Commander: Ideas for Five-Color Decks

When it comes to our dear Commander, we have explicit rules that limit our card choices; the famous color identity. This aspect present in each commander limits the different cards that we can put in our decks, to balance and diversify the game, preventing situations in which Mono Blue decks run Dimir Signet to have access to cards like Vampiric Tutor and Imperial Seal.

Therefore, the idea of playing without using any color or, on the contrary, with all the colors available in the game, causes a certain greed among players. Either you are a complete newbie who is totally envisioned by the idea and decide to do your best to put it into practice, or you are a player with some experience who looks and decides, “This is my time to make this happen.”

Objectively evaluating the best commanders of a certain color or combination is not a viable task. When you, for example, compare your favorite soft drinks, it's a fair comparison. Now, comparing them with water, wine and juices just because they are drinks, makes much of this task based on personal tastes and comparisons that do not fit all members of that category.

The same goes for commanders. It's easy to compare which commanders are better for Burn or Control. But if both the best commanders of these archetypes are the same identity, which of the two would be the best objectively? It depends a lot on personal taste and the mental gymnastics that are done when justifying.

In today's article, we won't make a Ranking of the best five-color commanders, but rather, we'll discuss the funniest, coolest and most fantastic commanders to brighten up your tables.

I HATE decks with this particular Jodah. Every variation of him is the same. Find a way to get five colors of mana, and pay all five to play up ten-mana atrocities like Omniscience and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger. End. Its users even try to justify themselves by saying that they can make countless decks with the various high-cost cards, but at the end of the day, it's always Omniscience and Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger.

I, personally, hate Jodah, Archmage Eternal decks. Other players usually love it, and Commander is all about doing things because you want to and enjoy them, not because someone who writes articles or won some big championship says so.

Jodah gives the player a sense of great power, allowing them to play their Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, and other things, for half the cost of the card. Sometimes simply tapping a Timeless Lotus is enough to put you at a great advantage, and that's what enchants many, seeing your mana yielding in the mage's hands is addictive, and maybe, that's precisely what you want.

Slivers are super-powered little creatures from the world of Magic. In the game's story, they are creatures that share a mind and when they are all together they share skills, which is translated into cards with effects such as "All Slivers in play have Flying", for example.

Thus, it is not surprising that the tribe wins people over for the sense of “army” they evoke. Each one of these pointy worms, when on the field, grants bonuses to themselves and their siblings, leaving their field well stocked and winning the hearts of the players for grandeur. Lucky for us, there isn't just one good five-color commander for Sliver decks, but five. Or six if we count the Morophon, the Boundless.

This wide range of options allows us to make many different lists based on the tribe. For example, Sliver Legion is a much more focused list on aggressive builds, while The First Sliver creates multiple possibilities for using the Cascade mechanic, filling up your board quickly.

My favorite is Sliver Overlord for its ability to tutor the right Sliver you need that turn or take control of an opposing Sliver, or even take back your Sliver that has been taken control of. Overlord may not grow the battlefield as fast as others, but it is capable of picking up all the specific cards you need to defeat your opponents.

As much as Esika, God of the Tree is a cool commander, the real gold is on her other side, The Prismatic Bridge, an enchantment capable of putting planeswalkers and hefty creatures in play at the start of your turn. From this, a flood of good ideas becomes available, the most popular being the making of a Super Friends deck or a deck focused on legendary creatures, since this creature type also takes advantage of the commander's front.

It is also possible to make a God tribal with Theros' pantheon and their ability to be enchantments during most of the game, bringing them with this type to the battlefield. As well as the gods of Amonkhet, such as The Scarab God, which can be put into the game and come back from the graveyard as many times as necessary from this acceleration. And of course, you'll want to use The World Tree in this deck, to allow you to get as many of them on the field as you can at once.

Personally, I prefer her to Jodah because it only works for creatures and planeswalkers and these need to be revealed from the deck, so that, unless you have scry, this commander creates surprising situations for everyone at the table, and even manages to tinker a little with the player's luck.

This here is a build that is not only fun, but also highly customizable. With its entry into the battlefield, Niv-Mizzet Reborn allows you to look at cards from the top of the deck and add cards of different combinations of two colors to your hand.

You will, of course, want to have cards of all ten combinations in your deck, avoiding artifacts and cards of one color or three or more. It allows dozens of different builds. The player can choose to make a build as optimized as possible, with only the best cards of each combination, aiming only at victory. Or create a list based only on cards from Ravnica guilds, which always comes with the watermark of the guild they belong to, maybe even putting complete cycles of cards, such as Steam Vents and the other Shocklands, for example. But there is one idea that, for me, stands out among them and is most likely how I would build my deck:

A really fun Niv-Mizzet Reborn deck, for me, has two parts. A core, i.e. several cards that need to be there for the deck to work, such as lands, mana artifacts and a few other important cards, comprising just under 60 cards. The other part of the deck would come from a stack of 100 cards of two colors, which would be drawn through a shuffle or something, which when finished would provide these other 40 cards semi-randomly to your deck, bringing total unpredictability to your games. . This was an idea I saw being discussed with a Mayael the Anima deck, but I think it would fit perfectly with this one.

As this list is entirely personal and molds itself with the player's favorites, instead of it I will put another one from the commander, to bring ideas and encourage the imagination of the players.

Better than a deck that allows you to use the five colors two by two, is to have a deck that benefits from cards that have all five at the same time. Jared Carthalion allows the player to use the most exotic cards in the game, all at the same time, in addition to their supports, many of which are available in the character's own pre-constructed deck.

All the planeswalker's abilities are focused on generating five-color tokens or extracting as much value as possible from cards with all colors, permanent or not, through effects that use relatively little loyalty and seek to be recursive for this commander. The fact that he's a Planeswalker also makes it harder to remove him from the table.

Forming the best strategy to use these cards is a fascinating challenge, and can bring to your commander tables one more ingredient for you to break your head. Using cards like Fallaji Wayfarer and Transguild Courier it is possible to meet the requirements of multicolored cards without having all five colors, or even five mana, available. Also, cards like Scion of Draco fit perfectly in the deck too, greatly contributing to the quality of your board.

Jared Carthalion is undoubtedly a commander that will only get better as card designs allow themselves to experiment more with greater amounts of color in decks.

In this article, some of the coolest five-color commanders in the game were gathered. Obviously, it would not be possible to place all those with this color identity in a single article, leaving a new version of it proposed for the future, when we have more commanders, cards and news capable of allowing new lists in the format.

What did you think? Have you played with any of these decks? Do you like five-color commanders? Leave your opinion in the comments!