Throughout Magic’s history, cards that interact with and remove lands have been a constant taboo subject. With many players slamming such designs as “unfun,” they’ve largely been phased out of constructed and Commander alike. This has had the unfortunate side-effect of pushing some genuinely interesting MTG cards, like Natural Affinity, out of the spotlight. While this card can be used as land hate, it also has plenty of utility and combo potential beyond that.
Natural Affinity MTG
Though there are plenty of MTG cards that animate lands en masse, Natural Affinity has a couple of crucial edges. First of all, it animates all lands in play, making it an easy way to expose opposing lands to removal. You can follow it up with a Delayed Blast Fireball or a similar one-sided wrath to totally clear all of your opponents’ lands off the board, putting you firmly in the driver’s seat.
The other major advantage Natural Affinity has is its instant speed, which lets you cast it in response to enemy board wipes to blow the table out. When using the card this way, however, you’ll need cards like Heroic Intervention or Adept Watershaper to protect your own board. Alternatively, you can run it alongside cards like Crucible of Worlds and Icetill Explorer, and simply replay the lands that you lose.
If you’d rather avoid the sighs that come with mass land destruction in Commander, you can also use Natural Affinity as an emergency creature source. Late in the game, when lands are plentiful, it can provide a squad of attackers or blockers on demand. It’s also a cheap way to create a ton of fodder for sacrifice outlets like Phyrexian Altar, provided you can follow up with a game-winning play.
Land Of Hope And Combos
Speaking of game-winning plays, Natural Affinity also enables a nice suite of Commander combos. With Intruder Alarm and Squirrel Nest, for example, you can produce infinite 1/1 Squirrel tokens. After casting Affinity, tap your Squirrel Nest land to make a token, thus untapping the Squirrel Nest land since it’s a creature now.
For a simpler combo, you can pair Affinity up with Aggravated Assault for infinite mana and combat phases. With at least eight lands in play, you can animate them all with Affinity, then activate Assault to untap them all again. Keep doing this, and you can win with any unblockable creature, or sink your infinite mana into Walking Ballista to finish off that way.
If you’re feeling really nasty, Natural Affinity actually lets you steal all opposing lands alongside Necroskitter and Darkness Descends. Dropping this pair after Affinity will kill all lands in play, then Necroskitter will resurrect all of your opponents’ lands under your control. The mana advantage this gives you should be more than enough to win the game, though most pods will concede on the spot before that happens.
The Sleeper Awakes
While Natural Affinity is a flexible and powerful MTG card, it’s also not one for every Commander pod. As it’s technically a mass land denial spell, it’s not permitted in bracket three or below tables by the official guidelines. You can always make a case for it in rule zero conversations, of course, but players at lower brackets don’t tend to look fondly on such effects overall.
Even with this divide in mind, Natural Affinity still feels like a pretty underplayed card in current Commander. By EDHREC numbers, just 8,110 decks run it, which is low for a card of this power level. Among mass land animation spells, this is probably the best option out there, so it definitely has potential beyond this small clutch of decks.
This potential is reflected in Natural Affinity’s current price, which is higher than you’d expect given its low play rate. The black-bordered Mercadian Masques original will run you around $5.70 near-mint, and the white-bordered printings aren’t far behind, either. While this is a little on the pricey side, especially for budget decks, the potential blowouts the card offers at high-power tables make it a worthy purchase regardless.
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