New Grixis EDH All-Star Soars Past Spider-Man Competition

Last updated on October 2, 2025

Norman Osborn | Illustration by Scott M. Fischer

If you're a regular casual Commander player, you're probably use to green gobblin' up the competition, but Green Goblin takes on a whole new meaning in competitive EDH (cEDH), where it's hiding behind the backside of Norman Osborn. This new double-sided legend has firmly taken the #1 spot for commanders from Marvel's Spider-Man.

A New Bracket 5 Contender

Norman Osborn is a perfectly fine card as a conniving, unblockable creature that shapes up your hand while potentially growing over time, but it's the back side that's caught some buzz in cEDH. Green Goblin is a discard commander and graveyard commander in one, maximizing wheels and other discard effects by allowing you to cast spells you've discarded from the graveyard. Better yet, those spells come at a discounted rate thanks to Green Goblin's cost reduction on spells cast from the graveyard.

So what's the plan in cEDH? Well, there are multiple avenues you can take with a commander like this, but they all fall into combo territory, revolving around a few specific cards.

The first is Lion's Eye Diamond. The hosts of Play to Win go pretty deep on how you can build an entire deck around LED with this commander, but the basic gist is that this piece of fast mana lets you produce mana while pitching your entire hand, which then becomes castable with Green Goblin in play. That makes something like Frantic Search mana-positive when you can cast if for just , and you can sort of storm off from there.

Green Goblin's in the perfect Grixis color combination for some of cEDH's biggest wincons, including Underworld Breach, Thassa's Oracle, and Demonic Consultation, and it's reminiscent of other Grixis commanders like Kess, Dissident Mage, another cEDH hall-of-famer.

You can also focus heavily on wheels, or combine it with the above strategy to turbo through your deck. Wheel of Fortune draws you seven cards while discarding your entire hand, which hopefully includes other wheel effects. You still have access to your discarded cards for a turn at a discounted rate, so it's more like your wheel drew you 10+ cards if you're able to rattle off some spells from your graveyard. Echo of Eons, for example, costs just to cast from the ‘yard with Green Goblin in play.

Orcish Bowmasters plays especially well in the wheels version of the deck, since a single wheel effect is usually enough to KO one opponent. Psychic Frog uses the whole buffalo too, discarding cards at will and eating up unnecessary fodder from the graveyard to get in and draw cards.

Spider-Man Competition

Not too long ago, we sang the praises of Anti-Venom as the #1 commander from Spider-Man, but the competition's caught up to the point where Anti-Venom, Horrifying Healer is now #4, just barely edged out by Eddie Brock/Venom, Lethal Protector at #3. Poetic, almost.

Cosmic Spider-Man clocks in at #2 right now, though the #2-4 slots are all fairly close, within 200 decks of one another on EDHREC. Peter Parker trails behind at #5 with almost 500 less decks than Anti-Venom.

Norman Osborn sky-rocketed past the rest, with 1,000 more decks than the next most popular commander from the set, making it a clear #1 from SPM after the dust has settled.

But just because these Fleem impersonators are the top pick from Marvel's Spider-Man doesn't mean they're anywhere near the all-timers list. Norman Osborn is currently ranked #568 on EDHREC, proving that SPM just isn't that popular of a set. Normy+Gobby are certainly in line with powerful Final Fantasy commanders like Y'shtola, Night's Blessed and Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER, but they just don't have the same swagger. Maybe that'll change with time, but it seems like there's a cap on how big a Spider-Man commander can really get, competitive or not.