The Ultimate Guide to Lands | The Command Zone 455 | Magic: The Gathering Commander EDH

Since the beginning of

magic

, a player's power has always derived from one place, the most precious resource that fuels all spells, the land, but as the game evolved, the

lands

have followed suit and today There is nothing basic about building a mana base, utility

lands

, mdfc channel lands, and more, the options can seem almost endless, even overwhelming, but choose wisely because, while your lands can be the foundation upon which you build your victory, a weak mana base will inevitably lead to the collapse of your empire. Today we go beyond the mountains and the plans of old maps.

A walk through the all-too-often overlooked part of your deck can be dangerous, but fear not, this is the

ultimate

guide

to the lands, Greetings, Humans, You have entered the

command

zone

, your destination for all things ancient mountain dragon, enjoy your stay, how is it? Welcome everyone back to another episode of the Command Zone podcast. I'm your host, Josh Lee Kwai, and I'm Jordan Pridgen. I'm one of the writers here at Command Zone. Jordan and Avid Commander Player replace Jimmy today and us. We're talking about something that's like 30 to 40 of your deck and it's definitely something that's not talked about much.

I would say 90 to 95 percent of our episodes are not about what 30 to 40 of your deck is. It seems like we should definitely spend more time. So we're going to do this episode, which is the

ultimate

guide

to landing, and then we'll probably get back to talking about the other cars on our platform after this episode, yeah, sure, but then this will be here, yeah, exactly. For everyone, I mean, there are so many questions when you're building your land base that you know it's really a lot to cover. How many lands should you put in your deck to start?

What color should they be? How many touch lands? Can you afford to run how many utility lands or which colorless lands? What about lands that are sometimes spells like mdfcs channels? A lot more of those recently too like every set coming out and there's more so it's a big question yeah so we're. We're going to cover all of that stuff, but first we have to talk about the

command

from our sponsors channelfireball.com, that's the place to go if you want to order all of these cool lands for your decks. They have a whole new market, there are a lot of suppliers.

They're all licensed, uh, businesses, LG is competing for your business. The streets of New Capenna are right around the corner, man, and I like the trioms and the things they ruined. I mean, I'm going to want a lot of those, yeah, wins that we're going to achieve. I mentioned several times during this episode if you want the old ones or the streets of the new kapena, then the channel firewall market is the place to go to get all your

magic

products, singles, anything, you're a magic player. If you're going to order magic cards anyway, you can also use our affiliate link when you order channelfireball.com and you'll simultaneously support the content you enjoy and of course you can also enter the code command at checkout at in case you forget to use the affiliate link and then of course since you have cards and you know you're going to want accessories for those cards, the place you're going to want to go is ultra professional, they have the highest quality accessories. we use them for all of our stuff and they're gonna get some stuff like all the stuff with the sweet new nuclear art that's coming out so you know you want to keep an eye out for that you know get some of their sweet boxes. mats, sleeves, whatever you want, yes I really enjoyed it, they have released something recently which is eclipse dice, oh yeah what are these dice packs and they are very clean dice, really good for spell table play, really good for uh. game content because it's very easy to say I like fancy dice, but sometimes they can be a little busy and it can be like a two or three on that, actually yeah, you want one that you can read immediately at the table, yeah, professional soldier. does the best things to protect your stuff and decorate your battlefield and then of course the final way to support all of our content is directly if you go to the patreon.com command

zone

we have a ton of stuff going on. our patreon, in fact, we'll probably talk more about it at the end of this episode, but I just want to say that the game night auditions are happening right now, so if you've ever dreamed of being knighted and being on the show with Jimmy and I we showed off your

commander

skills going for Commander Glorians in front of millions.

Well, now there's a chance you won't be able to audition to be on the show. There are some rules and requirements. There will be a link in the show notes that you will need to follow. To figure that out, one of the requirements is that you have to be a patron of our content to be able to enter, but you can be a patron at any level, so yeah, that's exciting. I love the fan episodes every year so please audition for that and Another bonus is that we shout out one lucky patron each episode and this episode is dedicated to Greg Taylor.

Greg, you're great too because you have a very easy name to say, so yeah, when I saw Greg Taylor I thought, Yeah, I can do this one. sometimes it's like I'm not sure, one thing I want to say real quick before we get to the main topic is that we have another episode of Command Zone Live in case you missed the one we did a couple of weeks ago when you're watching this, it was very funny, we had a lot of people in the chat, a lot of people liked being able to come in, uh, interject while we were, you were there, I had to be in the chat, so I mean, I was sitting here in the offices. while they were doing it, but it was still fun to be in the chat, everyone asking questions, throwing things around, yeah, a lot of our team were in the chat and then the chat was able to do it while we were discussing the main topic.

I know it brings up good points that we could bring up during the show and actually interact with us in real time, so if that sounds like fun to you, because we just released the episode as a video on demand on our channel, if that sounds like it. good for you and you want to go to the next one it will be on April 20th and again those links will be in the show notes on how to attend and where you are going so you can see it yeah come join it will be a ton of fun okay the main topic land on edh, the definitive guide.

I mean, lands are probably the most important part of making your deck run better and be more efficient. Oh yes, yes, they are the key to making sure you can stay on top of the game and pitch. your spells in time, but they also do a lot more than just provide mana, balancing how many lands you need and what colors and how many you can afford to play that only produce colorless versus wanting to have some lands that provide utility but don't want to slow down with tap lands, I mean, this is all a lot to think about, yes, and it's an important skill to understand because I would say that if you don't master it, it trips you up a lot more than you realize and so improving can come a lot from just understanding how this mana base that your entire deck is built around, simply making it better, not just in a single deck, but in all of them, yes, if you can increase your skill or talent to create a mana base it will improve all your decks, not just a better one.

This is something you can use for every deck you currently have and every deck you build from now on, it's a really important skill. The biggest question we get asked this all the time by Jordan and people you know is how many lands should I run in my

commander

deck, which is deceptively hard to answer, sometimes it's like all the questions you get asked , the real answer. It depends, but also in our program we're always conscious of giving people real, practical answers, so we don't just say it depends, we give you some numbers and we break them down so this first question can be broken down and we did a lot. of math to figure out what it was, but the first step I took in putting this outline together was just looking at the decks that Jimmy and I have been building for game nights and stuff recently, yeah, because I don't think it's very helpful to go back five years. and looking at the decks because the format of the games did change a lot and we've been talking about that throughout the show, how it's more like two minutes and it speeds up a little bit and things like that.

Over the last few years, you know, when I've looked at decks and not like a direct breakdown of data, but just looking at it and feeling it, Jimmy and my decks generally average between 33 and 37 lanes in the old one. We used to say that people should run between 37 and 38 lands and we've definitely dropped that a bit in certain decks and we're going to talk about the reasons why, but those numbers 33 to 37 are pretty true for everyone. our decks over the last two years, I know I used to run like 38, but I tend to run like 36 in my, but you know it really depends on the deck, yeah, but if you're asking in general how many lands should I run in my deck that's probably the range you're in most of the time, not that some decks aren't outside of that, but those are the outliers right now, yeah it's still a pretty big range from 33 to 70 37 like that's a difference 20 or something like that. right, and that's a pretty big difference, like 18 different, sorry, yeah, yeah, so think about it this way and we did a breakdown, yeah, we did some math on this, uh, that's fun, so yeah, if you have 37 lands. your deck, what is the percentage chance that you have three to four correct lands in your starting hand, which is ideal?

Generally you keep a hand that has three to four, if it's two, if it's more or less, you're going to mulligan. Yeah, generally you don't want one or two lands and you don't want six or seven lands or five is like on the edge, but I think generally five lanes and two spells you don't want to keep that hand, so we did it. some calculations and in your seven land hand, the chance of getting three to four lands is uh, in a 37 land deck it's 45.89 percent of getting a good hand, so it's three to four lands, yeah now we should say there's a couple of caveats that we assume you only have one commander you have no companions so there are 99 cards in your deck no companions either um 46 let's say the probability of your starting hands getting three or four lands exactly, not two or five, that's below 50 percent, yeah, not as high as I would honestly think. no, and this is also like we said, it is counted when you get five lands and you can still keep the hand, maybe so you will have to make some decisions on your own, but if we take mulligans into account, what right do you get? a mulligan and a free commander, then you actually have a 70.72 chance of getting two or three lands, so that's pretty good, yeah, three or four lands, yeah, I'm kidding, yeah, you have a 70, huh, basically you have a 71 chance of getting three or four. lanes like right in the sweet spot, yeah, so with the mulligan, assuming you know the one again, you have the only chance to get the three or four lands on that first hand and then, because you can start to get a second chance that average We have a 71 percent chance, yes, of having a good starting hand, which we are going to determine or we are going to classify as getting three or four lands so that it is completely clear once you have drawn your first hand and go.

To mulligan your hand, your chances have been significantly reduced to 46, because if you reshuffle all those cards it's the same as if you were drawing your first hand, but since you have two chances in total, it kind of increases your overall chances. now. That's three to four lands in your starting hands, but I'm also worried about continuing to hit my land drops correctly so you can get started. You can have 20 lands in your mulligan deck until you find a hand that has three, but then if you only have 17 lands left in your deck, so your chances of drawing the fourth before your fourth turn decrease, so my question is With 37 lands in the deck, assuming we start with three lands, it's hard to imagine people. um, starting with a hand that doesn't have three lenses, sometimes two is fine, but you know most of the time you want three and you're going to mulligan until you get that, so imagine now you've already done your mulligans and found that hand out of three lands, what are my chances of getting my fourth and fifth lands if I have 37 lands in my deck?

So to get that fourth and fifth land, you basically need to draw two lands in your first five draws of the game. Yeah, we also put it into a hypergeometric calculator and figured out a few things and with 37 lands your chances are 61 61.4 of basically getting two lands in the first five draws, so I mean it's not a hundred, no, not yet. many chances of running into a man, even when you have 37 lands for me, calculating these numbers made me go, I shouldrun more lands yeah I might need more of my lands well the interesting thing was this was the high end of the range that Jimmy and I had in our decks if you go to the low end of the range and obviously we're not going to do this for everyone them, but if you say okay, what about decks where I have 33 lands?

What do those percentages look like? And this is what it looks like if you have 33 lands in your deck, your probability of getting a starting hand with three or four lands is 39 38.99, so there are 39 chances, so you've lost about seven percent, which is great. knowing four less lands in your deck and then with the mulligan you have 63.78, so about 64 to get three lands in your starting hand and that means that in more than a third of the games you won't be able to achieve that with your mulligan , Yeah. So if you have 33 lands in your deck, a third of the games you'll have a starting hand that has two lanes, probably, or maybe I guess it could be five, six or seven, but it's sure less likely, okay and then the same question assuming you find that starting hand with mulligans. that starts with three lands and that's what's my chance of getting my fourth and fifth lands in time from there because remember if you have three starting lands in your starting hand, now you only have 30 left in the deck, yeah. instead of the 37 lands, which if you start with three, there are 34 left in the deck, so your chance of reaching your fourth and fifth lands in time with 33 lands in your deck, two points is one percent fifty-three per one hundred and fifty-three, yeah, which feels like a little bit low, but 33 lands, I think it's not unexpected that we feel that way, no, and here's another thing that I added that I think is important to think about and We've been talking about what the ground base has been like. going down and I think more and more often two lands might be an acceptable starting hand and if at 37, if two lands is an acceptable starting hand, let's say you have a lot of two men on a ramp or something like that, uh, the rate with The amount you get a good hand with a mulligan actually increases to 93.67 percent, so 37 lands make it a very good chance that you'll start with at least two right, so not necessarily three if you have all the stamps and stuff, and that's what you're like aiming for a ramp, you know you could probably get two, but I know I don't tend to feel good about my hands unless they have three, because your chances of hitting your third, fourth and fifth lands decrease in time if just starting with two is much lower, of course there are factors that when we talk about this later will help you if you have a lot of cards to draw then you will have a better chance of finding those lands but still , 37 to 33 actually. range, there are big differences between the two, as you can see, I wanted to talk real quick before I get much deeper into the variants because it's easy to play a hand from a deck and, well, I got three lands the first time and I had a chance to make that, you know, 46, but it seems like it worked and therefore it's okay, whereas variance is how you evaluate that over the course of many, many, many, many games that will tend toward the average, yeah, like that than anyone. or two blips on the radar shouldn't really change the way you think about this, but rather notice a pattern over time and people have a kind of fallacy that they tend to attribute things to chance more than they really do. they should.

So if you've been having problems, you should assume that you need to fix the variance yourself, you should change the way you're doing it instead of just assuming that the deck always plays against you, so land counts as factors. consider this and this is how you determine if you're going to be closer to 33 or closer to 37 uh there's a lot of things that I would think that would help push me towards one or the other so if I have a lot of ramp of cmc low, you already alluded to this value of two mana or less, um, I would say, and that this is not a rule, but that's how I think about it, for sure because for years we have been adopting this philosophy of you should have 10 ramps, 10 cards to draw, you know, blah blah blah blah, we updated our template recently and were recommending more ramps than we used to, but I think 10 ramps doesn't change how many lands I still want. 37 or so, sure, but every ramp piece I have, you know, has a low cmc after 10, I'll probably think about cutting a land, so if I have 15 ramp spells, then I could go to 33 34.

Maybe don't be one by one, maybe it's like every other dash spell, like I take one, land and I generally won't go below 33, but more ramp and we tend to play more ramp means I can afford to play a little less land because then you have those two mana. ramp that you can play with the two lanes that you have and it will make up for it at least a little, it will give you a little more time to draw the next card, the next land that you need to land, yes, exactly and You know the decks will have 10 cards draw like we've talked about, so it'll be a good opportunity to find those extra lands and still hit my land drop at some point, but I won't feel too far behind because I'd probably have hit a couple of ramps if I hadn't hit enough land or something yeah another thing I would think about is the number of colors in my deck so generally the more colors I have in my deck the more I want more lands in my deck because you just don't have so many opportunities, let's say your four colors, I can't, I don't think I want to play a four color deck that has 33 lands because the failed case of not getting just the lane you need that opens up in blue for you or something, it's much higher, yes, and that could be turned off as a major part of my deck, so I'm more likely to want to run more lands in decks that have more colors, yes, whereas if I'm monocolored, 33 lands may feel much better because whatever it is, as long as I have some lands, sure I can play my spells, but in a deck with a lot of colors it's not just that I need some lands.

I need you to know that the lands also have the correct colors, yes, so I would prefer to have a few more to have a better chance of, like you said, having blue there or something. I also like to think. about what my fixation colors are and this is mostly when you think about green because green is like the fixation color definitely the most common so you might do it often or maybe not often because green is so incredible that it doesn't tend to be. in this position, but you may have a three or four color deck and green is one of those colors and green is not the dominant color in that deck, maybe you know that it is mainly blue and red and there is a little bit of green there. but green provides your ramp and you're fixing it, which means you usually want to have access to green early in the game and green can unlock those other two colors for you with your ramp and your brute stuff and stuff, so you could I think I want a little more green land on those decks and maybe I can reduce the land count a little on the other two because most of my ramp is green.

That makes sense? Yeah, another thing that could make you lower your land count is just having a lot of cheap card draws, especially up front, well I was just going to say because these tricks and stuff, especially the early ones, just let you see more cards early on. , so all the numbers we were talking about are obtained. changed if instead of looking you know five cards in the first five turns you are looking at nine cards, yes you have a much better chance of finding light there and if you imagine a deck with 33 lands and there will be 66 spells and imagine that each of those spells It's just a blue card draw spell.

Yes, what's going to happen? You are going to play on an island. You're going to cast that spell. You are going to draw a card. whether it's an island or the card that draws your card, yeah, and then every time it's an island it's going to get stuck in your hand and what you're going to end up with is just seven lands in your hand or six lands depending on what turn it is or whatever and also travel tends to clutter up lands in your hand because you can only cast or play them at a certain speed and then there's just a jam of lands ending up in your hands so if you have a lot of canned trophy type spells or maybe you have the excitement of possibilities of unfaithfully looting that kind of thing and I think it's important to specify that we're talking about some kind of cheap card draw because I always want to have raw cards, but cheap card draw is something that really You can end up inundated with lands if you have too many, and of course you can't like it if you missed your fourth land drop if you find it on turn six.

Yeah, you can't go back in time and play it on turn four, so it cost you that, so you need to find things in time, yeah, and so you know it's your fourth, fifth, and sixth lands that are in danger when keep an opening hand of three lands because you still have to find them, so yeah, looting, you know, the smuggler's helicopter, would count in the would-like-a-lot category, I don't think just having one or two of these would make it change my land count, but if I look at my deck and it already wants to do that kind of thing, it will shake up a lot of my deck for whatever other strategy I use, there are 20 to 25 cards that do that, so I'd be fine, this deck can afford to have less lands because I'm just going to look at more cards from my deck and the lands will naturally end up stuck in my hand anyway, yeah, and then on the other end because I think mainly from what we just Talk about reasons to remove lands from your deck and this is kind of the exception, but there are some reasons to run more than 37 lands in your deck and generally that's when you're running a strategy. that's focused on lands, so a land synergy deck uh, and I've had land decks that have up to 45 lanes, oh yeah, but because I mean sometimes, like you're playing a landing deck and you want to get it . every turn and maybe even more if you have cards that allow you to make three or four land casts per turn, as if you never want to get into a situation where you have no lands in your hands running your lotus cobra and your tireless trackers so that you like them. it keeps triggering and if in normal decks, if you draw, it lands in places where you want spells, they don't do anything in your deck, you're like, I'm okay with that because it's going to cascade into other triggers that go to You know, do tokens or you know if you have a Lord Wing Grace deck you can immediately discard those lands and turn them into more card draws so you never have too many yeah so in general I think those decks like to lean on playing a lot. more lands and just being like I'm never going to miss my land giveaway because my lands count as spells, uh, because of my synergies and so that's going to be one of my advantages in this game.

Well, I want to talk about two common mistakes that we see from players and number one is too few lands, you rarely run into the player, in fact, off the top of my head, I can't think of running into a player. that they are naturally managing too much land, it is because they are not glamorous. Right when you start, the lands don't look fun, sure, sure, no, but no one really plays magic to be like they want to release a dragon and attack you with it. Nobody's like they want to put a plane on the line.

Yes this. the mountain is going to take you down, yeah, you think I want to get this with this and then they're going to combine like that and lands are very rarely included in the excitement of the game, so overall as a player. especially if you're new, you almost always will be if you're on one side of this, too few lands, you need more lands. I know, several times I had a friend come into Commander and show me his deck. and they say: I don't know, it just hasn't worked well. I think you have 30 lands on this day yeah you need seven more yeah common mistake number two is cutting lands slowly over time and we. everyone does this it's very difficult not to fall for this it's insidious because new cards come out jessica's will comes out delty voidwalker and you say that that has to go in this deck and then you place your deck and you have Jessica's wheel on one side and you're looking at your deck and you like every card of your day, yeah, you're like it's in your deck and you've played this deck maybe a lot and it's already been fine-tuned and you're looking at every card and you're like, I like this.

I like this every time I drive this. I'm happy. I like this. And you go through the whole deck and you say, "I can't understand anything and you know what's a lot easier than picking a card to cut, killing one of your babies there, it's just getting rid of a land, yeah, and a lot of times you think that this deck works without a problem. I've never done it. I had a problem with Lance, so I can probably afford to take out this mountain and put in Jessica's will and it will be fine and the funny thing is that because of the variation, it often doesn't lands more or less, it's hard to tell.

The difference is that in video and film production there is something that you probably know, and that is that if the sound is not synchronized with the video in aframe, it's not really possible to know correctly. I just can't understand it now, two frames. you start to notice it, it's hard to tell if it's a header behind, but you know the sound is off so you're actually two frames away, double what you were when the first problem occurred and I think this is similar like if you cut a land, what's the kind of thing that, if in this movie, the sound decreases one frame every minute, like 20 minutes, you notice, it's going to be like, yeah, it's going to be like an old kung fu movie, yeah , exactly.

Oh, so you want to mess with me, uh, if you are, if you're just listening, that didn't make any sense, but anyway it was basically a reference, uh, yeah, so this is something that I think we've all been. guilty of that is putting in a new card putting in a new card putting in a new card over the course of a year or so, suddenly your 37 lands are reduced to 34. and that's the point where you say, yeah, it just goes away. feels a little clumsy or maybe you're starting to notice it, but your brain probably doesn't like to sound the alarm saying yeah, you drew lands, it's like I don't know, let me see all the spells in the deck, yeah, yeah, HE.

