How Many Lands Should You Really Play in Commander?

Last updated on December 24, 2025

Command Tower | Illustration by Evan Shipard

Lands in Commander decks can be a difficult piece to refine when deckbuilding, but it doesn’t have to be. A little bit of insight into how your deck wants to play can greatly influence your land count.

There are a lot of different types of Commander decks and it can be daunting to decipher the golden ratio. Let’s start digging into all that info right now because there’s no time like the present to learn something new!

How Many Lands Should You Play in Commander?

Lay of the Land | Illustration by Chuck Lukacs

Try to fit into your deck about 41 lands at the most and roughly 33 at the least. That leaves at least 58 non-lands to make up your deck. You have 99 total cards to work with here, or 98 if you play with a partner commander.

These counts depend on multiple variables that I’ll dive into soon, but I’ll start by saying that these land counts complement your deck construction.

What Kind of Decks Run Lots of Lands?

This is a good place to start. There are a couple of tricky decks with 99 lands and a commander like Child of Alara, but that's another story. Let’s say you run a ton of big spells and ramp spells. You want a lot of lands on the field, so shoot for the 37-42 land range in your deck.

You could also run a deck that doesn’t play a lot of mana rocks and want to make sure that you don’t miss out on mana. Some decks even base their strategy around lands, like the landfall ability, so those deck builders stuff everything they can into their deck to make sure they don’t miss any triggers. You also see a lot of fetch lands and the like in these builds.

When Should You Play Lower Land Counts?

Reliquary Tower | Illustration by Jesper Ejsing

You should play with lower land counts if the mana value of your spells rarely go above 3-4. In that case, pack lands more towards the 33-35 range. Just like opposing ends of a spectrum, the reasons you’d play lower land counts vs. higher ones are basically the reverse. This gives you great odds to see spells after your opening hand more than you see lands.

Some decks run a number of mana rocks to help their sources and don’t really care about how many lands they have. They have either no need for lots of mana or they have other ways to cast their spells and generate more mana.

What Can Affect How Many Lands You Need?

Lots of things can affect the number of lands you want in your deck, my friend. Lots of things. Deckbuilding is a very intricate part of our favorite game and lets players express their creativity, wits, knowledge, and personality.

Let’s go over some of the most important factors and how they affect your land base.

Curve

Serpentine Curve | Illustration by Kekai Kotaki

“Curve” refers to the number of spells of each mana value you have in your deck. Interestingly enough, when you plot the info on a bar graph, you can usually trace a line that tells you how your deck will behave.

An example of a 60-card deck's mana curve with total number of cards on the y-axis and mana value on the x-axis.

If your curve hits its peak near the spells with a mana value of 1-3 (which means you have a lot of spells of that mana value), your deck plays a lot of small and fast cards to overwhelm your opponent in the early game. Decks like this play fewer lands since they only need a few for the whole deck to work like a well-oiled machine.

Meanwhile you have decks with their curve really only peaking with spells that cost between 4-7 mana. Tons of big stuff means you need tons of mana and can call for tons of lands to complement this. Your mana curve is often the easiest way to find your starting point for how many lands you need.

Card Draw and Cantrips

Land Tax | Illustration by Chuck Lukacs

Card draw is something that is easy to forget about when you build a deck. It happens.

Draw engines and cantrips are super common in a lot of decks in Commander. You have a chance to draw lands when you draw cards.

It’s not always great to draw a lot of lands. Decks that draw a lot of might run just enough lands to play all their cards properly but stay on the low side because they know they’ll draw as much as they’ll eventually need.

The same goes for cantrips. If your deck is full of cantrips or ways to draw cards when you play cheap spells, you don’t need a ton of lands because your hand will likely never be empty. A full hand usually has a land or two to play.

Around 33 to 35 lands is good for a deck that draws a lot.

Cycling Cards

Archfiend of Ifnir | Illustration by Seb McKinnon

This falls into roughly the same category as card draw but is sometimes better. Cycling gets you to draw cards and you could draw into a land, but that’s almost the same as a cantrip. I differentiate cycling because some cards have typecycling called “basic landcycling” that lets you find a basic land.

