MTG Ramp By color

What are the best MTG ramp cards?

The best MTG ramp cards are the ones players actually reach for, and a handful of those measurably raise your win rate. The lists below rank every mono-color and colorless ramp card in Magic: The Gathering by how many tracked Commander decks run it, counted from real games on Playgroup.gg. Where a card has been played enough for us to measure its effect on winning, and that effect is clearly positive, its win-rate lift is shown beside the count.

Deck counts are drawn from 146,944 tracked decks on Playgroup.gg.

Lists last computed 3 Sep 2026 from decks and games tracked on Playgroup.gg.

How ramp differs by color

A two-mana rock and a six-mana sorcery are not the same card, so the useful question about a color is not only what it ramps with but when. Each bar is that color's ranked cards grouped by mana value. Lands count as zero.

Ramp by color

Red Ramp

Red makes treasure, which is mana right now and nothing at all next turn. It has the most explosive single turn of any color.

Clusters at three mana: 11 of 30 ranked cards.

9,426

Decks running Jeska's Will

#	Card	Decks Decks running it	Win-rate lift
1	Jeska's Will +1.2% win rate · 18,784 games with it · 2148 pilots · 698 commander groups	9,426	+1.2%
2	Big Score +0.5% win rate · 12,648 games with it · 2093 pilots · 495 commander groups	8,118	+0.5%
3	Professional Face-Breaker	6,221	—
4	Storm-Kiln Artist +0.6% win rate · 9,249 games with it · 1583 pilots · 261 commander groups	5,992	+0.6%
5	Mana Geyser +0.4% win rate · 8,112 games with it · 1395 pilots · 369 commander groups	5,385	+0.4%
6	Goldspan Dragon +1.2% win rate · 9,683 games with it · 1404 pilots · 249 commander groups	4,826	+1.2%
7	Unexpected Windfall +0.0% win rate · 7,121 games with it · 1228 pilots · 364 commander groups	4,779	+0.0%
8	Seething Song	4,387	—
9	Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer	4,293	—
10	Cursed Mirror	3,802	—

See the full red ramp list

Black Ramp

Black pays with life and with bodies: rituals for one explosive turn, sacrifice outlets, and payoffs that scale with the Swamps you already control.

Clusters at two mana or less: 15 of 30 ranked cards.

15,718

Decks running Dark Ritual

#	Card	Decks Decks running it	Win-rate lift
1	Dark Ritual	15,718	—
2	Black Market Connections +1.3% win rate · 16,997 games with it · 2210 pilots · 608 commander groups	9,092	+1.3%
3	Deadly Dispute	8,177	—
4	Phyrexian Tower +2.0% win rate · 10,557 games with it · 1441 pilots · 446 commander groups	5,993	+2.0%
5	Pitiless Plunderer +1.8% win rate · 11,274 games with it · 1668 pilots · 288 commander groups	5,965	+1.8%
6	Cabal Coffers +0.5% win rate · 8,497 games with it · 1144 pilots · 376 commander groups	5,613	+0.5%
7	Warren Soultrader +3.1% win rate · 7,272 games with it · 1003 pilots · 241 commander groups	3,490	+3.1%
8	Culling the Weak	3,171	—
9	Cabal Ritual	3,093	—
10	Crypt Ghast +3.3% win rate · 4,360 games with it · 679 pilots · 171 commander groups	3,004	+3.3%

See the full black ramp list

Blue Ramp

Blue mostly cheats on cost instead of adding mana, and what ramp it has is expensive or lasts a single turn.

Clusters at four or more: 15 of 30 ranked cards.

8,433

Decks running Mana Drain

#	Card	Decks Decks running it	Win-rate lift
1	Mana Drain +3.5% win rate · 15,092 games with it · 1705 pilots · 685 commander groups	8,433	+3.5%
2	Midnight Clock	2,774	—
3	Sky Diamond	2,140	—
4	High Tide	1,883	—
5	Urza, Lord High Artificer +0.4% win rate · 3,369 games with it · 472 pilots · 133 commander groups	1,780	+0.4%
6	Uthros, Titanic Godcore	1,539	—
7	Silver Myr	1,383	—
8	Tezzeret the Seeker +0.9% win rate · 2,042 games with it · 250 pilots · 94 commander groups	1,066	+0.9%
9	Agent of Treachery	940	—
10	Aminatou's Augury +3.1% win rate · 1,499 games with it · 267 pilots · 82 commander groups	936	+3.1%

See the full blue ramp list

Green Ramp

Green puts extra lands onto the battlefield, which is permanent, cheap and available from turn two. No other color gets this.

