Which Mana Rocks are Worth Playing? | A Guide to Mana Rocks in EDH

welcome to the picky nerds guide on mana rocks uh today we're gonna show you why mana rocks i'm your host joe cherries i'm your host beezy and that makes us the nitpicking nerds do you enjoy ramping out you couldn't do it without us so i think you at least owe us a subscription he's right and besides you want to be subscribed to this channel because our subscribers are 10 percent more likely to rock this claim we get here then they begin to want you to rock but you probably won't rock isn't that something what do you say on turn two uh or you're about to draw your second card you don't have anything to do on turn two all right but you you're what are you looking to draw you say no i don't know if you could i don't i want a rock i was thinking like you have um you have cage sun right and then you have four mana rocks next to it so then the second one in is the third rock from the sun that's what i was thinking of also a good one on topic so what is a mana rock yeah well first what are we doing both an existential crisis question and a video topic starter wow and the existential crisis thing i have no idea and in the sense of the video we're talking about mana rocks we're talking about things that tap for mana artifacts they come down and they can produce mana in some way or another yeah so we're not talking about things that filter mana like if you put one man into it and it puts one man out that's filtering that isn't a man of rock in our definition our definition is a artifact that taps for mana right it produces mana for no mana basically whatever uh you get the idea you'll know it when you see it but we're going to go over the best ones sort of the traps what we expect from each different cost which ones you really want to avoid so let's get into it so we're going to start off by talking about what are our expectations for a manorak and then what are sort of the standards at each given cost yeah so expectation slash standards uh manorax come at all costs you can get a manorack that costs six mana costs seven mana but it better be doing something pretty extreme we want ones that you can play early so they can ramp you into the big spells like game those ones are much more important if they if they're on the low end of the cost that means that you get to put them out early and use them more often to generate more mana so if you play a mana rock on turn one but only let's just say i don't know that doesn't really exist you play mandarin on turn one and test for one mana now every turn you're generating one mana so it two it pays itself back very quickly you can't ramp into more ramp commander is a game usually on turn ten we're into like hey manger haymaker swinging game territory where like you gotta have answers for stuff so you want to ramp out the first like four or five turns but when you're on turn six you can't be like and now my new man rocks i wouldn't be like who cares yeah unless your deck has a way to take advantage of that which is well yeah sometimes bad rocks are but in in general this is this is going to be we're going to say this basically right now and then never again so please listen to this statement this is in general not counting niche situations and we're not really taking a budget into consideration yes we're not talking about the consideration if you take budgeting consideration some of these rocks get a boost but we're not trying to talk about that right now we there's there's great budget matter rocks that that's a whole other video where you're gonna talk about the ones on a budget that you should play this is i have a deck i want to build the best version of the deck that i can within reason right and here are the man rocks that i may or may not want yeah i want to build 80 to 90 deck i'd say that's probably more appropriate we don't want to build a cdh deck but we want to build what we do in the picky nerds semi-competitive like 90 range yeah 990 if if cdh is 100 then we're at like 90. uh so cheap matter rocks another thing they're doing is they're helping you double spell so that if it's turn two you can even go like two mana mana rock and then tap it to play something else which is why we like our mana rocks to generally enter the battlefield untapped yeah manorax coming in on tap is a huge thing because they get you a juice right away which means they essentially cost less mana to play on that turn and another thing that we're all going to say once uh green decks we're basically not talking about those they almost never almost never want main rocks yes there are exceptions to that rule we're not gonna we're not gonna we don't have to list all the exceptions this video will never end if we only if we go over exceptions to everything yeah we're just not gonna play we're gonna in general if we're building a green deck we're not gonna play man right i've been painting with broad strokes to get this get the point across so the manorak priority list we're starting at zero and one mana artifacts what do we expect we talked about soul rings in this area manic crypts uh chrome max chrome diamond these cards are extremely extremely good chrome diamond mox diamond yeah all the moxon max opal they're all insane they're mostly broken there's a couple that we can maybe get into later but more or less if you have it you're going to play it and feel pretty good about it yeah these cards are extremely good in if your deck is trying to be very very strong when you're pushing towards that 100 these become even better uh soaring is just almost an auto include if you have mana crypt it's pretty much an auto include if you have it they're like the best cards in commander i think they're some of the best cards in magic so there's really no reason to exclude soul ring or manic those jump over even into green decks easily yeah those those ones fit in green decks but not obviously not the average one right so two is where