Howdy folks! We’ve recently forayed into the worlds of cheap, 2-cost mana rocks as well as the pricier 4-cost mana rocks. Today, we’re looking at the big boys in the 5+ range. If you aren’t familiar with what mana rocks are for or are in need of a quick refresher: 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.
5 or more mana is starting to really get into that deep investment range for a “setup” card like a ramp spell. This is the part of the game when people really come out in force and start playing their cards to push their strategy forward, so if you want to be pushing your mana base forward, you’ve got to go hard in the paint. We’re really looking for these to be generating a good chunk of mana, and truthfully some of these could be deemed threats in themselves just from the amount of resources they give you to play around with.
We’re going to use a good old letter grade tier list to generally rank all of our options on how easily they can be included in decks, but as a reminder: there will always be other cases of specific strategies, playstyles, and commanders that can make better use of these than a general point of view can show, so don’t be afraid to play these if you find a solid synergy.
Our ratings are as follows:
S: The only reason you wouldn’t include this is personal choice, other synergy, or budget.
A: Always a solid choice, or is overwhelmingly good in a specific archetype.
B: Generally a good pick, can work well in most decks or very well in others with synergy.
C: Good in niche situations or specific decks, but might be outclassed by other picks if you don’t have specific synergy with it.
D: Generally outclassed by other picks. Only playable in very particular niches or if you just like the card and it fits your deck’s theme.
Without further delay, let’s check out the cards!
Altar of Shadows
Altar is unique in that it doubles as a removal spell as well as a…ramping source of ramp. The caveat is that this thing is gut-wrenchingly slow, costing 14 mana before it does anything at all. Counter manipulation does help its case here, but honestly I think you’re better off playing something like Black Market which basically does the job of this but better.
Rating: D, it’s like paying the cost of a luxury car and getting a ’99 Honda Civic.
Caged Sun
Interestingly for a ramp spell, this doesn’t actually generate mana naturally but instead absolutely juices up your mana generation from lands. Assuming you probably have 5-6 lands at the earliest when you play this, it effectively doubles your mana pool if you’re generating all of the same color mana. Of course, the value of this does go down the more colors you have to generate, so this shines in 1-2 color decks in particular. It’s a solid investment of your mana because you’re realistically going to get what you put in, but just be wary that if you play this on curve, it might get blown up before you can untap with it.
The cherry on top? It provides a sweet little anthem effect, which honestly can be really beneficial in go-wide strategies that have an expensive top end to their mana curve.
Rating: A, I can’t confidently say it’s for every deck, but if you don’t have green ramp it’s one of the best big mana generators in the Mono-color identity.
Chromatic Orrery
This card is a bit funny to parse, since the wording makes it effectively “Add five mana in any combination of colors.” Not having to worry about mana fixing is great, and compared to something like Chromatic Lantern, this color fixes your mana generation from any source rather than just lands. While in a vacuum the seven mana cost is quite expensive, the rate of making 5 mana for that is pretty solid. The card draw also isn’t too bad, with it reaching that golden rate of card draw cost (1 mana for your first card, 2 for every card after that) at three different colors on board. Realistically I do think this is playable for anything with three or more colors that needs really heavy mana generation, but the clear winner is running this to just solve your mana problems in 5 color decks. The catch there is that you do have green ramp to help with that, so make sure you really need the juice when you’re packing this.
Rating: C, 3-4 color decks with ramp/fixing issues and 5 color decks can make use of this, but you’ll really only get the most value from it when your mana curve is super high or you have ways to get extra value from untapping it or drawing more cards.
Coveted Jewel
This card is like the Monarch mechanic dialed up to 11. It generates stupid value but gets passed player to player as they take hits. It’s a great way to force aggression on the board and, like many “symmetrical” effects, it becomes particularly useful when you can reliably make use of it more than others. In decks that have a lot of unblockable creatures or just go really wide and need the resources, this can be a good way to up the pace of the game but make sure you’re still speeding past the competition.
Rating: C, you really only want to play this when you want to see the table erupt in violence or you have a way to reliably make sure you’re getting the most benefit from it. Definitely an S for fun value though.
Dreamstone Hedron
Frankly I’m a little torn on this one. The sacrifice effect is nice when your options are “draw for an answer or lose,” but ideally you don’t really want to be paying effectively 9 mana and losing a big ramp piece to draw some cards. Even ranking up to the other cards on this list, 6 mana for generating three colorless is not particularly great, and realistically the best case for this are decks that specifically want that access to colorless mana, like (fittingly) Eldrazi decks. It’s definitely not the worst card in the world if you’re in something like Mono-Blue that just doesn’t have the means to ramp lots of mana reliably outside of artifacts, but it’s not the first one I’d reach for.
Rating: I’m going to go with a C, because I do think it’s at least flexible enough that I don’t think I’d bat an eye at seeing this in a good chunk of decks, but I do think it’s pretty readily outclassed by a lot of things here.
Gauntlet of Power
This is really similar to Caged Sun above, but is cheaper, only works for basic lands, and most importantly is symmetrical, meaning this applies to all players. This can be advantageous, especially if you’re in a mono color deck and run a lot heavier on basics than other players. Things like mono-white decks that can use both the anthem and the ramp can eat pretty well here.
Rating: B, it’s got a narrower use case than Caged Sun due to it working for other players, but at 90% of tables, if you’re playing this in a mono-color deck you’ll really be the only one actually making waves with this, and the extra creature power on board from other players can end up helping you at times.
