Commander Cards You Should Be Playing
Since a large part of my job is pulling everyone’s commander lists, I get to see certain cards very often. Things like Sol Ring or Arcane Signet. I also see a lot of cards that, in my opinion, shouldn’t really be in most commander decks. For this week’s article I wanted to talk about some of the cards I don’t see enough of and cards I see too much. Keep in mind these are all my opinions on cards and if you have a niche deck that needs to run Lightning Bolt or Mind Funeral have fun with it. These are general tips for deck building in Commander. Let’s jump right in with: Commander’s Sphere. If you’ve played commander in Game Grid since I’ve started working here you know I have nothing but disdain for 3-mana rocks. If they cost three they’d better do more than tap for one mana. Even Commander’s Sphere cycling in the late game isn’t worth it for me. It is effectively a worse Triome at three mana to draw a card. The only 3-mana rocks I ever play are Worn Powerstone in 1 or 2 color decks and Coalition Relic or Chromatic Lantern for 3+ color decks. There are so many 2-mana rocks you should be playing instead of the 3-mana options. Cards like Star Compass, Pillar of Origins, Prismatic Lens, and even one-shot cards like Pentad Prism if you have a combo that you want to get quickly. On top of the dislike I have for 3-mana rocks, green decks should be playing less mana rocks and more cards that cost 2 that search up lands into play. Cards like Rampant Growth, Farseek, Nature's Lore, and Three Visits are better than your 2-mana rocks when you have lands that count as Forests in your list. When your Three Visits goes and gets a Zagoth Triome you are much further ahead than the 4-color deck that went and cast a Commander’s Sphere, putting a Shock Land into play untapped with Nature’s Lore and Three Visits is icing on the cake. Green also has access to the one mana ramp spells of Wild Growth and Utopia Sprawl, both of which should be in basically every green deck. If you are ramping hard and aren’t in Green you have some other options for big rocks. Cards like Thran Dynamo and Gilded Lotus are expensive but put you very far ahead if you can play them on turns 2 or 3. From ramp to removal: a common problem I see across most commander games I witness at the store is that people do not run enough interaction. This isn’t 2010, you cannot afford to only play one Swords to Plowshares, one Naturalize, and one Wrath of God. Commander decks are so streamlined and so linear now that you have to have interaction at every spot in your curve. Whether that’s a counterspell at 1 mana, like An Offer You Can't Refuse, or a multi-target removal at 6 mana like Casualties of War; you have to be able to interact with your opponents at every stage of the game. You don’t have to have best-in-slot for every card in your deck. Don’t wanna spend $7 on Cryptic Command? Play Dismiss. Most of the time Dismiss is going to do exactly what Cryptic Command does for an easier mana cost. For your white based interaction: if it only kills one creature it had better cost one mana or be free. There’s a reason that Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile are the high water mark for removal. White is king in board wipes, and has been since Alpha, with old cards like Wrath of God and Akroma's Vengeance all the way up to more recent additions like Farewell and Vanquish the Horde, white has firmly cemented white as the board control color. When you pair white up with Black you get some of the most effective spot removal in the game, with Anguished Unmaking and Utter End being catch all removal for everything but lands and Vindicate picking up the slack in that department. Cards like Oblivion Ring and Banishing Light are fine for Commander but I would stay away from them unless you have enchantment synergy of some kind (when your Oblivion Ring also draws you a card it makes the risk of giving them back the card less painful). The last thing I want to talk about in white is Disenchant style effects. While there is nothing wrong with playing good old Disenchant itself there are better commander options with cards like Dust to Dust and its more contemporary clone Return to Dust. Both of these cards are great for dealing with the more problematic card types that normal removal doesn’t hit. Ideally you want your interaction to hit as many things as possible, which is why Arcane Denial and Counterspell are my top choices for interaction in blue, your countermagic needs to be fast and hit most threats which is why Arcane Denial is my first stop for blue countermagic. If your counterspell cannot counter everything it had better only cost one mana. An Offer