Mana acceleration

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Mana acceleration is Magic: The Gathering jargon for the concept of accelerating one's mana base, thereby enabling one to gain as much mana as quickly as possible, often in order to play high impact cards. By using mana acceleration, players tend to exchange card advantage and tempo in exchange for the ability to play more high impact cards than the opponent.

The term is used interchangeably with ramp.

Forms of mana acceleration

Mana acceleration can work in several different ways:

  • Mana accelerators may be non-land permanents that produce mana by tapping. Llanowar Elves is perhaps the archetypal mana accelerator: Playing a Forest and Llanowar Elves on your first turn and another forest on your second allows you to play a more expensive card on your second turn than you would have without the elf. The Moxen are the most powerful example of this type. Mana Stones are a particularly common form of this type of mana acceleration.
  • Some cards enact mana acceleration by producing a one-off effect that adds a quick rush of mana to your mana pool. Black Lotus is the best-known example.
  • Mana acceleration also covers cards that reduce casting costs, such as Stone Calendar or the Affinity mechanic.
  • Cards that fetch lands from your deck, such as Rampant Growth, or Land Tax and put them into your hand or play also speed up mana production, or at the very least make certain that you aren't short on mana; they also thin your deck, making a player slightly less likely to draw a land later in the game when they are no longer needed and can be considered dead cards. Increasing the lands playable a turn (i.e. Explore, Summer Bloom) has a similar function, capped by the number of lands drawn.
  • Some mana accelerators increase the amount of mana your lands could produce, such as Utopia Sprawl. Most land auras are functionally the same as single-card accelerators, but cards such as Mirari's Wake or Gauntlet of Power can potentially double the next turn's mana and scale with the number of lands.

Colors

The different colors approach mana acceleration in different ways:

References