Maze’s End Commander Deck Guide

Maze's End | Illustration by Cliff Childs

Players have been enamored with Maze's End since its release in Dragon’s Maze. It suddenly capped off the cycle of Guildgates with an alternate win condition that demanded you play five colors (or close to it). While Maze's End decks never took off in any competitive format, they make a fun casual deck without the traditional endgame present in most Magic decks.

Nowadays, the best home for Maze's End is in Commander, and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate gave us both a slew of new gate cards and a legendary creature to collect them in Nine-Fingers Keene.

Join me as we both run the Dragon’s Maze and travel the perilous road to Baldur’s Gate in this Nine-Fingers Keene–Maze's End Commander deck!

The Deck

Nine-Fingers Keene | Illustration by Nils Hamm

This is a Maze's End deck. We want to win with Maze's End’s effect. There are combat-based solutions to victory present, but any time we aren’t activating the Maze with 10 different gates on the field is a loss in my book. To get there, we’re running a host of the best land-search effects we can get our hands on to dig out Maze's End and Gond Gate, and then capitalizing on those gates hitting the field with a variety of landfall effects. We’ll use Nine-Fingers Keene to refill our hand with gates and keep the pressure on. With luck, we’ll have all 10 gates and our Maze on the field before anyone knew what hit them.

The Commander

Since we can’t just put Maze's End in the Command Zone, we’re running Nine-Fingers Keene as our actual Commander. Nine-Fingers is the only legendary creature that specifically mentions gate lands, so it’s almost a no-brainer that we’re running the leader of the Guild at the head of our deck. Given their color identity, Nine-Fingers does lock us out of the red and white gates and any associated cards, but the majority of our spells in a 5-color Maze's End deck will be green anyway. Really, we’re just saving ourselves the trouble by cutting 2 colors.

Nine-Fingers Keene is a notoriously difficult-to-remove rogue who’s Ward ability will usually keep it safe well into the midgame. Nobody wants to pay that steep cost to remove a creature that's just getting you taplands, right?

Getting Gates

Traditional Rampant Growths can’t search up our gates, sadly. We’re including all of the gate-specific tutors in Navigation Orb, Circuitous Route, District Guide, Gatecreeper Vine, Explore the Underdark and Open the Gates. Six cards does not a strategy make, however.

To tutor up specifically our gate lands, we need to look to the Sylvan Scryings of the world. Alongside that are a number of other spells to search up any land generically, which we’ll use to fetch Maze's End and the other utility gates from our library.

Crop Rotation is the number-one choice for tutoring up a land. At 1 mana, nothing beats this tutor.

Nylea's Intervention is expensive, but pulls exactly what we need from our deck. Titania's Command works similarly, pulling a pair of gates to our hand. Tempt with Discovery is as fun as a barrel of monkeys in a pod that doesn’t know not to accept your offer. Finally, it’s a little slow comparatively, but Elvish Reclaimer is a great way to dig out any specific land.

Typically our game-ender, Reshape the Earth can grab every gate we could possibly need along with the Maze's End, Gond Gate, or Field of the Dead.

Playing and Keeping Gates

Nine-Fingers Keene is great for digging through our library to find gate lands, but it can’t put them onto the field all alone. That’s where our army of additional land drops comes in. Of course, classics like Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Walking Atlas, and Skyshroud Ranger are here, but also a host of Explore effects. Besides Explore itself, we’re running Growth Spiral, Urban Evolution, and Eureka Moment.

As far as creatures go, we’ve got both Courser of Kruphix and Oracle of Mul Daya to keep the top of our library clear. Gretchen Titchwillow provides an excellent repeatable dump for extra mana, and Coiling Oracle will always be great value for its mana cost. 

The absolute best extra land drop in this deck is Burgeoning by a mile. A turn 1 Burgeoning basically guarantees you’ll have dropped your entire hand of lands by turn 3, giving you more than enough mana to cast Nine-Fingers and refill your hand immediately.

Now, let’s talk about land destruction. Fully land-destruction themed decks are rare, but you'll still need to be prepared for the inevitable Field of Ruin coming at your Maze's End. There are several cards in this deck to help mitigate this risk by letting you play lands from your graveyard or returning them to hand.

Should you find yourself on the receiving end of that Strip Mine, never fear! Cast Crucible of Worlds or Ramunap Excavator and call it good. Life from the Loam can get those lands back, and dredging it back to our hand is a great way to dig for some more gates.

It’s a long shot but I find it hard to leave home without a copy of Elixir of Immortality. There are just too many Bojuka Bogs around in my pods to leave anything valuable in my graveyard for too long, and I’d much rather have Maze's End tucked safely away in my library, rather than exiled forever.

Playing and Protecting Keane

Nine-Fingers Keene, while not the focus of this deck, is still an essential part to keep our engine going. Nine-Fingers is a triple threat: a 4/4 with evasion, a (slowly) ramping creature, and a nine-card drawer once we hit the midgame. Since Keene needs to connect with an opponent to trigger its gate-finding ability, we’ll need to make it an unappealing (or impossible) target to block.

First up isn’t the easiest way to make Keane unblockable, but it is the funniest. Vorrac Battlehorns gives a creature what I like to call “inverse-menace” (where it can’t be blocked by more than one creature at a time), as opposed to Keane’s inherent menace (where it must be blocked by two or more creatures). These two effects combine to make Nine-Fingers unblockable (Alpha Authority does this, too). Sure, you could just cast Way of the Thief, or even equip Whispersilk Cloak instead, but isn’t explaining a mouthful of rules text half the fun of Magic?

