Academy Ruins
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Legality

Format Legality
1v1 Commander Legal
Archenemy Legal
Block Constructed Legal
Canadian Highlander Legal
Casual Legal
Commander / EDH Legal
Commander: Rule 0 Legal
Custom Legal
Duel Commander Legal
Highlander Legal
Legacy Legal
Leviathan Legal
Limited Legal
Modern Legal
Oathbreaker Legal
Planechase Legal
Quest Magic Legal
Tiny Leaders Legal
Vanguard Legal
Vintage Legal

Academy Ruins

Legendary Land

: Add .

, : Put target artifact card from your graveyard on top of your library.

legendofa on Card Cost/Land Mana

1 month ago

The pie chart should be reasonably balanced, although a couple of factors can skew it one way or another. If your 1-2 mana cards are heavily dominated by one color, your lands should be weighted toward that color to ensure you can reliable use your low-cost spells when you need them. If a lot of your cards have heavy color weight, you need more lands of that color. If you have a lot of higher-quality lands like shocklands, ABUR duals, or triomes, these can help smooth out color curves and make a perfect balance less necessary.

The tool I use most for adding lands by color is a calculator. My process is a little involved, but has given me very reliable results.

  1. Count the number of pips of your first color.

  2. Count the total number of all colored pips.

  3. Multiply the number of pips of your first color by the number of land slots in your deck.

  4. Divide the number you got in step 3 by the total number of colored pips. Round up or down to the nearest whole number.

  5. Put in that many basic lands of your first color.

  6. Repeat for your second, third, etc. color.

To put this in algebraic form, Pc/Pt = Lc/Lt, or (Pc x Lt)/Pt = Lc, where Pc is the number of pips of a given color, Pt is the total number of colored pips, Lc is the number of land slots that provide a given color, and Lt is the total number of land slots. As an example, if I have 25 blue pips, 19 black pips, and 16 white pips, and I want to fill 24 land slots in a Modern deck, I multiply 25 (# of blue pips) by 24 (# of land slots in deck) and divide by 60 (total # of pips) to get 10 blue land slots. Repeating for black and white, this formula gives us 8 (rounded up from 7.6) black land slots and 6 (rounded down from 6.4) white land slots. I use 6 Plains, 10 Islands, and 8 Swamps as placeholders.

At this point, check for skew. To continue the example, are most of my 1-2 mana cards black, and most of my white cards higher cost? Cut a Plains and add a Swamp. Do many of my blue cards require ? Cut another Plains and add an Island. Now, we have 4 Plains, 11 Island, and 9 Swamp. This step is part observation, part feel, and part placeholders.

Once you have the color curve set, start adding nonbasic lands. If your nonbasic land provides a color, replace a basic land of that color. If it provides two or more colors, I cut whichever basic land I have the most of, then the second most, then the third most. If I want to add a playset of Raffine's Tower, I see that I now have the most Islands, followed by Swamps, then Plains. I cut two Islands and one of each of the others, leaving me with 9 Islands, 8 Swamps, and 3 Plains. If I then want to add three Watery Graves, I cut two Island and one Swamp, cutting Island first to maintain the chances of starting with black mana available on turn 1 and because more Islands are available. Fetchlands, including Evolving Wilds and similar cards, should be treated as whichever basic lands they're able to find.

Colorless utility lands need more consideration--does it needs a color to use? What colors do I need least? What colors do I need most? Let's say it's an artifact deck leaning heavily on the Alara block. I want to add two Academy Ruins. My current land base is

7x Island 3x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave

I know that I don't need Plains early in the game, that I do need Swamps early in the game, and that Academy Ruins needs to use. I cut one Plains for the first Academy Ruins and consider cutting a Swamp, but the need for early pushes me to cut an Island for the second Ruins. The land base is now

2x Academy Ruins 6x Island 2x Plains 4x Raffine's Tower 7x Swamp 3x Watery Grave

This would be a good point to pause and playtest. Make sure you hit the colors you need when you need them, you're not overloaded on a color, and everything flows smoothly. Tweak lands as needed test some more, and keep tweaking and testing until everything's locked in.

As a personal preference, I try to leave as many basic lands as needed to pay any colored cost in the deck. If I have Mechanized Production, but none of my cards need more than one black or white pip, then I will leave a minimum of two basic Islands and one each basic Plains and Swamps. Every format has some form of nonbasic land destruction (and I include Blood Moon in this), and basic lands are reliable and harder to negate or remove.

SufferFromEDHD on ¿Card Draw Voltron?

2 months ago

Forbid seems like an auto include in a deck based off "you have no maximum hand size"

Expedition Map green like land tutor for blue. Academy Ruins would allow you to rinse and repeat.

