The 15 Best Commander Decks I’ve Ever Played

Last updated on January 28, 2023

Vivien on the Hunt | Illustration by Jake Murray

I’ve been a Magic player longer than I haven’t, and that’s largely because of Commander. It’s a great format. It can be casual, competitive, or anywhere in between. That and its multiplayer capabilities have kept me around all this time and allowed me to connect with so many people.

I’ve had the pleasure of playing dozens of different decks. Different strategies, colors, themes… You name it and I’ve probably piloted it a few times. That’s why I’m bringing you my top 15 decks I’ve played to go over what makes them fun and why you should pick them up!

#15. Giada, Font of Hope Angels

Giada, Font of Hope | Illustration by Eric Deschamps

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a sucker for angel tribal. Angels are one of the few tribes in Magic, including merfolk and elves, with just too much synergy. There are dozens more angels than you need, so you can pick from the cream of the crop of commanders and creatures.

Giada, Font of Hope is one of the best angel commanders, and I’ve been rocking with it since its release in Streets of New Capenna. It’s powerful, cheap, and brings far more value than it should. Angel decks also have some of the best individual creatures out there, like Avacyn, Angel of Hope and Archangel of Thune.

If you’re looking to pick up a new deck, particularly a creature-based one, I can’t stress enough how fun and powerful Giada is!

#14. Nekusar, the Mindrazer

Nekusar, the Mindrazer | Illustration by Mark Winters

One of my first 3-color decks ever was Nekusar, the Mindrazer. It’s a powerful wheels-based deck that seeks to resolve its commander and other anti-card draw permanents like Underworld Dreams and Spiteful Visions, and to turn ordinary wheel cards into direct damage powerhouses.

It’s an obvious strategy that’s revealed the moment an opponent reads your commander, but it still operates consistently and effectively. There isn’t much an opponent can do to stop you when piloting this deck. Killing your commander will slow you down, but with good timing, there’s only so much removal for your opponents to use. Especially for your enchantments.

Chaining wheels into more wheels and dealing 21 damage to each opponent on turn 7 or 8 is one of the most fun and powerful things you can do in Commander. Don’t hesitate to give this commander and strategy a shot!

#13. Sythis, Harvest’s Hand

Sythis, Harvest’s Hand | Illustration by Ryan Yee

I’m sure you’re no stranger to enchantress decks, but on the off chance that you are, picture this: you’re playing a dozen or two cards per turn, drawing three times as many, and only ending the turn because you’ve taken far longer than you should have. That’s how enchantress decks operate, and Sythis, Harvest’s Hand is no different.

This Selesnya () enchantment deck operates off having card-neutral or -positive enchantments to allow you to continuously accumulate more mana sources, enchantment effects, and threatening creatures. You have protective enchantments like Sterling Grove to give an extra layer of defense while the big bombs like Starfield of Nyx and Sigil of the Empty Throne go to work.

While never more than barely high-power level, enchantress decks offer a surprisingly fast-paced and cantrip-filled playstyle that keeps you busy throughout the entire match.

#12. Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow

Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow | Illustration by Yongjae Choi

Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow has recently become one of my favorite commanders in my collection. It offers a great middle ground between high power and cEDH, so you can play against a wide variety of other decks and power levels. Yuriko brings a fun yet competitive strategy unlike any other deck.

It revolves around Yuriko’s ability to flip the top card of your deck, turning its mana value into direct damage to each of your opponents. It’s much like Purphoros, God of the Forge in that it chips away at everyone at once.

My list, and any list worth its salt, uses plenty of deck manipulation cards like Sensei’s Divining Top to ensure high-cost cards get revealed, dealing maximum damage per turn. It even functions with split cards like Commit // Memory, dealing damage equal to the combined mana value!

It’s a powerful but simple strategy that I’d recommend to anyone looking for something fresh.

#11. Oloro, Ageless Ascetic Lifegain

Oloro, Ageless Ascetic | Illustration by Eric Deschamps

I’ve always been a fan of turtle-y cozy Commander decks, and no card does it better than Oloro, Ageless Ascetic. It’s a premiere lifegain commander that gives you consistent lifegain for triggers, and even card draw if it’s in play. It’s the ultimate defensive commander, and in Esper () colors no less.

Gaining life each turn and relying on powerful triggers like Crested Sunmare or an early Serra Ascendant is the ultimate feel-good moment in multiplayer Magic. This is a control player’s dream Esper deck, especially if you like to sit back and hold up interaction while you march toward victory.

