Despite what some players will have you believe, Commander isn’t just about your commander, there’s another 99 cards in your deck that you need to consider. Marvel Super Heroes is a legendary-heavy set, which makes sense given its theming, but that doesn’t mean it’s only got useful commanders in there! Some of these legendaries work well just in your deck itself, and (gasp) so do some of the non-legendaries too!
With that in mind I present to you five cards to consider putting in the meat of your commander deck from the newest Marvel set.
Mister Fantastic, Reed Richards
First off, a lovely bit of utility that can fit in a good proportion of decks that splash into blue. This version of Reed lets you draw a card on an instance of one or more tokens entering. No once per turn restriction, just a once per trigger (I guess? I can’t think of a better way to describe it) guideline.
Token is such a generic condition that a lot of commanders can make use of this. Do you make token copies? Treasures? Clues? Birds? You name it, you get value from it. Drawing cards just means that you get to make your deck do whatever it likes to do faster.
Minotaur, Roxxon CEO
A black card that cares about creatures dying? How original. However, replacing any non-token creature you sacrifice with a Villain token will slow the resource depletion of a lot of aristocrat strategies, plus you can keep interacting with the Villain archetype stuff that this set has introduced (which the commander precon this comes from is loosely based around).
You’ll notice, however, that this isn’t just your creatures, it’s any non-token creature, so clearing your opponents board also works wonders in increasing your army of villains for whatever use you require.
Stark Industries Executive
It’s a common that makes a treasure. You pump two mana in, you get one mana to use in the future. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you why this is good in red, the colour that generates lots of mana that needs to be used up on the spot?
I try not to make these lists “cards James is looking for for his decks”, but this is definitely a card I want for my treasure deck. Combine this with something like Xorn which would double the output (suddenly making the net mana cost zero) and you will rapidly build a horde worthy of a dragon (and maybe useful for a future Smaug deck from the upcoming Hobbit set).
Murdock’s Crusade
White is the colour of removal, and this two cost sorcery certainly fits the bill well! Utilising the Teamwork mechanic lets you use both sides if you like, but whilst the high toughness/CMC clause is a little prohibitive, I can think of plenty of big threats that I could have used this spell to get rid of. You do have plenty of options for this kind of thing in white, with far less restrictions, but I think this might be worth considering if you know what you’re going up against.
Training Regimen
Green smash! What’s the point in buffing up your creatures if an opponent can chump block? Again, a well trodden (hah) space in green is giving creatures trample, or giving creatures counters, so why not use a card that can do both regularly?
A good chunk of the green cards in this set revolve around +1/+1 counters, so if you’re leaning into Hulk, or other cards from this set, as a whole? This is well worth your time as an include.
I hope you found this little selection useful! As someone who was initially sceptical of the set (and is still sceptical of the plane of New York), I have to admit that there are more than a few cards here that I’m seriously considering getting my hands on.