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I hate being mana screwed. By mana screw I mean missing a land/mana drop during the first 2-4 turns of the game. I feel this is poor mechanic and here are two reasons why.

It punishes bad/new players more then it punishes good players. Given the same deck, a new player is going to have a harder time playing a low land hand than a good player. This disadvantage is exaggerated further when you consider a deck a new/bad player builds compared to a good player. All in all it means that new/bad player loses more games due to mana screw compared to good players.

It adds harmful variance to the game. Essentially the mana screw mechanic is roughly equivalent to rolling a 20-sided die before a game begins, if you get 20 or 19 you lose, otherwise you can actually play the game. The reason the mana screw is such a bad mechanic, is that it prevents the player from taking any action and also removes interaction between players.

It's just not fun. Not being able to take any action in the early game simple because of random chance, is not an enjoyable experience.  Losing because you had to mulligan down to 4 because you didn't get any lands in your draws is an incredibly frustrating.

The Solution

At the start of a game you select up to 4 basic lands from your deck and reveal them to your opponent. These lands are considered your "Starting Territory" and make up the beginning of your hand.

After you pick your Starting Territory you then draw the rest of your hand from your deck. If you should mulligan, you still draw one less card, but the first few cards would always be your "Starting Territory."

Example:
I pick 2 Swamps and a Plains as my Starting Territory. I then draw 4 more cards to create my first hand of 7 cards (the 3 cards that make up my starting territory count towards the hand size). If I decide to mulligan, then I keep the 3 lands reshuffle the rest of my hand and draw 3 cards.

Essentially your starting territory places a lower limit on the mulligan.
For tournaments, the starting territory would be set at signup and could not vary between matches.

Possible problems with this solutions: 4 might be too high. It might need to be changed to 3. Also it might be ok to vary which lands you want between matches.

What does everyone think about this?

I posted this orginally in the general forum, but it probably should have went here.

Aside from that, your solution makes color-intensive cards not mean anything. An almost mono-blue deck can splash Kitchen Finks easily if I can just make sure I draw the two Plains beforehand.

More importantly, your solution is also frustating. Imagine I have a white-black deck. I'm afraid that my mana is bad so I get two Plains and two Swamps. I see those plus Glorius Anthem and other two lands in my opening hand, so I decide to mulligan, but now I'm stuck with four set cards. That means that I only see two new cards. And I better hope they are going to be nonland cards that I can cast relatively fast. Having one hand affect your next ones when you don't choose is awful.

Also, I don't like my opponent knowing that I really have this many lands in hand, so he can kill my only creature and I stay doing nothing. Or him or her knowing my colors.

Heh. I do quite like the idea of errataing cycling {C}{C} onto basic lands. It would rather fail new players though: suddenly these things they've been trained to ignore have a complex strategic choice built-in. 

And of course this doesn't do much to alleviate mana screw (too few lands). 

Dec 31, 2012 -- 8:38PM, zammm wrote:

That solution (or something like it) has been proposed many times before. The problem is that then someone builds an aggro deck with three or four lands, and only three or four lands, and go to town because every single card they ever draw is gas.

What does this deck do if it encounters a deck with land destruction/mana denial?

What about being allowed to remove two cards from one's hand from the game to be able to fetch a basic land of the corresponding color? It doesn't help multicolor decks as much as monochrome ones, since you'll be removing the cards of the color you're fetching.