When is the Splash Worth It?

03/08/2024

Despite drafting two Boros aggro decks at PT Chicago, I would say that I generally have a fairly strong multicolor bias in limited. I'm always looking to push the limits of splashing in every set from Kaldheim to Lost Caverns of Ixalan. And of course, my favorite manabase is 11 Forests, 2 Evolving Wilds, and one copy of each other basic.

But at the same time, one of the reasons why I'm so successful at splashing and building multicolor decks is that I know when it's worth it. Yes, I'll often navigate drafts with a predisposition for being more than two colors, but I'm almost never going to actually end up playing a deck with irresponsible mana without very good reason.

So today, I'd like to impart some of that knowledge to you, through three questions: Why do we splash? How do we splash? and When do we splash?

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Part 1: Why do we splash?

To answer why we splash, the best place to start is to talk about why we play two colors in the first place.

Why two colors?

Two colors is the default in limited for a good reason - a manabase of 17 basics in 40 cards naturally happens to be pretty okay at casting two different colors of spells. 9 sources is 86% to draw one in your opening hand, and 92.5% to have one by turn 3!

Obviously. you could improve your mana to perfection by going down to a single color. But it's extremely hard to get enough cards in that one color during the draft, and especially hard if you also want those cards to be powerful. Playing a second color gives you access to a wider range of powerful cards that you could pick up during the draft, and helps guarantee that you can make a functional deck with everything you need.

On the flip side though, we could extend this argument to playing more colors - it would be pretty nice to expand our range to yet another color, and include even more power. What could go wrong?

Of course, the thing that immediately goes wrong is the mana. One thing I see many players new to limited do is attempt to play three colors of cards with a 6/6/6 manabase - 6 lands of each color. It seems perhaps reasonable, and it can be easy to dismiss the times that you stumble, and assume that it'll work out.

But in reality, by playing a poor manabase you're just taking on so much more risk. 6 sources means only 71% to see that color in your opening hand, and still only 81% to draw it by turn 3. If you're missing a color a quarter or a fifth of the time, you really can't rely on being able to cast spells of that color early!

The math here can be a bit unintuitive - you might think that 6 sources can't that much worse than 9 sources; after all it's 2/3 of the way there, right? But in reality, you're more than doubling your chances to miss! From 14% to 29% chance of missing in your opening hand; and from 7.5% to 19% of missing on turn 3.

So then why splash?

Well, as noted above, it'd be nice to get access to more powerful cards. If we play a two-color deck, we're restricted to only 40% of the mono-color cards in the set, and only 10% of the two-color cards. By extending to the third color, we increase our range to 60% of the mono-color cards, and 30% of the two-color cards - that's a lot!

As we learned above, we can't just play a fully three-color deck to achieve this; the mana is just too bad. But maybe we still want to fit a really powerful card in our deck - like a first pick

Izoni, Center of the Web for our UG deck. Surely we can stretch our mana for that, right?

Well, yes, we can! The key observation here is that the problem we ran into above with three color decks is that we tried to care about all three equally, which caused all three of them to have mediocre chances of showing up early. What happens if we stick to caring about two colors primarily, and just sneak in mana sources for the third where we can find some leftover space, with little care to how often we draw those sources?

This is, in essence, what the concept of splashing is. You want to have consistent access to one or two colors of mana so that you can cast the bulk of your spells with not much awkwardness, but if you have another color with only a few cards that you can wait until the lategame to cast, you really don't need to sneak in that many sources to support it!

And the great thing is, this gets you most of the way there to the power of adding a full third color to your deck. After all, the two main colors you end up in are likely to just be the open colors - any splash cards are often extremely strong (and often bomby) early picks. And generally, more powerful cards will be pretty good late in the game too, not just on-curve.

So by introducing a splash instead of a full third color, we can both reap most of the benefits of playing more colors, while not paying that much of a cost. The tradeoff is that we won't be able to cast our splash cards consistently on curve, but hopefully they should be generically powerful enough to be worth it anyways.

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Part 2: How do we splash?

I mentioned 9 sources above, and I would call that the gold standard for what to aim for in your main colors. 8 sources is fine too; but I think that is the bare minimum for any color you want to have access to by turn 3.

So then, what if we only care about casting the card by turn 6? Well, we can do a similar hypergeometric calculation, and get the following numbers: 51.5% for 2 sources, 67% for 3 sources, and 77.5% for 4 sources.

These numbers are amusingly close to the pattern of 1/2 chance to miss on 2 sources, 1/3 on 3 sources, and 1/4 on 4 sources. Of course, this pattern really does not hold for any other numbers (5 sources is only 15% to miss, not 20%), but it's actually a pretty good mnemonic! So where should we draw the line?

Well, it's a bit less clear on this one. It honestly depends a lot on exactly how deep your splash is, and exactly what cards you're splashing; so I would generally just recommend that you keep these numbers in mind and think about how much you care about having your splash color.

