Dig Through Time #5: Non-Green Colored Mana Ramp

Welcome back to another installment of Dig Through Time! This article is the second part of a series, so you should really also check out the previous installment, “Colorless Mana Ramp,” in which I examined the ramp cards that could go in ANY deck.

As I said in that previous article,

Green is often considered one of the best colors in the Commander format, largely because of its ability to use ramp effects to get a lot of lands into play (and then produce big effects with that mana). This doesn’t make the other colors less playable, of course—they all have great cards and strategies that do things Green can’t—but it does mean that we often approach the format with the expectation of “big mana” in mind. Commander is the format in which we generally expect to cast eight-mana or ten-mana spells at some point.

This article is going to look at the other four colors’ options for ramping their mana, divided into four sections for white, blue, black, and red (along with a small concluding section of multicolored options). Let’s go!

WHITE

Overall, white tends to ramp by putting additional lands into play (or drawing additional lands), which is a plan that is very strong in Commander. Although it has much fewer such options than the color green does, and many of its cards are weaker than their green counterparts, the underlying strength of the strategy can still do a lot of work toward making white’s manabase both powerful and durable. It is also important to note that white’s penchant for putting Plains onto the battlefield can make Extraplanar Lens, Gauntlet of Power, and Caged Sun (as discussed in Dig Through Time #4) especially powerful in mono-white decks.

Category 1: Extra Mana Producers

These cards don’t put extra lands on the battlefield, but they do let you jump directly ahead in mana production for a relatively small cost.

Marble Diamond, Tooth of Ramos, Thunder Totem, and Sunseed Nurturer. Marble Diamond is just about the most straightforward possible ramp effect, and it will therefore often be overshadowed by colorless options with upsides (like Mind Stone or Guardian Idol). Tooth of Ramos is similarly overshadowed by colorless options—although it can be sacrificed to hit a high-water mark of mana production for a turn, sacrificing a mana producer is not generally a good play in Commander. Thunder Totem, on the other hand, is actually quite good in white Commander decks, particularly ones dedicated to Equipment: sometimes you just need a creature to pick up your Sword of Fire and Ice for a turn after somebody sweeps your board, and a flying creature with first strike is perfect for the job. Sunseed Nurturer is part of a three-card cycle from the Naya shard of Alara, but it’s the weakest of the three because gaining two life is not usually a big deal. It’s a shame that Oloro, Ageless Ascetic only has four power, but Karlov of the Ghost Council can easily become 6/6 and begin triggering the Nurturer.

Category 2: Actual Land Ramp

These cards all have the capability to put extra lands into play, although some of them require you to jump through some hoops first.

Weathered Wayfarer, Knight of the White Orchid, Kor Cartographer, and Sun Titan. Weathered Wayfarer may not look like a ramp effect since it merely puts lands into your hand, but it is capable of searching for ANY land, thereby opening up possibilities like Myriad Landscape and Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx that qualify as legitimate ramp. (Also, if you are playing with enough devotion to white to make Nykthos good, you should consider Thalia’s Lancers to fetch it!) People underestimate the Wayfarer all the time, but I believe it should have a home in just about every white Commander deck: after all, in a four-player game, there is only a 25% chance that you will be playing first, so in 75% of games an early-game Wayfarer will be able to fetch the perfect land every turn before you make your land drop. Knight of the White Orchid operates on a similar principle: as long as you didn’t play first, you can play the Knight on your third turn (before making your third land drop), get a free Plains onto the battlefield to go with your 2/2 first-strike creature, and then play your normal land for the turn. That extra Plains not only comes into play untapped (which can set up another two-mana creature that turn) but also can be a nonbasic Plains like a white dual land, white shockland, white battle land, or Mistveil Plains. Kor Cartographer is a fantastic option for decks that want to reuse their creatures’ enters-the-battlefield effects, since it doesn’t have the “catch up” condition that the Wayfarer or Knight do, and it can also search for non-basic Plains. Sun Titan isn’t exactly “straightforward” ramp, but it can put lands from your graveyard directly into play, and you can build your deck to take advantage of that option: just play fetchlands and perhaps a Crucible of Worlds to go along with them, and you will be able to use Sun Titan triggers to develop your manabase when you have nothing better to target.

Category 3: Drawing Extra Plains

These effects don’t qualify as “true” ramp since they don’t actually accelerate you, but they DO help you continue making land drops, and that can be just as valuable as acceleration at various points in a game. Additionally, they can serve as mana-fixing in multicolored decks, since Land Tax can get any type of basic land while the other cards can get nonbasic Plains like the cards discussed above.

Land Tax, Tithe, Gift of Estates, and Oreskos Explorer. As we discussed previously for Weathered Wayfarer and Knight of the White Orchid, the fact that you will generally not be playing first, and will therefore have fewer lands than somebody else as a matter of course, makes all of these cards much more powerful than they would otherwise be. Land Tax is the most efficient of all: a turn-one Tax can rapidly fill up your hand with the basic lands of your choice. Some people, afraid to discard their lands due to hand size, decide to take fewer than the three lands a turn that Land Tax can provide. Really, though, you should take the opportunity to thin basic lands out of your deck, even if you end up having to discard three of them every turn. (And, if you end up discarding many basic lands to any of the cards in this category, a mid-game Planar Birth can be an absolutely HUGE ramp effect.) Tithe, Gift of Estates, and Oreskos Explorer all provide two or more lands’ worth of raw card advantage. Tithe is the best of them, despite only getting two lands at most, since it makes one-land opening hands keepable and can be cast on an opponent’s turn (so that your hand isn’t above seven cards at the end of your own turn). Gift of Estates, if cast in the early turns of a game, will often lead to your having to discard a land or two, but it can be a very welcome boost to your hand in the midgame. Oreskos Explorer is a 2/2 creature along with an effect that scales with the number of players, so it plays well with ways to blink or bounce creatures.

