Over the last few years, Wizards of the Coast has made sure to give support to lots of creature types that didn’t have it before. Just in the latest release – Final Fantasy – Scouts and Mutants received much-needed Commanders with Jenova and Vaan respectively.
However, even with all the new Commanders, there are still some creature types that have been neglected. In this article, I’m going to take a look at the five creature types that I think are most in need of a Commander.
While you can always choose Morophon to be the general of these decks, I’m looking for Commanders that actually have something to do with each of these creature types and their mechanical identities.
SPECTERS
In Magic, Specters are undead creatures who ride terrifying flying mounts and have the ability to erase memories with their touch. This ability to get rid of memories is reflected by the fact that most Specters can make your opponent discard cards.
Of all the creature types on this list, this is the one that I’m most surprised doesn’t have an adequate commander. Specter has been around since Limited Edition Alpha and it is one of Magic’s most iconic creature types, in large part thanks to Hypnotic Specter, a powerhouse during the game’s earliest days.
Furthermore, Specters actually have a fairly cohesive mechanical identity that would make it pretty easy to design a Commander that would make all of them better. After all, virtually all 27 Specters have flying and make the opponent discard cards in one way or another.
Right now the best we have is Urgoros, the Empty One. The game’s only legendary Specter. While he does the usual Specter stuff, he doesn’t come with an ability that makes your other Specters any better and he’s also mono-colored, which leaves several Specters out.
Specters have only been printed in the Grixis colors, so giving us a legendary Specter with that identity would allow players to jam their decks full of them. It could simply be a Specter lord that also comes with an ability that pays you off for making your opponent discard, and I think we’d all be pretty happy.
TROLLS
In Magic, Trolls are incredibly resilient and often angry beast-like people that dwell in nature. Their resilience is often expressed in Magic cards by abilities that make them difficult to target or destroy, or allow them to come back from the graveyard. Some of them regenerate, others have hexproof, and others still are indestructible.
So, like Specters, Trolls have a well-established mechanical identity. However, it would admittedly be much more difficult to design around than Specters, since the resilience of Trolls is expressed in so many different ways. But it would be great even if we could just get a super-resilient legendary Troll that buffs your other Trolls.
While there are several legendary Trolls available, none of them do anything special with other Trolls. If you really want to build a Troll deck in Commander that focuses on taking advantage of their resilience, the best you can do is Varolz, the Scar-Striped. His Golgari identity gives you access to most Trolls, and he can also regenerate, and turn your fallen Trolls into +1/+1 counters.
KOR
Unlike the other creature types on this list, which are rooted in real-world folklore, and have thus appeared in lots of fantasy media, the Kor are unique to Magic. They are a human-like people with very white skin whose primary residence in the multiverse is Zendikar, although they have also appeared in Dominaria. Nahiri, an important figure in the Magic story and a former planeswalker, is the most well-known Kor in the game.
Of all the creature types in this article, the Kor are the most plentiful. There are 86 of them, as well as 9 non-Kor cards that make Kor creature tokens. As a result, the Kor aren’t quite as unified in their mechanical theme as Specters or Trolls. However, most Kor are very interested in Equipment.
In fact, the one Kor payoff in the game – Armament Master – gives +2/+2 to your Kor creatures for each Equipment attached to him. It’s a shame he isn’t legendary though.
The good news is there are Equipment-oriented legendary Kor out there, like Nahiri, Forged in Fury and Akiri, Fearless Voyager. But none of them offer you any special payoff for playing other Kor creatures.
SHADES
Shade is a predominately black creature type. In the lore, they are undead ephemeral beings of darkness somewhat akin to spirits. This is another creature type with a clear mechanical identity, as their association with darkness often results in them costing multiple black mana to cast and also having the ability to use Black mana to raise their stats.
This means that a mono-black legendary shade that does something with Devotion to Black or multiplying Black mana would be especially useful for these spooky creatures. If Nirkana Revenant were legendary, it would be the perfect Shade Commander. It doubles your black mana produced by swamps while also possessing the usual Shade ability to raise its stats.
Of all the creature types in this article, the need for a Shade commander is perhaps the most desperate. At least the other creature types have powerful legendary creatures with their type, so you can sort of make a Commander deck around them. That’s not really the case for Shades.
This is because the best you can do on that front is Ihsan’s Shade, as he’s the only legendary shade in the game. And as a legend originally printed in the famously-underpowered Homelands, he’s not exactly powerful or interesting by today’s standards.
DRYADS
Dryad is a predominantly green creature type. In the lore, they are the spiritual bodies of trees. In other words, they are to green what Shades are to black. Mechanically, this results in Dryads often having something to do with lands or mana.
There are actually 8 legendary Dryads in Magic, so you do have several potential picks for a Dryad Commander. There are two that can work decently as commanders for Dryad decks since they at least vaguely have something to do with the Dryads’ love of mana and lands.
Zimone and Dina let you give up creatures to draw cards and put lands into play, while also draining the opponent’s life. However, their Sultai identity also excludes several dryads with White in their identity.
Chorus of the Conclave has a better identity to maximize the number of Dryads you can play, and it has an effect that lets you sink as much mana as you want to into your creatures, allowing them to enter with additional +1/+1 counters on them. However, at 8 mana, the Chorus is far from ideal as your Commander.
So, even with a fairly large number of legendaries, right now there isn’t a Dryad Commander who does a great job of focusing on the creature type’s love of lands and mana.
END STEP
Those are five creature types that are desperately in need of a Commander. The good news is, I’m sure we’ll get some significant support for at least a few of these in the coming years, as right now they seem to be doing their best to give us Commanders for every significant creature type in the game.
What do you think? Did I leave out any creature types that you really wish had a Commander? If I did, let me know on X or Bluesky.
Jacob has been playing Magic for the better part of 24 years, and he especially loves playing Magic’s Limited formats. He also holds a PhD in history from the University of Oklahoma. In 2015, he started his YouTube channel, “Nizzahon Magic,” where he combines his interests with many videos covering Magic’s competitive history. When he’s not playing Magic or making Magic content, he can be found teaching college-level history courses or caring for a menagerie of pets with his wife.