As any Magic player will tell you, mana rocks and Commander are inseparable. Even today, when the format has sped up considerably, the ability to get ahead on mana early is a huge advantage. While green can do this through land ramp and mana dorks, for other colors, rocks are the best bet. As a result, the vast majority of Commander decklists you’ll see online will come packing a handful of these handy trinkets.
Widespread as they are in the format, we actually only get to see a fraction of what’s out there in the mana rock world. Key players like Sol Ring and Arcane Signet dominate the category, squeezing out some genuinely interesting alternatives. Today, we’ve rounded up some of the best, most underplayed mana rocks in the MTG Commander format. If you want to do something a little different with your ramp slots, these will serve you very well indeed.
Charmed Pendant
While it’s steeply-costed at four mana, Charmed Pendant does something utterly unique among mana rocks. Rather than tap for a set amount of mana, it instead mills a card and converts its colored pips into mana for you to use. With the right cards, this can easily generate you a huge burst of color-fixed mana, more than justifying its cost.
Naturally, Charmed Pendant is at its best in decks that can manipulate the top of their library. Commanders like Glarb, Calamity’s Augur and Isu the Abominable are ideal fits, for example. Pendant plays double duty in these decks, generating mana and milling away bad options to set up better topdeck plays.
You can also boost the card by running the likes of Scroll Rack and Sensei’s Divining Top, or more offbeat options like Haunted Crossroads, in your 99. You’ll need pip-dense cards in your deck to line up, of course, so it’s not for every deck. In those that can accommodate it, however, it’s a fantastic, novel ramp option.
Phial Of Galadriel
Three mana for a mana rock, even one that perfectly fixes your colors, isn’t exciting at all in 2026. Fortunately for Phial of Galadriel, it has a lot more going on besides that. In a wonderful bit of top-down design, the card offers you advantages in dire straits, whether you’re low on cards or low on life.
The latter is fun and flavorful, but very unlikely to come up in Commander. If you’re down at five life, you’re much more likely to just lose it than be in a position to gain a bunch back. The former ability, however, is very juicy indeed. It’s not hard at all to empty your hand in some decks, at which point Phial essentially becomes a card advantage engine alongside your regular draw suite.
Discard decks, like Norman Osborn//Green Goblin, are a great fit for Phial, since they can often get rid of their hands on demand. It’s also excellent in Eruth, Tormented Prophet, since it shifts your regular draw to Impulse draw, keeping your hand clear. Outside of specific strategies like this, Phial is also just a nice addition to aggressive decks, as a ramp piece that helps out when you’re low on resources.
Sarevok’s Tome
Mana rocks are generally known for their subtle, quiet power in games, rather than their ability to actually do things themselves. Sarevok’s Tome flips this idea on its head, offering a ton of useful utility alongside a very reasonable ramp rock.
Taking the Initiative on entry is already excellent, since, at minimum, you’ll get to tutor up a basic land for your trouble. You’ll also get to tap Tome for two the turn you play it, which means it essentially costs just two mana. By itself, this is a very solid deal, and doubly so if you can reliably protect the Initiative.
Beyond this, Sarevok’s Tome becomes absurd in a dedicated Dungeon deck. If you’re running Sefris of the Hidden Ways or Hama Pashar, Ruin Seeker at the helm, you’ll be able to finish a Dungeon relatively easily. Once you do, the second ability on Tome can legitimately win you the game. It’s rare for a mana rock to offer power on that level, which makes Sarevok’s Tome particularly exciting.
Honor-Worn Shaku
While Honor-Worn Shaku is awful as a standalone mana rock, it earns a spot on this list thanks to its surprising combo potential. Thanks to its unrestricted untap effect, Shaku can go infinite with a surprising number of different cards.
For the most part, these combos revolve around creatures that offer benefits when tapped or untapped. With King Macar, the Gold-Cursed, for example, you can use Shaku alongside Patriar’s Seal and Clock of Omens to exile every opposing creature in play. You can also use it to turn a Tui and La, Moon and Ocean enchanted with Sinking Feeling into an infinite card draw engine.
Honor-Worn Shaku has a role in several more traditional combos, too. You can pair it up with Cadric, Soul Kindler and Saffi Eriksdotter, for example, to create an infinite loop, resulting in infinite mana and death triggers. It can even create infinite 1/1 tokens, if used with Emmara, Soul of the Accord and Aura of Dominion. The sheer range of combos on offer here is Shaku’s biggest strength. As long as your deck supports one or two of them, the opportunity of adding a mana rock/enabler is effectively zero.
Thran Turbine
We see a lot of new mana rocks in MTG every year, but none ever really come close to the gold standard that is Sol Ring. A one-mana rock that taps for two is good enough to be banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage, after all. That said, Thran Turbine does a pretty solid impression of this legendary rock, albeit with a few trade-offs.
First of all, you only get the mana here during your upkeep. This puts it in a similar spot to Braid of Fire, where you need some kind of instant-speed outlet to take advantage of it. Even more significantly, you can’t spend Thran Turbine mana on spells of any kind. This means you’ll basically be using it for activated abilities and nothing else.
Even with these hefty restrictions, a Sol Ring is a Sol Ring. There are plenty of great ways to abuse Thran Turbine, in a wide range of decks. Commanders with potent activated abilities, like Grenzo, Dungeon Warden, are an obvious starting point. You can also use it to pay for abilities like Channel or Cycling from your hand, or to crack artifact tokens like Clues, Food, or Blood. Considering its efficiency and flexibility, it’s hard to deny the fact that Thran Turbine is one of the most underplayed mana rocks in all of MTG Commander.
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