we get more realistic now we're expecting like this is where most of them fall they're really efficient at two and i find that you know really efficient at two and then at one it's like insane it's way more efficient than it too and then at three it falls off but we're talking about two most common you're gonna find like your arcane signals your talismans your regular signets they just come out they're going to fix your mana they're going to enter untapped mostly yep and the two is the sweet spot where you want the most of them and you can use them right away so all the we want the ones that come in on tap we said there are things we'll talk about more of that we're going to talk about more this is just general we're not going over specifics two minute rockets that coming on tap tend to be very strong because they repay you one of the mana right away so they essentially cost you one mana to play of course on turn two if you play a cygnet you won't be able to activate it because it does have you need to put a manner it is this is a mana filter that is also a rock in our definition because it produces an extra mana it creates mana basically but just not by itself either way segments are amazing because while they don't produce mana by themselves they fix mana and they can turn a colorless into two colors which is ridiculous how about three mana mana rocks uh these need to tap for two plus and they really need to have a relevant second ability in your deck so it's they tap for two plus and or have a relevant like static ability or activated ability so what are some examples of ones that you would play well really the only just one quick example because we've got plenty more examples is warren powerstone inner is tapped but does make two so that's one of the ones that's like pretty much worth it if you need to know how good soul ring is look at warren powerstone and look that it's a playable card and say wow wow wow huh this costs two more matter than solving an answer is tapped uh the silvering actually costs negative one mana yep so it costs four more than story pretty insane actually yeah so how about four mana okay now we i'm really not going to cut it for tapping for just two some cases there's cards i like to do it but i want three or more mana and or a super cool activated ability friend dynamo is kind of the standard for this where oh it comes down it really only costs you one yeah so it doesn't feel too bad uh and the and i would actually avoid the red animal can also fall into something that we mentioned later which is gonna be traps it can fall into the trap category because if honestly if you're playing a three four color deck in carlos mana and you have a lot of pips in your deck you want to be careful with something like thrand dynamo because it does make colorless yeah that's the fair point maybe you want to stick to like you know the red or the blue decks with that one um five plus i'm basically just gonna say avoid these unless you're an artifact deck or you're some corner case that i'm sure you'll know it when you're in it where you're like i want every meadow rock ever but this is where you have gilded lotus um dreamstonehedron which we'll talk about and even the newest card uh chromatic orry yeah there's some seven man of mana rock there's some there's some there's some decks that want commander corey there's definitely sure they definitely exist i'm just saying if you're building a deck don't just don't just say i open chromatic orange in my pre-release pack right i want to jam this don't just jam it find the right deck for it yeah outside say what matter if the question is what man of rocks do i want to play chromatic orien's not even in the list of like hey what should i be looking at yeah chromatic aurelia is a card you look at based on your commander your commander says i'm five colors and i love having 70 man on my mana pool yeah like giganta or something you just have a million man at a tap worry but okay now that we got the priorities of the way you kind of know what we're looking for so we're going to talk about our favorites here uh our favorite manor rocks we we put in a lot of decks and i'll explain why we like them what they do differently than other manor acts obviously when i talk about like signature they're very good when i talk about talismans they're just those are staples and they're great but we're going to talk about the ones that like might not be in every document we'll talk about why and where we like them yeah they're in the corner case or why like they fit into what we just talked about like what do we want at zero one two three so the first one uh i guess we'll each take one because some of these aren't mine and some of these are joe's sure i like ever flowing channel slot it's a zero-man artifact and has multi-kick or two so you can paint two any number of times when you cast it and then enters the charge counter for each time you kick it and now attempts for mana equals the number of charge counters on it the reason i like this so much is that it's basically it's a bad mana rock at every point other than two but there's there's some points where you can cast this thing for like this the versatility of it makes it so strong you can cast it for eight and it pays you back four right away so two taps on your you're paid off and the fact that it's counters and they stay you just add on slowly proliferate add them double them whatever and then this is insane it's like one of the best cards in your deck yeah uh this deck you want to fi or this deck this card you want to fit into the right deck you want to put it in a monochord decks often love this card because you don't need a lot of restrictions on color are you often like maybe two color decks if you have proliferate ways to use the charge counters maybe you want if you want big mana if you really want to store up your mana for the next turn this is also great for a deck like that competitive decks decks