The Best Commanders in EDH Ranked (April 2026)

Last updated on April 1, 2026

Tymna the Weaver | Illustration by Winona Nelson

With Commander being Magic’s most popular format, it’s no surprise that lots of players search far and wide for commander rankings to pull ahead of their opponents. It might be a casual format but that doesn’t mean there’s no strategy involved. Whether that means getting the best Commander precon or stocking your deck with the best EDH cards, sometimes strategy is the fun part.

Rather than $40 precons, today I look at the commanders at the helm of EDH decks that can go for upwards of $1,000. Yes, you read that right: No cheap Commander stuff. Here’s our official commander tier list for the best of the best, from the cream of the crop to just pure jank.

The Criteria

Kess, Dissident Mage | Illustration by Izzy

I judge the commanders based on their performance at the helm of their strongest deck. All casual etiquette goes out of the window; infinite combos, mass land destruction, mana rocks, etc. are all fair game here.

There are a few key factors that I use to determine a commander’s placement:

• Speed: How quick is the deck? The faster your game plan, the less time your opponents get to interact with you.
• Resilience: If you have a deck that could threaten a win on turn 1 but it folds to Gut Shot, that’s an example of a deck that lacks resilience. You need to be able to protect your game plan and come back from situations that go awry.
• Number of Colors: When you disregard budget, you find that the more colors you have in your commander’s color identity, the better. This gives you more versatility in what cards you can play and makes you less susceptible to hate pieces like Boil.
• Timing: A deck that can win on the stack is better than one that needs all of its pieces on the field. The same goes for a deck that can win on an opponent’s turn against one that can’t.
• Versatility: How many different wincons can the deck run?
• Card Quality: Some decks need more room for cards that are just combo pieces.

Wizards provides the Commander Power Brackets and our tiers add a bit more nuance.

#1. S Tier / Bracket 5: The Cream of The Crop

This is where the best of the best live. The very top of cEDH. Bracket 5 belongs to some of the fastest combo decks and the harshest of stax. These are the optimal decks to play assuming an “average” meta. Tutors, fast mana, and infinite combos are the bread and butter of this tier, with most decks overflowing with plenty of each. With that being said, they can be outclassed by lower-tier decks in specific situations.

I only cover the top handful, but there are a few others that go into this tier like Najeela, the Blade-Blossom decks.

Kenrith, The Returned King

The first point in Kenrith, the Returned King’s favor is simple: It's a 5-color commander. This gives you access to all of the best cards across all five colors, which in turn enables you to play most competitive strategies. Kenrith also brings a lot to the table by itself. Although they're a bit expensive at , Kenrith brings five different and useful effects. The only mode that tends to be irrelevant in competitive play is the lifegain.

With haste, reanimation, and card draw in the command zone, Kenrith decks are incredible at grinding out value and staying resilient. They can also easily employ combo lines that rely on already-good cards like Agatha of the Vile Cauldron and Underworld Breach. This is amazing for minimizing the number of “dead” cards in a deck.

Kenrith can also easily be an outlet for infinite colored mana. This means that you don’t need another card to win the game once you’ve got infinite mana. Just use Kenrith to draw your deck and play Thassa's Oracle.

Another point in Kenrith’s favor is that it’s a commander that’s very easy to build a casual deck with as well. Unlike Kess, Dissident Mage, Kenrith can easily be modified to hang with casual tables.

Kess, Dissident Mage

Kess, Dissident Mage is one of the premier Grixis commanders in the format, and one of Magic's best wizards. It comes with an extremely powerful effect: casting instants and sorceries from your graveyard during your turn.

Kess is usually built as a Demonic Consultation / Tainted Pact commander. This means that the deck tries to win by using Pact or Consultation to mill itself and win with Thassa's Oracle or another LabMan effect.

Kess is especially resilient because you can pull the combo off even if Pact or Consultation end up in the graveyard. There’s no reason to play Kess as an all-in combo deck because of this; you should play a more midrange game. You can also back your combo up with the counterspells you used to stop your opponents from winning if you’re doing it on your turn.