In my experience, I will almost never want only two sources - I almost always want better than just 50% on turn 6, even if I'm just splashing one card. So I usually tell people "3 minimum, ideally 4" for splash sources.

Source Math

So where does this leave us? Well, if we want 9 sources of our two main colors, and 4 sources of our splash, that totals to 22 basics - way too many! But thankfully there will usually be several ways that you can fix your mana.

Every evolving wilds, for example, contributes 3 sources. Every dual land contributes 2. Anything spell that

makes a treasure or searches for a basic will generally count for 2 sources - as they often require one color of mana themselves. A green spell, for instance, can't really find your first green source.

In general, 2 different splash enablers will be enough to have barely serviceable mana even with a splash, and more on top of that will help make it good.

The classic minimum splash manabase is, of course: one Evolving Wilds, and then a 7/7/2 split of basics for 17 lands total. This gives you 8/8/3 in sources, which does technically meet the bare minimums I laid out - but meeting the bare minimum is not particularly inspiring.

If you bump that up to two Evolving Wilds? Then you can play 7/7/1 in basics, for 9/9/3 in sources - much better! You could also shift a source over to the splash to get 9/8/4, but I often find that you should prioritize main color sources being good much more than splash sources being good.

Of course, sometimes your second main color is more like a secondary color, and/or sometimes your splash is quite deep - then you might want a 9/8/4 manabase. But you should have good reason before you do that.

Advanced Techniques: Multiple Splashes

You might be tempted to run the same numbers for multiple splashes: 3-4 sources for splash colors, and 9 of your main colors. And this is still a good baseline; you need more fixing of course as you add on more colors, but it's very doable.

However, as the total number of cards you're splashing starts creeping up, you need to keep in mind that the costs also start going up.

If you're just splashing 3 cards of one color, then it's probably fine that you only draw mana of that color on turn 6 or 7 - maybe you'll have 1 or occasionally 2 cards stuck in hand, but you can probably spend mana on spells of your main colors in the meantime.

However, if you're suddenly splashing 6 different cards of two different colors, that just makes it all the more likely that you'll end up with multiple cards stuck in hand without anything to spend mana on. That's when you start running into trouble.

I don't have exact numbers here, but generally you should just keep in mind that the more distinct cards you're splashing, the better you have to be at drawing your splash colors early so you don't get stuck. Perhaps, as an approximation, add another source requirement for all your colors for every three splashed cards. So 1-3 splash cards would be 3-4 sources per color; 4-6 cards would be 4-5 sources per color; and so on.

This is where true 5-color sources come in handy too - Evolving Wilds is great, but it's not great at casting both of your splashes. I had a lot of decks in LCI that enabled splashes across all five colors with

Sunbird Standard and Captivating Cave.

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Part 3: When do we splash?

And so we arrive at our final question: when is the splash worth it?

It's easy to just default to always splashing bombs - it's natural to want to play all your best cards, even if they aren't in your main colors. But it won't always be the right thing to do.

You really need to weigh the costs and benefits: How much does splashing impact your mana? How good are the cards you're splashing? Especially, how good are they when cast late in the game? How much better are they than the cards they would be replacing? Do they add something unique to your deck that's worth the risk?

These are all questions that I can't really answer too concretely, as the answers mostly come from experience and vibes. But I will highlight two points:

First of all, it's extremely important to recognize that the way to evaluate splash cards is specifically as lategame cards, since you often won't be able to cast them early. So, a card like

Sharp-Eyed Rookie whose power is mostly in being able to come down on-curve is going to underperform drastically, while a card like Izoni, Center of the Web is going to be roughly as good as it would be if it weren't splashed.

And secondly, you should really be thinking about what the splashed cards bring to your deck that you didn't already have. Specifically, this gets at the case of splashing removal - as bombs will generally add the dimension of "very powerful card". Removal is something that every deck can make use of, and notably still functions well late in the game (well, at least most removal does). So it checks that box, but you also have to consider if your deck actually wants more removal.

If you already have a solid removal suite in your main colors, it often doesn't add particularly much to splash even more removal - in modern limited, removal has diminishing returns. But on the flip side, if you're sorely lacking removal, and absolutely need some to function, you might want to even do an extremely sketchy splash for it!

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Conclusion

Splashing is an intensely complex topic in limited, as there are so many different ways you could go about it. I didn't even really touch on how splashing should affect your picks in draft! I might have to revisit this some other day.

That said, a lot of the complexity can be distilled to just a few core concepts - understanding limited manabases, understanding how manabases affect splashed cards, and understanding what kinds of cards are worth splashing for.

The remaining complexity all comes down to the specifics of execution - and this is made even more complex by the fact that the dynamics change from set to set as the tools and payoffs change. So, there's really no better way to improve than simply getting your hands dirty, throwing stuff at the wall, and seeing what makes a good splash!