All 33 Sultai Commanders in Magic Ranked

Last updated on June 17, 2025

Muldrotha, the Gravetide | Illustration by Jason Rainville

Choosing what color or color combo you use can be a difficult first step into the sea that is the Commander format. Even once you’ve chosen a color, picking from the vast array of viable and unique legendary creatures to be your commander isn’t exactly an easy step.

So I’ve got another ranking of some of the best tri-color commanders in Magic, this time focusing on the Sultai combination of green, blue, and black. Blue and black are two of the most powerful colors in Commander, so you have a lot to look forward to and expect from these commanders. I also have a sample Sultai EDH decklist for inspiration.

Let’s get into it!

Why Go with a Sultai Commander?

Tasigur, the Golden Fang | Illustration by Chris Rahn

The best Sultai cards offer a lot of diversity in playstyle and theme across all the viable commanders. This color combo can confidently support Commander's mill themes, sacrifice decks, any sort of graveyard strategy, pod and Food Chain combo lists, landfall decks, and even mutate creature-based strategies.

This diversity makes the Sultai colors a great place to look if you’re not set on an archetype for your Commander deck yet. Most Sultai commanders support different tactics and open up an expansive variety of different strategies.

#33. Brokkos, Apex of Forever

Brokkos, Apex of Forever gives us a commander that comes back from the graveyard time and time again. It’s a straight-forward commander that wants to hit the bin and mutate out of the graveyard as often as possible to get a bunch of value. This commander is quite hard to remove since the opponents need to exile it or you can just recast it. It plays a bit like an aura that keeps coming back, but it's not overly powerful.

#32. Rayami, First of the Fallen

Rayami, First of the Fallen gives Sultai an aristocrats–Voltron commander that promises lots of fun. This vampire is the definition of keyword soup, and the general gameplan is to stack as many keywords as possible to make this an unbeatable monster in combat.

You need plenty of creatures with keyword abilities. Nabbing a few keywords from your opponents’ creatures is nice, but it’s unreliable. Creatures like Nightveil Predator and Wilson, Refined Grizzly give you tons of keywords on a single card. Stonecoil Serpent is especially strong since you can cast it for 0 and it dies for free.

#31. Vorosh, the Hunter

Vorosh, the Hunter is another option for a Sultai Voltron commander that comes with the purest form of the strategy: make your evasive commander big. Vorosh can grow itself to lethal power in a couple of attacks thanks to its ability.

Further evasion is an important piece of the puzzle, with equipment like Sword of Feast and Famine and Sword of Fire and Ice being great choices. F&F gets the nod for giving you extra mana to use on Voroth’s ability. Herald of Secret Streams is also a big winner here since it helps your entire team slip through for lots of damage.

#30. Henry Wu, InGen Geneticist

Henry Wu, InGen Geneticist is an interesting commander and a great flavor win, as a human that exploits non-human creatures (dinosaurs). This leads to a somewhat powerful but limited engine in scope, and there are better options for the aristocrats archetype.

You have some interesting interactions with cards like Ophiomancer, which is a human and makes disposable snakes that you can exploit for cards later, or with some aristocrats staples that also put humans on board, like Bastion of Remembrance and Zulaport Cutthroat. It’s a weird mix that can draw you a bunch of cards and give you many death triggers, but I’m not sure what the endgame here is. Maybe some blue and green cards that get better when you draw more cards like Lorescale Coatl and Nadir Kraken.

#29. Nashi, Moon's Legacy

Nashi, Moon's Legacy has a lot of great things going on, the biggest granting a second use out of your rats and legendaries. Menace and ward help it attack safely.

It's exciting to copy legendary spells like Isildur's Fateful Strike, Kamahl's Druidic Vow, and Teferi's Ageless Insight, in addition to the vast collection of legendary creature options that are rampant in Commander.

#28. Otrimi, the Ever-Playful

Another mutate commander, Otrimi, the Ever-Playful cares much more about creatures with mutate than Brokkos does. Otrimi is distinct from Brokkos, even if both care about the graveyard. You’re looking to extract all the mutate value you can from this playful monster!

