Summary
Commander has just about the entireMagic: The Gatheringcardpool to work with, and yet there are some inevitable truths of any well-rounded casual Commander deck. One such truth is the fact that you must have some amount of interaction, whether that’s a glut ofsingle-target removal spells, or a handful of board wipes to reset the battlefield.
Board wipes in particular have, rightly or wrongly, received some flack in the community for leading to stale, prolonged games. Cards like Blasphemous Act and Farewell are popular for a reason, but board wipes don’t have to be so universally punishing all the time. In fact, some of the best board wipes are the ones that only affect your opponents, leaving you in a winning position.
10Wash Out
Takes Some Tricky Maneuvering
Turning Wash Out into an actual one-sided board wipe requires some finesse. You ideally want to focus your deck around permanents of a single color, and you need to get a little bit lucky that your opponents aren’t overlapping too much.
That level of variance means that Wash Out will sometimes completely trounce a mono-colored opponent, or sometimes be a complete wash against an opponent with the exact same color of permanents as you. If you’re exceptionally diligent, you can line it up to bounce permanents from all your opponents at once without disrupting your own board at all.
9Winds Of Rath
A True Rath Of God
Aura-based decksface a bit of a paradox in Commander. You need to load up your creatures with auras, but you still probably want a few board wipes as emergency reset buttons if your opponents get out of hand. However, a board wipe can undo so much of your own progress.
Winds of Rath is the perfect solution to this problem. It preserves your enchanted creatures and probably wipes out all the rest. That not only secures a leading position in the game, but often opens up attacks with your buffed up creatures that very same turn.
8Scourge Of Fleets
Either Fair, Or Fairly Annoying
Scourge of Fleets can be quite annoying to play against. By the time you’re casting a seven-mana creature, you should have enough Islands in play that Scourgebounces the majority of opposing creatures. It checks toughness too, so high-power creatures aren’t necessarily safe either.
Where Scourge gets irritating is when its controller hasblink effectsorclones that can copy it, making it very difficult for their opponents to maintain a board of creatures. Of course, Scourge has no built-in protection, so it’s an easy combo to disrupt if you’re on the receiving end.
7Overwhelming Forces
An Easy Way To Make An Enemy
Overwhelming Forces had a little resurgence after its affordable reprinting on theOutlaws of Thunder Junctionbonus sheet. It’s always been a pretty backbreaking card, at least for the targeted opponent, but it’s also been somewhat obscureandpricey.
This one-sided board wipe does come with a bit of a weighty downside. You’re going to make a definite enemy of at least the person you targeted with this, plus the cards you draw off of it should attract the attention of the rest of the table. Plan around that, because resolving this card probably makes you the archenemy.
6Volcanic Vision
Expensive, But Explosive
Spellslinger decks have no shortage of board wipes at their disposal, even hyper-specific ones like Immolating Gyre and Volcanic Vision. The latter costs seven mana, but it also picks up a spell out of your graveyard for later use.
Volcanic Vision incentivizes you to play a few expensive instants or sorceries in your deck, but you can work around that by running potent spells with cost reduction, like Dig Through Time or Treasure Cruise. These rarely cost more than a couple mana to cast, but still count as eight-mana spells for the purposes of Volcanic Vision.
5In Garruk’s Wake
A Relic Of The Past, Still Holding On
In Garruk’s Wake was oncea hallmark Commander staple, back in an era when Commander matches were still very long, grindy, and amenable to casting nine-mana spells. That’s not the default for casual Commander games anymore, which means In Garruk’s Wake isn’t as commonplace as it once was.
Even though modern Commander’s somewhat hostile towards expensive sorceries, there are still plenty of decks interested in a mass sweeper that leaves your board intact. Some decks are designed to cheat out expensive spells, andTreasure decks can reliably generate the mananeeded to cast a spell this expensive.
4Kindred Dominance
Where Do Your Allegiances Lie?
Kindred Dominance requires you meet the bar of being a typal deck before it’s really a consideration, but meet that bar and you’ve got a great asymmetrical board wipe on your hands. It’s a low bar to meet too, considering how popular typal decks are in Commander.
Your opponents will occasionally control creatures that line up with the creature type you’re going to name, but the spell should almost always work out in your favor. If nothing else, you can name a creature type that no one controls and wipe the entire board.
3Massacre Wurm
Token Decks Beware
There’s a category of cards in Magic that give creatures -2/-2, colloquially nicknamed ‘Infests’ based on the Onslaught card of the same name. They’re better described as ‘mini-sweepers,’ since they can’t reliably kill larger creatures. Still, sweeping away smaller creatures is sometimes all you need to do.
Massacre Wurm is an Infest stapled to a large creature that also punishes your opponents for losing creatures. Token decks live in fear of this Wurm, since it can come down, wipe away theirarmy of little token creatures, and sometimes even close out the game all at once.
2Delayed Blast Fireball
Worth The Delay
Delayed Blast Fireball is a lesson in reading cards carefully. At face value, this looks likea Foretell cardthat costs a small fortune to cast, dealing five damage to each opponent and their creatures. Technically, that’s all true, but there’s more going on beneath the surface.
The real trick is finding a way to cast this spell from exilewithoutForetelling it first. That’s pretty easy to do, since cast-from-exile cards arered’s primary source of card advantage. However, you can also use mechanics likeCascadeandDiscoverto flip into Delayed Blast Fireball for its full effect.
1Cyclonic Rift
Blue’s Best Boardwipe, Period
The best one-sided boardwipe.The best overload spell. The best bounce spell. Cyclonic Rift tops so many categories of cards in Commander and is responsible for winning just as many games as it is for stopping other players from winning. It’s been a top-tier card since the dawn of the format.
Rift’s pedigree as one of Commander’s best sweepers is well-deserved. It catches all permanent types, operates at instant speed, leaves your own boardstate untouched, and even has the two-mana mode of being a single-target removal spell if need be.
