Five Commanders I Never Want to Play Against Again

While Game Changer cards help us avoid salty cards in the 99, there isn’t a list so much a “salt” list of Commanders. Thankfully you can always see a Commander coming, and veto it if you’re not in the mood – or change up your own deck to better suit the table. Here are five Commanders I’d rather not play against again. 

Just to be clear, this is very much a tongue-in-cheek kind of article – I’ll play against anything once, and generally speaking there isn’t really that much that annoys me about a particular Commander. As you’ll find out, it’s much more about the dynamic shift that occurs in gameplay in the pod.

FIVE COMMANDERS I’D RATHER NOT PLAY AGAINST

5. MS. BUMBLEFLOWER

Ms. Bumbleflower is the epitome of what makes group hug so insufferable. The message is that they deck is “just here to have fun”, but in practice, it’s the most insidious way to slide under the radar that exists short of straight out lying about your deck. People at the table know that you’re up to no good, but between the fact the Bumbleflower player is often salty at people pointing it out and the fact that some players aren’t wise to group hug’s propensity for machinations, it’s often a real struggle to get the table to stop accepting party favors and start picking the right fights. 

What makes this Rabbit ever more frustrating to play against is the fact that it starts out as a fantastic blocker, able to impede incoming pressure from a player who is wise to the group hug player’s game. It can also make blockers larger – including itself, which gives a route for a Commander damage alt-win con. It also jumps creatures, which means you don’t even have to choose evasive creatures in your decklist – Bumbleflower makes anything good fly. On top of it all, you’re also drawing cards. 

It isn’t so much Bumbleflower that’s the issue here, it’s group hug’s dynamic shift in Commander. It turns a game into a potential non-game, and is the quickest way to find out of the players at the table have different intentions on what they want to get out of a game. Ultimately, when the group-hug deck wins, it won’t be a celebrated victory – it’ll just end up with players salty at other folks who wouldn’t listen to them about the upcoming problem, or salty at folks who threw caution to the wind and abandoned all pretense of a game where players try to curve out and compete to win. 

4. SISAY, WEATHERLIGHT CAPTAIN

I used to have a Sisay deck, and it was sweet. It jammed a bunch of powerful Legends, including infamous mana dorks Selvala, Heart of the Wilds and Jegantha. It also tutored the exact same stuff to win every game, and rarely needed the “toolbox” of other legends, as their roles could be better served as interaction in hand. 

Therein lies the reason why I don’t care to play against Sisay again outside of cEDH. It’s one of the most linear decks in the format, and by and large, every Sisay deck looks roughly the same. Unless you’re bringing “Heroes of Dominaria” to the table with your themed deck in B2, I genuinely would rather see literally anything else in your collection that might be more interesting to play against. 

3. DEREVI, EMPYRIAL TACTICIAN

Threat memory is a hell of a thing, and some fears die hard. Like many folks who started playing Commander in the 2010s, Derevi has scarred me for life. Derevi decks back in the day were degenerate things that locked down the table and proved resilient to most interaction. Given over a decade of new more powerful cards, they’ve only gotten more degenerate and more ready to mess you about. 

Has the rising tide raised all ships, and given us more speed to pressure a Derevi deck that isn’t on combo? Probably. Are Derevi decks now more likely to run a plethora of combos and free interaction to protect them, because they know that we know what’s up? Absolutely.

Again, just like Sisay, unless we’re in cEDH, I just don’t care to see this one across the table.

2. KOMA, COSMOS SERPENT

“It’s a sea creature typal deck”, says the Koma player, who proceeds to rip Force of Will, Force of Negation and Mana Drain off the top via Rhystic Study as you try and fail to stop Ragnarok from happening on the kitchen table. 

Koma is a hell of a lot of value for seven mana, and it doesn’t take Simic decks two seconds to get that many lands into play. Once you’re set up with your uncounterable Serpent, you have a way to dodge board wipes by making Koma indestructible. You also have a way to tap down the most aggro creatures at the table – or if someone has a good mana rock or dork, tap it down during their upkeep or draw step. Hell, you can deactivate a combo piece this way too if they haven’t yet deployed all of the parts they need to combo. 

Koma is above all the kind of archenemy Commander that warrants pointing all available fire power at it to keep it down. I’d genuinely rather play against Toxrill at this point because you get more windows to pick it apart. Simic just outvalues Dimir on every possible metric. 

1. CHILD OF ALARA

A bit of a “gimme” for the #1 spot, sure, but I definitely don’t want to play against a Child of Alara deck ever again. Grinding out a game by making the table suffer is a strategy reserved for the most unfeeling of pubstompers, and it doesn’t mean you’re good at deckbuilding if your only goal is to cycle through the baby until people give in.

There are plenty of Commander that have a “wrath” in the ‘zone, but when you look at the likes of Massacre Girl or Themberchaud, there’s no comparison. These are focused decks, and they can set up to win through control by either shredding life totals with pings as stuff dies, or burning people down via damage amplifiers. They have an end point. What’s more, Child of Alara is five color, which means it’ll be stuffed full of the best spells possible to enable the strategy, rather than restricted to only what’s available in limited colors. Five color decks are obnoxious at the best of times, but especially so when they’re playing control. 

While Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Niv-Mizzet Reborn can be equally obnoxious control decks to face off against, they at least draw cards, and that puts them closer to ending the game. There’s also a modicum of deckbuilding intent with the way their draw triggers work. Child of Alara is just “blow it all up”, which isn’t fun for anyone.

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These are five Commanders I’d rather not play against again unless there’s a compelling reason to do so. Thankfully, unlike what you might hear on the internet, most Commander players are amiable and reasonable folks, and having a little pre-game chat about what you’re in the mood for can usually help avoid situations where folks feel at the mercy of unfun strategies. Sometimes that means vetoing a deck, but sometimes you gotta compromise and bring something that can handle it if that’s what’s across the table.

What Commanders make you the most salty? Which ones would you rather not see across the table? Let us know on socials.