Singleton Shmingleton - Skyshroud Ranger
July 17, 2023 by
Jesse Barker Plotkin 
(Skyshroud Ranger | Art by Mark Tedin)
Excuse Me, Did You Drop This Land?
Hello, and welcome back to Singleton Shmingleton, where I bend the singleton rules of Commander by building decks with as many functional reprints of a certain card as possible. This week I'll be talking about Skyshroud Ranger and its friends, which seem like they could be some of the strongest mana dorks around if you draw enough lands. Llanowar Elves functions as a single additional land, but in the perfect scenario Skyshroud Ranger ramps you a land every single turn! Of course, it's hard to have that many lands in hand, and you're down a card when you use the Ranger as your ramp, but the dream is there. And where better to realize it than Commander, where having twelve cards in hand is entirely unremarkable and excessive mana production is what everyone wants?
Creatures that give extra land drops have seen some competitive play. Amulet Titan decks in Modern have played Azusa, Lost but Seeking since Summer Bloom was banned, and have adopted Arboreal Grazer as well. Especially with lands that produce two or more mana, the explosivity of these effects can open up combos that Llanowar Elves couldn't dream of. Powerful, but needing some build-around work: sounds like a perfect brewing challenge.
Yes, In Fact, It Was a Land Fall
Here's a list of creatures that tap to put a land into play from hand:
cards that put down lands
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The most played of these creatures is, unsurprisingly, the colorless one, at 21,085 decks. The least played is Budoka Gardener, who, despite seeing print in a preconstructed deck, only slots into 6,230 decks. Give the gardener some love! It at least deserves more play than Scaretiller.
In addition to these nine creatures, there are other effects that work out similarly. Cards like Wayward Swordtooth let us play an extra land each turn, and Burgeoning also lets us capitalize on lands in our hand. Shout out to Gaea's Touch, which is still underrated at 6,288 decks. And that's even after having an entire article written about it!
How Do We Get Lands in our Hand?
This is the biggest question Skyshroud Ranger is asking. If we get the lands, it can take us from there. There are several ways to put a lot of lands in our hand. Drawing a lot of cards, for instance. We could build a deck with as many functional reprints of Braingeyser as possible, chaining bigger and bigger draw spells each turn. Or we could build a Tatyova, Benthic Druid deck with something like eighty lands and a few powerful payoffs. But what these creatures make me think of is my old Patron of the Moon Moonfolk deck, and the shenanigans that list got up to.
Moonfolk looked a little different in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, but back in original Kamigawa block their theme was returning lands to hand. Take Meloku the Clouded Mirror, the most-played of these Moonfolk: she has a powerful ability, but you need to bounce a land to use it. In the lower rarities, some of the abilities were not nearly as powerful (we're not going to play Moonbow Illusionist), but many others hold up well). Soratami Savant makes it very difficult for our opponents to cast spells, and Soratami Rainshaper will stop people from targeting our creatures even if we never activate it.
So there's our core engine: our Moonfolk can return our lands to our hand for moderate value, and our Skyshroud Rangers can put them back onto the battlefield. Let's see how we can profit from all of this moving cards through zones! Many of these payoffs will sound familiar to all 623 of you Patron of the Moon players, but green also adds plenty of spice.
The first and most basic payoff is that this deck will get tons of Landfall triggers. I've included some of the best Landfall threats like Avenger of Zendikar and Scute Swarm to drown the table in tokens. Beyond these, another essential Landfall card for this deck is Retreat to Coralhelm. It combines with any of our Skyshroud Rangers to dump every land we have in hand onto the battlefield, like a build-your-own Fastbond. Because of that, it opens up many infinite combos, so make sure you're paying attention when you've got it in play! The deck feels truly broken with Retreat in play, so if you want to go deep, you could play Drift of Phantasms to have effectively two copies.