Instead of drawing a card, you search your library for a basic land to put in your hand. Including these cards might make you more comfortable with running less lands since you know that you can get the land you need if you have one of these in your hand.

Cycling Lands

Ketria Triome | Illustration by Sam Burley

I’m not done with cycling yet, get back here. Decks with high land counts will use cycling lands a lot. They fill land spots but if you’re good with roughly 15 lands already on field, you shouldn't need many more. You can just cycle these away to draw cards for alternative value out of a card that would otherwise be dead in your hand.

Fixing and Ramp Cards

Cascade Bluffs | Illustration by Brandon Kitkouski

Fixing and ramp are what we call cards or effects that make it easier to play all the cards and effects you want.

Ramp usually involves putting lands from your deck onto the battlefield, mana dorks, or mana rocks to generate extra mana ahead of the one land per turn curve. A mana fixer more or less makes sure your colors are correct to cast your spells. This comes in the form of filter lands, artifact filters, and spells that search for lands from your deck and add them into your hand to make sure your next land drop is the right one.

You can take this two ways in my experience. You can play a ton of lands and a ton of ramp to just absurdly accumulate mana sources. Or you can play ramp and fixing cards to a certain extent, say maybe 10 or so cards or more, while your land count stays low around 35 to a middle ground of 38 or so.

When it comes to mana rocks a lot of players use a ratio of two rocks per one land. So if you originally ran 40 lands but you have 10 rocks, you can comfortably drop about 5 lands. Some players say the ratio is three-to-one, but it’s up to you at the end of the day. This is just a suggestion to help guide you.

Mana Sinks

Urza, Lord High Artificer | Illustration by Grzegorz Rutkowski

Mana sinks are my favorite reason to run tons of lands. They are generally some sort of activated effect or big X-cost spell that you can dump a ton of mana into for powerful results. Decks that have these run tons of lands, comfortably playing the 39-42 area without a care in the world.

Maybe they flood out early in the game but then they draw that super powerful X-spell or a creature with a dangerous activated ability. Next thing you know, they run away with the game with all the value and momentum from pumping all of that mana into one super powerful spell or effect.

Optimal Mana Curve

If your deck does not lean into a particular strategy that cares about a particular mana value, aim for a lower overall curve. You can still play expensive spells that cost 6+ mana, it just means you should avoid running too many without a clear plan on how you will cast them.

The average Commander deck should focus on the 1-3 mana value portion of the curve. Most ideal starts involve a ramp effect by turn 2, whether that's a mana rock or a Rampant Growth effect. The more redundancy you have on early-game acceleration, the more reliably you can cast expensive cards higher up on the curve. An ideal strategy-agnostic curve is heavily weighted towards cheaper, early-game plays, with a small handful of expensive plays. It's also easy to overload on 4-drops and 5-drops, but if you're deck is only designed to play one land per turn, you really should consider trimming a number of expensive cards from your deck.

Do You Need More Lands for a 4- or 5-Color Deck?

Ancient Tomb | Illustration by Howard Lyon

The task to build a 5-color Commander deck is a doozy. But it’s fun. All other cards aside, your land base is super important. This isn’t a deck that can scrape by using only basic lands . I mean, with the right ramp and mana rocks you could, but it’s certainly not as consistent as a refined mana base.

In short, no, you don’t necessarily need more lands for a 4-color commander or a 5-color deck. You likely run about 37-38 lands already and that’s a pretty good average for most decks. I bump that up a little bit to 38-40 to be sure you’ve got enough lands of each color to draw.

Run one of each basic in decks like this at the very least. Ideally you’d run two or three of each basic for consistency’s sake and the ability to fetch them with ramp spells like Rampant Growth. If you want to run some shenanigans with Thassa's Oracle and Tainted Pact, run only one of each basic land.

Ultimately, needing more lands actually still falls to your curve. Don’t worry about bloating your land base if you play tiny spells. Keep it around 36-38 and you’ll be fine. If your spells are big or you have a lot of expensive activated abilities, bump it up to 40 or so. Refinement and tinkering are a huge part of Magic so you can always change it up as needed if a certain land count isn’t working out.

Is 36 Lands Enough in Commander?

Yes, 36 lands is enough for many commander decks, especially with good land searching and ramping options available in every color of the pie.

MTG Arena Historic Brawl Considerations

This is an interesting thing to consider. Arena has a hand-smoothing algorithm that influences players to play fewer lands or to change up the combination of what lands they play in the past. Look at some of the current decks in Brawl, and land counts don’t get too low.

Yeah, a lot of decks play around 38 or less, but that’s right around average for decks that don’t want to play lands like crazy and just want to make sure they have lands to play. And you can still find lists with 40 lands without looking too hard. The main reason the hand-smoothing doesn’t change up the format is because of land variety.

Commander and Brawl both have a ton of lands to pick from. I rarely have tons of basics in my decks and Arena has quite a few non-basic lands to pick from even if it doesn’t have every land in MTG’s history.

Utility lands are always valuable and tons of mana for the late game is key for you to cast the biggest spells or multiple spells in one turn. The nature of land bases hasn’t changed for Brawl compared to its Commander predecessor in that respect.

Beware of Colored Sources

Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx | Illustration by Jung Park

Now you need to recognize the responsibility that comes with land bases and colored sources.

Don’t just throw in lands for land’s sake. Throw in the lands you need. Your color ratio of spells will usually feature one color more than another if you’re in a color combo. Or one color in your deck might have a ton of spells that cost double or even triple of that color.

Take a good look at how much of each color you need for each spell and choose your lands accordingly. You need a critical mass of colored sources to cast everything so make sure that critical mass is stable.

A Note About Mana Screw and Mana Flood

Mana screw and mana flood can happen even to the best of mana bases. I’ve been saying to test and tune your deck consistently, but I should also note that Magic is a game of chance when you boil it all the way down. You will have unlucky draws and you will have fantastically lucky draws. Don’t use one unlucky play session as evidence to add or remove lands.

I will confess that until about a month ago, my Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow Commander deck ran 29 lands. I now run 32 lands because over the course of a year I found myself missing the mana I needed just a bit too often. It took me so long to figure that out because my deck does a lot of work for very little cost. Once I did change it, though, those three lands made a world of difference compared to my consistent bad experiences beforehand.

You don’t have to go swap lands around every day because you drew bad at an FNM or Saturday Commander event. Run some test games with friends or at a local shop for a few days if you think something is wrong with your lands. The more tests, the better you can pinpoint your trouble.

If you consistently get mana screwed or flooded, then lands are part of your issue. I’ve seen players take one bad draw to mean you need to change up your land base and they only made it worse for themselves.

How Many Mana Sources Should I Run In My EDH Deck?

The typical number of mana sources you should run in your EDH deck is 43 to 55. Aim for between 33-40 lands and your mana rocks and other sources should be 10-15. These numbers can change if your deck is full of low cost cards or if you have other sources of mana slotted in like mana creatures or cost reducers.

How Do You Calculate Lands for a Commander Deck?

You calculate lands by starting with a solid number like 40, then you factor in all the traits of your deck. If your deck cares about lands, has a high average mana cost, or has lands that function more like spells, you skew the land count higher. If you have low mana costs, lots of ramp, rocks and reducers, or don't need to cast your commander several times, you can lower the number of lands in your deck.

How Many Basic Lands Should I Run in a Commander Deck?

You fill in your commander deck with basic lands after you've calculated all the other lands you need. Ensure you get your mana fixed, the ratio of your mana costs to the amount of mana sources for that color should match.

As a general rule you should run at least 33 lands just to make sure your first draw has some mana in it. If not then you may run in to the same problem I did where I found myself needing more land later in the game.

Commanding Your Lands

Mana Confluence | Illustration by Richard Wright

And there you have it. The ins and outs of Commander land bases. Are there any unique methods you use to decide your land base? Is there something big I missed when going over everything here? Start up some conversation in the comments!

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Thank you for your time today, stay grounded, and I hope to see you again soon!