Nekusar, the Mindrazer Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on February 26, 2025

Nekusar, the Mindrazer | Illustration by Mark Winters

I’ve always had a fondness for Nekusar, the Mindrazer. It’s among the best early commanders for new players because it has a clear game plan, with a handful of useful support cards. While many Nekusar decks draw from the same palette of cards, there’s a charm to a commander whose game plan you understand.

Nekusar has even seen plenty of support over the past few sets, making it a deck that evolves and grows with the times. Let’s look at how you can build a Nekusar Commander deck in 2025.

The Deck

Damnable Pact | Illustration by Zack Stella

We’re all in on wheels, baby. Nekusar, the Mindrazer laid the template for group slug commanders to come, and this deck is hellbent on maximizing the commander’s damage ability. There’s lots of effects that force your opponents to draw cards then punish them for doing so; it’s the quintessential “stop hitting yourself” strategy.

To support all the card draw, you have a bunch of ramp, plus a few cards like Force of Will and Chrome Mox that are powerful, but card disadvantage. You’ll turn that to your favor by using these cards to empty your hand quickly so each wheel gives you as many cards as possible.

With respect to some of that fast mana, and the free interaction, this deck definitely pushes towards high power. It lacks the combo win conditions or general strategy to compete with proper cEDH decks, but don’t take this to a pod of precons or casual decks!

The Commander: Nekusar, the Mindrazer

Nekusar, the Mindrazer is the deck’s crown jewel. Your primary wincon is the death by a thousand cuts that your commander and other draw punishers enable, and Nekusar fuels itself with the additional card draw. This is truly a deck built around its commander, and playing it every game is an essential part of the game plan.

Forced Draw

These cards support everything else. Your forced draw comes in two flavors: wheels that cause tons of card draw and provide huge bursts of damage, and Howling Mine effects that offer a steadier source of card draw and damage.

Wheel of Fortune and Timetwister are simply the best of the best, and they’re sadly locked behind the Reserved List. They’re inaccessible to most… but that’s why I proxy.

Wheel of Misfortune might misfire since your opponents can choose 0, but then you just get a personal wheel! It doesn’t really go wrong.

Windfall plays nicely with our other forced draw effects as the Howling Mines keep hands relatively full.

Reforge the Soul is one of the pricier wheels, but the occasional miracle makes it one of your most efficient options.

Echo of Eons pulls double duty: You get two wheels if you cast it naturally, but it pairs nicely with any discard wheels since you can flash it back later.

Jace's Archivist is a particularly important piece as the only repeatable wheel effect in the deck.

Winds of Change wraps up the wheels, and it’s remarkable for its efficiency. You can often play it in the same turn as another wheel for a powerful finish.

Howling Mine itself is the marquee forced draw effect, but you also have Dictate of Kruphix and Jace Beleren to get in on the good times.

Anvil of Bogardan is a nice forced wheel because it’s just a loot; your opponents don’t get a full card, and it works with Waste Not. Giving players no maximum hand size has some sneaky synergy with Windfall.

Teferi's Puzzle Box doesn’t put your opponents up on cards, but it still forces them to redraw for a ton of triggers. It straddles the line between a wheel and a forced draw effect, and it’s generally one of your most valuable game pieces.

You should almost always choose Brotherhood on Struggle for Project Purity. It’s an invaluable Howling Mine since it triggers on your upkeep; the weakness of traditional versions of the effect is that your opponents can draw their cards, then kill it and deny you one.

Draw Punishers

These are the deck’s bread and butter, the cards that take that long list of forced draw effects and translate them into a win condition. I’ve also woven in a couple of discard punishers since they’re the backside of the same coin.

Kederekt Parasite’s likely the first card in every Nekusar deck as the most efficient draw punisher in the game.

Scrawling Crawler, Spiteful Visions, and Ob Nixilis, the Hate-Twisted are invaluable draw punishers because they include forced draw effects; they’re very much duplicate copies of Nekusar, the Mindrazer.

Fate Unraveler is a classic of the archetype, even if Razorkin Needlehead makes it look rather silly.

Phyrexian Tyranny is one of the bigger burn effects in the deck. It works particularly well late, as your opponents are stuck between a rock (losing more of their dwindling life) and a hard place (sinking mana into your enchantment to stay alive).

