What a dilly of a pickle! – NOW WITH POLL

I was playing my Savra deck last night and had a bit of a realisation moment; I’m a bad deckbuilder. OK, I may be overstating things a little there, but let me elaborate. I had the following opening hand:

Verdant Catacombs, Crypt of Agadeem, Svogthos, Stinkweed Imp, and some other stuff. Play and crack Verdant Catacombs (getting Overgrown Tomb). My second turn draw; Life from the Loam. “Man I’m good at this game” I think to myself as I cast it and get the Catacombs back, drawing a Swamp for turn 3. I cast Stinkweed Imp, thinking there’s nothing wrong with a bit of early defence… then the Nicol Bolas player to my right plays Consuming Vapors… and then Bojuka Bog’s me. Brutal, but effective. SO effective, in fact that I pretty much do nothing for the next 5 or 6 turns. This is when I come to the realisation I alluded to above. Bogging a graveyard which contained only a Life from the Loam and a Stinkwed Imp should not have stopped me in my tracks, but it surely did. I came to the following conclusions:

1. My decks all love doing stuff
2. I tend to put in cards that “do stuff” ahead of cards that “do nothing” (I’ll define that term later on)
3. If someone manages to stop me doing stuff, I’m back to doing nothing
4. (not really relevant to this particular game, but) I need to put 1 or 2 (or 5) more lands into all my decks
5. In order for point 4 to not result in me going “land, go” in the later game, I need to put more card draw into all my decks
6. More lands + more card draw = less stuff!!! But see point 1!

Hence my dilly of a pickle (of a jam). As far as I’m concerned, spells that say “draw X cards” are do nothing cards. In Savra, I have things like Skullmuncher, Skulltap, Culling Dais and Carnage Altar, which are all pretty good card draw, if you have creatures. Which I didn’t.

Thing is, my decks are already 35-40 lands, plus some “do nothing” cards. If I were to put in the lands I probably need, plus the draw/selection spells to get me past all my new lands, they’ll be about 50% do nothing… which means half the game (to my thinking) will be wasted!

What do you think, gentle reader? Should I bite the bullet and make my decks better, at the expense of doing less stuff? Or should I leave them as is, and just realise every now and then that I’ll get stuck like I did with Savra?

Very keen to hear all y’all’s opinions on this 🙂

Edit: Now with super-poll action!