Ravnica, the City of the Guilds. Here you will find ten distinct factions. Each adorning signets, designs, and morals reflecting their colors. Each guild is responsible for a different section of the city. A Guildgate adorns the entrance of each guild. The Gateway Plaza is where the ten guilds meet. The nexus of all things Ravnica.

Gates have played a vital role in the story of Magic. They first appear in Gatecrash and Return to Ravnica. We saw a handful of draftchaff-worthy Commons/Uncommons and the Gates themselves.

But there must be something more here?

Gates have come a long way since Ravnica. At this point, there is such good Gate support that it is a worthy consideration for your commander decks! Ravnica may have given us ten Gates, but as of this article, we have 23!

Here’s a quick rundown:

The original Ravnica – 10
Battle for Baldur’s Gate – 9
Misc other sets – 4

We will go into the Gates with a bit more utility later. But for now, let’s get the boring ones out of the way.

The original Ravnica Gates are all two colors. They enter the battlefield tapped. Nice and simple.

Meanwhile Battle for Baldur’s Gate brought us mono-color Gates. These all enter tapped, and have a chosen color. They will tap for one specific mana or the chosen color of mana. This offers nice flexibility. In your Jeskai deck, Cliffgate gets red or any other color.

These Gates are all unremarkable but make up 15 out of the 23 Gates. This is our foundation!

Gond Gate will make your Gates enter the battlefield untapped! Meanwhile, Baldur’s Gate works like Cabal Coffers but for Gates!

For the cost of a tall Americano, you get a land base that synergizes with itself and can enter untapped. That’s before we think about Maze’s End.

The only other budget-conscious Gates are Basilisk Gate and Heap Gate. These two are admittedly much worse than the other Gates discussed today.

Basilisk Gate taps for colorless. It can also give a creature +X/+X for each land you control. This might be worth playing if your main plan is beatdown. But the colorless mana it generates can sometimes be a problem.

Heap Gate also needs to find the fight place. It taps for colorless or can filter mana. You can tap three lands to make a treasure token.

Including Heap and Basilisk Gate should be done with a little more caution. They are not as “free” to play as the other ones. However, they are not useless!

Assuming budget is less of a concern, there are three Gates you need to try!

The Black Gate was printed in The Lord of the Rings. It taps for mono black and has an activated ability. For two mana target creature cannot be blocked by the player with the most life. Like Basilisk Gate, this second ability won’t come up too much unless you are heavy on the beatdown plan. We are mainly playing this to pad up our Gate count.

Talon Gates of Madara is the most powerful Gate of the lot. It can tap for colorless or filter mana just like Planar Nexus. But it can also act as a removal spell!

When it enters the battlefield, up to one target creature phases out! This is a fantastic ability on the offense or defense. Casting a Crop Rotation lets us phase out a problematic attacker or save our creature from a removal spell. All that, and for four mana we can return Talon Gates to our hand!

This is repeatable!

If you’re splashing out on a Gate, make it this one.

Planar Nexus is great, but it is a little expensive for what it is. It is not technically a Gate. You won’t see it in Scryfall if you look up “type=gate”.  It does not have the Gate subtype. However, it is “every non-basic land type”. This means it is a Gate, Locus, Cave and so much more. It is worth including if you have additional land synergy or if you are trying to max out your count of Gates.

It is also relevant for Maze’s End. The Maze insists that you have 10 Gates with different names. Planar Nexus will help you here, while clones such as Vesuva and Thespian Stage will not.

There seems to be only a small handful of Gate synergy cards that stand out as uniquely powerful. Sage of the Maze costs three mana and taps for two. It can also turn a land you control into a powerful beater. Finally, you can tap a Gate to untap the Sage. This can give you a great boost of mana.

Guild Summit is a fantastic draw engine in a blue Gates decks. When it enters, you can tap any number of Gates to draw cards. Additionally, it draws a card whenever a Gate enters. Pair this with flicker or reanimate effects to net a huge card advantage.

Finally, Nine-Fingers Keene is the clear option for a Gate Commander. You can play 15 Gates in the deck at most. Assuming you play Keene turn 4, and attack turn 5, that’s a decent chance of finding a Gate. That gives you an 84% chance of seeing a gate in those top nine cards (assuming you still have 15 in your deck).

Land-searching effects are a must-have for a Gates deck. Your priority should be in order:

1. Gond Gate
2. On color Gates
3. Baldur’s Gate
4. Maze’s End

I put Baldur’s Gate lower in the picking order because it needs time to ramp up. It does not net you mana until you have 4 Gates in play. The early game focuses on Gond Gate and your fixing. Then, once you hit critical mass, go for Baldur’s Gate!

Your land tutors need to grab non-basic lands. Reap and Sow, Realms Uncharted, and Hour of Promise are excellent options in this vein. However, green has a lot of ramp. None of these are a surprise.

Land-searching effects typically come in three flavors:

Search into play.
Search into your hand.
Search and sacrifice.

Searching into play is often the most mana-intensive. Temp With Discovery comes to mind here. It’s powerful. With that said, four mana is a large investment. Weigh the risk of spending turn four to ramp versus falling behind on board.

Crackling Perimeter turns your Gates into direct damage. You can tap a gate to deal 1 damage to each opponent. This card shines late in the game. Once Baldur’s Gate is in play, you can keep your other gates open to activate Crackling Perimeter. This gets even better with Seedborn Muse. The potential to burn the entire table in one turn cycle is too good to pass up!

This style of Gate deck will likely run every Gate it can get its hands on!

I play The Necrobloom as my Gate commander. The goal is to use Necrobloom’s dredge ability to reduce the downside of Crop Rotation effects. This gives me great flexibility to tutor for generically strong lands, or Gates for mana fixing.

This is followed up with cards that force my opponents into tough positions. Liesa, Shroud of Dusk, Orcish Bowmaster, and Yasharn, Implacable Earth make life hard for my opponents, limiting their options. These creatures make for mean attackers!

Meanwhile, the gates keep coming into play. Maze’s End looms closer and closer. This is a war on two fronts! The Necrobloom is one of my favorite decks. Two strategies merge to keep the pressure on the opponent. Clog the board with tokens to stop aggro. Annoying hatebears to slow things down. Finally, Maze’s End is a win condition that is hard to interact with!

Gates as a side dish to your main deck can be much leaner. If you still want to run Maze’s End you need at least 10. In this scenario, maximize your colored Gates, then add colorless gates for redundancy. For a three-color deck, I would suggest:

Gond Gate Baldur’s Gate Thran Portal Gateway Plaza CLB Choose Gates x3
Ravnica Gates x3

This is a good starting point. You can go up or down on gates depending on how deep you want the theme to be.