To say that Blue is a hated color would possibly be an understatement. When it comes to Magic The Gathering, Blue is known as the color of interaction, the color that stops other people from playing the game, but a vast majority of the best blue Commander cards actually don’t do that at all. We’ve got the rundown of the ten best blue Commanders, and some on the list may surprise you (and a few won’t surprise you in the slightest).
The Reality Chip
The Reality Chip is a pretty great card, but what makes it one of the best blue Commanders is how funny the typing is. It’s a Legendary Artifact Creature - Equipment Jellyfish, what’s not to love here?
As a card, The Reality Chip is a fun way to be able to cast cards from the top of your library. It allows you to look at the top card of your library at any given time, and for three mana you’re able to attach it to a creature as an equipment. While it’s equipped, you can play lands and cast spells from the top of your library. Combine that with ways to stack your library and it’s a super powerful ability to have.
Orvar, The All-Form
Orvar, The All-Form is an interesting card. It’s a changeling, meaning it can slot in a great number of decks, and it all relies on instant and sorcery spells. Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell that targets one or more permanents you control, you get to create a token that’s a copy of one of those permanents. That can do a great deal of things - it can allow you to really ramp up your mana production, it can make your board absolutely massive, or it can help win you the game (one of the more interesting combinations is using Luck Bobblehead from the Fallout set to win the game by copying it several times).
The second ability of the card won’t come up often, though - it creates a copy of a target permanent when an opponent causes you to discard Orvar, but if it’s being played as your Commander that shouldn’t really ever happen.
Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus
Tekuthal, Inquiry Dominus is a really fun card. It allows the controller to proliferate twice instead of once if they would proliferate, meaning that there’s a whole host of fun things you can do here. You can manipulate +1/+1 counters with the right cards, you can manipulate Planeswalkers with it (cards like Teferi, Temporal Archmage really benefit by the ability to proliferate), or, if you’re evil, you can use it in order to get your opponents as many poison counters as possible.
For one colorless mana and two Phyrexian mana you can also remove three counters from among other artifacts, creatures or planeswalkers you control in order to make Tekuthal indestructible, making it extremely hard to remove without certain pieces.
Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy is on here more because I, the writer, love it than the quality of the card (though the quality of the card is still pretty impressive!).
It’s a dual faced card that on one side lets you draw a card and discard a card by tapping it, before transforming if there’s five or more cards in your graveyard. What it transforms into is Jace, Telepath Unbound a planeswalker with a pretty tame +1 ability (it gives a creature -2/-0 until the end of your next turn), but pretty great minus abilities. For -3, you can essentially give any instant or sorcery card in your graveyard Flashback, which can result in some extremely degenerate strategies involving extra turn spells. As a Ult, the card makes it so that every single time you cast a spell you choose an opponent to mill five cards. What this means is that within twenty cards you can completely mill your opponent out.
Octavia, Living Thesis
At first glance, Octavia, Living Thesis looks like an incredibly expensive commander at eight colorless mana and two blue mana. But, as long as there’s eight or more instants/sorcery cards in your graveyard you can cast it for only two blue mana, so make sure you’re playing one drops if you build this deck.
This is another Commander for a deck which plays a whole host of Instant and Sorcery spells. Whenever you cast or copy an instant or sorcery spell, you’re able to make any creature have base power and toughness of 8/8 until the end of the turn. The best possible way to use this is to have cards with trample, and suddenly your opponent is facing down a horde of creatures that require mass blocking.
In addition to all of this, the card has Ward 8, meaning that an opponent has to pay eight mana just to target it with a spell. This makes it incredibly hard to remove without using mass-removal, and makes target removal near impossible.
Urza, Lord High Artificer
Urza, Lord High Artificer isn’t just one of the best blue Commanders - it’s one of the best Commanders in the entire game full stop. It turns every single untapped artifact you control into a blue mana producer and it creates a 0/0 colorless Construct artifact token that gets +1/+1 for each artifact you control. Plus, for only five mana (an extremely easy thing to get when the Commander itself helps to produce mana), you can cheat out cards by shuffle your library, exiling the top card of your library and casting it without paying its mana cost. Cards like Time Stretch can just win the game out of nowhere using the ability, and other cards can just give you more advantage over your opponents.
Minn, Wily Illusionist
Minn, Wily Illusionist is a fun card that was printed in the Adventures From The Forgotten Realms commander decks. It’s really great as a Commander for decks that focus on draw power especially.
Whenever you draw your second card each turn, you create a 1/1 blue Illusion token. That token gets +1/+0 for each other Illusion you control, meaning that shapeshifters and changelings can come in really handy here. If that was where the ability ended, it would be a pretty decent card, but the real spicy stuff comes when an Illusion dies.
Whenever an Illusion dies, you get to put a permanent card with a mana value equal to or less than the power that Illusion had on the battlefield. So, at very worst, you’re getting additional lands. At best? You could be putting cards like Blightsteel Colossus onto the battlefield for free.
Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant
Being totally honest, there were multiple Jin-Gitaxias cards that could have been on this list. There’s Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, a frankly evil card that should never have been printed in the first place. There’s Jin-Gitaxias, a pretty fun card that also transforms into a really good saga. Yet above all of those, Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant stands heads and shoulders.
Not only does the card counter the first instant, sorcery or artifact spell that your opponent casts during each turn (a ridiculous ability that people often forget about, resulting in some hilarious interactions), but it also gives you value. The first instant, sorcery or artifact spell you cast each turn is copied, and you can pick new targets for those copies. What makes this ability especially fun is that, since it’s an effect written on a creature, you can flicker it with cards like Displacer Kitten to completely abuse the effect.
Eluge, The Shoreless Sea
Eluge, The Shoreless Sea is a pretty recent addition to this list, printed in Bloomburrow. It’s also proven itself to be an incredibly popular commander, perhaps due to the flexibility it has.
Whenever it enters or attacks, you get to put a flood counter on a target land, which turns said land into an Island in addition to its other types. Why does this matter? Well, in addition to the fact that Eluge’s power and toughness is equal to the number of Islands you control, it also reduces the cost of the first instant or sorcery spell you cast each turn by one blue (or colorless) mana for each land that you control with a flood counter on it. Have you ever wanted to cast a Cyclonic Rift where the Overload cost is equal to the same cost as casting the spell normally? Now you can!
Ojer Pakpatiq, Deepest Epoch
Ojer Pakpatiq, Deepest Epoch is a card taken from a cycle of God cards that were all printed in the Lost Caverns of Ixalan. It’s also one of the more interesting Gods from that cycle, coincidentally.
It makes it so that every single instant spell cast from your hand gains Rebound, meaning you can cast it for free from exile during the upkeep after you first cast it. With the sheer amount of high-quality, low-cost Instant spells, it’s not really hard to understand why this card can quickly become a target for the table - but the design team thought of that scenario.
Whenever Ojer Pakpatiq dies, it returns to the battlefield tapped and transformed as a land with three time counters on it. That land taps for blue mana, and whenever it taps it removes a time counter from itself. Then, for three mana, you can transform back into Ojer Pakpatiq as long as there’s no time counters remaining.
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