If you’re familiar at all with Commander, you’ll have heard a lot of talk about Ramp. If you’re newer to the game: Ramping is the term for spending your mana on sources of additional mana to use on later turns. Think of it like an investment; spend more mana now to have access to more later. Due to the nature of Commander being a multiplayer format where players have high starting life totals, raw aggression isn’t as potent as it is in a 1v1 format, so the early turn are best used setting up your board and hand to be in a more advantageous state for the rest of the game. While Ramping is not the only way to aid in setting up your game plan for success, it’s widely considered to be universally helpful and always a safe addition to most decks – if not a necessity for some.
This Ramp can come in many forms, such as: adding more lands to the battlefield, creatures that tap for mana, or what we’re going to talk about today – mana rocks. A “mana rock” is a colloquial term for an artifact that’s primary purpose is tapping for mana, similar to a land.
Today, I want to talk about some mana rocks that fall into a specific category: the 2-drop rocks. The reasons for this are threefold:
- First, these cards are almost all accessible and reasonably priced for the purposes of budget deckbuilding. None of these will break the bank, and many are essential pieces when I’m deckbuilding myself. Many players aren’t aware of how easy it is to access some of these pieces and run less efficient ramp due to this.
- Second, these cards are flexible in gameplay. A 2-CMC rock has flexibility in that it allows you to play multiple cards easier in the midgame, not just allowing for the coveted turn-2-ramp play. The difference between a 2 and 3 cost ramp piece can decide you playing one or two spells on turns 3-5, which can be crucial for some decks.
- Lastly, these cards are flexible in deckbuilding, and can allow for a much more balance mana curve and ramp package rather than piling a lot of your ramp into a single mana cost “slot” in your deck.
None of this is to say that more expensive mana rocks are not worth it, but they should be providing something to your deck beyond what you could get from a cheaper ramp source to be worth your time.
For the purpose of this article, I don’t plan to rank anything necessarily, but more talk about the use cases of these cards and where best to put them, as I believe all of them have a home in the right deck. Here are a few criteria for what we’ll be looking at today:
- The card has to has to have at least one card from it’s cycle playable in a deck, regardless of color identity. There are a lot of cards like Orb of Dragonkind that are tied to a specific color and fall under a more specific use case, which we might look at more in a future article.
- The card has to be an artifact. It’s fine if it has other typings, but we won’t really look at any pure mana-dorks or land ramp spells, with a small exception.
- The card has to cost two (or less) mana, OR can be cast for two or less mana if the mana cost is flexible. We’re going to ignore the “fast” mana for today, such as Sol Ring, Moxen, or other cards that tap for more than they are cast for, as they are worth a bit more discussion for a different article.
- The card has to actually generate mana, not just fix mana or be net-neutral on casting. We’ll leave the eggs at home today.
- We’re trying to look at things that can permanently ramp your board state, not accelerate mana for a single turn, as those have a different use case than ramp in setting up for a single, powerful turn. We’ll leave stuff like Lotus Bloom or Lotus Blossom at home.
Let’s get into some artifacts, shall we?
Honorable Mention: Wayfarer’s Bauble
Before we get into a lot of the rest of the actual mana rocks, I want to mention Bauble as it’s technically not a mana rock in the traditional sense, but it does get a land out into play regardless of your color identity. The overall cost of the card is 3 mana to do this, but since the actual card is only 1 to cast, it lets you stretch this cost over multiple turns. Land ramp is renowned as the safest form of ramp, often because mass land destruction is less common than mass artifact or creature destruction. Bauble is really great in decks where you can afford a slightly slower but slightly safer start, or any big-mana decks that don’t have green, since you’ll be punished significantly less if your artifacts get blown up. Special mention to decks that can easily recur this from the graveyard too, as it’s decent repeatable ramp.
Arcane Signet
If you don’t have access to green (or even if you do in a 4-5 color deck), this fixes your mana and comes in untapped, doing pretty much everything you want from this type of mana rock. It’s now been reprinted to hell so it’s cheap as chips. This goes basically everywhere as long as you’re running mana rocks of any kind unless you have ramp that synergizes with your deck better.
Automated Artificer
It’s got a niche use case compared to a lot of the other cards on this list, but if the overwhelming majority of what you’re casting are artifacts anyway, it’s not bad. Notably, it’s got a big butt with 3 toughness compared to the other artifact creatures here.
The Signet Cycle:Â Gruul Signet
The signets are a Commander classic for good reason. If you aren’t familiar with them, they come in untapped and work in a much simpler way than they seem at first glace: you put one mana in, and get two out, netting you one extra mana. Functionally, it plays like any other mana rock, you just “technically” have to tap it with another source. These are absolutely the crème-de-la-crème of mana rocks to me. They filter your mana colors and are available in every color pairing, meaning your three color decks can slot in three if your heart desires (mine usually does). While the mana that comes out is in fixed colors, that isn’t a huge deal when your mana base is properly built, as often it will be more beneficial to have access to multiple colors from the same mana rock than not. My general rule of thumb for these is similar to Arcane Signet, as I generally include them unless I have access to a more synergistic ramp source for my deck.