Sisay, Weatherlight Captain

Sisay, Weatherlight Captain is a rare 5-color identity commander that costs 3 and feeds itself. The expensive activated ability is one of the best in the game, and when you consider that you have access to every game changer and tutors are one of the measures that put your deck up a bracket, a super-powered creature tutor for creatures and that cheats the card into play is busted.

Tymna the Weaver + Thrasios, Triton Hero / Kraum, Ludevic's Opus

Tymna the Weaver paired with either Thrasios, Triton Hero or Kraum, Ludevic's Opus are the archetypal S tier commanders. They’ve been on top of the Commander game since way before Flash was banned.

Not only do these partners give you four colors (either or ) but they also give you the two best colors in competitive Commander: blue and black. Tymna brings you some of the most important things in Commander at the helm of your deck.

Tymna gives you a card draw for each opponent you’ve damaged. This card advantage is so impactful that “it blocks Tymna” is a part of evaluating creatures for competitive Commander. Thrasios lets you use excess mana at the end of every turn cycle for some card advantage. Thrasios could also let you draw your deck if you’ve got infinite mana. Naturally, this leads to Thassa's Oracle victories. Alternatively, Kraum gives you additional card advantage and helps you dig deeper toward your combos.

Thrasios and Tymna are also very low on mana cost with mana values of 2 and 3 respectively. This means you can get your commanders out on the battlefield extremely quickly. Before Flash was banned, these two were considered to be “tier 0,” meaning that they were the optimal duo to play in nearly all situations. Thankfully, the banning rectified this, allowing other MTG best commanders to compete at the highest level. Despite this, the pairing and Tymna decks in general remain extremely potent.

Both combinations are also great at pulling off a “Turbo Naus” strategy, where you play a very low average mana value deck and try to resolve Ad Nauseam as quickly as possible to pivot to a win.

#2. A+ Tier / Bracket 4: cEDH

These are the decks that contain all the raw power of the A+ tier decks but are just a little bit more meta-dependent. Some A+ tier decks can combo off faster than some S tiers, but they usually lose out on resilience to do it.

This tier contains all of cEDH’s mono-colored decks. These have viable win conditions in cEDH and might even be better than S tier decks in a known meta.

This is quite a large tier with the likes of Heliod, Sun-Crowned, Zur the Enchanter (care for a Zur-led EDH enchantment deck?), and many others representing it. Some of the most fun cEDH games can be put together with the variety of A+ tier commanders.

Atraxa, Grand Unifier

One of the best ETB creatures in the game, Atraxa, Grand Unifier puts on a show at cEDH tournaments, and at one point claimed a 20% share of the metagame on MTG Top 8. Perhaps it’s to be expected; Atraxa, Grand Unifier made waves in most Constructed formats, why not this one too?

The deck seeks to generate a massive mana advantage to turbo out Atraxa as quickly as it can to refill its hand, which is a great thing to do when you dump a bunch of fast mana into play. The decks often win via Thassa's Oracle with Demonic Consultation or Tainted Pact, though some also employ Bolas's Citadel + Sensei's Divining Top + Aetherflux Reservoir. They often employ Food Chain + Misthollow Griffin to generate infinite mana and draw their deck with Atraxa.

Though Atraxa has a demanding mana cost, the deck is quite powerful. Play without red and get your pick of cEDH staples and flexible build paths. Want to play a more stax-centric deck? Slap in cards like Drannith Magistrate. If you don’t think that’s good, you can flex into a more combo-centric build.

Derevi, Empyrial Tactician

Derevi, Empyrial Tactician is the culprit behind some really powerful loops. One of the more popular ones adds Mana Vault + Emiel the Blessed, for infinite ETBs. Meaning Aura Shards takes down your opponent's artifacts and enchantments, or Guardian Project lets you draw your entire deck. Infinite mana is also available with the addition of Scorched Ruins and Eldrazi Displacer.