that just want to jam a million two-minute rocks this is one of the better two-minute rocks because sometimes it's a four-minute rock it's it's a great two-minute rocket and like again any extra mana can just go into it if you want to think about this way it also only costs basically because it can always it always costs one more to kick basically so basically two you get one mana four you get two man and i'll cost you two mana basically then you get six now cost you three mana that's but if if carlos is if if colors aren't a factor then that's true right obviously colors can be a factor and there's even times where i've cast this for zero oh you get a draw trigger or something like the fact that you can just do nothing with it and have it be useless and trigger some stuff is even extra relevant yes it's just another thing you can do with it if you're playing something like uh an artifact that plays like kci then you can just sacrifice play it get one of your triggers off one of your money artifactors because you're playing an artifact duck maybe you want to play it for zero and exchange it with goblin wallet with something in your graveyard like we could just let's just talk independent of one another for five minutes about what casting a spell might get you there's a million things i think if this is like a movie we would do that i'll let you do the next one the next one is mine stone it's two mana for an artifact that tests for one or you can pay one and tap it sacrifice it to draw a card again this is basically ever falling challenge for two but it also has the added ability of going into late game you can just draw a card when you no longer need this ramp because maybe you're around like seven eight lands you're just like well i really need a powerful spout or really hope i draw one with this there's not a rock there's not too many meta rocks that are never dead this is never a bad draw it's either three mana replaces itself i mean that could obviously be better but how many metarox just say oh you drew me and it wasn't that great okay try another card yeah try again that's amazing it's sweet yeah it is you can just try again and it's a two minute rock that comes in untapped we talk about why we like those they're great in many situations we just you want them to come in untapped on turn two so you can ramp into your fours your fives your sixes and really get going because edh has a lot of big spells and even if it doesn't if you're not playing that without big spells you want a double spell you kind of touched on this but i like to bring it up again like the mana rocks that make colorless probably just avoid them in three plus color decks yeah if you want to focus more on like signets and other stuff but i'll let you go to the next one uh the next one is thought vessel this is a two mana rock that says you have no maximum hand size and it taps for one colorless mana this one is just gravy yeah there's the gravy boat it's gravy and there's no there's there's not a better word for it because it's just bonus because it's already a decent rock kind of just it it's gravy in the way that mind stones draws also gravy for that card it's a decent rock it makes it one mana it only basically costs you one because it taps right away and well this is a fringe card it goes index where you want a huge hand size but when you have it it's better than reliquary tower it's better than like spell book or most of the other effects it's better than that say you don't maximum hand size because those cards tend to suck yeah this is a colorless rock as we mentioned earlier so we don't want to put into too many three four color decks but again amount of blue where you can draw a million carries this card is great oh yeah it ramps you to blue sun zenith and then the extra man you spent gives you extra cards which don't go away if you don't discard this thing has literally drawn you cards yes it has gotten your card advantage from doing that but don't confuse that because like there are in some decks you don't want to just jam as many of these effects as possible because like i think ventures journal is an absolutely awful card oh that card is so bad i don't yeah i think it's basically useless especially with the creation of thought vessel but we can move on to hedron archive which is a format of rock attacks for two wingdings you play two tap and second to draw two cards this is just two mind stones stapled together exactly we talked about where this fits in the criteria it's a four meter rock so it either has to add three mana or have a really cool static and i think it has the activated ability of drawing two for just two which is i think that's pretty good rate honestly it's a perfectly fine rate uh it's right in the middle because i think we'll talk about the next one up from this and like mine sounds really good the one above this is really bad i think this one is like right in the middle where i don't put it in every deck or every deck that wants an artifact but there's some decks i've been more than happy to play this yeah it just depends on how good your character is how how good your card selection is that's where this comes down to do you really need to if you're if you're playing this on four are you really ramping into something sweet for six or seven next turn well this is like red decks white decks and colorless decks like you want this all day long yeah i mean carlos dex carlos texas is like one of them it's like top 15. yeah you want this card in your deck uh next one coalition rock i love this one this is a three-man whack that taps for a color uh any color mana and then you can tap it to put a charge counter on it and on the beginning of your pre-combat main phase uh you you remove all the charge counters and you get eddie color mana equal to the number of characters removed this way not only is it a three-minute rock that taps for two functionally the first time you just charge it up and then