I am sorry but earlier in the comments some one said blue is the best mono color. How is it not black?

Countermagic.

Black also lacks good answers to enchantments and artifacts.

Blue does a better version of almost anything black does.

What's difference between tier 4 "have trouble winning in competitive metas" and tier 5 "can't win often in competitive metas"?

Tier 4 might squeeze out a win once in a while, it's possible. Tier 5 decks I've never ever seen win a single game of competitive EDH, except as color identity placeholders. thegigibeast can you update the descriptions to say that? Sorry for not making that clear.

Shouldn't Reya Dawnbringer be tier 5 then? 9 mana commander which doesn't do anything until your next upkeep and not guaranteed to do anything even then and it has only access to white. I just can't see how it could win in any competitive game. I've only casual EDH though (and sometimes Edric, Spymaster of Trest, before mulligan change) so it might be I just don't understand how competitive EDH works.

Updating tomorrow if I don't forget :p (on my phone right now...)

Im not sure if anyone has made a case for this yet but i feel like Nekusar is good enough to be tier 2 if played the right way. Most Nek decks i see are full of howling mines and janky control spells but there is a variant referred to as "chaos ramp combo" that is really powerful. I've seen that deck destroy tier one decks. I know a few newer lists are out there that are omitting $75+ cards but the best i've seen is a little older. http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/multiplayer-commander-decklists/511377-nekusar-mindwheeling-pain

With a few updates (the deck is from 2013) and simple modifications, this archetype is easily tier 2. It is brutally consistent and wins on turn 2-6 if played well and with the optimal list.

I just put together this list as an example of a more up to date and optimized version of the list mentioned in my last comment.

http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/wrath-of-the-lich-king-3/

r/cEDH built Jhoira of the Ghitu for their weekly Brewsday Tuesday. It's a consideration since we don't currently have a Jhoira list. Link

Interesting list. Fun to think of commanders like this. Also a great way to start a lot of arguments. The ones I take most issue with are:

Tier 5

diaochan - t: destroy 2 target creatures has to at least be good enough to get you to tier 4. I mean, I know not all tables politic too much, but come on.ghost council of orzhova - a nigh-invincible sac outlet can be handy. At least better than tier 5.ob nixilis, the fallen - a likely 9/9 for 5 with a little life-drain isn't super exciting, but definitely not tier 5 material.Phelddagrif - I don't think I can forgive this placement, unless you have a no-talking rule or something. The ability to offer tokens, cards, life, etc to coerce the table into doing what you want makes phelddagrif unique and awesome. Hard to use, granted, but definitely not tier 5.*stitcher geralf - never used him, but I just have a hard time seeing that ability be THAT weak, even if he is a bit slow. I mean, phage the untouchable is in tier 4, and she makes you LOSE THE GAME WHEN YOU PLAY HER.

Tier 4

Alhammaret, high arbiter - this is tier 5 garbage.dralnu, lich lord - this might be the biggest mistake on the list. If you untap with dralnu with a competitive list, you should win the game, period. Every tutor becomes a nearly unlimited supply of extra turns, and black has an absurd number of tutors, plus a few from blue. Dralnu is a must-kill threat, putting him in tier 4 is ridiculous, he's at least tier 2. And don't say it's because he has a tap ability, there are loads of tap ability creatures in tier 1-2, and most of those don't win the game on the spot.ib halfheart - is there some combo I'm not aware of? He seems like hot trash.iname, death aspect - pretty sure this deck is built to just win the game the turn after iname with some mass-reanimation spell. I think it was, at one point, one of the most powerful decklists out there in the competitive scene. I haven't played it, but you might want to look into it a little deeper.kagemero, first to suffer - board wipe every turn? Seems better than Tier 4 to me.kataki, war's wage - no one has ever played this as a commander. Tier 5.Lazav, Dimir mastermind - just because idiots play this card as a mill deck doesn't mean having a hexproof version of your opponent's best creatures (Which you killed) is bad. He's a really strong commander for control in my experience.Nahiri, the lithomancer - I've wrecked tables with nahiri easily, because she gets huge benefits from white's biggest strengths - boardwipes, landwipes, and most of all, humility. I've never seen a card neuter a table as effective as humility in Nahiri. Sure, she's mono-white, but if other commanders can be mono-white and still in the upper tiers, she damn sure ought to be.phage the untouchable - ok, fine, command beacon is a thing, but seriously, this is the definition of tier 5. maybe tier 6.ryusei - how is mono-red supposed to use a death trigger? Tier 5.sygg, river cutthroat - potentially multiple cards per turn on a 2 mana commander in one of the best color combos? Does not seem like tier 4.uyo, silent prophet - this is another pretty big mistake imo. Uyo is nuts. You play her with a bunch of mana ramp, then dump her out on 10 mana. If a board wipe happens, np, replay her. If someone wants to spot remove her, you can copy it twice and throw them in his face. If no one kills her, you drop time warp or some ludicrous bomb sorcery like blatant thievery with a ton of mana up, then copy the crap out of it. It's powerful and annoyingly hard to disrupt without screwing yourself over too, since she can copy enemy spells.Varolz - someone else said it, I'll reiterate it. There is a lot of infect in the game. There are a lot of tutors in BG. It is very easy to kill someone turn 4 with varolz. Turn 3 is definitely possible. Saying "you'll get combo killed by someone else on turn 5" is a stupid argument - we're talking about tier 4 commanders here, not comparing it to top-tier combo decks. Varolz is a very fast way to kill people compared to almost any other combat-focused commander.*zhuge jin, wu strategist - who? tier 5.