You Can’t Refuse, Swan Song, Flusterstorm, and Stubborn Denial are all contenders for spots in my deck depending on what the rest of the list looks like. If I’m not playing a lot of big creatures, I won’t be playing Stubborn Denial for example. I also tend to stay away from countermagic that opponents can get around just by having lots of lands in play. So cards like Spell Pierce, Mana Leak, and Convolute very rarely make it into my decks (with the only exception being Mystic Confluence because that card does so much other stuff.) Black is the first color I think of when I want to remove a creature, and as such it has lots of cards I usually don't play because that’s all they do. Like with white, don’t play removal that only kills one creature unless it costs one or is free. Cards like Bone Splinters and Spark Harvest fit into lots of black strategies and Snuff Out is a very powerful card at most tables. To be frank I think black really needs some help in the interaction department for Commander, it is very good at advancing its own game plan with tutors and graveyard interaction and is pretty poor at stopping the opponents in a multiplayer format. You really do not want to be playing Thoughtseize in your commander deck, but something like Go Blank is a card that makes it into most of my black heavy decks. Black really hits its stride with the two color removal we have already talked about with white and some other fantastic options with red. Dreadbore, Bedevil, and Kolaghan's Command all stand tall as very good options for removal that can hit multiple card types. The new Sheoldred's Edict is a card I haven’t had a lot of experience with in commander but it does hit all opponents and you do get a choice of what card types you’d like to remove. Red loves two things: direct damage and screwing with blue players. At higher power tables where 3 of the 4 players are playing blue, cards like Red Elemental Blast and Pyroblast tend to make it into my CEDH decks. Red’s removal tends to be lackluster for everything except artifacts ( Blasphemous Act notwithstanding). The best way to remove a creature while you are playing a red deck is to force your opponent to have to block to stay alive, that doesn’t mean you get to ignore your artifact removal however. Shattering Spree and Shatterstorm can set those players who got ahead with mana rocks back to playing fair magic Green is in a similar spot to red, in that it has a hard time removing creatures. Outside of a few niche commanders, fight spells aren’t super worth it in commander, there are too many things that can go wrong. What green does get, and I try to play as many of these effects as I can fit in my deck, are creatures with enter the battlefield effects that destroy artifacts and enchantments. Reclamation Sage should be in every green commander deck, or you should have a good reason why you aren’t playing it. The same goes for Boseiju, Who Endures and I have even been enjoying a Carnivorous Canopy style effect more and more. Green also gets the mass enchantment removal spell Tranquility, which if it won't hurt your deck too severely, is definitely worth running in your creature heavy lists. The last green card I want to talk about has been a Commander staple since the format’s inception, Beast Within. It answers everything and should be in almost every green deck. I like it better than the white version since white has more efficient options but Generous Gift does work in a pinch. Let’s talk about card draw, direct damage, and mill spells. What do these three things have in common? You shouldn’t play one shot versions of either of them in commander. As much fun as Lightning Bolt can be in 60 card formats, it will be underwhelming in basically every commander board state. The same is true for small, one shot card draw. Divination shouldn’t be in any commander deck. If you’re playing at higher power level tables you have access to cards like Brainstorm, Ponder, and Preordain. At lower power tables you have cards like Silver Scrutiny or Stroke of Genius, with Stroke of Genius having the added benefit of drawing someone else out of the game. Turn your infinite mana into infinite cards for your opponent and draw them to death on their upkeep. Mill and Burn have the same problems in Commander. You have more opponents with more resources. In a modern or standard game of Magic you have one opponent with 20 life and 60 cards in their deck. Easy enough to burn through. In Commander you have three opponents with a total of 300 cards and 120 life. You just do not have the resources to kill all your opponents if you are spending cards like Lightning Bolt to remove 2.5% of your total opponents life totals. Same