Mulligan Rules in Magic: The Gathering
The mulligan is one of the most consequential decisions a player makes before a single card is played — a structured mechanism that lets players redraw an unplayable opening hand at the cost of starting with fewer cards. Understanding how the rule works, when it changed, and how different formats apply it is foundational to competitive and casual play alike. The Magic: The Gathering Authority home covers the full rules landscape, but the mulligan deserves its own careful treatment.
Definition and scope
At the start of every game of Magic: The Gathering, each player draws 7 cards. What happens next is governed by the mulligan rule: a player who doesn't like that opening hand may shuffle it back into the library and draw a new one — but under the current system, each successive mulligan eventually costs one card.
The rule that governs this process in competitive play is the London Mulligan, named for its debut at Mythic Championship London in 2019 and officially adopted into the Comprehensive Rules later that year. Under the London Mulligan, a player who mulligans draws a full 7 cards each time, then puts a number of cards from their hand to the bottom of their library equal to the number of times they have mulliganed. A first mulligan results in putting 1 card back; a second means putting 2 back, and so on. The end result is a hand of 7 minus the number of mulligans taken.
This replaced the Vancouver Mulligan (introduced in 2015), which drew one fewer card per mulligan and included a "scry 1" compensation for any player who went down to 6 or fewer cards. The London system is generally considered more powerful because a player can always see 7 cards and then curate their hand rather than receiving a smaller hand outright.
The term "free mulligan" — sometimes called the "Paris Mulligan" workaround for Commander — refers to a format-specific variant where the first mulligan back to 7 has no cost at all. Commander's official rules, maintained by the Commander Rules Committee, include this free first mulligan as a baseline, acknowledging that 4-player games and 100-card singleton libraries make hand variance considerably more punishing than in 1-on-1 formats.
How it works
The London Mulligan process unfolds in a specific sequence under the Magic Comprehensive Rules (Rule 103.4):
The bottom-of-library placement is private — opponents do not see which cards were put back.
Common scenarios
The two opening hands a player will encounter most often break into recognizable categories:
The no-lander — a hand with zero lands. With a typical 60-card deck running 24 lands, the probability of drawing a 7-card hand with zero lands is roughly 5.3% (calculated from hypergeometric distribution). Most competitive players mulligan this without hesitation.
The mana-flooded or mana-screwed hand — a hand with 6 or 7 lands, or one with a poor distribution of colored mana relative to the deck's requirements. These are context-dependent. A hand with 6 lands and 1 interactive spell is often a mulligan; a hand with 6 lands and 1 win condition might be a keep in certain control strategies.
The slow hand in an aggro mirror — a 7-card hand with no plays until turn 3 or 4 can be lethal against an opponent curving out from turn 1. This is a case where the format matters enormously: the same hand that's acceptable in a slower Commander format game might be an automatic mulligan in a Modern format aggro matchup.
The combo-dependent hand — certain combo decks require specific 2- or 3-card combinations to function. The London Mulligan significantly strengthened these strategies because a player can fish for key pieces across multiple 7-card draws.
Decision boundaries
Deciding when to keep versus mulligan involves balancing three factors: functionality, speed, and resilience.
A functional hand can cast its spells. A hand with the wrong colors, no mana, or cards that can't interact meaningfully with the opponent's strategy is not functional regardless of individual card quality. Speed refers to how quickly the hand can develop — turn-1 plays in aggressive formats, early disruption in control builds. Resilience describes how well the hand handles losing a single card to removal or disruption.
The risk calculus shifts with each successive mulligan. A 6-card hand is slightly weaker in card advantage but can still win. A 5-card hand is statistically disadvantaged in most matchups; the card advantage principles that govern mid-game decisions apply even at the opening draw. Going to 4 cards is almost universally a concession to poor fortune rather than strategy.
The London Mulligan's design deliberately favored deck-consistency strategies over pure card-quantity strategies — the player who mulligans twice but curates a perfect 5-card hand has a better path to winning than the player who kept a mediocre 7. That tradeoff is, more or less, the whole philosophy of the modern mulligan rule in one sentence.