Endless Horizons and Eternal Dragon. These cards, like Kor Cartographer and Sun Titan, provide the luxury of not having to care about who played first, and they also can generate some very powerful effects. Endless Horizons is a strong card: it is capable of stripping your deck of all its Plains (including nonbasic ones) and then giving you an extra card a turn for the foreseeable future. Of course, it is not quite as simple as that, and you can also be cautious if the situation warrants it by exiling only five or so Plains instead. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when casting Endless Horizons: If somebody destroys it within a few turns, are you OK with never drawing another Plains? (The answer, depending on the turn you cast it and on the number of nonbasic lands in your deck, is often “yes.”) Do you need to leave some Plains in your deck for cards like Myriad Landscape or Strata Scythe? Do you have nonbasic Plains you want to leave in the deck to get with fetchlands? Do any of your opponents play Oblivion Sower? That last possibility is scary, but unless Oblivion Sower is rampant in your play group, you should probably be playing Endless Horizions if your deck is at least half white. Eternal Dragon is a very different card, but it is easy to fit into decks by taking up a land slot: its Plainscycling means that, as long as you can get up to two mana, it can become whatever Plains you want (including nonbasics). And then, if you run out of gas later on, it can eventually become a 5/5 flying creature or an extra (very expensive) Plains every turn.

Category 4: Build-Specific Options

These are some of the weirder options available to you, but they can be very strong in precisely the right kind of deck.

Pearl Medallion. This card is usually only good in mono-white decks, and it only becomes better than, say, Marble Diamond if you are planning on casting more than one white card per turn. Since that is harder than it sounds, you shouldn’t be blinded by dreams of Pearl Medallion’s saving you three mana every turn: unless you are actively casting and re-casting certain white spells like Whitemane Lion, Stonecloaker, or Dust Elemental, something like Worn Powerstone will be more consistently powerful for you.

Oath of Lieges. This card sees some play in “hugs” decks that want to give everybody more power and accelerate the game: most of the time, most people are going to get a free basic land out of their deck and onto the battlefield every turn with this card. Only the person with the most lands gets no benefit—and, with people getting free land out of their decks, that role usually shifts around the table fairly rapidly. So…we already know that it is good when you’re abandoning “good” strategy and trying to give everyone more power. What is this card’s optimal use for slightly more selfish decks? If most of your opponents play very few basic lands, then Oath of Lieges can keep feeding you free cards while they have nothing to search for. If most of your opponents use green land-ramp spells (such as Boundless Realms) all the time, then the Oath can let you catch up with very little mana or cardboard invested, although you should be warned that it will still give some free lands to people who have ramped second-hardest. If you’re playing “prison” cards that affect your opponents’ ability to search their libraries (like Aven Mindcensor or Stranglehold), you can completely eliminate the Oath’s benefits to your opponents.

Serra’s Sanctum. This card is pretty obvious about its optimal applications. If you’re building a Heliod, God of the Sun deck, or if you’re building any kind of Enchantress-based deck, Serra’s Sanctum will be a fantastic (if fairly pricey) addition, and you will probably want to play Weathered Wayfarer, Expedition Map, and Thalia’s Lancers to find it.

Ballyrush Banneret, Daru Warchief, and Herald of War. Just as with the Sanctum above, you probably already know if your deck is interested in these effects. For an aggressive Kithkin or Soldier deck, Ballyrush Banneret is a solid addition, while Daru Warchief probably has a place in just about any soldier-based deck. (It is worth noting that Darien, King of Kjeldor is actually a Soldier, so the Warchief helps ramp into him.) If you’re building an Angel tribal deck (or a Human tribal deck to a lesser extent, since Humans tend to be cheaper), then Herald of War is worth trying to find a place for.

BLUE

Blue, the color that has the best ways to draw cards, is supposed to be bad at ramping its mana. If it could draw cards AND cast all of them, all the other colors would be in trouble. Well, guess what: blue can ramp harder than you think, which means that it can give all the other colors some serious trouble, particularly if you stick to things that Blue is historically good at—playing with artifacts or casting instants and sorceries.

Category 1: Relatively Straightforward Ramp

This is a small category, and most of these cards are not as good as the colorless mana-ramp options covered in the previous installment of Dig Through Time, but there are some old and unknown cards here that can fit into certain deck designs.

Sky Diamond, Eye of Ramos, Sea Scryer, and Deranged Assistant. Sky Diamond and Eye of Ramos are both probably not worth playing except in decks that are ridiculously hungry for blue mana (as an Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor deck might be): colorless cards like Thought Vessel and Unstable Obelisk are almost always going to be better. The ability to sacrifice Eye of Ramos to get an extra mana doesn’t really qualify as much of an upside in Commander, where you want to hold on to all your mana production. Sea Scryer is thoroughly unexciting for the format; Deranged Assistant, by contrast, can actually be very useful in graveyard-centric decks that are interested in playing Millikin. That’s not a card that you might expect to have a direct analogue, but Commander has a very deep card pool!

Apprentice Wizard, Dreamscape Artist, and Benthic Explorers. These are the more surprising ramp creatures that most people don’t expect to find in the color blue. Apprentice Wizard is actually fairly strong, since it basically taps for two colorless mana. I mean, it’s not as good as Palladium Myr, but it’s close, and it provides two points of devotion for Thassa or Keranos! Dreamscape Artist taps to transform a card in your hand into a blue Harrow. This ability can be very strong if you have drawn a LOT of cards, perhaps by using a Consecrated Sphinx: when you have too many cards to cast all of them, the ability to repeatedly search for two basic lands can be very much worth pitching unnecessary cards for. Also, the two lands enter the battlefield untapped, so you are only effectively spending one mana for this effect! Benthic Explorers, although it can fix your mana and block some relevant creatures, is just not very exciting. Its best use is often to make an ally by untapping a friend’s land at a crucial juncture.

