Our Top 10 Cards for Dominaria United
Chief: Exxaxl usually helps me out with these top 10 articles, but he isn’t available. Where can I find someone to help out on such short notice? Uh…JUDGE!
Reyemile: Hey, how can I help?
Chief: Don’t be mad, but I actually need someone to help me write this article real quick.
Reyemile: Well, per policy I can grant you a time extension of up to ten minutes before I have to issue a tardiness penalty. So let’s get cracking! How do you want to start?
Chief: Sounds good. Let’s start with a quick introduction!
Dominaria United (DMU) marks Magic’s first return to its most iconic plane since the eponymous Dominaria in 2018. Sets that take place on this plane are often pivotal to the story of Magic and are usually full of iconic cards and legendary characters. As such, it’s no surprise that DMU is simply packed with exciting new cards and commanders! In this article, we (Chief, #1 Serra Paragon Stan and Reyemile, Definitely Not a Phyrexian Sleeper Agent) will each go over our top 10 cards from Dominaria United, including cards from the Commander set.
Author's note: These lists are in alphabetical order! We love all of these cards and we hope that you do as well.
Chief:
Activated Sleeper
This is one of the auxiliary Commander set cards that appear in Set and Collector Boosters. This is black's take on a Clone effect, allowing you to pay 3 mana at flash speed to have it enter as a copy of any creature in a graveyard that died this turn. The efficient mana cost makes it very easy to cast Activated Sleeper after a board wipe to get a copy of the best creature that died or use it to pull off other tricks!
People who enjoy graveyard shenanigans in Commander should love this card. I'm expecting to see it played in decks across the spectrum, because it scales so well to tables of different power levels. Activated Sleeper will probably be played alongside Protean Hulk for extra value and as a general purpose creature designed to capitalize on board wipes. It might even be a—wait for it—sleeper hit in cEDH for decks that would love to make copies of creatures like Dockside Extortionist or even Thassa’s Oracle.
Defiler of Faith
Let me make one thing clear: all of the Defilers are great cards! In fact, I don't even think that this one is necessarily the best. This one just happens to fit best into the type of decks that I play. Paying life for colored mana is very strong, so I’d imagine that all 5 cards in this cycle will see some play in Commander in decks with heavy colored pips. This goes double if their abilities synergize with other cards those decks are playing.
I'm definitely going to be adding Defiler of Faith to my Adeline, Resplendent Cathar deck. I can definitely use the 1/1 tokens and I certainly don't mind paying life for mana when I can offset it with life gain from cards like Soul Warden. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this card and the others in its cycle perform in Commander. While not nearly as busted as Phyrexian mana, this design space has a lot to offer and I’m hoping to see more similar cards down the line as part of the current Phyrexian story arc.
Reyemile: My Defiler rankings for Commander are as follows:
Dreams—Drawing cards is nuts!
Vigor—This big boy makes other big boys.
Faith—Small tokens are better than no tokens.
Flesh—Evasion is good.
Instinct—It might kill mana dorks sometimes?
Gerrard's Hourglass Pendant
This card has such a cool design. I love permanent spells with flash and I love artifacts that you can grab with Urza's Saga. Combining these things together on a card that has relevant and interesting abilities is even better. Flashing in Gerrard's Hourglass Pendant could make you the hero of the pod when someone casts an Expropriate, but this effect definitely feels a bit more niche than its other uses.
The real meat here is the board wipe recovery on the activated ability. The fact that it even brings back lands makes cards such as Strip Mine or fetchlands even more valuable, while also opening the door for a one-sided Armageddon or Jokulhaups if you're inclined to walk that path. This card practically feels tailor-made for me and will be a definite inclusion in many of my decks.
Plaza of Heroes
I'm already seeing this land referred to by many people as an auto-include in Commander. While I wouldn't go that far, it is very good in some decks. This is pretty much free real estate that you can use to protect your commander if you don't mind the possibility of a colorless land. If you're playing a commander with a low mana value, it will probably even tap for colored mana right away.
This land will shine in decks that need the commander to stick around for things like combat damage, but it also feels like a solid inclusion in decks based around legendary creatures. I can definitely see Plaza of Heroes tapping for 5 colors quite often in a deck led by Sisay, Weatherlight Captain while also doubling as a way to protect her from removal. I'll certainly be adding it to a few of my own decks too.