Liliana's Caress and Waste Not are classics of the genre that the deck wouldn’t be complete without. On a similar note, Tergrid, God of Fright provides one of your best win conditions.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse is one of the best draw punishers creatures printed in recent history, and it’s a key piece of the deck’s stabilization. It’s hard to race a player who gains 8 or more life each turn, with a burst of 14 coming from random wheels.

But no draw punisher can match Orcish Bowmasters, with its combination of a massive amass token, board control, and direct damage making it the single most valuable card in the deck.

Auxiliary Support

These cards generally work well within the deck’s game plan without explicitly being a wheel or a draw punisher; most of these reward you for playing draw sevens or work with your commander.

While much of the support for Nekusar comes from the wheel package, Ghyrson Starn, Kelermorph and Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin provide different support. Kelermorph amplifies Nekusar’s damage—and the damage from most of your other draw punishers—to close out the game three times as fast. Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin provides huge bursts of card draw while growing into a massive threat; Valgavoth, Harrower of Souls fulfills a similar function.

Surly Badgersaur and Bone Miser reward you for discarding cards with a variety of effects. Inti, Seneschal of the Sun only rewards you with card draw, but what more could you want?

Faerie Mastermind plays beautifully with this deck’s forced draw effects. Every Howling Mine triggers nets you a card and wheels three so that you always have more cards than your opponents, even as you distribute cards like a group hug deck.

Reanimate primarily functions as a roundabout protection spell for Nekusar, but keep an eye on opposing graveyards. You never know when a wheel will put Archon of Cruelty or Avacyn, Angel of Hope into the graveyard.

With all these discard effects, a couple of madness cards are excellent. Big Game Hunter provides a very cheap removal spell with no shortage of targets while Necrogoyf becomes a massive threat with all the wheeling going on. Call to the Netherworld provides a free though restrictive Raise Dead effect that’s handy when you need to recur something like the commander.

The Medicine

Most players don’t like interaction, either finding room for it or playing against it, but it’s a crucial part of any game of Magic. That goes double for a deck that supplies your opponents with so many cards. You can’t hope to answer every threat at a Commander table, but this removal suite should handle the most pressing.

This list has three pitch-counters in Force of Will, Force of Negation, and Misdirection, primarily to protect your forces. The card disadvantage on these is negligible since your wheels help you see so many cards.

Fierce Guardianship and Deflecting Swat make appearances, mostly to protect Nekusar since it’ll become a high-priority removal target.

The counter suite is rounded out with An Offer You Can't Refuse and Swan Song for hyper-efficient cards to win counter wars and quell the Wrath of God, plus Arcane Denial and Mana Drain for catch-all protection.

The creature-based interaction takes a multi-target approach. Cyclonic Rift is simply the best board wipe in the format while Toxic Deluge and Blasphemous Act are among the most efficient ways to clear a table. Fire Covenant takes a more surgical approach, cutting away prominent threats while leaving your board untouched.

The Mana Base

The mana base begins with a robust selection of mana rocks to accelerate you and make use of all those extra cards. Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond are useful despite their card disadvantage, rather like the pitch-counters. Gemstone Caverns, though not technically a rock, fulfills the same role.

Sol Ring provides a classic source of fast mana, alongside Mana Vault, which I find particularly useful to cast cards like Tergrid, God of Fright and Bone Miser ahead of a wheel.

The complete set of Talismans and Signets, including Arcane Signet, rounds out the mana rocks with some of the best-in-slot options.

The land base includes a few value lands in Takenuma, Abandoned Mire and Mystic Sanctuary for some recursion and Otawara, Soaring City and Sink into Stupor for a touch of interaction.

The Strategy

The deck’s greatest strengths lie in its consistency and its redundancy. You have enough duplicates of your crucial effects and enough card draw between the wheels and Howling Mines that you should always do The Thing, except for games with wild mana issues. Due to this consistency, the most critical components to look for in your opening hand are ramp and lands to ensure you can play the cards you draw; Wheel of Fortune looks far less impressive when you only cast one card before playing it.

This deck plays for the midgame; you’ll develop for the first three or four turns, then turn the corner quickly with a few well-timed wheels dolling out 21 or more damage across the table.