it'll tap for two next turn that's that already fits our our criteria but you can also build up the charge counters same way as ever flying channels and it makes any color twice so it can like make green white or blue red yeah you can you get to choose what turn you want to use it twice basically it's always gonna give you one mana no matter what because the first turner comes out you can choose not to use it and then put the charge counter so you get that next turn and then if you really need all the mana you throw it all in or you just save the charge kind of for next turn and just makes one man a turn yeah random proliferate okay it'll tap for three next turn functionally yeah also uh a cool cool little my my favorite little uh combo with this seedborne moose oh that's sweet you just keep putting charge counters and everybody's everybody's turn you put a charge counter on it so when it's your turn you get like three mana off of it yeah three off of the trigger it's four because you got the trigger it taps for what it's sweet i love this character that's really cool speaking of three mana meta rocks that have charge counters that happen every turn that you can proliferate uh it's midnight clocks two in a blue for an artifact taps for blue so it's three man on taps for one hold on there's that ability we're gonna uh expect by now two in a blue put an hour counter on it every upkeep you also put an hour counter and when there's 12 you remove them all exile this thing chuck it into a river and then you shuffle your graveyard and hand in to your library and then draw seven cards yeah so this card is really going to get you a fresh seven after it goes off it produces mana for a few turns five so they can it can be if you play on turn three you can do it for a ton of turns this thing goes off really quick any dates because it's each upkeep so it only takes uh three full goes around the table for you to for this thing the trigger go off and you get to draw the fresh seven which means you can just empty your hand as fast as possible and just throw out all your resources and then with all your extra mana that you have laying around put counters on this to get it to go even faster it's this card is great and i haven't really gotten to put it in a deck because i don't have a deck that like wants this that badly but i i almost want to build one because it's just it's so oh i'll draw five cards with my mana rock i paid three mana it netted itself back it produced all three that i spent on it maybe more and now okay i'm just gonna draw a seven i i had two cards in my hand but now i have seven yeah i like this card a lot i think it belongs in a lot of different decks depending on the museum definitely i think it belongs in decks that really want to use their resources quick and like just kind of throw their cards out like i want to play everything out of my hand quick and then midnight clockwise draw me a fresh seven after that which is something that not a lot of not a lot of anarchics will do actually i would say almost no man around like that is the biggest upside in any manor rock i've ever seen not that this is like broken but just in terms of like what a mana rock does for no mana it's pretty crazy yeah i mean again it's only four turns around the table zero investment just hope it doesn't get it might get swept in the boardway but just fine you can't you can't the dice removal isn't a good argument but if it gets wet from the border hey whatever this isn't a huge target i mean it only becomes a target once it's at like 10 counters but even then you could just leave up six mana so it's like someone targets it's like okay i'll activate activate and now it goes off uh last one is covered jewel i absolutely love coveted jewel it is a six-man artifact and when it enters you draw three cards and it taps for three mana of any color but there's a little caveat if somebody attacks you with creatures and one of them is unblocked they gain control of the coveted jewel and then they draw three cards and they untap the coveted jewel that's a lot of card draw if if you've got ways to like sacrifice it to take it back multiple times this kind of becomes it's like a weird six mana draw six make six mana and then somebody else draws three and makes three mana it's really weird you can i mean even then it's like this this also adds uh what i really like about this card more than anything is it adds an extra layer to the game of magic right it's like the monarchy yes exactly like the monarchy where it's like there's this extra layer of attacking there's an extra slayer of politics and that that's what makes cdh so much fun is that it's not just this one-on-one game where there's no objectives the whole objective is just win the game there is zero other objective there is zero other i meant like objectivity there's way less objective like that was strictly wrong it's like well no because i need to deal with him yeah like that you can't factor that there's no you know algorithm for that yeah exactly yeah i agree with i agree with what you're saying also but also what i was saying was right too so lastly but not leastly we have traps uh-oh which basically just means hey we've played with these or experienced these or based on our criteria for like what we think a card should be i would avoid all of these mostly and i'd like to mention right away that because i just want to re-mention it budget is not being taken into account for these i know some of these are expensive but the cheap ones some will be like but i have tons of these more budgets it's like yeah if it's your budget doc that's great your debt costs 50 and you that was your goal for the deck that's fine because these these things obviously obviously a quarter card gains a ton of value for a budget deck right it's object like there is an objective like best thing when your budget is a dollar well i can tell you the best matter rock for a dollar but we're just talking