How to Build a Commander Mana Base

You can build the perfect Commander deck.

Great commander. Strong synergy. Enough ramp. Plenty of card draw. Efficient interaction. A sensible mana curve.

Then you keep three lands and discover that none of them produce the color you actually need.

Welcome to mana bases.

Your mana base is probably the least exciting part of building a Commander deck and one of the parts that has the biggest influence on whether the deck actually works.

Nobody adds a Forest to a deck and thinks:

"This is going to be disgusting."

But when your mana base is bad, you notice it immediately.

Missing colors. Lands entering tapped at exactly the wrong moment. Keeping apparently good hands that cannot cast anything. Drawing too many utility lands and somehow having six mana available without being able to produce two blue.

A good Commander mana base should mostly be invisible.

You play lands.

You produce the colors you need.

You cast your spells.

You complain about somebody else's Rhystic Study instead.

That is the goal.

What is a Commander mana base?

Your mana base is the collection of cards that allows your deck to consistently produce the mana it needs.

Lands are obviously the foundation, but when thinking about your mana base as a whole, you should also consider:

• Basic lands
• Dual and multicolor lands
• Fetch lands
• Utility lands
• Mana rocks
• Land ramp
• Mana creatures
• Treasure generation
• Other forms of mana fixing

Not all of these cards are lands, but they all affect how reliably you can cast your spells.

This is important because building a mana base is not simply deciding:

"I play three colors, so one third of my lands should produce each color."

Your deck does not necessarily need each color equally.

The goal is to produce the right colors at the right time.

How many lands should a Commander deck have?

For most Commander decks, somewhere around 35 to 38 lands is a very reasonable starting point.

Around 36 or 37 is comfortable for many normal Commander decks.

But there is no universal correct number.

A low curve deck with lots of cheap ramp and card selection may function perfectly well with fewer lands.

A deck with a six mana commander and several expensive threats may want 38, 39 or even more.

Landfall decks often actively want additional lands because drawing lands is part of their engine.

The important thing is not reaching some magical number.

Your land count needs to work together with:

• Your mana curve
• Your ramp package
• Your commander
• Your card draw
• Your strategy
• The amount of mana your deck wants throughout the game

If you want a deeper look at the actual number, that is exactly what the How Many Lands Should a Commander Deck Run? guide is for.

Here, we are interested in what those lands should actually be.

Start with your color requirements

The first thing I look at when building a mana base is not the number of colors in the commander's color identity.

I look at the deck itself.

Imagine you are building a green, blue and black deck.

That does not automatically mean you need exactly one third green sources, one third blue and one third black.

Maybe most of your early ramp is green.

Maybe your card draw is heavily blue.

Maybe black is mostly used for expensive removal and late game threats.

Those requirements are completely different.

Your mana base should reflect when your deck needs each color, not simply how many cards of each color appear in the deck.

Mana symbols matter more than card count

Suppose your deck contains:

20 green cards.

20 blue cards.

20 black cards.

It looks perfectly balanced.

But now look closer.

Most of the green cards cost something like .

Several of the blue cards cost .

And your black cards mostly cost or .

Suddenly the requirements are not equal at all.

Blue needs more support because you frequently need multiple blue sources relatively early.

Black may need less because most of those spells are played later, when you have had more time to find a black source.

This is why simply counting cards by color is not enough.

Look at the actual colored mana symbols.

More importantly, look at when those symbols need to be available.

Early colors are especially important

A color you need on turn two is usually more demanding than a color you need on turn seven.

Imagine your deck uses green for most of its ramp.

You have Nature's Lore, Three Visits, Farseek and several other early green spells.

That means producing green early is extremely important.

If your opening hand has three lands but none can produce green, the rest of your mana development may immediately slow down.

The same principle applies to commanders.

If your commander costs , you need access to three different colors relatively early if you want to cast it on curve.

If it costs , you have much more time to find your second green source.

Same six total mana.

Very different mana base requirements.

Count mana sources, not just lands

This is one of the most useful ways to think about mana bases.

Do not only ask:

"How many Islands do I have?"

Ask:

"How many sources of blue mana do I have?"

A Command Tower is a blue source in a blue deck.

A Breeding Pool is a blue source.

A Watery Grave is a blue source.

A fetch land that can find either of those can effectively help you access blue.

An Arcane Signet can produce blue.

A Birds of Paradise can produce blue.

Suddenly your mana base becomes much easier to understand.

