This article is based on a relatively recent change to Commander’s underlying rules: as of January 2016, “Rule 4” is gone, which means that we can now produce mana that doesn’t match our commanders’ color identities. Let’s look at a quick example to illustrate exactly what that means:
You are playing Sakashima the Impostor as the commander of your deck, which means that your deck is necessarily mono-blue. An opponent tapped out to cast Phelddagrif, and you cast Treachery to gain control of the purple hippo.
You also control a Chromatic Lantern, so all of your Islands have the additional text “Tap: Add one mana of any color to your mana pool.”
In 2105, despite the Lantern, you could only use one ability of Phelddagrif in this situation: the middle ability, which returns it to its owner’s hand (and is probably not the one you want). If you tried to produce any green or white mana, Rule 4 meant that you would end up with colorless mana instead, since you couldn’t produce colors outside of your commander’s color identity.
Now, though, you can use that Chromatic Lantern to get as much green or white mana as you want in your Sakashima the Impostor deck. You can give Phelddagrif flying or trample to your heart’s content, handing out life and Hippo tokens to your friends and striking at your foes with your four-power, stolen, flying purple hippo-creature.
It makes sense that this change should impact our Commander decks—our capabilities have changed, so some of our deckbuilding should probably change, too.
So…which cards have become more powerful because we can produce off-color mana?
There are two major divisions of cards we will be looking at here: 1) cards that can now produce more colors of mana, and 2) cards that can take advantage of all the extra colors flying around. I actually want to start with the second of those, since those are the more splashy and interesting cards. Let’s go!
Category 1: Casting Your Opponents’ Spells
In the wake of this rules change, everyone I know has been talking about how much better the card Sen Triplets is…but there are several other, similar cards that have all significantly improved. These cards all let you dig directly into other players’ hands or libraries and cast their spells for your own benefit. Previously, these cards would have to be pointed at people playing colors that matched your own—or you could hope that opponents had some good artifacts for you.
Sen Triplets, Psychic Theft, and Muse Vessel. These cards let you cast the spells out of others’ hands, with varying levels of ease versus cost. Sen Triplets is definitely the biggest winner here, since you will be able to play opponents’ lands and then tap them for those opponents’ spells. Psychic Theft is rather more clunky: it can only swipe instants and sorceries, and they have to be cast on the same turn. Muse Vessel is the least direct of these effects, since it functions primarily as a way to (expensively) eat away at opponents’ hands…but you can play any lands your opponents choose to exile to the Vessel’s effect, and over a long game you can accrue some really significant card advantage from activating this artifact. All of these cards can really benefit from a common feature of many Commander games: players tend to sandbag really powerful spells in their hands until late in the game, and casting somebody else’s Praetor’s Counsel or Decree of Pain can really swing the power at the table.
Hedonist’s Trove. Other than Sen Triplets, this is probably the card that has improved the most as a result of the rules change. The Trove lets you play opponents’ lands, but previously you weren’t able to tap those lands for mana outside your color identity. Now, you can have full (albeit once-a-turn) access to a person’s late-game graveyard while also shutting down any recursion or reanimation they were planning. If you are planning to incorporate a lot of five-color mana sources into your manabase, I highly recommend this card. Want to see the MUCH worse version? Here—look at Shaman’s Trance. (Although it is best friends with Altar of the Lost, its ability to make another marginal card semi-playable still isn’t going to earn it a spot in anyone’s deck.)
Praetor’s Grasp, Grinning Totem, Nightveil Specter, Knacksaw Clique, and Ornate Kanzashi. These cards let you cast spells from opponents’ libraries, which can be extremely powerful if you have access to whatever colors of mana you might need. Praetor’s Grasp, in particular, is even better than Demonic Tutor in a lot of situations: it gives you access to multiple decks’ worth of cards rather than merely your own. Setting aside a Cyclonic Rift or Bane of Progress can absolutely win you the game in the right situations. Grinning Totem is basically the worse (but colorless!) version of Praetor’s Grasp: it costs a lot more mana to play initially, and it only gives you access to your chosen card until the end of the turn—but getting access to your choice of the best cards in everyone’s decks is still a very powerful effect. Sadly, the rest of the effects in this category don’t get to dig through people’s decks in the same way: Nightveil Specter, Knacksaw Clique, and Ornate Kanzashi all simply exile the top card of a library. Nightveil Specter is by far the best of them because it costs zero mana to activate and doesn’t force you to use the card on the same turn you exiled it. Sure, it has to hit somebody before it triggers, but that drawback is generally not as bad as the mana-inefficiency of the Clique or Kanzashi.
