#mana base

The main reason to use Snow-Covered Swamps is to be prevent your opponents to benefit from your Extraplanar Lens. This artifact cares about the land’s name, so their regular Swamps - much more common than their snowy counterparts - won’t generate extra black mana. 

But beware. In the early game, it’s common to find targeted artifact removal in your opponents’ starting hands. You don’t want to exile a land and then have your artifact destroyed, right? You need at least to be able to cast your early game spells before using it (in case of doubt, wait until you have five swamps or four swamps and a mana rock).       

Being precautious to avoid helping your opponents also kept Gauntlet of Power out of the core list. Not only it can provide them loads of mana that may be used against you, but it gets much worse with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, letting every basic land under your opponents’ control generate BB (if their general is black) or 2 (if they’re not).

There are very few occasions when you won’t copy Cabal Coffers with Vesuva or Thespian’s Stage. Most of these occasions will happen in the early game if you’re mana screwed, and that’s why you shouldn’t count Vesuva as a land when deciding whether to keep your inital hand or to mulligan. I also usually don’t keep an initial hand without three lands or two lands and at least one cheap-costed mana rock.

Similarly, only in very specific situations you should tutor other lands before playing those three. Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is amazing, but vulnerable to nonland mass destruction/bouncing/exiling (you can choose to tutor it before copying your coffers, of course, but you can’t copy legendary lands, and having multiple coffers is a way to ensure it’ll be harder for your opponents to get rid of all of them). 

Could Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth be a better land play than Vesuva or Thespian’s Stage? In this case, we have to ask ourselves if we really preffer to access the extra mana from the new swamps in that round (usually to change the board state), or if it would be ok to wait for another Cabal Coffers to be active only in the next turn. Sometimes, you’ll be able to deliver a fatal blow if you choose Urborg, and you know what they say about never putting off until next turn what you can kill right now.

The colorless portion of this suggestion is pretty straightforward, but I guess Sculpting Steel deserves to be discussed because of its flexibility. For 3 generic mana, this artifact can enter the battlefield as a copy of any mana rock you or your opponents control.

In the early game, drawing or tutoring it should focus on taking you to the mid game (when you can cast almost every card you draw). Most of the time, Sol Ring should be a great choice in the first three or four turns (as most decks run it). 

In the mid game, however, Jet Medallion can gain in scale, and the battlefield may offer better options rather than the ring, as Gilded Lotus, Sword of Feast and Famine or Thran Dynamo.

In the late game (or as soon as they appear), you should probably target mana doublers as Caged Sun or even Gauntlet of Power (if you fell you can end the game before passing your turn, otherwise you should evaluate the danger of letting your opponents have access to extra resources if you run Urborg or if their general is black). 

Omissions and improvements for specific needs (examples)

While they’re granted slots in several well-tuned EDH decks, I wouldn’t reccomend using additional low-costed mana rocks as Coldsteel Heart, Charcoal Diamond, Leaden Myr or Mind Stone if your aim is building a strong ramping suite. Their slots could be used to include tutors (as Expedition Map, Vampiric Tutor and Demonic Tutor) and card drawing powerhouses (as Necropotence, Phyrexian Arena and Bloodgift Demon).

Those tutors and draw engines may even substitute land fetching (this is why I preffer Liliana Vess over Liliana of the Dark Realms, and Expedition Map over Jouneyer’s Kite). After all, getting the right nonbasic land or artifact at the spot is better than slowly fetching a few basic lands). Keep in mind that both your tutors and card drawing pieces will complement your goal of generating loads of mana.

Obviously, not every strategy follows the same path, and below you’ll find some tips on how to improve or to adapt your ramping. Feel free to contribute!

Playing on a slightly lower budget (other changes may apply)

-1 Mana Crypt // +1 Palladium Myr

Relying on poison counters and/or commander damage

+1 Homeward Path // +1 Shizo, Death’s Storehouse // +1 Cathedral of War

Playing tribal decks

+1 Cavern of Souls // +1 Volrath’s Stronghold

If you can’t gain substancial amounts of life

-1 Ancient Tomb // -1 Mana Crypt // +1 Bojuka Bog  // +1 Palladium Myr

Using self-mill or dredge

+1 Crypt of Agadeem // +1 Volrath’s Stronghold

Playing against self-mill and/or dredge decks

+1 Bojuka Bog

If you still need more mana

+1 Gauntlet of Power // +1 Liliana of the Dark Realms // +1 Deserted Temple

If you still need much more mana (I really don’t think you will, but...)