Serra Paragon
I love angels. They're my favorite creatures in Magic. Cards like Serra Angel, Exalted Angel, and Baneslayer Angel are iconic cards that meant a lot to me at different times during my history as a Magic player. These days, my favorite angels tend to do more than just turn sideways with a bunch of keyword abilities on them. This is one of those angels. We’ve seen a fair number of new white cards that utilize the graveyard. Serra Paragon is another new entry in that design space, actually allowing you to play lands and cast spells right out of the graveyard!
You might have noticed that this card has a lot in common with Sun Titan. Both of them care about permanents with mana value 3 or less in your graveyard. While Sun Titan doesn't fly and he costs 2 more mana, he also doesn't require you to spend additional mana to keep using his ability and he doesn't bring things back with an exile clause. I believe that most decks that run Sun Titan will also want to consider Serra Paragon, and some may even prefer it.
Shanid, Sleepers’ Scourge
This is the alternate commander for the Legends’ Legacy deck. While Dihada, Binder of Wills feels quite powerful in her own right, I prefer the design space of this card. Shanid feels like he’s trying to fill up the board with powerful legendary creatures, give them all menace, and turn them sideways. That isn’t a flashy gameplan, but it does sound very appealing to me for casual Commander. I expect to see a lot of creative builds using different legendary creatures to go wide and smack down opponents. There are even some new tools to help out in DMU proper, such as Relic of Legends.
Shanid’s biggest strength is probably the card draw that you get for any legendary spell or playing legendary lands. That’s right—you get to draw cards for playing lands in Mardu! There are a surprisingly high number of legendary lands available, so building a solid land base with a high number of legendary lands won’t be too difficult. You’ll be losing life in order to draw cards, so you’ll want to keep an eye on your life total. Legendary spells such as Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Shadowspear can help keep you afloat by providing steady life gain.
Reyemile: Lemme add Whip of Erebos and Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord to the pile of life gain legends. Also, don’t forget to protect your vulnerable life total with Kor Haven, a powerful (and legendary) utility land.
Silverback Elder
Have you ever had the oddly specific desire to turn every single creature spell that you cast into either a Knight of Autumn or an Elvish Rejuvenator? Well, now you can! Silverback Elder will make it difficult for decks based around artifacts and enchantments to establish any type of board presence while also ramping you. I’m almost thankful that he doesn’t also draw cards!
If you’re a Gruul mage at heart, you might even pair this card with Harmonic Prodigy if you’re already running other cards that have synergy with it. Silverback Elder is a shaman, which means that you’ll be able to get two triggers each time that you cast a creature spell! This is another strong green engine that will get out of hand quickly if left unchecked. I can picture this card seeing play across multiple formats, possibly even being the big chase card for the entire set.
Tetsuo, Imperial Champion
I’m a huge fan of the original Legends set, but many of the legendary creatures from that era haven’t held up well over time. Legends Retold is a great way to revisit these characters and update them for the modern era. Tetsuo Umezawa was an important character to Magic’s early story, so I was extremely excited to see a new version of the character. This card stands out to me because Grixis doesn’t usually deal with equipment, but the abilities on the card still feel right at home in this color identity.
Tetsuo’s ability to gun down targets or cast big spells for free is sure to lead to a lot of spicy gameplay and I’m really excited to see what people can put together for this commander. Exxaxl and I talked about him at length when we revealed him as our preview card for Dominaria United, but I honestly just adore this card’s design. I can see Tetsuo decks going many different routes, but I definitely expect to see a lot decks based around extra combats and extra turns.
Vohar, Vodalian Desecrator
I certainly wasn’t expecting to see such a powerful card in the cycle of uncommon legendary creatures this time around. Vohar can do a serviceable impression of the classic Merfolk Looter, allowing you to sift through your deck while filling up your graveyard for later. You can also sacrifice this completed merfolk and pay 2 mana to cast an instant or sorcery card from your graveyard. These two effects in tandem in the command zone can be quite powerful and open up a lot of different lines of play that are perfect for higher power Commander games.
Vohar can function as an outlet for Isochron Scepter and Dramatic reversal, draining your opponents as you filter through your deck. You can also use the looting ability to crack Doomsday piles with ease. What really sets him apart from other Dimir commanders for me is the sacrifice ability. You can use this to easily pull off double Demonic Consultation or Tainted Pact lines into a Thassa’s Oracle win. With all of these strong synergies, I’m definitely expecting to see some powerful Vohar decks at cEDH tables once the card is in circulation.
