Mana acceleration

Mana acceleration or ramp - after Rampant Growth - 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 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.

Description

A deck that ramps may play creatures that tap for mana, cards that allow you to play extra lands, and lands that tap for multiple mana, for example. A Ramp deck accelerates]] the ability to play high-impact, high-cost spells early on in the game. Whereas in older formats this took the form of fatties, in current formats it is more about planeswalkers or big instants or sorceries.

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, as they immediately generate mana without costing mana. Mana Stones are a particularly common form of this type of mana acceleration, generally requiring a mana cost. Typical premier set design uses three-mana five-color artifacts as the baseline.
• 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, but most are no longer typed artifacts and are covered by creating the artifact token Treasures. Red retains a small number of mana-generating spells that may or may not be net positive in mana.
• Mana acceleration also covers cards that reduce casting costs, such as Stone Calendar or the Affinity mechanic. Due to the deckbuilding requirements, it is usually not the same category.
• 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. Rampant Growth effects are two-mana if restricted in the color (often Basic Forest), and any basic at three-mana, sometimes with additional upside.
• 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:

• White usually has little need for mana acceleration since it relies on quick, effective creatures with low casting costs to begin with. White occasionally employs land-fetching cards like Land Tax and Flagstones of Trokair, but in those cases, there is usually no acceleration, but rather card advantage. While some fetchers such as Knight of the White Orchid and Claim Jumper exist, they specifically require the controller to be down on lands to begin with; they are usually used in low-land decks to gain card advantage and add to the board, but are significantly worse in both axes when flooded. However, the rise of multiplayer Commander gives new texture to being "behind on lands", with the format allowing for more high-cost spells. Starting in 2021, white gained more ramp to help solve these problems. This can take the form of "catch-up ramp" (giving you a land if an opponent has more lands than you), or "suntide effects" (putting lands from the graveyard into play), or treasure production.
• Blue makes little use of mana acceleration, though the blue-heavy Affinity mechanic was a huge boon in the Mirrodin block. Some exceptions from the game's early days exist, including High Tide as well several cards that produce colorless mana (such as Apprentice Wizard and Energy Tap), justified with blue's association with artifacts. Restricted mana acceleration on creatures has become more common in the 2020s: Creeping Peeper, Sage of the Unknowable, Oaken Siren and Karfell Harbinger all add mana to differing subsets.
• Black started as the color for one-off mana effects like Dark Ritual and Sacrifice but slowly drifted away from that strategy. It infrequently features permanents that can produce mana turn after turn to help it ramp up quickly and cast large spells. Usually, a form of payment is required. Black also has a series of treasure creators, but more often uses it as a sacrifice piece than a mana source.
• Red originally had little in the way of mana acceleration (except Sisters of the Flame), but over time it appropriated black's production of one-off mana effects ("Ritual)" with cards like Skirk Prospector, Seething Song, Braid of Fire and Rite of Flame. With treasures, it gained a way to generate mana without being net positive the turn cast.
• Green is the undisputed master of mana acceleration, with varied cards like Llanowar Elves, Birds of Paradise, Rampant Growth, and Wild Growth. Besides being the land-fetching color, green is also the color with permanents that can produce mana turn after turn to help it ramp up quickly and cast large spells. See Green: Mana.
• Artifacts can be extremely useful mana accelerators since they can fit into a deck of any color. Cards like mana stones and cards like Fieldmist Borderpost help decks to accelerate as well as fix their mana colors. In Vintage, Urzatron lands, mana stones Black Lotus, Sol Ring, and the Moxen are sought-after artifact mana accelerators.

For a while, Green had two-mana Rampant Growth effects and colorless had Signets, but the Signets were much stronger and needed to be pared down; unfortunately, there was not much space between two and three mana. In time, R&D settled both being standardized at three mana, with artifacts getting the five-color Manalith variants with minor cardless upsides, while green got land-fetching ramp with a "kicker" mode or card advantage rider.

See also

• Standard Mana Ramp deck