+1 Gauntlet of Power // +1 Lake of the Dead // +1 Journeyer’s Kite // +1 Deserted Temple // +1 Liliana of the Dark Realms // +1 Burnished Hart // +1 Myriad Landscape (the list goes on...) 

As always...

Please feel free to share your corrections, opinions, critics and observations on this article, they’re all welcome! I would also like to thank everyone who likes, reblogs and comments my posts. You have no idea how much you encourage me with your support! My next articles about playing monoblack in EDH will focus card advantage and mulligan. Until there!

Monoblack in EDH (related articles)

Evolving Wilds / Terramorphic Expanse

Grade: B-

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: The cream of the crop when it comes to budget options for mana bases. These two cards have been reprinted plenty of times at common. They can fix your mana base by fetching any basic land you need with the cost that the land comes into play tapped, costing you tempo. They can even become card advantage engines in decks with a little land recursion.

Recommendation: These are really pretty nice budget options. They don’t maintain tempo as well as the Fetchlands, but they offer fairly solid color-fixing.

Mirage Fetches

Grade: B-

Cost: $0.40-$0.50

Comments: Tempo-wise, they seem identical to Wilds and Expanse; they both give you an untapped land on your next turn, so you recover your tempo in both cases as if they were taplands. Wilds and Expanse have a very slight advantage in terms of card advantage, however, as they can thin your deck by a single basic land immediately, improving the quality of at least one future draw by a tiny bit. Mirage Fetches are also slightly more limited in what colors of mana they can fetch for us, as they can only fetch lands with one of two appropriate basic land types. The trade-off for this is that Mirage Fetches are not limited to fetching basic lands, and these are the only real budget options that can grab Shocklands or ABUR Duals.

Recommendations: These are fine budget alternatives to more expensive Fetchlands, and one of the few inexpensive options for fetching Shocklands or ABUR Duals. I wouldn’t run any which couldn’t fetch at least two colors of mana for my deck, however, outside of some very unusual circumstances (hi, Titania!).

Panoramas

Grade: B-

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: They do tap for 1 colorless can help you maintain tempo early on while dropping mana rocks or late while trying to build up enough mana to cast a haymaker. And you can generally play around their 1 colorless mana cost to fetch up to one of three shard-relevant basic land. Even though they search for basic lands within a particular shard, they can be used in decks of any color identity (because they do not have any mana symbols of their own). The trade-off with Terramorphic Expanse and Evolving Wilds is that unless you stay completely on-color with them, you can’t always be certain that the Panorama you draw will be able to fetch the color you need. I would’ve liked to see wedge versions of these in Khans of Tarkir.

Recommendations: I overlooked them myself for a little too long in my Pauper Commander decks. I think they’re pretty even with the Expanse and Wilds, thought slightly harder to take advantage of with land recursion.

Vivid Lands

Grade: B-/B

Cost: $0.40-$0.50

Comments: They hit tempo just as hard as any other budget options, but by themselves they probably provide among the strongest mana-fixing among budget options. They offer a single colored mana unconditionally the turn after they come down, and two times per game they can provide any color of mana you need. They don’t provide the minor deck-thinning that the budget fetches above offer, and thus don’t provide the ability to generate card-advantage which the fetches do once you can recur them from your graveyard, so they’re more limited in utility once you begin to upgrade your deck.

Recommendations: Arguably the best among budget options for a mana-base in need of color-fixing. The trade-off is that these cannot be slotted into a recursion engine to help generate card advantage. They can only fix your mana twice, but they still produce colored mana even after they provide those two turns of mana-fixing.