Vodalian Hexcatcher
A cycle of mono-color lords was on my bingo card for DMU, but I wasn't expecting the merfolk lord to be so powerful. Being able to sacrifice merfolk to counter noncreature spells is very strong, especially when played with cards like Deeproot Waters that create merfolk tokens. It even has an extra synergy with Lullmage Mentor! The fact that this card is only 2 mana feels like a steal, especially with flash.
Vodalian Hexcatcher slots perfectly into decks led by older merfolk commanders such as Sygg, River Guide and Kumena, Tyrant of Orazca or the new Emperor Mihail II featured in the run of auxiliary Commander cards in Dominaria United Set and Collector Boosters. This card feels poised to make a pretty big splash—pun intended—and may even lead to a resurgence of merfolk decks in Modern and other formats.
Reyemile:
Braids, Arisen Nightmare
Braids rises and falls with game theory. Will your opponents collaborate to deny you resources, or fall into a Nash equilibrium of selfish decisions that fill up your hand? Either way, you want a plethora of cheap things to feed Braids.
That said, I’d resist the temptation to stick some of the zero-drop artifact creatures like Ornithopter in. Even if you have enough uses for fodder that they’re not dead draws when Braids is off the battlefield, having multiple types is a major drawback since it gives opponents many more choices to sacrifice themselves. Assuming that card draw is your best outcome, and—lets be real—it is, sacrificial enchantments are your best option. Consider Treacherous Blessing and similar ETB enchantments for maximum value.
Chief: I’m just glad that Braids is back in what appears to be a lot less bannable version. I think that she’s stronger than ever, but she doesn’t really stop people from playing Magic.
Elas il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim
Elas doesn’t seem great in the 99. It’s playable for sure, but “gain life or deal damage when something enters or dies respectively” is an overcrowded deck slot with a ton of competition. Elas’s general strength struggles to compete with pieces that will have more synergy with the other 98. For example, it’s probably worse than Wayward Servant in zombie tribal, Soul Warden in life gain, Zulaport Cutthroat in aristocrats, or Corpse Knight in a tokens list.
Where Elas shines is as a commander. Having unlimited access to repeated cheap life gain can turn on dozens of powerful payoff cards. Her death trigger in the command zone can transform loops with Gravecrawler or Reassmbling Skeleton from spinning your wheels into a table kill. Most importantly, Elas vastly outperforms commanders such as Ayli, Eternal Pilgrim and Killian, Ink Duelist in a deck with Lurrus of the Dream-Den as the companion. I love brewing with companions and can’t wait to see what players can put together with the kor and the kitty.
Ertai Resurrected
Four mana is a lot of mana to keep up at any given time, and giving opponents extra cards isn’t something you want to be doing, group hug decks excepted. So why would you play a four-mana card that makes opponents draw?
You play it because it answers almost everything! Ertai is unconditional removal for a variety of problematic permanents. While it can’t touch enchantments or artifacts directly, it can remove them from the stack or negate any abilities those permanents attempt to resolve. The number of combos that can resolve through a successfully cast Ertai is vanishingly small. Heaven help your opponents if you have cheap repeatable sources of blinking, because no amount of card draw will help when every single spell that you cast gets countered.
Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief
Ivy can copy permanent spells. That’s it. That’s the review. Not enough detail? Okay, let’s dig in a little deeper.
There are plenty of ways to double up on your instant and sorcery spells—most notably Zada, Hedron Grinder, a commander who makes dozens of unplayable cards suddenly very strong. So if all you were doing with Ivy was copying Cerulean Wisps to draw two cards, this list wouldn’t make my list at all. The ability to clone auras is what makes Ivy a unique engine for enchantress decks. Imagine getting two Ancestral Masks for the price of one! Plus, she can also copy mutate creatures, and I cannot wait to start double-stacking mutations in my Otrimi, the Ever-Playful deck.
Meria, Scholar of Antiquity
Out of all the cards on my list, Meria is the one I’m most expecting to see hit Max Power. Meria has potential to generate huge bursts of mana or huge bursts of card advantage when paired with cheap artifacts. Zero-cost artifacts all become Moxen with her, and also can all be freely cast when hit off her impulse draw ability. And of course, having a commander with a draw effect makes Goblin Recruiter-Conspicuous Snoop lines much, much faster.
Meria also shares the ability to tap certain older artifacts whose effects require them to be untapped with other commanders like Galazeth Prismari and Urza, High Lord Artificer. Winter Orb and Static Orb are the go-to lockdown pieces to abuse this ability. It remains to be seen whether a Gruul shell can abuse this trick to the same effect as its blue cousins.