Consciously, I would say try not to cut lands from your deck if it seems like it, if you think it always runs smoothly, you've never had problems with lands, that's a sign that you should keep the same amount of lands in that deck , yeah, you're not going to get swamped, they're not going to screw you if you want, yeah, don't mess with that, okay, we recommend it and this is kind of a general thing and again I look at Jimmy and my game decks. nights for the last few years 50 total mana sources in your deck if you combine lands and ramp, this is higher than it used to be.

I think we wanted to have about 47 or so and we've added two or three. ramp spells, yes to this equation, but if you have 20 ramp spells and that's what a lot of cdh decks look like without 30 lands, 20 ramp spells because they have all that fast mana and they just box it in, yeah, exactly, and I think I know that even casually you want to be, maybe you're not running the moxes on super fast mana, but in general, even if you have some that you know, farm and Kodama reaches and stuff, I think you still know that maybe I have I have 35 lands and I have 15 ramp spells and I think that that will still make sure that your deck runs smoothly and feels good, yeah, and I mean again, this is like a little guide.

I know I have decks that have like 37 lands and like 12 ramp spells, which is close, like 49, yeah, and I think you could be a little bit above, a little bit below, but you want to be in that range, I don't think You want to combine those two things together. and be like it's 41. yeah yeah that's way off, well one thing here that's important is that when we say lands, we're not talking about lands that don't always produce mana. I know the labyrinth is like the one I've done for a long time. I almost forgot that it didn't generate mana and put it in my deck and count it like one of my lamps puts it in the dirt pile when you're laying it all out. true, and then when you draw it at first you think this is not a three land hand, yes this is a two, there is a fifth in this, yes, it will cast anything, yes, meizovith is a removal spell , it's interaction when you're breaking up. in your deck it's not a land because it doesn't tap for mana, so you can't count it in the land category of your deck to be outside of that number 50, even like cabal chests.

The Kabbalah chests are interesting, I wouldn't count it. as a land in my deck, but I would count it as a ramp spell in my deck. Sometimes I'm willing to count it as a mono black land if I'm so sure I'm going to have all the swamps, but that's what I said I have a mono black deck and I've had a couple of games where I have two swamps, two black utility lands and my cabal coffers sitting there just being useless yeah because it won't create any endowment you need at least three swamps before you are it counts as a land really true or you need an urborg obviously so yeah I normally count it as a ramp spell, so it's part of my mana package, but it's not a land in my deck, so yeah, it's fine.

Now that you know what or sorry, now that you know how many lands you might want in the deck, the next question is what lands do I want in my deck, so the first thing we're going to talk about here is how to determine your color distribution so that the first step in determining you know which lands you want to run and how many, or is it also involved in how many, surely you know what the percentage of spells of each color is in my deck and in general. you want your lands to produce mana at similar percentages to the colors of the spells in your deck, so this is where you want to use deck building websites like moxfield tapped, i know, tapped like it just gives you a little pie chart and inside or outside, remember which one is which will tell you the percentage of colors in the deck and then the other will tell you the percentage of the amount of mana produced by your lands in the deck so you can easily look. in the deck and I say, "Okay, you know, in my deck I have, let's say, red and green, and you know, if I remove all the lands, I just look at my spells, you know, 62 of my spells are green, 38 of my spells are." red, this is a rare deck that doesn't have colorless spells and you might be able to say okay, if I'm going to have 36 lands in this deck, then I need 22 forests and 14 mountains, that's the same thing, 62 forests and 38 mountains , TRUE?

And I think that's obviously a simplistic example, but that's the first step to figuring out that could be a really good place, like if you're building your mana base, just setting up those basic layouts can be a really good place to start. true, but obviously it's not always that simple so there are factors to consider when determining your color distribution and it's not always just about your spells, it's also about things like your mana curve and how your color distribution is distributed to along your curve, so let's say in the same example red and green deck 62 green 38 red but I look at my mana curve and notice that half of my red spells are one, two and three drops, which probably means I want more red mana than you would otherwise want. because I know I want that red mana at the beginning of the game and not later, all my important things are green, right, so I want to make sure that at the beginning of the game I draw red, in that case, instead of 22 forces and 14 mountains , you already know. maybe you'll just look at it and say, oh, I want 16 mountains and 24 or 17 mountains and 19 for something in that range because I know a lot of my early works are in red and I want to make sure that I've read in my initial hands and this goes What you were talking about before, sometimes there's a little bit more green because your first few ramp spells are green, yeah, it's very similar to that, just knowing where on your curve you're going to want to play these things, you can take in consideration activated abilities on your commander, so Chatter Fang is one that wants a green card but wants black mana to activate its abilities and is an ability that you may want to activate a couple of times on a turn so you can have a little more black , even if the black is just, you know, 30 of that deck, yeah, just to know that I can specifically produce a black guy, it triggers that ability sometimes.

Kenrith is another really good example because I mean he can. he uses all five colors and has stuff, but if you're building him specifically as a reanimator deck, even if black creatures don't make up a big part of your deck, you're always going to want to access his black reanimator ability, so you're going to want to put a little more on that, yeah, because you might want to cast a black spell and activate that ability or activate that ability twice later in the game and if your deck doesn't have a ton of black mana that it can create. then you may not even be able to activate your key core strategy that you are looking for, yes kykar is something I was thinking about and this looks different because with kykar you can sacrifice spirits to create red. safe mana, so I might slightly skew my deck with less red more towards the other colors or less, you know, in conjunction with the percentage of my spells because I know that I have this additional source of red mana if I need it if I'm in an In In case of emergency, I can create red mana that way, while I can't create white or blue that way, so that's something I would think about and then another thing I would consider about color distribution is if you have cards in your deck with something crazy. mana demand, yeah, like four black or something like forexian obliterator, right, something like that, yeah, that's black, black, black, right, like you can't even run that in a five-color deck, I probably mean which is difficult in a three-color deck, yes, because what's your turn?

You'll be on before you have four black mana, specifically two black and two colorless, sure, maybe, but four black is a lot, so you're in a mono black deck, a two-color deck, and even a two-mana deck. colors you are starting. to be like well maybe I play this on turn six sometimes I use really hard stuff like my zaksara deck because zexara produces two mana of any color so that takes care of that but you need something to make it possible yeah I have done. it definitely cuts cards and decks uh a lot of times just because they have hard casting costs or because sure there are abilities too and there's like a fang chatter where something has fire breathing or something like that that costs red mana to give it extra power and you're just looking at it , it's like if it were a deck of four or three colors, what am I going to have two, three, red men on the table?

It's just not worth taking that ability off the card, it's still good, I probably won't cut it, you know? even if bolo is still true, it's black, black, black, so it can be a very powerful card, but there are decks where I think it doesn't matter how powerful it is if you're not likely to be able to cast it. until very late in the game, yeah, a card you can't cast isn't powerful at all. The next section is that more colors are equal, the more complicated, so as you add colors to your deck, the color percentage distribution philosophy can start to break down.

Below, imagine you have a deck of four or five colors, this happens all the time, right, and it's a five-color deck, it has all five colors, but you look at the color distribution and you think I only have six white cards in the deck. mallet, yes. this is common because you have an enlightened tutor, an idyllic tutor, you know you only have the best white cards and there are only five or six, yeah, and that would mean that in my deck that has like 36 37 lands you're only supposed to have like three or four planes or three or four lands that create white, especially those that only create white and those percentages could be... working on the same six white cards, four lands that can produce white, but that's a really high variance situation .

To be there, there will be a lot of games where I draw a white card and I just don't have white mana, so it's dead in my hands, and maybe a lot of games where I have white mana, but no. white card to play, which isn't so catastrophic because that white mana can still help me cast my other spells because they presumably have some colorless or generic in their cost, so in those situations I'd like to have more white than I need based on the percentages. otherwise, yeah, that leads to this and we have this concept in the show called overlay because you don't just look at your lands and say I have 36 and then you know 22 forests and what were 14 mountains for?

Is that split that potential layout is actually a really bad mana base, even if complete matches exactly how you need to cast spells and that's because you have all the lands that only touch for one color, but we have a lot of lands in magic that tap for multiple colors a lot of dual lamps a lot of lands that tap for two different colors and then less but still there are lands that tap for three colors and then there are attack lands for five colors you can actually have a land that provides a multi-color source that changes your percentage imagine that same deck 62 percent green spells 38 red spells but my base land is one hundred percent red and green, that would be awesome but suddenly the costs aren't do they matter as much or the colors at the correct cost every land in my deck plays for both red and green and then suddenly every land in my deck is both colors and then I only care if I drew the spear, not I draw the lanes correct color and there are so many dual lands and stuff that it's almost possible to do that for two color decks and it's also not advantageous because we're going to talk about the utility lines of this layer and stuff like that and some lands have disadvantages like You'll have to play Guild Gates and Life Lands if you do that, but you can still mess around with the percentages because your land percentage will add up to more than 100 and I'd say overall I tend to build closer decks. being all will give you all the colors you need that would otherwise, yes, and I think most of thePeople do it because you want to be able to cast your spells and that's why it's more important, 30 of my deck are blue, 30 are green, 30 are red. but 50 of my mana base can produce blue, you know, 40 percent can produce red and 70, can you know how to produce the third color, green?

I don't remember what color it is. It's a much better situation than mountains 22 and 14, yeah, so it's really important. the overlap of this is really important, uh, to think of a way to make your deck buzz more, so in that deck we talked about where there are five colors but only six white cards, it won't cost you as much to have it. know 10 white sources among your lands if you build there because five colors you may have some wins there you may have a triple lane there it will cost you we will talk about the lands that come and are played exploited later and how that costs you, but there ways to do it so they will listen, if I lead that enlightened tutor, it is very likely that he has white manners and not the other way around, with only four white sources, okay, we are just at the tip of the iceberg.