Trilands

Grade: B

Cost: $0.32-$0.99 (though Arcane Sanctum and Seaside Citadel cost $1.65-$1.75, making them technically non-budget options by the definition of this series)

Comments: Efficient mana-fixing for wedge decks and shard decks. The tempo hit can hurt, just as with any other lands that enter the battlefield tapped.

Recommendations: Completely playable. These are great budget options for three-color decks, but I would pass on them in a five-color deck, as having more than a few lands which enter the battlefield tapped can be crippling.

Tainted Lands

Grade: B/B+

Cost: $0.85-$0.99 (though Tainted Isle costs around $1.20, making it technically non-budget by the definition of this series)

Comments: Very effective mana-fixing in B/x decks which do not impact upon your tempo at all.

Recommendations: Two-color decks with black in their color-identity can very reliably get a Swamp onto the battlefield to activate the free color-fixing the tainted lands allow for. Three-color decks have a more difficult time reliably getting a Swamp onto the battlefield and may be stuck with lands which can only produce colorless mana. A definite pass for five-color decks.

Temple of the False God

Grade: B/B+

Cost: $0.25-$0.60

Comments: The drawback is very easy to play around. The main weakness of Temple of the False God is that it fails to produce colored mana. But the tempo boost it can provide is absolutely staggering. Producing that one additional colorless mana means you can slam Prossh down on turn 5 without any mana rocks. The tempo boost is huge for Control decks and can help Aggro decks keep the pressure on and keep their commanders on the battlefield.

Recommendations: If your colored mana requirements aren’t too demanding, the tempo boost from Temple of the False God is excellent across the board. Krond, Progenitus, and Return to Ravinca Guildleaders may want to pass on the Temple, but the majority of decks can probably find a way to squeeze it in, particularly if they can’t afford Ancient Tomb. In decks with minimal colored mana requirements, or decks which can reliably untap non-basic lands, the Temple of the False God is an absolute powerhouse, and likely deserves to be included alongside even its big brother, the Ancient Tomb.

Lairs

Grade: B+

Cost: $0.43-$0.75

Comments: Great budget color-fixing for shard decks. They come into play untapped and have the same “return a land to your hand” clause that allows you to return a land you’ve already tapped for mana to your hand which the Ravnica Karoo lands have. As a bonus, the Lairs come into play untapped, so the tempo hit doesn’t come until your next turn, when you need to replay the land you returned with the Lair. They’re still open to the same 2-for-1 that all of the Karoos open you up to with regards to targeted land destruction, though.

Recommendations: Great in your shard-colored decks, awesome if you can get multiple land drops per turn. They definitely lose their luster in a meta with significant targeted land destruction, though. It’s also a shame that no wedge-colored decks exist.

Tap-Painlands

Grade: C-

Cost: $0.50-$0.75

Comments: These are only available in enemy color combinations, and they still come into play tapped. After that they can give you 1 colorless mana, or 1 of two enemy colors of mana at the cost of 1 damage, making them strictly worse than Guildgates or the Snow Taplands and also strictly worse than the Painlands.

Recommendations: If you are really hard-pressed for budget mana-fixing, the 1 damage is fairly negligible, but Guildgates, Invasion Taplands, Snow Taplands and Clan Lands / Refuges are all better options and are similarly priced or cheaper to obtain on the secondary market.

Teferi’s Isle

Grade: C-

Cost: $0.78

Comments: After you play this card, it takes two turns before you can tap it for those two blue mana. And then you only get the two blue mana every other turn.

Recommendations: It could theoretically supplement a mass land destruction package by casting your Armageddon while it is phased out, giving you a big head-start while rebuilding your mana-base, but it’s still a giant hit to your tempo, and remains a big tempo hit every other turn for the rest of the game. If you’re dying for a way to support your mass land destruction, this could be borderline playable.

Terminal Moraine

Grade: C-

Cost: $0.23

Comments: It taps for colorless by itself, but it has the worst land fetch return-on-value in the game.

Recommendations: There are better budget land fetch available which search more cheaply. The ability to tap for 1 mana can help you maintain tempo, which is nice, but the cost to search for a single tapped basic land is extremely high. Any other budget fetch is a direct upgrade to this card.