about the best mana rocks so the first one we have on on trap city here is the diamond cycle they're like let's talk about i think it's pearl diamond the intersect cost two makes a white and there's one for each color yep uh these are just this this is uh there's more there's a lot like this there's they enter tapped and they tap for one mana the trouble is they come and tap they don't do anything the first turn they get your manner back it takes two full turns every single time yeah if you want to talk about just like this the cards aren't even that bad i don't think but the problem is there's 30 mana rocks that are better than them and then the bottom 10 of those don't even make decks so i don't see how these would the yeah the main issue is the answer tap more than anything right oh you're a red blue deck okay well you've got is it signet you've got arcane signet you've got felwar stone then you could play over this you've got thought vessel you play mine stones like well now how many metamocks do you want because fire diamond probably isn't going to make it you can even play sapphire medallion and fire or fire medallion over this if these engines don't tap they're really good let's be clear about that because these become these move up to like signet levels and tests yeah they do become that but but entering tapped and also not having abilities just kind of pushes them below a lot of stuff exactly enter entering tapped is such a huge downside it's so big like i can't actually i can't overstate how big entering tabs it's just like when we talk we talk about we've talked about lands in the past it's the same concept it puts you a whole term behind it stops you from potentially double spelling there's so many things that that a rock or a land entering tap can prevent you from doing maybe talk about that some other time but we got pillar of origins next i this card probably doesn't even see that much play i just want to talk about it's two mana for an artifact enters battlefield chooses creature type and then it adds a mana but only for the creature type of any color i think this card's terrible i think it's like unplayable uh this is weird to me because you could just play creature spells that are this costs one less and then that card has another ability tacked onto it or some creature or some land i i it's so not worth it it's not the type like it's not a dragon so it won't trigger anything for dragons it doesn't add mana for anything that's not a dragon why do you want this thing you know what i was thinking in my head i would play this in my umori creature deck but it's not a creature so i can't so let's catch things it's just here's the issue right um pill of origins doesn't actually give you an upside it just says a man of any color for this tribe so the upside is any color so if i'm like mono red dragons this is worse than every other thing that just comes in like arcane signet or just makes a mana i mean thought festival's better mindstone has no abilities doesn't do anything it just makes a mana so this becomes worse it needed to say like whenever you cast whenever this man was spent to cast a creature spell like scry one or something then we'd be like more in the discussion it would be cool uh whenever you cast if you cat say like you name dragons and then you cast a dragon you get like or a colored yeah same exact thing that's that's way more usable it's way better that's that's just a playable kind of thing it's not broken maybe uh it sounds very good it goes infinite with uh any one mana thing that bounces itself sure there's no whatever okay that's not really that doesn't exist is that what we're worried about because that character is just playable next is chromatic lantern avoid this in one two card decks three color decks you can consider it but unless you're very color intensive i wouldn't use it four in five color decks those are really where you want it because in four and five color decks chromatic lantern actually starts having very very relevant text where you're fixing your mana and it's very prevalent to your deck as opposed if all your lands tap for one extra color than they would have that is not a good static ability on a three-minute rock that only makes one we said that we wanted to make two or have a good static i don't think the static is all that interesting it's not even as good of a static as uh dried of the elysian grove aka naked drive boy where he actually says now all your lands are all types so you can trigger like valid could a bunch of times yeah it doesn't have that it's just they make any color and he also goes your extra land drops that curve's way better well yeah that's not he's not a man of rock yeah that guy if that he was a man of rock i would play him he's an enchantment i mean he'd be oh my god he'd be such a good man of rock if he was if he was if he was an enchantment and not a creature that could be so good you mean if he was an artifact if he was an artifact or a champion i'm saying he's an enchantment well okay if he's not a creature if he's if you remove the type creature from died of the listening group that card gets such a huge boost because it doesn't just get swept even board wipes that could be so good okay we're just talking about we're literally talking more about fake cards that don't exist yeah on every single bullet that's cool so we'll get to the next one uh these are possibly traps there's basalt monolith three-man artifact taps for three pay three to untip it grim monolith two mana taps for three pay forward on tepid and mana vault one minute attempts for three pay four on your upkeep to untap it or deals of damage to you yeah why do we have these as sometimes traps uh because if you have the way to untap these then they just become weird rituals uh or if you don't have ways to untap them then another reason these become traps is is if you don't have ways to really cast huge spells they're going to be so impactful it won't