#10. 5-Color Kenrith Good Stuff

Kenrith, the Returned King | Illustration by Kieran Yanner

This is exactly what the title says. I first started playing Commander when I was 12 years old, and all the decks my friends and I played could be summed up as “[commander name] Good Stuff.”

It’s a style and strategy that’s both underrated and incredibly fun to play. You get to toss all your favorite/pet cards into a pile with some staples and get playing. When it works you have an incredible time and, at worst you just play land drops until you find something fun!

Kenrith, the Returned King (as well as Golos pre-ban) helped bring this strategy to the main stage, so much that it’s one of the most popular commanders in the format! It offers great utility, lifegain, card draw, recursion, you name it.

5-color decks like these are just good cards and lands, and a well-rounded commander that can do it all is just perfect. I’d highly recommend you try out this deck in a casual setting, even a high-powered one!

#9. Rakdos, Lord of Riots

Rakdos, Lord of Riots | Illustration by Yigit Koroglu

I started playing Rakdos, Lord of Riots when I wanted a casual but powerful Rakdos () deck to play in casual pods at my local game store.

It’s a very simple strategy: deal direct damage early to reap massive discounts via your commander. It has allowed for some particularly crazy games, especially if you get Rakdos in play early. There isn’t much that’s as fun as deploying a bunch of 10+ mana value creatures all together on turn 5 because you did three damage to every player.

This strategy needs a few key pieces to get off the ground. The first and most important is a way to deal consistent damage to your opponents, ideally each one. It isn’t just a pre-requisite to cast your commander, it’s also how you can make up for the fact that the non-bomb cards in this deck are often mediocre ways to ping each opponent for one damage.

After the direct damage is secured it’s just a matter of resolving Rakdos and having cards to play. This strategy works sort of similarly to the next deck I’m going to mention because it doesn’t get too much going in the first three or four turns.

This deck quickly makes up for lost time with massive Eldrazi and other high-mana value threats. Who needs a proper mana curve when you have turn 4 Eldrazi and your opponents don’t have Path to Exile?

#8. Kozilek, the Great Distortion

Kozilek, the Great Distortion | Illustration by Aleksi Briclot

I’ll admit I was skeptical when I first started putting together my Kozilek, the Great Distortion deck, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it held up. I was very worried about the early game with this deck and how it would perform without staple card advantage or land acceleration. To my surprise, it held up just fine and became one of the most fun decks I’ve ever played!

This is a colorless deck, mono-brown if you will. You’ve got no colored permanents or spells, but plenty of action.

The game plan is pretty simple: use the bountiful sources of colorless mana to ramp out into the countless bomb payoffs. You’ve got access to everything from Emrakuls to the other Kozilek, and you’d be surprised to see just how much work one of those can put in!

#7. Azami, Lady of Scrolls

Azami, Lady of Scrolls | Illustration by Ittoku

Prior to my ventures into the world of Urza, Lord High Artificer, I was deep in the trenches of Azami, Lady of Scrolls wizard tribal. It’s honestly a blue player’s dream: plenty of counterspells, lots of card draw per turn cycle… As the pace setter, everybody immediately looks to you for permission whenever trying to cast something big!

It has essentially the same win condition as Urza, too. Generate infinite mana and untaps using Isochron Scepter to draw your deck and play Thassa’s Oracle. You’ve also got Mind Over Matter for some sweet combo action.

All in all, it’s fringe cEDH. It’s not too powerful, especially compared to some of the newer stuff, but it’s in an interesting middle ground where you can still take games off of high-power cEDH pods while joining up high-power casual games. If you need a single deck to fill those needs, check this one out.

#6. Scarab God Zombies

The Scarab God | Illustration by Lius Lasahido

The Scarab God is one of the most powerful legendary creatures I’ve ever seen in Magic. It can completely take over a game once it comes down, and it becomes much more potent if you’ve already got some zombies in play.

Between the lifedrain and the card advantage gained through scrying, this commander catapults its pilot ahead as the game progresses. It’s also great versus graveyard decks, stealing creatures from the graveyard and using them to its advantage. Don’t even get me started on when my Scarab God opponent stole my Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite and wiped my board of tokens.

This deck is high-power but still very straightforward. It makes zombies, uses plenty of lord effects to buff them, and wins off sticking one of a few high-powered creatures (your commander included) to close out games. The Scarab God, Gray Merchant of Asphodel, Mikaeus, the Unhallowed, and Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver are all prime end-game bombs.

The deck also gets the best of both worlds from blue and black. Blue brings incredible interaction in Counterspell, Cyclonic Rift, Mana Drain, and more. Black brings sweet tutors and removal like Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Toxic Deluge, and Feed the Swarm.

It’s a great well-rounded midrange zombies list that anyone who enjoys creature strategies should try out.

