5 Spookiest Commanders to Brew This Halloween

It’s Halloween week and that means it’s time for a Halloween-themed article. Magic has no shortage of super spooky Magic cards. There’s even a card that directly references the holiday itself, in the form of All Hallow’s Eve.

While there aren’t any other cards that directly reference the holiday, there are tons of cards that have Halloween vibes. In this article, I’m going to give you my picks for the 5 spookiest Commanders in Magic, and discuss how best to build a deck around each of them.

THE JOLLY BALLOON MAN

Watching horror movies is a Halloween tradition in many households, and Duskmourn: House of Horrors is loaded up with references to modern horror tropes, but The Jolly Balloon Man is the one that stands out the most for me. Murderous clowns are always scary, and this one seems to most directly reference Pennywise in It, given his love of balloons.

This scary clown also makes for a fairly interesting commander, as his ability to generate temporary 1/1 flying token copies of your other creatures has a lot of different applications. On the surface, you can use him to rebuy powerful triggers that you can get when a creature enters, attacks, or dies. For example, copying your Solemn Simulacrum every turn is pretty sweet!

It’s also not that hard to combo off with The Jolly Balloon Man, as if you combine it with something like Village Bell-Ringer or Zealous Conscripts, you can make as many tokens as you have mana, since you can keep untapping The Jolly Balloon Man with their enters abilities. You can even go infinite with the Bell-Ringer, provided you have a creature in play that can tap for mana.

UMBRIS, FEAR MANIFEST

Magic has lots of spooky creature types, and many of them are based on real-world folklore and fiction, like Zombies and Vampires. But Nightmare and Horror might just be the game’s most terrifying creature types. This is because creatures with these types are often the things we are the most viscerally afraid of, but given physical form. 

Umbris is both a nightmare and a horror, and it represents fear itself. It also happens to be a powerful payoff for both creature types. Umbris is all about exiling big chunks of your library, and it gets larger and larger the more cards you exile. Flavorfully, it sort of represents a feeling of creeping dread that gradually becomes abject fear.

If you’re using Umbris as your commander, you’re going to want to include lots of Nightmares and Horrors, as well as other mill effects so that you can effectively eliminate your opponent’s entire deck. The best fits for such a deck are creatures that have the right time and can mill the opponent out, like The Mindskinner and Nemesis of Reason.

GRETA, SWEETTOOTH SCOURGE

Trick or treating is one of the hallmarks of Halloween. It’s all about going door-to-door and asking people to give you sweets. However, should you go trick or treating this Halloween, I’d steer clear of Sweettooth. It’s a village on Eldraine where the sweets have a mind (and teeth) of their own.

Greta, based on Gretel from “Hansel and Gretel,” lost her brother to this spooky village and now she’s out for blood. Or well….sugar, I guess. Basically, when Greta goes trick or treating, she’s going to kill all of her candy.

Greta is a great Food commander because she can cash them in for great value in two different ways. Giving up Food to draw a card is usually the more powerful option, but sometimes you really need to buff your board. She also happens to give you Food to work with up front.

Combine Greta with other powerful food generators like Tireless Provisioner, and payoffs like Gyome, Master Chef, and you can have a very powerful deck.

GISA, THE HELLRAISER

Greta has us covered when it comes to the “Treat” part of “Trick or Treat,” and Gisa has us covered when it comes to “Trick.” One of the less wholesome ways to celebrate Halloween is to commit minor crimes of vandalism. This can include smashing pumpkins, toilet papering someone’s house, or throwing eggs.

Gisa encourages us all to commit those crimes and she does it in the spookiest way possible – by giving you two Zombie tokens every time you commit one of them. If that’s not quite Halloweeny enough for you, she’s also a Zombie and Skeleton lord.

Gisa can thrive in any deck packing lots of creatures with those types, but it’s her crime trigger that really makes her incredibly strong. Two Zombie tokens, even entering tapped, is a huge addition to the board. Especially when she’ll make them into 3/3s. 

A good Gisa deck aims to trigger that ability every turn, and quickly raise a Zombie army. Ideally, you want zombies that have repeatable ways to commit crimes, so that you have a critical mass of synergy.

For example, Cemetery Reaper is a Zombie lord that can commit crimes by targeting cards in graveyards, and Zombie Trailblazer can tap Zombies to commit crimes.

REAPER KING

Reaper King is my pick for the Halloweeniest legendary creature in all of Magic. There’s just so much spooky stuff going on here! Let’s ignore what he has going on mechanically for a second and just focus on that art. 

This dude is a huge scarecrow. Scarecrows are often associated with autumn and Halloween. He also has a freaking pumpkin for a head and a very gangly body. I also think he bears more than a passing resemblance to Jack Skellington from Nightmare Before Christmas. And Jack is, of course, the king of Halloween.

Reaper King, meanwhile, is the king of scarecrows. And the plane of Shadowmoor has a whole lot of them. In addition to being really fun flavorfully, Reaper King is also incredibly powerful, not only buffing all of your scarecrows, but also stapling Vindicate onto all of them. Destroying any permanent is very strong, and Reaper King can do it multiple times per game with ease.

Obviously enough, Reaper King is at his best in a Scarecrow typal deck. For a long time scarecrows were pretty sparse and you really had to play some bad ones to play a Reaper King commander deck, but there have been some really strong ones printed recently – including in Duskmourn: House of Horror.

The Swarmweaver and Wickerfolk Thresher are just a couple examples of the great upgrades Reaper King decks have recently received. In addition to just jamming your deck full of Scarecrows, you can really go off with blink effects. This is because Reaper King’s permanent destruction effect triggers any time a scarecrow enters.

So, constantly blinking your scarecrows every turn with Conjurer’s Closet or Teleportation Circle is really likely to allow you to take over the game.

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Those are some of the spookiest commanders in Magic. If you want some more spooky Magic content, I have a playlist filled with Halloween-themed MTG Top 10s over on my YouTube channel.

Happy Halloween!