Dust Bowl I always suggest this in mono colored decks heavy with basic lands.

Khurgar on Modern Lands

2 months ago

Allright, so here's the "how the fk does it work?" part.

The deck is a prett slow one that takes some time before it really activates, so several cards both in the main deck and side board are there to mitigate the pressure that we might suffer from early plays. Lightning Bolt, Fire / Ice and Arboreal Grazer fills these slots in the main deck.

What the deck wants to do is generally to discard lands with Seismic Assault to deal damage to the enemy, then use cards such as Wrenn and Six, Life from the Loam and Slogurk, the Overslime to recur those lands to your hand again.

Trade Routes is used for 3 reasons. The first is pretty straight forwards, use your land cards in hand to generate new cards. Second use is to be able to play your channel lands early in the game to give mana while being able to pick them up later in the game to use their channel effect. And the third one is to make Slogurk, the Overslime to grow rapidly. If you discard a land and opt to dredge a Life from the Loam, Slogurk, the Overslime can grow anywhere between +1 to +4 +1/+1 counters for a single mana, ontop of digging for utility lands that you can return later.

Sadly I have not had a lot of time playtesting it, and I think that the sideboard needs a lot of work. First and foremost I feel like I have doubled down a bit too hard on artifact hate, albeit with a lot of cards with multi purpose.

Anyways, the rundown of why I included the cards are as follows: Damping Sphere was included to stop decks such as tron and titan, and it also works well versus decks such as breach or storm or other more jank combos such as neobrand.

Pithing Needle and Relic of Progenitus dont need explaining.

Brotherhood's End was included to deal with asmo decks, affinity, prison tron, goblins, merfolk and other similar decks to these.

Force of Vigor is in the deck solely because I have no way to stop a turn 2 kill from hammer, other than blocking with an Arboreal Grazer. I am strongly considering cutting it though.

Haywire Mite is included to stop Kaldra Compleat, but will probably see play in the same games that my other artifact and enchantment hate cards.

Otawara, Soaring City is just so that you are more likely to draw them, especially in matchups where they run pithing needle to stop Boseiju, Who Endures, but is also really good for returning combo pieces to hand, or just big beaters like murktide. Its also really good vs tokens.

Boseiju, Who Endures just a really solid card, deals with most problems the deck faces, such as graveyard hate and blood moon effects.

Bojuka Bog is a fantastic card in this deck. With this card and Trade Routes you can exile your opponents graveyard every turn if you'd like, although it is only in sorcery speed.

Cards that I would like to experiment with: Expressive Iteration is a card that I am gonna experiment with in place of Fire / Ice. I think that Fire / Ice is much better at stalling out the game, but expressive is such a valuable card to have in the mid game.

Academy Ruins and Buried Ruin to be able to get artifacts back from the graveyard.

Shadowspear to deal with agressive matchups where the opponent have no good way of dealing with my constructs or Slogurk, the Overslime.

Orvar, the All-Form versus decks that enjoy discarding your hand, so generally versus decks that runs archong or liliana.

I hope you enjoyed the read, give me some thoughts in the comments if you have any =)

The_Warleader on Feedback Wanted - Optimus Prime Rolls Out!

4 months ago

Cool deck! =)

Lightning greaves is typically going to be much better unless you need to target your own creatures (which you don't have too much need of, aside from modular triggers). I would personally cut the Saheeli - you might not know this as a returning player but planeswalkers without any dedicated support aren't typically worth running in commander unless they have an immediate impact on the game (something like Ugin, the Spirit Dragon for example ). They're just too easy to remove in multiplayer games and are especially difficult to ultimate.

To go back to the discussion of lands - I totally agree with multimedia. If you can afford it, you should definitely include fetch lands to show off those awesome dual lands you have! Here are some auto-includes for my 3-color commander decks that I don't believe were mentioned:

Battlebond lands - Spectator Seating , Training Center , and Sea of Clouds basically regular dual lands in commander

Reflecting Pool is very potent in 3-4 color decks and isn't too expensive

Triomes - so Raugrin Triome is all three of your land types to help your buddy lands come in untapped. Is searchable with fetch lands and can cycle in a pinch.

And don't forget your lands can offer utility! Buried Ruin , Inventors' Fair , Slayers' Stronghold / Hanweir Battlements  Meld , Spinerock Knoll / Windbrisk Heights , Academy Ruins (though that one is pretty expensive).

Anyway, I hope this helps and hope you are enjoying playing Magic with your friends again!

Tur on Hidden Power - Crop Rotation

5 months ago

Hello everyone! This will be a trial forum post for a "Commander - Hidden Power" series. My goal is to show relatively inexpensive cards which are often overlooked by commander players in semi-competitive and casual play. (This post is not designed for competitive play.) If you enjoy the topic, please provide positive feedback and I will consider creating similar posts.