Evasive creatures like the ones we saw with Brokkos are even more valuable with Otrimi since it really wants to deal combat damage. Slither Blade is still a great option, as are Gudul Lurker and Silhana Ledgewalker. Blighted Agent gives you evasion and adds some spice to the board.

#27. Indominus Rex, Alpha

Indominus Rex, Alpha is an efficiently costed 6/6 beater with a turbo-rummage ability. The fun part will be to pick which creatures and abilities you include; some favorite options are Gurmag Swiftwing, Kefnet the Mindful, and Questing Beast. Just don’t expect to find many blue, black, or green creatures with double strike.

Rather than go Voltron with the indominus dino, this Sultai deck could lean into payoffs for putting creatures into the graveyard. Whichever way you choose, the quality of creatures in this deck will likely be pretty high, so have fun, and remember to double check if the abilities you're looking to include actually show up in this dino's textbox.

#26. Kotis, Sibsig Champion

Despite being printed in the Tarkir: Dragonstorm precons, Kotis, Sibsig Champion isn’t a very exciting commander when compared to the Standard set Kotis. To cast a creature from your graveyard, you need to have three other cards there, and even then you still have to pay its costs. You get a reward when you cast or reanimate a creature in the form of +1/+1 counters on Kotis, but it still remains a vanilla beatstick with no abilities.

#25. Xavier Sal, Infested Captain

Proliferate and build an army of creature tokens. Xavier Sal, Infested Captain, one of the very few populate commanders in the game, has two straightforward activated abilities and either one is feasible to build around. Good old Kiora's Follower and similar untap effects will maximize the value you get out of every +1/+1 counter and creature token. Some of the oozes will give you both counters and tokens if you’re looking to go beyond the birds, saprolings, and zombies.

#24. Volrath, the Shapestealer

Who said you needed to include your own win conditions in Commander? As one of the best shapeshifters in Magic, Volrath, the Shapestealer copies your opponents’ best creatures to beat them at their own game. It’s always going to be bigger since it becomes a 7/5 and shrinks the opposing creature. Volrath gives you lots of options since every game is a little different depending on what you can mimic.

You’re going to want plenty of -1/-1 counter synergies, since those are the only counters you really want to be giving your opponents. Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons, Nest of Scarabs, and Blowfly Infestation give you some additional value from distributing these counters.

#23. Mimeoplasm, Revered One

Mimeoplasm, Revered One riffs on The Mimeoplasm. Here, we get more flexibility in what you copy. It’s better than the original if you have a graveyard filled with small creatures with good combat abilities, and you can take advantage of a bigger graveyard. That said, you lose the explosiveness the original offers when you snag a big creature and make a large Mimeoplasm in play.

#22. Felix Five-Boots

Felix Five-Boots is the ultimate saboteur commander, doubling that type of trigger. It’s in the right colors for this mission since saboteur creatures are usually in Dimir (). Ninjas thrive on damaging other players – Ninja of the Deep Hours, Mist-Syndicate Naga, Okiba-Gang Shinobi, the list goes on.

Among cards that give the saboteur ability to every creature you have Edric, Spymaster of Trest and Coastal Piracy. Necropolis Regent is a good card to have by these saboteurs since your army can get big quickly. Other interesting cards to add to this deck are ways to slip past blockers like Sleep or Open into Wonder. 

#21. Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer

Kadena, Slinking Sorcerer lets you cast morph spells for less (which is usually the entirety of the cost) while generating card advantage whenever a creature enters face down.

Morph is balanced around having to pay , so being able to skip out on this makes reaping the benefits of morphing creatures incredibly efficient. The Cyclonic Rift effect from Thousand Winds suddenly doesn’t cost a total of 10 mana, but it still holds the hidden knowledge aspect of a morphed creature.

#20. Nine-Fingers Keene

Most of the Sultai commanders so far care about the graveyard to some degree, but Nine-Fingers Keene gives you a completely new, niche theme: Sultai gates! It wants to get as many cards with the gate type into play as possible for a bit of ramp and card draw later in the game.

