For the many, many players who enjoy Commander as their primary Magic: The Gathering format, this week has been an eventful one. Tuesday’s big Weekly MTG update switched up the brackets and the Game Changers list, for a start. Wizards also hinted at more potential changes to come, including some pretty impactful bans, and the addition of another bracket. Perhaps the most interesting of these potential changes, however, is a shift to how hybrid mana works in the MTG Commander format.
If this proposed change goes ahead, hybrid mana cards will become playable in decks that use only one of their colors. Since the mechanic was designed as an either/or for other formats, this makes perfect sense for Commander. It would be a huge shake-up for the format, mind you, with nearly 500 cards gaining a ton of flexibility overnight. To help you prepare for the possibility of such a seismic change, we’ve decided to break down the best hybrid mana cards for a hypothetical post-change MTG Commander format.
Honorable Mention | Deathrite Shaman
This list is primarily intended to highlight the best hybrid mana cards for MTG Commander after the potential rules change. We’d be remiss not to mention the obvious best hybrid mana card overall, mind you.
Deathrite Shaman is a card so good that it’s banned in both Modern and Legacy to this day. With a steady stream of lands in graveyards, it’s like a more resilient Birds of Paradise at a base level. On top of that, it also has two additional modes, letting you snipe your opponents’ graveyards while generating advantage.
Deathrite Shaman is often referred to as a “one-mana planeswalker” due to this incredibly flexibility. While it’s not as broken in Commander as it is in other formats, since not everyone there runs Fetchlands, it is still one of the best mana dorks available. Commander deckbuilding is all about maximizing the value in each card slot, and Deathrite Shaman serves as ramp and graveyard hate in one. For just one mana, you really can’t do much better.
Unfortunately, since it has both a green and a black mana symbol in its text box, Deathrite Shaman won’t be playable in Mono-Black or Mono-Green even if the proposed change goes through. Given how powerful the card can be, this may be a good thing, mind you.
5 | Ashiok, Dream Render
Ashiok, Dream Render, appropriately enough, is the definition of a sleeper card in Commander. While it’s not a big flashy win condition, it is a fantastic tech card that shuts down a lot of the most common shenanigans in the format.
For starters, it’s one of the few options any color has to stop tutor effects. Cards like Opposition Agent and Leonin Arbiter can do so as well, but these alternatives are almost all creatures. Ashiok is a more resilient path to the same effect, which makes it highly valuable, especially in higher-bracket pods where tutors are more common.
Ashiok is also a stellar graveyard hate piece. Getting to exile all of your opponents’ graveyards at once is rare, especially without exiling your own in the bargain. Ashiok lets you do so up to five times, which is more than enough to take heavily graveyard-dependent decks out of the game.
While Mono-Black decks have access to a lot of top-tier graveyard hate, including the inimitable Dauthi Voidwalker, Mono-Blue decks, or blue decks without black in their identity, aren’t quite so lucky. If the hybrid mana rules change comes into effect, Ashiok will become a fantastic option for such decks overnight, particularly those like Bruvac the Grandiloquent that pursue a Mill strategy.
4 | Beseech The Queen
Beseech the Queen is definitely one of the most controversial cards from the hybrid mana update discussion so far. Allowing cards to be played in mono-colored decks is one thing, but in this case any deck could play Beseech after the change, since it’s a hybrid black/colorless card.
This doesn’t sound like much of an issue at first. In non-black decks this would just be a horrendously clunky six-mana tutor, right? Well, there’s actually nothing in the Commander rules that says you can’t generate mana outside of your Commander’s identity, so lands like City of Brass, and especially Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth, will let you cast this for three in any deck.
Even without those lands, it’s easy to make three black mana with Treasures these days. This leaves Beseech the Queen as a (mostly) unconditional tutor for any color, which is potentially very scary indeed. Other colors do have access to tutors, of course, but they tend to be more specialized than black’s. There’s been early discussion about this card’s potential in the likes of Magda, Brazen Outlaw in cEDH, and I think its potential goes far beyond that.
Concerns about the sanctity of the color pie aside, Beseech the Queen would definitely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the proposed hybrid mana change.
3 | Manamorphose
While Commander was once the kind of format where you wouldn’t have dreamed of running an efficient tool like Manamorphose, those days are far behind us. Now, a ‘free’ draw that also fixes your mana perfectly is a very useful card in all manner of decks.
Naturally, Manamorphose does a ton of work in Combo lists, whether it’s upping your Storm count or just digging you through your deck for free. It’s also great in Spellslinger strategies, those that care about casting a specific number of spells each turn, and weird edge decks like Flubs, the Fool. The card has a ton of homes, in other words, and it’s not just an extender for combos as it is in constructed formats.
With the proposed change, Manamorphose would easily become one of the best hybrid mana cards in MTG Commander. For red decks without green, the color fixing it offers is massive. Green is the best fixing color by far, so decks without it would love access to something like this. Green decks without red have less to gain, especially since red is one of the core combo colors. That said, I’m sure a ton of aggressively-minded green lists would find a home for it somewhere.
2 | Vexing Shusher
A lot of the best hybrid mana cards in MTG Commander are tech cards, and Vexing Shusher may be the very best among them. This is an uncounterable creature that can also make your other spells uncounterable, making it ideal protection for any kind of combo deck. Even in fair strategies, getting to force your creatures through is a huge advantage to have.
Mistrise Village got a ton of hype when it dropped back in Tarki: Dragonstorm, but Shusher arguably does the same job better. Being able to protect multiple spells per turn is a big plus. Also, Village is a blue card, which has plenty of ways to deal with countermagic already. Green and red struggle a lot more with that, so giving them access to the effect is definitely more impactful.
With the hybrid mana change, the number of decks that can run this incredible protection piece will skyrocket. I can easily see it showing up in all manner of high-tier decks, especially at the cEDH level. Commanders like Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy and Vivi Ornitier would love access to a tool like this, for example. Throw in the incredibly relevant Goblin type line, and even lower-bracket decks like Krenko, Mob Boss might give it a try. Vexing Shusher honestly feels pretty underrated as-is, but with the hybrid mana change, it’d become another beast entirely.
1 | Lurrus Of The Dream Den
While Lurrus of the Dream Den gets to be the face of this final entry, due to its overall infamy, we’re really talking about the full cycle of Companions here. That’s with the exception of Jegantha, the Wellspring, of course, since its activated ability means it’d still be restricted to five-color decks in Commander post-change. Lutri, the Spellchaser is also exempt from this discussion, since it remains banned in the format.
Companions are unique in that they can be run in your deck or as an add-on to it, so they already have a lot more options than most cards. With the proposed hybrid mana change, however, they’d become even more flexible. A difficulty these cards have is finding homes as Companions due to their specific deckbuilding requirements, but halving their color requirements would really help with that.
Just imagine an aggressive Winota, Joiner of Forces deck with Lurrus as a Companion, for example, or a Meren of Clan Nel Toth Reanimator deck with Gyruda, Doom of Depths tagging along for the ride. The possibilities are endless, which is what makes this cycle so exciting in a hypothetical post-change world. There’s been some talk about bringing Companion back recently, and the difficulties therein. With the hybrid mana change, I think the Companions would get a whole new lease of life in Commander.
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