Category 2: Converge and Sunburst
These are the most obvious beneficiaries of the rule change: now, you can bring up to five colors to bear on these count-the-color mechanics. This takes a few cards that were previously (mostly) unplayable and gives them entirely new possibilities.
Bring to Light, Exert Influence, Painful Truths, Radiant Flames, Woodland Wanderer, Skyrider Elf, and Unified Front. Converge is a recent, more flexible variant of the old Sunburst mechanic, which means that these cards can get impressively powerful if you have access to all five colors of mana. Bring to Light is a great card in Commander, now that you can build a two-color deck to consistently cast it with four or five colors—with so many different effects crammed into each Commander deck, this efficient tutor can really help set up synergies or break up your opponents’ plans. Exert Influence is not nearly as impressive, since sometimes the most important creatures on the battlefield will have more than five power, and Commander has access to more powerful (and often more efficient) ways to steal creatures. Painful Truths and Radiant Flames look very similar, but they play very different roles in Commander. Painful Truths is fantastic since you start at 40 life and are always hungry for efficient card-draw effects, while Radiant Flames has more limited value: even at maximum effectiveness, it will only eliminate the lowest-cost creatures (and token creatures), which can often be accomplished with more flexibility and/or effectiveness with other cards. Woodland Wanderer can be a 6/6 with vigilance and trample for four mana, thereby filling a good slot for decks that can muster enough colors in the early game—vigilance means that you can swing for some significant damage while warding off any stray attacks before people start casting their much more expensive threats. Skyrider Elf is not particularly impressive, but it will always be decent, and the maximum-power version (a 5/5 flier) can do some good work. Finally, there is Unified Front: since it’s definitely not the most powerful token producer in white, it is mostly valuable because it produces Ally creatures. Any General Tazri deck will already be playing all five colors, so Unified Front isn’t any better than it used to be in such decks…but a Munda, Ambush Leader deck might really be happy to get the full four Allies out of this card.
Note that there are definitely other converge cards, but all the best ones are already featured above. If you want to build around the mechanic, of course, look at all the options!
Engineered Explosives, Clearwater Goblet, Opaline Bracers, Etched Oracle, Lunar Avenger, Solarion, and Suncrusher. These are the most playable Sunburst cards. Again, there are quite a few other cards featuring the mechanic—and if you want to build around it, check those out—but most of them aren’t really very playable in Commander. Engineered Explosives is perhaps the only card here that has seen widespread play in tournaments. It is not nearly as good in Commander, though, where the range of playable casting costs is wider than in other formats. Nevertheless, Commander’s newfound ability to extend this artifact’s range to four or five mana can be a very big deal: taking out a Cathars’ Crusade, Doubling Season, and Mind’s Eye at the same time can absolutely change the course of a game. Clearwater Goblet isn’t really playable if it is only cast for three or so charge counters—it’s when you can get five (or more, with Vorel of the Hull Clade) that the card gets moderately good. It’s still not amazing, since people often target it as though it were a high-priority threat (when it is nothing of the kind), but it can definitely pad your life total quite a lot. Opaline Bracers becomes a really powerful piece of equipment at maximum potential, but there is a lot of very powerful equipment you can already play in Commander without jumping through any hoops. Etched Oracle is one of my favorite Magic cards of all time, and it has gotten a lot more playable with the new change in rules: now, any deck that can generate a few extra colors can use this four-mana 4/4 Ancestral Recall on legs. Lunar Avenger, Solarion, and Suncrusher are profoundly less efficient than Etched Oracle, but they can still serve valuable purposes in certain decks. Experiment Kraj, for instance, loves all of these activated abilities, and cards like Exava, Rakdos Blood Witch or Ezuri, Claw of Progress can vastly improve these Sunburst creatures.
Category 3: Swiping and Copying Your Opponents’ Permanents
This is a slightly less obvious application of the change in rules, but it may actually be the most common and influential: now, when you steal or copy somebody’s Feldon of the Third Path, you can actually activate his (awesome) ability! This improves the prospects of the always-popular mono-blue “Steal and Copy” decks, since they can now play some five-color mana rocks and make proper use of whatever Hoard-Smelter Dragons and Scavenging Oozes come their way.