Fallen Empires Saclands

Grade: C-

Cost: $0.23-$0.26

Comments: Slow slow slow. These cards always hit your tempo for at least one turn, and then do little more than a basic land. They do offer a one-time chance to accelerate you by a turn later at the cost of sacrificing the land, putting you a turn behind for the rest of the game.

Recommendations: Fringe-playable, even with a decent land recursion engine. They’re slightly less vulnerable than the Visions Karoos, hit your tempo less and can provide more colored mana, but they’re still hard to use at all.

Archaeological Dig

Grade: C-

Cost: $0.35

Comments: It doesn’t hit your tempo until you need to use it for mana-fixing, only on the turn after you use it for colored mana. You can usually play around when you need to sacrifice the dig, but it’s still inefficient mana-fixing.

Recommendations: Borderline playable. There are better sources of mana-fixing. It gets better when you have a land-recursion engine, but there are still better cards at the budget level even in that sort of package.

Springjack Pasture

Grade: C-/C

Cost: $0.41

Comments: It basically only taps for colorless. We’ll revisit this one when we talk about utility lands, but as far as a mana base is concerned, Springjack Pasture is much slower than the Dual Storage Lands. For a similar effect. However, there are many more uses for 0/1 tokens than there are interactions with storage counters, so this is still playable, even if those tokens essentially cost 5 generic mana each.

Recommendations: Springjack Pasture has some cute interactions with good cards in the format, like Parallel Lives in a token deck, or a common utility value engine like Trading Post. Considering it as part of the mana base makes it come off as very weak, but it can be a more useful budget option as a utility land.

Crystal Vein

Grade: C

Cost: $0.23

Comments: This land follows a similar formula to the Fallen Empires Saclands above. In return for only producing colorless mana, Crystal Vein comes into play untapped. Coming into play untapped normally would not be enough to fully offset only producing colorless mana, but for a sacland like this, having the control to sacrifice it for a mana boost immediately is huge.

Recommendations: The easily-controlled tempo boost Crystal Vein provides makes it playable. Because it comes into play untapped, it’s even open to abuse in decks with land recursion engines, particularly if these decks can get multiple lands onto the battlefield every turn. It’s still usually inferior to Temple of the False God for budget mana acceleration in your mana base, though.

Unstable Frontier

Grade: C

Cost: $0.21

Comments: In many ways it functions like Unknown Shores / Shimmering Grotto, providing mana filtering at the cost of tapping 2 lands. It is slightly more useful in certain decks, however, because it turns a land into a basic land until the end of turn, so it can potentially combine with cards that interact with basic lands (such as turning a nonbasic land into a swamp for Cabal Coffers or Crypt Ghast). It only works on your lands, though, so you can’t deny mana to your opponent or get creatures with landwalk through, meaning its utility is very limited.

Recommendations: Pass for most decks. It gets a slight edge over Shores / Grotto for the potential interactions with a number of mana multipliers, and it’s at least slightly playable outside of those decks.

Riftstone Portal

Grade: C

Cost: $0.33

Comments: It enters the battlefield untapped and only provides colorless mana. If you can get it into the graveyard, suddenly all of your lands gain the additional ability to tap for green or white mana in addition to everything else they can do.

Recommendations: Most strategies would have a very difficult time getting this into the graveyard, so it’ll usually just be strictly worse than a basic land, tapping only for 1 colorless. This could be a hidden gem in Dredge / Self Mill packages for decks with a green/white color identity, but it’s a very narrow package. For example, a Dredge-supported Karador, Ghost Chieftain deck could almost definitely make use of this, but this is still narrow color-fixing.

Guildgates

Grade: C

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: These are unimpressive and slow, always entering the battlefield tapped as the cost of tapping for two colors of mana, but they are an extremely cheap and easy budget way to fix a mana base. They can also be used as a win-condition in a five-color Maze’s End deck. Other cards that care about the “Gate” subtype are fairly unimpressive, so the special subtype is worth very little to most decks.

Recommendation: When starting out a budget deck, or playing a 2-3 color Pauper Commander deck, these are fine but slow mana-fixing. I also would consider them the absolute first place to start upgrading your mana-base.