We have a lot more to talk about here about Lance, but first let's take a quick break and listen to a message from our sponsors. Now we return to the underworld cook with asmr anna martica says tina culda auto brought to you only by factor in the food token network oh welcome back food fans look I had a great recipe prepared but then the ingredients for my Beeble Borscht organized a leak and Grizzlebrand ate my fryer. Now I'm hungry, I'm tired and I don't have time to cook. Thanks to Nine Health. I have these factor meals that are ready to eat in just The two minute factor makes it easy for me to eat clean 24/7 with fresh prepared meals, never frozen, they are so delicious you wouldn't believe that in They are actually good for you.

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Not all lands that are utility are colorless, but this is kind of a special category, so utility lands are lands that do something else. provides okay mana um some examples of this some really good ones are kessick wolf run which is a land that taps for colorless mana it also pumps a creature and gives it trample yeah and in some decks that could actually be a win condition, can be very powerful there are things like the academy ruins that allow you to take artifacts from your graveyard and put them back in your deck so you can draw them again there is an arcane beacon that takes hex check off of things of your opponent this is all you are You'll be tempted by that you'll want in your deck when a lot of these feel good I could use this in any deck yeah and you think about the land design philosophy it's like That's okay, this land gives you a closer ability. to what a spell could do and the way they balance each other, they have a disadvantage and the disadvantage is that it doesn't create colored mana, so now you're in that deck that was red and green and if you're not careful, you could have 10 15 lands that only produce colorless and now your percentages again may be out of control because yes you only have mountains and forests, there may be a situation where yes I drew four lands but they were two green and two useful and I can't use them. my red cards, so you just have to be careful with things like that when you're building your decks, so again, more colors generally means you want fewer useful lands.

If you have a five-color deck, it's hard for any of your lands you play to not do it. create color because you are very color intensive and all over the map with your needs, just think about how you look at them in your starting hand and if you want, you don't have any color, but you have three lands that can't be kept. hand and I've definitely built decks where I draw opening hands and very often and they're three colors, but I get like one color plus two utility lands, which makes me realize oh no, this is a problem, yeah, because, oh, I can only cast green. spells but I have, you know, three different colors in my starting hand, yeah, I'm going to draw the other two colors so I can play the rest of my deck, like it's pretty bad if I don't, so I looked at the decks that Jimmy and I had built for game nights again and categorized them by how many colors they were and I could see an obvious indication of roughly how many utility lands, colorless utility lands that we were willing to run into decks based on how many colors they were, like this that if it was a single color deck we often had 10-12 utility lands, yeah I mean you have a lot of freedom in a single color deck because you can run mostly the basics for your color stuff and you'll get your colors because you have a lot of that color there, so you can afford to put a lot of really cool monochromatic lamps, that is, not monochromatic utilitarian lamps that don't produce that color on your terrace, yeah.

It is one of the advantages that I would say of a monocolor deck that few have, but that is one of them. It was a two-color deck. We had between seven and nine useful lands. Often, three-color decks would drop from five to eight and then to five. four and five color decks we were five or so utility lenses, a lot of five color decks if you knew that a utility land maybe two for me in three more decks like they really have to work with the strategy to justify it because you just start to feel it so fast yes you will only have a couple and they are the best you know you are an artifact deck and yes the academy ruins get one of the spots but those spots are coveted because I need my spear for mana because I need many different colors, so a common mistake number three is too many useful lands and you see this a lot with players, especially newer deck builders because it's often hard to realize after the game that the reason why that you lost is because you had too many colorless lands and this can also be insidious.

I've played a lot of games where I get all my colors but I only have one or two colors and a couple of useful lands and so I can't really use my cards the way I want. I may not be able to cast two blue spells in one turn, so I'm forced to follow play patterns that may not be ideal for the situation and then later. game, I lose the game or whatever and it's hard to rewind and go back and really identify that as the reason you lost, yeah, you know, because you were a little tight on the colors, not that people think it's like Oh, I haven't either. my color or not and that's very easy to say like, oh I couldn't cast red spells, I'll get the whole game right, that'll show and I'll fix it so it's not even like that all the time, sometimes it's Well, I never got my second red spell, uh, and I can still play all my red spells, but I could never play two of them in the same turn, yeah, yeah, or I couldn't hold this thing, I couldn't play a red creature and wait for my spell red removal, you have an ability that costs blue and two and you would love to be able to activate it three times, but you only have two blue, yeah that can matter a lot so pay attention to that.

I think a lot of people are running too many utility lands and ultimately it's great if your lands can do things, but yeah, it's better if you can cast your spells well. I think arcane beacon is a great example of one that's like oh it looks like it could be great at anything because sometimes people have a hex check that you want to get rid of, but if you're not a deck that needs to get rid of that hex check probably isn't worth the space. in your tattoo or I run it in that deck because that deck is about removal, but it's not just about removal, maybe I don't want that Another problem with utility lands is that they often come onto the battlefield tapped, so I'm talking about cards like and these are good cards Mr.

Bandit's Hall great card haste something costs some life but comes in a bunch of leveraged mirrors this is a crazy card right you might like branching and cloning stuff oh this is crazy , crazy as to if you just look at him in the vacuum of his power level, yes, you are both wise, you are the original that protects everything that makes your uh, countless cases of sorcery, countless, countless, sorry, uncountable, you can't count them, yes, maybe you can't count them, but that's up to you, um, but this is a big disadvantage, a land that firstly only creates colorless and secondly enters the field of battle turned.

These are double disadvantage lands and that's pretty important. Let's talk about why turned is such a big land. There's a downside here for a second and you can see the design philosophy between how over time they've figured out how to balance these lands, so consider the next Ravnica guild gates returning to Ravnica or the third returning to Raven, do you? how many How many times have we returned to Ravagnin? It's been 15. Like three sets and two too many returns, so the guild gates are the worst tapped lands out there because in exchange for the disadvantage of some lands coming in tapped, you get access.

When you touch it to get a second color, it's like a gruel guild door and you'll touch it to see red and green, but when you touch it, you basically get nothing, yeah, and I think we used to say this like four or five, five , probably six years ago. Now that Gil Gates was okay to run a pair if needed for a budget deck, um, because there were less dual lands, I don't think they're okay anymore unless you're a Gate theme, yeah, if you have something to teach you. raises gates and does things because of gates, sure, yes, but it's not good enough anymore because there have been so many lands, so there are the snow duels that came with Caldheim, do you remember those?

Oh yeah, so these are guild gates, but they're snow lands. So the snow sometimesIt matters and what is much more important to them is that they have types of land, say forest or mountain or whatever, and again you see what the disadvantage of this land is: it comes harvested and they have discovered that being harvested is such a big disadvantage. that not only can we have two other advantages that the guild doors do not have and that are not yet broken. In fact, I still rarely see them on the battlefield, but they make good targets to search for. which we'll talk about later, but also look at the modern horizons artifact dual lands like Dark Moss Bridge and Silver Cliff Bridge, so these are lands that again have two that you tap for two colors of mana. , but they are also artifacts, so they count towards artifacts, they are also indestructible, yes, even bigger, I would say, upward than um, well, it's debatable with the topic of land types, but bigger than the snow, probably, yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't play land destruction, but if you do or if something is just destroying all the permanents or something, you know there's stuff out there and the artifacts are often animated. to attack, then indestructible matters, yes, it can be a big problem, so think that the disadvantage is that they come. in game exploited the advantage is the second color their artifacts are indestructible really good they became much better than a guild door i mean look at the trumps the charms are incredibly pushed when you think about it oh i love trumps yeah the downside is that come into play The nice thing is that you don't get just one extra color, you get two extra colors, they also have cycles, so cycling is cool, so if you know you ever have too many lands, you can swap them out for something else, They also have types of land.

There's actually three types of land on them, so the trumps are, you know, very pushed and then there's utility lands that are tapped lands, so Moswart Bridge is kind of like that, right where all the lands are hidden. Hidden things, I guess it comes, it comes. tapping on it hides a card, but then you have some way to get access to that card, issuing it for free, yes, almost free, you have to pay a little, but a lot less than you would probably pay for the card, otherwise, that's something like that. a big advantage but the disadvantage is that it comes into play tapped, think bojoca swamp, it will get rid of someone's graveyard and the disadvantage is that it comes into play tapped, this is one of the most played lands in the entire format because for good reason.

Yes, because that ability is so powerful. Carfell port is one, I think about it again. from caldheim right where it comes tapped but it has a reanimation spell uh you know it's straight up sack, get a creature card from your graveyard on the battlefield this is an incredibly powerful ability to have a spell on a land like that but coming into play exploited is such a huge disadvantage that they can just put them on carts and honestly you don't see many portal carfells played in Commander as I've seen it a few times, it's playable but I don't. is. like a powerful gryphon is a big cost and i think that alone tells you how big the downside is to something being taken advantage of, um oran reef, the vast forest is another one where you can touch it and add a counter to all the green creatures that come in to the battlefield. this turn that seems incredibly powerful can be huge but you don't see a ton of orange reef vassals get played you do it in puzzles plus one and stacks of counters yeah yeah so why are touch lands so bad, of course, they slow you down and me?

They'll cost you mana if you think about it because you could have been playing an untapped land that turn which gives you one more mana and if that was one more turn like that it all adds up over time yeah so the land you play tapped gives you It effectively costs one mana because it's the opportunity cost of not playing a land that could have come and been played untapped and then especially their poor early play because they ruin your kind of planned play pattern, so we talk about the show all the time. lately on play patterns, you know you want to play that mana rock on turn two, a lin tapped if you have two touch lands and you're opening hands and only three lands total, well you can do it, you can go touch land and then The normal land plays your uh mana rock but then next turn if you didn't draw an untapped land, yeah, instead you have four mana available, you'll only have three and if your commander is uh for cmc, it's orvar or something like that. that you want to get it out as quickly as possible, which delays you a full turn in getting your commander onto the battlefield, which causes your entire strategy to go off track and set you back a full turn, so these tap lines can be very dangerous if you only know how to play without problems. the game and you often feel behind in games where it's strange that you're like it never started, yes, and touch lands can cause that, and they're much worse in the early game, but also sometimes it's pretty bad at the end of the game, I mean, how many times have you had a hand where you're okay, if I draw my sixth land, I'll do something explosive, right, or the austere command will unlock and I can come back to this game?

