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 Black cards for the format.
As an important aside: we’re not considering lands in this list. Cards like Cabal Coffers are incredible in any mono-black deck, but they feel like cheating when discussing the best X color cards in Commander, the same with Urborg, Tomb Of Yawgmoth. 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.
Dark Ritual
Dark Ritual is a very simple card, and one that really speaks for itself. For the price of one black mana, you get three black mana. Since the card is so cheap to cast, this often means you can cast drop a three mana spell on turn one, thus quickly ramping up the game. Some decks can even use this to cast their Commander on turn one, thus amping up the pressure on their opponents.
Blasphemous Edict
Blasphemous Edict is a fairly new card, printed in Foundations. On first glance, it seems to serve as yet another board wipe for a color that doesn’t exactly have a shortage of them, but there’s slightly more to the card. First off, the card is reduced from five mana to one mana if there’s more than thirteen creatures on the battlefield, something that will often happen in a four-player format. More importantly, however, the card actually doesn’t destroy anything: it instead causes each player to sacrifice thirteen creatures that they control, meaning protection effects like Hexproof and Ward just don’t work, and it can resolve a really difficult-to-manage board state.
Feed The Swarm
Feed The Swarm isn’t on this list for the reasons you may think. While the ability to destroy a creature is brilliant in a lot of circumstances, there are also a ton of creatures with abilities that prevent destruction. However, Feed The Swarm can also destroy any enchantment on the field, and enchantment removal can be difficult to come by. Certain decks rely on enchantments to keep their game strategy afloat, and removing those cards can slow them down to a crawl.
Gray Merchant of Asphodel
Gray Merchant of Asphodel, known affectionately by long-time Magic The Gathering fans as ‘Gary’, is a really fun card that can also lead to very quick games. It’s a five-mana creature that, when it enters the battlefield, causes each opponent to lose life each to your devotion to black, with you gaining the amount of life others lose. Combining this card with recursion and abilities that flicker cards on the field and suddenly your opponent’s start to lose a whole lot of life.
Crypt Ghast
Crypt Ghast is a mana fixing card. For four mana, you get a creature that provides one additional mana whenever you tap a Swamp for mana, which is pretty great on its own. But the card also has Extort, an ability that allows you to play one mana every single time you cast a spell so that your opponents lose one life and you gain life equal to the total life lost.
Reanimate
What is there to really say about Reanimate? It’s the single best piece of recursion in the entire format, it brings back any creature of your choice from any graveyard for the meager expense of one mana and some life, and it can enable some utterly degenerate turn two or three plays. If you want your opponent to have to stare down a massive Eldrazi early into the game, this is the card that allows you to do that.
Demonic Tutor/Vampiric Tutor
Another auto-include in most black decks, we’ve grouped together Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor because they’re fundamentally and mechanically almost identical, with the main difference being that one is an Instant and one is a Sorcery. Both these cards allow you to add any card from your deck to your hand, meaning you can set up combos by pulling pieces directly from your library, and if your strategy has to change, you can change it on the fly by grabbing removal.
Bolas’s Citadel
Bolas's Citadel is really fun in certain strategies. The card allows you to look at the top card of your library at any time, and also allows you to cast the top card of your library by paying life equal to its mana cost rather than paying actual mana for it. What this does is allow players to quickly accrue a massive amount of resources onto the field which can then be used for the second ability of the card: you can tap the Citadel, sacrifice ten nonland permanents and cause each opponent to lose ten life, which is a full quarter of their life in Commander.
Torment of Hailfire
Want to end the game in a shower of fire? Torment of Hailfire is the card for you. You choose how much mana you want to put into this card since it’s an X spell, so it can be as powerful or as minuscule as you want it to be. Still, the more mana the better, since Torment of Hailfire forces each opponent to either sacrifice a nonland permanent, discard a card, or lose three life for each mana spent for X. If X equals ten or greater then it essentially causes the game to become untenable for most decks. They’ll lose everything that they’ve worked for.
Orcish Bowmasters
Orcish Bowmasters is a fairly new, and already extremely hated, card. It’s deceptively simple: for every card that an opponent draws outside of the first card they draw for a turn, you get to deal one damage to any target before adding a +1/+1 counter to an Orc (after creating one, if you don’t yet have one). Since the card has Flash, you can cast this in response to a massive draw spell and ping an opponent for a ton of damage, or remove creatures from the board that you need to be gone as soon as possible.
Opposition Agent
Opposition Agent might be better for high-power Commander games than your standard kitchen table Magic, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s an incredible card. Opposition Agent has flash, meaning it can be cast during your opponent’s turn, and this is a card you absolutely want to surprise your opponent with. It allows you to control your opponents whenever they search their libraries, and causes them to exile whatever you choose to search for. You can then cast that card using mana of any color, which can completely remove absolutely massive game-winning pieces from your opponent’s grasp.
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