Summary
Deserts have only been a main feature of twoMagic: The Gatheringsets: the Wild West inspiredOutlaws of Thunder Junction, and the Egyptian-themed Amonkhet, which also includes Hour of Devastation. If you’re building anything close to a Desert deck in Commander, you’ll be visiting these sets quite a bit.
However, lands only make up a portion of a 100-card deck, and there aren’t that many Deserts in Magic to begin with, so it’s really up to the nonlands in your deck to pull the Desert theme together. Thankfully,lands-matter deckshave been a staple of Commander for quite some time, with plenty of generic support that also works with Deserts.
10Cataclysmic Prospecting
A Treasure Of A Board Wipe
Red-Red-X for a damage-based board wipe is usually worse than it seems. That requires six mana to kill a board full of 4/4s, something you could do with a card like Languish or Storm’s Wrath for just four mana. This formula has been used before onother red sweeperslike Delete and Spiteful Banditry.
Thankfully, theTreasure productionfrom Catalysmic Prospecting is a huge boon to an expensive board wipe. With enough Desert-mana at your disposal, it’s possible to refund almost all your mana when you cast this, allowing you to be the first player to rebuild.
9Colossal Rattlewurm
Colossal Indeed
Commander’s not really a format wherelarge statsdetermine games, but a 6/5 statline on a four-drop with nothing but upside, and the potential to ambush creatures in combat… that’s something you probably shouldn’t ignore. Trample really pushes this card over the top, making it excellent on offense and defense.
Note that cards like Colossal Rattlewurm are far from optimal athighly competitive tables, but Desert decks in general are already below the bar in terms of competitive viability. Still, a creature this large can definitely run the tables in a more casual setting.
8Scavenger Grounds
Graveyard Hate On A Land
Scavenger Grounds is the most commonly played Desert outside of dedicated land or Desert decks. The upside of on-demand graveyard hate far outweighs the downside of only tapping for colorless mana. Slipping that kind of utility into your land section is invaluable, assuming you may support acolorless landor two.
Scavenger Grounds gets even better in actual Desert decks. Normally, it sacrifices itself for its activation, but in a deck with other Deserts, you can sacrifice those first, exile graveyards, and have Scavenger Grounds stick around for additional activations.
7Hour Of Promise
Promises Of Lands And Zombies
You really want yourramp spellsto come down in the early stages of the game, or provide extra utility if they’re more expensive. The latter is true of Hour of Promise, which gives you a few blockers and ramps into any lands you need,not just basics.
Five mana for a ramp spell is a bit daunting, so you’ll either want to ramp into this, or make sure you have some highly impactful lands to fetch up once you reach five mana. Of course, you should prioritize the Deserts needed to guarantee getting theZombietokens.
6Dune Chanter
A Jack-Of-All-Deserts
Dune Chanter eliminates the hassle of choosing between Deserts and basic lands or other non-basic utility lands. As long as it sits in play, everything’s a Desert, including the lands in your graveyard. It also makes your mana situation near-perfect, allowing Deserts to tap for any color of mana.
Land-based decks tend to make good use of their graveyard with cards like Ramunap Excavator and Crucible of Worlds allowing them to play lands out of their graveyard. Dune Chanter helps here too, since it can mill over lands and gain a few points of life in the process.
Some Deserts like Hashep Oasis force you to pay life to produce mana. you’re able to use the alternative ability Dune Chanter gives those Deserts to tap them without losing life.
5Sand Scout
White Ramp And Token Generation
White ‘catch-up’ cards are plentiful, but they almost always fetch plains cards, whereas Sand Scout can fetch any color of land so long as it’s a Desert. This should almost always ramp and fix your colors as early as turn two.
The second ability’s a welcome addition, too. It’s not tied specifically to Deserts, so you’ll make a 1/1 if any land hits your graveyard from anywhere. That includes lands you sacrifice,cycle,mill, and so forth. That’s once per turn, but you can trigger this during other players' turns for extra Sand Warrior tokens.
4Crop Rotation
The ‘Gotcha!’ Effect For Lands Decks
Crop Rotation is one of the best cards you can run for land-based strategies. Whatever the best or most crucial land in your deck is, Crop Rotation will find that for you, and the land it puts in the graveyard is usually relevant too.
Crop Rotation is at its best with a toolbox of utility lands for it to choose from. That lets you access key forms of interaction at instant speed depending on the situation. Bojuka Bog and Glacial Chasm are examples of lands that can blow an opponent’s plans wide open if they weren’t anticipating them.
3Yuma, Proud Protector
Hazezon’s Second In Command
Kudos to Wizards forthe trans representation. That aside, it’s great that Desert decks have a second viable commander now, even if it does sharethe exact same colorsas Hazezon, Shaper of Sand. Those poor blue and black Deserts are still stranded without a home.
Yuma’s a much more general lands-matter commander than Hazezon, though it does incentivize you to prioritize Deserts. An army of 4/2s with Reach is a pretty good reason to bias towards Deserts, plus they tend to find their way into the graveyard naturally, making Yuma all the easier to cast.
2Hazezon, Shaper Of Sand
The Desert Commander Of Choice
Despite the existence of Yuma, Proud Protector, Hazezon, Shaper of Sand is still the top-pick Desert commander. Thisre-imagined versionof Legend’s Hazezon Tamar gave players their first taste of an actual Desert commander, and Hazezon 2.0 even makes a guest appearance in Yuma’s precon.
It’s more narrow than Yuma, but it’s cheap to cast, plays perfectly with most Deserts, and provides board presence while you’re putting Deserts into play. It falls into niche territory and doesn’t get widespread support that often, but it’s an interesting alternative to most ‘landfall’ decks.
1Field Of The Dead
A Top-Tier Lands Wincon
There exists a god-tier of lands in Magic that are eitherbanned in Commander(Tolarian Academy, Karakas), orprohibitively expensive(The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Gaea’s Cradle). Then there’s a tier right below that of busted lands that are, in fact, legal in the format.
Field of the Dead exists within that second-place tier. Once you’ve hit seven lands of different names, every additional land creates a 2/2 Zombie token. It’s an entire self-contained gameplan, and likely the first card you’ll be looking for with effects like Crop Rotation and Hour of Promise.