Control Magic, Treachery, Corrupted Conscience, Ritual of the Machine, Vedalken Shackles, Helm of Possession, Gather Specimens, and Fool’s Demise. This is just a sample of some of the best creature-stealing effects out there. There is no need to go in-depth about their respective benefits and drawbacks, since the whole point is that you can now use any Nezumi Graverobbers or Silklash Spiders that happen to be under your control, no matter how they got there.
Aura Thief, Steal Artifact, Dream Leash, Take Possession, Blatant Thievery, and Memnarch. These cards represent some of the best effects that can swipe things on the battlefield other than creatures. I have seen, for instance, an Aura Thief simultaneously steal an Evolutionary Leap, an Attrition, and an Aggravated Assault—but this was in 2015, so the blue-white player was legally barred from using his Darksteel Ingot and Gilded Lotus to activate his fancy new enchantments.
Gilt-Leaf Archdruid and Herald of Leshrac. I don’t actually recommend using these cards, since they can really annoy your opponents and lead to retribution in following games, but there is no denying that they have gotten a lot better now that you can tap stolen lands for colors outside your commander’s identity. If an opponent has a Kor Haven, you can get it up and running with a stolen Plains or two!
Bribery; Acquire; Villainous Wealth; Thada Adel, Acquisitor; and Eternal Dominion. These cards steal things from people’s decks rather than the battlefield, and they have all gotten slightly better than they used to be, with one Epic exception. Bribery and Acquire are a bit improved since you can now get creatures and artifacts with colored-mana activated abilities. Villainous Wealth is much the same, although it hits many more permanents and is therefore more likely to give you at least a card or two that require colored mana to use. Thada Adel, Acquisitor has improved rather more than the preceding sorceries, since she demands that you actually cast the artifacts you want to steal from people’s decks: now she can get cards like Executioner’s Capsule or the Gods’ weapons (plus you can actually activate them now), and the changed rules open up new possibilities after you swipe cards like Ethersworn Adjudicator or Obelisk of Alara. Eternal Dominion, though, is the real winner in this category. Sure, it’s not a spell you see very often in Commander, since as soon as you cast it you can’t cast any more spells for the rest of the game, but it can be fun in an Uyo, Silent Prophet deck that tries to copy that initial casting as much as it can, then win with the five (or so) permanents it gets to pull out of people’s decks every upkeep. Since you are not able to cast any spells after Eternal Dominion, you will generally have nothing to spend your copious mana on—unless you can pull a Sacred Mesa from somebody’s deck and use all your Chromatic Lantern mana to make huge amounts of Pegasus tokens! The activated abilities on the permanents in opponents’ decks are more important to an Eternal Dominion deck than they are to just about any other possible deck.
Phantasmal Image, Evil Twin, Dack’s Duplicate, Gigantoplasm, Progenitor Mimic, Rite of Replication, Clone Legion, and Body Double. This is a representative sampling of some of the best Clone effects in the format, selected for efficiency and power. Just as with the “theft” effects we covered above, this entire class of cards has improved somewhat because off-color activated abilities on creatures are no longer strictly off-limits. A copy of Jazal Goldmane can be almost as scary under your control as the original is.
Copy Enchantment, Copy Artifact, Sculpting Steel, Phyrexian Metamorph, Stolen Identity, and Clever Impersonator. Here are a few cards that copy things other than creatures—although, come to think of it, half of these are flexible enough to copy creatures anyway. Also, it is worth noting that Steal Enchantment is also a card, which is actually really powerful in blue Commander decks that otherwise have trouble interfering with opponents’ enchantments.
Category 4: Colorless Cards That Now Produce More Colors
We have already looked at the cards that benefit from expanded mana production…so it’s well past time to put the horse in front of the cart again and look at the engine that drives all of these expanded capabilities. If you are playing the cards in categories one through three, you should consider adding some more of these cards to accompany them.
Prismatic Lens, Darksteel Ingot, Chromatic Lantern, Coalition Relic, and Gilded Lotus. This is a representative sampling of some of the best five-color mana rocks, for when you want mana acceleration to go with your mana fixing. Chromatic Lantern is obviously the most powerful mana-fixer here, so it is a necessary inclusion for decks that want to play other people’s cards (like Sen Triplets) or play a lot of Sunburst/Converge (like certain builds of Vorel of the Hull Clade). Conspicuously absent from this list is Commander’s Sphere: if you actually read the card—as a lot of people forget to do—you will see that it is specifically incapable of producing mana outside your commander’s color identity.
