Commander Quest — Lands

Aaron Meacham
4 min readOct 21, 2020
Photo by Bailey Zindel on Unsplash

With the explosive popularity of Zendikar Rising’s modal double-faces cards (MDFCs), landfall decks are getting a big boost. Solid performers like Flagstones of Trokair and Undiscovered Paradise see a sharp uptick in play and price, but are there any dark horse cards that can benefit from the landfall synergies Zendikar Rising brings to Commander without putting a hurt on your wallet?

Riftstone Portal

Obviously green wants as many lands and landfall synergies as it can get, but white hasn’t necessarily been the most obvious partner color for lands decks in Commander. However, powerful cards from Zendikar Rising like Felidar Retreat are making big waves in Selesnya (Yasharn), Naya (Obunn), and even Four-Color (Omnath) decks in the format. Riftstone Portal offers advantages of its own with a much smaller price tag than something like Flagstones.

And just like how you want to get Flagstones into the graveyard to reap its full benefits, there are plenty of staple ramp cards in green/white color that both put lands into your graveyard or want them there — Harrow, Crop Rotation, Elvish Reclaimer, and Knight of the Reliquary to name a few.

Color-fixing options on a land that enters untapped? Sign me up.

Dunes of the Dead

As mentioned above, there are plenty of lands staples that put or even want lands in your graveyard. Adding to your board when you sacrifice a land is just extra value. Coming into play untapped means you’re not losing tempo by playing this, but tapping for colorless means you probably aren’t running it in decks with three or more colors.

Mono-red or mono-green feel like good homes for this since they don’t have access to Bojuka Bog and will be more likely to play Scavenger Grounds, which gives you multiple opportunities to exile graveyards.

Red also has access to Geomancer’s Gambit and the new Cleansing Wildfire that turn on landfall and…

Aaron Meacham

My name anagrams to “a man becomes.” I love movies and Kurt Vonnegut. I don’t understand how anagrams work.