Naturally, you need to look at gate synergies. There are more than 10 legal in a Sultai Commander deck, although Gateway Plaza is weak enough it probably doesn’t make the cut, even in a gates deck. Baldur's Gate and Basilisk Gate are the standouts as gates that provide you value beyond mana fixing. There are also powerful gate synergies from Ravnica to draw on; Guild Summit and Gatebreaker Ram are easy includes. And you’d be remiss to not add a Maze's End!

#19. Jorn, God of Winter / Kaldring, the Rimestaff

Jorn, God of Winter is the perfect legend for anybody looking to cool down the Commander table with its snow synergies. The front side gives you the best snow commander, who can basically double your mana by untapping a bunch of snow lands. It can also be played as an artifact that gives you lots of power in a grindy game that makes it hard for your opponents to interact with you.

You could also occasionally lean on Kaldring, the Rimestaff for some recursion, though this is secondary at best, and not usually the reason you're running Jorn.

#18. Sidisi, Brood Tyrant

Sidisi, Brood Tyrant has mostly been overshadowed by Teval, the Balanced Scale, but you can still pull off some powerful combos with this naga-turned-snake commander. Altar of Dementia is your key player, which lets you chain together a bunch of zombies and sacrifices in a creature-heavy deck. Or you can go full attrition and just let Sidisi be your army-maker alongside incremental self-mill effects.

#17. Archelos, Lagoon Mystic

Here’s a choice landfall commander: Archelos, Lagoon Mystic. This card slows the game down for your opponents because all their mana rocks, Treasures, and lands hit the battlefield tapped. It’s also great at enabling attacks since their creatures come into play tapped, leaving them defenseless.

You want to make sure you can keep Archelos tapped when it’s not your turn to slow your opponents down. You don’t want them reaping these rewards. Attacking won’t always be a solution, so look to other effects. Convoke spells like Pile On and Chord of Calling will help, as will ways to get Archelos to tap for mana like Cryptolith Rite and Song of Freyalise.

#16. Damia, Sage of Stone

Commanders that provide a source of cards advantage are always powerful, and Damia, Sage of Stone can draw you tons of cards. It’s a bit pricy for a commander but can helm a strong midrange strategy focused on efficient spells and interaction. Combine ramp to cast your 7-mana commander and other spells, interaction to keep opponents off-kilter and empty your hand, and a few finishers to… finish the game, and you're all set for a powerful Damia deck.

#15. Sin, Spira’s Punishment

Sin, Spira's Punishment is a massive flier that makes token copies of permanents in your graveyard. You can grow a substantial board with a solid mill engine. The worrisome part is the steep 7 mana cost, but at least you get a great enters effect. There’s a fine balance between adding the mill effects and juiced targets you want to make copies of.

#14. Gonti, Canny Acquisitor

Gonti, Canny Acquisitor supports one of my favorite archetypes: theft. You'll start by paying 1 less mana to cast spells you don't own. So, cards like Xanathar, Guild Kingpin and Siphon Insight get a lot better. Plus, you have an incentive to play saboteur creatures since you want to deal damage to a player anyway and get more spells from their library.

Shadow creatures and unblockable creatures can be good additions, and Dimir tends to have a lot of these. Green adds beef and trample to the archetype. Since you’re casting cards from exile, bear druid Doc Aurlock, Grizzled Genius and Savvy Trader will make spells even cheaper. All of these pieces add up to a nice engine that lets you play your opponents' spells while dealing them damage.

#13. The Master, Transcendent

The Master, Transcendent from Fallout only asks one thing from you: mill your opponents. Giving them rad counters is good since the counters will do some of the lifting. Its special ability is to reanimate a creature that was milled in a given turn, but there are some considerations: First, the creature will always be a 3/3 green mutant, so it’s better to get creatures with good abilities than large beatsticks. A card like Screeching Scorchbeast is a nice fit, even as a 3/3, as is Toxrill, the Corrosive. Second, you have some control over the creatures you’ll put into your graveyard. This deck can run cards like Consecrated Sphinx and reanimate them via spells, or get them as 3/3 mutants.

#12. Tatsunari, Toad Rider

Tatsunari, Toad Rider is a not-so-subtle Naruto reference and a brilliant enchantress commander. Sultai has access to some choice enchantments to accrue value with, but it lacked a solid enchantress commander before Neon Dynasty brought us a boy and his frog. Tatsunari and Keimi give you some steady pressure as you accumulate your enchantments for value.

