Is Dark Depths good in Commander?

Dark Depths

Legendary Snow Land

Dark Depths enters with ten ice counters on it.
: Remove an ice counter from Dark Depths.
When Dark Depths has no ice counters on it, sacrifice it. If you do, create Marit Lage, a legendary 20/20 black Avatar creature token with flying and indestructible.

CMC: 0
Mana cost
Color identity: C
Rarity: mythic
Set: From the Vault: Lore
Price: —
EDHREC rank: #1361

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Dark Depths puts a 20/20 indestructible flying token on the board the moment its ten ice counters are gone — and the entire Legacy and Commander combo ecosystem exists specifically to make that happen on turn two or three. The cost is real: it enters with those counters and produces no mana, so it's a dead land until you can manipulate or remove them. Commanders like Isu the Abominable, which cares about +1/+1 counters, and enchantments like Mayael's Aria, which rewards having the biggest creature, both treat the resulting Marit Lage token as a payoff worth building around.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

Format	Verdict
commander	legal
legacy	legal
modern	banned
pioneer	not legal
standard	not legal
vintage	legal
pauper	not legal
oathbreaker	legal

Dark Depths is banned in Modern, where the Thespian's Stage copy-and-sacrifice line creates a Marit Lage token as early as turn two with no meaningful interaction required — too fast, too consistent, too hard to disrupt on a format-wide scale. Legacy tolerates it because the format has both the speed to match it and the disruption to answer it: Force of Will, Wasteland, and Surgical Extraction all keep it honest. Commander gives it a pass for the same reason it gives most non-mana-vault-style cards a pass: you're one player against three, the token dies to exile removal, and spending lands to assemble the combo costs tempo. It's powerful in the 99 but nowhere near the consistency of a two-player 60-card environment.

Best Commanders

Commanders with the highest synergy

Isu the Abominable

79.8% of decks · synergy 0.78

Isu the Abominable removes ice counters from Dark Depths directly — attacking with Isu strips counters from any target, so Dark Depths can have its counters clawed off over several combats without needing a separate Vampire Hexmage or Stage combo.

Omo, Queen of Vesuva

72.7% of decks · synergy 0.66

Omo, Queen of Vesuva puts lore counters on permanents and can place counter types across card types, giving Dark Depths a native counter-removal engine right in the command zone — stack enough effects and Marit Lage arrives without any secondary combo piece.

Jorn, God of Winter

68.7% of decks · synergy 0.65

Jorn, God of Winter untaps snow permanents on attack, and Dark Depths is a snow land — that interaction pairs with counter-removal pieces across multiple turns, letting Jorn decks treat the Depths as a slow but inevitable win condition in the background of an already synergistic snow engine.

Lord Windgrace

28.5% of decks · synergy 0.26

Lord Windgrace recurs lands from the graveyard, which means a Dark Depths that gets Wastelanded or sacrificed can come back — and fetching it with Crop Rotation or Elvish Reclaimer is trivial in a Jund lands shell that already wants those cards.

Titania, Protector of Argoth

25.9% of decks · synergy 0.23

Titania, Protector of Argoth creates a 5/3 token every time a land enters from the graveyard, so sacrificing Dark Depths as part of the Thespian's Stage line generates a free token on top of Marit Lage — two threats for one combo.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

163 decks