COMMANDO

IT”S LIKE COMMANDER, BUT WITHOUT DEDICATED SUPPORT

How to take your favorite commander deck and go commando with it.

1. remove all mana producing land from your commander deck.
2. reduce the remaining deck card count to 60.
   1. this should mean that no more that 10 additional cards need to be culled.

So what will be used to summon and cast cards from your hand?

Any card can be deployed into your land section of your play field, whenever you would normally play a land. So every card can be used like a land, but it only produces mana that it has in its casting cost. So if a card requires a red and a green to cast, it can be tapped to produce either a red or a green, thus behaving like Taiga,  a red/green dual land. Also if a card only requires green to cast, it will only produce green when it is tapped, and would be, for all purposes, considered a forest, a basic land. Cards deployed as land, are only land, they have no abilities other than tap to produce a mana, and its type is changed to land. If that card is returned to the hand or graveyard it forgets its special land/mana producing abilities and type, and is restored to its original state as written on the card.

Cards that search the library for a land of a type, can be used to instead retrieve a card from the deck that would an equivalent mana producer, and must be played as one. Same goes for abilities that name lands of a type, For example, swamp walkers can walk on any mono black mana source in the land zone. Alternately, a spell or ability that targets a non-land type can not be used to target cards being used as a mana source in the land area of the play field.

The challenge now becomes a situational evaluation of a cards usefulness in the moment.

Bring on the 2-Headed Commando events

NOTE: If your commander deck depends on lands in graveyards, choose a different deck.

Example card | mana color it could produce | the land type it represents

• Fog  |  green  |  forest / basic
• Counterspell  |  blue  |  island / basic
• Disenchant  |  white  |  plains / basic
• Lightning Bolt  |  red  |  mountain / basic
• Juzam Djinn  |  black  |  swamp / basic
• Millstone  |  colorless  |  wastes / basic
• Nicol Bolas  |  blue-red-black  |  multi-color / non-basic

Commando is a creation of the Iron Wyvern, a game store in Loudon Tennessee.

Published – JULY 5th, 2024

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