The Diamond Cycle:Â Charcoal Diamond
The Diamonds are a cycle of rocks that enter tapped and tap for one color of mana. Easy, breezy, no frills. I often find these best for lower color decks, as they don’t really help fix your mana (while the cost is flexible being two colorless, the generation is fixed to one color) and they’re slightly slower as they come in tapped. I tend to include these in Mono Color decks and occasionally in two color decks as well. There is beauty in consistency and ease of use, and these are about as simple as it gets.
Coldsteel Heart
This functionally is the same as above, except you pick a single color when this enters and it always taps for that. It also is a Snow artifact, which is a niche upside and unless someone in your playgroup is absolutely fucking bananas and runs Snow hate, is usually not a downside. This is a bit nicer than the Diamonds as it lets you select the color, so it can be more useful if you have more colors in your deck to pick from. Honestly, it’s not even bad in mono-color decks just as another 2-cost colored ramp source. Special mention to using this in blink/flicker strategies where you can change the color as needed by flickering it.
Corrupted Grafstone
I have tried to play this card, since it has the potential to be solid if you’re really coming out of the gate milling yourself. Getting to tap for any color of mana is quite solid for a two drop rock, but you really have to be certain you’ll have a reliably full enough graveyard to at least have this tap for something. Obviously, having something that isn’t a land in your graveyard isn’t particularly challenging, but this can feel bad if it comes out on turn 2 and can’t tap for another few turns.
Cryptex
I wanted to mention this one because I think it’s quite interesting. It’s similar to the Grafstone above, but it’s got a potentially really good payoff to refill your hand in the midgame. You need to be in a deck that actively has cards in the graveyard and does not care about keeping them there, but it’s got some potential.
Ebony Fly
I love this little dude. It enters tapped and taps for a colorless, but what it does do is give you access to evasion on the fly (bah-dum-tiss) for another creature. Do you have a commander who you often really want to get in for damage that doesn’t naturally have evasion? This could be a really good backup for that scenario, and the only overhead cost you’re paying is not having colored mana on his tap effect. The D6 dice rolling has niche use cases as well, but even outside of that it’s great just to carry a bigger creature into someone’s face.
Everflowing Chalice
We’re getting into the territory of trading colored mana for other benefits. EFC has the incredible flexibility to tap for more mana when you either need to ramp harder in the midgame or just don’t have anything better to do when you draw this. Notably, you can cast this for zero and tap it for zero. If you can Proliferate counters, this can also get pretty chunky. I think this card is criminally underrated for how much I see it in practice vs how cheap it is, and if you aren’t super strapped on colored mana generation for your deck you should check this one out.
Fractured Powerstone
In most games, this will just be a simple mana rock. It doesn’t enter tapped, which is solid. I won’t comment on it for Planechase games, but in normal games it’s pretty decent just as a ramp tool. I tend to not pick it over other things, but I’d never really bat an eye at someone running it.
FromTheShire: If you play Commander games with the Planechase deck (which you absolutely should sometimes), this thing is incredible.
Felwar Stone
This one is a bit weird to analyze, since it’s effectiveness both hinges on how many colors opponents have and how many colors you have. Theoretically, this gets better the more colors you have access to since you’ll often not be at tables against a bunch of mono-color decks of the same color. Not entering tapped makes this have such a low overhead that I think it’s generally pretty great as long as you’re not super strapped on colored pips in a mono/two color deck – tapping for an off color isn’t really any worse than tapping for colorless in many cases.
Flywheel Racer
This technically meets criteria, but I don’t like that it requires you to hold a creature hostage in order to use it. Could be nice if you explicitly have vehicle synergy like in Shorikai, Genesis Engine.
Myr Dork Cycle: Gold Myr
The effectiveness of these actively hinges on if your deck benefits from your things being creatures/artifact creatures. You’re effectively trading safety (as creatures are vulnerable to more removal) for more synergy in creature centric strategies. This is especially true with this cycle, as artifact creatures are often vulnerable to quite a bit of removal. Myr decks or artifact creature centric decks will eat these up, but aside from that they can still fit well in any creature heavy strategy if you’re ok with losing this sometimes to a sweeper.
Guardian Idol
While I think this card has been outclassed, I want to mention it because it’s really good for ultra budget decks. In reality, the difference in efficiency between this and some of the other rocks won’t be noticeable at lower-mid power tables, and if you chose to upgrade a deck it’s a really easy slot to replace with something later on.
Hedron Crawler & Manakin
See: Myr Dork Cycle, as this is effectively the same but taps for colorless and is a construct. Obviously, there are some cases for constructs having synergy, but aside from that it can be handy when you specifically need colorless mana or just don’t need as many colored sources but want more bodies on board.
That’s a wrap for part 1, join us next week for part 2! Let us know if there are any other ramp related topics you want to see us cover. Enjoy your games!
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