You get versatility with Derevi, with Birthing Pod or Winter Orb builds. This is the power to untap or tap permanents at will.

Godo, Bandit Warlord

Godo, Bandit Warlord, MTG's best extra-combat commander, is a fast combo/stax deck. Simply playing Godo and having the mana to equip Helm of the Host, which it can tutor, is enough to start infinite combat steps and kill all of your opponents thanks to its ability. This is often referred to as a “0-card” combo since you don’t need to have any specific cards in your hand to power out a win. This means that the deck doesn’t have to run any dead cards and can go all-in on ramping and protecting the combo.

Godo’s game plan often devolves into “counting to 11,” which is the mana needed to play it and equip the Helm. This is made a lot easier with cards like Treasonous Ogre and Magnetic Theft.

If Godo has all these benefits, then why isn’t it S tier? The answer is actually pretty simple: colors. Godo is a mono-red commander, which means you don’t have access to some of the most powerful cards in the format. It also wins on the battlefield, meaning the deck can be pretty “soft” to removal as there are only so many Fork effects you can play. On the other hand, these downsides allow Godo to play stax pieces like Blood Moon to punish your multicolored adversaries.

Krark, the Thumbless

Krark, the Thumbless has certainly risen to the occasion when it comes to strong cEDH commanders. As players have become increasingly familiar with the playstyle, found tighter and stronger builds, and learned the ins and outs of the card, its power level has risen accordingly.

It's a really enjoyable commander to play with, but maybe not the most fun to play against. Too many Krark players take far too long with their die rolls and coin flips. If you're going to take this puppy for a spin, get many, many practice games in and scenarios ahead of pulling up to your LGS and failing your combos.

Urza, Lord High Artificer

It took a while for one of Magic’s most powerful in-universe characters to finally get their own card, and what a card it is. If Urza, Lord High Artificer was multicolored, there’s no doubt that it’d be firmly in S tier or perhaps even tier 0.

Urza can play a variety of different strategies ranging from Polymorph-based combos to extremely resilient stax. One of its main advantages is that it not only makes it so that stax pieces like Winter Orb don’t affect you, but it also turns them into mana rocks! Urza is also an infinite mana sink, and lets you play your whole deck with infinite colorless and just a few blue mana.

Because of all these perks, Urza basically doesn’t need to dedicate any slots to a wincon. This makes the deck’s card quality one of the highest in cEDH.

The Gitrog Monster

One of cEDH’s pioneer decks and one of the most complex to pilot, The Gitrog Monster is a deck that evades categorization. Despite the steep mana cost of its frog horror commander, the deck is really quick, though not quite Godo-quick.

Whole tutorials have been made on how to execute some of this horror frog commander’s most complex combos. Once you’ve mastered this deck, you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world, especially as your opponents are unlikely to know all the game states you can combo from.

This is pretty much the only land-based strategy in cEDH, and for good reason. The Gitrog Monster is quick, resilient, and has really high card quality.

#3. A Tier / Bracket 4: cEDH Viable

Commanders in this tier are a bit suboptimal for cEDH. Their strategy might have one large flaw or there are simply better commanders out there. If pushed to their maximum, any 5-color or 4-color commander with blue can reach this rank thanks to sheer card quality. Because of this, I evaluate commanders by their general usefulness and power level a bit more rather than by their strongest deck.

Tutors, fast mana, and infinite combos are quite common in this tier. Most decks have at least a few of each. These commanders can usually hang at cEDH levels of play and might even be ideal for some niche metas, but they tend to be a step down from S tier and A+ commanders.

These are usually commanders that provide a lot of value like Edric, Spymaster of Trest, or that function as combo or stax pieces like Grand Arbiter Augustin IV and Marath, Will of the Wild. A lot of commanders that have extremely powerful effects but are very costly like Narset, Enlightened Master and Ramos, Dragon Engine go here.

Ghave, Guru of Spores

Ghave, Guru of Spores is often referred to as the commander that goes “infinite with anything,” and that’s a pretty accurate name. Ghave is extremely easy to infinite with out of nowhere. In fact, making a Ghave deck that can’t assemble an infinite combo is quite the challenge.