Teferi, Temporal Archmage; Fatestitcher; and Tidewater Minion. These are the cards that can untap lands or mana rocks, thereby generating some significant amounts of mana. Teferi, Temporal Archmage is a really powerful card, despite the fact that he is expensive to cast and fragile once on the battlefield—there is no denying that untapping four permanents can turn into a huge amount of extra mana, especially if you have anything like Gilded Lotus or Gauntlet of Power in play. Fatestitcher and Tidewater Minion are very similar, although the Minion is a much better blocker: they will both generate at least one mana (but possibly quite a bit more, particularly if you are running a lot of good mana rocks or Soldevi Excavations). These cards are often wise choices for commanders who have powerful tap abilities (like Arcanis the Omnipotent) or a good combination of offensive and defensive abilities (like Dragonlord Ojutai).

Category 2: Cost Reduction

This is where some of the most powerful and effective cards for blue decks can be found, since cost-reduction effects really pay dividends for decks that can draw and cast a lot of spells. If you are using effects like Fact or Fiction or Mystic Confluence to draw cards, or if you are doing interesting shenanigans with Quickling and Equilibrium, these cost-reduction cards can translate into a lot of mana.

Sapphire Medallion, Jace’s Sanctum, and Arcane Melee. Sapphire Medallion is the most straightforward of these options: in a mono-blue deck, it can really accelerate the rate at which you cast all of your non-artifact spells. Jace’s Sanctum and Arcane Melee are similar-looking, but they have some really significant differences. Jace’s Sanctum only affects spells you cast, while Arcane Melee affects everyone’s spells. The extra scry effect attached to Jace’s Sanctum also makes it surprisingly powerful, since scrying away a land can feel a lot like drawing a full card in the kinds of decks that want to play Jace’s Sanctum in the first place. (Also, if you are trying to build a deck that really focuses on cost-reduction effects, Battlefield Thaumaturge may be worth incorporating into your plan.)

Training Grounds. Cost-reduction doesn’t only have to apply to casting spells: sometimes, you just want to dump your mana into using the creatures you already have on the battlefield. Training Grounds is the much more powerful version of Heartstone (and it only affects your own creatures). If you are playing a commander like Ambassador Laquatus; Oona, Queen of the Fae; or Muzzio, Visionary Architect, dropping this one-mana enchantment onto the battlefield can ridiculously turbo-charge your abilities or at least save you a lot of mana.

Stonybrook Banneret, Mistform Warchief, and Warden of Evos Isle. These are much more specific forms of cost reduction, when compared to the others already discussed. Stonybrook Banneret is slightly better than you might think: it is totally feasible to cast multiple Merfolk or Wizards in a turn and therefore get some significant discounts, and it’s worth noting that islandwalk is actually quite good in Commander, particularly if you are using some powerful Equipment. Misform Warchief is not particularly good, but if you plan to play a lot of creatures, it can save you at least one mana a turn (and sometimes rather more, if you are playing some sort of tribal deck). Warden of Evos Isle is pretty obvious in its applications, and probably will only make the cut in theme decks built around commanders like Isperia the Inscrutable and Kangee, Aerie Keeper.

Category 3: Context-Dependent Ramp

These cards really don’t qualify as “ramp” in a vacuum, but they can easily serve that role over the course of a normal Commander game. Some of them may be dependent on your knowing your playgroup well, though!

Mitotic Manipulation. This card may look bad in a singleton format like Commander, but it is some of the best ramp available if you are playing enough basic Islands! In mono-blue decks particularly, this card can be set up to be very likely to hit an untapped Island, thereby making itself a very valuable way to get more land on the battlefield quickly.

Tolaria West, Trinket Mage, Treasure Mage, Fabricate, and Tezzeret the Seeker. These cards can fetch other ramp cards in your deck! Tolaria West, if it doesn’t need to serve as a tapped, blue-producing land in the very early game, can fetch a surprisingly wide range of ramp options: in addition to the many lands featured in Category 3 of Dig Through Time #4 (like Myriad Landscape and Temple of the False God), it can get Mana Crypt, Everflowing Chalice, Astral Cornucopia, or any of various Moxen. Trinket Mage is even better since it can fetch the same nonland cards with the addition of Sol Ring, Wayfarer’s Bauble, and a host of other good options. Treasure Mage isn’t very good in the early game, but its ability to fetch Dreamstone Hedron and (especially) Caged Sun make it worthy of notice here. Fabricate can obviously go get any of the artifact-based ramp options, while Tezzeret the Seeker can not only search for Sol Ring and Mana Vault but also untap both of them during every turn that he stays alive afterward!

Copy Artifact, Phyrexian Metamorph, Clever Impersonator, and Stolen Identity. These copying cards are all quite good in Commander even under normal circumstances, since they can duplicate some of the incredibly powerful permanents that you and your opponents will commit to the battlefield. In most play-groups, too, people will play “mana rocks” like Sol Ring, Thran Dynamo, or even something as weak as one of the Signets, and that is why we can consider these cards to be “ramp” effects. Just like Sculpting Steel, they can copy any mana-producing artifacts in play. Although you may WANT to be copying cards like Akroma’s Memorial or Magmatic Force, the flexibility of these cards means that you can make the less flashy play of copying a Sol Ring in the early game or a Caged Sun in the late game. Copy Artifact is vastly underplayed in the format considering how cheap it is, Phyrexian Metamorph and Clever Impersonator are probably the best of these effects (considering their cost and flexibility), and Stolen Identity can simply get out of control: once you have more than three or more copies of Caged Sun, you probably have just about as much mana as you could ever need.

Thada Adel, Acquisitor and Acquire. If the above cards can share the wealth of your opponents, these ones take power out of those opponents’ decks and put it to use for your benefit. Thada Adel, Acquisitor is actually a fantastic card in the format, since almost everyone plays Sol Ring and many people play Islands, which can help your Merfolk Rogue sneak past their blockers. In the early game, an unopposed Thada can collect a lot of jewelry, which can then help you play more powerful ramp (or other) artifacts from the decks of the blue players at the table. Acquire relies much more on your knowledge of your friends’ decks than Thada Adel does: it’s not really worthwhile to cast this five-mana sorcery just to get a Sol Ring, so you want to have a pretty good sense of who plays Caged Sun or Gilded Lotus. Interestingly, you can judge the rough “level of Magic professionalism” of your friends by their reaction to Thada Adel or Acquire digging around in their decks: some players have no real problem with your putting their artifacts onto the battlefield in this way, since it’s not like you have cost them any card advantage, tempo, or board position. All you have done, after all, is change the composition of their decks very slightly. Other players, however, absolutely HATE having their artifacts pulled from their decks, and they will react as if you stole it directly from their hands or the battlefield. If the people you play with are of this latter type, try to explain how little you have impinged on their game-plans and, if that doesn’t work, perhaps avoid these two cards entirely.