Don’t forget that Fireshrieker’s double strike doesn’t just get you an additional Keane trigger, it also turns your commander into quite a terrifying beatstick. Slap Blackblade Reforged on there and you’re looking at a one-shot Commander damage kill (note: not a Maze's End victory, doesn’t count).

Sticking the “Land”ing

Rounding out the decklist is a selection of cards that care about lands (or specifically gates) entering the battlefield. We won’t go long about the staples Tatyova, Benthic Druid or the pair of additional land-player druids from earlier, but I do want to pull your attention to a few specifics.

Tiller Engine is a sleeper from the Dominaria United Commander Decks that’ll make sure those gates hit the field untapped, or let you add a mana and untap a land as soon as it hits the field.

Guild Summit’s “gatefall” makes it the best card draw for any gates deck. Finally, Rampaging Baloths sees a lot of play, but it’s probably the best generic landfall payoff on a body.

The Mana Base

Gates are not known for their mana base efficacy. Nearly all of the gate lands enter the battlefield tapped, meaning we’re likely to be playing a little slower than the rest of the table. With 34 lands, 14 of which are gates, we’re really leaning on our ramp spells and additional land drops to keep us in the game. Tutoring for Gond Gate (or one of the other Amulet of Vigor effects) as soon as possible turns the mana base around 180 degrees. On the bright side, most of our lands are two or more colors, and the Baldur’s Gate gates let you choose which color they tap for.

Our only mana rocks are Arcane Signet, Sol Ring, and Chromatic Lantern, since we want to favor additional lands over artifacts in this deck.

The Strategy

Obviously, if you can pull the Maze's End in your opening hand, it’s tempting to keep it. However, the high number of tutors and Nine-Fingers Keene’s potential to fly through your deck means it’s not necessary. Instead, I focus on a hand that can play Nine-Fingers by the fourth turn, and usually hope to have two to three gates on the field by that time. Typically, this means keeping at least two green mana.

Our Explores and Growth Spirals are going to make the early-game difference. Keeping a full hand and never missing a gate drop is paramount to making this deck perform.

If we can drop Keane by turn 4 and get in by turn 5, we’re doing great. We’re almost guaranteed to hit another gate on each successful attack with Nine-Fingers. Carefully stack the triggers from Explorer's Scope and Aqueous Form on Nine-Fingers’s attacks to get the best possible cards to choose a gate from.

We’re really looking to have the nine gates we need on the field by turn 6. At this point we should tutor up Maze's End if we haven’t yet, and then go for the throat. If we can get to this point, our victory is basically assured. Maze's End’s effect can only be countered by Stifles or land destruction, and the odds of your playgroup running these out in response are either very slim or very clearly broadcast.

Combos and Interactions

This deck is pretty straightforward, in that most of the interactions can be boiled down to “reading the card explains the card.” I do want to shout-out Reshape the Earth: Remember that each of those lands “sees” the other lands entering the battlefield, meaning there’s never a reason you don’t grab Field of the Dead alongside one of those 10 lands.

There are some misconceptions concerning Gond Gate. This land has a replacement effect that allows gates to come into play untapped, but that effect only applies if Gond Gate is already on the battlefield when the other gates enter. This means Gond Gate itself enters tapped, and if Gond Gate enters play at the same time as other gates, they all enter tapped. For example, if you use Circuitous Route to search for Gond Gate plus another gate, they both enter tapped.

Rule 0 Violation Check

The only Rule 0 fuss I could see anyone kicking up about this deck is the fact that it’s built to achieve an alternate win condition. At this point, I don’t know what to say to those people, though.

Budget Options

This deck clocks in at about $170 for the singles – maybe a bit pricey to purchase all at once, but certainly doable in small chunks. There are some easy cuts if you’re looking to save a buck, however.

There’s a lot of redundancy built into this deck, and a few of the key cards can be replaced with slower variants. Amulet of Vigor is just extra insurance for Gond Gate, so we could axe that for an Archelos, Lagoon Mystic. Burgeoning is another card that fits into the “win-more” category, and could be replaced with something as simple as Scaretiller in an instant.

Other Builds

This Maze's End–Nine-Fingers Keene Commander deck works off of digging through your library to get as many gates on the field as possible, but is limited to green, blue and black. Other Maze's End decks could use 5-color commanders like Child of Alara to control the board with wraths until you can assemble your gates, or Garth One-Eye to consistently cast Black Lotus into a pile of ramp to get all your gates out at once.

Wrap Up

Gond Gate | Illustration by Kamila Szutenberg

When combat damage starts to bore you, when milling’s lost its luster, and Approach of the Second Sun feels too dirty, Maze's End is there for you. Maze's End will always be one of the wonkier ways to win a game of Magic, but it's that weirdness that makes it feel so uniquely MTG.

What’re some of your favorite alternate win condition cards? Don’t you miss running Maze's End in your Golos, Tireless Pilgrim decks before it was banned? And do you think we’ll get a Maze's End reprint anytime soon? Let me know in the comments, or over on Draftim’s Twitter/X.

Thanks for reading, and happy building!