My Top 10 Flash Creatures for Commander
Like many Commander players, I consider creatures to be the most fun part of the format. This fun can come from big creatures turning sideways or from utility creatures with powerful abilities that provide me with an advantage or my opponents with a disadvantage. I love creatures so much that every single deck that I play regularly is based around creatures and using them as the main component of my strategy.
The biggest disadvantage that most creatures have is that they can only be cast at sorcery speed. This can result in you spending resources to casting something like Sun Titan or Terror of the Peaks and then have it removed by a board wipe or other removal before you get much use out of it. While there’s no doubt that cards like these can be quite powerful in Commander, it can be frustrating to have this happen.
One of the easiest ways to increase the effectiveness of a creature in a multiplayer format like Commander is to give it flash. This allows you to hold up mana and cast the creature only when you want to, which makes it a lot easier to play around board wipes or to exploit opportunities to gain a big advantage. A card like the now banned Hullbreacher is one of the best examples of flash elevating a card’s power level to the next level.
It’s easy to see why Hullbreacher wound up on the ban list, because it was very difficult for the average casual deck to handle such a huge swing in resources. While not every creature with flash is so egregious, there are still a lot of powerful cards out there that can be used to catch your opponents with their shields down. In this article, I’m going to showcase my top 10 favorite creatures with flash. Queue theme music!
Sorry, I couldn’t resist flashing that one in. Without further delay, let’s do this!
Aven Mindcensor
Between tutors, fetchlands, and green land ramp, there’s usually plenty of searching going on in Commander. If you’d like to make things a little bit more fair, Aven Mindcensor can restrict your opponents to looking at just the top 4 cards of their library. There’s still a chance that they might find something that they want, but their options will become much more limited.
The most obvious application for Aven Mindcensor is stopping cards such as Demonic Tutor or Green Sun’s Zenith, but it can also be used to punish greedy mana bases that rely too much on fetchlands. You’re just trying to enforce the singleton nature of the format. This is also the oldest card to make this list, so it’s interesting to see a unique Future Sight creature that clearly went on to influence future card designs.
Snapcaster Mage
If you’ve been following my articles for a while, it’s not exactly news that I’m a sucker for Invitational cards. Snapcaster Mage bears the likeness of Tiago Chan and has seen heavy play in a variety of different formats. It turns out that being able to reuse instants and sorceries from your graveyard is just really good, especially when you have the option of doing it with a flash creature.
While it can be argued that a card like Eternal Witness will often work better in some decks than Snapcaster Mage, you can’t use that card to give something like Mana Drain flashback at instant speed to stop a key threat and keep you in the game. This wizard is a key example of a card that is elevated by flash in a way that makes it feel powerful and exciting every time you see it.
Notion Thief
While it’s no Hullbreacher, this card remains quite powerful. It turns out that people just really like drawing cards, so you’ll almost always get plenty of mileage out of a creature like Notion Thief. You can use this card to capitalize on what your opponents are playing and steal their card draw, or you can force them to try to draw cards in order to reap the rewards for yourself!
If your opponent has an Esper Sentinel, you can just ignore the tax and draw cards while also incentivizing all of your other opponents to pay to keep you from getting even further ahead. You can also combine Notion Thief with something like Windfall in order to strip your opponents’ hands and draw a massive amount of cards. It should be pretty easy to win the game with so much card advantage.
Dualcaster Mage
If you’d expect a red flash creature to do something chaotic and disruptive, you won’t be disappointed by this card. Dualcaster Mage can be used to copy any instant or sorcery spell when it enters the battlefield. This means that you could steal a tutor or a counterspell from an opponent, or you could just copy one of your own spells for twice the fun. You’ll almost always find a good use for this creature.
In comparison to a card like Reverberate, there are advantages and disadvantages. While it costs more mana, it’s less restrictive because you don’t need more than a single red mana. You can also use Dualcaster Mage to copy a spell like Twinflame in order to make infinite token copies of itself with haste in order to swing out and win. This powerful card can function as interaction, extra value, and a combo piece.
Opposition Agent
Between Hullbreacher and this card, Commander Legends really didn’t pull any punches when it came to flash hatebears. Opposition Agent takes hating on tutors to a new level. Not only can you control opponents while they’re searching, but you get to steal whatever you find! This effect can be completely back-breaking in practice, allowing you to acquire all sorts of things while gaining tons of free information.
If you flash in Opposition Agent in response to an opponent cracking their Scalding Tarn, you not only get to exile a land that you can play later and you can look at the cards in that player’s hand since you control them. This can be a massive heads-up in Commander. You also don’t need to worry about letting your opponent search with your Wishclaw Talisman, since they’ll find exactly what you need.