Cards like Ashnod's Altar, Phyrexian Altar, and Earthcraft are all-stars in Ghave. It was best summarized by TappedOut user PookandPie in their primer as:

So because of X, I get infinite +1/+1 counters. Because of infinite counters, I get infinite tokens. Because of infinite tokens, that means infinite mana, and because of infinite mana, you have to get me a cheeseburger. It all checks out, call the judge, I don't care.

Kefka, Court Mage

Kefka, Court Mage has dangerous written all over its face. Card advantage when it walks up, a sizeable cost for the edict to transform, then game-breaking card draw for producing a spectacle. There is a lot of room for ridiculously strong plays with discard that can't be easily answered. Synergy with flickers and discard payoffs like Tinybones, Bauble Burglar, Entropic Battlecruiser and Waste Not, then backed up by counterspells and alternate plans like control, reanimator and wheels.

Lavinia, Azorius Renegade

Lavinia, Azorius Renegade is one of those commanders that can actually be top dog at a cEDH table if everyone is playing the right kind of deck for it. Lavinia really thrives against high-speed combo decks.

This can be built in many ways, though the most popular option is to build a stax deck looking to leverage Omen Pool combos. You can build Lavinia at pretty much any power level since its own power scales down with your opponents’ power.

Muldrotha, the Gravetide

Muldrotha, the Gravetide is one of the most popular casual commanders and it’s easy to see why. As perhaps the best Sultai commander and one of MTG's best mill commanders, it’s expensive but provides a boatload of value when you stick it on the field.

Muldrotha decks generally play a midrange-y game plan trying to fill your deck with a balance of different permanent types to get the most out of its effect. One of the strongest Sultai cards, the biggest reason Muldrotha isn’t a true cEDH commander is that it doesn’t contribute much to most combos by itself and has a prohibitively high mana cost in that environment.

Pantlaza, Sun-Favored

An interesting Naya commander, Pantlaza, Sun-Favored favors creature-based combos, especially with Food Chain. This deck makes use of Pantlaza’s discover trigger to generate value and assemble wins.

Once you have infinite mana with Food Chain (assembled via an enabler like Temur Sabertooth or Emiel the Blessed, you use your outlet to cast Pantlaza, Sun-Favored an infinite number of times until you discover into Walking Ballista, which you’ll put into your hand instead of casting, then cast an infinitely large Ballista to win the game with. Since Ballista is a key piece, you can easily add a back-up combo with Heliod, Sun-Crowned.

While this deck has a lot going for it in terms of wins, it has one notable weakness: Naya decks exclude blue cards and black cards, cEDH’s best colors. This especially limits your ability to interact with people that interact with your combos, though Naya creatures combo off with enough variants you could likely get away with having more combos than your opponent's interaction if you’re lucky.

#4. B Tier / Bracket 3: High-Power

The high-power tier is for commanders that can be oppressive in casual play but are almost always the wrong deck to bring to a cEDH night. They’re often crowned “archenemy” at more casual tables and can be hard to find a place for unless you intentionally power them down to find the right table.

Tutors, fast mana, and infinite combos are rarer in this tier, but most decks will still have at least one combo and a few tutors.

Glarb, Calamity's Augur

Glarb, Calamity's Augur is an early way to play off the top of your library and generally makes it easy to play the best sultai cards. The top deck manipulation with surveil and good scry colors makes this deceptively solid creature and card advantage engine.

Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy

Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy is a devastating druid from Ikoria. Dorks do double duty and the cheat into play activated ability goes bananas when you hit monsters like Void Winnower, Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, and Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger.

Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar

Kutzil, Malamet Exemplar is in one of the best color pairs for going wide, with an oppressive first ability that really halts a turn of interaction. It also makes a decent aura commander if you want a compliment to anthems and +1/+1 counters. Kutzil works in tandem with Sovereign Okinec Ahau, and Myrel, Shield of Argive really doesn't need any other soldiers to have a big impact and second the protection of your turn.

