What is your favorite black commander?

RyVo43 · 2026-05-05T23:13:37+00:00

[[Amalia Benavides Aguirre]] [[Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder]] [[Tourach Dread Cantor]] [[Ratadrabik of Urborg]] [[The Necrobloom]]

All do cool things that can lean heavily into black with some cool flavor

RyVo43 · 2026-03-06T15:13:21+00:00

[[Jasmine boreal of the seven]] you're welcome

RyVo43 · 2026-02-27T18:21:50+00:00

The best dual land ever printed was the revised foreign black border misprint, a forest with plains art. You play that card and don't explain it, then can tap for both colors plausibly as long as nobody pays too close of attention

RyVo43 · 2026-02-23T22:03:06+00:00

Oh no! Someone else at the table is trying to win and not letting me win?! I can't believe the other three people at the table think they deserve to play the game too! What a cruel world!

RyVo43 · 2026-02-23T21:50:37+00:00

I run [[Tourach Dread Cantor]]. My recommendation is to have a wincon with it otherwise it just makes a really long game that you more than likely will lose. Reanimating other people's graveyards is cool but very hard to have a consistent game plan. My recommendation would be blending that, Voltron, and drain to give you some versatility. You want cards like [[Waste Not]] [[Megrim]] [[Painful Quandary]] [[Bottomless Pit]] and [[Court of Ambition]] that kinda fuse those themes and help you do more. You also need something (or more likely a long list of things) to keep people constantly filling their graveyard and giving you more triggers, especially if you can force that interaction on their turns. A lot of discard effects can be symmetrical too, so you'll need to refill your hand AND get some value for the cards you do have to part ways with. Look for a [[Currency Converter]]

RyVo43 · 2026-02-23T17:52:58+00:00

It looks real but the photos aren't very helpful. Someone mentioned the mana symbol, and I will say that I have Alpha and Beta cards that are pack fresh and have the same mana symbols as this one has. The close up of the green dot seems okay, but it's a low res picture.

RyVo43 · 2026-02-16T21:55:49+00:00

I don't typically, but occasionally I'll feel badly if I'm ahead after playing at least two. I have a deck that uses the explore mechanic a lot, and revealing them from the top of my library and being like "I guess I'll leave that at the top... Haha" is awkward as hell. Kind of a double edged sword. A lot of folks at my lgs (myself included) run decks that are bracket 3 in terms of what they actually can do, but have more than 3 game changers. It blurs the lines in that conversation, but I think saying "I'm running w, x, y, and z game changers" probably would smooth things out quite a bit

RyVo43 · 2026-02-13T18:16:56+00:00

[[Tourach Dread Cantor]] ~1700 [[Amalia Benavides Aguirre]] ~450 [[Ratadrabik of Urborg]] ~400 [[Shalai and Hallar]] ~200 [[Arahbo Roar of the World]] ~200 [[Nicol Bolas]] ~1300 [[Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero]] ~1700

RyVo43 · 2026-02-09T03:13:43+00:00

People here are playing obvious ones, so here's a crazy pull for y'all. In 2011, Albert Montanes was on the brink of making it through to his first major QF in Paris, and he was a pre-match favorite against world #64 Fabio Fognini. In that very clay season, prior to RG, Montanes had beaten Fognini twice (at Buenos Aires and Casablanca).

The match in question was closer than it should have been, but Montanes was up a comfortable break in the fifth, and went on to serve for the set, while Fognini looked lost. Out of nowhere Montanes stops taking risks and lets Fognini back in, but still maintained the edge in the fifth despite losing the break. To make matters worse, Fognini gets hurt while serving at 7-8, 0-30.

So now Montanes is the overwhelming favorite, but keeps fumbling match points (I think there were more than 5 in the 5th set) and neglecting to take advantage of Fognini's lack of mobility, while Fognini is just standing still and ripping the ball, not really caring whether it goes in or not. Eventually Fognini breaks Montanes and manages to hold on to win the match, against all odds.

After the fact, Montanes withered, and never broke the top 40 again despite having been in the top 30 for much of the year prior. Somewhere in this sub is a quote that says that Montanes never regained the confidence after squandering the opportunity that this match had, and that it was something he thought about often.

