You Should Play Less Two-Mana Ramp

Rakdos Signet

by Martina Pilcerova

Take the Off-Ramp

Three-mana ramp is better than two-mana ramp, and I'm tired of pretending it isn't.

Hi, I'm Michael Celani, and I just can't stop picking fights. Conventional wisdom suggests ramp costing two mana is the gold standard when building a deck. It comes out faster, requires fewer up-front resources, and consistently provides mana for the rest of the game (assuming it isn't removed or something

Think again, because as my partners taught me, exploding too early ain't all that great. Ramp doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are tangible deckbuilding costs to including an abundance of Signets, Talismans, and Rampant Growths

The Fixing Isn't That Good

If your deck has three, four, or even five colors, then a significant barrier to your early game is getting the correct colors of mana to cast your spells and your commander. Proponents of two-mana ramp argue it provides early mana fixing in decks, which allows you to cast a wider range of your spells earlier.

There is some truth to this argument; after all, if you have only black mana and then cast a Rakdos Signet

The core problem is that at two mana, the fixing is often limited to just one additional color. Signets and Talismans only provide two colors of mana, and common land ramp spells, like Rampant Growth

Ramp that makes any color often comes with serious drawbacks, such as Fellwar Stone

This downside is intentional; in fact, the only spell that unequivocally avoids this pitfall at two mana, Arcane Signet

Three-mana ramp spells (more often than not) solve this perfectly, since they let you make mana of any color, or otherwise give you access to at least two additional types of mana. They often don't require you to have any specific type of mana upfront, either; there's a lot of Manaliths

There's Little Flexibility

Most two-cost ramp spells also fail to do anything other than add mana sources, and this becomes a big problem as time goes on. Assuming your deck is built properly, you'll naturally gain access to more resources as you play a land each turn. This reduces the individual impact of each mana rock you play, because on turn two, Arcane Signet

Three-cost ramp is allowed much more flexibility in what it's allowed to do. As a baseline, a substantially larger portion of the category can sacrifice themselves to draw cards or can be cycled away, meaning when you find the card late, it's not a dead draw. Even comparatively terrible three-cost ramp spells, like the Ravnican Lockets

Some ramp artifacts, like Patchwork Banner

Should you still merely care about the raw quantity of mana, then spells like Grow from the Ashes

If you're willing to give up the fixing, or you're only in a single color, then three-cost ramp has gotten some insane options lately:

• White's Hourglass of the Lost
  can return an entire category of nonland permanents from the graveyard to the battlefield when you need it most.
• Blue's Midnight Clock
  is a way to refresh your hand, and Misleading Signpost
  can save you from a meticulously planned attack that just barely kills you.
• Black's Crowded Crypt
  works perfectly with aristocrats strategies to create enough creatures for that final push at an opponent's life total.
• Red's Cursed Mirror
  enters as a copy of any creature on the battlefield, including your own legendaries if you just want a powerful dies trigger.
• Even green has interesting options at three mana, like Loot, Exuberant Explorer
  , who eventually taps to cheat out cards from the top of your deck, and Freestrider Lookout
  , which staples a land drop into practically all of your interaction.

All of these spells have clear utility in the late game, and you'll be much happier drawing these than another Signet you can't cash in on.

There's Other Options on Turn Two

Overcentralizing your mana at the two-mana mark also takes away from potential early-game plays. Remember, ramp isn't something you play in a vacuum; it's competing with literally every other spell you can play on-curve.

If you've read my set reviews, then you've heard of the too-specific two-mana value engine: permanents that cost two and draw you cards, but only if you follow some specific instructions. The phrase "too-specific" might sound like a backhanded insult, but putting down something early that synergizes with your gameplan and consistently refreshes your hand is going to provide you way more value over the course of the game than a simple mana rock ever will.

If the "specific" part of it scares you, then I'm pleased to inform you that there's tons of these, for almost every strategy you can think of. Don't believe me? Face-down creatures, a strategy nobody cares about, has

You might also be interested in simply playing an early game threat. Spells like Agate Instigator

You Don't Need The Ramp That Early

And on that note, there's one last thing you should consider when building your deck: is it even necessary to ramp that early?

Remember, your hand is going to consist of seven cards at the start of the game, and if your plan is to spend one of those ramping to get to a four-mana turn three, then you really want to be spending all that mana every turn to get the most value out of that card. If you leave your rock untapped to play a three-drop on turn three, then you might as well not have ramped at all, because you've sacrificed the main advantage low-cost rocks have: their speed.

I posit the following: two-cost ramp only has a consistent and significant advantage over three-cost ramp if you always want to cast a four-drop as soon as possible. This isn't a strawman argument, as plenty of decks want their four-drop commander

Finally, if you're using low-cost ramp to make up for the fact that you don't have consistent land drops in the early game, then you need to run more lands and are objectively a bad person, both morally and spiritually.

Two-Bit Rocks

This isn't a hit piece that says that two-mana ramp is bad or that it has no place in the Commander landscape, because it does. If it didn't, that general knowledge would have already spread long before this article and everyone would have stopped using it already; in other words, it would be Return to Dust

Consider this a call to be more selective with which cards you include in your deck. It's easy to add tons of Signets and Talismans to your list and call it a day, but resist that temptation, because you're going to curse yourself the next time you need to draw a removal spell or are desperately searching for that last combo piece only to waste your draw on a stupid dumb Fellwar Stone