Steal Artifact, Master Thief, Annex, Dream Leash, Confiscate, and Blatant Thievery. THESE are the cards that people can get legitimately annoyed by, especially when you are using them as ramp effects. Here, you are actually taking away somebody’s toys! These cards can all be effective but very (shall we say) “politically sub-optimal” ways of ramping your mana, since one of the surest ways to annoy Commander players is to hurt their mana development. Steal Artifact and Master Thief are relatively weak since they can only take artifacts, thereby requiring you to hope that somebody has played a mana rock (and Master Thief is, even then, a very fragile way to gain a mana rock). Annex can take lands instead, which means that it is much more consistent but is also never going to give you more than one or two mana (unless you are taking Lotus Vale or Scorched Ruins… and making somebody very angry at you in the process). Dream Leash constitutes a good combination of price and flexibility, with the ability to take any tapped land or mana rock (along with, of course, creatures), while Confiscate and Blatant Thievery are the most high-powered versions of this effect. It is important, too, to keep in mind that people will get their permanents back from these effects if you are taken out of the game: even if your friends have no interpersonal problems with your swiping their mana-producing cards, by playing with these “stealing” effects you are building a game-mechanics-driven incentive for people to kill you.

Category 4: Build-Specific Options

Although we have already looked at the majority of blue mana-ramp effects, there are a few different ways to get ahead of the curve for decks that are interested in pursuing very narrow plans.

Etherium Sculptor, Chief Engineer, Vedalken Engineer, Renowned Weaponsmith, Cultivator Drone, and Grand Architect. We all know that blue is good at playing with artifacts—and here is the proof. Some of these cards are ferociously efficient at producing mana as long as you are casting (or activating the abilities of) at least one artifact a turn. Etherium Sculptor is less powerful than the other options here unless you are casting at least two artifacts a turn, but it can be very strong indeed if you are dealing with ways to re-play artifacts, like Skeleton Shard, Crystal Shard, or Cloudstone Curio. It’s also particularly strong if you want to build around Myr Reservoir, which is a fantastic card for a relatively weak tribe. Chief Engineer fulfills a very similar role, but it is particularly strong if you are playing with artifact creatures that produce tokens like Myr Battlesphere, Thopter Assembly, Hangarback Walker, and Sharding Sphinx. Vedalken Engineer and Renowned Weaponsmith, despite their differences, are really similar to each other for our purposes, since the added functionality of the Weaponsmith (fetching Heart-Piercer Bow and Vial of Dragonfire) is not useful in the format because of the weakness of those two cards. If your artifacts need colored mana, then the Engineer is better, but otherwise the 3 toughness of the Weaponsmith gives it the lead. Cultivator Drone, despite having the biggest body of any of these cards, is the most limited in its usefulness: it only taps for one mana, there aren’t very many colorless spells that aren’t artifacts, and relatively few cards in Magic have activation costs specifically requiring colorless mana. If you are building a specifically Eldrazi-heavy deck, then it is a solid addition, but it’s probably a bit underpowered in most other decks. Grand Architect is the more powerful version of the Engineer and Weaponsmith, since its tapping ability effectively operates as though it has haste—and tapping to produce two mana, for any of these three cards, is very powerful indeed. Note, too, that the mana from these cards can be used to pay the activation costs of artifacts like Batterskull and Steel Hellkite, not just to cast them (and, if you want to really max out on this kind of effect, you can also run the “bad” version in Soldevi Machinist).

Curious Homunculus. We have seen a LOT of this kind of effect for artifacts, but sometimes your deck is much more concerned with casting instants and sorceries, and then Curious George is your man. In such a deck, he is really easy to flip into Voracious Reader, his powered-up form, and will provide even more mana while being a 3/4 with Prowess!

Patron of the Moon. This card has a profoundly powerful ability to drop lands from your hand onto the battlefield, but your deck really has to be set up to take advantage of it. Generally, that means having ways to draw a lot of cards (as with Consecrated Sphinx, Recurring Insight, Jin-Gitaxias, and ways to untap Arcanis the Omnipotent) or to return lands to your hand for an effect (as with any of the legal Moonfolk, Flooded Shoreline, and Ovinomancer). Really, when you have four or six lands cluttering up your hand, there is nothing sweeter or more powerful than spending two or three mana and putting all of them directly onto the battlefield.

Iceberg. This almost entirely unknown card is actually very powerful: you can drop it on turn four or five or so, use it to cast a large effect on the following turn, and then—for the rest of the game—have the ability to save up some of the mana you don’t use. It is also very good with cards that let you proliferate counters (like Inexorable Tide), just like its artifact counterpart, Gemstone Array. If you find that you don’t tend to use all your mana every turn, this card might make for a very powerful addition to your deck.

Merfolk Wayfinder and Treasure Hunt. These cards fulfill the same general role that Gift of Estates and similar cards do for white: getting extra lands into your hand in order to keep making land drops in the midgame and late game. Unfortunately, these are both significantly weaker and more conditional than white’s options: you need to be able to manipulate the top of your deck in order to get a worthwhile amount of value from Merfolk Wayfinder and Treasure Hunt. Sensei’s Divining Top is a good way to do that, but you might need to play cards that dig a bit deeper, like Soothsaying, Ancestral Knowledge, or Mystic Speculation. Once you are playing enough cards that can influence the top of your deck, the Wayfinder and Treasure Hunt actually become very strong card-draw options that will enable you to hit the higher reaches of mana production.