Clusters at two mana or less: 17 of 30 ranked cards.

28,768

Decks running Cultivate

#	Card	Decks Decks running it	Win-rate lift
1	Cultivate	28,768	—
2	Farseek	24,349	—
3	Nature's Lore +1.4% win rate · 40,025 games with it · 4436 pilots · 1034 commander groups	20,663	+1.4%
4	Rampant Growth	19,418	—
5	Birds of Paradise +1.0% win rate · 31,929 games with it · 3513 pilots · 882 commander groups	16,000	+1.0%
6	Three Visits +1.3% win rate · 29,960 games with it · 3425 pilots · 915 commander groups	15,895	+1.3%
7	Kodama's Reach	15,166	—
8	Llanowar Elves	11,873	—
9	Sakura-Tribe Elder +0.3% win rate · 19,215 games with it · 2542 pilots · 626 commander groups	9,853	+0.3%
10	Elvish Mystic	9,688	—

See the full green ramp list

White Ramp

White taxes the rest of the table rather than fetching anything, and its catch-up ramp only works while someone else is ahead on lands.

Clusters at two mana or less: 13 of 30 ranked cards.

11,871

Decks running Smothering Tithe

#	Card	Decks Decks running it	Win-rate lift
1	Smothering Tithe +0.9% win rate · 25,081 games with it · 2598 pilots · 798 commander groups	11,871	+0.9%
2	Sun Titan	5,659	—
3	Sevinne's Reclamation	4,363	—
4	Archaeomancer's Map	3,697	—
5	Monologue Tax	2,835	—
6	Knight of the White Orchid	2,476	—
7	Tataru Taru	2,361	—
8	Keeper of the Accord	2,037	—
9	Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation // Temple of Civilization	1,847	—
10	Marble Diamond	1,624	—

See the full white ramp list

How these ramp lists are built

Start with what the order means, because it shapes everything else on this page. These lists are ranked by how many tracked decks run each card, not by a rating and not by the measurement. Separately we compare decks that run a card against decks on the same commander that do not, pool those matched comparisons, and ask whether the difference is bigger than chance. Only a handful of cards clear that bar. The rest are played widely and honestly, and we cannot tell you they help.

That is why the lists are ordered by deck count rather than by the measurement. Sorting a list by a number whose confidence interval crosses zero for most of its rows would be ranking sampling error and calling it insight. Deck count is a smaller claim, but it is one the data can actually carry, and it answers the question people arrive with: which ramp cards do Commander players put in their decks?

The win-rate lift is therefore a marker, not the ranking. It appears beside a card only when that card has been played enough to judge and its measured effect is clearly positive, which means clearing minimums on games with the card, on how many separate commander groups it was seen in and on how many different pilots played it, with a cap on how much of the sample any one pilot may hold, and then landing entirely above zero. A card that was measured and came out flat gets an empty cell rather than a number near zero, because a number near zero reads as a verdict and this one is not.

Read that figure as a difference, not a multiplier. A +2.2% lift means a deck running the card wins 2.2 percentage points more often than decks on the same commander without it: 27.2% of its games rather than 25.0%. It is not a 2.2% relative increase, and it is not a claim that the card wins 2.2% of your games on its own.

Land ramp, rocks and rituals all count

The candidate pool is every Commander-legal card carrying Scryfall's ramp oracle tag, which is a human-curated tag rather than a text search. That covers land ramp, which puts extra lands onto the battlefield, mana rocks and mana creatures, which tap for mana themselves, rituals, which trade a card for one turn of extra mana, and cost reduction. One exclusion is deliberate: cards whose only mana effect is to hand a land to an opponent are removal spells, so cards like Path to Exile, which a raw reading of the tag put at the top of white ramp, are excluded from the candidate pool. Multicolor cards are left out too, because someone searching for white ramp wants mono-white cards they can put in any white deck rather than gold cards that need a second color. Each surviving card is counted across every non-archived tracked deck whose mainboard contains it.

Counts are drawn from 146,944 tracked decks on Playgroup.gg.

The ramp oracle tag comes from Scryfall and popularity across public decklists is answered better by EDHREC than by us. What we add is the count from decks that were actually played, and the measured effect on winning where there is one to report.

Counted from decks and games tracked on Playgroup.gg. Every card name links to its full stat page.