The beauty of Commander is the variety of expression. When you can use any Legendary Creature as a Commander, surely you’ll never meet someone using the same as you?
Sadly, this is not always the case. Commander is a game, which means people want to win. So that’s where the “meta” comes into play, decks start to homgenise, and… eurgh. Your deck should be a fun expression of who you are! But it can be a bit difficult to actually find weird and wonderful commanders that are still good, even if they aren’t overly popular, or “good enough” that your favourite influencer is screaming about them.
I wanted to take a bit of time to shine a light on three commanders you may not have seen or considered before, and for this article, let’s take a look at Secrets of Strixhaven!
Sanar, Unfinished Genius
Secret of Strixhave is a spellslinger’s dream, there’s no denying that, and Sanar is a brilliant facilitator for that. Red and blue are good colours for instants and sorceries, and whilst he has no way to re-up his prepared status whilst he’s on the battlefield, he’s such a low cast cost that bouncing him to hand or recasting him from the command zone are valid methods of doing so. This is without talking about the steady Treasure generation he provides with his face ability too, as the whole point of his decks will be to be casting spells, so you should naturally be able to activate each turn.
As a couple of suggested includes for a Sanar deck, you’re going to need some card draw. Windfall is a classic example of this. If you’re constantly casting spells, your hand is going to be low, so having to discard won’t be a huge issue for you, but will definitely inconvenience your opponents.
Alchemist’s Talent can make your treasure twice as effective, and let you start pinging people for damage equal to the cost of your spells, which is really just free damage.
Bonehoard Dracosaur gives you more cards you can cast, token blockers, and treasures, what more would you want? Oh, and it’s a 5/5 first strike flier? That’ll do.
Aziza, Mage Tower Captain
Red/White is a colour pairing that looooooves tokens. As we’ve said, SOS loves casting spells. So, a commander that lets you tap creatures to copy spells? That’s a match made in heaven!
For my suggested picks for this decks, lets look at some token generation, and maybe a finisher or two.
Otharri, Suns’ Glory is a very consistent token generator attached to a very useful creature. Swing each turn, keep ticking those rebels up, and just try and keep one around so that when Otharri is eventually removed, you can just bring them right back!
Crackle with Power is my favourite finisher spell. Even if you cast it with X=2, that’s 10 damage to two targets, and with Aziza, four targets. If you have enough mana to pump this up properly, it can scale up to be a targeted board wipe with face-punching potential, what’s not to love (other than the price)?!
Adipose Offspring is another sleeper hit for a sudden burst of tokens. Get a big creature on the board, sacrifice it to the emerge cost, you suddenly have lots of tokens ready for doubling. Simple!
Tam, Observant Sequencer
Tam is another “facilitator” commander. Their prepared spell lets you draw a card and gain a life, and landfall reprepares them. There isn’t much more to say about Tam themselves, so let’s look at some includes.
Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait lets you play more lands, and then you can draw cards from that land.
Druid Class is a classic “class” spell for any landfall decks, giving you life, letting you play more, and then eventually letting you turn them into a massive beat-stick!
Lastly, Case of the Locked Hothouse might give you a little more direction in this deck. If you wanted to focus on an Enchantment deck as a subtheme, this is the card you you, and once you have a good land base you can start playing them off the top of your library.
I hope these suggestions have given you a good jumping off point for brewing, as it’s always worth going back to these older sets to dig for some hidden gems!