BLACK

Black has relatively few cards to ramp its mana, but the legacy of one particular card—Cabal Coffers—has given it a very strong core of cards that care about swamps on the battlefield and can produce huge amounts of mana if you are mono-black or heavily dedicated to black.

Category 1: Relatively Straightforward Ramp

These cards, just as with the options for white and blue, tend not to be as strong as the colorless options detailed in Dig Through Time #4. Still, if you need as many mana rocks as possible that tap for black mana because you’re playing a theme Shade tribal deck, Phrexian Obliterator, or Pestilence effects, then perhaps you will want to expand your search beyond Coldsteel Heart and Chromatic Lantern.

Charcoal Diamond, Skull of Ramos, Vesper Ghoul, and Kozilek’s Translator. The mana rocks here (Charcoal Diamond and Skull of Ramos) are pretty simple, but Vesper Ghoul deserves a little discussion: this is a very strange card, and it will be a very rare deck that wants to play it. If you are interested in tapping for all five colors, you don’t need a black creature to fulfill that need for you: just play the aforementioned Chromatic Lantern or Commander’s Sphere. If it is important to have a creature in play for some reason, though, then Vesper Ghoul can fulfill that purpose. Kozilek’s Translator fulfills the role of “black mana creature” much better, since it has a significant-sized body and doesn’t tap to generate its colorless mana. It is a bit expensive for a mana creature, but it is actually still quite playable.

Category 2: Swamp Doublers

These are the serious-business, heavy-hitting mana acceleration cards for the color black. Unless your black deck is very aggressive and uninterested in the late game, you should probably be playing at least one of these. Because all of these cards care about the number of swamps on the battlefield, it is usually a good idea to play Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth with them—and, if you want to commit to the theme much harder in multicolored decks, you can run the enchantment version in Blanket of Night or the (much worse) temporary version in Nightcreep. (Note, too, that with one of these “everything is a swamp” effects on the battlefield, the cards Filth, Crusading Knight, Karma, and Stern Judge all become very scary indeed.)

Cabal Coffers and Magus of the Coffers. Here is the original card that spawned this entire category, along with its Magus clone. In the late game, these cards can produce huge amounts of mana, but they can be actively bad in the early game, particularly in multicolored decks that don’t have an Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth online yet. You need three swamps plus one of these cards before your Coffers effect counts as a mana producer at all, and that can make them bad draws early on. That’s not really a reason to avoid them—it’s just something to keep in mind, and it’s a good reason to run cards that are capable of tutoring for both cards (the Coffers effect and Urborg) at the same time, like this short list of cards. Cabal Coffers singlehandedly makes Expedition Map a very important card for many black decks.

Crypt Ghast and Nirkana Revenant. These are the more powerful versions of the Coffers effects above: you don’t have to pay two mana before getting an extra mana for each Swamp you control. Crypt Ghast’s lower mana cost and extort ability make it overall better than Nirkana Revenant (which is fortunate, since it also costs much less money): the Ghast, after all, can give you ten mana by turn five and the ability to gain quite a bit of life with your extra mana at a multiplayer table. Nirkana Revenant can build itself up to really significant amounts of power and toughness in the late game, though, so if you have good ways to get creatures through blockers (like the above-mentioned Filth, for instance), it is still a fantastic addition to a black deck.

Category 3: Build-Specific Options

A surprising number of “weird” cards in the color black can generate black mana for you, but they don’t follow many common patterns or strategies. To use these cards optimally, you ideally want to build them into the core plan of your deck.

Priest of Yawgmoth, Soldevi Adnate, and Lake of the Dead. These cards let you sacrifice permanents to get a really significant temporary boost in mana. Priest of Yawgmoth is fantastic in artifact-based decks—think about it in combination with Spine of Ish Sah or Ugin’s Nexus—and Soldevi Adnate can fulfill a similar role if you’re dealing with artifact creatures like Junk Diver (and possibly recurring them with Scarecrone). Of course, Soldevi Adnate can also sacrifice any black creatures at all, so if you are planning on recurring such creatures (with, for instance, Nim Deathmantle or Phyrexian Reclamation), you can generate a huge amount of value with the Adnate. Lake of the Dead doesn’t exactly fit with the other two cards here, but it can similarly sacrifice a card for a large temporary gain. The problem with Lake of the Dead is that Swamps are much harder to bring back from the graveyard than creatures or artifacts, so you can’t use it too frequently without hamstringing your overall mana production. It is also harder to get the Lake into play in the first place—but in certain decks that want to get big, powerful turns with spikes in mana production, this card can still do a lot of work.

Black Market and Carnival of Souls. These cards thrive when people are putting a lot of creatures onto the battlefield, although Black Market is clearly much safer than Carnival of Souls. Interestingly, though, Black Market (once upon a time) was a very dangerous card because of “mana burn”—you would take one damage for each floating mana that you couldn’t use at the end of every phase. Now, though, the card simply produces a huge amount of mana if given a little time to acquire charge counters. It can ramp up very quickly, particularly if you play Wrath of God-style effects or have a way to sacrifice multiple token creatures (like Spawning Pit or a commander like Vish Kal, Blood Arbiter), since the death of any creature, anywhere on the battlefield, gives it a counter. Carnival of Souls, on the other hand, gives you mana when creatures are entering the battlefield rather than dying, which is hard to control because you never know when an opponent will cast Avenger of Zendikar and provide you with thirteen black mana… and make you lose thirteen life. Some people are seduced by the power of Carnival of Souls, since getting a free mana for each creature is really significant, but it WILL kill you. Unless you are running a huge amount of lifegain, the card is too risky to be worth it: a big Living Death can make you lose sixty life out of absolutely nowhere.

