Mulligan math: how many Basic Pokémon should you run?
· 5 min read
You mulligan when your opening 7 cards contain no Basic Pokémon — not a missing Supporter, not a missing Energy. Basics are the only card type that keeps an opening hand legal, which makes your Basic count the single biggest consistency dial in deck building, and one of the few you can set with exact numbers.
The mulligan rate is just draw math, flipped
The chance of a mulligan is the chance that zero of your Basics land in a blind 7-card hand from 60 — the complement of the "at least one" odds covered in the draw math article. For a 60-card deck:
- 8 Basics — 34.6% mulligan rate
- 10 Basics — 25.9%
- 12 Basics — 19.1%
- 14 Basics — 13.9%
Take the 10-Basic line: that deck starts about a quarter of its games with a reveal, a shuffle, and a redraw, while the opponent draws a bonus card. Many strong, popular lists run exactly that number. They aren't wrong to — the cost is real, known, and paid every tournament, which is a fine trade as long as the rest of the list earns it back.
There is no free lunch
If low mulligan rates were free, everyone would run 16 Basics. They aren't: every Basic you add is a slot you can't spend on draw, search, energy, or tech. Thin-Basic decks accept the mulligans because the slots buy them power or speed somewhere else; fat-Basic decks buy stability and pay in flexibility. Both are coherent positions. What's incoherent is not knowing which trade you made.
Choose your number on purpose
Set the count on purpose: a deck that mulligans a quarter of the time should be doing it on purpose, for power it gets back elsewhere. When you build, compute the rate (or use a tool that does) and decide whether the rest of the list justifies it. Cutting a Basic for one more tech card isn't making the deck "a little less consistent" in the abstract — it's moving a known percentage.
Watch it in your real games
Theory sets the rate; your logs confirm it. Over a real sample of games, your observed mulligans per game should drift toward the computed rate — and if your sample is small, expect it to swing wildly for a while first (small samples lie). Tracking openings is also one of the six play skills worth reviewing on its own — see the disciplines article.