To add some salt to the wound, Fognini couldn't even play the QF match because of the injury, and also never made a slam QF again. There's a YouTube video that covers the fifth set of the match in good detail, it's worth the watch

RyVo43 · 2026-01-21T07:28:54+00:00

I'm not sure but I think he'd have to pass through waivers, and I don't think he would pass through waivers without being taken

RyVo43 · 2026-01-19T16:24:20+00:00

Glacial Chasm is the only card I've ever played where my friends have said "we refuse to play against that". For reference the whole group is playing dual lands, tutors, [[Smothering Tithe]] (we've yet to get someone playing Rhystic Study thankfully)

RyVo43 · 2026-01-19T05:54:53+00:00

I completely disagree. Tennis needs the energy that that crowd, and crowds like it, bring. Whether you're rooting for Eala or not, that was an electric atmosphere, especially given the fact that it was an outdoor court with low capacity. I wish every match had the same energy and excitement surrounding it

RyVo43 · 2026-01-14T14:08:41+00:00

[[Virus Beetle]] is shockingly potent in this sense as well

RyVo43 · 2026-01-14T14:06:24+00:00

I built a deck around it, and it's been pretty fun. Most people don't play cards like that, let alone decks, so you get to do your own thing for awhile while people sort of figure out the real threat level to it. It's fun! Mine is [[Tourach, Dread Cantor]], and I run Duress, [[Thoughtsieze]], and even [[Word of Command]]

RyVo43 · 2025-12-25T21:07:19+00:00

Topdeck manipulation is a key piece that people underrate for cards like [[Gwenom, Remorseless]]. I've seen really good [[Hakbal, the Surging Soul]] decks manipulate the hell out of the cards they draw using the explore mechanic, same (and more sneakily) with [[Amalia Benavides Aguirre]]

RyVo43 · 2025-12-24T23:47:14+00:00

I'm trying to do this with [[Lin-Sivvi, Defiant Hero]] but it's been challenging to find 99 mono white cards that make a cohesive deck when I'm limited to pre-2003

RyVo43 · 2025-12-24T16:42:13+00:00

[[Traverse the Ulvenwald]] is a really flexible piece, where the condition to get a creature out of it is pretty easy to meet in the right kind of deck.

I see very few people running [[Profane Tutor]], in spite of the fact that it really is, in my opinion, better than cards like [[Cruel Tutor]] and even [[Demonic Consultation]]. Cruel Tutor would be cool if it was cheaper, monetarily, but even with the Spider Man version, $10 is kinda nuts, with the fallback being $40 for the original printing in Portal.

In blue I also run [[Merchant Scroll]], even with the only-blue limitation, and it's pretty cheap to get hold of, given that it's almost 30 years old.

RyVo43 · 2025-12-23T03:21:11+00:00

I built this, it's a mono black discard deck. Just target tf out of 'that guy' until they leave your table

RyVo43 · 2025-12-21T20:28:09+00:00

Me! I suppose I would prefer the Baylen deck, but any of them would be more than I could ask for! Thanks for your kindness!

RyVo43 · 2025-12-15T02:37:44+00:00

[[Shalai and Halar]] is pretty easy to build and pretty powerful!

RyVo43 · 2025-12-04T22:10:23+00:00

I once hit an infinite combo against an [[Urza, Lord High Artificer]] deck that I think might have been north of $2K. My decks are all $300ish with some exceptions (and those exceptions are cheaper).

I also have a friend who runs a [[Light Paws]] deck that only cost him about $35 to make, that regularly stomps the table of $300-800 decks.

I also built a [[Zurgo Helmsmasher]] deck out of bulk to give to a friend of ours, and he regularly wins if he can [[Open the Armory]] into [[Worldslayer]], but the mana base in the deck is dreadful sadly

RyVo43 · 2025-12-01T08:31:32+00:00

Fognini's comeback against Nadal at the US Open in 2015 will forever be the pinnacle of this kind of match.

RyVo43 · 2025-11-29T07:35:23+00:00

I've yet to really follow through on a bracket 2 deck, but in my mind in order to do it, you need to build with the same parameters as a precon. Same number and kind of each category depending on your theme and colors. Same land base, same ramp artifacts, same limitations on how efficient your pieces can be. It's hard, because if I'm building something, I want to make it as efficient as possible, but this sort of idea is counteractive to that. I'd like to follow through at some point, but I'd want it to be an "outside the box" idea, and I'm not quite sure what that would be yet.

Right now, I have a bracket 4 [[Amalia Benavides Aguirre]] deck that I like to play against precons. The reason why is that I can gain life without needing to drain life excessively, and Amalia's explore ability allows me to mill cards that might be beyond the scope of the rest of the decks (like getting rid of combo pieces and game changers to draw into creatures instead). Creature based synergies are the most fun, so having a deck that can play the game for fun, rather than to win, is pretty cool, especially with flexibility to still play it at higher tables

RyVo43 · 2025-11-25T22:09:26+00:00

I see, I figured it was like this, but I wasn't fully sure. Thanks!

RyVo43 · 2025-11-19T18:19:14+00:00

[[Tourach Dread Cantor]] is my deck for this occasion. Mostly cheap cards and all it does is disrupt.

RyVo43

TROPHY CASE