The important thing is whether you can reliably produce the colors your spells require.

Basic lands are still good

Commander mana bases can become ridiculous.

Fetch lands.

Shock lands.

Bond lands.

Triomes.

Battle lands.

Pain lands.

Filter lands.

Utility lands.

Lands that somehow have enough text to qualify as short stories.

And after all that, basic lands are still excellent.

They enter untapped.

They do not cost life.

They are easy to find with ramp.

They survive effects that punish nonbasic lands.

And most importantly, they are extremely reliable.

A good mana base does not need to avoid basics.

In fact, many Commander decks should probably play more basics than players initially think.

The exact number depends heavily on your colors, budget, ramp package and strategy, but basics are not the cards you reluctantly add because you ran out of expensive lands.

They are part of a healthy mana base.

Dual lands make multicolor decks work

Dual lands are the backbone of most multicolor Commander mana bases.

A land that produces two of your colors dramatically improves your ability to cast spells consistently.

There are many different types.

Some always enter tapped.

Some enter untapped if certain conditions are met.

Some cost life.

Some care about how many opponents you have.

Some care about your basic land types.

Some require another land to work properly.

The important question is not simply:

"Does this land produce two colors?"

It is:

"How reliably can I use this land when I need it?"

A dual land entering tapped on turn eight may not matter.

The same land entering tapped on turn two when you wanted to cast your ramp spell can completely change your sequence.

Commander makes some lands better than they look

Some land cycles are particularly good in Commander because the format is multiplayer.

The lands commonly called bond lands, for example, enter untapped when you have two or more opponents.

In a normal four player Commander game, that condition is almost always satisfied during the part of the game that matters.

That makes them excellent fixing for multiplayer Commander.

Command Tower is another obvious example.

In most multicolor Commander decks, it produces every color you need and enters untapped.

It is boring.

It is efficient.

It belongs in an enormous number of decks.

Sometimes boring is exactly what you want from your lands.

How many tapped lands is too many?

Tapped lands are not automatically bad.

But they have a cost.

Every land that enters tapped potentially delays what you can do by one turn.

If your deck is relatively slow, a few tapped lands may be completely harmless.

If your deck wants to curve out aggressively, they become much more painful.

The real problem appears when too many of them accumulate.

One tapped land during the first few turns?

Probably fine.

Turn one tapped land.

Turn two tapped land.

Turn three tapped land.

Now the table is playing Commander and you are playing a very beautiful slideshow of your mana base.

The faster your deck wants to operate, the fewer lands that always enter tapped you generally want.

This is one of the easiest upgrades you can make to a mana base.

You do not necessarily need expensive lands.

Sometimes you simply need fewer bad tapped ones.

Fetch lands are about more than fixing

Fetch lands are extremely powerful mana fixing.

They allow you to find lands with the appropriate basic land types, which means a single fetch land may effectively give you access to several different colors depending on what your deck contains.

In optimized mana bases, fetch lands combined with typed dual lands can make color fixing incredibly reliable.

But fetch lands are not mandatory for Commander.

You can build excellent mana bases without expensive fetches.

This is particularly important for casual and budget decks.

A mana base should be judged by whether it works, not by how much Cardmarket says it is worth.

There are plenty of cheaper lands capable of producing consistent mana.

Fetches improve flexibility and consistency.

They are not an entry fee for playing three colors.

Fetchable lands become more valuable

Some nonbasic lands have basic land types.

A land may be both a Forest and an Island, for example.

That matters because cards that search specifically for Forests or Islands can find them.

This makes typed dual lands particularly useful with cards such as Nature's Lore, Three Visits and Farseek.

Your ramp can suddenly become mana fixing.

Instead of simply finding another green source, you can search for the exact color combination you need.

This is one of the reasons land types matter much more than they initially appear to.

Read your ramp spells carefully.

Sometimes they are better than "find a basic land."

Utility lands are powerful, but they are not free

Commander players love utility lands.

And for good reason.

Why play a land that only produces mana when you can play one that produces mana and does something else?

Card draw.

Graveyard hate.

Creature removal.

Protection.

Sacrifice outlets.

Creature lands.

Commander protection.

Spell recursion.

The list is enormous.

Utility lands are effectively extra spells hidden inside your mana base.

That is incredibly valuable.

But there is a catch.

Every utility land has an opportunity cost.

If it only produces colorless mana, it does not help you cast colored spells.

If it enters tapped, it can slow you down.