Mirri, Weatherlight Duelist is another side to combat control that lets you funnel attackers into whatever profitable blocks you like. Abzan Falconer, Damning Verdict, Duskshell Crawler, and Master Chef add a super effectiveness to your strategy. The Great Henge and Tribute to the World Tree ensure you don't need to land combat damage to draw cards.

Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh

Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh is surprisingly good with language, a leader of few words, but at the heart of the matter is the casting cost on the little red kobold.

Partner is the big one from the keyword soup, and allows it to be a free creature alongside more powerful commanders like Tymna the Weaver or Thrasios, Triton Hero. One of the secrets to Rograkh is how it allows Deflecting Swat, Diabolic Intent, and Mox Amber. Cloudstone Curio means Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh is one part of a combo that lives in the command zone.

Fire Lord Azula

Fire Lord Azula is pretty good to compare with Kess, Dissident Mage. Azula really hits where it hurts with flash cards and free spell copies. Notice Azula's hair and you'll sense that something is off, and that is the requirement to attack. This is one of the only things that hold the Avatar: The Last Airbender commander back from the top tiers.

The Necrobloom

You might recognize a couple of dangerous things that got cards banned in the past. The first is pumping out zombies upon landfall, and while paying is far different from the land, Field of the Dead, the effect is the same and consistently coming from your command zone. The second powerful part of The Necrobloom grants dredge 2 to lands in your graveyard. This effect replaces your would-be card draw and returns that fetch land or cycled Indatha Triome to your hand, and as a “drawback” you mill two cards. The powerful decks over the years that used Life from the Loam, combined with reanimation, and incredible toughness show how powerful The Necrobloom EDH deck could be.

Zada, Hedron Grinder

Zada, Hedron Grinder is one of the quintessential creature-storm commanders. The game plan of most Zada decks is simple: Pump out a bunch of tokens alongside Zada and then use Crimson Wisps-like effects to draw a bunch of your deck. From there Zada uses anthems and rituals to assemble a lot of mana.

The deck offers you an opportunity to play unusual cards like Fiery Gambit to great success. It’s also one of the best Commander decks to make with a low budget while still maintaining power.

#5. C Tier / Bracket 2: Casual

This tier is where most casual decks live. We’re talking your average LGS Commander pod. While the commanders used might be more powerful than the tier would suggest, that’s usually counteracted by most players not getting the most out of them. This tier has the highest number of fun commanders with interesting effects but they’re either too costly or too weak to be competitive material.

Tutors, fast mana, and infinite combos are practically nonexistent in this tier. Decks will sometimes have a few of them, but only very rarely. Most commanders fall into this tier, and it’s also the place where creativity thrives the most.

Baylen, the Haymaker

Baylen, the Haymaker turns Magic into a sort of worker placement game where you build up your tokens and then can assign them to give you advantage throughout the game. With access to great token generators and token support, there's rarely a full cycle of turns in which every token you control becomes tapped. The ability to play on other turns really becomes incredible when you can ramp, draw cards, and grow a huge trampling threat at instant-speed. Food and treasure are some of the easiest tokens to make and this Naya Commander puts them to work.

Bristly Bill, Spine Sower

The word is out on farmer Bill as an amazing 2-drop, and landfall for pumping your creatures is incidentally good. Then there’s that thing about being able to double the counters on all your creatures, and you’ve just entered a new power level. Scatter a little Goldvein Hydra here and Railway Brawler there for overwhelming power, and that’s still within Outlaws of Thunder Junction. The greens grow fast with cards like Arwen, Weaver of Hope, Tribute to the World Tree, and Flare of Cultivation. Tools like Cathedral Acolyte and Duskshell Crawler make your massive creatures much more difficult to deal with, and before long your threats will outnumber the blockers. Bill is stuck in a rural neighborhood without blue or black for great interaction, otherwise, it might belong at a higher tier.

