You need a means of filling your graveyard before you’re happy to play this cave, but it has a very high ceiling for the low opportunity cost of a tapped land. These numbers can change if your deck is full of low cost cards or if you have other sources of mana slotted in like mana creatures or cost reducers. As a general rule you should run at least 33 lands just to make sure your first draw has some mana in it. If not then you may run in to the same problem I did where I found myself needing more land later in the game. Commander and Brawl by association both have a ton of lands to pick from.
The nature of land bases hasn’t changed for Brawl compared to its Commander predecessor in that respect. “Curve” refers to the number of spells of each mana value you have in your deck. Interestingly enough, when you plot the info on a bar graph, you can usually trace a line that tells you how your deck will behave. Now I have 3 decks, a simic with Kruphix playing 38 lands, an orzhov with Teysa Karlov playing 35 lands and an azorius with Tameshi playing 33.
How many lands do you play in commander?
Lands in Commander decks can be a difficult piece to refine when deckbuilding, but it doesn’t have to be. A little bit of insight into how your deck wants to play can greatly influence your land count. We are a group of friends who have made commander deck a serious effort to keep gaming a part of our lives. Whether playing amazing board games, finding weird indie/retro video games, or taking part in a new tabletop RPG campaign, we’re passionate about the awesome memories, friendships, and creativity that gaming can build.
Most ideal starts involve a ramp effect on turn 2, whether that’s a mana rock or a Rampant Growth effect. The more redundancy you have on early-game acceleration, the more reliably you’ll be able to cast expensive cards higher up on the curve. An ideal strategy-agnostic curve is heavily weighted towards cheaper, early-game plays, with a small handful of expensive plays. It’s also easy to overload on 4-drops and 5-drops, but if you’re deck is only designed to be playing one land per turn, you should really consider trimming a number of expensive cards from your deck. If your deck is full of cantrips or ways to draw cards when you play cheap spells, you don’t need a ton of lands because your hand will likely never be empty. If an effect sets a land’s subtype to one or more of the basic land types, the land no longer has its old land type.
This card can also be a good addition to decks that can make use of lands from the graveyards. Creature lands don’t traditionally see much Commander play since they can be rather inconsequential and small, but Cactus Preserve makes up for that—at least, the small part. I wouldn’t play this with commanders with a mana value less than 5, but it’s a solid way to incorporate an additional threat into your mana base. I won’t pretend tapped lands are great, but the Temple cycle of lands originating from Theros are some of the better ones.
Is there a limit to the number of dual-lands you can hold in your deck?
Fabled Passage bridges the gap between Evolving Wilds and Prismatic Vista for a basic land fetch that’s untapped most of the time. It’s a great mana-fixing tool, especially if you want shuffle effects or ways to get lands in the graveyard. It’s easier on the wallet than Vista while being far more powerful than Wilds. Even after sacrificing your two lands to Scorched Ruins, it’s still a positive mana trade playing this land. This works well in colorless decks and decks that don’t mind getting some lands in the graveyard. It’s like spending an extra mana to Time Warp twice and you have no restrictions on what you can copy.
How many land cards can you play?
This would translate to 14.5 lands in 40-card decks or 21.8 lands in 60-card decks. Take a good look at how much of each color you need for each spell and choose your lands accordingly. You’ll need a critical mass of colored sources to be able to cast everything so make sure that critical mass is stable. Fixing and ramp are terms used for cards or effects that make it easier to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to lands. These counts depend on multiple variables that I’ll dive into soon, but I’ll start by saying that these land counts complement your deck construction.
Plenty of Commander decks have powerful draw engines that frequently make you have to discard to hand size. Reliquary Tower is an easy way to let you keep all the cards you draw and is less likely to be removed than an artifact like Thought Vessel. Having Mutavault become a changeling makes it a powerful addition to typal decks. You can get a real combo with The Book of Exalted Deeds or just sneak in one more creature to trigger Kindred Discovery and Shared Animosity. Aggressive Duel Commander players can find value in a cheap creature land, too.
That means Wasteland can blow up some of your opponents’ best tools at no extra cost. Where Nykthos rewards you for going hard on one color, Tarnation Vista’s second ability wants you to lean into a multicolor deck to get up to 5 mana. It has a much lower ceiling, but critically counts tokens, which can be quite useful. You need to be in at least three colors for this to become mana-positive.
If something is colorless and has no mana symbols on its text, it can be used with any commander. As a general rule of thumb, you want somewhere between 33 and 42 lands in a Commander deck. Anything that modestly resembles Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx deserves some attention and Three Tree City is a fantastic parallel to that card. This stands out as a fantastic card for elf or goblin decks given how quickly those strategies amass a wide board state, but any typal deck would be happy to visit this prominent locale in the Valley. In a format filled with massive battlecruisers, giving creatures haste can be devastating.
I’ve been saying to test and tune your deck as you find the need to, but I should also note that Magic is a game of chance when you boil it all the way down. You’re going to have unlucky draws and you’re going to have fantastically lucky draws. Don’t use one unlucky play session as evidence to add or remove lands. Decks that draw a lot might run just enough to play all their cards properly but stay on the low side because they know they’ll draw as much as they’ll eventually need. Lots of things can affect the number of lands you want in your deck, my friend. Deckbuilding is a very intricate part of our favorite game and lets players express their creativity, wits, knowledge, and personality when constructing their own concoction.
I’ve already gushed over the benefits of shock lands, but those are toned down compared to the original dual lands found in Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, and Revised. Everything I discussed before remains true with these while never asking you to pay 2 life. It’s safe to say we will never have dual lands this good again, and if they have a failing, it is their scarcity due to their presence on the Reserved List. They’re basically perfect dual lands, and if you’re one of the lucky few who has tracked them down, you’ve probably seen just how much they help the consistency of your manabases. For multicolor decks, it’s hard to beat the original dual lands like Taiga or Tundra.