that degree. Changing out an optimal card for a suboptimal card to improve CB makes your deck worse, even when you have CB online.
While I agree with basically all of this your last sentence is not necessarily true in practice. In theory I agree, but testing is always needed, metagames are always different. Besides, Counterbalance is sort of a combo card, a control combo card. You build combo decks using cards that have devastating affects. Changing your mana curve in a way that suites a combo seems worth testing to me.
You'll notice though that most combo decks try and minimize cards that are dead outside of the combo. There are exceptions of course, Dream Halls and Sneak Attack and Hypergenesis come to mind, but these are none of them tier 1 decks because their goodstuff/jank ratio is too low.
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