Jet Medallion, Heartless Summoning, Frogtosser Banneret, and Undead Warchief. These cost-reducing effects, as in all the other colors, are much better if you are casting a lot of spells or returning cards to your hand to cast again and again. Jet Medallion is pretty straightforward, and it’s great if you’re using buyback (as with Corpse Dance and Disturbed Burial), returning creatures to your hand (as with Grim Harvest and Soul of Innistrad), or just doing shenanigans with Endless Cockroaches. Heartless Summoning, however, is the kind of efficient card that you can build a whole deck around. For obvious reasons, it tends to be bad with token creatures, but if you are casting expensive creatures with powerful effects (like Rune-Scarred Demon and Baleful Force) or a lot of midrange creatures with enters-the-battlefield effects (like Shriekmaw or Gray Merchant of Asphodel), the -1/-1 to all your creatures won’t matter at all, and you will get to spend a LOT less mana. (Note, too, that there is a terrible, funhouse-mirror version of Heartless Summoning that reduces the cost of noncreature spells but requires you to sacrifice creatures: Blood Funnel). The last two cards here—Frogtosser Banneret and Undead Warchief—are pretty obvious about the sort of decks they should be played in. Aggressive red/black Goblin decks (piloted by Wort, Boggart Auntie; Grenzo, Dungeon Warden; or Shattergang Brothers) can find a home for the Banneret, while just about any Zombie-themed deck will be happy with the huge power boost and mana discount that the Warchief brings to the battlefield.

Altar of Shadows and Herald of Leshrac. These are grouped together because they both cost far more than most people are willing to pay for mana ramp effects. Altar of Shadows’ mana-ramp feature is basically an afterthought, following its primary and VERY expensive creature-destruction effect (and/or manipulation of charge counters, through proliferate or other effects). Herald of Leshrac takes a similarly long time to get rolling, but once you start stealing three or more lands every turn from your opponents (and attacking with an enormous flying creature), it is not very hard to win. The Herald will definitely draw some ill will from your opponents, but at least he is courteous enough to try to win the game fairly quickly.

Waste Not. This card counts as “ramp” only in a very loose sense, but if you are building a deck that wants to make opponents discard cards (and then probably draw new cards to discard again), it is hard to ignore the value that Waste Not represents.

Liliana of the Dark Realms. Like a (much) weaker version of Land Tax, this version of Liliana is perfectly happy just using her +1 loyalty ability to add Swamps to your hand. It is incredibly difficult to ever get her to her ultimate ability—which, in a mono-black deck at least, should give you all the mana you could ever need—but if you can reliably get two or three Swamps from her, she may very well be worth the slot in your deck. It is also worth noting that she can fetch nonbasic Swamps, so she can provide you with some mana-fixing that still works with cards like Cabal Coffers or Crypt Ghast.

Witch Engine. This is an incredibly weird card, but it can provide a huge boost of mana for a turn before you hand it to an opponent. In an optimal setting, it can be used to play politics with another black-mana-hungry player at the table, and as a result you can sometimes even get it back under your own control, passing the Engine back and forth to further your swampy agenda at the expense of the rest of the table. Of course, it may not be wise to trust another black-mana-playing opponent… which is why you can combo this card with Homeward Path, to take trust out of the equation. Alternatively, of course, it can simply serve as a 4/4 creature with swampwalk to combo with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth.

RED

Red has a lot of good things to do with huge amounts of mana, such as the unofficially-named “firebreathing” mechanic and Fireball-style “X-spells,” but it doesn’t really have any of the straightforwardly powerful (and affordable) options for mana ramp that the other colors have.

Category 1: Relatively Straightforward Ramp

By now, we are probably used to the repeated comments that single-color-producing mana rocks are not as good as colorless or five-color options, but the color red might be a slight exception to that standard. Sometimes, as Dragon Tyrant can attest, you really just need a lot of red mana.

Fire Diamond, Heart of Ramos, and Foriysian Totem. These cards all produce red mana, obviously, but with varying upsides to go with that basic functionality. Well, except for Fire Diamond: its only benefit is that it’s cheap. Heart of Ramos can give you an extra red mana when you most need it, although it’s still not an amazing mana rock. Foriysian Totem, however, is actually quite good. A 4/4 creature is big enough to matter in combat, and its trample means that it can actually do quite a bit of damage when attacking, especially when equipped with a Sword of Feast and Famine or something. Its ability to block two creatures can also really matter sometimes, as it can soak up a lot of damage in a chump-blocking situation.

Hardened Berserker, Sisters of the Flame, and Exuberant Firestoker. As usual, creatures are not generally as good at ramping your mana as artifacts would be… but there is one red commander who makes ramp creatures make sense: Purphoros, God of the Forge. With him, any late-game creature damages all of your opponents, every point of devotion is valuable, and small creatures can become large through the application of his global power-pumping ability. Even with that said, though, Hardened Berserker is still hard to make a case for. It’s difficult in Commander to find a safe place to attack with a random 3/2 creature, and the Berserker’s ability only affects the next spell you cast, adding up to quite a weak package. Sisters of the Flame, on the other hand, is great with Purphoros and actually taps for a red mana, which can be relevant in very red-hungry decks. Exuberant Firestoker is obviously only worth playing in decks with large enough creatures, but in those decks it can actually be quite good at whittling down the life totals of the players who are hard to attack with said creatures.

Category 2: Mana Doublers

Doubling your mana was once entirely contained within red’s slice of the color pie, with Mana Flare and Gauntlet of Might from way back in 1993. Sadly, the Gauntlet has become much too expensive for most people to be able to afford, so red’s access to this effect is mostly limited to two enchantments, one simple and one weird but neither ideal.