#11. Zaxara, the Exemplary

Next up is the X-spell commander, Zaxara, the Exemplary. If your incredible X spells don’t decimate your opponents, the huge creatures they leave behind thanks to your commander’s ability certainly will. Just imagine dropping an X=7 Torment of Hailfire where your opponents are also greeted with a 7/7 to deal with after losing half their hands and all their mana rocks. Beautiful, isn’t it?

This nightmare hydra empowers a very niche strategy. Of course, everyone enjoys X spells since they get better the more ramp and mana you have, and Commander typically allows you to easily reach 7+ mana pretty quickly. Playing spells with high X counts is also incredibly fun and very rewarding, even when you don’t wipe your enemies off the face of the earth.

#10. The Mimeoplasm

An absolute Commander classic, The Mimeoplasm is one of the most popular and powerful Sultai commanders at your disposal. The most common way to build Mimeoplasm is (surprisingly) ooze typal, which is wicked cool and something we should all try out.

Of course, the more straightforward way to build The Mimeoplasm is to load your deck up with a combination of giant creatures and value creatures with great ETBs, so you can craft your own monstrous value beater that's just oozing with flavor.

#9. Zimone and Dina

Another lands-matter commander, Zimone and Dina differentiates itself from the others by looking to combo off with land synergies. While Archelos and Keene could combo, Zimone and Dina functions as a combo piece right out of the command zone to go infinite as quickly as possible.

An easy combo to assemble with this card is a bounce land (ex: Simic Growth Chamber) with Intruder Alarm and Field of the Dead. With some carefully-stacked triggers, you can essentially keep replaying the same bounce land over and over to generate an arbitrarily large number of zombie tokens. And even when Zimone and Dina isn't comboing off, they're usually just offering great value regardless.

#8. Teval, Arbiter of Virtue

Teval, Arbiter of Virtue is an interesting commander that offers you great power and possibilities, balanced with a real downside to play around. You have lifelink, so buffing Teval’s power and attacking is a good way to gain life, or you could use the black drain life effects to offset your life loss from casting spells.

You also want to mill yourself and cast spells with delve to take full advantage of your commander, which brings in a dilemma: I want cheap cards to preserve my life total and fill the ‘yard, and expensive cards to take advantage of delve. Sultai () in Tarkir: Dragonstorm brought many ways to take advantage of cards leaving your graveyard, and this commander can deliver that in spades.

#7. Teval, the Balanced Scale

Teval, the Balanced Scale is a raw-power commander that gives you mill, land recursion, and a direct incentive to take cards out of your graveyard. You create some 2/2 Zombie Druids that can be used to defend, attack, or as sacrifice fodder.

So many effects exile cards from your graveyard in small increments that triggering Teval on demand won’t be hard to do. This commander is a house when taking advantage of cards like Life from the Loam, or the Gravecrawler/Reassembling Skeleton combos.

#6. Kotis, the Fangkeeper

The Standard set Kotis is much more interesting than the precon edition. Kotis, the Fangkeeper has indestructible with a good saboteur ability. This commander plays well with equipment and combat tricks, as you want to pump or Voltron up your commander to get the most from its ability. Sultai colors () are excellent for playing defense too, so you can keep your opponents guessing what will happen when you swing in (e.g.: pump effect, Negate, hexproof).

#5. Glarb, Calamity’s Augur

Glarb, Calamity's Augur is a very effective creature right off the bat, with repeatable surveil and the ability to play cards from the top of your library. You don’t need to build around it with a certain creature type or specific strategy, and the result is a very flexible 3-drop commander.

Glarb lends itself well to ramp strategies, considering that you’ll make your land drops and have a good incentive to play cards that cost 4 or more mana. For maximum effectiveness, you want effects that manipulate the top of your library and let you play more lands per turn. Finally, free surveilling sets up synergies like reanimate and flashback, also giving you that typical Sultai graveyard value.

#4. The Wise Mothman

Rad counters are one of the main mechanics in the Fallout set, and for each rad counter, a player will mill a card and possibly lose life each turn. The Wise Mothman is an enabler and payoff for this strategy. It's a rad counter spreader in the command zone, and Sultai is the best color identity to take advantage of players milling.