If it requires additional mana to activate, you need enough resources to actually use it.

One or two colorless utility lands are easy for many decks to support.

Six or seven can quietly destroy a demanding three color mana base.

Utility lands are not free spell slots.

Your mana base still needs to produce mana correctly.

Colorless lands still cost you something

This is especially important because colorless producing lands often look harmless during deck building.

You add Reliquary Tower.

Then Rogue's Passage.

Then Myriad Landscape.

Then another interesting utility land.

Then something that protects your commander.

Then a land that interacts with graveyards.

Individually, every inclusion makes sense.

Eventually you draw an opening hand containing three lands and somehow cannot cast a spell requiring two colored mana.

That is the hidden cost.

A land can technically produce mana while still making your mana base worse.

The more colors you play and the more demanding your colored costs are, the more careful you need to be with colorless lands.

Reliquary Tower is not automatically good

Yes, I am going there.

Reliquary Tower is one of the most commonly played utility lands in Commander.

And sometimes it is excellent.

If your deck regularly has more than seven cards in hand, removing your maximum hand size can be genuinely useful.

But if that happens once every ten games, you are essentially playing a colorless land to solve a problem you barely have.

That may be completely fine in a mono colored deck.

In a demanding three or four color deck, it can be a real cost.

This applies to utility lands in general.

Do not play them because they are "Commander staples."

Play them because your deck actually uses them.

Your commander affects the mana base

Your commander should influence your mana base in several ways.

First, consider its mana cost.

A commander costing requires different fixing from one costing .

Second, consider how important it is to your strategy.

If your deck really wants to cast its commander on curve every game, your mana base should be built to make that happen consistently.

Third, consider commander tax.

If your commander costs five mana and frequently dies, you may eventually need seven or nine mana to cast it again.

That means your deck may need to continue making land drops much later than a low curve deck whose commander costs two.

Finally, some commanders produce mana, reduce costs or generate card advantage.

All of those things can influence how you build the rest of the mana base.

Mono color mana bases still need thought

Building mono color does make fixing much easier.

You can play a large number of basic lands and rarely worry about having the wrong color.

But that does not mean you should stop thinking.

Mono color decks have much more freedom to use utility lands because their color requirements are easier to satisfy.

They can often support several colorless lands without causing problems.

They may also benefit from lands that compensate for weaknesses in their color.

The challenge changes.

You are no longer asking:

"Can I produce my colors?"

You are asking:

"How much utility can I add without making my mana worse?"

Two color mana bases are forgiving

Two color Commander decks are relatively easy to build.

You can combine a healthy number of basics with dual lands and usually achieve excellent consistency without spending much money.

Command Tower and a selection of lands producing both colors already do a lot of work.

Your exact balance should depend on your colored requirements.

If the deck is mostly green with a small amount of black, your mana base should probably not be split exactly 50/50.

Again, follow the spells.

Not the commander's color identity.

Three color mana bases need more attention

Three colors are where mana bases start becoming noticeably more demanding.

You now have many more combinations to support.

A hand containing three lands can easily have plenty of mana while still missing one of your important colors.

Dual lands become more valuable.

Flexible fixing becomes more valuable.

Fetchable lands become more valuable.

Mana rocks that produce any of your colors become more valuable.

And colorless utility lands become more expensive to include.

Three color mana bases do not need to be expensive.

They just need to be intentional.

Four and five color decks need real fixing

Once you reach four or five colors, simply adding a few dual lands and hoping for the best is not enough.

Your mana base becomes part of the deck's core infrastructure.

Lands that can produce several colors become extremely valuable.

Flexible fetch effects become extremely valuable.

Cards like Command Tower become obvious inclusions.

Your ramp package also needs to help fix colors rather than merely generate more mana.

This is where the difference between ramp and fixing becomes especially important.

A mana rock producing only colorless mana may accelerate you.

It does not necessarily help you cast a spell requiring three different colors.

Four and five color decks need both.

Ramp and your mana base should work together

Your ramp package should complement your lands.

If you play a lot of land based ramp, make sure your mana base actually contains enough targets.

This sounds obvious.

It is surprisingly easy to forget.

If most of your ramp searches for basic lands and your deck contains five basics, eventually those spells become much worse.

If your ramp searches for Forests, consider playing lands with the Forest type.

If your mana rocks produce any color, they can help compensate for more demanding color requirements.

Your mana base and your ramp package are not separate systems.

They are parts of the same machine.

