Four colours is where a Commander mana base stops being a shopping list and becomes a sequencing problem. You need every colour early enough...
Four colours is where a Commander mana base stops being a shopping list and becomes a sequencing problem. You need every colour early enough to cast a curve drawn from four different colour requirements, on a land count that still leaves room for a deck. The good news: four-colour bases fail in predictable ways, and predictable failures have honest fixes.
Real lands, read exactly
Exotic Orchard — Land (mana cost ): {T}: Add one mana of any color that a land an opponent controls could produce.
City of Brass — Land (mana cost ): Whenever this land becomes tapped, it deals 1 damage to you.
{T}: Add one mana of any color.
Every land named here can be checked in the MTGBrew card database — mana-base advice should always survive a trip to the oracle text.
How to apply this to your deck
Start from the curve, not the colour wheel. Count the pips your early spells actually demand, colour by colour, and weight your sources toward the colours you cast on turns one to three; the fourth colour usually enters through fixing lands that produce anything, plus a small number of true sources. Prefer lands that enter untapped on the turns your curve is busiest, and accept tapped fixing only where the early game is empty anyway. Then stress-test: goldfish ten hands and count how many keep a playable first three turns in at least three colours — a four-colour base that cannot do that needs more fixing, not more hope.
Build the list in the MTGBrew AI deck builder and count your coloured sources colour by colour against the spells you actually cast early; the MTGBrew Learn guides return to this habit in every mana-base piece, because most 'bad luck' in Commander is a mana base quietly miscounted at build time.
If this topic is on your bench, keep going with Voltron Deck Tech: How the Archetype Works and Wins in Commander — it covers the neighbouring decisions from a different angle, and the two pieces together give you a fuller picture than either one alone.
The short version
A mana base is a promise your deck makes to its own curve. Keep the promise measurable — sources per colour, lands that enter untapped when the early game needs them, utility slots that still tap for mana — and the strategy on top of it gets to be the reason you win or lose, instead of the lands deciding before the game starts.
Keep reading
Keep reading: Voltron Deck Tech: How the Archetype Works and Wins in Commander and Rules: Deathtouch and Fight — Why One Damage Is Enough.
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