10 Best Red Cards Right Now In Commander - January 2025 Edition

Magic The Gathering’s Commander Format has one massive deckbuilding advantage over formats such as Standard: You have the option to include almost any card in Magic The Gathering’s storied history. But with so many cards, how can you decide what to put in your deck? We’ve got the lowdown on the best Red cards for the format.

 

As an important aside: we’re not considering lands in this list. We’re also not including banned cards in this list, as we want to discuss cards that you can actually play in the format. This list also won’t reflect the best Commanders for the color, as that’s a separate list.

 

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer

 

 

Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer is a terrifying turn one card. It’s one Red mana, but if you pay 1R then you can have it enter with haste, though it’ll bounce back to your hand at the end of the turn. If Ragavan connects with your opponent, then you exile the top card of their library and create a treasure token. The best part is, that you can cast the spell that you’ve exiled from the top of your opponent’s deck, potentially using their own tools against them.

 

Deflecting Swat

 

Deflecting Swat is part of a cycle of spells that you can cast for free as long as you control your commander. This is a really fun one, and allows you to completely redirect the target of any one spell or ability. What this means is that if your opponent attempts to Path to Exile one of your cards, you can instead make it so that they exile one of their own cards, scuppering their plans for domination.

 

Wheel of Fortune

 

Wheel of Fortune causes every player in the game to completely discard their hand and draw seven cards, and it’s probably not difficult to see why it’s so good in red decks. This can essentially allow you to play your entire hand before drawing seven cards, completely refilling your hand and allowing you to keep going.

The big downside to this card is that it’s EXTREMELY expensive. There’s been a very limited number of reprints of this card, and it’s an extremely popular card when it comes to Competitive Commander, so getting your hands on a real copy is really difficult.

 

Jeska’s Will

 

Jeska's Will is another card with a special use case when you have your Commander on the field. It allows you to choose between two modes: either you can add red mana equal to the number of cards in a target opponent’s hand, or you can exile the top three cards of your library and have the ability to cast them until the end of the next turn. If you control your Commander, however, you don’t need to choose between these: you get to do both of those, meaning you can start casting massive spells from exile, assuming you choose the correct opponent for its effect.

 

Blasphemous Act

 

There’s a strong argument to be made that Blasphemous Act is the best board wipe in all of Magic The Gathering. This spell would usually cost 8R to cast, but the cost of the spell is reduced by the number of creatures on the battlefield, meaning it’s often actually a one-drop. It deals thirteen damage to every creature on the battlefield, meaning that it can deal with almost every creature in the game, leaving very few circumstances where Blasphemous Act doesn’t put in a large amount of work.

 

Faithless Looting

If there’s one thing you should know playing Magic The Gathering, it’s that draw power? It’s extremely powerful. Faithless Looting allows you to draw two cards and then discard two cards, which is pretty great on its own, but what makes this card special is that it has Flashback, meaning it can be cast from your graveyard for an additional mana cost to do the same thing again!

 

Vandalblast

 

Vandalblast is part of a long lineage of artifact hate in Magic The Gathering. If cast as a one drop, it destroys any artifact that you don’t control, which is pretty cool. But if you cast it for 4R as part of its Overload cost, then you destroy every single artifact on the battlefield that you don’t control, meaning you can completely wipe away all of the ramp pieces that your opponent has worked hard to acquire.

 

Blood Moon

 

As you may have noticed, this is strictly a list of the best Red cards in Commander, and as such Blood Moon simply has to be here. However, if I’m offering personal advice, I wouldn’t recommend putting this card in any of your decks just so that you don’t start losing friends. Blood Moon is an enchantment that does one very simple thing: it turns every single non-basic land on the battlefield into a mountain. Playing this against decks that require multiple colors, and that need cards like Three Tree City can just completely shut them down, and it’ll also end your friendship to boot!

 

Underworld Breach

 

Underworld Breach makes it so that every nonland card in your graveyard has escape. This means that by paying the card’s mana cost again and exiling three other cards from your graveyard, you can cast that card from your graveyard. There’s a myriad amount of things that you can do with this card: you can bring back creatures that unfortunately ended up in your graveyard, or you can cast massive sorcery spells that essentially just win the game for you on their resolution. Sure, Underworld Breach does sacrifice itself at the end of the turn, but the sheer value you get before that point is wild.

 

Simian Spirit Guide

 

Simian Spirit Guide is a very simple card, and one that you actually don’t want to cast ever. By removing it from your hand, you add one red mana to your mana pool, meaning that you can very quickly cast smaller spells, or you can surprise your opponent with it on their turn to cast instant spells.

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