Invasion Taplands

Grade: C

Cost: $0.30-$0.50

Comments: Copy/paste my comments on the Guildgates above. These are still unimpressive, still slow, and lack any unique subtypes or supertypes.

Recommendations: When working on a budget deck that needs fixing, the Guildgates and Clan Lands / Refuges are cheaper to get on the secondary market. The Invasion Taplands are slow but certainly playable in a budget deck.

Snow Taplands

Grade: C/C+

Cost: $0.50 - $1.00

Comments: Functionally identical to Guildgates with the very real exception that the Snow supertype is infinitely more useful than the Gate subtype... in a non-budget mana-base. If you can support Snow Taplands with a critical mass of Snow basics, you can take advantage of Scrying Sheets as a very slow mana-sink and card advantage engine. However, Snow basics and Scrying Sheets are definitely not budget options. Also only available in allied colors, so no support for poor Boros decks.

Recommendations: I’d consider them an upgrade from Guildgates in two-color combinations which are normally hurting for card advantage, such as Selesnya or Gruul, if you’re willing to drop some serious coin on getting Snow basics and Scrying Sheets. There are better options in the budget world.

Clan Lands / Refuges

Grade: C/C+

Cost: Bulk commons for Clan Lands, $0.33 for Refuges

Comments: A direct upgrade over the Guildgates listed above. The 1 life they grant is largely useless in Commander, but still worth just a little more than the “Gate” subtype the Guildgates bring to the table. The fact that there is also an uncommon cycle of the allied colored lands in the Refuges is nice for consistency.

Recommendations: These are the true direct upgrade from the Guildgates. Outside of a few extreme edge-cases of using life-gain as an advantage, they are probably equal in effectiveness to the Guildgates, much like the Snow Taplands, but they offer less utility in a more expensive mana-base then Snow Taplands.

Dual Storage Lands

Grade: C/C+

Cost: $0.20-$0.33

Comments: These are the “fixed” versions of the old Mono Storage Lands. They enter the battlefield untapped and can be tapped for colorless mana immediately, protecting your tempo, but also act as mana-sinks, usable at instant-speed. In control decks, it gives you the option to squirrel away mana you didn’t use before your turn starts. You can get any combination of the two allied colors of mana you want when you do activate the lands, one for each counter on the land. Also note that you do not need to tap these land to use their “remove storage counters” ability, so you can tap the land for colorless to activate its own ability.

Recommendations: These would be perfect for Vorel of the Hull Clade, but none would fit in his color-identity. As they’re printed, they’re playable budget lands in control decks which are looking for mana-sinks. They’re not effective mana-fixing, as they require a lot of planning to take advantage of, but they don’t necessarily hit your tempo the same way the older Mono Storage Lands do.

Mirrodin’s Core

Grade: C+

Cost: $0.25

Comments: Comes into play untapped, so it doesn’t hurt your tempo. Mirrodin’s Core can behave like a Storage Land in that on turns you don’t use it, you can put a charge counter on it. Later, you can tap the land and remove the charge counter to get any color of mana off of it. It’s only ever good for 1 mana, but you can put multiple charge counters on it if you don’t use it for several turns to give you several turns of color-fixing when you need it.

Recommendations: Certainly playable in decks that need color-fixing, particularly control decks that aren’t racing to hit a certain prohibitive color combination. It’s not terribly difficult to play around the need to charge up the core, since you only need one charge counter at a time to get any color of mana you need on the next turn, but it still represents a mild hit to tempo. Being able to tap for 1 colorless mana in a pinch is also nice.

Opal Palace

Grade: C+

Cost: $0.30

Comments: Opal Palace is the only budget option which does not impact on your tempo. Rather, Opal Palace offers some fair color-fixing and interesting utility at the cost of 1 colorless mana. For Aggro commanders running Voltron packages, you should consider whether the additional +1 or +2 power is worth effectively increasing the commander tax by 1 (as it costs 1 colorless for Opal Palace to provide either of its benefits, and most Aggro decks would be hard-pressed to keep pace and cast a Voltron commander for the third or fourth time).