Experiment Kraj

Fun fact: In most Slavic languages, “Kraj” means “end.”

This is one of the few casual commanders that’s actually fond of infinite combos. Experiment Kraj can be played as a semi-combo commander. Obviously, there are the usual Simic +1/+1 counter strategies, but you can also use Kraj’s ability to give it the activated ability of a creature that untaps itself, thereby creating an infinite loop.

Maralen, Fae Ascendant

What does Maralen, Fae Ascendant want you to do? Establish a handful of elves or faeries and the more you control, the more spells you can play from among your opponent's cards. I love how this deck casually wants board presence, exiles instead of mills and can take lots of angles with elves on the ground or faeries in the air. Get to four of the relevant creatures and you potentially hit enough instants to spout off a free spell per turn. The biggest drawback here is how costly it is to cast Maralen, but as long as you can exile spells with the ETB ability, you go leaps ahead in mana and cards.

Odric, Master Tactician

Odric, Master Tactician is a commander that tries to play a relatively fair game of Magic. There aren’t many combos that go into this commander, or really even that many synergies.

You want to make a big board of creatures and swing with them, either selecting that your opponent doesn’t block in order to finish them off or using Odric’s ability to pick how they block to serve as pseudo-removal. Soldier typal is also a very common way to play this commander.

Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker

Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker puts an interesting spin on reanimation commanders. Being restricted to 1-power creatures makes for some really fun deckbuilding decisions.

The deck generally needs to protect Shirei at all costs because without it, you’re just a deck with a bunch of bad 1-power creatures. If you can manage to do that, though, Shirei is a threat to be reckoned with, especially once it gets a few Blood Artist effects going.

Toph, the First Metalbender

Toph, the First Metalbender would qualify as a build-around with either of it's two abilities. The combination of both sets you up to do ridiculous things that were not meant to be repeated. Artifacts like Mishra's Bauble, The Stasis Coffin, and Mindslaver can get automatically returned to play thanks to earthbending. Almost anything that wants artifact recursion can work with Toph and it's positioned to move up a bracket with Crop Rotation and The One Ring, but it is also comfortable to make lands matter and dominate.

#6. D Tier / Bracket 1: Low-Power

The low-power tier is where you’ll find most of the simply suboptimal commanders. Why would you play Jugan, the Rising Star instead of most other green +1/+1 commanders if you prioritize power level?

The tier also has some of the more unique commanders in the game that simply drew the wrong end of the power curve. There might not even be anything weak about the commander itself. Aboshan, Cephalid Emperor is a perfectly fine typal commander; it just so happens that there aren’t many strong cephalids.

Tutors, fast mana, and infinite combos generally aren’t played in this tier. Decks might have some very rarely, but never if it doesn’t fit with the “theme” of the deck.

Dargo, the Shipwrecker

Dargo, the Shipwrecker has silly synergy depending on which partner commander you choose. Tymna is certainly excellent and Ikra Shidiqi, the Usurper offers great colors for sacrificing. Here's the beauty of Commander, you can build this a few different ways, and you'll always want to consider combing Dargo with Phyrexian Altar for an infinite loop that needs pre-sacrificed stuff and a third card to win.

Doran, Besieged by Time

There are more than 2,500 creatures with greater toughness than power among Abzan creatures, so the cost reduction by Doran, Besieged by Time is legit. The axis of attacking and blocking never looked so strong with this absurd bushido variant. So what if they know you're coming, combat is no problem when you back up Doran with Bedrock Tortoise, Fangorn, Tree Shepherd, and Ikra Shidiqi, the Usurper.

Inspirit, Flagship Vessel

Inspirit, Flagship Vessel is a neat one from the Jeskai () Edge of Eternities Commander precon. It is in fantastic colors for artifacts and good with both +1/+1 counter strategies and charge counter play. A creature token generator quickly brings you to a fully stationed Inspirit and a highly resilient board that doesn't need to go super wide to work smoothly. Just look at the capability with Magistrate's Scepter, Lux Cannon, and Darksteel Reactor onboard the spacecraft commander.

