If you want to buy time in a game of Commander, there’s no better tool than enchantments like Propaganda and Ghostly Prison. Paying two mana for each attacking creature may not shut down every strategy completely, but the presence of multiple opponents makes these cards so much better. Not only do these enchantments keep creatures away from you, but they make it much easier for them to be pointed at your opponents.
All of that said, these enchantments don’t help if attacking isn’t the core game plan of your opponents. Tapping creatures to activate abilities is still fair game, which can easily get out of hand. New Commanders coming out soon, like Mister Fantastic, for example, can go infinite using their tapped ability. In the likely situation where you’ll need stronger forms of creature denial, Mudslide might be the budget card you’re looking for.
Mudside MTG
For three mana, Mudslide offers an enchantment that taxes untapping creatures during their owner’s Upkeep. This not only restricts the number of creatures that a go-wide tokens player can repetitively untap, but if players want to keep their creatures untapped, there’s a real chance they simply won’t attack at all. Thanks to the added benefit of taxing activated abilities that require tapping creatures, Mudslide is a force to be reckoned with.
Like many old cards, however, Mudslide comes with the downside of being a symmetrical effect, affecting your creatures as much as your opponent’s. That said, there are a ton of ways to play around the effect that Mudslide enforces, allowing you to shrug the effects off while your opponents have to trudge through the mud.
Notably, Mudslide does not affect Flying creatures, which is undoubtedly a flavorful nod to the natural disaster it represents. If you’re playing a typal strategy that primarily uses Fliers, like Dragons, Mudslide becomes an asymmetrical effect. This allows the card to easily slot into decks like The Ur-Dragon, Blim, Comedic Genius, and Kaalia, the Vast.
Additionally, Mudslide becomes extremely potent when your strategy uses a lot of Vigilance effects. If you don’t need to tap when attacking, Mudslide won’t have a chance to tax your untaps. This makes the card a real sleeper pick in the ever-popular Duel Commander Aragorn, King of Gondor. Not only will Aaragorn be allowed to attack without being taxed, but you’ll be free to keep control over the Monarchy that he enables.
Mudslide otherwise only taxes the natural untap that happens at the beginning of each turn. This means that, if you can consistently untap your creatures with an effect like Seeborn Muse, Mudslide won’t affect you at all. This makes the enchantment absolutely ridiculous in an Alexios, Deimos of Kosmos deck since the creature untaps itself when moving across the board. This also works for other Commanders that change control every turn like Karona, False God and Slicer, Hired Muscle.
Going Above and Beyond
With some specific Commanders, the synergy that Mudslide provides can go even further. While the core idea with Mudslide is to keep your opponent’s creatures tapped while you avoid Mudslide’s ability somehow, there are rare occasions where you want to keep your own creatures tapped.
Kalamax, the Stormsire is a great example of this. This Commander needs to be tapped to turn his abilities on, which makes finding ways to ignore Kalamax’s untap useful. Mudslide circumvents the need to send Kalamax into battle to turn it on, preventing additional risk to your Commander.
This also helps with some bizarre, niche Commanders like Maraxus of Keld. While you’ll need to pay to untap Maraxus himself, you can keep an army of small tokens tapped to boost your Commander’s stats without risking them in combat. You can similarly use this to keep Sami, Ship’s Engineer tapped to create Robot Tokens without worry, or keep various Survival cards, like Kona, Rescue Beastie tapped. The unintuitive use of Mudslide grants it even more homes than players may have expected.
Mudslide is otherwise powerful in strategies that tap or otherwise interact with tapped creatures. Tetsuo Umezawa, for example, will have plenty of opportunity to destroy your opponent’s creatures when they’re more difficult to untap. This similarly does dividends in strategies that interact with Stun Counters since your opponents will have to pay mana even to attempt to remove the counters in the first place.
Extremely Easy to Abuse
Thanks to the multiple ways that players can get around Mudslide, it’s rather easy to fit the card in a multitude of strategies. It also means that the card’s viability may vary depending on what Commanders are popular at any given time, but, more often than not, Mudslide will throw a serious wrench in your opponent’s plans.
The enchantment is also quite cheap, considering that it’s on the Reserved List. You can find heavily played copies of Mudslide for less than a dollar, which means that this card will easily overperform its price point in any Commander deck that can shrug off its tax effect.
If you’re playing any Commander deck that can reliably ignore what Mudslide is dealing out, you might want to consider giving this card a try. With all the crazy tapped abilities coming to Commander on the horizon, this card might win you a lot of games.