Playing along with our Moonfolk theme, we have a few more cards that return lands to our hand. This is a deck built to negate these downsides, so we might as well go all in! Gush is a busted "free" draw spell that can help us dig through our deck, and Thwart and Foil are free Counterspells. Foil is usually not as good as it looks because holding an Island isn't as easy as it looks, but we can just snap our fingers and put an Island in our hands, so it's almost Force of Will. Flooded Shoreline can control the board as repeatable bounce and can even bounce our own creatures on defense.
Now we get to the stax element of the deck. There are a lot of symmetrical land-bouncers that will restrict our opponents on mana while not hurting us much. Mana Breach and Overburden will restrict how many spells our opponents can play, and Storm Cauldron can slow the pace of the game down to a crawl - but not for us! We can keep playing almost as usual, and hopefully overwhelm our opponents quickly enough that they can't get too mad about mana denial. Speaking of which, play Sunder at your own risk. It's on the salt list for a reason, but it's just too perfect for this deck. Make sure you can put these cards to good work because the longer you take afterward to win, the more enemies you'll make.
Utility Spotlights
Here are a few little packages that make the deck run like an oiled machine:
Amulet of Vigor and Tiller Engine: Many of our lands will come into play tapped, whether naturally or because they're coming from Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy or Patron of the Moon. These cards make all of our sequences smoother, and can even open up infinite combos. I've added Trinket Mage to find the Amulet of Vigor just because it's so important to the deck.
Simic Growth Chamber, Guildless Commons, Jungle Basin, and Coral Atoll: Lands that bounce lands! That's exactly what the doctor ordered. These lands can keep our engines going at full speed, and combine well with everything we've got. Just like in Modern, they're a killer combo with Amulet of Vigor, and they can rebuy our utility lands. Speaking of which...
Halimar Depths, Crumbling Vestige, Mystic Sanctuary, Skyline Cascade, and Saprazzan Skerry: These lands love to be bounced, and I am so happy to have found a home for them. Is it too much of a stretch to call Halimar Depths the Sensei's Divining Top of this deck? And when was the last time you saw Skyline Cascade? If our opponents ever make the mistake of tapping one of their creatures, you can bet they'll never see it untap again.
Lotus Cobra and Tireless Provisioner: With these creatures in play, mana will never be a problem again. Throw in Nissa, Resurgent Animist if you remembered that Aftermath existed. If we have any draw engine in play with these creatures, we can cycle through a ridiculous amount of cards.
The Decklist
Skyshroud Ranger
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This is the kind of deck that makes me love to play Commander. It's tricky like a puzzle, there are always options, you can play mostly at instant speed, and you get to use terrible cards to great effect. Running so many utility lands really makes a deck so much more fun; it's as if you get to play fifteen more spells! There are also a surprising number of infinite combos. I didn't try to add any to the deck, but just about any three of our ten best cards will net us infinite mana or Landfall triggers. That adds a fun dimension to the deck as well, where you have to think about loops and whether playing that Retreat to Coralhelm will just win the game on the spot.
In terms of making engines out of redundant cards, this deck is a success! Skyshroud Rangers are key to the deck running well, and are often the creatures our opponents should kill to stop us. It feels good when someone uses a Swords to Plowshares on your draft common, especially when you can just play another two of them next turn. Zimone, Quandrix Prodigy is a perfect commander for the deck, acting as both engine piece and draw engine and coming down early enough to guarantee a smooth start.
Until Next Time
The best deal in town: two bodies for two mana! This effect is usually not good even in Limited, but saw a decent amount of play in March of the Machine in Ral's Reinforcements. The key to its success was a way to use the bodies for more than their stats, in this case, Convoke. Let's see what value we can squeeze out of our dorks next time on Singleton Shmingleton!
Jesse Barker Plotkin
Jesse Barker Plotkin started playing Magic with Innistrad. He was disqualified from his first Commander game after he played his second copy of Goblins of the Flarg, and it's all been uphill from there. Outside of Magic, he enjoys writing and running.
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