(Opened for August 01, 2015)
I’ve yet to create a Commander deck that features green, but I have white in four of my first five Commander decks and all of them include Land Tax. When it comes to mana ramp, It’s hard exclude that enchantment in any deck that has white in it simply because it generates an absurd card advantage, an advantage that is easy to abuse in multiplayer Commander where at least one player is sure to be one land ahead of you in the arms race.
As I continue to accumulate non-basic land cards, however, I began to feel less and less enamored of Land Tax. Sure, it nets me three cards in an instant, which may begin as nothing but basic lands but can easily filtered out to more useful cards with the use of Scroll Rack and Teferi’s Puzzle Box). In the first few turns of the game, however, one-shot cards like Tithe are even more useful since they allow you to play with non-basic Plains cards as well (like Sacred Foundry), which, in the long run, are even more helpful than a bunch of basic Plains. In spite of Moonmist Plains], I think there is still much room for Wizards to print non-basic plains to make Gift of Estates matter more than Land Tax in a multi-colored deck.
Knight of the White Orchid falls into the non-basic side of this debate. None of my white decks are creature-based, however, so I’m still looking for a niche for this reprint. Perhaps it’ll fit right into a Naya-tokens Commander deck that I’m hoping to build some day? Who knows.
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Pack #59: Magic Origins, featuring Sword of the Animist
Mad Blue (Part 2)
(Continued from here)
The plan that I have for my Temur Commander deck is to play lots of chaotic cards like Grip of Chaos and Shared Fate to mess around with everybody’s planned courses of action and prove to Kira that blue isn’t always as calculating as she think it is (and that, Counterspell’s aside, it can actually be fun). The thing about such a plan is I’d then have to rely on spells that have really high mana costs, so I have to figure out a way of surviving the first few turns by slowing my opponents down.
Then again, I realized that I don’t always have to slow them down if I can speed myself up –after all, green is part of the Temur palette, so I might as well take advantage of it by playing lots of mana ramp. Typically, you’d want cards that not only searches for lands from the library, but also immediately bring them out onto the battlefield. I’d much prefer sorceries to do this for me because they are more mana-efficient, but Sword of the Animist would also be a good addition since it’s a repeatable source of extra land drops.
This would mean that I’ll have to play more basic lands in the deck, which is not easy to do since I rely so much on non-basic lands for utility (ex. Halimar Depths) and consistency (ex. “shock lands” like Steam Vents). Then again, that decision wouldn’t be so hard to make in the next few months, considering the return of full-art lands in Battle for Zendikar.
(To be continued)