Loot, Exuberant Explorer

Loot, Exuberant Explorer is really a Timmy card, an exuberant explorer that gives you additional land plays, then has a powerful cheat into play ability that really requires you to have tons of lands in play to benefit from. Some players get really angry toward the cute beast, so don't feel bad when you disrupt them with a Bane of Progress or Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger. Green cards are really good, but still limited and that keeps Loot from moving up any brackets.

Sauron, the Dark Lord

Sauron, the Dark Lord is a big problem for opponents and in perfect colors for supreme control of the pace of the game. The ward cost is harsh and amass for every opponent's spell really adds up. The ring tempt opportunities are limited as are the ramp options among Grixis cards, but otherwise it makes a very strong control deck in Commander.

#7. F Tier / Bracket 1: Fun Jank Still Kill On Sight

This tier consists of commanders that are strictly worse, usually by a wide margin, than other available options. This is where all of the vanilla commanders from Legends go. These commanders still pull removal in their direction because without it, the deck's plan usually sputters. With that being said, there are some interesting options that simply take too much effort to pull off unless you switch objectives and go for the best story.

Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer

Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer wants it all, a Pariah and any similar effect.

Then you turn this around, add vigilance, the ability to block all creatures with Entangler and go Voltron commander and add all equipment and auras to it as well. Bastion Protector, Inquisitor's Flail, and Nemesis Mask all but ensure combat will go your way every turn. Gift of Immortality is a excellent answer to any “dies to Doom Blade” arguments. Again, Anti-Venom is stoppable, but still a kill on sight commander.

Haakon, Stromgald Scourge

Yet another conundrum is Haakon, Stromgald Scourge. Once you manage to get it into the graveyard it’s actually quite a force to be reckoned with, but doing that can be really difficult.

You'll need a card like Command Beacon to even get Haakon out of the command zone in the first place. This means that the deck will play a lot of black tutors to find an effect like this and attempt to discard Haakon with Tortured Existence and the like.

Ozai, the Phoenix King

The Mark Hamill-voiced Ozai, the Phoenix King is big and powerful. You want to store up unspent mana in advance, otherwise Ozai is a literal lightning rod for removal. The reward for pulling off a once in a hundred years play is a 7-power commander that hits real hard and offers lots of mana for instants through firebending.

Phage the Untouchable

After reading Phage the Untouchable’s effect, you might be wondering how decks using it can even get it onto the field. You’ll generally use effects that either end the turn, like Sundial of the Infinite, or ones that prevent you from losing the game, like Platinum Angel.

Phage also doesn’t have any evasion, so getting it to actually connect with your opponent can be pretty difficult.

Yargle and Multani

I told you vanilla commanders belong in the fun jank category. Yargle and Multani is a triple stacker of power, and a Giant Growth away from lethal commander damage. I really want to use one of the legendary vanillas from Aetherdrift, but none of them have a second color. Thus, I go sarcastic with people and ramp with black and bite with green to ensure Yargle and Multani and Pack's Favor are the one shot I need for my least favorite opponent.

Commanding Conclusion

Sisay, Weatherlight Captain | Illustration by Anna Steinbauer

There are a lot of different power levels in Commander and interpretation among the brackets. I could probably split each of these tiers into two or three more if I wanted to. They’re here to give you a general idea of the power level you can expect from them.

Tiers tend to matter more the higher up you climb. While three casual decks have a solid chance in a pod with one high-power deck, three high-power decks will be hard-pressed to eke out a win against a fully optimized Kenrith, the Returned King. The most important thing Rule 0 on non-cEDH games is to talk with your playgroup before the game starts about how to make the game fun.

But what about you, dear reader; what tier or bracket is your favorite to play? What’s your favorite underrated commander? Let me know in the comments, or head over to our Discord if that’s more your style. Commander has yet to come to Arena, but there’s still plenty to play beyond Brawl on Magic’s latest digital platform, so make sure you’ve got Arena Tutor to guide you through your Mastery progress!