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Best Commanders in EDH [Tier List] Part 1

Commander / EDH* Casual Competitive Goodstuff Multiplayer

smilodex Fariorn actAdmin

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(A) Tier 0: Titans: (3)

(B) Tier 1: Top Tier (14)

(C) Tier 2: Highly Competitive (27)

(D) Tier 3: Competitive (50)

(E) Tier 4: cEDH playable (75)

(F) Tier 5: Fringe Competitive (175)

(G) Tier 6: High Power (268)

(H) Tier 7: Mid Power (390)

The Best Commanders in EDH [Tier list] Part 1 - Top Tier

We had to split the list in two parts, because tappedout wouldn't allow us to make a list with more than 1300 items.

That's why we now have a list that goes from Tier 0 (Titans) to Tier 7 (Mid Power) and a secondary list that has Tier 8 (Low Power) - 10 (Jank/Trash).

Welcome everybody to the EDH Tier List where you can find the strongest/best, most competitive or most jank commanders in the format.

First of all, it must be said that it is generally very difficult to draw a clear, unambiguous line with commander rankings. This list seeks to categorize all multiplayer COMMANDERS (we don't rate the decks, we rate the maximum potential of a certain commander) in adherence with the power level distinctions, which you can find below. We rate the potential of all the multiplayer commanders and the best possible decks, which are playable with this particular commander. This ranking is also from a competitive standpoint. Please keep that in mind!

It's important because some of you will might be thinking: why commanders like Atraxa, Praetors' Voice are ranked under a commander like Zirda, the Dawnwaker?? There are a lot different aspects you have to consider, when you try to rate the power or the potential of a commander. But most of the time the answer is value, paritiy breaking or COMBO!

Atraxa looks like a solid +1/+1 commander with some of the best commander colors avaible and really good stats, BUT there's no efficient combo with Atraxa who could win the game against 3 opponents nor does she provide you card advantage, where Zirda, the Dawnwaker for example is already one part of a efficient combo (Zirda + Basalt Monolith/Grim Monolith + a card like Walking Ballista), which makes it pretty easy to win fast with her as a commander. Another important point why Atraxa is "only" rated as a high power commander, is because in her commander identity you have already the top partner pairing of TnT = Thrasios, Triton Hero + Tymna the Weaver.

While some colour combinations in EDH have mostly commander-independent builds, e.g. you can take an optimized Kenrith, the Returned King list, replace him with with Atogatog and the deck would still be quite strong; we choose, to only list those evaluated by their own synergies.

Skills a strong commander should have:

  • they should be cost efficient / cheap and/or easy to cast
  • they should have good stats for their costs
  • they should have as many good effects as possible
  • they shouldn't have any ot to many downsides
  • they should have a high/good coloridentidy
  • they can break parity in some kind of way
  • they have inpact as soon as they enter the board (either they have haste, or a good ETB- or static-Effect or they have triggered ability)

Commanders from Tier 0 to Tier 4 are commander who can be easily broken with specific cards. Most of the commanders in the competitive category (T0-4) have one or more of the following characteristics:

Most popular deck archetypes in the first Tiers are:

  • Combo
  • Turbo/Ad Nauseum
  • Stax/Hatebears
  • Farm
  • Reanimator (Hulk/Razaketh etc.)
  • Storm/Spellslinger
  • Toolbox/Pod Decks
  • Wheel
  • Polymorph/Evolution
  • Control
  • Midrange/Value
  • Landfall

When you want to learn more about cEDH specific Archetypes, we can highly recommend you the #3 part videoseries of Eisenherz:

Commanders from Tier 6 to Tier 10 can also have some of the mentioned characteristics but mostly they can't do it, that efficient like the top commanders. In these categories you can find different commanders who are enabling other strategies which you can't or just rarely can find in the top tiers. Popular archetypes in casual games are for example.

  • Tribal/Theme
  • Voltron
  • Aggro
  • Token
  • Copycat
  • Aristocrats
  • +1/+1 or -1/-1 Counter's
  • Discard
  • Landdestruction
  • Pillow Fort
  • Lifegain
  • Group Hug/Slug
  • Burn
  • Mill
  • Chaos

Tier Description

The Commanders in this category have proven themselves as the best commanders in the format. They are consistently competitive, even over several shifts in the meta. Playing any of these decks into a competitive environment should always yield solid results. A Tier 0 commander is most of the time a partner commander or a 5 colored commander. These commanders are most of the time easy to cast and they should be removed as fast as possible, or they will dictate the game. Short: These commanders are somewhat broken!

Top Tier commanders are powerful creatures/planeswalkers with obvious forward-facing strengths. They set themselves apart from Competitive commanders in consistency of gameplan or have powerful niches in the metagame that make them strategically compelling picks into certain types of opposing decks. Most of the fully tuned Top Tier commanders can frequently win within the first 3 turns.

Highly Competitive EDH decks are designed with one principle in mind: No compromises. This principle is made up of several facets that will be explained now:

  1. No significant budgetary restrictions - Even if you can't afford some of the high-end cards that see frequent play in cEDH, proxying those to bring your deck to full power is a very good thing to do. Don't let yourself or others be held back by what they are able to spend on cardboard.

  2. Power - Like the decks in the first two Tiers, decks/commanders in this Tier are hyper efficient, really fast and super consistent.

  3. No intentionally suboptimal choices - Let's get this out of the way: even suboptimal decks can win in cEDH, so being able to win a game in a pod with cEDH decks does not automatically make a deck competitive. As noted earlier, the cEDH mindset is about trying to make optimal choices. Pet cards don't have a place in a hyper competetive environement. This does not mean that everyone should only be playing the same proven decks over and over, but choosing to hamstring yourself when clearly stronger options exist does not fall within the scope of competitive EDH.

  4. Redundancy - Most commanders in this Tier, have more than one efficient wincon or when they just have one, they can protect it really well.

  5. Mindset - Having the right mindset is one of the most important things when it comes to cEDH. Competitive players want to find the best builds and play them as well as possible. When you go into a game, every decision you make should be made with the intent of winning that game: no spite plays, no nonsense politics, proper threat assessment. An ideal competitive player wants to make the correct decision at every point in the game, and competitive players should strive to reach that ideal.

Commanders in this Tier are the average cEDH commanders:

  • Powerful strategies - Some strategies are better than others, and cEDH is interested in the best of them. It's hard to define how good a strategy must be to be competitively viable, but all commanders in this category have strong synergies, combos and strategies to consitently win games of cEDH.

  • Consistency - A competitive deck isn't just sometimes good. It doesn't matter whether your deck can win on turn 1 or 2, it doesn't matter that it can go Mishra's Workshop into Trinisphere turn 1, what really matters is what it can do consistently. So when judging whether your own deck is competitive, ask yourself the question: "What can it do consistently? How fast can I reliably win?", and then ask yourself: "Is that powerful enough for cEDH? Is this deck solid enough for a blind meta?"

  • The "Turn 3" rule - cEDH has become a lot faster since its inception. Right now, the critical turn on which you need to be able to either consistently threaten a win or an insurmountable advantage or have the means to stop others from winning, be it through interaction spells or static effects, is turn 3. If your deck isn't consistently relevant by turn 3, it's not competitive.

    • Decks at this level can compete viably at competitive tables, but either exert some suboptimality that puts them behind other choices or take an angle on the game that might not be as clearly effective as other strategies. Tuned decks in this category are often "suboptimal" commander-choices (like Alesha, Who Smiles at Death/Kefnet the Mindful <<>> Extus, Oriq Overlord  /Urza, Lord High Artificer... Alesha & Kefnet are still strong commanders, but if you want to play competitive, there are other better choices) in their color.

    Decks at this level are pretty good, but can't quite compete consistently at the cEDH level. Nevertheless, many of these commanders are very strong (especially in casual pods) and they usually fall into one of these five categories:

    A. From here one on we are more one the casual site of EDH. In this tier you'll find most the strongest combat based commanders (which aren't already in the higher Tier because of their synergies or because of card advantage) like the strongest voltron commanders or very fast burn, token or other beatdown decks.

    B. Fully tuned decks whose strategy isn't quite powerful enough (but often very unique) for cEDH - not every fully tuned deck can be competitive, no matter how much time you put into it. A powerful strategy is one of the facets that make decks competitive.

    C. Decks that used to be competitive, but have fallen by the wayside as cEDH evolved - With rules changes, banlist updates (for example Arcum Dagsson after the Paradox Engine ban), new cards being released, and people getting better at the game, the landscape of cEDH continues to evolve. Unfortunately, this also means that some decks that used to be good just aren't up to par anymore.

    D. Worse versions of existing competitive commanders/decks - another facet of what makes a deck competitive is not choosing to play something that's consistently going to perform worse than another build with the same strategy (for example Prime Speaker Zegana/Keruga, the Macrosage could also be a solid Simic Food Chain deck, but Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath is the best choice for this kind of deck for cEDH). Actively choosing to play something that's worse isn't really competitive, even if the chosen deck is still powerful.

    E. Budget cEDH Decks - budget versions of cEDH decks often need to make compromises. This means that they're going to be a bit slower and less consistent than their budgetless counterparts. You can find examples of budget cEDH decks here:

    In this tier you'll also find a lot of solid combat based commanders. All in all the commanders from now on are all I'd say fairer, nothing here is really "broken" and most decks really suffer against board wipes. The commanders here are all playable and you can find some commanders with card advantage but not as much as in the top tiers.

    Decks that are built after a theme in this power level are often highly synergistic with that theme. Even combo decks should be expected in Mid Power. While these decks won't have the same speed, power, compactness or consistency as the ones found in High Power and above.

    You'll rarely find commanders which are part of a fast combo or which generate card advantage (like card draw etc.) and because of that you'll find a lot of combat based commanders like in Tier 6, but worse. From now on, commanders mostly have a pretty simple and straight forward gameplan.

