Commander Corner: 5-color EDH and the $4 Mana Base WRITTEN BY Orren Mckay

Magic is expensive. EDH is no exception. The mana base for a 5-color EDH deck with all the dual, fetch and shock lands can easily approach $2,000. This article will take a look at how you can play one of these decks by spending only a few dollars on your mana.

The original idea for this came from a friend of mine years ago. He decided to build a Cromat deck using only basic lands. The deck seemed to work ok but he only played it for a single evening then scrapped it. I thought it was an amazing idea and it stuck with me. Can you actually build a solid, playable 5-color EDH deck using (almost) exclusively basic lands?

Before getting started on the actual deck building it is important to identify the things you want your deck to do. My goals were:

1. Be able to cast the Commander on turn 5.

2. Minimize potential mana problems (obviously).

3. Avoid having lands come into play tapped (to avoid slowing down the deck too much).

4. Have a very inexpensive mana base that anyone could throw together for a few dollars.

5. Be fun to play.

With all this in mind, I set about making an unorganized list of cards and half-formed ideas on a couple of sheets of paper. The first draft of the deck had Reaper King as the general. I figured being able to cast him partially using colorless mana could make things a little easier. To minimize mana problems, the deck was primarily green. This is kind of taking the easy way out with mana fixing, but I wanted to make sure I had a working deck. The deck ran around 20 green cards, 5-8 of the other four colors, and then some artifacts and gold cards. The non-green cards all only required a single colored mana to cast. This way, it would be possible to cast the non-green spells and still be able to cast the general on turn 5. For the green cards that required double green, I made sure that all of these cards were cards that you would want to cast on turn 6 or later. This lead to some interesting choices like playing Greenwarden of Murasa over Eternal Witness. There was also a morph theme in the deck. I thought being able to cast a morph creature face down for three colorless mana would make it possible to use on early turns those times when mana wasn't lining up quite right. The deck had 13 forests, 5 mountains, swamps, islands and plains, a Command Tower, an Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse and a Terrain Generator. The first three non-basics are inexpensive no-brainers. I debated about the Terrain Generator for a while because if I played it in the first five turns, it could prevent me from playing my commander on turn 5 (as it only produced colorless mana). In the end I decided to let it stay. If you are able to use it to put a single land into play, you can still stay on schedule for your turn 5 Reaper King. For artifact mana, I went with six signets. Gruul Signet and the other three Green and X signets plus Boros Signet and Dimir Signet to pick up one of each of the other four colors. Sol Ring and Darksteel Ingot were in there along with the standard Kodama's Reach, Cultivate, Explosive Vegetation package.

I tossed the deck together and played four games with it. I was pleasantly surprised about how well the mana turned out. The general was able to be cast by turn 5 in three of the games. There were no major mana issues in any of the games with one of the games getting accelerated very nicely due to a Sol Ring and pair of signets turns one and two. After this very productive evening of testing I immediately scrapped the deck. It ended up being a very good theoretical test, but the deck itself wasn't any fun to play. I didn't bother to keep a deck list for the Reaper King, but many of the pieces ended up in the Horde of Notions deck below.

After getting a better feel for what is required from a 5-color deck full of basic lands, it was time to build an updated deck. At this stage, I actually built two: Horde of Notions and Scion of the Ur-Dragon. The Horde was built from the skeleton of the Reaper King and the Scion included some of the ideas that didn't make it into the original prototype.

Horde of Notions

I kept the morph theme in this deck as well as limiting non-green cards to only requiring a single colored mana to cast. Vesuvan Shapeshifter is an exception to this but I figured it would be ok because of its alternate morph costs. The shapeshifter is also a good choice if you have a number of other morph’s in your deck since you can flip it down during your upkeep and use it to copy other cards' morph abilities. Once again, I was very happy with how the mana worked out. The more I play them, the more I come to like signets. The only problem is that they are fragile. Having six may be too many for a deck. I didn’t fully embrace the elemental theme possible with the Horde, but I had some of the best ones. The Horde himself (itself?) is pretty amazing as a creature. I may end up playing him as one of the 99 in another 5-color deck. Sadly, the Horde failed at the last goal on my list; it wasn’t much fun to play. It may be that elementals just don’t excite me that much.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon

Dragons, however, are exciting. The Scion of the Ur-Dragon deck ended up being the place where some of my other mana fixing ideas got tried out. The mana base uses a few less basics so it can pick up the Shards of Alara panoramas (Bant Panorama, etc.). After playing a few times, I’m still on the fence about these. They have a lot of potential to fix mana issues, so they may be good choices. The full set of five feels like too many. Rupture Spire and Transguild Promenade are two additional sources of any color mana. Their drawback of having to pay a mana when they come into play isn’t too bad if you are careful and manage when you play them so as not to slow your game down too much. The Scion deck had red as its primary color but I wasn’t as strict as with the Horde when it came to other colors mana costs. This was unavoidable due to some of the dragons I wanted to include. Some of the mana fixing I tried was … interesting. Mycosynth Wellspring was an odd one that I figured I had to test out. It ended up being only ok. If there had been a good way to productively sacrifice artifacts in the deck, I think it would have been much better. Chromatic Lantern was good, but it kind of made me feel like I was cheating a little when it came to what I was trying to do with the mana and the deck. Journeyer's Kite was ok, but fairly slow. I like Fellwar Stone. It provides useful mana no matter what color opponents are playing, plus I get to show some love to a card that has lived in various card boxes of mine for the last 22 years. Boundless Realms ended up a disappointment. Each time I had the chance to cast it I found I would rather be using my mana doing dragon stuff. Silverglade Pathfinder was a definite surprise. It ended up being very good. The rest of the deck has mana fixing similar to the Horde deck plus dragons and a reanimation package to cheaply get back dragons that you send to the graveyard with the Scion. The Mimeoplasm is exceptional as one of the 99 cards. The deck runs a spread of reanimation spells with Reanimate as the least expensive and Bladewing the Risen at the top of the curve at 7 mana. Body Double isn’t specifically reanimation, but it plays nicely with the rest of the deck. The deck itself seemed to work pretty well. Some parts of it were a little clunky, but playing dragons is fun.

The biggest standouts for me from the two decks were Deathrite Shaman and Land Tax. This really shouldn’t have surprised me because both of them saw or currently see play in competitive Eternal formats. For a five color deck running primarily basics, Land Tax is ridiculous. Its a one mana enchantment fixes all your mana by itself. I figured Deathrite Shaman wouldn’t stand up to the EDH environment. I was completely wrong with that one. Having a second toughness makes him much hardier and he can provide just the right amount of early game mana fixing to get you through a rocky start. Being able to cast him for green or black is also a nice perk. His other two abilities are excellent later in the game for a little bit of graveyard control.

After playing for a little while it became obvious that I am still a little kid who likes to cast dragons. Since there is no real point in fighting against your nature, the next step in this deckbuilding process is clear: more Dragons! To do this end I merged the aspects of the Horde and Scion decks that I liked changed around some dragons and tweaked a few things. That lead to the deck below.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon

I’m calling the above deck a beta because I don’t think I’ve ever had an EDH deck that I was done tweaking and tuning. For this version of the Scion of the Ur-Dragon, it has three primary colors (red, green and black), and two secondary colors (blue and white). This provides a bit more freedom when picking which cards and dragons to include, but it also places more of a burden on the player to pick the correct mana when fetching lands.

Attacking with the Scion in this deck is always eventful. You can grab Savage Ventmaw and cast a huge dragon (or maybe something useful or practical) post-combat. Teneb, the Harvester and Balefire Dragon are interesting choices. Every time I have a Scourge of Kher Ridges on the table it impresses me more. I cut down to two panoramas and two signets for this version. I kept the three colored mana lands and included a couple of the mana doublers from the earlier decks. Both Sarkhan’s are dragon-friendly planeswalkers and Xenagos, the Reveler works as a kind of discounted Gaea's Cradle. This version of the Scion deck seems to do a pretty good job managing potential mana issues. There are still (and always) tweaks to make with a deck. Imperial Hellkite is a definite upcoming cut. I am on the fence about Sneak Attack. It makes for some nice tricks and plays well with reanimation cards, but it seems like there should just be a better choice for that slot.

People who play the Scion in EDH or fans of dragons in general may notice two dragons missing from this deck. No Dragon Tyrant or Nicol Bolas. I omitted Dragon Tyrant because I felt it would be an issue if I ever had to pay his four red mana upkeep. I can get double strike from Atarka, World Render if that’s an issue and I doubt I will ever have enough red mana to pump Dragon Tyrant for a one-shot general kill from the Scion. Nicol Bolas is meaner than I want to be in a game of EDH. It’s way too easy to grab him as your first dragon and wipe out someone’s hand. I am not a fan of effects like Myojin of Night's Reach in general since it tends to drastically slow down the game. Nicol Bolas painfully slows down one person’s game and creates an enemy that will persist between games. There is an argument that if I were to include Nicol Bolas in the deck, I wouldn’t have to use him. The problem with this is if he is an option, I WILL get him every time. I am a huge fan of everyone having fun in EDH, but I will also do my absolute best to win every game. If you can get Nicol Bolas and cripple the biggest threat at the table, it’s a bad play not to do this. Sometimes in deck building you have to take steps to protect yourself from yourself.

I hope this article has helped explore the basics side of 5-color EDH. Playing a 5-color deck using mainly basic lands was way more fun than I initially expected. It requires some additional thought and planning that is usually lacking from a 3-color EDH deck loaded with duals, shocks, and fetch lands. I am definitely going to keep my deck together and continue playing and updating it. Even if you have no desire to play a 5-color EDH deck, many of the things discussed in this article will apply to the new 4-color commanders coming out in November. If there are any dragons that are must includes that I left out, or if you have better methods for mana fixing that I have overlooked, please join in to discuss this article on discord.

Tappedout.net links for the deck lists:

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/horde-of-notions-4-mana-base/

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/scion-of-the-ur-dragon-4-mana-base/

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/scion-of-the-ur-dragon-4-mana-base-version-20/