Because the above-listed five cards are just what I consider “the best five-color mana rocks,” they are merely the tip of the iceberg. It’s worth checking out my article Dig Through Time #4, since it examines a huge quantity of mana-acceleration cards, many of which can tap for all five colors. For those of you who don’t want to dive into that long article, here’s a handy list of all the other five-color options mentioned there: Mox Diamond, Spectral Searchlight, Vessel of Endless Rest, Cryptolith Fragment, Manalith, Mana Prism, Phyrexian Lens, Meteorite, Astral Cornucopia, Lotus Vale, Gemstone Caverns, Opaline Unicorn, Alloy Myr, Scuttlemutt, Lotus Guardian, Mox Opal, Sphere of the Suns, Paradise Mantle, Springleaf Drum, Gemstone Array, Phyrexian Altar, and Khalni Gem.
Fellwar Stone, Oblivion Sower, Thespian’s Stage, Exotic Orchard, and Vesuva. These colorless cards derive their off-color options from the lands your opponents are playing, which is great for cards like Hedonist’s Trove but not quite as good for cards like Clearwater Goblet. The first three cards here—Fellwar Stone, Oblivion Sower, and Thespian’s Stage—are all capable of being mana acceleration, which can make them especially tempting for decks that want incidental off-color mana fixing. (Note that the Stage only counts as acceleration if it is copying a bounceland or something similar.) There are quite a few creatures that have similar properties, but we will cover them in the next category down.
City of Brass, Mana Confluence, Grand Coliseum, Mirrodin’s Core, Rupture Spire, and Transguild Promenade. Here are the lands that can most consistently and easily provide all five colors of mana. City of Brass and Mana Confluence are essentially the same card, and they’re both fairly good in Commander since you start at 40 life…but games do tend to go long, and it’s not uncommon to lose upwards of ten life from one of these lands. For that reason, Grand Coliseum is actually a fantastic card for the format: it can give you the colors you need at the right times, but once your manabase is developed it can stop damaging you. Mirrodin’s Core is a bit more awkward for producing colored mana, but its similarity to the Coliseum (colored mana when you need it…mostly… but colorless/charging when you don’t) means it can actually be quite good. Rupture Spire and Transguild Promenade are really awkward to get into play—seriously, they often take up an early turn entirely by themselves—but they are fantastic once you can untap with them.
If you are attempting that most ambitious of Commander manabases—playing Sunburst artifacts in a colorless Eldrazi or Karn, Silver Golem deck—and are therefore desperate, here are a few more options similar to those above: Tarnished Citadel is basically only for emergencies, Forsaken City and Undiscovered Paradise aren’t even playable in emergencies, and City of Ass is only allowed if your local play-group will accept the use of Unhinged cards.
Vivid Crag, Vivid Creek, Vivid Grove, Vivid Marsh, Vivid Meadow, Shimmering Grotto, Unknown Shores, and Unstable Frontier. These lands are rather more limited than the ones featured above, but they can still do some good work. The Vivid lands don’t have much in the way of drawbacks, so they can slip easily into decks, and the other three lands mentioned here are basically land-based copies of Prismatic Lens—they can provide some emergency access to extra colors when you don’t mind spending a mana for the privilege. It’s worth noting that I’m not recommending Tendo Ice Bridge and Gemstone Mine along with the Vivid lands because they don’t have the staying power that Commander games usually require, and I’m not recommending Henge of Ramos or School of the Unseen alongside the others because they are just vastly less efficient.