Green decks get to cheat a little

Green has access to some of the best land ramp and mana fixing in Commander.

Cards like Nature's Lore, Three Visits, Farseek, Cultivate and Kodama's Reach can dramatically improve consistency.

Mana creatures also provide additional colored sources.

This means green multicolor decks can often fix their mana more easily than decks without green.

But do not use that as an excuse to build a terrible mana base.

If your mana only works when you draw your green ramp spell, your mana does not actually work.

Your lands should still be functional on their own.

Ramp should improve your mana base.

It should not perform emergency surgery on it every game.

Mana rocks help, but lands are still lands

Mana rocks are excellent.

Arcane Signet, Fellwar Stone and other efficient rocks can provide acceleration and fixing at the same time.

But I would be careful about treating every mana rock as if it were simply another land.

Lands are much harder to interact with.

Mana rocks can be destroyed.

Board wipes can remove artifacts.

Some effects shut them down entirely.

And you normally need lands before you can cast them anyway.

A hand containing one land and three mana rocks may technically contain four mana sources.

That does not make it equivalent to a four land hand.

Your rocks support your mana base.

They do not completely replace it.

Treasure changes the equation, but not completely

Treasure has become an enormous part of Commander.

Many decks can generate significant amounts of temporary mana while fixing colors at the same time.

That absolutely affects how a deck functions.

But Treasure generation should be evaluated realistically.

If your commander reliably creates Treasure every game, that is meaningful.

If you have three cards somewhere in the 99 that occasionally create Treasure, that is not a reason to remove three lands.

Ask how consistently the mana is available.

Mana you might generate is not the same as mana you can depend on.

MDFCs can help smooth your land count

Modal double faced cards can be extremely useful when balancing lands and spells.

A card that can be played as a land when you need mana and as a spell when you do not gives you flexibility traditional cards cannot provide.

They can help reduce both mana screw and flooding.

But they are not always equivalent to normal lands.

Many enter tapped.

Some have meaningful costs.

And if you include too many while reducing actual lands aggressively, you can create new consistency problems.

Think of MDFCs as flexible tools.

Not permission to pretend your 30 land deck secretly has 38.

Budget mana bases can be very good

One of the biggest misconceptions about Commander mana bases is that good fixing has to be expensive.

It does not.

Expensive fetch lands and premium dual lands can make a mana base faster and more flexible.

They are excellent cards.

But Commander offers a huge number of affordable alternatives.

Pain lands.

Check lands.

Bond lands, depending on the colors and price.

Typed tapped duals.

Basic lands.

Various newer dual land cycles.

Budget fetch effects.

Mana rocks.

Land ramp.

You can build a very reliable mana base without spending more on the lands than on the rest of the deck.

The biggest difference between a good budget mana base and a bad one is often not money.

It is planning.

Do not automatically add every land that enters tapped

Budget deck building has one common trap.

You search for lands that produce your colors.

You find fifteen of them.

You add all fifteen.

Then you discover that almost every land in your opening hand enters tapped.

Color fixing is important.

Tempo is also important.

Sometimes a basic land is better than a mediocre dual.

A Forest entering untapped and allowing you to cast your turn two ramp spell may be much more useful than a dual land that technically produces two colors but delays your entire turn.

The best mana base is not the one containing the highest number of multicolor lands.

It is the one that lets you cast your spells consistently and on time.

Think about the order your lands enter the battlefield

Not all tapped lands are equally bad.

A land entering tapped on turn one may cost you almost nothing if your deck has no one mana plays.

A tapped land on turn two may be disastrous if most of your ramp costs two.

A tapped land on turn five might barely matter.

This is why you should evaluate lands within the context of your curve.

Ask:

When can I afford for this land to enter tapped?

Some lands are excellent early.

Others are better later.

A good mana base gives you enough flexibility to sequence them properly.

Do not forget about life loss

Some of the best fixing in Magic asks you to pay life.

In Commander, starting at 40 life makes that cost much easier to accept.

Paying one or two life to have your mana work correctly is often a very good trade.

But life is still a resource.

If your mana base contains a large number of lands that constantly deal damage to you, and your deck also uses life for card draw, tutors or other effects, those small payments can accumulate.

This does not mean avoiding pain lands or shock lands.

It means understanding the total cost of your mana base.

As with everything else, context matters.

Your mana base should support your actual deck, not an imaginary average deck

Generic recommendations are useful starting points.

But eventually you need to look at your own list.