The powerful card I plan on discussing here is Crop Rotation.

This card under five dollars and is one of the most powerful mono-green tutors. Period. Yes, I'm counting all mono-green tutors. This includes: Worldly Tutor, Finale of Devastation, Green Sun's Zenith, Survival of the Fittest, Chord of Calling, Natural Order, Tooth and Nail, Sylvan Tutor, Time of Need, Scapeshift, Hour of Promise, Tempt with Discovery, Reshape the Earth, Boundless Realms, Traverse the Outlands, Rampant Growth, Harrow, Cultivate, Harvest Season, Explosive Vegetation, etc.

It's one color, one mana, instant, searches for any land, you can sacrifice a tapped land, and puts the land onto the battlefield untapped (unless otherwise specified).

Although, Crop Rotation is often overlooked by players because of the very expensive cards it can search and not being "flashy" enough. Yes, Crop Rotation is ideal with any of the following cards: Gaea's Cradle, Mishra's Workshop, The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, Serra's Sanctum, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Diamond Valley. However, suppose we don't have a one thousand dollar mana base and cannot play the land cards above. Is Crop Rotation worthless? No. It is still one of the best mono-green tutors. There are so many utility and theme lands which are excellent targets. Ramp lands and color-fixing are also viable options. Here are a few categorized ideas:

Utility Lands:

Theme Lands:

Ramp Lands:

Color-Fixing Lands:

There are many more unlisted cards in each category which could fit your specific deck.

Some of the cards listed above have some pretty cool synergies with Crop Rotation here are a few:Urza's Saga, you can let the saga get to chapter III, then with the ability on the stack sacrifice it to Crop Rotation to get both the artifact and land. Field of the Dead is ideal in every two or three color commander deck with a sufficient mana base (in fact some of my win conditions are given by Field of the Dead). You can also use Field of the Dead as a combat trick. Scavenger Grounds and Bojuka Bog are fantastic for graveyard combo disruption. Maze of Ith and Glacial Chasm will hurt your lands, but sometimes it is needed to stay alive.

Simply having the ability to greatly effect the board state using a one-mana instant speed spell is impressive: life gain, damage prevention, removing steal effects, getting around blockers, denying counterspells, combo stoppers, unlimited hand size, sacrifice engines, haste, recursion, ramp, creating token blockers. The list goes on-and-on-and-on. If fact, if you're playing 3-4 of the lands listed above you should really consider Crop Rotation in the ninety-nine.

All in all, I'm always surprised the number of deck lists which do not play Crop Rotation. This is a fantastic card and one of the best mono-green tutors. It has so much hidden power. Ask yourself if there is a nonbasic land which you are playing (or would play) that would do well with Crop Rotation.

Drakin83 on Say Hello to my Little Friends (LLR Deck)

5 months ago

the card you missed is Academy Ruins

Maccano1 on Urza's Artifact Buddies

6 months ago

1ST ROUND OF CHANGES:

REMOVED: Preordain, Sharding Sphinx, Hexavus, Wreck Hunter, Wire Surgeons, Sanwell, Avenger Ace, Whirler Rogue, Phyrexian Rebirth, Urza's Ruinous Blast, Ash Barrens, Evolving Wilds, Kayla's Music Box,

ADDED: Sword of the Meek, Thopter Foundry, Organic Extinction, Their Name is Death, Raffine's Tower, Academy Ruins, Reality Heist, Cyberdrive Awakener, Scrap Trawler, Foundry Inspector, Emry, Lurker of the Loch, Kappa Cannoneer,

Hi_diddly_ho_neighbor on Rule 0 - Urza and …

6 months ago

Neat idea!

Are you asking for just self-recurring artifacts or artifact recursion in general because and are very good at the latter. For the former, your options are a little limited without . I'd look at artifacts with "unearth", or artifacts like Spine of Ish Sah, Scrap Trawler or Myr Retriever. If you want more general artifact recursion then I'd recommend Daretti, Scrap Savant, Goblin Engineer, Scrap Mastery, Trading Post, and Trash for Treasure. Most of these can be safely played at the precon power level. Some recursion effects that are on the stronger end are Goblin Welder, Portal to Phyrexia, Emry, Lurker of the Loch, and Academy Ruins. These are stronger in my opinion because of their efficiency, repeatability, and they possess fewer constraints.

As far as "how to build a precon level deck" goes, I wouldn't worry about purposely nerfing the deck per say, but maybe asking yourself "could a precon handle the synergies, resiliency, and value engines that my deck creates?". Ultimately though, I think the best advice I can give is to build the deck that you want to build, and that you think is precon level. Then play it against some precons. That will give you the best feel for where you deck is at and if you need to add or remove things.

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