tier 3

crosis the purger - was a cool card when invasion came out. He is now a piece of crap. Tier 5 imo, tier 4 at best.dromar the banisher - see crosis, although he's arguably a little better. But he usually bounces himself, which is dumb.why is ezuri in the same tier as eladamri? Has anyone ever made an eladamri deck since ezuri was printed? I get that sometimes tiers are kind of broad, but if those 2 are in the same tier, it's probably too broad.freyalise, llanowar's fury - there's no way freyalise is in a higher tier than nahiri. Know who's great at protecting planeswalkers? White. Know who sucks at it? Green.mishra, artificer prodigy - there's all of, like, 3 cards that make mishra more than a vanilla 4/4. It's cute that people have figured out ways to make him actually do something, but that does not make him tier 3.nicol bolas - does someone just really like grixis dragons? Bolas is garbage tier by today's standards, although he's still better than crosis. If I wanted an 8-mana hand discard spell that everyone could see coming a mile away, though, I'd just tutor for my myojin of night's reach, rather than fumble around with my lightning greaves and pray to god that no one kept up an stp or something.ojutai, soul of winter - does not deserve the same tier as his sleeker, later counterpart. There are no good dragons in WU anyway. Tier 4-5.sen triplets - this card sucks. Everyone will target you. You're playing control colors with a commander who only works when you cast stuff at sorcery speed - stuff that won't synergize with your deck. Looks cool, is awful.seton - no one actually plays druids, even with that OP land-stealing lord.sigarda, heron's grace - a 4/5 flyer with no interesting abilities for 5? Sign me up! for tier 4-5.surrak dragonclaw - a garbage vanilla legend. Tier 5.venser, shaper savant - he's a powerful card with certain combinations, but I cannot imagine how he'd be any good in the command zone.volrath the fallen - lol, so a 1-shot commander on turn 3-4 (varolz) is tier 4, but a 1-shot commander on turn 5-6 (assuming you have what, draco?) is somehow tier 3? wot.yosei, the morning star - I'm mostly curious about this one. Are there really reliable enough reanimation in white to justify this guy as a legend? Black has oodles of tutors and reliable reanimation like volrath's stronghold and corpse dance to guarantee their commander doesn't get stuck after a death trigger, but can white really boast the same? I feel like one countered reanimation spell and you're out a commander for the foreseeable future.

Tier 2

sidisi, brood tyrant - as someone who made some of the first sidisi decklists, I can't say I ever thought she was particularly good. I highly doubt tier 2.teneb the harvester - this card is slow and boring. Tier 3 at best.*shattergang brothers - this card is too expensive and slow. also, why is savra a tier lower? her ability costs no mana and lets you get extra value out of sacrificing to something else. Granted, that means you need other sac outlets, but that's not exactly hard in BG.

Tier 1

edric, spymaster of trest - maybe it's just my experience, but edric sucked for me. I always ended up fending off board wipes or having my commander removed before combat damage, and ended up with hands flooded with lands and difficulty keeping creatures on board. Not to mention, enemies can take advantage of him too and wreck you. Your lack of a competitive decklist makes me suspect he's not actually tier 1.Calling karador and scion of the ur-dragon "tier 1 lists" is, imo, ridiculous. The combos they accompany have little to nothing to do with them. If you're going to include the most powerful version of a given commander - ignoring how most people would build it to be synergistic with the commander, i.e. mass dragon reanimation or dredge for scion and karador, respectively - then you may as well put atogatog in tier 1-2, since you can build a very-nearly-as-strong HD combo deck with atogatog. Frankly, almost any commander can be extremely powerful if you just ignore them and build whatever the fastest combo deck in your colors is, but that's a very boring list. If you think it's necessary to include decks like HD, doomsday, adnaus, or whatever the latest degenerate flavor of the week is, then I'd include those as their own decklists rather than tie them to a commander that doesn't do anything particularly powerful other than be the best option in the required color scheme.

I would like to comment on Scion, because is HD list is better than with creatures like Atogatog in IMO, because he has access to backup combos while others don't.

Any 7/7 Sliver has also access to backup combos.

I think Scion can tutor them much more easily... I mean, Sliver Legion can't combo as easily as the others, Sliver Overlord could tutor, Sliver Queen could easily combo, but I just think Scion can combo easier... But I never actually played an HD deck, maybe I am wrong.

Freyalise is leagues stronger than Nahiri. -2 destroy artifact/enchantment is so much better than an equipment drop, and Freyalise's tokens can actually do something other than hold a sword. Mono G is better than mono W anyway. Ramp is so much easier and Freyalise does a pretty good job of dominating the board. Nahiri is really cool, but not the same tier as Freyalise.

Indeed. The best build for 5C currently is Hermit Druid, which wins by reanimating Necrotic Ooze while Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius and any infinite mana pair (usually Devoted Druid and Morselhoarder) are in the GY. Scion can also win via Niv by entombing him and Worldgorger Dragon, then casting Necromancy or either of the other two reanimator enchantments (generates infinite mana). It's essentially a one-card combo with three interchangeable pieces. Additionally, he can one-hit an opponent with Skithyrix + Moltensteel and do a bit of toolboxing with Dragon Mage, Teneb, or other utility dragons as needed. For those reasons, he's miles better than any 5C commander.

The difference here is that Scion can serve as a tutor for backup combos (namely Worldgorger Dragon) while Sliver Queen is merely a finisher for a combo once you have infinite mana. She is technically part of a combo with Mana Echoes but she doesn't tutor for it. Sliver Overlord is really the only Sliver commander worth considering going up a tier since he can tutor for game-winning combos involving Slivers, which there are.

None of them are as good for Hermit Druid as Scion though simply because of "easy" (3WUBRG plus the cost of Animate Dead/Dance of the Dead/Necromancy to do it without Entomb) access to a backup win condition with Worldgorger Dragon. The other 5 color commanders don't have this, which makes them inferior even though you could run a similar strategy with them.

If you wanted to, you could trivialize a lot of top tier generals by saying "they're only good for their colors and a minor other feature". For example, how often do Jeleva Storm players actually cast their general? Rarely. Does this make her better than other generals in her colors, like Sedris and Marchesa? Yes, because Storm is generally considered to be the best Grixis playstyle and those two do very little to help that strategy. Although you will rarely cast Jeleva, when you do she yields better results for your given gameplan than other Grixis generals do. You could talk similarly about Zur - people only really cast him when they have nothing better to do but grab Necropotence. Does this make him better than Oloro? Yes, because grabbing Necropotence is better than gaining life. I should note that I'm not comparing Zur to Sharuum here because Sharuum and Zur's optimal deck configurations rarely overlap in function unless you decide to build them both as Esper stax decks, in which case Zur would probably be slightly better since he's cheaper and he can grab stuff like Solitary Confinement. You could do the same for Karador and Tasigur since Karador is functionally just a reanimation spell and Tasigur is just an infinite combo outlet (and rarely a draw engine).

Why don't we trivialize them this way? Because the purpose of this list is to rank decks that are in an optimized state. If a deck relies on its colors more than its commanders, then the commander that has a beneficial effect, no matter how insignificant it may seem, will be a better commander than other commanders in those same colors. That's why Scion is considered top tier for Hermit Druid combo decks and the rest aren't.

I've gone on long enough, but I'll just finish by talking more about slivers. I can't believe Hivelord is above Legion. Legion is basically if Craterhoof Behemoth were a sliver. If anyone can explain to me how that's worse than making your slivers hard to remove, I'd love to hear it. And don't bring up symmetry - the advantages your opponents gain from you having Legion in play are nearly insignificant compared to the advantage you have. The only case where that wouldn't be true would be in a match where multiple players are playing sliver decks, in which case the whole game would be a hot mess anyway even before the generals hit the field.

any1 see any speculation on where new emra-cruel stands in CEDH? I want to say tier 3 but karn is slightly better to me in most scenarios. Thoughts?

Sorry if this isnt the place to post this but i wanna ask around on thoughts on its CEDH place.

It's too early to say for sure, but unless something big is revealed in EMN that colorless decks can really abuse, Emrakul the Promised End is most likely Tier 4. Both Kozileks and Karn are better than him for colorless generals, and, speaking from experience, colorless EDH decks are generally not that good. The Mindslaver effect is marginally useful, you could even take out a few opponents with it if you know what you're doing and how to pilot their decks, but it depends too much on the decks you're facing to be consistent. The body and evasion aren't anything special since killing with commander damage rarely ever happens in competitive EDH. It's not indestructible and it's now vulnerable to sorceries. Also it can be countered. Any one of these individually would make it slightly worse than original Emrakul, but all of them together make it drastically inferior. I can't even see it being used in the 99 of most competitive EDH decks, let alone as a commander.

But at least new Emrakul isn't as bad as Ulrich.

The new Emrakul is awful. Even Tier 4 is a stretch for her. Not much else to say.

Hey, I don't think this card will be competitive at all but what's everyone's thoughts on the new werewolf commander?

Link for those who haven't seen ithttp://mythicspoiler.com/emn/cards/ulrichofthekrallenhorde.html

I hate Ulrich. boring. worthless.

decent in standard, great in limited, boring crap everywhere else.

I won't disagree with you, horrible overall. Not a competive commander in any way.

Interesting concept though: Gruul politics? Oh you want that creature dead, any way you can go a turn without a spell?

Another idea I have for him is just Voltron (again I don't think he will be competive). A deck of instants to buff him to murder a creature or punch in enough for a kill?

Even though he is a weak card over all, he does offer an interesting playstyle. He is kind of useless though if he flips to a human on someone else's turn...

I know this is a place for competive builds and he isn't. However, I feel like he has potential as an interesting commander or at least fun one. And I was wondering if you guys can think of anything, any cards, really, that adheres to being useful with him. I think the biggest mistake people are making with him is that they want to run a werewolf tribal, which in my opinion is not the way a deck around him wants to be built.

Apologies about the formatting in my other post =/

Comparing scion as HD combo and atogatog as...what, atog tribal? is kind of comparing apples to oranges. If the list is "what's the most optimized possible list for any given commander?" then obviously the 5c commanders would dominate the list, even if they're functionally useless, because they have access to the best cards and combos. On the other hand, if the list is "what are the best decklists assuming we're trying to build around the commander's ability?" then scion probably isn't tier 1.

Right now the list is a sort of hybrid where it's assuming the most optimized decklists for a few commanders but the "build around the commander" decklists for the rest. I guess it's useful to have both types of decks in the same list, but it seems a little weird to assume that scion is playing HD whereas atogatog isn't. Frankly I'd be more worried about atogatog if I sat down next to him, NO ONE plays atogatog as a tribal commander and it's almost definitely some degenerate nonsense, whereas most scion lists I've seen are dragon decks and not HD.

In my experience, most people are playing a build-around-the-commander list that falls mostly into the tiers listed, and a very small number are playing one of the netdecked fast combo lists. Certainly they come up occasionally, but if I was making the list, I'd maybe have 2 entries for any given combo commander - one for the more typical build-around-me list, and one that's specifically for the combo list. Just because one guy plays a Karador combo list (which still doesn't look tier 1 to me, but whatever) doesn't mean that Karador is a particularly powerful commander, or that you need to freak out and kill him ASAP when he sits down next to you. And just because someone is playing Atogatog definitely doesn't mean you're safe to ignore them.

The "best possible deck" list is boring because 99% of commanders contribute almost nothing to their optimized decklist and tiers are really flat. The "build around the commander deck" list is necessarily non-competitive because that's usually not the most powerful deck for that commander. But calling this a competitive ranking and then assuming atogatog is playing atog tribal or something is kind of a contradiction. I think the only way to "have it all" is to label the combo lists as their own lists, including the commander if you prefer, but separating out the more typical build for that commander into a lower tier. The list can't be a "competitive" ranking without being boring and flat with a lot of very repetitive combo decklists and commanders that have no synergy with their own deck.

In other news - Freyalise doesn't really do anything interesting. Sure, mono-green is better than mono-white and her abilities are fine, but in her own deck she doesn't really do anything that can't be done better with other cards. Nahiri synergizes perfectly with the best things mono-white has to offer, and makes her deck powerful in a way it can't be without her. Mono white is kind of awful, but Nahiri can actually make it pretty powerful. Freyalise could be replaced with practically any other decent mono-green commander without missing much, she only looks good because she's supported by better cards. She takes silver and makes gold. Nahiri takes lead and makes gold. Personally I'd say she's the better alchemist.

Also - lots of decks straight-up cannot answer Humility, and Nahiri plays it better than any other commander. Humility into land-wipe never fails to force a table scoop.

All of this is way less important than figuring out why the hell Dralnu is tier though 4 o_O