Hello and welcome to Commander Bites!

Today we are going to be taking a look at Mole Man, Moloid Master!

Mole Man is a three mana 1/1 that let’s you play lands from your graveyard and a Landfall ability of whenever a land you control enters, you create a 1/1 green Minion creature token named Moloid with “Whenever this token attacks, you may mill a card.”

Game Plan

Mole Man is a very straightforward Commander to understand, and that is to play lands, get tokens, mill cards that provide some sort of value, repeat.

The question that does come with a lot of Landfall Commanders is how hard do you want to go in the Landfall theme. How many cards with Landfall is too many cards to track?

With something like Mole Man I think that fewer cards with Landfall triggers would be better, but I wouldn’t say none. We are going to lean more into playing fun lands from our graveyard than every Landfall card.

Support

The first thing to look at would be the lands that would work best in the deck, and there are a bevy of options.

For quick cheap multi land triggers the land cycle from Streets of New Capenna, more specifically Brokers Hideout, Cabaretti Courtyard, and Riveteers Outlook would work best because they immediately sacrifice themselves to search for a land, namely a Forest in our case, and gain us one life and two Landfall triggers.

War Room is a solid utility land that can draw us a card for three mana and one life, Eden, Seat of the Sanctum let’s us mill two cards and we may sacrifice it to return a permanent from our graveyard back to our hand, Tranquil Thicket can Cycle for a single green mana, and Emergence Zone can let us cast spells as if they had flash if we sacrifice it.

If we really want to be mean then there are of course cards like Strip Mine, Ghost Quarter, Wasteland, and the like to destroy our opponent’s lands and/or nonbasic lands depending on your land destruction card of choice that you can recur because of Mole Man letting you play lands from the graveyard.

Argoth, Sanctum of Nature would also work well because for four mana and tap we can make a 2/2 Bear creature token and more importantly mill three cards. We can also make use of Titania, Voice of Gaea who gains us two life when one or more land cards are put into our graveyard from anywhere and at the beginning of our upkeep if we have four or more lands in our graveyard and we have both Argoth and Titania in play then we can meld them into Titania, Gaea Incarnate.

When Titania, Gaea Incarnate enters then we return all land cards from the graveyard to the battlefield tapped, which we can definitely use for a variety of Landfall triggers, especially with the lands that can fetch us another land.

We also have plenty of options to help support our archetype to include Return of the Mole Man, which has a Landfall ability that mills two cards and a six mana ability that makes X Moloid tokens that do what we want to so.

Spelunking not only gives us card draw, an additional land drop, but also has it so that any lands we control enter the battlefield untapped which makes a lot of ramp spells even better, Tireless Provisioner can make us a Food or a Treasure token as a Landfall trigger, and Ancient Greenwarden doubles all of our Landfall triggers.

Using the land removal lands and ways we can play additional lands per turn like Azusa, Lost but Seeking, Loot, Exuberant Explorer, or even an Exploration can give us a potential control win, which is an accomplishment in a mono-green deck if I do say so myself, or you could even just swing in with all the Moloid tokens after using a Craterhoof Behemoth to win with a classic green aggro strategy.

Setbacks

As you would expect for a graveyard deck, our graveyard is pretty fragile and we can potentially lose it all to a Bojuka Bog or to a Scavenger Grounds. While we have some ways to potentially counteract those cards, it is still something to watch out for.

What becomes a major concern, because we are milling ourselves, is what happens if we mill out. While mill isn’t one of the best strategies in Commander, it is a popular strategy that can make things better or worse for us.

While we can use Mole Man to get our lands back, we have to make sure we can recover cards from our graveyard because otherwise we lose out on our own payoffs.

We can use a cheeky Gaea’s Blessing as a way to potentially combat mill strategies while also not majorly hurting us if it gets milled from one of our Moloids because we are saving our own cards, but that is just one way to combat us milling out, which doesn’t save us if we draw it because it only works if it goes from our library into the graveyard.

Landfall cards also can be a both a pain to track and a pain to resolve if there are too many of them and they can potentially make you the archenemy because once people see that you are playing a Landfall Commander, your Landfall cards are going to be lightning rods for removal.

Bracket Rating: 3, Very Low 4 if you MLD

I don’t think that Mole Man is inherently an overpowered Commander, mostly because there are a lot of answers to graveyard based decks in Commander that can answer him, but there are also a lot of really solid ways to make use of Landfall strategies that make him a particular threat.

I only put him as a bracket 4 Commander when you use the previously mentioned cards like Strip Mine and Ghost Quarter because with you being able to recur lands from your graveyard and potentially playing more lands with cards like Azusa, you can lock your opponents out of the game by destroying all of their lands.

MLD is something that is not allowed in bracket 3 and lower so if you do play this strategy then you are in bracket 4 by default but there is a chance that you may not be as strong as some bracket 4 decks which is why I have it at a low bracket 4.

Otherwise Mole Man is a solid strategy that has access to a lot of payoffs in making many Moloids and playing some neat lands as well.

Thank you for reading, see you all tomorrow!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual