Card draw and extra turn spells are going to be very powerful options to put on your attractions. Out of the Unfinity commanders that care about dice, The Space Family Goblinson is your best option. You’ll want to include a bunch of Forgotten Realms and Baldur’s Gate cards with dice rolls, and having an Unfinity attraction would allow you to buff your commander each turn. Captain Rex Nebula isn’t tied to any specific Unfinity mechanic, giving you more flexibility when it comes to deckbuilding.

Counterspells can switch between offensive and defensive depending on your situation, making them a unique and powerful option for interacting with your opponents. For multicolor decks, it’s hard to beat the original dual lands like Taiga or Tundra. They always come in untapped and they’re fetchable so they’re very efficient. The Construct you can make with it can be very powerful in artifact decks or it just gives you the option to make a body if you don’t have an early creature to play.

Magic: The Gathering Foundations

Taken to the extreme, strategies like “Draw Go” or MLD, which aim to restrict opponents’ ability to act at all, aren’t forbidden in Commander, but they aren’t very popular. Most people don’t find them fun to play against, and one of the tenets of Commander is the shared play experience. If your deck isn’t fun to play against, people won’t want to play against it and you can’t force someone to play Commander with you. It also violates the exactly-100-cards premise of Commander, and encourages players to run narrow, powerful answers to popular strategies that might not be worth running in the main deck. Pauper Commander is your chance to play Magic without the ultra-powerful cards that come at mythic and rare. You can take that build-around uncommon and make it your commander, since nonlegendary uncommons are allowed in your command zone.

Commander damage

In Legacy for example, if a Red deck becomes overpowering, opponents can always add Blue Elemental Blast to their sideboard. A superfriends deck can conceivably remove the Sun and keep pumping. If the superfriends deck is overpowered, then the Sun would still help, but it would not be a decisive sideboard card. Communicate what you enjoy about Commander, what you’re hoping (or not) to see in that game (such as specific cards, length of games, or general strategies), then change plans a bit if necessary. Sometimes that’s pulling a few cards, sometimes swapping a deck, sometimes changing tables or deciding not to play.

Every once in a while things will be removed from the list to allow a deck some specific win condition. When this happens there’s usually an implicit (or explicit) promise from the person playing the banned card that they won’t abuse it in a way that makes it unfun for everyone else. Some groups ban both “accidental” and by-design infinite combo decks. Sit with the other players and discuss what can and can’t be played and make sure everyone has as much fun as possible.

Luckily, there are some lands that always seem to pop up in Commander, and for good reason. These lands are either just good in general, or particularly good in the format. For example, the Bond lands like Training Center are infinitely better in a multiplayer format since they’re otherwise just tap lands. As a celebration of the release of Unstable, silver-bordered cards were made legal From December 1, 2017, until January 15, 2018, by MTGCommander.net. A player that has been dealt 21 or more combat damage by the same commander throughout the game loses the game. Do you think any of the commanders with an acorn symbol shouldn’t have it?

Can I Lose to Commander Damage From My Own Commander?

If your Commander over the course of the game is able to deal 21 damage, it’ll knock your opponent out of the game. This allows for fairer matches between low-attack commanders and stronger commanders. After all, getting hit for commander damage by something like Quintorius, Field Historian is very different than getting hit by The Ur-Dragon.

There’s still lots of complexity and power at play, it leans less on individual card quality, and more on card synergies. Eldrazi Unbound is colorless and headed by Zhulodok, Void Gorger with a strong emphasis on the cascade keyword ability. After six mana to cast your commander, you’ll get great card advantage as long as you use the mana rocks to accelerate to the 7+ costing cards. It’s important to keep a mix of mana values in this deck so you can reap huge value when your eldrazi-sized spells result in two more strong spells. Tricky Terrain is a Simic () land ramp deck, and if you haven’t tried one of these decks in Commander, a typical card searches a land from your library and has a downside of drawing a card. This is the MH3 deck that gives you access to the best counter spells, the biggest creatures and some of the best win you the game cards.

Let me know in the comments below or over on the Draftsim Twitter. I love flavor text, and I love mechanics that get players to pay attention to the little details on Magic cards. But Hardy of Myra’s Marvels seems like far more trouble than it’s worth when it comes to deckbuilding. Fluros of Myra’s Marvels is way too specific to be consistently good. Even if you manage to build a deck around a single number, it’s going to be hard to also have it payoff well.

While what laying out your mana curve is a great starting point, I suggest one more thing before starting to play. The term I’m going to use is “turn mapping” where we lay things out not strictly by mana value, but by what turn we expect to play that card. Chatterfang’s mana value is three, so most of the time (there are always edge cases) he will be your turn three play, assuming you’re making your land drops every turn. Including a hate card or two, especially if you play against the same strategy a lot, might be worth running in your list.

A few varieties and flavors of Commander have popped up since it began. These variants include formats such as Canadian Highlander, Oathbreaker, and Tiny Leaders. Each of these spinoff formats bring a refreshing ruleset that still resembles the official EDH we know and love. We’ve also got a tier list of the best commanders, the most fun commanders, and a guide on how many lands you need to build a good deck. Brian played Magic intermittently between 2003 and 2017 when he fully embraced his love for Commander. Finding ways to maximize the value of each piece of cardboard in the deck is one of his favorite things to explore, especially if it involves putting lands in the graveyard!

As such, we’re letting you know that we’ve updated our Privacy Policy to reflect the new rule set forth by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Everything good about Mana Confluence and City of Brass is the same about Command Tower, with the added benefit that it doesn’t cost you anything. Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Commander Nights is a WPN-organized weekly Commander league with rotating rules and achievement-based prizes. Helm of the Host suddenly gives you more real copies of the same creature that you can resurrect with Claire D’Loon.

So if a card deals 20 damage, but then adds an additional 1 damage thanks to an ability after the fact, this doesn’t count. If it has an ability that causes other players to lose life or other damage that isn’t combat damage, this doesn’t count either. This also counts mana symbols that might be a different color than the casting cost but are used in abilities. If you have a card that costs only white mana mtg combo but has a red costing ability, you can include red in your deck. The force behind any and all Commander rules is the Commander Rules Committee. This is a group of players and fans of the format, most of them part of the group that created, nurtured, and popularized the format way back when it first started.