Ramp is super important in Commander, getting extra mana to play your spells earlier then usual really gives you an advantage. It can be the difference of getting your commander out before anyone else or even establishing a win con. Normally, I like to use the command zones stats and go for 10 ramp peices mininum in a deck (more if the deck needs it or wants it for value, like in landfall decks) because there is so much I’m breaking this down into 2 articles, in this article we will explore colourless ramp, mana rocks and lands that generate more mana.
Ramp is usually found in green cards such as rampant growth or three visits but what of you wanted to ramp outside of green?
Colourless ramp
There is a tonne of colour less ramp so I will break this down into a few sections, I will avoid talking about sol ring and arcane signet though, these are good, if you have them, they go in any deck at all
Rock me
Mana rocks are great, they are a one of investment for a permanent you can reuse throughout. The talsiman cycles are great, 2 mana and can generate a colourless or by paying a life can fix our colours if we need
Dark steel ignot is an idestrucable mana rock which is more relevant then may first appear, this means that people will have to exile it to remove it, vandleblast or bane of progress just can’t touch it.
Everflowing chalice lets us put as much mana as we want into it to get as much back, and skyclave relic copies itself if we kick it
Whilst they aren’t strictly ramp there are also Artifacts the reduce the casting cost of spells and sort of acts like ramp, these are the medallion cycles.
great, if you don’t, there is cheaper alternatives that function very similarly
Let’s not forget the humble mind stone which for 2 Ramps us a colourless but late game you can sac it for card draw, and there are some commanders that absolutely can abuse this by getting it back from the yard.
We can also consider mana crypt, mana vault, basalt monolith, Grimm monolith and the mox’s but these are usually out of people’s price range. If you have them, great, if you don’t, there is cheaper alternatives that function very similarly.
Ramp without the rocks?
There is also other options available to us, such as mana dorks in the form of myr’s, getting us a land through equipment such as sword of hearth and home, sword of the animist and explorers scope or untapping all our lands with sword of feast and famine.
The sad robot, solemn simulacrum and it’s goaty cousin, burnished hart are great, espically in decks that care about creatures dieing. Mitch’s (from the commanders quarters podcast) all time favourite, Wayfarers bauble is also great at getting us a land, espically in decks that care about artifacts or sacrificing permanents.
Mana doublers in the form of caged sun, power gauntlet or extra planar lense allows for explosive plays and can be really powerful but these are global effects and your opponents can benefit from it.
There is as well a single colourless sorcery that ramps us. Strixhaven gave us environmental studies, a 2 drop that grabs us a basic to hand and gives us 2 life, which may not always be relevant but can matter in some gain and drain decks. This isn’t to battlefield but it can still gaurantee a land drop on turn 3.
I couldn’t not write an article about ramp and not talk about Mana Dorks, the Myr cycles are great 2 drops that provide us additonal resource and ornithopter of paradise
Big tracks of lands
Finally in the colourless ramp we have lands, which may sound a little redundant but bare with me on this one.
There are plenty of lands in magic that tap for multiple colours such as bounce lands and let’s not forget cards like temple of the false god and Ancient tomb which give us 2 colourless. Urza’s saga was released recently in modern horizons 2, a saga land which at its end point gets us an artifact with mana value 1 or less, it’s basically screaming to be a sol ring, but can also be any one of the mox’s (if you have these) or mana crypt. So long as it has a 0 or a 1 mana value specifically
on the next article I will discuss the rest of ramp available to us outside of Green cards. leave a comment and let me know whats your must have ramp card in a deck. Until next time.