with cards like Tome Scour or Archive Trap. You can absolutely win with mill, but it will be all at once in one big turn with Prosperity and Sphinx’s Tutelage. The other option is a little more Commander specific but with Phenax, God of Deception or Captain N'ghathrod, you can nickel and dime your opponents’ libraries out of the game. If you are running mill, just be sure to bring all of your Tormod's Crypt and Relic of Progenitus so you can stop them from getting value from their graveyard. Burn in Commander looks a lot different than burn in every other format. You need consistent and repeatable forms of damage. Instead of Lightning Bolt, play Ankh of Mishra, Sulfuric Vortex, or Roiling Vortex (with the added bonus of Roiling Vortex really punishing people trying to cheat cards with things like Cascade.) Red damage doublers like Furnace of Rath or the new Solphim, Mayhem Dominus really crank up your effects that do the consistent damage, with Chandra's Incinerator cleaning up the creatures so you don’t get left behind by your opponents. The one exception to the one shot damage cards for me are the X spells that can target players. If you have ways to make all the mana, turning it into a Banefire can delete one player from the game immediately. If you don’t feel like singling out one player, use something like Comet Storm or Rolling Thunder to off the whole table and each creature in play at the same time. I have also witnessed one of the sillier burn wins, Earthquake for 30, then in response to my own Earthquake, cast Teferi's Protection and blink out leaving everyone else to deal with the Earthquake. These are a few of the cards and archetypes I see a lot of when pulling lists for Commander and hopefully you’ve seen some things that will help elevate your existing decks or better your deck building for the future. Remember that Commander is supposed to be fun and collaborative, if you have a decklist you’re having a hard time getting to work, bring it into the store and we will help you get the final list hammered out. Or if you’re looking to build a new deck and need some cards for it, send us a list. Thanks for reading and let me know if you agree or disagree with any of the cards I’ve mentioned here.
Draft Heuristics
Since we have a lot of newer drafters coming in with Phyrexia: All Will Be One, I thought I’d share some of the heuristics that I use for drafting. To save you a Google, a heuristic is a line of thought that is the default answer most of the time. Learning these heuristics will make you a better drafter, and learning when to break them or when they do not apply will make you a great drafter. As much as I’d love to take credit for these I cannot in good faith do that, most of them come from Limited Resources (if you want to get better and aren’t listening to this podcast you are missing out.) The main reason you want to use heuristics in your play is to relieve some of the mental load of thinking every move or pick through. If you don’t need to think about whether or not to take the two drop or the three drop that leaves more mental space open for actual hard decisions. This applies the most in gameplay, where if you know how to work most board states because you’ve been there before; when you come upon a novel situation you have more time and less stress to think the difficult turn through. The first heuristic I want to talk about is applicable for most magic games, not just limited, but it is much more important in limited. Use as much of your mana as you can each turn. Just play your cards. If you are holding a creature back and cannot enumerate why you are holding that creature back, then you should cast it. This is also true for lands. Team Ultra Pro has a thing they do in testing for the Pro Tour, if you skip playing a land and cannot justify it to the rest of the playtest group you lose your “don’t play a land privilege” and have to play a land every turn if you can. You’re not at a poker table, you’re not bluffing your opponent. If you have 6 lands in play, haven’t played anything in two turns, and are sitting with three cards in hand I am just going to assume you have three lands in hand. The second heuristic is for the draft portion specifically. If you have a choice between a low mana cost card and a higher mana cost card that are of comparable power level for their mana cost, take the lower card first. If you spend your first pack picking one, two, and three drop creatures in pack one then when you get passed a good five drop in pack two you don’t have to make the choice between power level and curve. This is especially true in cube, where most five drops are interchangeably powerful (the difference between