It's going to be so cool and you draw it and it's a tapped land and you say that's not what I wanted, yeah I mean I wanted to land, this is a bad genius wish, now I have to wait until the next turn and a turn extra is a great deal so they can guide you that way over time, but I wouldn't say that tap lands are something you can't run because we just said that bojukubog is one of the most played lands in the mm-hmm format, so That many people. of people want to have untouched lands in their decks and you see this a lot in cdh of course, which I think is valid, but I think it's probably okay for most decks to have at least a couple of lands that can play touches. because they are very powerful, yes, as long as they are the right ones, yes, I know for me they have to really advance my strategy in some way to be tap lands.

What's up with the jukabog? Do you play it because it's usually more of a hate spell? I have to indulge my strategy, but I would say the jukebox is kind of an exception to that because there's just not enough hate in the graveyard for people to just run in general, so having a piece that can stop a platform marina of whatever you're doing, it's pretty important. I think it's rare that there is a game where your spells allow you to be one hundred percent mana efficient. I'm sure there's usually a twist somewhere, like you know, four, five, six, uh-huh, where depending on how your spells line up, there's going to be mana. or two leftovers that you just can't use and you could definitely get away with having that land tapped and then you get the bonuses, yeah, because if you think about a guild gate, which is the worst of the tapped lands, it's not a good land and we're not saying you should play it, but even at the guild gate next turn, when you untap it, it's just a tiger, well, it's just an underground sea and it's just as powerful from then on as a Dual Earth. it's because it just does the same things, it's just that initial disadvantage and if you're in a situation where all you have are basic concepts available to you or something absolutely, it would open a guild door, yes about all concepts basic, like just help.

My percentage is a little bit lower exactly, it's still better because again a guild door won't hurt your deck if you had 10, it might because you're going to draw so many of them that you'll be behind them all the time, but you can often do that. find that spot to fit in a tap line like a lot of times it's just turn one you don't have a drop you just play and now you straighten it out and you're the same player that played the tiger turn. one if they didn't play well a drop because you didn't have any weight to spend that mana so I would say most decks are probably fine running one to four touch lands, four is a little high as it used to be a lot more used to be say oh, you could probably run like six or seven, but yeah, again, because the games just don't last as many turns as they used to, if you don't go in on turn 14, you end up on turn eight, nine.

I just can't afford to stumble and I mean all of these things are personal preference, but if you have seven tap plans, you're going to start to feel it in games, okay, I'm going to cover this. I'm going to ask you a question because look at jimmy and my decks and we generally have between one and four tap lands in our decks, what would you say is the most common tap land that we play? Well, I'll give you a hint, it's not pajukabog, uh, evolving wildcards, no, that's it. Although it's a pretty good guess, I think I would assume that we played a lot of four and five color decks because I don't think that was good in two and three color decks at the time, probably like myriad landscapes, myriad landscapes, it was because it's Basically a ramp spell, yes the card was a mirrored landscape and it has a double disadvantage: it is tapped to be colorless and comes into play, but since you can count it in the ramp category, yes, and any deck without green wants to sneak in We still played the play a decent amount, I don't know if that's right or not, it's just what we did, I think it makes sense, so let's talk about some lands that it's not clear if they are touch lines. or not so it's kind of interesting because not all lands are as clear as if they enter a battlefield tapped because there is a group that only has to do that like guild gates, yes, but there is somewhere if you meet a requirement, then it will be untapped, so you have to make an assessment, so, the first one is the Havelands, that's what we call them in battle.

Sorry, in the battle for center car things like Cinderglade, steaming, hollow, sinking swamp. They say they enter the battlefield tapped unless you control at least two basic lands, yes I consider those touch lands. I used to not consider those tabs. Yes, now I consider those touch lands. How many basic lands do you think you need to run in a deck before considering them untapped lands? Now these also have advantages. because they have terrain types and you can search for them, I think it depends on how many decks, but I don't know, between eight and ten, yeah, I think between eight and ten basics, I run them like three colors and less, I tend not to run them as much in fours and fives, but because they can recover, they are a little better in a two-color deck, I consider them basically untapped lands, but yeah, like three more, it's starting to get iffy, I still run them sometimes exactly because they are yeah uh recoverable it's mainly going to be in green decks because my green decks are going to ramp up and grow and farm the basics so I'll know the basics and play well what about the show lands?

These are things like Port Town and Game Trail and when you play them, if you reveal certain planes that you know from your hand, they will come into play unexploded. What do you think about the exhibition spear? They are those turned or barrel plants that I consider. those tap plants, yeah, yeah, I think it's the same thing. I guess I have to count how many basics I have in my deck. If I have seven or more, then I would consider it straightened. Yes, there's a good chance you have one of those. um, what's up with the slow lands?

These are the lands that come into play, uh, untapped if you already have at least two or more lands or something, I actually consider those lands untapped, yeah, that's interesting because I mean, if you have three in your hand, then you have at least two other lands, so usually you're the job and as we said at the beginning, you're usually looking for that starting hand that has at least three rails, but sometimes we have to keep it. You have to be careful with those, but I think the downside is that I have a two-lane hand and one of them is a slow land, yeah, it's not that high because then I'm in that situation, I could be with a guild gate, which is unless I have a one drop, I can play it on turn one and the fact that it's tapped doesn't matter, you often see people just play shock lands, uh, tap one, yeah, you're not going to lose two lives if you just don't have a spell.

To pitch, what about Mystic Sanctuary? I consider Mystic Sanctuary a touch land because you need three islands. Three islands are many. Three islands are a lot, even in single-color decks. Sometimes I find it difficult because you want to run the ruins of the academy and a lot. You guys know utility lands in those decks last time I put it in it was a two color land in my Zara renegade recruiter deck and I thought this is basically always going to come into play untapped it basically never comes into play untapped yeah it's very difficult. What about the castle locks at Castle Lochthwain?

You just need a swamp. I consider him straightened. It is too good. Any deck that has at least, you know, more than 10 swamps, probably maybe not in a five-color deck, uh, yeah, I would do it. I don't even play in a five color deck right yeah yeah okay bugbear's den I probably consider it a tapped land because I think it's fun because at 60card formats, like cards called fast lands that are like that, come into play. If you have less than a certain number of lands, those come into play untapped most of the time in Commander, it's pretty much the other way around because after the second turn you'll have more turns than you know or more plays than there are more turns after. from that part of the game where it's a tapped land now, I mean if you really need its utility I could look at running that because it won't mess up your starting hand too much, yeah that's true, and then the bug bear has some combo potential no I'm saying if you run because I think these three cards have a lot of play oh yeah mystic sanctuary is crazy but it still is I think a touch land in most circumstances so the best lands are obviously the that they always enter the battlefield untapped shock lands uh Payne lands yeah, I love the pain lands, the Battlebond lands that are uh we learned that they're reprinting and legends of Commander Baldur's Gate and in Commander if you're playing with more than one person, they're Basically just untyped duels, yeah, so it's a deluxe, sweet, amazing bunch, by the way, when they get reprinted in Commander Legends, Baldur's Kate, buy a bunch of them, their price will go down a lot, but we know they will rise again. they were like and they will never be bad in your life they were like 25 30 more yeah yeah and they probably aren't going to reprint them again for a couple of years so get your hands on them they should just reprint them on the floor in my opinion, but yeah, they just put them in all the commander decks, listen, their mages put them in all the commanders, yeah, they're definitely going to do that now just because we said it, how does that work, well, talk about awesome. lands, let's move on to the next category, which is big and that's fetchlands fetchlands, so let's start with onslaught and zendikar fetchlands because when people say fetchlands this is what they mean and these are the fetchlands of onslaught and zendikar, the original ones, right?

TRUE? They have been constantly reprinted in cruder form. If they had one of the master sets, if they came in untapped, you sacrifice and pay a life and then you can look for non-basic lands that have certain types of lands, so contaminated bases you can too, yeah you can. find the basics too so the polluted delta you can find a swamp you can find an island or you could find a sunken hole or you could find an underground scene or you could find a tropical island and that's the most important thing here this is an important part of why having the guys on the lands is so important and I know sometimes new players will like to say oh I don't understand why you have a blue with this thing that can only search for red and it's like because of the guys on it yeah , so you can and it works very well, retrieve and shake, let's say dueling is his thing, but this will work with triums and it will work like the snowy lands of yeah, uh, of caldheim again works with havlan.

Cinder Glade and stuff like that, but it means that in a four-, five-, or even three-color deck, well, any color deck, but in multi-color decks, if you find any of those Fetchlands, they'll look for whatever color you need. because they are looking for an island land, but any of the island lands that have been paired with any of the other colors can be searched, so oh, I need red, I already have blue, yeah, well, my polluted delta will find steam vents and that. will mean boom I have my red available to me so this is a very powerful combo and I would actually say it's the reason why fetchlands are so expensive and so powerful and so important that people want in their decks and It can be a Uncontroversial in the community, a lot of people don't like them, but the truth of the matter is that they are very, very efficient.

I mean, honestly, it would be nice if, especially, Onslaught and Zendikar Fetchline you could somehow get into the time machine, go back and they never existed. I think that would be totally fine because they make longer games, you have to search your library, make decisions, there are a lot of points where you're just watching someone search and them. I mean what colors am I going to need, I mean, I think that's a big part of why when they started the new pioneer format they just said and recoveries are prohibited, yeah, let's just not mess with that, but the gist of it of the issue They are legal in the format, so we can't deny how good they are.

In the last few years they've created a couple of new quest lands that I'd say are close to auto zenith and mild. fences aren't as good, but they can be included and serve a similar function, so prismatic view, yes, and legendary passage, they both only search for basics, but they can search for any basic and are still pretty good and often, they're untapped, I think there's In the fable passage, I think you have to have more than four lands or whatever, but yeah, but it can still help you get there when you only need one color for a pretty color. intensive, uh, commander, now this is in opposition or you know, it's different.

Fetchlands tapped and this is where we start to get into things that I think become harder to play or less playable, yeah, so this means that either Fetchland itself taps in or Landit go, it goes, it goes, it goes and has to enter. Tap to have the evolved wild card come in untapped, you can stack it on the turn you play it, but the land it finds, which has to be basic, comes tapped, so it's effectively a tapped land, yeah, it's not terrible, it helps you to fix your colors. but it's a buffer yeah, and I would say it's only playable if you have more than four colors, uh, because once you've searched the land and you search it again, it can only be a basic land, you're stuck on that color , so it's It's a little bit worse than a tri-land in a five-color deck in a lot of places because you know you can get the green, but then if you know, you find out in a second that you didn't, it didn't have red either. either clean or draw the red spell you didn't have in your hand a second ago, that's what you locked in the green one, you can't change your mind now, so that's a pretty big disadvantage.