Rivaz of the Claw
Dragons have been getting a push lately, and Rivaz is yet another powerful enabler for the tribe. If you’re running a dragon commander with Rakdos in its identity, then you can easily slot this in as a combination ramp and value engine. It’s especially spicy with Scion of the Ur-Dragon, since it lets you cast the dragons that Scion tutors straight to the graveyard.
Rivaz is also a legend, which means it can head your deck as the commander. Going straight from 3 mana to 6 the next turn after you play a land lets you rocket out some terrifying beaters like Hellkite Tyrant and Ancient Copper dragon quite early, and you can run black’s cheap graveyard tutoring like Buried Alive or Entomb to gain easy access to a variety of threats. The only real downside to this strategy is that pure Rakdos loses out on some good dragons—and also on some good flicker effects. Exiling a dragon and returning it to play gets around Rivaz’s anti-recursion exile clause, but in Rakdos your only reliable way to take advantage of that is Conjurer’s Closet.
Tear Asunder
What happens when you staple together two borderline playable cards? The unkicked version of Tear Asunder doesn’t have an exact equivalent but it’s quite similar to Deglamer, a cheap enchantment and artifact killer that can remove indestructible gods and prevent graveyard recursion. The kicked version is Utter End, a slightly overcosted yet incredibly flexible answer.
Both of those cards have ended up as the 101st card in several of my Low and Mid Power decks. Having access to both the narrow, cheap mode and the wider one with a cost bump means that this card fills two slots in one. Any Golgari deck can potentially make room for this interactive piece.
Chief: Did anyone else notice that this card has a Spiritmonger in the art?
The Elder Dragon War
This saga is interesting because it’s one of the best uses in the set of the read ahead mechanic, because ’s the saga with the most even split between times you want to play it on 1, 2, or 3. Weenie token hordes or elfball mana dorks? Pyroclasm them down on chapter 1. Opponent threatening to combo off? Chapter 2 lets you dig deep for answers. Need a 4/4 dragon right now?
…Okay, maybe chapter 3 is a bit of a step down. Probably don’t run this unless you can make chapter 3 good, but dragons have been spoiled for choice lately—see my comments on Rivaz—and The Elder Dragon War seems especially good with a commander like Rivaz or Bladewing the Risen that can take advantage of dumping uncastable dragons from your hand to the grave.
The Phasing of Zhalfir
Blue has a four-mana wrath now, I guess? To be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of color-pie bends like this, but I can’t argue against this card’s power. Leaving bodies behind is going to make this not great against go-wide token decks, but you’re usually going to be sweeping bigger and/or more useful creatures and downgrading every threat on the board in the majority of Commander games. This is going to go in a lot of blue decks, since its effect is largely irreplaceable, the best blue can normally do is mass bounce.
By the way, I’m kind of assuming that this is going to be read ahead to the final chapter, and that’s probably true 90% of the time. Saving your own creatures requires waiting multiple turns, and that’s a good way to lose. The Phasing of Zhalfir phases out nonland permanents, not just creatures, so don’t forget this card can also buy you a couple of turns of relief from a devastating stax piece or combo engine.
Weatherlight Compleated
Death triggers are available aplenty if you’re in black, a color that you’re most likely playing in an aristocrats strategy. Most of the ways to draw cards off binning bodies requires you to sacrifice nontoken creatures—think Midnight Reaper, Grim Haruspex, Harvester of Souls—so getting cards for tokens is a payoff that’s worth the work.
If you want to shortcut the effort, you can play around with proliferate. Using Throne of Geth to eat a servo or thopter tokens will let you double dip on phyresis counters. Or you can just put a ton of bodies on the board with a commander like Prossh, Skyraider of Kher. One final thing to be aware of is that you can’t put counters on a dead permanent, so playing a creature sweeper to draw off killing your own board only works if Weatherlight Compleated is either above 7 or under 4 counters.
Chief: I’m looking forward to adding this to my Adeline deck to capitalize on all of the 1/1 tokens that die. I’ll probably just deck myself, but it’ll be fun!
We hope that you’ve enjoyed our top 10 lists from Dominaria United. The set certainly has a lot of cool cards that we’re excited to try out in Commander. The fact that Dominaria is crawling with sleeper agents isn’t a good excuse to sleep on these awesome new cards! If you’d like to check out more PlayEDH content, you can find more articles here or tune into the PlayEDH Radio 903.1 podcast here.
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