There’s a subtle chaos element to this deck as well. Though you aren’t playing Chaos Warp or anything, it’s hard to develop a meaningful game plan when you begin half your turns with a fresh hand. This is another area where the redundancy comes in handy, as constantly wheeling affects you less than, say, a toolbox-y deck that needs to draw cards in a specific order.

This deck generally benefits from long games, so don’t be afraid to throw out board wipes and counter meaningful threats that could pressure you. The deck has lots of inevitability since it sticks several cards that peck away at opposing life totals and the combination of draw punishers and forced draw effects often pick off players with less than 10 life without much trouble.

Combos and Interactions

This is arguably a combo deck at its core that assembles a damage engine between draw punishers and wheels, but it has only one key combo that players might raise an eyebrow at, probably because it lets you kill a player as soon as turn 2.

All you need is Orcish Bowmasters and a 3-mana draw seven—Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune are the most consistent, but Windfall works in a pinch.

Cast the Bowmasters on the end step of turn 2 (or turn 1 if you have a Mox), dealing 1 damage and creating an Orc Army. On your next turn, cast your wheel, amassing a total of 21 Bowmaster triggers. Between the triggers and the Orc Army, you have a total of 42 points of damage to point wherever you like. Whether this is advisable is worth pondering: It likely makes you the archenemy, but it’s a neat hat trick.

Another cool combo comes from pairing Cyclonic Rift with any wheel effect to effectively end the game. Players can generally rebuild after an overloaded Rift, but a wheel makes that nearly impossible and basically restarts the game for everybody else.

Rule 0 Violations

Nekusar, the Mindrazer has been around the block often enough that players should be familiar with it, and the general strategy shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. But the high numbers of free interaction and the fast mana might not be so well received; thankfully, that’s easily amended by replacing Force of Will and its ilk with regular countermagic and the fast mana with other 2-mana rocks.

Budget Options

The bulk of the cost of most EDH decks rests in the mana base, so you should always look for ways to trim there; replace duals with gates, fetches with check lands, and so on until you’ve whittled the lands down to a reasonable price range, being mindful that it’ll slow the deck down.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse costs a ludicrous amount that might fall whenever it rotates from Standard, but for the time being I’d recommend playing Underworld Dreams, which didn’t make the initial cut due to its intensive mana cost.

Orcish Bowmasters has no real replacement, but you can pretend that Psychosis Crawler matches its pressure and hide your tears at losing the board control.

You can swap Bone Miser with Monument to Endurance for a cheaper discard payoff.

Ghyrson Starn, Kelermorph has become the most popular Izzet commander () on EDHREC, so it’s not particularly surprising that it has a hefty price tag. Tor Wauki the Younger makes for a fine replacement.

If you don’t want to proxy Timetwister and Wheel of Fortune, there are other wheels you can play, with Molten Psyche and Magus of the Wheel offering potential substitutes.

As a whole, the free interaction is very expensive, and you can slash that budget universally by replacing them with regular counterspells like Counterspell, Muddle the Mixture, Negate, and so on. The same applies to the Moxen and Mana Vault.

Anvil of Bogardan has a surprisingly high price tag due to a lack of reprints since Visions; you can give Kami of the Crescent Moon a spin instead.

Other Builds

Nekusar, the Mindrazer often clings to card draw; though powerful, it’s rather narrow. You could elect to take a battlecruiser slant by adding cards like The Locust God and Niv-Mizzet, Parun to build a deck that rewards you for drawing cards rather than punishing your opponents for drawing cards.

Another route could be a much more aggressive deck that focuses on maximizing Nekusar’s damage output with cards like Solphim, Mayhem Dominus and Harmonic Prodigy to focus on winning with a few massive triggers instead of many small ones. Death by guillotine rather than a thousand cuts, if you will.

Commander Conclusion

Spiteful Visions | Illustration by Brandon Kitkouski

I understand why some players dislike Nekusar, the Mindrazer; many of the decks look similar, and there’s enough redundancy that it feels like it goes against the spirit of a singleton format. But I love the feeling of playing a streamlined deck with all its cogs in order and can’t resist a strategy that sees so many cards.

What do you think of Nekusar? Do you enjoy playing it, or have any secret tech I should know about? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!