One of the most common deckbuilding mistakes Commander players make is not including enough interaction. With so many fun, powerful cards vying for slots in the 99 nowadays, cards that disrupt your opponents, rather than furthering your own goals, often come across as boring and inessential. This is especially true when it comes to graveyard hate, since it can often seem too situational on the surface.
These days, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Graveyard decks are everywhere in Commander, and they’re often some of the most dangerous lists around, capable of insta-kill combos or brutal creature reanimation plays. To help stem this wicked MTG tide, we’ve assembled some top-tier budget graveyard hate options that cost less than $1 each.
White | Ashes Of The Abhorrent
Ashes of the Abhorrent is a true multi-tool MTG hate card. For just two mana, this enchantment provides an answer to several popular graveyard strategies, and protects you against combos in the bargain.
For starters, shutting off abilities and casting from the graveyard is massive in certain matchups. Many classic graveyard Commanders, like Muldrotha, the Gravetide and Slimefoot and Squee, can’t function at all with this in play. It also shuts down graveyard loop combos that utilize cards like Gravecrawler and Underworld Breach, which are common even outside of dedicated graveyard decks.
On top of that, the lifegain ability here is much more relevant than it looks. Against any Aristocrats deck, this will gain you a ton of life as they carry out their sacrifice shenanigans. It’ll also save you from death by Blood Artist, if they get an infinite loop going. While not every Aristocrats deck is also a graveyard deck, the two often go hand in hand, making this a hugely relevant bit of overlap. At just $0.63 a copy right now, Ashes of the Abhorrent is a fine addition to your anti-graveyard arsenal.
Black | Author Of Shadows
When it comes to graveyard decks, the best strategy is usually just to exile everything they’ve been stocking up. Plays like this are difficult to respond to and often leave the graveyard player with few options and a long road to recovery ahead. Author of Shadows is a fantastic option for this kind of effect, and very affordable at just $0.39.
Getting to hit all of your opponents’ graveyards while ignoring your own is big here. This being pasted on to a creature as an entry effect opens up opportunities to repeat the effect, too. Sacrificing and bringing Author of Shadows back with Reanimate can let you repeatedly exile graveyards. In Orzhov decks, blink effects like Emiel, the Blessed can accomplish this even easier.
Author of Shadows also gives you a nice bit of card advantage, to boot. You can pick anything it exiles to essentially add to your hand for the rest of the game, and you can branch outside of your colors thanks to the fixing, too. This is at its best in decks with a dedicated mill element, like Phenax, God of Deception, to maximize your options. That said, graveyards tend to fill up naturally in most games, so Author of Shadows will almost always snag something nice for you.
Red | Weathered Runestone
Not every color has fantastic options in the graveyard hate department. It’s a real problem area for red in particular, with pretty much no viable picks available. For that reason, Mono-Red decks looking for budget graveyard hate options in MTG Commander will want to turn to colorless cards instead.
In this department, Weathered Runestone is probably the prime pick. While it’s in play, nonland permanents can’t enter from graveyards at all, which makes cards like Reanimate and Necromancy useless. It also prevents casting from graveyards, too, which stops Gravecrawler, while incidentally shutting down mechanics like Flashback and Harmonize.
As an added bonus, Weathered Runestone also prevents cards from entering via the library, which stops a lot of popular green tutors, like Eldritch Evolution and Birthing Pod. This card casts a surprisingly wide net across common strategies, making it a fantastic pickup at just $0.26.
Green | Primal Command
Green has a nice range of graveyard hate options available, but for MTG players on a budget, Primal Command is undoubtedly the best. While five mana is steep, you get a ton of different options here, which can help you out against far more than just graveyard decks.
Getting to shuffle away a player’s graveyard wholesale is great for a start, since that pretty much stops any graveyard strategy in its tracks. While it’s not quite as good as exiling generally, it has the added flexibility of being able to help you out in a pinch. If you’re close to decking out for whatever reason, you can get back in the game by shuffling your own graveyard back in.
As for the other options, they’re almost all bangers. While you’ll rarely ever use the Lifegain one, removing any non-creature permanent is fantastic. This excels at hitting multiple core engines to common graveyard strategies, like Phyrexian Altar or Grave Pact. If you need to stay ahead of graveyard decks, the tutor mode can help you find additional hate like Loaming Shaman or Boggart Trawler, to help keep them down. You can also use these abilities to further your own plan, too, which gives Primal Command a ton of play for a $0.46 card.
Blue | Bazaar Of Wonders
Blue, like red, isn’t exactly blessed in the graveyard hate department. It does have one interesting gem, however, in the forgotten Reserved List curio Bazaar of Wonders. It’s rare to see a Reserved List card selling for $0.99 near mint, and it’s even rarer to see one with an effect like this.
At first, Bazaar of Wonders is just an ‘exile all graveyards’ effect for five mana. That’s far too much by the usual standards, especially since it hits your own graveyard, too. Fortunately, the second ability here salvages things. While Bazaar is in play, spells that share names with cards in graveyards or in play are automatically countered. This sounds useless, but it can be surprisingly relevant in high-power games, where the same staples show up in all sorts of decks.
Even if they don’t, you can pull off a nasty combo with Bazaar and Spy Kit. Slap this on a creature you control, and every nonlegendary creature played afterwards will be countered. This affects your creatures as well, but if you can clear the board before you put this combo out, you can fully lock your opponents out of playing creatures. As upsides on a graveyard hate piece go, this is up there with the best of them.
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