The Enemy of My Enemy Is a Fool: The Mid-Power Commander Control Playbook

Consider this my manifesto.

You’ve read the title and you have questions. This is normal. Let us begin with some definitions and explanations

Commander is a format of Magic: the Gathering. If you’re reading this, you probably know that, but entertain me for a moment. In Commander, more than two players compete with each other to be the last one standing, piloting 100-card decks wherein no more than a single copy is allowed of any given card (except for Basic Lands). Players begin at 40 life, and with the exception of a small, hotly debated ban list, every card that has ever been printed is allowed.

The typical Commander game contains four players, and savvy players (like myself) will construct their decks specifically to perform their best when facing exactly three opponents. This is an important point to make. In practice, many Commander games have different numbers of players, but four should be regarded as the golden standard, the “correct” way to play the format.

Commander is a casual format. What this actually means depends on who you ask, and is again, hotly debated. Commander players like to fight, and in practice I am doing the same here, though far more eloquently and in much greater detail than the average chump at your LGS (local game store). How I choose to interpret this designation is that Commander is the spiritual inheritor to so-called “kitchen table Magic”; it is a format played as a vehicle for social interaction — an excuse to hang out — and played with whichever cards each person has access to and is excited about.

For the most part, this actually works. Even though the secondary market causes card accessibility to depend heavily upon access to money, most people are conscious of their power levels and more interested in a fair game than in stomping a bunch of preconstructed decks right out of the pack with their hyper-tuned infinite combat step combo. Sometimes, it doesn’t work. That’s to be expected. It’s the principle that matters.

Because Commander is a casual format, it is also the only format where the “competitive” variant is considered a variant. CEDH is a label that designates a specific subset of Commander metagames characterised by unrestricted access to the most powerful cards in the game and the intent to use these to win as efficiently as possible. CEDH is a (set of) metagame(s). This is also important. A “casual” deck has the potential to stomp on CEDH decks, because its strategies are likely things the CEDH decks are not built to deal with. Keep that in mind as we move into the discussion of power level.

The Commander community has been relentlessly trying to find a way to consistently evaluate the relative power levels of decks in order to ensure fair matches. So far, it has consistently failed. You could (and I choose to) read this in an optimistic way, and see it as heartening that Commander players are so dedicated to being nice to each other. A more cynical approach would surely be to build the strongest deck you can and tell people to build better decks if they don’t want to watch passively as you assemble an unstoppable engine. I am also, to some extent, sympathetic to this view, but not as it relates to the fiction of power levels.

Most commonly, power level is presented on a 1–10 scale, though the exact boundaries and measuring points of this scale vary greatly. That’s also why it’s often such a bad tool. The most common interpretation I’ve heard is that CEDH decks invariably occupy the 10, while the 1 is reserved for decks that are so bad they fall over themselves and sabotage their own game plans. I dislike this for many reasons, but most importantly because it includes a lot of data points that don’t need to be included. We can trim the scale. When I use this scale, which is extremely rare, and mostly to make a point, 1 represents an unaltered preconstructed deck, which I’d consider the entry point to the format. CEDH occupies the top three spots, 8 through 10, with 10 being the most dominant decks in the meta, 9 representing the more marginal decks, and 8 being representative of most experimental CEDH brews. I play a Thalia and the Gitrog Monster CEDH deck that I would place firmly at 8.

With this version of the scale in mind, let us look at the 5–6 power levels. This is where the great bad decks exist. These are decks that are very much not attempting to win as efficiently as possible, they’re built around fun ideas and concepts the player wants to express, but they’re tuned to serve this (suboptimal) strategy as optimally as possible, often within budget constraints. There are no hard rules for what decks fit here, but I would say as a rule of thumb, most players’ long term, tuned and optimised decks, most people’s favourite decks, will fit in here. This is my “mid-power commander” and it is what this entire thing is about.

Finally, let’s establish what control is. Control is considered one of the three basic deck archetypes, alongside aggro and combo. In Commander, this sort of falls apart. In lower power, every deck is an aggro deck (seeking to win through combat damage), and in CEDH, every deck is a combo deck. This is a gross oversimplification, but I am nothing if not gross and overly simple. Control generally takes the form of stax decks, which seek to restrict players’ options by playing cards that establish rules and limitations. Here, my definition of a control deck is a deck whose game plan and plan for victory is to first prevent all the other players from winning. So now that’s out of the way, let us actually look at the real details.

Rule #1: You can’t control a 4-player free-for-all game

You just can’t. It’s impossible to play control in Commander and you shouldn’t do it.

Looking more closely at the realities of the game, we can see that the resource game is always against us. In a 1v1 game of Magic, the control deck has a massive advantage, which is that every time it trades one of its cards for stopping one of its opponents’ cards, it has achieved net neutral value while slowing the game down. The control deck wants a slow game, because that will allow them to deploy their much stronger late game engines, and so trading one for one is almost always a win for control.

In Commander, you never trade one for one. It may look like it; spend one counterspell to counter one big dragon. But in actuality, there are now two players who did not spend a card at all in this interaction, and you have taken a net loss in relation to them. Let’s do some shoddy math. Opponent A casts a spell, you counter it. You take a -1 to relative card advantage, but opponent A loses a card, giving you a +1 to relative card advantage. That’s neutral. Then you factor in each of the other two opponents, each giving you a -1 to relative card advantage by not having spent any cards. You are now at a total of -2. Not good!

So what do you do? You do exactly what I said; you don’t play control. Instead of attempting to stop your opponents from building their plans, you allow them to get out their ramp, their early pieces, their weaker engines. You allow them to start swinging, maybe even get one or two commanders online. At the same time, you are also building. Not as aggressively as them, but you’re doing something. You’re also accumulating interaction cards in your hand for the right moment.

The goal is to deny your opponents access to their mid game strategies and more powerful engines. You basically allow them an early game, and then if everything goes right, you trap them in that early game. To do this, you need a solid grasp of the format you’re playing, the popular strategies, and the typical paths to victory for each of the commanders you’re facing. Playing control is all about knowing the other player’s deck better than they do.

Rule #2: Don’t counter setup, counter payoff

Countering a tutor or a card draw spell is almost always the wrong choice. Once again, this is because the value calculation is off.

Say your opponent casts an Enlightened Tutor in your end step. You counter it. They move to their turn, play a Swamp, and tap out to cast Liliana, Dreadhorde General. You don’t have the mana to counter this. In the alternative scenario, you let their Enlightened Tutor resolve and watch as they put Bolas’ Citadel on top of their library. The turn passes to them, they play a Swamp and attempt to cast the citadel. You counter it. They pass their turn, tapped out.

In the first scenario, you stopped the tutor, trading card for card, but left the player able to do something else with their turn. In the second, you took two cards out of their deck, made them tap out and effectively skip a turn. A smart player may tutor for something that can’t be countered, in order to trick you, but you shouldn’t let this possibility tempt you into spending your counterspells. Let your opponents damn themselves, let them reveal their entire plan, and make them play into the counterspell they fully expect you to have.

The same basic principle goes for card draw. I generally choose not to counter any draw spell that draws three or fewer cards, because chances are, only one out of those three cards is actually something I’d want to stop them from playing in the first place, and that is what I’d rather do. Spells that draw four or more cards, I will often consider countering, because the chances that they draw two or more things that I don’t want to see played go up.

Rule #3: Kill the group hug player

At the very least, give them a stern talking-to.

I always tell people that group hug decks are my least favourite decks to play against. The reason for this is simple, and comes down to exactly the same value calculation and fake math I’ve been using so far. In a 1v1 game, an effect that makes each player draw a card gives you +1 relative card advantage from drawing a card, then adds -1 to that from your opponent drawing a card. The result is 0 (ignoring the -1 if you played the card or +1 if your opponent played it; we’re assuming the effect came from nowhere). In a 4-player game, you get +1, then you get -1 for each of your three opponents. The result is -2, the equivalent of if an effect in a 1v1 game made your opponent draw three while you draw one.

With three opponents (and never forget, they are all your opponents, always), any symmetrical positive effect will collectively benefit your opponents three times as much as it benefits you. Do not play effects with symmetrical upside, and if you see them being played, prioritise getting rid of them.

Now, this is where I play devil’s advocate and tell you that there are some exceptions, Selvala, Explorer Returned being a big one. The key here is that the benefit she provides you, and you only, can in the right deck far outpace the -2 to relative card advantage when you activate her.

On the flipside of this point, this means that any symmetrical negative effects are a net gain for you. This is the principle stax decks are built around, and it’s why stax is the go-to control deck, especially in higher power Commander. Stax pieces, that is, effects that provide an equal, symmetrical downside to all players, are three times as bad for your opponents (collectively) as they are for you. So familiarise yourself with the most common stax strategies, learn to love them, and incorporate a few key pieces, even if you lean towards a more traditional counterspell strategy.

Rule #4: Make your opponents do the job for you

Another little fact about me is I groan every time someone says the word “politics” at a Commander game. That’s not because I’m averse to political discussion, in fact, if they wanted to discuss the value of Marx’s economic theories in a post-industrial economy, I’d be happy to join in. Sadly, that’s not usually what they want.

In a Commander context, “politics” usually means making a really poor game decision because another player promised you a shiny little trinket. It’s never the right choice to leave another player’s game-winning engine alone, and it doesn’t become any more the right choice just because they said they’ll destroy your commander if you do, and they’ll let you draw a card with their Loran of the Third Path if you don’t.

However, I want you to lean into the idea of Commander politics, if not exactly the practice of it. This is where you build into your deck a little bit of a pillowfort strategy. Pillowfort decks are dreadfully boring decks that use effects like Ghostly Prison and Privileged Position to make themselves impossible to interact with, and then they sort of just sit there until everyone’s tired of their shit and no one wants to play any more. I don’t want you to do that, but I want you to adopt some of their principles. The goal is to make yourself consistently the least appealing target for anything threatening.

You see, sometimes, you don’t even have to use counterspells or removal for a big threat. Sometimes, it’s enough to be the least appealing target. One of my favourite little tricks is to make sure your opponents know you’ve got an effect somewhere that prevents combat damage, especially a repeatable one. By making yourself unappealing to attack, maybe even impossible to attack, your opponents will have to put that pain elsewhere. And since your opponents are also each others’ opponents, it suddenly becomes a lot more important for them to deal with those threats.

Sit back, relax, deal with only the things that are a direct problem for you, and only at the moment they become a problem for you, and let your opponents use up all their removal spells in the process.

Rule #5: Stop playing Rhystic Study

This section will be short. It will be controversial.

Rhystic Study is not a card draw spell. If Rhystic Study is a card draw spell when you play it, then your opponents are making enormous mistakes. Rhystic Study is a great card and you should play it, but you should not play it as a card draw effect. The intent of this section is to provide an example for a broader point: know what your cards actually do. In a theoretically perfect game, you draw zero, maybe one card off Rhystic Study (because someone pulled removal for it but couldn’t afford to pay the tax when casting it). It’s a tax card that slows down the game, which is good and desirable for you as a control player, but it’s not card draw. Include it in your deck because it is a great tax effect. Do not include it to draw cards.

Rule #6: You are not a counterspell deck

Control has certain associations, and the most obvious of them is counterspells. The average casual player hears control and thinks of a deck that says no to everything until there’s nothing left to do. You’re not that deck.

Counterspells are great and they play an important role in all sorts of Commander decks, especially control decks. You do want a certain volume of them. However, they’re not very versatile, and versatility is key to success for a control deck in Commander. While I made a previous point about knowing how your opponent’s deck functions, it’s not possible to actually, truly know exactly how each deck works and Force of Will your way through their key cards. There’s too much diversity and variance for that to truly be viable.

A strong mid-power control deck is more reliant on removal and versatile interaction spells. You’re still saying no, but you’re saying no to a whole bunch of different things than just the action of casting a spell. This is where we get into card examples, but remember that none of what I say has to be copied card for card, and that I am bad at this. Terrible, even.

Orim’s Chant is a favourite of mine. I’ll cast it in response to a Jeska’s Will, making it often better than a counterspell, or I’ll cast it on the upkeep of that player who used their Enlightened Tutor to grab Bolas’ Citadel. In these cases it’s a pseudo-counter that also stops whatever their next thing would be. However, with the Kicker, it also doubles as a way to completely ruin Craterhoof Behemoth’s day.

I love Dawn Charm, enough for it to be considered my signature spell by everyone I play with. A lot of the time, it simply prevents combat damage, something I’m always happy to do. But the leg it has up over good old Fog is that when you’re not being attacked by a bunch of enormous hydras, it serves other purposes. Being able to save a creature from a boardwipe is always useful, and I have more than once countered a Jaya’s Immolating Inferno that threatened to deal 50 damage to my face.

My favourite artifact/enchantment removal spell is Return to Nature, which does double duty by also removing whatever creature your opponent’s flashbacked Dread Return is targeting.

The common thread here is that a control deck in Commander needs efficient, instant speed removal, graveyard hate, damage prevention, creature protection. And as far as possible, your cards should be capable of serving multiple roles. Yes, you want counterspells, but you want a much bigger toolbox than just that. You don’t want to be a carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer.

The reason why you want this diversity is because of the rules outlined previously. You’re not stopping your opponents from establishing their game plans and playing their threats, you are dealing with them only the moment they become a problem for you. With counterspells, you’re forced to act too early.

And that’s the end of my little list. I hope this made you a better control player in Commander, and if it didn’t I hope it made you a worse one. All change is good.