Terramorphic extension is basically the same as evolving. Wild cards, there are the Mirage Slow Fetchlands. I tried playing them in a couple of decks, like when I couldn't afford to go searching or something. You really feel how slow they are compared to normal fetch games, yes this is like a bad river rocky tar pit. now these are similar to Onslaught and Zendikar Fishlands in that they can search for non-basic lands with land types so they can find your Shocklands, your Havelands, Caldheim, Triums, Caldheim Snow Duels, but for example if you find them, use them. They to find a trio suddenly come into play, you straighten them, you straighten them, you touch them to go look for that trump, that trio comes into play, it's horrible, that's the worst, yes, and that's what happens with the slow recoveries from mirages, is that they enter their recovery lines. that they enter the battlefield touched and then if you go for a touch that lands with them, it's the worst thing that's ever happened, yeah, you really want to get shocked or something, and then there are the panoramas that are interesting because the The difference between a panorama is that you can only get three different types of land and you have to get the basics right, so if it's stripes you have to get an island, a plain or a forest because those are the colors of the stripes. , um, and you have to pay one mana to sacrifice it.

It's going to fetch one of those lands and the land comes in tapped, but the panorama itself is tapped for colorless mana, yeah, which, like the evolving wilds, the prismatic view doesn't like these other lands fetchlands. , they do not inherently do not take advantage of another to go. Find a land that does. I used to run panoramas quite often and I think if you're really in need of cards or something, I think they can do the job just fine, but only with all the options that have been printed these days. it's a little hard to justify them, I think it's too much of a disadvantage, yes, because it costs mana and the basics, well that's three disadvantages, it costs mana to loot, it can only find the basics, yes, the land comes into play tapped if you removed maybe any of those then suddenly maybe they would become playable, let's say you could find lands with any type that still cost one, although you would still go in to tap but you could find your trump or whatever and a tap for mana on your own by tapping. on its own it's pretty big because you can make a big difference, yeah, yeah, the turn you played, if you want to do that austere command, that probably solves your problem, um, yeah, very interesting.

I also had a question: do you think there is design? space for recoveries that obtain non-basic land types, but the land they find must enter exploited, so they enter untapped. It's basically the opposite of mirage recoveries, but they find something I don't know. I guess I mean it would be significantly less. powerful than searches, so with trios and this kind of stuff running around it might be okay because it's like drawing and it's like another copy of your trio on your neck. I'm not recommending more fetch hooks because again they take a lot of time, but it feels like putting the thing into play tapped would at least be a little more balanced in some ways, yeah, so I'd say all tap fetchlands and let me know if you agree with Jordan, but Jimmy and I in our decks. tended not to run any of the terramorphic extensions of the evolving wildcards unless we had a lot of colors um we definitely didn't run into the slow recoveries or the panoramas and the only time we could think about them is in two scenarios, one is a lot of landing, yeah, and then you really want to keep things coming and that makes another landing trigger happen, yeah, recovery lines are two landing triggers, right, perfect evolving wildcards enter the battlefield , that's the land that comes in, bring it, you loot it, go look for it. a basic comes on the battlefield which is a land that comes in, so if you have a guy that I retreat from, it's two counters plus one plus one on your entire team or two tutus or whatever, but I mean, a myriad landscapes gives you more, so yeah, that's true, but it comes on tap, so you literally can't, yeah, you can't do it right away, and then I think another thing that people don't think about enough is if you have a lot of graveyard synergies in your deck that care about similar things in your graveyard, so if you have a lot of digs, if you have a treasure cruise and a dig through time in your deck, yeah, the fables passages with prismatic view they look much better and I would definitely like to get as many car loads from sellers as I can afford. put in that deck, um threshold is another one, I play a card called tails and restore quite a bit oh yeah, yeah, there's a three mana creature that taps to untap lands, but if you have at least seven cards in your graveyard, untap three lands and that is. an incredible rate, something that basically creates three mana and often more.

We'll talk about this in a second or things like the death shaman, yeah right, that's a great example. I definitely want a lot of quest lines in my deck to ensure death. true sharma is a mana idiot when i want it to be a gap in the underworld another card sees a lot of play you want the cards in your graveyard to get rid of the escape cost on other cards so if i had a gap in the underworld in my deck, could play a little more of these quest lands, these ones that are a little undecided, I don't think I'll ever be playing as the mirage, slow quests, but evolving wildcards, could fit into a fable passage of Prismatic view again, these are not all cheap cards. but there are situations to play them where it's not about your needs for color and stuff like that, yes, but I've been burned too many times by those slow recoveries, yes, never again, yes, it's a shame, I always wanted them to be good, right?

OK? There is one more category of land that we are going to talk about here and this is the recently spelled lands and it is quite recent. Yes, we have obtained some lands that are simply our spells. I'm not talking about things like the port. from carfell that has a spell type ability but is activated as if you still play that land as a land these are just spells that you don't play never enter the battlefield they are not going to trigger landfall when you use the spell part these are mdfs mdfcs of a strict shelter and which of them, well, the zinda car was just lands and lands on both sides. and then there are the new neon dynasty channels that are functionally the same as the example and sometimes better, often better, and dendegar had the yeah, what am I talking about, yeah, they're the ones with the glass pool imitation, yeah, stuff like that, sure, so let's talk about mdfc double-sided modal cards first.

Now we are not talking about those that are lands on both sides, the roads, of course, these are what we are talking about, the ones that are landsin one. side and then a spell on the other, so the green recovery land on one side comes into play tapped, yeah, but on the other side there's a regrowth spell, right, it's a green sorcery tuner, you get a your cemetery and put it in your hands. it's a huge advantage for the cost we were talking about before going into tapped play i mean it's crazy i run this in literally every green deck right it's so good yeah vala cut wake up this is a card insane, it's the red version of crocodile recovery where on the one hand it's a red earth, on the other hand it's a wheel for you, it rules, it's so good, it's also an instant like yes, it's crazy, agadem's awakening , I lost this card recently, which on one hand is a land that, by the way, can pay life, so it comes untapped, yeah, so it doesn't even have the tap drawback and then the other side is like go back to the battlefield, you know everything you have in your graveyard, which is different cmcs, basically crazy, yeah. um it takes man, obviously, it's expensive, it's very expensive and that's how a lot of these work, but the rise of the dark kingdoms in a tilt, I know it's a little hyperbolic, but still, what if it's in your hand, you can't. afford to cast it, play it as a lane, play it as a lantern, yeah, so my question is: do you count these as lands or spells in your deck?

You know it depends on what role they're playing in the things I normally try to do. count them as lands especially if it's something like agadem's awakening because it can be a land when i need to be a land others like it if i'm running like i run kazul's fury in one of my decks because i want to be able to draw stuff of people and throw them at people, um, but I count that one more as half spell, half land personally, I think one of the reasons why Jimmy and I have run out of lands in the last few years, it will be reduced to 33, which I think being unthinkable for us in 2015 or something is because we are almost always running three to four, maybe even five mdfc, so we really have 38 lanes in the deck, yes, because balague recovery saves you in those moments when you know you roll a two. -land hand, well one of the other cards in the hand is Bollywood recovery, you're good, yeah, play that on turn one, hit your third rail, you know it'll save you and then in situations where you will save again, in situations where you would. you've drawn five lands into your hand, but one of them probably has a good comeback now that it's a four-land hand, so at both the low and high end of that spectrum those cards fit in any slot, the awakening with velcro is very good because if you have too many rails in your hand, but the volume is a valid wake up, sweet, I can get rid of these and I will be fine.

All my decks that don't have a valid cut awakening. Look, I know I should really get a velik awakening and it's almost costless. because you can cut a terrain if necessary, these are one of the cases where it is okay that you are placing a slightly worse terrain, it comes into play, but generally that disadvantage is not as big as the advantage of having Sometimes it can be a spell because you're not going to play it as the land side in every game, so it's not like that exploited disadvantage is something that costs you, you have to pay all the time in a lot of games, you cast it as a spell that has no drawbacks .

I was looking at one of my decks the other day and thought: wait a minute, I only have 32 lanes in this, what am I doing? I look, oh, I have five mdfc, so of course it probably still feels good, yeah. okay let's talk about the canal lands which are the neon dynasty ones this is something like boseju that holds this is the cloud seiju that gets rid of an artifact enchantment um otawaru the towering city is a rebound spell yeah , that's the blue one, right? takanume uh abandoned meyer what's the um get a creature or planeswalker back from your graveyard, yeah these are and these lands come in untapped naturally, which seems like a bug, just like the almost strict upgrades on basic lands, it's pretty crazy now, do you count them as spells or lands in your deck?

I count them as lands because it's almost the other way around. from the mdfc exactly, they are lands that surely give me the spell I want and we must keep in mind that channeling is not casting a spell, no, so in reality most of the time they are better than a more difficult spell to counter, a counterspell will not. counter channel ability on autovaro you need like a disallow to get rid of an ability activation so that's pretty annoying um yeah these channels land and these mdfc I think have fundamentally changed the way you can build decks because you can make your spell count three four five higher than it used to be and if you're not running them in your deck, I almost certainly don't even need to know what your strategy is, you're almost certainly missing something . value, yes, you are leaving a certain amount of efficiency, value and power on the table, yes, and you know these are the best.

I even have decks that work like Malacure Rebirth or some of the others because the cost is so low now, obviously. channel landings are expensive cards now, but a lot of the mdfcs still aren't and even if you don't have the ball again, Alcott awakening recovery, there are probably others because like I said, we're running four to five. in a lot of our decks, which means that not only are we running all the a pluses, but we're also running some of the b-pluses because, again, it's just a question: would you rather have a mountain or a card that's a mountain? basically, but sometimes it also does something else, oh yeah, I mean, if you have enough spells like hall splits, which is a simple thing, just find a spell for yourself, I put in a lot of hall splits, awesome, it's cool, okay , something interesting about these lands of spells.