Mana Flare, Gauntlet of Might, and Chaos Moon. Mana Flare is a really powerful card—which, unfortunately, can be a serious problem, because letting your opponents untap with double their normal mana can really spell trouble for you. The only “responsible” way to use the Flare is to wait until the very late game so that you can spend three mana (preferably from mana rocks) to cast it, then use all of your doubled mana from lands to do something scary immediately (like a big Comet Storm). Gauntlet of Might, on the other hand, is great for mono-red decks whose owners can afford it, as you might expect for a Gauntlet of Power that costs less mana. It affects all red creatures and all Mountains on the battlefield, including your opponents’, though, so it can be nearly as suicidal as Mana Flare when you’re facing other mono-red opponents. Chaos Moon is a very strange card: it checks on EVERY upkeep (including opponents’) for the number of permanents on the battlefield, and either screws mono-red decks or boosts them depending on that number. If you’re playing this card, there are two deckbuilding challenges to face: first, you want to be able to control the number of permanents on the battlefield during your upkeep, since you want to have that Gauntlet of Might effect during your turn, when you can use the doubled mana to cast things (and that bonus power to attack). Second, you want to stay away from small red creatures that will die to the occasional -1/-1 that will pop up during some opponents’ turns. The only real problem with these two challenges is that they conflict with each other: the easiest way to control the number of permanents during your upkeep is to create or sacrifice token creatures, but most red token creatures aren’t happy about the looming possibility of a global -1/-1. One of the very best cards to handle this dilemma is Spawning Pit, since it can both sacrifice and create (non-red) token creatures at instant speed. Chaos Moon can actually be fairly good in two-color red decks, too—you can play with a bunch of green or white tokens to control the permanent count, cast your non-red spells on “bad” turns, and take advantage of the doubled mana from Mountains to cast huge spells on “good” turns. For instance, a Rosheen Meanderer deck could play cards like Hangarback Walker and Verdeloth the Ancient to make tokens, sacrifice them to gain control over Chaos Moon while getting Goblin Bombardment-style benefits, and cast its most powerful “X-spells” while half of its lands (all the Mountains) are charged up by the Moon.

Category 3: Build-Specific Options

Red has a surprisingly large number of cards that can reduce specific costs or produce mana in nonstandard ways.

Ruby Medallion and Grinning Ignus. These cards may not look like they belong in the same category, but I am putting them together anyway because they work well together. Ruby Medallion is good in decks that want to play many cheap spells in a turn, and bouncing and replaying Grinning Ignus is a great way to do exactly that, generating Storm count for Empty the Warrens or putting counters on Animar, Soul of Elements with each iteration. In “normal” red Commander decks, though, Ruby Medallion is occasionally something of a trap: because red can struggle to gain card advantage or refill its hand, including too many cheap spells in your deck (and casting too many of them at once) can leave you out of gas and hoping for a lucky topdeck, which is never a good place to be. Many successful red decks use individually-powerful (and mana-intensive) spells instead, so that a lack of card advantage can be offset by each card’s high impact… but this plan really doesn’t fit with Ruby Medallion. As for Grinning Ignus, many players are somewhat confused by the card, so it’s best to think of its “fair” use (that is, non-Animar, non-combo) as a kind of red Basalt Monolith: you cast him, then (on the following turn) you bounce him back to your hand to get a temporary boost in mana that can be reset on following turns by some more expenditure of mana.

Mana Geyser. Following on the heels of Grinning Ignus, there are a lot of red “ritual” effects that provide a temporary boost in mana, but none of them are a particularly good idea in Commander, where you generally want longer-lasting resources. Mana Geyser is the exception, since it can provide SO MUCH mana in a format largely defined by multiple players all trying to play a lot of land—it is not uncommon to get upward of 30 red mana by casting this one spell, which is enough power to produce some very long-lasting effects indeed.

Brighthearth Banneret, Dragonlord’s Servant, Dragonspeaker Shaman, Stinkdrinker Daredevil, and Goblin Warchief. These are the “tribal” cost-reduction effects, and for most of them it shouldn’t be hard to determine if they could find a good home in your deck. Brighthearth Banneret is the beneficiary of some very populous creature types: there are over 500 Warriors in the game and over 350 Elementals, so people looking to make tribal decks with the Banneret have a lot of options. The other four cost-reducers here—the Servant, Shaman, Daredevil, and Warchief—are more limited but more powerful, and you don’t need me to tell you if they are good for your decks.

Mana Echoes. This card, in contrast with the other tribal cards above, could use some discussion at greater length: if you produce several token creatures all at once, they will see each other for Mana Echoes’ purposes, thereby generating an absurd amount of mana. Casting something as weak as Goblin Rally, for instance, will produce sixteen colorless mana, even with NO Goblins already on the battlefield—and this card triggers when opponents put creatures onto the battlefield, too, giving you at least one mana each time! This card may look tempting in tribal decks that want access to big mana, therefore, but if your playgroup frowns on infinite combos, you should be aware that this card is somewhat notorious for producing such combos. Something as simple as a Sprout Swarm can produce infinite Saprolings and infinite mana, and even in just a mono-red deck Goblin Warrens and Skirk Prospector can produce infinite mana in combination with Mana Echoes.

Pyromancer’s Goggles. This card is fascinating and really fun. It almost ended up in the category “Relatively Straightforward Ramp” until I realized that this card—as a five-mana Fire Diamond—is terrible unless you are using it to copy spells, and that means that you should build your deck around it (at least a bit) if you’re going to include it at all. The first stop on the “great red spells to copy” tour is Dig Through Time #2: check out all the card-advantage instants and sorceries featured there, and imagine copying them. Remember that you don’t have to pay the costs twice, but you DO get twice the benefit of, say, Tormenting Voice. Copying a Fatal Frenzy, Burn at the Stake, or Overblaze can also be terrifying if you’re looking to hurt someone, while copying a Howl of the Horde post-combat (and then casting just about anything else) can be devastating in a lot of different ways.

Braid of Fire. This card, like Black Market and Mana Echoes, got a lot more powerful when the concept of “mana burn” was removed from the game. Now, if you play this card anywhere near the beginning of the game, it can start producing huge (and risk-free) amounts of mana during every upkeep by the mid- or late game. To harness this power, you need to build a deck that can make use of lots of red mana at instant speed. Commanders like Ashling the Pilgrim; Homura, Human Ascendant; Jiwari, the Earth Aflame; Kumano, Master Yamabushi; Nin, the Pain Artist; Olivia Voldaren; and Purphoros, God of the Forge are all prime candidates for this, and there are countless other options to fit into your deck that could benefit from this stream of mana, like Gemstone Array, Dragon Roost, Dragon Whisperer, Flowstone Overseer, or…well, a LOT of cards.

