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Let's talk about the five all-time best Magic sets for Commander!

When I first started playing Magic in early 1994, my gaming friends and I played multiplayer games, since that's just how we socialized: we played D&D and board games together, so multiplayer Magic just fit right into our dynamic. It wasn't until a few years later that I got into tournament Magic, but I've always enjoyed multiplayer Magic the most.

Once Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH) hit my radar - later renamed Commander - I was immediately hooked and have been playing and writing about it ever since.

So today I'm looking at the all the various Magic sets throughout its 32 year history to call out the top five sets specifically for Commander. I'll list them in chronological order just so that we can get a sense of history and how early sets shaped the environment that we first started playing EDH in, all the way to the current context of today's Commander.

A quick caveat: it could be argued that the very first Magic set, Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, should be at the top of the list. It set the rules of Magic and included so many of the basic building blocks of any game of Magic. That's any game of Magic, not Commander specifically, so I'm not going to include it in my list, but wouldn't be surprised if it was in your own list; I mean, it did introduce Sol Ring!

Let's begin our journey!

Legends (June, 1994)

Legends was released when Magic really started catching fire, and as such its supply was quite short to the demand of ravenous Magic fans. If you were lucky, you were able to grab a handful of packs from your local comic store, and the scarcity made what was quite an innovative set even more legendary.

What's wild to think about? Legends introduced multicolor - or "gold" - cards. Before Legends, all Magic cards were either a single color or colorless, so just imagine the visual impact of cracking a pack and seeing the gold border of a card for the first time!

All those multicolor cards were also legendary creatures (originally designated as "Summon Legend"), and this was yet another innovation from Legends. Many of the ideas used for legendary creatures came from the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns the set designers were involved in, so their names and artwork evoked the flavor of some famous - or infamous - character walking into your Magic deck.

But it was the Elder Dragon Legends that were next-level cool - they weren't just "Summon Legend" cards, they said "Summon Elder Dragon Legend." They were big, they had flying, they demanded a mana payment during each of your upkeeps, and they had various special abilities, with the villainous Nicol BolasNicol Bolas of course having the most fearsome ability of all!

This cycle of golden Elder Dragon Legends were so flavorful, they inspired a new player-created Magic format called Elder Dragon Highlander that set the rock solid foundation for EDH/Commander to become the most beloved way to play Magic in history.

The concept of building your entire deck around one legendary creature that you'd always have access to play was a brilliant idea that unleashed everyone's deckbuilding creativity. Without Legends' gold-bordered legendary creatures that grabbed your eye and stirred the imagination, I daresay we may not have ever had anything close to what Commander is today.

As a footnote, Legends also introduced an alternative way to defeat players with poison, found in just two cards. Over time poison got tons of support, and also ended up being a bit controversial for Commander since you can still lose from ten poison counters even though you start the game with twice as much life as normal.

Onslaught (October, 2002)

Onslaught is the first of the Onslaught block which also included Legions and Scourge. The Onslaught block leaned heavily into the theme of typal (creature type) cards, and I'd argue it laid the building blocks for many of the early EDH decks.

The block featured Beasts, Birds, Clerics, Elves, Goblins, Illusions, Soldiers, Wizards, and Zombies. Dragons had a small presence, but got more attention in Scourge.

Elves, Goblins, Soldiers, Wizards, and Zombies remain incredibly strong and popular typal Commander decks to this very day, thanks to the foundation created during Onslaught. Voidmage ProdigyVoidmage Prodigy was even designed by Pro Tour Hall of Famer, and arguably the best Magic player ever, Kai Budde!

Of course what might have been an even bigger impact on EDH/Commander - and Magic in general - was the printing of the allied-colored fetchlands.

These improved on the design of the Mirage fetchlands in a big way, and were instrumental in fixing the mana for our multicolor EDH/Commander decks before we had more options. Zendikar would later introduce the enemy-color fetchlands to round out the cycle.

Of course, these were hugely popular in competitive Magic formats too, and that demand, plus the relative scarcity, made them quite expensive,. Over time, Wizards of the Coast printed a lot of options that are much cheaper to acquire and, while less powerful, offered decent color fixing and a lot less shuffling.

But the advent of the "three-basic-lands-in-one" Triome cycle of lands from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, later completed in Streets of New Capenna, along with the powerful surveil lands from Murders at Karlov Manor, have made fetchlands even more indispensable to Commander players who wish to ensure perfect mana.

Notably, Onslaught also introduced the morph mechanic, which was quirky and fun and has slowly grown into a fan favorite and inspired riffs on the mechanic, such as megamorph, manifest, disguise, cloak, and manifest dread.

Interlude

I thought it important to note in this timeline that, in August, 2004 Sheldon Menery first wrote about EDH for Starcitygames.com in one of his Ask the Judge columns.

It percolated in the judge community for a while, and while I had heard about it early on - Sheldon and I used to see each other regularly at Virginia Magic events back in the day - I finally gave it a whirl in 2007 after Sheldon had written about it a few times more, and I began writing about it soon afterwards.

I still feel fortunate to have gotten involved in the format in its very early days!

Ravnica: City of Guilds (October, 2005)

The first expansion in the Ravnica block, followed by Guildpact and Dissension. The block was themed around multicolor cards and featured ten guilds, the names of which have become synonymous with each two-color combination.

Ravnica: City of Guilds introduced four of the guilds, along with a mechanic tied into the guild's theme:

• House Dimir - transmute
• Selesnya Conclave - convoke
• Golgari Swarm - dredge
• Boros Legion - radiance

Along with the guilds, the block introduced the powerful shocklands that were very close in power to the original dual lands, like BayouBayou, that had grown incredibly expensive over time due to being on the Reserved List, never to be reprinted. The "ShockShock" damage drawback was hardly a concern for EDH/Commander players that started the game at 40 life!

The block also gave us a cycle of bounce lands that were upgrades to the original cycle from Visions (see Coral AtollCoral Atoll). In the early days of EDH, the color-fixing and virtual card advantage of these lands really made our decks work. I still play them in my two-color decks, or decks that otherwise often play multiple lands in a turn (such as my Kynaios and Tiro of MeletisKynaios and Tiro of Meletis deck).

The flavor of the guilds, along with the various legendary creature that supported the themes, were just as important as the typal themes from Onslaught block to pique growing interest in EDH deckbuilding. It set the tone for other cycles of color combinations - from Shards of Alara to Strixhaven: School of Mages - that continue to inspire us to this day.

This set also introduced the hybrid mana mechanic, which has been somewhat controversial amongst Commander players over the years since all colors of the hybrid mana symbols in these cards must fall within the color identity of your commander.

Commander 2011 (June, 2011)

As EDH grew and grew in popularity, and gained more and more fans within the halls of Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company decided to make a product specifically for EDH fans. There was one obstacle: the acronym for the format stood for "Elder Dragon Highlander" with "Highlander" referencing the popular Highlander movie franchise's catchphrase "there can be only one" to describe the singleton nature of the format.

The solution? Change the name from EDH to Commander, and the leader of your deck was renamed from your general to your commander. Fourteen years later though, people still call the format EDH!

Problem solved, WotC released five wedge-colored preconstructed decks that were intended to be a one-shot product:

• Heavenly Inferno (Mardu)
• Mirror Mastery (Temur)
• Counterpunch (Abzan)
• Political Puppets (Jeskai)
• Devour for Power (Sultai)

In addition to a lot of cool reprints, the set introduced 51 new cards, legal in all eternal formats, designed specifically for Commander - which was a shockingly cool development for EDH fans!

Most importantly, each deck contained a Sol RingSol Ring and Command TowerCommand Tower.

The powerful Sol RingSol Ring had become a bit of a signature card since the early days of EDH, helping to power out the expensive legendary creatures of the day, as well as paying the tax for casting your deck's leader multiple times. But it hadn't been printed since Revised, and was way too powerful to be printed in any expansion set - it would have hit Standard like a mana hurricane!

If this product was going to get even more players excited about Commander without including Sol RingSol Ring, it would have jacked up the price of Sol RingSol Ring immensely and made the "signature" card more difficult to acquire for Commander fans.

Over the years there have been some who feel that Sol RingSol Ring should be banned from the format for being too strong, but it's become so iconic to Commander it's hard to imagine putting that toothpaste back in the tube.

And then there was the incredibly powerful color-fixing of Command TowerCommand Tower, giving any multicolor deck a land that was arguably more powerful than the original dual lands, but it only functioned for the Commander format.

Each deck retailed for $29.95, making it extremely easy for players to jump into the format. And jump in players did, with Commander exploding in popularity to the point that WotC delivered another set of Commander decks two years later, and then made it a yearly offering through 2020 before shifting towards tying Commander precon releases to Magic expansion sets multiple times a year.

Throne of Eldraine (October, 2019)

Inspired by the romantic Arthurian legend of Camelot and Grimms' Fairy Tales, Throne of Eldraine was filled with flavorful legendary creatures and monsters out of myth to inspire Commander fans everywhere.

But more important than the base set were the set of five decks released concurrently that were meant to support a new Commander variant format called Brawl that played very similar to Commander, but only used Standard-legal sets.

Since these commanders and their decks were designed for Brawl, they were balanced by the Standard cards at the time, but Chulane and Korvold in particular proved to be obscenely powerful as commanders for the larger Commander card pool.

Arcane SignetArcane Signet was printed in each of the decks to help offset the limited color-fixing available in the Standard mana bases at the time, and it became an instant must-play card for non-green multicolor Commander decks everywhere. Thankfully, even though WotC designers now view it as a mistake, the card began showing up regularly in Commander precon decks after that and brought the cost down to reasonable levels.

Tome of LegendsTome of Legends was another card tied directly to your commander, offering cheap and effective card draw for any color Commander decks that might be short on that, especially ones that are more aggressive.

Throne of Eldraine also introduced Adventure cards, which were cool two-in-one cards that played with exile in a flavorful and fun way. This inspired later cards with the foretell and plot mechanics.

It's also notable that the set introduced Food tokens, which turned out to be a fan favorite and has popped up in a lot of Magic sets since then.

Honorable Mentions

In closing, I'd like to mention a few other sets that were in consideration for this list, but in the end just missed out on the cut.

• Tempest (October 1997)
• Mirrodin (October 2003)
• Modern Horizons 1 & 2 (June, 2019; June, 2021)

Which sets would you have in your own Top 5 list? What set drew you into playing EDH or Commander?

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