matter that now you've lost like three or four mana so like maelstrom wanderer does not care they want to play manifold on turn one and then play milestone on like turn three it doesn't matter that we did it because those three extra turns were huge same with basalt and grimm or basalt monolith thinker monolith have like infinite combos you can do that's way different artifact decks that are untapping and tapping these totally totally want them but random mono black deck maybe you don't want manifold yeah i wouldn't if i'm playing a random deck would you play dark ritual no it's the same thing if you're never gonna untap it yeah because you're basically never gonna untap it because you're just not gonna have the extra mana laying around and when you do untap it no you lose all that advantage you just take a huge tempo like you just take a turn off the tempo what does that call it the tempo black hole yeah we like to say temple black hole a temple black that's what euros should be but it's not but yeah all these cars can be a temple black hole if you start untapping them without getting any advantage off because now you're just you're not even generating mana you're just doing a weird like move my mana to my next turn yeah i'll skip it's like skipping uh you know the the way over extended like analogies skip my turn and then have two turns or something yeah what's the point of that just take turns normally uh next up is a card that i love but i don't think it's very good it's commander sphere it's three mana for a thing that produces one of any color of your commander's color identity and you can stack it not tap it just sack it whenever to draw a card i only feel like this is a trap for certain reasons because i feel like it goes it just ends up with too many decks i think this character is fine and i think it definitely has homes in certain docks especially when you want to remember like say sacking artifact can get you an advantage or an artifact coming in and give you an advantage but i just feel like it's just it's not an auto included this is not something this isn't like it isn't to look at your two mana rock slot fill your two mile rock slot out then maybe if especially i like commander's fear especially if you're in two or one color because then you start falling into like okay i don't need producing any color is not that important but i don't have that many two mana rocks because like i don't get my i don't get sickness in one color don't get talismans you don't get talents in one color and then you go into two colors and you get those but you start running out if you need a bunch of them you start going to three yeah so red white uh that's fine you can't really play it in colorless because it does it won't tap for mana um so i like commander sphere but i think stick to budget mostly yeah exactly um i was i don't even think six two i think one and two color decks is where it belongs honestly because as soon as you get to three colors there's so many two men of rocks in three colors it's insane it just gets pushed into like not even close to playability this next one is a weird car that i think honestly we don't even really consider a man rock i look at this card and maybe maybe we're wrong right uh but i think this is one of the worst cards i've ever seen that i see played quite a bit it's gemstone array it's a four-minute artifact and then it you can pay two put a charge counter on it and then you can remove a charge counter and add a mana of any color to your mana pool am i missing something or is this like to me at least this card looks horrible yeah this is gonna be the one the comments if someone's gonna say nobody plays but it's like i'd love to talk about it i'm just like confused because i i get that you can proliferate the counter but this card by itself will literally never pay itself back ever yeah six mana to get one and then it's eight to get two or three this feels like skip your turn take two turns later what about ten i put ten men into it oh you get what three that's pretty bad that that's just like joke numbers to me so unless you're some like hyper insane infinite combo proliferate don't even think about it i don't see this character all being in any decks i but we've seen it and i just want to say don't play it because i don't even know the deck that goes in i don't have a deck on the top of my head but maybe you have one maybe there definitely might be some there's again there's always exceptions to the rule i don't know what the exception is in this case so i know it's going to say there's no exceptions like once you have like winding constrictor then you pay 2 mana to make 2 mana but that doesn't really get you anywhere then you need to make it produce an additional then it goes infinite okay moving on dreamstonehedron is when we talked about that is the next step up there's minestone for two and there's hydrogen archive for four and then there's dream stonehenge for six which produces three you can pay three and tap second to draw three this just no too far sorry two you've crossed i don't know where the line is but you crossed it because i'm not paying six mana for a rock that makes three well we mentioned five plus mana rocks or ones we just don't want to play and then we watch we want our five rocks attack for three i don't even think guild lotus is that great and this is way worse than that yeah i mean the bible kill notice mainly is that it cost five mana i mean it can pay itself back in two turns if you get the go rounds but it also draws a big target if you're a deck that's going to be casting huge spells uh yeah the character is perfectly fine a reasonable uh dreamstone haitian but again i don't know you either be in specific decks colorless maybe still just be played anyway because i know the colorless pool is way lighter than everything else well yeah i mean literally you have to play cards that have zero colors most magic cards have a color right you