The Wise Mothman deals with rad counters and +1/+1 counters, so proliferate is a nice way to get the most out of these mechanics. If you throw in a way to distribute poison counters like Infectious Inquiry or Prologue to Phyresis, there’s another angle of attack right there.

#3. Tasigur, the Golden Fang

Tasigur, the Golden Fang is a personal favorite in my play group, and for good reason. In a format where you have access to tons of fetch lands and early spells, Tasigur can easily become an infinite mana outlet in the command zone that costs only to play. This heavily influences how the deck is built since the goal is often to resolve something that flips your deck, like Doomsday, or that generates infinite mana and combos off using Tasigur’s ability.

You’ll usually see Tasigur lists heavily relying on Birthing Pod or cards with similar effects like Food Chain. The strategy offers rapid acceleration plus ample graveyard resources that can be used to cast a discounted commander or eventually be brought back with that commander’s ability.

#2. Yarok, the Desecrated

In second place is Yarok, the Desecrated, who doubles the triggered abilities from permanents entering the battlefield. This ability is incredibly busted and you want to use it until you’ve lost all our friends.

I recommend almost always including Solemn Simulacrum, Deadeye Navigator, Peregrine Drake, Eternal Witness, Reclamation Sage, and Conjurer's Closet in your Yarok EDH builds as they’ll always provide value in your games.

#1. Muldrotha, the Gravetide

Coming in at #1 is Muldrotha, the Gravetide. This commander heavily emphasizes a sacrifice- and aristocrats-themed deck through its recursion ability.

Being able to not just reanimate creatures but actually play any kind of permanent from your graveyard each turn lessens the cost of sacrifice mechanics while bolstering your threats from single-instance removal. Your mana rocks basically never stay destroyed, your commander comes back from the command zone, and your other artifacts and enchantments can just be replayed as well.

Cards that have abilities on death and when they enter the battlefield are extremely good in a Muldrotha, the Gravetide list since you get twice the value from them. Think along the lines of Solemn Simulacrum, River Kelpie, and Stitcher's Supplier. These kinds of cards help you out-value your opponents and generate resource advantages they won’t be able to keep up with.

Decklist: Yarok, the Desecrated in Commander

Yarok, the Desecrated | Illustration by Daarken

I see Yarok, the Desecrated as the most fun and interactive Sultai commander. This decklist is obviously lands-focused since you usually always hit land drops that work twice as hard for you. This lets you have a strategy that’s much more consistent and effective. The deck has 36 lands so you have plenty of ammunition for your landfall permanents.

Your early goal is to get something like Lotus Cobra or Scute Swarm out to get your engine turning with land drops. Ramunap Excavator plus any of the fetch lands in the deck lets you grab a lot of lands early. You also don’t have to worry about your life total here since losing 10 to 20 life this early is nothing compared to having five times more mana than everyone else.

A card like Traveling Chocobo allows you to find land drops more often and acts like a second Yarok in play. For a bit of inevitability, try Mistrise Village, so your key spells can get under counterspells.

The win conditions in this deck are very much related to lands, so we have a lot of cards that can benefit from multiple landfall triggers and cards that allow us to play multiple lands in a turn. Splendid Reclamation and Scapeshift are cards that can make tons of landfall triggers at once. Villainous Wealth and Torment of Hailfire are good wincons once you have enough lands in play. The many permanents with landfall should carry you to victory, as Yarok, the Desecrated doubles all those triggers.

Commanding Conclusion

The Mimeoplasm | Illustration by Svetlin Velinov

There you have it, a complete rundown of every Sultai commander out there. While I may be biased toward Esper, I think Sultai is a great color combination both thematically and in how it plays. The card draw and tempo of blue is what really takes the typically rotten Golgari () playstyle from good to great.

But what do you think? Do you like my rankings, or is something off in your opinion? Let me know in the comments or on our official Draftsim Discord.

Sultai not your preferred color trio? Check these out: Abzan, Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jeskai, Jund, Mardu, Naya, and Temur.

Until next time, stay safe and stay healthy!