Recommendations: Opal Palace actually has the most synergy in Combo or Control decks with a +1/+1 counter package (Ghave, Marath, Vish Kal, the Lesser Mikaeus, etc.).

Ravinca Karoo Lands

Grade: C+

Cost: $0.30-$0.55 (Dimir Aqueduct and Simic Growth Chamber both average $1.50, technically breaking this series’ definition of “budget”)

Comments: The Ravinca Karoos are a major upgrade over their cousins from Visions for two major reasons: they produce a second color and their enters the battlefield clause can be satisfied by returning a tapped land to your hand, minimizing their impact on your tempo for the turn.

Recommendations: These are Karoos that can work. They still hit you with a single turn of tempo loss, and they are still are still major targets for targeted land destruction. These are fine in a lot of decks for which they are on-color, but actually have significant synergy with extra land plays or effects that can untap non-basic lands. Derevi runs his (her?) full compliment of on-color Ravinca Karoos.

Rupture Spire / Transguild Promenade

Grade: F

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: Extremely ineffective and agonizingly slow. Not only do you take a tempo hit for the land entering the battlefield tapped, but you take an additional tempo hit for the land costing 1 colorless mana to put into play. So it takes up your land drop and costs mana and enters the battlefield tapped.

Recommendations: Do not use these cards. Even at the bulk common level, there are better options.

Rhystic Cave

Grade: F

Cost: $0.23

Comments: An extremely conditional source of color-fixing. In a multiplayer format, there will almost always be someone who can afford to deny you mana.

Recommendations: Unplayable. Giving your opponents easy control over part of your mana-base is going to end badly every time.

Homelands Filterlands

Grade: D-

Cost: $0.20-$0.25

Comments: Promenade and Spire do more damage to your tempo, but these relics of the past are strictly worse than other budget options and cost more. Tapping only produces colorless, and you need to tap these land and pay 1 generic to get the central color of a wedge, or 2 generic to get the allied colors of a wedge. Extremely expensive mana-fixing which can be had cheaper, even at budget level.

Recommendations: Hard pass. You can get cheaper fixing for less cash, and they don’t even fit into Pauper decks.

Henge of Ramos

Grade: D-

Cost: $0.20

Comments: Strictly worse than Opal Palace. Strictly worse than Shimmering Grotto / Unknown Shores. A very, very expensive way to filter your mana.

Recommendation: Unknown Shores / Shimmering Grotto are cheaper to buy and cheaper to use for filtering. It was even only printed as an uncommon, which means you can’t use it in Pauper. Pass on this one.

Rainbow Vale

Grade: D

Cost: $0.70

Comments: This arguably looks playable in a deck being built towards the Diplomatic archetype, such as in a Zedruu the Greathearted deck. You may be able to bribe an opponent for a turn with it, and it really is the only budget option that can directly slot into a Donation / Make it Rain package. Note that you don’t control who the land passes to after an opponent uses it, so it isn’t hard for opponents to deny you the land for the rest of the game.

Recommendations: If this becomes part of your budget mana base for a Diplomatic deck, you can get a lot more millage and mana-fixing out of a card like Forbidden Orchard, which I would consider a much stronger upgrade, as you’re the only one passing out bribes with this the Orchard.

Odyssey Saclands

Grade: D

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: Slow. Slow. Sloooooowwwww. They come into play tapped, and have to be sacrificed for color-fixing. These don’t quite murder your tempo the way the Spire / Promenade do, but it’s pretty close.

Recommendations: I’d avoid these as well in most budget mana-bases. Yes, it can be nice to fix mana in a pinch, but unless you are very hard-pressed to fix mana for a Commander with a very demanding colored mana requirement (ie: Progenitus or Krond the Dawn-Clad), you are accepting a large hit to your tempo to fix that mana. Even with these Commanders and large budget restrictions, I feel you’d be better served running more green ramp spells to fix your mana while advancing your tempo.

Primal Beyond

Grade: D

Cost: $0.90

Comments: It hits your tempo by entering the battlefield tapped, and can only provide colored mana for elementals. There are plenty of playable elementals in Commander, but in most decks, this will enter the battlefield tapped and only provide colorless mana.