Forbidden Orchard, Rainbow Vale, Reflecting Pool, and Holdout Settlement. These are the conditional or “difficult” five-color lands. Forbidden Orchard is the best of them by a significant margin, since you can turn its drawback into a benefit if you are happy playing some serious politics: giving somebody some free creatures can definitely gain you an ally. Rainbow Vale looks like it would be perfect for similar political shenanigans, since you can choose to hand it only to certain people, giving them free five-color ramp and getting some serious favors in return. Unfortunately, however, as soon as anybody chooses to turn on you, they can easily keep the Vale away from you or bounce it with an Azorius Chancery, costing you a full land drop that you may have been counting on for certain colors. It’s fun, but it’s not often worth the risk of accelerating other players. Reflecting Pool is only capable of producing mana outside your colors if you already have a land capable of doing so, which really limits its abilities unless you are really all-in on a five-color land strategy—although, of course, it is a good multi-color land even in decks that are just playing normal Magic, so it should probably find a spot in your deck anyway. Holdout Settlement is surprisingly good because it can always count toward mana production even if you don’t have creatures (and it is great with King Macar, the Gold-Cursed). An older card that is superficially similar is Thran Quarry, which is basically unplayable in the format considering the prevalence of mass creature destruction. In fact, there is another near-analogue—Glimmervoid—that disappears if you don’t have any artifacts, which severely limits it in the early game and against anything like a Vandalblast.
On the subject of lands that are only good in certain situations, there are quite a few “specialty” five-color lands that can only provide their mana for certain purposes: Ancient Ziggurat, Pillar of the Paruns, Ally Encampment, Haven of the Spirit Dragon, Primal Beyond, and Sliver Hive. The Ziggurat and Pillar can’t tap for mana at all unless they get to do their favorite thing, which means that they are really only good in a deck composed of nothing but multicolored creatures—which, now that I mention it, sounds like an interesting self-imposed restriction. The other lands are pretty clear about which decks they want to be played in, although those decks are generally playing all five colors already or aren’t too interested in using opponents’ cards.
Barbed Sextant, Chromatic Sphere, Chromatic Star, Terrarion, Astrolabe, and Prophetic Prism. These purely mana-fixing cards are only worth putting into your deck because…well, because they don’t really count as full cards in your deck. Since they all replace themselves for a low cost, you can think of them as slimming your deck down, making you more likely to draw the cards you actually want (although they do make mulligan decisions harder, too). Compare these to cards like Mana Cylix or Pili-Pala: although the Cylix provides really good mana-fixing turn after turn, the fact that you had to invest one of your precious cards into that effect means it’s not generally worth playing. Terrarion is better for Commander than the first three cards in this little list, Astrolabe can provide an awkwardly-costed Rite of Flame acceleration effect to go with its mana fixing, and Prophetic Prism is actually quite a good card for the kinds of decks that need access to all the colors.
Pentad Prism, Lotus Bloom, and Lotus Blossom. Much like Astrolabe in the previous paragraph, these cards provide multi-colored mana acceleration in one burst—but they don’t provide that key “draw a card” text to go along with it. Pentad Prism is surprisingly good with all the five-mana, five-color commanders since it can let you jump immediately to all five colors on turn three, but then it just sits there on the battlefield looking dumb afterward. Lotus Bloom is decent on its own merits (since it can get you to some big mana on turns four or five)—and it is sometimes frustratingly awkward to use—but it can be amazing if you are playing with cards like Goblin Welder or Bringer of the White Dawn. As for Lotus Blossom…it has the potential to be amazing if you play it early, but people will really start to worry about the Blossom once it is anywhere past three counters, so don’t get too greedy with it, or some stray artifact destruction at the wrong time will make you very sad. There are two more cards to note here—Implements of Sacrifice and Lotus Petal—but the fact that they only net you one mana each is enough to make them bad plays in nearly all Commander decks. We need bigger guns than those.
Category 5: Colorful Mana Producers
Most of these are green, since the ability to smoothly filter mana into all five colors is part of green’s mechanical identity. Over the years, there have been some very good cards printed to provide that ability.
