Mulligan

A mulligan is the decision to shuffle an opening hand you don’t want back into your library and draw a fresh seven, under the London Mulligan rule that both MTG Arena and paper tournaments use today. You always draw a full new seven, but for every mulligan you’ve taken, you put that many cards on the bottom of your library before you keep.

Mulligans exist because a random seven-card hand can easily be unplayable: all lands, no lands, or spells you can’t cast this game. Forcing players to keep unplayable hands would make matches come down to luck rather than skill.

When to Mulligan

Any hand with zero or one lands, or six-plus lands, is a mulligan in the vast majority of decks. The harder calls are hands with a workable land count but no early plays, which usually depend on what your deck needs to be doing by turn three or four.

Mulliganing for Your Archetype

Aggro decks want low-curve, fast-starting hands and will mulligan away slow ones even at some risk. Control decks can keep slower, land-heavy hands, since their games are built to go long anyway.