What I wanted to put a pin in here or mention is that and I've always been a big fan of Bounce Lance because they're pretty good, but wow, their stock is going up and up, these are probably the most underrated. lands in commander right now and i think because of mdfc and channel lands the bounce lines have gotten a lot better as of late, what is this? I mean, I feel like 12 months started to get better when Mystic Sanctuary type stuff was being printed and they're like, oh, it would be nice to be able to play this again, but now I can hardly imagine a board state where I don't have one of these lands. that I wouldn't mind having in my hand again. a spell and also, if you don't have bounce signs in your deck, you're often in a situation where balague recovery is going to get me back, you know my wheel of fortune or is going to get me back as something I'm actually going to do. to change the game and I don't want to play it as a land but if I have two bounce lines in my deck I don't have to worry so much, I will go, play it and with my card I will draw I can even give private lessons for the bounce line if necessary, yes , make like, there are all kinds of things you can do so bounce lands can pick up your land, buy it back and then boom, now I can play on the mdfc side. or I can play, I can channel side of the channel and, you know, sometimes it just turns my bounce line into a removal spell that I just drew correctly, absolutely yes, so people just don't understand that bounce is intrinsically their advantage cards, so a rebound, imagine.

You start, imagine you start, you mulligan and you have to go down to a six land hand, yes, and you have, yes, if you have a bounce line and a normal land, you have three land mana in your hand, but only two cards , so basically you still have seven cards, now it's going to be a little slow because you have to play your land and then the next turn play your bounce lands and then the next one plays your land, but you'll have three guys on the turn three with six cards and they can It will be a little frustrating when you get two to land in your seven card hand because then you think, "Well, if I can't play anything with this, maybe I have to discard something, yeah, so the pattern game with bounce lines" when you have seven in your hand and you have to play them, the second turn is, let's say you have a mountain and a bounce land and seven cards, you draw your card for the turn, you play your mountain on your next turn, you draw your card for one turn.

You play your bounce land, your mountain comes back into your hand and now you have eight cards in it and you have to discard, which is discard can often be great, yeah, you're often like, oh, a dredge card, oh, my anger, oh, something I am. You'll be able to come back later, you know, that's not even always a disadvantage anymore and that little disadvantage is offset by the fact that you're still at card parity because the bounce land you know gives you two mana, um, there you are. You're a little vulnerable because if someone wanted to destroy your land with a miner or whatever it's going to hurt you more than otherwise, it's not like getting rid of one land, it's like getting rid of two wells and people have It's a A little bit of a gut reaction to having to discard cards, but if you're discarding cards because you have eight cards in your hand, that's a good position to be in, I mean, you have a lot of cards, so yeah, yeah, you're good.

Yeah, I like bounce lines too because if you have something that can untap a land, it becomes like a grocery store, it suddenly becomes twice as good as it would be because instead of untapping basically, on the taps to one and yes, suddenly. You'll get double as a giant cure caller. I run him in my deck as Zack Sarah because you know he can untap xr twice, but I also have the bounce lands because they are more ways to take advantage of untap more. Also think white in recent years, the way they have given white ramp is to count how many lands your opponents have, if one of them has more than you then you can put additional lands into play, this is one way to have the same amount of mana. available but there are fewer lands on the table, there are a lot of ancillary benefits to bounce lands and that's why I wanted to give them special consideration by giving them their own little segment of this ultimate land guide because I really think bounce lands are very good .

I'm positioned right now that I want to run a couple of them in all my decks is because I hardly have any decks that don't have bo jukabog, a mystic shrine, uh, there's like we said four or five seasons of mdfc in my decks that I want. one of these channels lands on each platform if I can, so there are usually like seven, eight, and nine good targets for my bounce. Yeah, I feel like they include them in the pre-cons too, they're really cheap so they should be. easy to get, yeah, yeah, okay, so that was our little segment on bounce lands, we're almost done, we're almost done here.

I wanted to bookend this with two things, the first is common mistake number four, which is us. we talk about a lot of great lands, we talk about fetchlands and we have lands and bounce lands and mdfcs and channels and I don't want you to lose sight of this fact the mistake is not enough basic lands run the base in your deck run more basics The concepts basics are better than most lands because they just do their thing and have no drawbacks, so all this land touch, all this, you know, all the shenanigans you want to play are great, but you should probably run more basics on your deck. just make your deck more fluid, all the basics are a problem, but if you get to the point where I admit some of my decks are definitely at the place where you're just executing, no basics, it'll come back to haunt you, yes, in general.

I think it's a situation that's probably not optimal. You want some basics just to smooth it out. Make sure you can find the points you are at. It's okay, I apply the touch just when I need it, but if I have too many. It doesn't work, I play with my colorless land, it doesn't hurt me because the rest creates color, so you need a good balance and part of that balance is basic, yes, that's something I see a lot, and I am. I'm guilty of it too. This is probably the mistake of all the mistakes we've listed that I make the most, which is not having enough basics.

The basics will make your deck run smoothly, so yes, you'll probably want to play more of them first. Come on, I thought it would be fun to go through some specific lands and evaluate what we think about them because there are a lot of corner cases, it's magical, the first one is the temple of the false god. I was really bummed about this card. It's been a long time and I recovered and part of this is because you made arguments in the office for it and then I thought and said, yeah, okay, a lot of people hate this card, this is a land. that plays for two colorless mana, but it doesn't work unless you have at least five lands total, when you can't play it in all decks you need to play it more like a spell, but when you have decks thatthey're going to play in the crops and know the ramp and the gross and stuff just having a lot of land is a bit like having an ancient tomb with no downsides, sometimes I think this could also be that people are evaluating this because a lot of people think it's just horrible and they never play it yeah and I think they've run into too many situations where they have the temple of the false god in their hands and it's their fourth land and they don't have a fifth so it's like they only drew three lands in that game, yes, and I think there are a lot of problems with their deck construction when they are in that situation.

One is, you know, they may not have enough lands in their deck, they may not have a card cut enough. draw in their deck, they may have just kept a bad starting hand, um, we went over the percentages before, I build all my decks and most importantly, when I'm goldfishing it and I'm hitting my land, it drops every turn and if No, I'm fine-tuning the deck to the point where it has tricks, it has looting, it has some kind of mechanism to help me make sure I get lands every turn because I think that's the easiest way to learn how to lose a game.

Yeah, it's just that we played with a friend of ours and he is a really good player and has very powerful cards, but I noticed that he often has fewer lands on the table than everyone else and I think that is a hole in his game . We played a game recently. and he only had two or three lands the whole time and it was a hindrance, yeah, and right near the end of the game, I can often feel like I don't have a chance in this game because everyone else is creating eight turns of mana and I'm creating six and that's the kind of thing that you don't always identify as the reason you're losing games, so yeah, temple to the false god, ironically, I think it's better in green decks, now for sure because Rambo grows and farms and those things.

That's going to ensure that you get to those 5th lanes a lot more than other decks, but even like white decks, you know I often play crucible of worlds with fetchlands and saves and returns to put extra lands into play and just Hey, listen, my deck doesn't go to five lands like most games, so it's not False God Temple's fault, I think it's really good in decks that don't really have a hard cap on how much they can use their mana. I know once I can really set up an engine and if you get more you know if you have enough mana you can keep playing cards I can really use false god temple which is a lot of decks yeah I think it's fun because I think he was overrated at the beginning of the format and then now he's underrated because people hate him so much and he's actually decent, not saying he's amazing, but also in all the pre-cons and probably a lot of people start their pre-cons. travel, play and see, wow, this did nothing, okay, let's move on to the next one, which I know is close to dear heart, which is to remove mine, cut the wasteland, I love to remove mine and the wasteland, I would run one of each and every deck, if I had the option most of the time I just run strip land strip mine yeah because they're not cheap cards I think tectonic edge is getting into a category where I might start playing it because I think it's similar to bounce lands.

The way the lands are progressing and the lands are becoming more and more powerful recently. I want to have the ability to reach out and get rid of some problem lands if guys are left in the crib, of course I want to be able to get rid of them if people are playing things like that. but, but even just bo seiju bulleted recovery um, those are cards that, like I said, people will play and maybe expect to bounce later and, if you know, if you can destroy them before they bounce or whatever I've seen that people get.

The mystic sanctuary loops get set up, oh yeah, a lot of times and I'm like, man, I wish I had to take mine off, yeah, they're hard to keep open now, you want to touch them on fermented things like that, but they can definitely solve problems and a as the lands get more powerful the strip mine gets more powerful right yeah well I think it's fair to say I know we've said this before some people get a little upset about the destruction of the land , but you can operate an open pit mine very fairly on a platform. just as a way to slow down the strategies that really like to go off the track going really hard and there's nothing you can do about it because it's all on dirt yeah I don't think you should be in a situation where you just You can't get rid of an opponent's lands and now destroy everyone's lands.

What I see is that it is frowned upon, that makes sense, but I think you can't be. Hey, listen, you have some guy's crib or a crib. That's ridiculous or safe something like that and I'm just not allowed to touch it ever, that's not fair, yeah, exactly, I should have tools at my disposal to get rid of that. and you know, people shouldn't get mad about that. Uh, what's up with the urza saga? Awesome, fantastic, goes in every deck, really good, do you count it as a land? I do it by itself after a few turns, I don't know, then you get a soul ring, so that's fine and you're fine, yeah, that's it.

It's true and then it has all the advantages that you don't have more land than other people for white things, I count them as a land, although I have thought about counting them more like kabbalah arks, I'm not sure. Well, what about the field of the dead? uh, field of the dead, I don't know, I count it as a utility land, I mean, you need the right card for it, but do you play it a lot? Oh yeah, all the time, so it's an interesting trick. with the field of the dead, if people don't know about it, you should take half of your basics and turn them into snowy lands, oh, so if you have it, then only if you are red and green and you know you have. the normal licks of a mix of utility lands and dual lands, but you finish and say okay, my basics, I have, you know, seven forests and five mountains, then just turn three of the forests and two of the mountains into snow .