    Most commanders in this category aren't bad, but also aren't that amazing. If winning is important for you, you'll have more success in the higher tiers. In this category you'll find way more voltron, aggro and tribal strategies than in the categories above. You should expect strong creatures, big boards, some value engines and big mana payoffs.

    The commanders in this tier are on the bottom end of the powerscale. They are suboptimal. They don't have any good effects printed like carddraw/ramp (value) and they don't have as many or sometimes any good synergy. For almost every commander listed in this category there's another better commander out there, who can do a similiar thing, but better.

    This section is reserved for janky/trash commanders. Most people probably see these cards here in this list for the first time, because hardly anyone plays them. These cards don't provide a mechanical reason to play them - most of them have bad stats, negative effects, some are just vanilla creatures, others are entirely unusable without significant workarounds.

    All informations are of course without guarantee, the final evaluation only takes place after the card has been released and tested!

    Partner/Background commander are really difficult to categorize. We normally rate them as standalone cards

    Feel free to write your thoughts & suggestions for classification in the comments.

    Sometimes we add certain commanders before the set is released, especially if certain commanders are very weak, strong or interesting in some way. Otherwise we add the commanders one by one, after set release, when we tested some cards and when we have enough time to add them to the Tier List.

    Sometimes it takes a bit longer, like in the case when a new mechanic is released, like mutate or Venturing into a Dungeon etc. When something like that happens, we'll mostly add the commanders with normal abilities first and after we've had enough impressions of the new abilities, we'll add the others.

    • Golos, Tireless Pilgrim = was long time a Titan Commander and one of most versatile and strongest commanders in the format.

    • Leovold, Emissary of Trest = is also a pretty insane Commander who could also be one of the Top Tier Commanders or even a Titan, if he would be legal.

    • Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary = very poverful green commander, who's around the powerlevel of Selvala.

    • Braids, Cabal Minion = I also can't understand why she's banned... today we have so much stronger black commanders... nowadays she could maybe be fringe competetive.

    • Iona, Shield of Emeria = she was more a problem in the 99 of decks like Kaalia of the Vast but not as a commander... 9 mana is a lot to be relevant.

    We're currently evaluating the power of different commanders:

    The Stranger Things commanders are super difficult to evaluate since they can just partner them with each other...

    We'll see how things went out, but for now it feels like pure guessing

    Because we really dislike this product from WotC in so many ways, we decided to not really rate them here, unless they reprint them in a nice alternative art and make it more accessable.

    EDIT: After several people asked us that we should also please rate the Walking Dead Commanders, we at least put them in the appropriate power level order (from top to bottom, from somewhat strong to mediocre)

    To collect reliable data we tried to incorporate as many aspects as possible:

    • we played a lot of games, with specific decks
    • we compared already existing (c)EDH Tier lists
    • we looked at EDH-relevant videos and listened to podcasts on the topics
    • we evaluated statistics from the "cEDH Metagame Project v1-2", Moxfield, tappedout & EDHREC
    • we watched different (c)EDH Tournaments
    • we consider the cEDH-decklist-Database
    • we play, view and evaluate a lot of online / webcam games
    • we talk with many different people from the cEDH community
    • we interpreted and of course also included our own experiences and those of the players from our LGS

    You don't understand why a specific commander is rated so high/low? Just ask and we'll show you a decklist of that commander and explain you why that commander is better than another one. If you want to see the most competitive EDH decks, go and visit the cEDH-Database: https://cedh-decklist-database.com/

    To keep these lists up to date, we are looking for more active players with as much gaming experience as possible. Especially in the area of cEDH metagame. Nevertheless, you should have a connection to the casual part of magic. If you are interested in being registered as an additional editor or moderator for this list, please write me your Discord ID on my pin board.

    Hit the upvote buttom if you like the Tier list

    +1 Upvote

    Suggestions

    Updates Add

    Streets of New Capenna & Baldur's Gate Update 1 — June 21, 2022
    Edit

    Hello everyone,

    sorry for the delay, but real life issues had priority (pun not intended) and had to be dealt with before we could take care of the update. Well, here it is:

    You might notice, that we had to make some drastic changes. The list had to be split in two parts, because tappedout wouldn't allow us to make a list with more than 1300 items. That's why we now have a list that goes from Tier 0 (Titans) to Tier 6 (Mid Power) and a secondary list that has Tier 7 - 9.

    Another thing you might notice is that we swapped a few commanders around. Some got upgraded, some downgraded. As always, please keep in mind that we give our best to be objective, but we are human and will always have some sort of bias, just because of our own personal experiences.

    Furthermore, we changed the power rating of different commanders - The following commanders got a promotion:

    The following commanders have been downgraded:

    Finally, we have not yet included the "Background" Commanders, as they are really hard to assess, there are a ton of them with a ton of different combination and we want to take our time with that and see what brews people come up with in the near future and then, step by step, we'll add the missing commanders and the new commander backgrounds.

    Commanders we currently reevaluate:

    Thank you, for being patient! smilodex and Eisenherz

    Don't forget to leave a like

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