Ranking the Best MtG Mana Rocks for Commander

I have a soft spot for the Diamonds. Yeah, they’re not very good, certainly not as good as the mtg best mana rocks that offer you multiple colors, but these cards still represent good, honest fixing. Only tapping for one color and entering the battlefield tapped means that the spikier EDH players aren’t that interested in them, however, as you can’t chain them into other spells on turns with excess mana, and they can be a liability in decks with demanding color requirements. 

In more or less any EDH deck that has been even slightly optimized or focused, you’ll find two-drop ramp spells. While green decks have access to all the Rampant Growths and Farseeks they want, non-green decks tend to just rely on artifacts, rather than land-fetching sorceries, for their turn-two acceleration. Today, we’re going to have a look at the best options to fill your two-drop mana rock slots. Here we go!

 Any two-drop mana rock with some late game utility is always worth a second look, and Ebony Fly is, on average, a three to four-power flyer that also gives your best threat flying as well. That’s a lot of value for a card that still ramps you from two to four, no questions asked. Rather than something like Guardian Idol, I think Ebony Fly offers meaningful late game power, and its floor is very high as a decent piece of two-mana acceleration.

Personally speaking, I’m not a fan of no-hand-limit effects, and so Thought Vessel doesn’t rate highly for me. I find that Reliquary Towers generally slow games down as players agonize over which of their 15 cards to play, and I’ve enjoyed house-banning this effect from my games. Still, for those who love to draw a million cards and never have to discard to hand size, you can’t go wrong with Thought Vessel. 

Star Compass is an often-overlooked mana rock, principally because its use really falls off in three or more color decks. Without a critical mass of basic lands, Star Compass is unplayably bad, and for that reason I’d probably restrict it to one or two-color decks. In those decks, however, it’s great, and a card you should probably consider including if you’re looking to raise your mana rock numbers without making sacrifices on color fixing. 

Mind Stone is a classic. This card has been around forever, and I’m very quick to include it in my non-green EDH decks. Sure, it only taps for colorless, but being able to cycle away an otherwise-redundant mana rock in the late game can make all the difference. When you don’t need your 14th mana source but do need an extra card off the top, Mind Stone is absolutely perfect, and I don’t think this card is played by enough people. 

Entering the battlefield tapped is certainly a strike against Coldsteel Heart, but the flexibility it offers in being able to fix your mana is very relevant indeed. It’s no Talisman or Signet – we’ll get to them in due course – but certainly outshines something like a Star Compass in decks that are a bit more stringent in their mana requirements. It fixes your mana, lets you keep a wider range of hands and if you’re a snow deck, provides you with that extra bit of synergy. Coldsteel Heart is a rock-solid inclusion in any deck. 

In many games of EDH – perhaps even most – Fellwar Stone will just end up being a mana rock that taps for whichever colors your deck needs. Some of the time, the configuration of your opponents’ decks will screw you over and you’ll be left with… well, you’ll be left with a Mind Stone with downside, which isn’t actually all that bad, really. On the other side of the ledger, Fellwar Stone can be – and often is – untapped ramp with perfect fixing, meaning it’s a great card to run in most multicolored decks. 

Here we go – mana rocks that offer no-questions-asked fixing and come into play untapped, all for just two mana. Sure, you have to pay life to use their colored mana, but… who cares? Firstly, it’s not all that often that you need to tap these for colored mana, as you can just use their colorless mana ability to pay for generic mana in a card’s cost, and secondly, if you can’t do that, you can easily absorb a point of life or two given you start on 40 life. The Talismans are great, play them in your decks, don’t look back. 

Glittering Stockpile wonderfully addresses the problem most often associated with mana storage cards. Cards like Coalition Relic rely on you taking one turn off to have an explosive turn later on. 

Stockpile, however, lets you tap for red while also amassing counters. Then when you're ready for a big turn you can get a massive payoff. As with many cards mentioned today, this only gets sillier with the ability to proliferate. Additionally, it is a Treasure and can synergize with effects that care about the number of treasures you control.

Red seems to have a trend of awesome utility mana rocks. Cursed Mirror taps for a red while also being a hasty clone effect for one turn. Use it to copy a big beater, a utility creature, or to be a surprise source of extra damage. The ceiling is incredibly high for what is, at its worst, a three-mana rock. 

Crowded Crypt is a great example of a mana rock that can be a great finisher later in the game. It gets a counter whenever a creature you control dies making it an great include for aristocrats strategies. Its pay off for all those counters is for six mana you get a 2/2 with decayed for each counter. Whether you want a zombie army to swing in, or just more fodder for your Ashnod's Altar this card stands to earn you a lot of value over the course of a game.

More or less even with the Talismans are the Signets, who offer similar fixing without the downside of life loss. The Signets have their own, even more marginal downside: they can’t be used to hold up one mana. As they don’t tap for a single mana by themselves, you always need to make sure you leave up another source of mana in order to activate them. Outside of that, they’re great – in addition to the ramp and everything else, they can even turn colorless mana into colored mana!

Most of this article has been spent setting the relative downsides of various mtg mana rocks against what they offer in terms of fixing and immediacy of use. Well, Arcane Signet is, by all those metrics and more, undoubtedly the very best you can do when it comes to two-drop mana rocks. This card does it all: it comes into play untapped, it taps for all your colors – what more can you ask for? Well, I suppose you could ask for it to cycle away like Mind Stone.

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