Playing a tapped land in Commander has always felt punishing when you’re at a higher power table, but has the average Commander game changed? Do tapped lands feel rough even at lower bracket tables? How many enters tapped lands is it viable to run?
ENTERS TAPPED LANDS IN COMMANDER
If you started Commander before 2020, you probably started out playing cards like Evolving Wilds, Myriad Landscape and other enters-tapped lands in your decks. For a long time, it didn’t feel too punishing to play these kinds of lands, as the format was slow enough that missing out on casting a two, three or four drop creature usually meant throwing one less card under the board wipe bus.
Something has to be said about access to a good manabase back then, though – today we’re spoiled for choice with our dual-color land cycles and fixing (including in the form of treasures). It’s a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation, really; are tapped lands less viable because the format has sped up, or has the format sped up because we’re not locked into playing less efficient lands in our manabases?
Either way, the winds of change have swept through, and things looked quite different now.
ALL TAPPED OUT
Increasing pressure to have relevant plays in the first three turns has made a monumental change to the format. Even allowing for differences in power levels with the bracket system, the pressure to have early game plays feels real across the spectrum. Even if a game in Bracket 2 isn’t touted to end until at least Turn 8 on average, there’s still a lot of early game engine building and value generation that it feels crucial to capitalize on in order to be ready to make moves in the mid to late game.
A big part of that is the prevalence of cheaper to cast Commanders. When you want to always cast a two mana Commander on T2, you can scarcely afford to play a tapped land. It’s somewhat similar for a T3 Commander, especially one that cares about you have things in play earlier in the game; Isshin wants you to have a two drop to attack with when you drop him, as soon as you can.
What this fundamentally means is that tapped lands have gotten a bit long in the tooth. I’m not about to suggest that you can’t play them at all, but I am saying you need to be way more intentional about the ones you pick, the quantity you include, and the overall strategy of your deck.
For most new-school Commanders who fall into this kind of deckbuilding approach, it only feels good to drop a tapped land on T1; on T3 alongside a two-drop; on T4 alongside a three-drop. Anywhere else, and you’re either messing up your curve, or you’re stopping yourself from indulging in two spell turns when you could be partaking.
One important note before we move on, though: the amount of ramp in your deck and the amount of treasure generation can free you up for playing more enters-tapped lands, as this allows you to be more mana efficient.
TAPPED LANDS NEED TO PROVIDE VALUE
Bearing in mind that all manabases can be improved with a deep pocket, this advice will be a little less relevant to you if you’re on a budget. That said, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the ethos behind it when building a Commander that encourages you to curve out early in the game.
When choosing a tapped land these days, you really need to consider what it can do for you other than provide multiple colors of mana – and how often it might fail. Take the fastlands, the checklands, and the tangolands. All of these ask you to meet a narrow condition in order to come in untapped. With a manabase in 2026 and access to increasingly strong options, these are starting to feel less good in comparison – and often worse than a basic land if you’re trying to curve out.
Triomes are obviously the best example here for a three color deck – they are the defacto best Fetchland target on T1 and on “off” turns, and later in the game they can be cycled. You also have the Surveil lands, which beat Scrylands because of the graveyard synergy they can set up. That said, while we’re on the topic of Scrylands, I’d almost argue that I’d rather play one of those than a dual color land with a narrow condition, because they can at least help us reach our next land drop, or help us hit gas when we’re flooding. The Innistrad “slowlands” also improve on the tangolands in a lot of ways when you’re aiming to curve out, even without being fetchable.
Outside of manafixing, you want those tapped lands to really earn their place. A creature-heavy typal deck will still enjoy Path of Ancestry’s repeatable Scry, which makes it still a solid pick. Bojuka Bog might be one of the most powerful enters-tapped lands in the format. MDFC lands that don’t have the option to come in untapped by paying life tend to be the more powerful ones, like Malakir Rebirth. I could write a whole article on how MDFC lands have displaced much of the pre-2020 manabase, but I digress.
You other excuse for running more tapped lands is of course the build around – Emeria the Sky Ruin and Valakut, yes, but also hideaway lands that can easily be triggered – they’re still well worth running, too.
While you can ensure that tapped lands provide a net positive, there’s still an upper limit to the quantity you can include in any given deck. That’s because of one thing that most players could do with doing…
PLAY MORE BASICS
With a need to have untapped sources, we’ve kinda come full circle – we all just need to play more Basics in our decks. Basic lands will never let you down, and provided your deck isn’t too ambitious on what spells you want to cast and when, you can be safe in the knowledge that you’re more often than not going to be able to curve out when you run enough basics.
END STEP
Building a manabase in Commander isn’t hard, at least when it comes to having ways to get the right colors. What’s difficult is being disciplined with your deckbuilding, and taking the skills you’ve picked up in Limited formats to help inform the way you build a manabase. Take my aggressive Nahiri, Forged in Fury deck that wants to curve out – it doesn’t run any lands that come in tapped, other than an Inspiring Vantage, and three MDFC lands. With impulse draw being a big part of the draw engine in the deck, having MDFC lands makes sense, as it means I can either cast them or play them as lands if I exile them with Nahiri’s trigger.
My Henzie deck has plenty of critters who can fetch basic lands into play, so the tangolands are more viable in this build – that said, it doesn’t run the Jund Triome, instead opting for Starting Town, as it wants to have plays on every turn of the game after and including T2. It’s hardly a perfect manabase, but the fact that it includes only a few tapped lands means I’ll always be able to make a play when it matters.
When you’re including lands that can enter tapped, above all else, they need to make sense for your deck – and provide more pros than cons.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.