Gilded Lotus
To me personally, this is really the baseline for cards in this category. 5 mana in, 3 mana out of the color of your choosing. No frills, nothing crazy. Not every deck wants or needs this kind of ramp, but it being available really helps a lot of higher cost archetypes flourish. It suffers the same issues as every other mana generating artifact (relatively fragile, requires more specific interaction that not all colors can access) but also offers a nice up-front return in that you can still use it the turn you play it, basically refunding three of the mana of its cost.
Rating: B, it’s not going to blow you away but when you need mana, it’s not going to let you down.
Meteorite
This card is the all-star of the no-removal meta where you cannot run any removal spells.
In all seriousness this provides lackluster damage and lackluster ramp, and really was just a filler card for the limited environment of this set. It’s real awful.
Rating: D
Prismatic Geoscope
This one’s a bit funky. I’m going to compare this to Gilded Lotus since they have a bit in common and fill a similar role. This enters tapped, which is a ding to it. It taps for any combination of colors though, which is a nice plus for fixing. The catch of requiring a variety of basic land types is what really sets this apart, and it’s a bit weird because it effectively scales two different directions in terms of deckbuilding. Assuming you’re playing this towards it’s main use-case of a 5 color deck, it becomes better the more basic lands you run, or it becomes better the more dual lands you run that have basic land types, many of which are often more expensive options. Basically, it will best serve you with either a really cheap or really expensive mana base, which is quite a funny situation to be in. While the number of cards with basic land typing has gone up a lot over the past few years, I still think comparing this to other cards on this list makes it reserved to specific 4-5 color decks that already have a manabase that can accommodate it, since it realistically wants to hit that 4 land count to start to outpace some of these other options.
Rating: C, it’s honestly pretty solid if you build around it but you definitely need to consider your mana base as a whole when you want to run this card.
Pyromancer’s Goggles
It’s hard to rate this card purely as a ramp spell, because as a technicality it only ramps you one mana, but in practice you’re getting a full extra spell’s worth of value by copying something with that one mana. Obviously it’s pretty niche since it’s tied to one color and only specific archetypes within that color, but getting to copy spells readily and reliably can be really strong, and I often find this card is just subtle enough to fly under the radar until you start throwing really scary threats.
Rating: B, it’s much more niche than many of the options here, but in Red spell based strategies this card can really make it’s value back in spades and effectively double down on some of the scariest cards in your deck.
The Great Henge
If you’ve ever played against this card, you probably know what you’re about to read. This pretty much just does everything. Solid mana ramp, incremental lifegain, increases board presence with counters, draws cards. The cost is deceptive because it usually really will get cast when you can reduce it down to the 2-4 mana range, making it way more efficient than it reads on the topline. I think this card is honestly pretty broken, and if you’re in any strategy with green and creatures, you’re hard pressed to find a reason not to run this. Basically the only pitfall I can think of is that it’s an artifact in a color that doesn’t have much synergy with artifacts, but that’s pretty moot when it works so well on its own.
Rating: S, it’s pretty much only restricted by a really high physical card price and availability.
The Mightstone and Weakstone
The Magical Pop-Rocks are a bit of a funky card, sacrificing a bit of raw ramp power for an actually solid enter the battlefield effect tied to it. We’re going to ignore the meld part for now as the majority of decks won’t really be interacting with that aspect of the card, but it’s cool to have the option there and melding cards is neat.
The actual ramp part of this card is pretty lackluster, making only two colorless that’s tied to only being used for artifacts and paying ability costs. The real benefit here is that it does a lot of things on one card – it can draw cards, which makes this feel like much less of a mana sink for ramping, or it can use a nice stat-deteriorating removal spell that can deal with pesky indestructible creatures. Like most strong ETB effects, being able to recycle this by playing it from your graveyard or blinking it will yield the best results, but even as is it ends up not being a bad package. I think you still won’t really play this outside of artifact decks, but you could do much worse for a generally safe utility card.
Rating: C, it’s held back by the mana being needed for artifacts but it can do some work in the right place.
Throne of Eldraine
This card is specifically just nasty for mono-color; it does what it says on the tin. It makes a stupid amount of mana for the rate and provides re-usable card draw that literally has no downside if you’re only making mana of one color to begin with. I think this card is good enough that even two color decks that skew towards one color can get away with using this to good ends as well.
Rating: A, it’s good to see payoffs for playing mono-color decks and I’m definitely a bit biased here as someone who plays a lot of those, but it’s a really good piece to have on hand.
Timeless Lotus
This has exactly one use case, but it’s real good there. It makes a lot of mana for five color decks, and five color decks often need a lot of mana. It can help fix your colors easily, and has a really crazy rate; putting five mana in to get five out with no strings attached is great, with the only downside of entering tapped.
Rating: A, unless you’re really tuning a fast five color deck it’s always going to be a solid inclusion there.
Tome of the Guildpact
It’s hard to rank this as a ramp spell since it’s effectively more of a draw spell that happens to have a bit of ramp tied to it as a treat. You need to have a lot of multicolored spells to make this work to begin with, but if you can net 3+ cards with it, it ends up actually being a decent rate.
Rating: In terms of pure mana ramp? D, it’s not really going to actually help in that department, it’s just an added bonus. As a whole package? Probably a C, although I think it’s quite low down on the list as many people would often just rather run a separate good card draw spell and good ramp spell rather than have both tied together in a package that has to cut corners.
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.
