The Best New Commanders in Mystery Booster Commander Edition

The best new commander in Mystery Booster Commander Edition is Tresserhorn's Lord, Returned, a 10/4 that turns every sacrifice into a card, with Seluma, Light of Aysen and Homer, the Hermit close behind. Sixty brand-new legends in one set is a lot to sort through, so this list ranks the ten that will actually get sleeved up.

Three questions decide the order. How much does the commander do on its own, with no help from the 99? How does it play at a four-player table, where a card that is fine in a duel can be either a liability or a political weapon? And how many real combos does it unlock, using the numbers from the MBC combo page, which runs the set against the Commander Spellbook database.

Power alone is not the tiebreaker. A commander that makes the other three players lean in ranks above one that is strictly stronger but makes the game worse. If you want the full rulebreaker rules first, the MBC mechanics post covers them, and the set page has every card.

Tresserhorn's Lord, Returned costs for a 10/4 with trample and indestructible, and he draws you a card whenever you sacrifice a creature. The catch is the entry fee: when he enters you sacrifice three creatures, pay 3 life, and let an opponent draw three, or he leaves. In a duel that fee is brutal. At a four-player table it is a bribe you get to hand to whichever opponent you want on your side for the next two turns, and that is a real political lever. The Combo Finder lists 41 combos for him, most of them the same shape: Tresserhorn plus The Locust God plus any free sacrifice outlet, where each draw makes an Insect and each Insect is the next sacrifice. Run your list through the bracket calculator before you bring it to a bracket 2 pod, because that loop is a three-card infinite and the table deserves to know.

Seluma, Light of Aysen is a 4/4 flyer whose rulebreaker line lets a mono-white deck run Angel cards of any color identity, plus any basic land. On combat damage she reanimates an Angel from your graveyard. That means every Angel ever printed is on the table, and the strongest reanimation target in the set's own combo data is Aurelia, the Warleader: with Altar of Dementia you attack, sacrifice Aurelia, connect with Seluma, return Aurelia for a second combat, and repeat. Seluma leads the set with 46 combos. The honest downside is that she has to connect, and a 4/4 flyer is not hard to block or remove at a table of three opponents. Build the deck to protect her and the Angels do the rest.

Homer, the Hermit is a 0/9 Crab with landfall: whenever a land enters under your control, any number of target players each mill twice the number of Crabs, Lobsters, Nautiluses, Starfish, and Trilobites you control. The phrase that matters is "any number of target players." You pick who gets milled every time, so the player running graveyard recursion can be left alone while the other two get chewed through, and you can mill yourself for a self-mill plan. Hedge Shredder turns it into a two-card loop, putting milled lands straight onto the battlefield to trigger Homer again, and that pair is the most-played combo in the set at roughly 2,179 decks tracked. Mill is still mill in Commander, though, and we have written about why it struggles against three 99-card libraries. Homer is the first commander in a while that answers that problem by picking its targets.

Grizzlegom, Hurloon Hero costs for a 4/4, which is a lot, but the rulebreaker line is the broadest in the set: the deck can run any land cards at all. When he attacks he makes a Soldier for each Plains, draws a card for each Island, drains each opponent for each Swamp, grows by a counter for each Mountain, and gains you life for each Forest. Each of those checks the basic land type, not the color, so a Triome counts for three of them and Prismatic Omen or Dryad of the Ilysian Grove makes every land you control count for all five. Seven mana is the real cost of entry, and he dies to everything, but one attack with a mature mana base is a full turn's worth of value in a single trigger.

Sifa Grent is a planeswalker that can be your commander, with four loyalty and a passive that drains an opponent for 1 whenever any creature dies. The +1 goads up to two creatures, which at a four-player table is the point: you send the biggest threats at each other and collect a life point every time one of them dies. The −6 lets you play the top two cards of each opponent's library for free. Planeswalker commanders die to combat more than removal, and Sifa does nothing to defend herself, so the deck wants cheap blockers and sacrifice fodder. The Combo Finder lists 23 combos for her, all of them aristocrats-style loops that her passive turns into a drain.

Flitwing, Lyev Detective is a 1/1 flyer that lets you create Clue tokens in place of any tokens you would create. A three-mana commander with 34 listed combos is unusual, and the reason is that Clues are artifacts, so every token-making effect in blue becomes an artifact-count or sacrifice engine. The weakness is obvious: Flitwing is a 1/1 who does nothing until the deck is making tokens, and mono-blue has fewer ways to make them than the other colors. This is a build-around for a brewer, not a commander that carries a pile of good stuff.

Ekthi, Contaminator Priest is a 3/3 that gives every Equipment you control living weapon and pumps your other Phyrexians. Each Equipment arrives with its own 0/0 Germ, which Ekthi's lord effect grows to a 1/1, so a Voltron deck no longer has to keep a body alive to carry the swords. The 17 combos on file are mostly Sword of the Meek loops with Krark-Clan Ironworks or Grinding Station, where the Germ enters, the Sword returns to it, and the whole thing repeats. Those are three-card infinites, so the same bracket warning as Tresserhorn applies.

Maular, the Next Evolution is a 10/10 whose rulebreaker line lets a green deck run creatures with mana value 7 or more of any color identity, and whenever one of those attacks its power and toughness double. This is the most Timmy card in the set and it is not close. Every seven-drop Eldrazi, Dragon, and Demon is legal, and Maular himself swings as a 20/20. Nothing here is subtle, nothing combos, and the deck will spend its first four turns ramping while the table decides who it is scared of. That is a fair trade for a deck that wins by turning a creature sideways.

Whtz, the Bibliophile costs for a 1/3 that removes the maximum deck size, and its draw-and-gain-life ability drops from to free if you started with 200 or more cards. Mind Over Matter turns that free tap into a two-card loop: discard to untap, tap to draw. A 200-card deck is a real thing you will have to shuffle in front of three people who want to start the game, and the deck's consistency is roughly half that of a normal list. Whtz ranks here because the novelty is real and so is the combo, not because it is a strong default build.

Ashaya's Enduring Bond is a legendary sorcery that can be your commander, the first sorcery ever allowed to. You can only cast it while you control a legendary creature or planeswalker, and it discovers X, where X is the mana you spent on it. That last clause is why it belongs on this list: commander tax raises what you spend, so the second cast discovers for 5, the third for 7, and the deck gets better every time it loops back to the command zone. The cost is that your 99 has to carry its own legends, and until one sticks the commander is a dead card.

Elda, Conjurer of Spectacle gives your first nonlegendary creature spell each turn demonstrate, which copies it for you and for an opponent of your choice. At a four-player table that is a gift you hand out strategically, and the player you keep feeding tends to keep you alive. The Everforger is a colorless six-drop that opens up every artifact creature and Equipment in the game, and copies one of them per turn. Chira, All In rewards coin flips, dice rolls, and random discards with counters and Treasure, and Valko Indorian gives a mono-black deck every Phyrexian ever printed with menace and lifelink on all of them. None of them cracked the ten, but all four are real decks.

If you want the strongest deck, build Tresserhorn's Lord. If you want the deck your pod will remember, build Grizzlegom or Maular. If you are the combo player at the table, Seluma and Homer both have two- and three-card loops on file, and the combo page will check a pasted list against all 289 of them.

Whatever you build, record the games. A new commander's reputation is set in its first ten outings, and a win rate you can point to beats an argument about how good a card looks on paper. For the rest of our coverage of the set, start with everything we know about Mystery Booster Commander Edition.