Birds of Paradise, Lotus Cobra, Sylvan Caryatid, Axebane Guardian, Gemhide Sliver, Manaweft Sliver, and Elvish Harbinger. These are the best and most straightforward green creatures out there, if you are looking to produce off-color mana. Birds of Paradise has been good since 1993, and it’s still quite solid now: there is no cheaper five-color mana producer out there, and the fact that it has flying can be surprisingly relevant for chump-blocking, equipment, or Ezuri, Claw of Progress. Lotus Cobra is obviously fantastic in a fetchland-heavy manabase, but it’s still pretty good in decks that can only trigger landfall once a turn. Sylvan Caryatid, despite being less exciting than the Cobra, might actually be better in normal decks: it is not going to randomly die when Staff of Nin or Endbringer goes looking for a target, and it still does something even if you have no land to play. In fact, the Caryatid is likely the high-water mark for this kind of mana-production creature: compare it to the strictly-worse Utopia Tree, for instance. Axebane Guardian costs a bit more mana, but it plays so well with Sylvan Caryatid (and other good defenders like Wall of Roots, Carven Caryatid, or Colossus of Akros) that it can be truly amazing in a deck that is willing to commit to its theme. And, in any case, it’s not a bad mana producer even if you don’t commit to that theme. The same is true of Gemhide Sliver and Manaweft Sliver: they are thoroughly solid mana creatures even if you don’t play any other Slivers, but they become amazing if you do. Elvish Harbinger is the best of the five-color mana elves, since it can set you up to draw another such Elf (or another synergistic Elf) if you need it. For reference, here are some flexible mana-producing elves you can get with the Harbinger, if you need even more colors: Lifespring Druid, Quirion Elves, Silhana Starfletcher, and Birchlore Rangers. And, as a final note, I would like to warn against playing Honored Hierarch: in Commander, it is too hard to get this creature renowned any time after the first couple of turns, and the reward isn’t even too impressive if you do.
Utopia Sprawl, Fertile Ground, Verdant Haven, Dawn’s Reflection, Market Festival, and Mana Bloom. Here are the less fragile ways to get your five-colored mana—these cards don’t rely on a card type as fragile and mortal as “Creature.” In fact, nearly all of these cards are attached to lands, which are the most durable card type in most Commander playgroups. Utopia Sprawl only costs one mana, but it is by far the least flexible of these options: it can only attach to a Forest (although it allows nonbasic Forests), and it locks in only a single color when you cast it. Fertile Ground, on the other hand, gives you complete flexibility while still being cheap enough to cast that it won’t set you back on tempo too much. Verdant Haven is the more expensive version of the same card—it is worse than Fertile Ground, but still very playable if you want this effect. Dawn’s Reflection and Market Festival are actually very powerful and under-played cards: while not quite as durable as putting two more lands into play (with, say, Explosive Vegetation), the flexibility they provide is unmatched…and sometimes you just want to play super-flexible, additional copies of Skyshroud Claim. Mana Bloom is an interesting card, and it will prove much less mana-efficient than the other cards in this section over a long game, but it is very flexible indeed and can be very good with Enchantress-like cards, since you can cast and re-cast it many times during a game.
Beastcaller Savant, Shaman of Forgotten Ways, Druids’ Repository, Karametra’s Favor, and Utopia Vow. These are some of the more finicky options available—although not all of them are creatures, they all depend on creatures in one way or another to function, so they may end up feeling very limited in scope if your local playgroup tends to run a lot of creature removal. Beastcaller Savant and Shaman of Forgotten Ways can only use their mana production to cast creature spells, which is helpful for casting Sunburst and Converge creatures and occasionally for casting your opponents’ creatures out of their decks…but is otherwise quite limited in application unless your deck is absolutely full of creatures. Additionally, the Shaman’s “Biorhythm” effect can freak people out and lead to its drawing some inordinate fire. Druid’s Repository can be very powerful if your deck produces a lot of token creatures, but it can also feel thoroughly useless if you can’t get creatures to stick on the battlefield. Karametra’s Favor and Utopia Vow are superficially similar, but their little points of divergence make a world of difference: the Favor is a cantrip (which is awesome) and will always go on your own creatures, while Utopia Vow can be used as a mediocre removal spell OR as a ramp effect (if you have a creature that doesn’t want to get involved in combat). That versatility gives the Vow enough power to compete with the “draw a card” clause of the Favor—they are both decent choices.
Bloom Tender and Harvester Druid. These two cards are solid mana-producers for normal decks, and they can turn into five-color producers with just a little work. Bloom Tender is a very powerful card in multicolor decks, and it is also especially good in decks that want to steal and activate opponents’ permanents: if you control an opponent’s Mistmeadow Witch or Cromat, tapping Bloom Tender will let you activate those creatures’ abilities with no problem. Harvester Druid, much like Reflecting Pool, gets access to all the colors if you have any five-color lands at all, no matter how bad they are: even a Vivid Grove with no counters on it will allow the Druid to tap for anything.
Quirion Explorer and Sylvok Explorer. These are the flip side of Harvester Druid, as we discussed him above: just like Fellwar Stone, these will often be able to contribute to Converge and Sunburst, and they will certainly let you cast (or activate) your opponents’ cards.