So since those will count as at least half of what you know in a three-color deck, then all your basics can basically do everything you need to activate Feel the Dead, yes, or at least contribute to you knowing, yes What about the reliquary tower? reliquary tower much less, yes, lately I used to always do it, but it's like what I said before. I think people have too much of a visceral reaction to discarding cards from their hand. I don't always want to have one like that. you often even end up discarding down to hand size and two, it's not that terrible when you have to do something right, you caught it, you kept your best seven, yeah that's fine, I know people just don't want to have to do it. feels bad to rule it out, but reliquary tower I think there are too many good options right now and like we said you have a limited number of utility lands, tap for colorless that you can put in your deck and I think most of the time it really is the reliquary The tower isn't worth it if it isn't, you have to look at it like Gavin Township or Kessick Wolfe Run or Academy Ruins.

If you were, you're not running Academy Ruins in decks that, unless there are specific artifacts you're interested in recovering, you don't. Don't run Reliquary Tower in decks unless having a lot of cards in your hand is specific to your strategy yet, yes, if your plan in this deck is almost all the time to leave all your mana open and then at the end cast a a huge draw starting tomorrow and having 20 cards in hand to do a crazy turn with a safe locket tower might be what you need so you don't have to discard all that, but it needs to have a place, yes, by default, it doesn't I would put in all of them true, this is interesting, the path lands, these are the lands that like the clear water path or the cliff crown path, where they are a mdfc but they are a monocolor land on each side that goes into unexploded game so you play on the blue side and tap on the blue for the entire game or you play on the red side and tap on the red for the entire game obviously you can bounce it and reset it but most people don't do that.

Do you play with the road spear? I usually play one or two. They're often what ends up getting the cut once I've acquired all the things I really want, especially for three or more colored lands, because then it really gets to the point where you're cool, I needed white this turn. I played white, but on the next turn you needed green, so it doesn't provide green for that kind of thing. I think I still play them most of the time. I don't play them at all. I don't think I have power. playing on one just tried them for a while I think it's very easy to pick the wrong side get mad because they don't they're not recoverable uh you can't get them with rampant growths and stuff like that so I almost always prefer to have a basic land.

I think I'm almost always happy with them in two-color decks, at least because you know you often just need to get that second color and you're in line, okay, filter lands, oh. These lands are interesting. These are lands like Wooded Bastion and Twilight Meyer. We used to see them a lot in the format and now I see them less. These are lands that don't get mana on their own, but if you put in a mana. and tap them, tap for any combination of two colors so you can get two reds, two greens, or one red and one green.

I like them, I don't think I use them all the time, but like I'm generating mana. base and I already have one of the filter lamps for the thing, I will almost definitely put it in. I am the same as with the roads. I don't think I have a single platform that has a filter ground. I just generally don't want to be on that shift. I can't play my one drop with them if I have mana reflection or something in a deck. I'll definitely run them well because technically they produce two, so you get one and you make four, sure, but with a lot of money, sure, yeah, it's okay for the listeners.

This will conclude our ultimate guide to lands in Commander for listeners. What did we miss? Is there something about the lands? Do you think we forget to talk or wish we did? Let's dig deeper, we'd love to hear from you and of course if you want to get your hands on any of these lands I would suggest the MDFC or Canal Lands. The canal lines are already expensive, but some of the mdfc are still criminal. cheap and I think they're going to go up from here the command channelfireball.com is the place to go to order all your magic products, singles, anything, your magic players that you want to tune up, the decks you want to build. new decks, you're going to buy magic cards anyway, just use our affiliate link when you do and you'll simultaneously get the cards you need and support the content you enjoy again, that's channelfirewall.comcommand or you can use codecommand at checkout. and then of course you're going to want to put those cards in sleeves and deck boxes and beautiful playmats and, uh, those cool dice and all that stuff that you can get in ultra pro, yeah, ultra pro really does the things it protects.

Your game pieces are the best and look the best on the battlefield Ultra Pro gets the license If you are excited about the streets of New Kapena You like that new art deco style, well Ultra Pro will have licensing agreements with wizards to have the covers and play mats and deck boxes and everything you need to go with any crime family that you want to build if you want to form the dark family or whatever. I'm sure Ultra will have everything you need and Nuka Pin is looking. sweet so you're very sweet you'll definitely want it all right uh now it's time for the instep where we talk about something cool outside of the world of magic I'm going to cheat a little bit okay I'm going to talk about something that's a little bit inside the world of magic is our patreon, oh yes, we recently updated our patreon.

There's a lot of stuff going on there. If you've ever been thinking about joining, now is definitely the time to do it because we have The game night auditions going on right now are mentioned at the beginning of the show, but it's worth repeating, there's a link in the show notes. If you want to audition to be at game nights, you'll be able to sit in with us. to be knighted you're going to show off your deck and how good you are commander and the latest fan episode just came out and it was great yeah these are always fun episodes everyone enjoys them um so if you ever you wanted to be on the show now is the time auditions are open, you have to be a patron of our show to be able to audition, but you can be a patron at any level and speaking of levels, one of the things we did with Our Patreon is that we just revamped everything, so we used to be by creation or by video.

That's how Patreon charged everyone, so every time we posted an episode, whatever level everyone was on, that's what they would be charged. and we just switched to a per month model because I think our heart was in the right place when we did the video thing originally and started Patreon in 2016, when no one knewreally how this worked and basically we liked to set it up. and then we didn't get into it and we were looking at it at the end of last year like we need to rethink this um and I think originally we were thinking like, oh, if we take a week off then we won't exactly charge people so they don't have to. pay for it because if you know, if we only create seven videos in a month, normally, but then in a month we create five, I don't want them to be charged the same amount, but it's over.

It became a situation where, well, when we wanted to create additional videos, it felt a little bad and we don't always charge patrons for them, but you know, we never take months off because we have so many people that someone can. always fill out so it's easier to move on to monthly because now everyone knows what to expect yeah you know you're going to pay it's going to be whatever fixed amount you signed up for so it's going to be a lot easier. transparent, everyone can predict it, we don't want you to know that Patreon will never be a financial burden on anyone or anything, so when we changed that we were able to redo all of our reward tiers, which look really exciting, yeah.

We have a lot of interesting things now because that makes us say, "Oh, we should rethink and what else can we add." What can we give to our sponsors? We really want to give a lot more because we knew our patreon could be like that. a lot more, so we've added some really cool things, we have a ton of new products available through a Shopify store that we set up and anyone can go to that store by the way, we'll put the links to that in the show. notes, even if you are not a patron, but patrons of different levels can get a reduced cost, a discount on this product in the store and then patreon itself produces products like stickers, posters and things that were not available to us when we launched it. we were.

We're doing a per video charge, but now that we're per month we can make it so that at certain levels you can get stickers and posters and cool things like that through Patreon that we're going to design that will have a game night theme or extra. it gets thematic and stuff like that and then so do we and I think this is okay, wait before we move on to the more interesting stuff. Another cool thing we're doing is we've committed to doing more exclusive videos and exclusive content. Jordan, we did exclusives, yes. We did the um after our extra shift game where we did uh yeah, there was a lot of debate about it so we did our own little breakdown of everything that happened.

In fact, we got to see additional behind-the-scenes footage of all the words that were said. In putting this deal together, I bet yeah, I think that video wouldn't be like a full episode that we could post on our channel, but it's something we can do exclusive to the sponsors and they were the only ones. those who had access to that and our plan is, you know, this year to re-release more exclusive content for our sponsors and then of course the best thing I think or what I think most people are most excited about is that let's start. playing spell board games with our clients and if you are at a certain level the way it will work is we will post a calendar at the beginning of each month or probably not at the beginning of each month.

I'll probably release a few weeks in advance, so for example, the May schedule will go up very soon and that's when we'll start this whole program and each week there will be a command zone team member, uh, and a certain day. They will have been chosen in a period of time where they will be in discord and will be playing spell board games with sponsors who qualify and who are at the correct levels and we promise that at least one week of that month will be be jimmyrei so you know, let's say this the first week is ashlynn the second week is lady danger the third week is me and the fourth week is jordan um they are those that fall on different days we will put them at different times just so that people in different time zones and areas of the world, they'll know that at least they'll be able to have something they can fit in and then for even higher level patrons there will be one day a month where the other then was playing in the weekly stuff, jimmy, let's say another day, plus already you know, one a week will say like on this day at this time, in between these times I'm going to play games just for people.

You already know the champion level or whatever, and this will happen every month, so if you are at those levels you know that you will be able to have opportunities to play with everyone several times a month and of course with our Discord server. We're also going to plan to help facilitate more spell board games in general and, you know, I'm not saying that those are the only times that the staff and we could play in the spell board games that we could participate in on other occasions. sometimes the calendar will just show you as guaranteed that we will be here at these specific times you could finally have the chance to destroy josh lee kwang in a commander game yes I know that's a lot of people's dream I know it's also the dream because every time I went to a live event, that's what they would want to do.

Hello, nice to meet you. I'm a big fan of your program. I attack you.I attack you, I attack, but that guy has a charge of aurora, I attack you, okay, okay, josh, josh is out, okay, I pick him up, so yeah, there's a lot of cool things happening with our patreon , we are very excited about it, we believe we have achieved it. big update um so the patreon.com page or command zone is the place to go if you want to sign up there are so many reasons to sign up join our community um and I mean all the perks old ones are still there.

I talked about the new stuff, but if you just want to talk to us, talk to us on Discord every day, we're there answering questions going on stuff like that, so I appreciate everyone who supports us, and I appreciate our amazing team. Many thanks to area command team damon lynn shauna gillis arthur pradocroft ashland rose lady danger manson lung craig lynch josh murphy jake chief patrick nan jordan pidgeon sam waldow grav gololli truck tie jamie block mitch trafford and evan limberger and a special thanks to jeffrey palmer for the animations of the living cards that often sits behind us, he did this and started our program and yes, I thank you already Jordan, but thanks again for completing today, it was fun, good, happy, happy to be here and thank you all for watching us.

I think we've got a bunch of hotfix stuff coming up for Streets of New Capenna that we're already working on, you know, all the cool combos and awesome synergies for the multicolored commanders, so I think we'll be you pretty soon. you know, covering the new cards in that set, yeah, get hyped, yeah, if you're not subscribed to our channel, well, now's the time to do it because you don't want to miss any of the upcoming videos. Okay everyone, thanks for watching, we'll see. next time peace thank you for your attention for more queries send an email to commandcast rocketjump.com or ask us on twitter at jf1 and at josh lee kwai see you later crocodile greetings human