Baneslayer Angel and Elder Gargaroth is not all that huge) any of them would fill the slot of your top end. Obviously this doesn’t apply to the absurdly powerful rares that show up in limited sets, like Thrun, Breaker of Silence. It doesn’t matter how many five drops you have in your deck you put Thrun in your deck. Next is one that is becoming a little less true as time goes on, a little less universally applicable, and that is “Staying Open.” In draft staying open is the practice of taking lands and colorless spells early in order to leave your picks as open ended as possible. For example if in pack one almost every card I take is green, maybe I end up with a couple of decent red cards halfway through the pack, I am looking at playing red/green. But then in pack two I open Vraska, Betrayal's Sting. I’m not passing a $16 card for monetary and constructed reasons, but I’d also like to play this very powerful card in my limited deck. Since I am mostly green I am free to move into black and put this game winning Planeswalker into my deck and only lose out on the two or three picks I spent on the medium red cards in the middle of pack one. Now if I had spent pack one splitting myself evenly between red and green it will be much harder for me to slot Vraska into that deck, I'm going to lose half my picks in pack one, and this goes back to the previous heuristic, if I spent my picks on five and six drops I won't be able to play all of them because I will be using my pick on this Vraska. The next two kind of fit into the same heuristic and that is fine tuning your card evaluation ability. The Vanilla Test and the Quadrant Theory. The Vanilla Test is my favorite way to judge cards I’ve never seen before. If you take a creature and remove all the rules text from it, is that card playable? As an example, let’s look at one of the most underdrafted commons from Dominaria Remastered: Stonewood Invoker. If you take away this card's rules text it becomes a Grizzly Bear with a better creature type. While the 8 mana ability almost never matters, it doesn’t make the card worse, and you should be playing your Grizzly Bears in limited. While a 2 mana 2/2 with no abilities is a little below rate in modern limited they almost never are just vanilla 2/2. In All Will Be One, they have toxic 1 and first strike, or proliferate when they die. The Vanilla Test goes the other way too, while it is less common for under-statted creatures to be printed any more, you still get the occasional four mana 2/3. Those types of cards need a lot more heavy lifting from their text box than a four mana 4/4. An example from All Will Be One is Annex Sentry. A 3 mana 1/4 is a failure on the vanilla test, even with toxic 1, but when you look into its text box it exiles a creature when you cast it. Even though it fails The Vanilla Test it is still one of the better white cards in the set because its text box is so powerful. Quadrant Theory is simple on the surface when you’re looking to break down how good a specific card is, and gets far more complicated the further into the draft you go. It works best when you’re looking at first picks or looking to fine tune your pick orders for the set as a whole. You divide up your thinking into four quadrants. When you are ahead, when you are behind, when you are building, and when you are stalled. You take a card and try to find out where it stands in each quadrant, with “when you’re behind” being by far the most important quadrant; and “when you’re ahead” being the least important. Let’s do some examples from All Will Be One, starting with Malcator's Watcher. When you are ahead: this card doesn’t add much besides an evasive body. When you are building: this card is a great two mana play, it trades with most of the one drops in the set and a couple of the twos. When you are behind: it functions about the same as any two drop when you are losing, with two big exceptions: it draws a card to dig you to an answer and it can block fliers. When you’re stalled: Cheap fliers are good at breaking board stalls. In the Quadrant Test Malcator’s Watcher comes out quite high in three of four, making it a high pick for a common. Now for something a little harder (and something I am particularly soap box-ey about) Awaken the Sleeper. Let’s put it through the Quadrant Test. When you're behind: This card is an awful top deck. If you draw this while you are already losing you have probably just lost the game. It does less than nothing when you are behind. When you are building: You don’t really want to take a turn off to not cast a creature and maybe get three or four damage in on turn four with this card, when you are building this card hurts your board development. When you are winning: this is when Threaten effects are at their best. When you cast this card while you’re ahead you usually either put yourself so far ahead you have an insurmountable advantage or you win the game outright. This is why people play Threatens, because when you play it correctly it wins the game. What does this card do while you are stalled out? It will sometimes kill one of your opponents creatures, whether it’s the creature you stole and attacked with or something they chose to block with. Most often, however, they will just take the damage because since you’re in a board stall their life total is not in much danger and you just spent four mana and a card to do basically nothing. The only time I suggest playing Threaten type effects is when you have lots of cheap ways to sacrifice the creature you stole. In Quadrant Theory Awaken the Sleeper abjectly fails two of the four, excels in one, and is mediocre in the fourth. This makes Awaken the Sleeper a fine card for very, very aggressive red decks that consistently put their opponents on the back foot, and that’s about all. The last heuristic I want to touch on is one of the harder ones to do, it is learning all of the cards in the set. Learn what they do, learn how they interact with each other, and learn the art for all of them. The faster you are able to look at a board state (especially if you play arena) and tell what is happening without needing to read all the cards the better you’ll be able to play and the less brain space you’ll need to put into figuring out how the game pieces interact with each other. If you already know what all the things do then you can use your opponent's turn to think through the lines of play for your next turn, speeding up your play considerably. These are good starting points for limited but ultimately the only way you get better at limited is by doing it more. The reason the good drafters that you know are as good as they are is because they have done hundreds if not thousands of drafts over the course of their Magic careers. It might be disheartening but remember, every single one of those drafters have been where you are (I spent ten years getting whooped by Richard Cook every Friday at FNM) and most of them didn’t have the infrastructure and content you do to make yourself better. Watch professionals draft, listen to podcasts, watch the Pro Tour coverage, and read articles (plug, plug). All of these things will make you better at drafting and I look forward to cracking packs with new Magic players for years. What’s your favorite draft format ever? What’s a weird or interesting thing that has happened to you in limited? Let us know in the comments and remember Game Grid drafts every Thursday at 6:30!
$50 Deck Tech - Karametra, God of the Harvest
You folks remember when we had those $50 commander deck swaps? I’ve never really stopped making $50 decklists, which means I have a pretty huge backlog of these things. So, periodically, I’m going to do a deck tech on one of them for this website, with the full list, suggested upgrades if you wanna throw some more money at it, and regular play patterns. If you like these kinds of articles please let us know and we will make some more! (and you can buy all these cards at your friendly, local Game Grid!) To start off, here is the decklist itself: Commander (1) (1) Karametra, God of Harvests Sorceries (8) (1) Ascend from Avernus (1) Decree of Justice (1) Entreat the Angels (1) Finale of Glory (1) Martial Coup (1) Nyleas Intervention (1) Overrun (1) Solemn Offering Instants (5) (1) Return to Nature (1) Sanguine Sacrament (1) Summoners Pact (1) Unexpectedly Absent (1) White Suns Zenith Artifacts (3) (1) Clown Car (1) Horn of Valhalla (1) Sol Ring Enchantments (5) (1) Careful Cultivation (1) Felidar Retreat (1) Quarantine Field (1) Wild Growth (1) Zendikar Resurgent Lands (38) (1) Blossoming Sands (1) Canopy Vista (17) Forest (16) Plains (1) Radiant Grove (1) Temple Garden (1) Temple of Plenty Creatures (40) (1) Admonition Angel (1) Artisan of Kozilek (1) Avacyn's Pilgrim (1) Avenger of Zendikar (1) Bane of Bala Ged (1) Beast Whisperer (1) Breaker of Armies (1) Channeler Initiate (1) Chorus of the Conclave (1) Courser of Kruphix (1) Dawnglare Invoker (1) Decimator of the Provinces (1) Druid of the Cowl (1) Elfhame Druid (1) Elvish Mystic (1) End-Raze Forerunners (1) Endless One (1) Fauna Shaman (1) Fyndhorn Elder (1) Fyndhorn Elves (1) Gala Greeters (1) Genesis Hydra (1) Gilanra, Caller of Wirewood (1) Humble Naturalist (1) Ilysian Caryatid (1) Llanowar Elves (1) Maja, Bretagard Protector (1) Naga Vitalist (1) Ornithopter of Paradise (1) Paradise Druid (1) Pathrazer of Ulamog (1) Primordial Sage (1) Quirion Explorer (1) Rampaging Baloths (1) Reclusive Taxidermist (1) Rift Sower (1) Stonecloaker (1) Undercellar Myconid (1) Weaver of Blossoms (1) Whitemane Lion For the first part of this tech I want to talk about Karametra herself: Karametra is a devastatingly simple commander. Play a creature, get a land. So what do we do? Play lots and lots and lots of mana dorks and things to do with 9+ mana. Every dork that gets played nets us another land on top of the mana the dork itself makes. Karametra also has a fun interaction with the card Whitemane Lion. When the Lion enters the battlefield you must return a creature you control to its owner’s hand, which means you can return itself. So you effectively have a 2 mana, instant speed, rampant growth so long as your commander is in play. This also works for the slightly less powerful Stonecloaker, which also gives you a small amount of graveyard control. To really crank up the value of these interactions an upgrade that’s on the expensive side is Amulet of Vigor. Making all your lands come into play untapped means Whitemane Lion is only 1 mana put a land into play. For the dork section we are playing all of the basic single green mana dorks you’d expect: After these three there are also the slightly less good 2 mana ones with Paradise Druid being the best of the bunch because of the hexproof. There are a few 3 mana dorks in the deck, but all of them tap for more than a single mana or have another effect that impacts the board. Fyndhorn Elder ramps you from 3 to 6 without Karametra. The mana creatures are a place where we can upgrade pretty significantly. A glaring omission from this list is Birds of Paradise. But sitting around $7 for the cheapest copy it is priced out of the $50 list, its not a huge upgrade on the Llanowar Elves. What is a huge upgrade is Sylvan Caryatid. You may have also noticed that the only mana rock in the deck is Sol Ring. You are generating so much mana with your commander that you do not need additional rocks to make the deck hum. If you feel the need and have the cash, Jeweled Lotus is a big upgrade to this deck to let you play Karametra as early as turn 2. There are a couple of ways to use all these lands we are pulling from the deck. The first order of operation for them would be to use landfall abilities. There are a lot of things to choose from here, you could go with low impact ones like Kazandu Nectarpot or Jaddi Offshoot , or you could go with the game winner that is Rampaging Baloths (stupid Omnath, Locus of Rage being red. He’d be perfect here). The other obvious answer is Avenger of Zendikar and now that he is $3 instead of $30 it's a pretty free addition to this deck. The last landfall card I want to talk about is Felidar Retreat. Not only does it let you build a creature base very quickly, it also lets you turn your army of stupid little green things into an actual game ending threat. It’s not uncommon to get 4 or 5 counters per turn from this enchantment and that ends the game very quickly if you have 6 or seven Llanowar Elves out. Now for the fun part: the X spells. There are a lot of X spells to choose from in these colors that would be fun to play, but the ones I chose were the ones that made lots of creatures and also affected the board in other ways. Martial Coup. is an underrated and seemingly forgotten Wrath effect. Both White Sun’s Zenith. and Decree of Justice make oodles of creatures at instant speed. You can play pretty much whatever X spells you feel like but I would highly recommend keeping Ascend from Avernus. This Baldur’s Gate rare is one of my favorite creature rebuilding spells in the game. Did you just get wrathed and lose all of your tiny dorks, but still have 22 lands in play because of your commander? Well, hit that undo button and get ready to punish your opponent for daring to Bolt the Bird. There are a lot of expensive X spells that I didn’t have the budget for but the first and largest improvement you can make in this section is Genesis Wave. This card can single handedly win you the game and pairing it up with another upgrade, Concordant Crossroads, can give you the win on the spot. If you can find them, the Tyrannid creatures that have Ravenous are also great additions to this deck, but they’re tricky enough to acquire so I didn't want to spend a lot of time on them. The lands in this deck are pretty simple and abundant. I am running 38 lands, 39 would probably be better, but I am greedy. You want to run every land with the Plains and Forest subtype. I included most of them, but the harder ones to find like the snow dual and the cycle land. I went with Temple Garden because I had a bit of budget left over after I removed Horn of Greed. The obvious upgrade to this section is a Savannah, but I won't fault you for not wanting to get a dual for this deck (Davis might though). Another expensive, albeit very powerful, option is Gaea’s Cradle. Finally we get to the 8+ mana cards! Obviously we are going to play lots of Eldrazi, but since most of the Titans run on the spendier side of things, we will be sticking to the cheaper options. Pathrazer of Ulamog, Breaker of Armies, and Bane of Bala Ged are all very budget-friendly options for big Eldrazi beaters. Pathrazer is hard to block making triple blocking it a problem if you have any instant speed removal. Breaker of Armies gets really close to being a Plague Wind against one player. It has enough power to clear out most boards, and if it doesn't kill everything it will definitely kill lots of things. Bane of Bala Ged is kind of a filler piece, but with better Annihilate it holds its own at 7 mana. That brings us to the boars in the room. Decimator of Provinces and End Raze Forerunners are both budget options for everyone's favorite green win con: Craterhoof Behemoth. There’s a reason this thing sits comfortably in the $25 to $35 range. Combine this with Natural Order and you have a pretty clean 4 mana win the game button. Decimator and the Forerunners do a passable job of Hoofing people, but to really knock the game down in one turn, you need the big guy himself. This list has been a pretty fun time, it goes from zero to game over very quickly and it rebuilds well because of cards like Beast Whisperer and Primordial Sage. Overall it plays very similarly to a lot of swarm green decks but with the added bonus of cranking out a X=15 spell when the table has finally answered all of your little dorks. If you have a commander you’d like for us to make a $50 list around or want to buy any of the cards featured in the article please come visit us in store or take a look at our rares catalog here on the website. Thanks for reading and we will see you next week. -Adam Godfrey
Top Ten Planeswalkers
Welcome to the first top ten list for Game Grid Logan! This is an article format I’ve wanted to do for our website for quite awhile. Hopefully we can expand this into lots of different article types so keep a close eye on our website to see new articles as they come out. With that out of the way, our first list is Top Ten Planeswalkers. Time to set some parameters. This is not just about what the best are for competitive play, I’ll leave that to Nizzahon. It’s also not who is best in the lore or in commander, but who are my personal top ten in aggregate for individual Planeswalkers not individual Planeswalker cards. And the list starts with: #10 Nicol Bolas To be quite honest Nicol Bolas fell on and off this list a bunch of times. As much of a sucker as I am for old Magic lore, the various Bolases don't seem distinct enough to rank much higher than this on the list. If I had to, I couldn’t remember the difference between Nicol Bolas, God Pharaoh and Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker All that said, he was the big bad for several years of story and squeaks in at #10. #9 Oko Oko is on here for the exact opposite reason to Bolas. It isn’t for his lore impact, which is basically non-existent. It isn’t for his design, hot elf is fine but overdone. It is solely because of his constructed impact. Very few cards in Magic’s history have affected the game in the same way Oko has. So he gets to walk home with #9 #8 Garruk Wildspeaker You know what’s cool? Big green dudes. You know who’s a big green dude? Garruk. Garruk Wildspeaker specifically is a very underrated Planeswalker and good enough to go in your commander deck that has lands that tap for more than 1 mana. Got a Gaea’s Cradle? Now you got 2. #7 Sorin Markov Edgelords unite! Everyone’s favorite playboy vampire comes in at #7. His story with Nahiri and Ugin is very interesting and having a black mana character not be a villain, but also not really be a good guy, is a unique take on his character. In constructed formats most of the Sorin’s have gotten some play, and in the case of Sorin, Solemn Visitor he ran his standard alongside Gideon. #6 Ajani Goldmane Cat man? Cat man! Remember how Ajani was kinda everyone in the Gatewatch’s grumpy but loving dad? Well now he’s a murder robot and he stabbed a saucy old lady to death. The second of the original 5 planeswalkers from Lorwyn (and not the last) to make this list, Ajani is everything you want a walker to be. He’s themed well, he’s had big character growth. The only thing holding him this low on the list is that he hasn’t had a major constructed outing in 10+ years. Ajani Goldmane and Ajani Vengeant both saw lots of standard and extended play, but other than a brief stint with Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants, he hasn’t seen much constructed since. #5 Karn, Silver Golem How do Tron players count? 