#5. Sliver Overlord

Sliver Overlord | Illustration by Tony Szczudlo

Slivers have been around in Magic since, well, almost forever! They’re a unique tribe of creatures that each act as a lord for themselves, giving each other sliver including themselves a buff usually in the form of a keyword ability. One sliver gives trample, the other haste, another flying, and they add up to create massive creatures out of one another.

This is a heavily cEDH-influenced list that seeks to combo off with cards like Sliver Queen, Training Ground, and Cloudshredder Sliver to create infinite mana to then blow up the entire table.

But that’s just one of the ways the deck can win. It’s a creature deck at heart and can easily run over tables with a wide board full of 5/5 creatures with flying, haste, first strike, vigilance, unblockable, and whatever other keywords you can jam in. It’s a very fun deck to play, and I recommend that every commander player give slivers a shot at some point.

#4. Tasigur Turbo Ad Nauseum

Tasigur, the Golden Fang | Illustration by Chris Rahn

Tasigur, the Golden Fang and Ad Nauseum are one of the oldest cEDH strategies in the book. There’s a plethora of ways to fill up the graveyard out there, and a turn 1 or 2 Tasigur is all but a feature of this deck. It’s also a sweet infinite mana outlet in the command zone, which allows for on-the-spot wins once a combo is put together.

This deck is a turbo list first and foremost and runs incredibly low to the ground with an average mana value of just 1.44. Your Ad Nauseum becomes an excellent draw spell when it’s time to pop off, and it increases your combo consistency significantly.

As for closing out games, there are a few options. Demonic Consultation and Thassa’s Oracle are about as easy as it gets. There’s even a sweet Neoform tech where you can flip your turn 1 Tasigur into a turn 2 Toxrill, the Corrosive or Hullbreaker Horror, which can run away with the game if unanswered.

#3. Tymna Kodama Stax

Tymna the Weaver | Illustration by Winona Nelson

Tymna the Weaver and Kodama of the East Tree is a stax classic. It puts you perfectly into the Abzan () colors, allowing for all the good old fashioned graveyard strategies.

This deck is sort of like a muted Blood Pod list with plenty of early interaction, card advantage, and ways to pull ahead. Much like Pod lists, this deck can come completely out of left field to win a game. Graveyard hate is nowhere as prominent in EDH as it should be, and that gives this deck a massive advantage when playing from behind.

You’ve also got the full power of early mana dorks to set you off on the right start. They work as mana sources and become excellent Eldritch Evolution targets to grab one of your many different stax pieces.

#2. Urza Poly Kraken

Urza, Lord High Artificer | Illustration by Grzegorz Rutkowski

My personal favorite deck is also the one I’m currently playing most: Urza, Lord High Artificer. It’s a fast and furious combo deck that pops off using Hullbreaker Horror to generate infinite mana and instant-speed interaction.

This deck revolves around fast artifact mana through Urza, which it uses to rush out stax pieces and eventually combo off by using a Polymorph on your Construct token. I first built this list purely because I wanted a mono-blue control deck, but I was surprised at how consistently it won on turn 3 or 4. It was a very different playstyle for mono blue even with aggressive mulligans.

#1. Blood Pod

Tana, the Bloodsower | Illustration by Magali Villeneuve

Blood Pod is a 4-color Pod-based deck, and one of the most powerful cEDH I’ve managed to pilot. One of my good friends is a master pilot of the deck, and it’s always a major threat in any pod it’s in. It has the perfect mixture of powerful interaction, ways to get ahead, and combo potential that I’m always a little bit scared of what it’s going to do next.

The main combo revolves around a Pod effect, like on Vivien on the Hunt and Birthing Pod, and making infinite combos with Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. It can go off from basically nothing, assuming you know the combo lines, so it’s always a threat despite what permanents it may or may not have.

It’s strong against removal, too. It functions well from the graveyard thanks to cards like Karmic Guide, and even functions completely under most stax effects. This allows for the perfect intersection of defensive interaction (like Red Elemental Blast and Veil of Summer), brutal stax effects (like Archon of Emeria, Collector Ouphe, and Drannith Magistrate), and a consistent combo thanks to the many different tutors in the list.

There’s almost always an out or way to clutch a win, the trick is just learning how to see the lines.

Wrap Up

Jeweled Lotus | Illustration by Alayna Danner

I hope you enjoyed reading through these decks even a fraction of how much I’ve enjoyed playing and writing about them!

What do you think of the decks I’ve chosen? Have you played any of them yourself? What do you have to say about them? Let me know in the comments below or over in the Draftsim Discord.

Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy!