Very few MTG cards truly stop an opponent from playing Magic: The Gathering. Select cards are certainly capable of shutting down specific strategies, but for the most part, shutting down a wide range of decks on a budget isn’t a possibility.
All of that said, if you want to play the villain and do this, Possessed Portal, can stop the average Commander game plan. Better yet, with some careful deckbuilding, making this card work to your advantage isn’t too difficult.
MTG Possessed Portal
For a whopping eight mana, Possessed Portal turns a casual game of Commander on its head. Preventing any form of card draw means that players will no longer be able to draw answers to this artifact or continue the game in a meaningful way. Eventually, everyone at the table will have no choice but to start sacrificing permanents to the portal. Of course, that includes you, so you’ll need to come with a plan.
The most straightforward way to use Possessed Portal is to include it in a deck that can generate a lot of tokens repetitively. A wide variety of different Commanders, like Nath of the Guilt Leaf, Queen Merchesa, and Prossh, Skyraider of Kher can achieve this. By continually creating tokens you’ll have plenty of sacrifice fodder to feed into Possessed Portal. Nath will even drain your opponent’s resources quicker, giving them less time to find a way out of the situation. If you need more tokens, creatures like Ophiomancer, Tendershoot Dryad, and Illustrous Wanderglyph can create enough to pay for Possessed Portal on their own.
Outside of creating tokens to outlast Possessed Portal, you can also use cards that can replay things from your graveyard. With Muldrotha, the Gravetide, for example, you can repeatedly replay the cards that you sacrifice. You can even sacrifice the Portal before your turn starts to draw cards, so long as you’re ok with spending eight mana to recast it.
Adding Cards to Your Hand Without Drawing Them
If you’re not interested in trying to outlast your opponents, it’s also possible to get around Possessed Portal’s card draw denial. Thanks to the evolution of MTG in general, there are now tons of ways to gain resources without actually drawing cards.
Impulse Drawing is the most straightforward of these, allowing you to exile cards that can be played for a limited time. Cards that repeatedly Impulse Draw, like Outpost Siege, and Chandra, Torch of Defiance, won’t be stopped by Possessed Portal. This makes Eruth, Tormented Prophet a particularly nasty Commander to use Possessed Portal with.
Some recent card advantage tools just add cards to your hand from the deck. The ever-popular Stock Up, Dig Through Time, and Consult the Star Charts all play into this strategy. Other card draw replacement effects, like Abundance, can also bypass Planar Portal.
If you still can’t find enough alternative draw cards to make this plan consistent, you can also bypass Possessed Portal by temporarily getting rid of it. Blink effects, like Abuelo, Ancestral Echo, and Guardian of Ghirapur can give you a window to draw some cards, getting ahead of your locked-down opponents.
Cheating in the Portal for Cheap
Outside of playing around Possessed Portal’s downsides, the only thing left to be concerned about is the card’s mana value. This card will be devastating whenever it comes into play, but if you can cheat Possessed Portal in early, a lack of resources will make dealing with it significantly harder.
Surprisingly, there are a lot of Commanders who help fix this. Arcum Dagsson and Daretti, Scrap Savant, for example, can both cheat in Possessed Portal effortlessly. Other support cards in the 99, like Trash for Treasure, can also help you shut the game down extremely quickly.
With many obvious ways to make Possessed Portal work for you, there’s little stopping players from turning Commander on its head with it. Better yet, despite only having one 22-year-old printing, the card only goes for about $1.50 on TCGplayer, making it rather affordable. This is likely in part due to players being unaware of Possessed Portal, with only about 3000 decks utilizing it on EDHREC.
All of that said, there is one reason why some MTG players may be hesitant to play Possessed Portal: it simply isn’t that much fun. Inverting the expectations of a Commander game is interesting the first time it happens, but staring at one player while no one else can do anything is typically something Commander players try to avoid. Nonetheless, pulling out Possessed Portal on occasion can create interesting play experiences that your friends haven’t seen before.
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