Commander players have campaigned for years for white to get better card draw and support. That goal has been achieved, and now we’d argue that it’s blue that falls short of the current Commander metagame. Is blue only “good” at high power tables? Probably, yeah. So let’s discuss why.
WHAT IS BLUE GOOD AT IN COMMANDER
When you think about what Blue is good at in Commander, you inevitably think of card draw. Blue is capable of drawing cards the most efficiently of any color, and can easily draw reams and reams, if not the whole deck.
Blue can clone what everyone else is doing, meaning it can try to punch up at any table. If they have a good engine piece, boom, you have a good engine piece. Clones can sometimes be cheaper to cast than the original game piece they’re copying, and they often come with significant upside.
Blue is also good at doing things with artifacts. It can tap and untap them, it can draw cards, it can get effects it likes cheaply. You can build an artifact theme, and generally have a good time, even without dipping into black, red, or white.
Blue is great with high-stakes interaction, like counterspells and other forms of disruption. It has some cemented color pie breaks that give it good removal. It even has free counterspells for when you’re in a stack battle in high power and cEDH gameplay.
The thing is, what blue is good at here hasn’t held up, and in some ways, these strengths have become glaring weaknesses in blue’s overall adaptability and utility.
BLUE’S STRENGTHS AREN’T WHAT THEY WERE
First up, let’s look at card draw. While blue has long been associated with card draw – and still has some of the strongest engines, like Rhystic Study, Consecrated Sphinx and the like – the change to how Commander is played has resulted in other colors getting increasingly consistent access to draw and card advantage.
Black has always been good at drawing cards by paying life, and has more tools than ever to do this. Some might argue green is better than blue at drawing cards nowadays, not least because of cards like The Great Henge and all of the card advantage and other bonuses gained from just playing lands and hitting landfall. What about red and white, the historically weaker colors for card draw?
Well, red has really leaned into the impulse draw technology, and can exile multiple cards until end of turn, until end of next turn, or until certain conditions are met. Red is so good at this now that you can arguably see more cards in a red exile-draw based deck than in some lower power blue decks.
And what of white? White has long been the most maligned when it comes to card draw. Well, not anymore. White can draw off of tokens, it can draw off of multiple creatures entering, it can draw off of mana value three or less, or off of lower powers entering play. Honestly? A well-constructed white deck can draw cards extremely efficiently, and though it’s not as broken as landfall draw a card, it does allow you to draw off of game actions you were already going to take, which is the most powerful kind of draw.
If these decks are drawing off of going wide, or burning you out by casting spells from exile, then they’re progressing their game state while keeping their hand topped up. The same can’t be said for blue – a Faerie Mastermind doesn’t grow bigger like Black Widow, does it?
Blue is the color of Clone effects, and while previously Clones have been an extremely flexible and resilient approach to mid-tier games of Commander, they’ve dropped off significantly. Players play fewer generalist haymakers, and Commanders – the most reliable Clone target – are geared aggressively around an all-in strategy that is hard to trigger and gain value off with one Clone. Further, the kind of synergistic, eggs-in-multiple-baskets approach to deckbuilding now means that cloning just one of your opponents creatures rarely achieves anything – those permanents work in tandem, after all.
And as for counterspells? Well, they’re card disadvantage. You’re trading one card for an opponent’s one card and then leaves you both down a card compared to the other players at the table. That’s also assuming you’re not playing the kind of counter that gives an opponent a resource; An Offer You Can’t Refuse is great in cEDH and high-powered games but becomes less of a good deal the more casual you get.
True tempo-generating counters like Mana Drain exist at a reasonable casting cost, and most of the free counterspells are less efficient and generate less of a tempo gain than red’s redirect effects. Deflecting Swat and Untimely Malfunction are usually better than running counterspells because they not only save your thing but make sure that interaction chips away elsewhere.
CASUAL COMMANDER IS ESSENTIALLY A MIDRANGE FORMAT
When you look at blue in the context of other colors in casual Commander, it struggles to perform the flavor of midrange that the format demands. Blue is strong in 1v1 in ways that don’t scale up to multiplayer Magic. Landing one evasive threat and drowning the opponent in card advantage doesn’t quite cut it in Commander – unless of course that is a Voltron threat, and you’re drawing cards for playing auras and equipment… at which point you’re not in mono blue.
What blue is currently good at in Commander is essentially “being annoying”. They can disrupt well, but often by using mass bounce, which adds to the game clock. Outside of a Cyclonic Rift or similar, they invariably don’t get ahead. What makes matters worse is that most decks nowadays draw cards from making plays, meaning bouncing everyone just gives them a chance to replay their hand and draw even more cards.
Blue is also good at mill, and mill is its best wincon outside of combo. Mono blue mill is a pretty narrow archetype, and though it has had some fresh licks of paint (looking at you, Mindskinner), it invariably puts everyone on high alert, and, well, annoys the table.
The best blue Commanders for the midrange hell of Bracket 2 and 3 that aren’t mill or combo tend to be “doing cool stuff with artifacts in a less ostensibly busted way than Urza, Lord High Artificer”, or they’re Minn, Wily Illusionist. Minn is probably the most midrange blue Commander out there, and she’s an engine baked into a win condition, which is telling. When you look at the rest of the top blue Commanders, the likes of Talrand and Baral just make for miserable gameplay (on average), and if they’re not doing artifacts or drawing you cards, there’s precious little design space explored otherwise.
One other thing worth covering here is something that came up when chatting with my friend Jack. Blue doesn’t really have great alternatives to its Game Changer cards. Part of blue’s reputation for being so good at draw and control is because of the above three cards. When you take them away, the next best alternatives fall a lot shorter than the ones in other colors. If you don’t play Smothering Tithe, you still have Smuggler’s Share, Gleaming Splendor, and Tataru Taru. You have other ways to make mana like Sword of the Animist available for equipment decks, and white can also reanimate lands from the yard with ease. There’s nothing that really comes close to a Fierce Guardianship or Force of Will, except… Deflecting Swat, which isn’t on the Game Changer list, and is red.
HOW CAN YOU FIX BLUE?
I guess that leads us on to how blue can be “fixed”. Blue can absolutely be a support color in this environment – indeed, this is where it performs best, even in cEDH – but it lacks the ability to produce varied and adaptable gameplay that plays to the color’s strengths when it’s going it alone. Other colors have seen adjustments to give them more tools, but what can blue get?
Well, we’re seeing some more exploration into giving blue more landfall. This is so far mostly on higher mana cards, and annoyingly still brings those lands in tapped half of the time, but more of this could be sweet.
Making counterspells and bounce spells as valuable as red redirects would go a long way to helping blue feel like it has unique tools. Imagine a mashup of Fractured Identity and Reflector Mage – bouncing a permanent and making a token copy with Vanishing counters. Make it so that they can’t recast whatever you bounced or Remanded, for as long as the token stays in play.
Basically, give blue some ways to interact that aren’t just going down a card. Giving blue more competitively costed ways to generate mana like Mana Drain would help it to keep up with ramping in other colors.
Above all, though, you need to give blue some more design space, or all of the new mono-blue Commanders will just end up being too similar.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.