don't get the talismans you don't get the signatures you don't get you don't even get the diamonds yeah you don't even get the charcoal by me no charcoal liner my favorite diamond okay there's only one this is all the same card there's only one of them one one card left talking about but there's like 30 of them this is three mana artifact cycle they tap to add one two or three colors and they're bad we have the banners the crystals the clue stones the obelisks the monuments and the key runes and also the lockets there's so many of these there's three men of anarchs that come down and basically just produce one mana they often they sometimes produce three different colors two different colors uh some of them draw a card in a weird way that you don't really care about that much yeah uh like the clue stones crack in a weird way but the best the banners do too the the best ones that we the ones that we like the most are lockets which you can pay for in section to draw two cards which is pretty awesome to replace them with two cards way down the line after using them best for budget if you're in a budget i think these these lockets are actually just great like if you're on a budget these are like the best matter rocks you can have also if you're on a budget i think crystals are great crystals are good too because they just cycle so if you don't want a mana rock you just cycle it yeah it's like lockets super amazing like i'm such a big fan of them for budget and then crystals hey you got some macquarie cards then you don't want to like break the bank or buy your cards take use your crystals and we're not if we're not talking about budget don't play any of these get them out of your deck don't even think about them because they're all worse than chromatic lantern and we don't like that so i mean they're below this card that you need to find every excuse to play anyway so i just don't bother yeah just don't play these uh don't play them anywhere and accept budget budget is the exception even then avoid all of the ones with no text and keep stick to the lockets or crystals yeah i would agree with that okay that's a lot of tips i feel like we just threw out like a hundred thousand tips at people so let's just let them cool down for five minutes we'll just talk about plugs all right so special shout outs to all of our patrons we love you all as much as we can without making you uncomfortable you guys are the greatest for the poopy babies uh nipping nerds fans are aka the puppy babies if you would like to become a poopy baby and join them and support us monthly you can go to patreon.com using the link in the description below speaking of links in the description you go to the tcg player link we have below which is where the description is if you haven't watched a youtube video before click on the link navigate where you want buy what you want and then we get a kickback on the order yep uh so that's pretty awesome we do love kickback and if you love seeing joe and sometimes never meet you can go to twitch.com nitpickingnerds check out him streaming from 10 to 4 weekdays eastern standard time and i won't be there probably what would that link be it's in the description what is the description i lost the track it's below oh good call good call nice one that's why there's two of us yeah so what's the why is there so why why is there a tidbit about our life i meant to say what's the tidbit about our life not why is there one we got to cop out last time and talk about how we have a new studio um maybe the tidbit is that we're getting more stuff for the studio we've already said that unless you have something literally said that last episode i think that was me so you got to come up with oh come on come on um get really hyped getting really hyped because this friday is paper my the thousand-year door or not the thousands paper mario uh origami king the combat is questionable and we'll see if it's fun we're going to literally already use this as a as a thing but i'm excited it's getting closer so i'm going to keep using it i it's going to be the first video game i played in like two years so we'll see if it's good like the first new video game maybe the first new video game i've played in like seven years i don't know i don't play video games i mean the which just puts me which ostracizes me from like those nerds who just sit down and play video games and i'm like i can't talk to you about anything i play so i play i i play few and far between video games i play some but not as many you couldn't talk to like the cod players about anything like i have no idea oh i have no clue they're talking about i feel like a mom i don't know no they always they're always talking about but it feels like the cod and the fortnite players are always talking about the toughest part about it is if you don't keep up with it it's really hard because they always talk about the newest patch and how it runs the dlc no not the dlc just how the newest patch ruined the game every time it always maybe is that the one with the kill streaks i don't i'm sorry jimmy i don't know they ah i like literally like so every time i talk to a fortnite player the newest patch is the worst thing that's happened to the game how many 12 year olds do you know uh i mean my brother plays fortnight my brother's 12th fortnight nephew is 14 13. basically 12. yeah we're done we're just rambling i mean that's what we always do we always ramble uh peace out chad scout [Music] you

Channel: Nitpicking Nerds

Views: 101,911

Keywords: Mana Rocks, mana rocks edh, mana rocks mtg, EDH, Commander, Nitpicking Nerds, guide to mana rocks, Which mana rocks are worth playing, a guide to mana rocks in edh, best mana rocks, worst mana rocks, mtg, edh, commander, nitpicking nerds, edh mana rocks, commander mana rocks, top 10 mana rocks edh, top 10 mana rocks, mana base, upgrading mana rocks, upgrade mana base

Id: KXGO8RjPAh0

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020