If you want to be a great Magic player, the mulligan is a key skill you'll need.

A mulligan is when you attempt to draw a better starting hand at the beginning of the game.

In fact, one of the best ways to level up as a player, whether it be in traditional 60-card formats, Limited formats, or even Commander, is to learn how and when to take one. Evaluating in the moment, is it best to keep your hand or ship it back and risk it all?

That's a real skill that separates the best players from the Average Joes. Let's take a closer look at the rules of a mulligan in Magic.

The Current Mulligan Rule

Since 2020, the London Mulligan is the official rule from Wizards.

How they work is pretty simple:

1. You can choose to mulligan for any reason
2. You shuffle your hand back into your deck
3. You draw seven cards
4. You can choose to keep this hand or do it again
5. Once you keep your hand, you put one card on the bottom of your library for each mulligan you took
6. You do not scry

In multiplayer formats like Commander, the first mulligan is free, so you wouldn't have to put a card on the bottom of your library for that one.

The Multiplayer Exception

In singleton formats, like Commander and Brawl, it's a lot harder to stack a deck for consistency. In a shorter hand, you have a higher chance of it being unplayable, and Wizards understands that too.

For that reason, these formats operate with a special exception. You don't have to stick anything back under your deck the first time. Obviously, house rules can vary in a specific pod or LGS, but that's the official way to handle it.

The Early Days of Mulligans

From the very beginning of Magic, the built-in random nature of a deck has been fundamental to the game. It keeps things fresh and can level the playing field between a first-timer and a World Champion.

You feel this the most in the moment that you draw your first seven cards. Sure, you could draw the perfect hand that lets you win the game in crushing fashion, but what about when the opposite happens?

The decision to allow a redraw was always an important one, but it's also delicate. There will always be players that try to game the system, or stack their decks, or come up with some devious way to combo off on turn one.

The original mulligan rules were simple. If your opening hand of seven cards contained no Lands or only Lands, you could reveal your hand to your opponent, shuffle, and draw a fresh set of seven.

We've come a long way since then, and each version was named after the city where it was first allowed in a professional MTG setting.

1997's Paris Mulligan

While the original rules were straightforward, they were brutal. There are so many games where drawing only one or two Lands in your opening hand is a set up for disaster. Players really felt like they lost the game, with no recourse, on their opening draw.

The Paris mulligan replaced the original in 1997. This rule allowed a player to send their opening hand back for any reason without revealing it to their opponent. To balance this, you drew one less card with each mulligan.

This was an improvement, but it was eventually deemed too restrictive. In 2015, we saw the implementation of the Vancouver mulligan.

2015's Vancouver Mulligan

The tides turned again in 2015 with the Vancouver mulligan. It was very similar to the Paris version but this time, once you decided to keep your hand, you could Scry 1.

This helped a few things. Players would cling to an unplayable hand because they didn't want to start off at a disadvantage. The option to look at the next card and have the option to tuck it away to the bottom of your library was just the right consolation prize to get this practice off the ground.

It also made it so that games wouldn't stall out due to a lack of mana, smoothing over bumps in the competitive scene, too.

The Vancouver rule was an improvement, but it didn't get at the real problem. Giving players smaller starting hands each time was fair, but seeing fewer cards before you chose was too restrictive.

When Wizards went back to the drawing board in 2019, that was the biggest pain point solved with the implementation of the London rule.

Conclusion

Mulligans are one of the most difficult parts of the game to master, it's something that requires patience and fearlessness. Learning which hands to throw away and which to keep are one of the most difficult, yet rewarding, aspects of learning a deck.