1, 2, 7. With a story that goes back to the earliest days of the Magic lore, The Silver Golem has had huge impacts in both the lore and various competitive formats. One of the few cards to have both a creature and walker he has had multiple Modern defining decks built around both Karn Liberated and Karn, the Great Creator. The robo-pacifist is also a major player in the current Phyrexian story and it’ll be interesting to see if he cuts loose on them a second time. #4 Liliana Vess I promise the rest of this list isn’t going to be The Lorwyn 5. Liliana Vess has been the premier black Planeswalker since walkers were a thing. As the most powerful necromancer in the multiverse, Liliana has had a huge impact on the story, from a cage match with Garruk (that she won) to a knock down, drag out fight with Emrakul (that she lost), she joined the Gatewatch just to get scammed by Nicol Bolas with the worst contract ever written into fiction. On top of the goth GF’s lore implications, she is also one of the most successful constructed Planewalkers, with Liliana of the Veil in the running for the best planeswalker card ever printed. #3 Nissa Revane Is it weird that Nissa made it but Chandra didn’t? Maybe. There aren’t a lot of 5+ mana walkers who are format defining, and even fewer tribal walkers. Nissa has been both of those things, with her Nissa Revane being a tribal walker and Nissa, Who Shakes the World being a definitive, format warping card. In the lore Nissa filled the role of the counterpoint to Garruk’s feral, strength centered, green viewpoint. She is the tranquil and slow to anger side of nature, that becomes an unstoppable force when provoked. #2 Teferi Akosa By raise of hands, who knew what Teferi’s last name was? Me neither. Teferi, like Karn, goes back to the very earliest days of the game’s lore. With Zhalfir and Jamuura both being settings for the first bits of story we got. The enigmatic time mage was always around but didn’t get his own card until Time Spiral in 2006. Being one of the driving forces in the story for darn near 30 years, Teferi has a lot of great moments. He also has a lot of format defining cards. From Teferi, Time Raveler ruining standard and being the only thing holding Rhinos at bay in modern, to Teferi, Hero of Dominaria …well ruining standard and being one of the few 5 mana cards to make a splash in Modern. Teferi has more than earned his spot in second place. Honorable Mentions For the honorable mentions section of these lists I wanted to get more perspectives from Sam and Davis. So here are their picks that weren’t already on the list. Sam: Gideon Jura makes it here as an honorable mention. This brawny mon-white soldier wasn’t just muscle, but the heart of Magic’s story for most of the Gatewatch arc, the glue that kept that disjointed band of misfits together. Whenever he’s had a card in standard, he’s always seen play, but has never really shined in eternal formats. This, coupled with the fact that his death has cut him out of the story, keeps Gideon just off the top 10. Davis: Daretti the trash-loving goblin pope who’s also half wheelchair. If that description didn’t make you want to know more then I can’t help with that. He definitely hasn’t done as much as the Gatewatch; in fact, he hasn’t done much of anything in the lore outside of Conspiracy. Magic’s got a number of planeswalkers that are far cooler than their current roster, and it’s a shame they don’t have more lore/cards for them yet. #1 Dack Fayden Ha! You thought number one was gonna be Jace! Well it’s not, it’s the Greatest Thief in the Multiverse! Dack has had… Ok but for real this time. #1 Jace Beleren Who else was it gonna be? Jace has been the face of Magic since Planeswalker cards first became a thing. Mr. blue accordion himself has not only had entire books and storylines dedicated to him, but was also the most expensive card in standard not once, not twice, not even three times; but four different cards defined how standard was played. In formats like commander, planeswalkers need to be good for exactly one activation since you’re probably not going to untap with it. There are multiple Jaces that are good enough for that single activation. There really isn’t another option for me for the top spot. Do you disagree? Leave us a comment to let us know who your favorite walker is! We hope you liked this new thing we are trying. If you did, leave us a like and a comment and hopefully we will have lots more content like this going forward. - Adam Godfrey