Recommendations: Great color-fixing in a Horde of Notions deck, where it is likely to enter the battlefield untapped and can almost always tap for any color of mana with no drawback. Pass on it for any other deck.

Mono Storage Lands

Grade: D

Cost: $0.30-$0.85

Comments: First introduced during Fallen Empires, the Mono Storage Lands have two separate but similar cycles, the second in Mercadian Masques. Both cycles produce only a single color of mana, and neither has the option to tap for mana on its own without using its storage counters. These are extremely slow and basically offer you one or two chances to get a modest burst of mana in exchange for essentially skipping a land drop, and then staying a land behind for the rest of the game, a pretty significant hit to your tempo.

Recommendations: In theory, the Fallen Empires Mono Storage Lands could be played in a tapdown-style mass land denial package (running packages with Winter Orb, Stasis or Hokori Dust Drinker). You get a storage counter at the start of your upkeep on these lands when they are left tapped, so leaving them tapped to your tapdown package does nothing to prevent you from building up storage counters on them. But there are plenty of other effects (particularly in green and blue) which can let you play around your own tapdown, and you are usually better served using tapdown packages to protect your tempo advantage in an aggro deck, and Mono Storage Lands are poor choices for decks interested in the tempo that aggro decks demand.

Visions Karoo Lands

Grade: D

Cost: $0.30-$0.50

Comments: These cards hurt your tempo just as hard as the Spire and Promenade as you have to return an untapped land to your hand to put these onto the battlefield untapped. They also offer no mana-fixing for this huge tempo cost. They can offer a limited amount of padding as part of a Stax package, or when planning to play around a Stax package, and there is a small amount of synergy with cards like Cataclysm (which are generally not good in Commander).

Recommendations: Avoid them. Yes, they have a degree of synergy in decks that can reliably get more than one land play per turn, or which can reliably untap nonbasic lands, but even in those cases they are fringe-playable at best. They didn’t even make the cut in a budget mana-base for Derevi, Empyrial Tactician running both Azusa and Amulet of Vigor with a huge Mass Land Denial / Tapdown package featuring Stasis and Winter Orb, and that should be the perfect storm for these cards.

Invasion Saclands

Grade: D+

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: They still come into play tapped, and they still need to be sacrificed to fix mana, and their mana-fixing is very limited. They are limited to shard-colored decks, and they always tap for the central color of the shard and sacrifice themselves for the two allied colors of the central shard color. It’s very awkward mana-fixing. They are still better than Odyssey Saclands because they at least offer a tiny bit of acceleration when you sacrifice them to make up for entering the battlefield tapped.

Recommendations: These are extremely awkward cards to use even in the shards they’re on-color for. The tempo boost they could theoretically provide is extremely difficult to ever take advantage of. I’d strongly recommend against using these lands as well.

Shimmering Grotto / Unknown Shores

Grade: D+

Cost: Bulk commons

Comments: These cards affect your tempo much less than the Spire or Promenade, but their color-fixing is extremely expensive. They tap for colorless and come into play untapped. Certainly not a bad start for a non-basic land at common. They can also fix for any color of mana, but at the cost of 1 colorless mana, meaning on the turns you use them to fix your mana, you are essentially a turn back.

Recommendations: Weak, but sometimes necessary for color-fixing in Pauper Commander. A definite step-up from the Spire / Promenade, but also a very early replacement when you can upgrade your deck.

Slowlands

Grade: D+

Cost: $0.20-$0.30

Comments: These cards don’t necessarily impact your tempo immediately. It’s possible, though extremely awkward, to play around the tempo hit that these cards smash you with. Unlike other budget color-fixing options, you pay tempo every single time you tap these cards for colored mana. That’s extremely painful for color-fixing.

Recommendations: Arguably weaker than the Grotto / Shores. You can, in theory, get a little more flexibility out of the strange depletion counters clause found on the Ice Age slowlands by coupling them with Karoo lands or land sacrifice / land recursion packages, but these are complex and fragile packages with very little payoff.

Next time, we’ll be looking at some playable budget options to help your mana base.