How many colored symbols do you have?

Which colors do you need early?

How expensive is your commander?

How much ramp do you play?

What colors does that ramp require?

How many utility lands can your deck support?

How many lands enter tapped?

How often do you need double or triple colored mana?

Does your strategy care about basic lands?

Does it care about land types?

Does it want lands in the graveyard?

Does it want to sacrifice lands?

Does it want to play additional lands each turn?

The correct mana base emerges from those answers.

Not from copying 36 lands from another deck.

Goldfish your mana base

One of the easiest ways to test a mana base is simply to play the deck by yourself.

Shuffle.

Draw seven.

Play five or six turns.

Then do it again.

And again.

Do not worry about whether your imaginary opponents are attacking you.

You are testing the machinery.

Look at your mana.

Can you consistently play your early spells?

Do you have the colors you need?

Can you cast your commander on schedule?

How often are tapped lands delaying you?

How often do colorless utility lands cause problems?

Are you missing land drops?

Are you flooding?

Are you constantly searching for one particular color?

Twenty or thirty opening hands will tell you much more than staring at the mana base in the deck builder.

Pay attention to how you lose games

Real games provide even better information.

When your deck struggles, ask why.

Did you miss land drops?

That may indicate too few lands, insufficient card draw or simply normal variance.

Did you have enough lands but the wrong colors?

That points toward fixing.

Did too many lands enter tapped?

Your mana base may be too slow.

Did you draw several colorless utility lands and fail to cast colored spells?

You may have become too greedy.

Did you flood constantly?

Perhaps you need more card advantage, mana sinks or utility from your lands rather than simply removing lands immediately.

Do not react to one bad game.

Magic has variance.

React to patterns.

Mana screw does not always mean you need more lands

This is important.

If you cannot cast your spells, the automatic reaction is often:

"I need more lands."

Maybe.

But perhaps you have enough lands and the wrong colors.

Perhaps your curve is too high.

Perhaps your ramp costs too much.

Perhaps your opening hands are too greedy.

Perhaps you are keeping bad hands.

Perhaps too many of your lands enter tapped.

Perhaps you have seven utility lands producing colorless mana in a deck that wants on turn three.

Adding another land will not necessarily solve those problems.

Diagnose the problem before changing the number.

Mana flood does not always mean you need fewer lands

The opposite is also true.

If you draw too many lands, removing lands is tempting.

But sometimes the better solution is giving your deck more ways to use them.

Card draw.

Activated abilities.

X spells.

Utility lands.

Landfall triggers.

Cycling lands.

Channel abilities.

Repeatable mana sinks.

Commander abilities.

A deck that can use twelve mana effectively does not fear drawing its eighth land nearly as much as a deck whose entire hand costs three.

Good mana bases are not only about producing mana.

Good decks know what to do with that mana when they have it.

A practical way to build your Commander mana base

When building a new deck, I like to approach the mana base in roughly this order.

First, decide approximately how many lands the deck needs based on its curve, commander and ramp.

Then look at the deck's colored mana requirements.

Identify which colors you need early and which cards require multiple symbols of the same color.

Add reliable multicolor lands that fit your budget and strategy.

Add enough basics to support your colors, ramp and any effects that care about basic lands.

Then add utility lands carefully.

After that, look at the complete mana base again.

How many lands enter tapped?

How many produce each color?

How many only produce colorless?

Can your ramp find the lands you actually play?

Can you cast your important early spells?

Can you cast your commander on time?

Then shuffle the deck and test it.

Because a mana base that looks perfect in a deck builder can still find creative new ways to betray you.

It is Magic, after all.

So, how do you build a good Commander mana base?

A good Commander mana base gives you enough mana, the correct colors and access to those colors when you actually need them.

For many decks, that starts somewhere around 35 to 38 lands.

But the number is only the beginning.

Your mana base should reflect your colored mana requirements, mana curve, commander, ramp package and overall strategy.

Use multicolor lands to improve fixing.

Keep enough basics.

Be careful with lands that always enter tapped.

Treat colorless utility lands as a real cost.

Make your ramp work with your lands.

And test the deck rather than trusting the numbers blindly.

You do not need the most expensive mana base.

You need a mana base that works.

Because nobody remembers the game where their lands quietly produced exactly the colors they needed for ten turns.

But everyone remembers keeping three lands and realizing none of them can cast their commander.

Usually right after saying:

"Yeah, this hand looks fine."