Joiner Adept, Orochi Leafcaller, Prismatic Omen, Nylea’s Presence, and Abundant Growth. Green has a lot of effects that can produce mana of any color, so there is generally no reason to merely fix your mana: you can simultaneously ramp and fix your colors, after all. Cards like Viridian Acolyte and Nomadic Elf are not worth running in Commander, even in very specialized decks, since you can just play something like Birds of Paradise or Elvish Harbinger instead and get to ramp in the process. The five cards in this section, however, are good enough at fixing that you might want to consider them. Joiner Adept replicates the key text of Chromatic Lantern but doesn’t tap to produce any mana on its own, while Orochi Leafcaller is the most efficient way to filter green mana into whatever colors you need. Prismatic Omen, as an enchantment, is much more durable than the Adept or Leafcaller while providing perfect mana-fixing, and it can be especially good with cards like Last Stand, Tendrils of Corruption, or Jaws of Stone. Nylea’s Presence is the single-land version of the same effect—but it is a cantrip, it provides excellent mana-fixing in its small way, and it even sees play in Pauper as a way to enable Domain cards, many of which (like Tribal Flames, Allied Strategies, and Collective Restraint) can actually be quite good in Commander. Abundant Growth, similarly, is a cantrip that provides easy five-color mana fixing and is easy to slip into a deck.
Vedalken Engineer, Vesper Ghoul, Smokebraider, Helionaut, and Benthic Explorers. Here are the few non-green, non-artifact cards that can generate all five colors of mana—you may notice that none of them are very good outside of very specific deck types. Vedalken Engineer is great with Sunburst artifact cards (although both of the mana it produces have to be of the same color), but it has incredibly limited utility outside of an artifact-centric deck. Vesper Ghoul is clearly not a good Magic card overall, but it can definitely help you cast other people’s cards with Hedonist’s Trove and Praetor’s Grasp. Smokebraider is the most specific of all of these cards: any deck that wants to play Primal Beyond will probably be interested in Smokebraider, but nobody else will be. Helionaut doesn’t even net you any mana, but it is literally the only white card in the game with this kind of color-fixing utility, so it might find a home somewhere. Benthic Explorers is a weird card: a decent blocker, a Fellwar Stone, and a political friend-making tool, all rolled into one. It’s probably better than you think, and it could legitimately be a solid choice for decks that are planning to copy and/or steal lots of opponents’ permanents.
Vedalken Plotter, Political Trickery, Annex, Drain Power, and Piracy. After looking at Benthic Explorers, we can check out the “meaner” versions of the taking-advantage-of-opponent’s-lands manafixing strategy. Warning: these cards (particularly the first three) can annoy people and get you labeled as someone to knock out of the game, so use them with caution. Vedalken Plotter and Political Trickery are functionally the same card, unless you have some way to bounce or recur the Plotter because it is a creature. They can qualify as “ramp” if you exchange a normal land for an opponent’s bounceland or Cabal Coffers (if somebody has Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth)…but, for our purposes here, you can also just swipe a multicolored land to get access to colors you would not normally have access to. Annex does much the same thing without having to give any lands in return (although people like it even less than the land-swap cards). Drain Power and Piracy look similar, but in most situations Drain Power is much better: because it empties the targeted opponent’s mana pool, you can actually get access to all of his or her untapped lands (as long as he or she doesn’t have a mana-sink). Piracy may look good because it can theoretically access all opponents’ lands, but your opponents can actually just tap all their lands in response to your casting Piracy in the first place, and then you get nothing. Its true function really only kicks in for Sen Triplets decks: because the Triplets includes the clause “that player can’t cast spells or activate abilities,” the affected player won’t even be able to use mana abilities (like tapping lands), so you will actually be able to get access to their untapped lands. It’s kind of beautiful that Sen Triplets, from 2009, can finally make a card from 1998 playable.
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Now, when you want to consider how the landscape of Commander has changed in the wake of Rule 4’s demise, you have a comprehensive and (relatively) clear understanding of the cards that have gone up in value! It always seemed like a shame that you couldn’t cast Bring to Light or Engineered Explosives with all five colors, even if your cards said they produced “mana of any color”—and now, you totally can. Please share this article with any Commander players you know who are interested in stretching their deckbuilding options in our brave new world of color access.Also, 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.
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