Soulbright Flamekin. This card…it isn’t particularly good. It CAN turn six colorless mana into eight red mana, though, so it may have a home in a deck somewhere. If you are running a lot of colorless mana acceleration like Thran Dynamo and a lot of dragons with firebreathing (or just Ghitu War Cry / Captive Flame, which, now that I think of it, are also great with Braid of Fire), you MAY really want to convert colorless mana into red mana while giving your creatures trample—and then Soulbright Flamekin could be your card.

MULTICOLOR

Now that we have covered all the non-green colors individually, we can take a quick look at some of those colors in combination. There are not too many of these cards, but a surprisingly large percentage of them reduce mana costs. If you are looking to aggressively cast a lot of spells (to trigger, say, Shu Yun, the Silent Tempest multiple times), you can definitely find a good option here.

Nightscape Familiar, Stormscape Familiar, Sunscape Familiar, and Thunderscape Familiar. This cycle of cost-reducing creatures also has a green entry (Thornscape Familiar), but it’s often not really worth playing if you can just run green mana-ramp effects. Probably the best of these cards is Nightscape Familiar, since it can survive the occasional Planar Cleansing (or huge attacking creature) by virtue of its regeneration ability, which is much better on a small creature in Commander than flying, defender, or first strike. Also, blue and red really appreciate getting a discount on spells, so Nightscape Familiar is in the right colors. All of the others creatures here are on roughly the same level: decent but not very impressive. Perhaps the most notable thing about all of these cards is that they don’t have to be played in three-color decks: a Vela the Night-Clad deck that wants to bounce and replay creatures could run both Nightscape Familiar and Stormscape Familiar to make its spells cheaper.

Grand Arbiter Augustin IV and Rakdos, Lord of Riots. These two legendary creatures are both fairly well-known already as commanders that let you cast your spells more cheaply, but it’s worth noting that they are quite good as part of the other 99% of a deck, too. Grand Arbiter Augustin IV will frustrate your opponents and get targeted for removal, but while he’s on the battlefield he can make expensive cards that draw other cards (like Dragonlord Ojutai; Drogskol Reaver; Ephara, God of the Polis; Isperia, Supreme Judge; and Sphinx’s Revelation) MUCH better, since they are a lot cheaper and so are the cards they help you draw. Rakdos, Lord of Riots is often the commander of decks that play huge artifact creatures, but he is actually just a really good creature in any decks that play a lot of creatures and can consistently get some damage through to opponents. Often, after a swing from Rakdos, all you have to pay for your creatures will be their colored costs, as the big Demon wipes away their colorless costs entirely.

Herald of Kozilek. This card combines a significant size (for blocking, at least) with a surprisingly powerful cost-reduction effect. Although there are quite a few Commander-playable Eldrazi colorless creatures, that role sadly limits the Herald to Eldrazi-themed decks—fortunately, there are MANY great artifacts in the format. In any really artifact-heavy deck, you might be surprised by how much mana the Herald will save you over several turns while holding off mid-sized ground creatures.

Goblin Electromancer and Mizzix of the Izmagnus. The Izzet guild really knows how to run electricity through Goblins to great effect. These are the sorts of cards that are fairly obvious while you’re building a deck: if you’re planning on playing multiple instants or sorceries a turn in these colors, these will be great for you. Particularly once you get a few experience counters, Mizzix of the Izmagnus can make buyback cards like Whispers of the Muse or Capsize into really unfair pieces of cardboard. Of course, if you are curious about some good cards to keep Mizzix on the battlefield, check out Dig Through Time #1.

Ral Zarek and Unbender Tine. These cards can serve as legitimate ramp effects by untapping your lands and/or mana rocks, much like Teferi, Temporal Archmage or Tidewater Minion. Ral Zarek is definitely not the best planeswalker in existence, but he can untap mana sources for you while tapping people’s blockers, which is enough to make him a definite consideration for certain kinds of Izzet decks. Unbender Tine looks really straightforward, but (just like Ral Zarek) it has complicated applications: it can untap opponents’ cards to play politics, it can turn a tapped creature into a blocker, it can let you re-use any abilities (on creatures, lands, artifacts, etc.) that require tapping, etc. This card looks weak until you start playing with it and see its possibilities.

Gem of Becoming. This card isn’t really worth playing if you can only get two of the three land types it offers, so it only fits in Grixis (blue/black/red) decks or in five-color decks. In those decks, though, this card is surprisingly strong, not only because of the raw volume of card advantage it represents but also because it can get nonbasic lands. If you are playing with shocklands, battle lands, or original dual lands, Gem of Becoming can probably alleviate any problems with color balance you might have for the rest of the game. Also, you can get it onto the battlefield on turn three, when you might have nothing better to do, then sacrifice it for lands in the midgame when you need more land drops and won’t have to discard as a result of getting three more cards in hand.

And, now that we have reached the very end of this article, it’s probably wise to remind people of the Signets, the Talismans, the Obelisks, the Cluestones, the Banners, the Keyrunes, and the Dragon Monuments. None of them are particularly good (with the possible exception of the Signets), but they can definitely help you fix your mana. Here’s one of each, to serve as a visual reminder:

* * *

Well, thanks for going through four of the five colors in Magic with me! I highly recommend using this article and its companion piece, Dig Through Time #4, as resources to consult whenever you build (or rebuild) a Commander deck. Share these articles and ideas with your friends, too—if we can all get up to twelve or fifteen mana in Commander games, we can all do more of the awesome and ridiculous stuff that makes the format such a good way to generate stories!

Now, please head to the comments and give me some requests for future Dig Through Time articles! We all know how hard and how satisfying deckbuilding in the Commander format can be, and there are often cards out there, lost in the mists of time, that are exactly what you’re looking for to make your deck run like clockwork.