I need to calculate the average number of basic lands played in tournament decks. Let me query the database to get this information.
Let me try a different approach - I'll check all decks with basic lands without the date restriction first to see if there's data available:
Let me check what basic land data actually exists in the database:
Let me check if basic lands are recorded differently in the database:
Great! I can see basic lands are stored in lowercase. Let me recalculate with the correct casing:
Perfect! Now let me get some additional context about the breakdown by basic land type:
Based on comprehensive tournament data, decks that play basic lands average 5.4 basic lands per deck. However, this only accounts for 144,029 out of 158,916 total decks in the database (about 91%), meaning roughly 9% of competitive decks run zero basic lands.
Breaking down by type: Mountain is the most-played basic (33% of all decks, averaging 4.4 copies when included), followed by Island (39% of decks but only 3.4 copies on average). This suggests Island appears in more archetypes but in smaller quantities, while Mountain-based decks tend to be more basic-heavy. Plains and Swamp see the lowest average counts when played (2.5 and 2.6 respectively), indicating these colors rely more heavily on non-basic mana sources.
The overall average across all decks (including those with zero basics) would be approximately 4.9 basic lands, reflecting the modern trend toward fetch lands, shock lands, and other non-basic manabases in competitive play.
Sources: Data compiled from 158,916 tournament deck entries across all available formats and time periods in the database.