Solitude
Free spells are usually pretty good. Putting free spells on a body is even better, because there are so many ways to abuse them. In light of this, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that Solitude has gained a lot of attention in multiple formats. since its release. While paying 5 mana to get a 3/2 body with lifelink at flash speed while also removing a key threat isn’t always bad, the ability to evoke this creature is what really makes it shine.
Swords to Plowshares only costs 1 mana, but having a second copy of Swords to Plowshares that you can cast without spending any mana at all is pretty awesome in a singleton format. It can get even better if you’re playing cards like Ephemerate to get extra uses out of it by flickering it in response to the evoke trigger. Your opponents might even feel obligated to use their own removal to stop this from happening!
Endurance
This is another card from the same cycle in Modern Horizons II. Unlike Solitude, you probably won’t look for too many ways to abuse Endurance on the stack. This doesn’t change the fact that it’s a wonderful tool that can be used to stop various graveyard shenanigans or even recover your own graveyard if its in danger of being exiled. That’s a pretty sweet deal at either cost that’s available to you.
This creature is able to answer some of the most powerful cards in the entire Commander format. It becomes a lot more difficult to win with Thassa’s Oracle if your graveyard gets shuffled back into your library and Underworld Breach won’t do much if your opponent doesn’t have a graveyard. Since green isn’t known for its stack interaction, Endurance feels like a great card to have in scary situations.
Cathar Commando
As the only Common to make my top 10, this creature’s understated power lies in the fact that you can easily flash it in at any time and save it for when you need it. Cathar Commando is a valuable piece of removal for creature-based decks. The fact that it’s a creature that sends itself to the graveyard also makes it very easy for some decks to reanimate it if they’re looking to use it again.
Unlike most creature-based removal, this card is not based around an enters-the-battlefield ability. This means that Cathar Commando will still work through your opponent’s Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines and other similar cards. Since you don’t need to sacrifice it on the same turn that you cast it, you can also play around effects such as Archon of Emeria with ease. Pretty impressive for a Common.
Hullbreaker Horror
This was actually our preview card for Innistrad: Crimson Vow, so I was lucky to be one of the first people to see it. Hullbreaker Horror is a massive bomb that just does so much to help you take over games. Having flash and being uncounterable makes this thing a nightmare to deal with. Once it’s on board, it’s not uncommon to see infinite mana generated with mana rocks that are repeatedly bounced and cast using its ability.
Despite it being an uncounterable creature that you can cast at flash speed, one of the most common things to do with Hullbreaker Horror is cheating it into play with a card like Polymorph. You’ll usually see this alongside commanders such as Urza, High Lord Artificer, since he functions as an infinite mana outlet and he brings a Construct token with him for the Polymorph.
Archivist of Oghma
We’ve seen a couple of tutor hate cards already, but what about turning tutors into card advantage? While it won’t stop your opponents from searching their libraries, Archivist of Oghma can quickly refill your hand when you’re playing against tutors, fetchlands, and land ramp. It also gains you some life, which is a nice bonus that might even be relevant if you’re playing a life gain strategy.
It also doesn’t matter who controls the card that’s letting your opponent search their library. This means that you can draw a card if your opponent searches for a basic land when you Path to Exile their creature. It also means that you’ll draw a card for each opponent that has a creature that gets exiled by your overloaded Winds of Abandon, because the search on that card is mandatory.
Author’s note: Despite the confusing wording on the card, the searches on Winds of Abandon are all carried out as a single action. This means that an opponent who has 10 creatures still only searches their library once.
Honorable Mentions
I’d like to recognize Pestermite, Deceiver Exarch, Bounding Krasis, Restoration Angel, and Village Bell-Ringer because each of them has the ability to function as a great utility card or a combo piece. They all famously go infinite with a certain legendary goblin and the ability to cast them at flash speed presents a narrower window for opponents and allows you to assemble the combo earlier.
I’d also like to highlight that Containment Priest is a criminally underplayed card that stops a variety of things that you’re likely to see in Commander. Everything from reanimator strategies, flicker, and even some specific popular commanders are stopped in their tracks by this unassuming creature. This is probably the most underplayed card that originates from a Commander product.
Deadeye Navigator is a popular card that often acts as a combo piece, but it doesn’t do a whole lot when the creature that you flicker won’t return to the battlefield. Most Commander players have seen how powerful Winota, Joiner of Forces can be in all power levels of Commander, including cEDH. She’s essentially a vanilla 4/4 if Containment Priest is in play. Don’t sleep on this card.
In Conclusion
Before I go, I did want to highlight that Faerie Mastermind is an amazing flash creature coming out in March of the Machine. This card features the likeness of Yuta Takahashi and I’m looking forward to seeing it in action. I’d also be remiss to not point out that Winding Canyons lets you cast any creature at flash speed. It’s definitely my pet card and it can go in any Commander deck!
Thank you for sticking with me until the end. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article. I’d love to hear about your favorite creatures with flash. Feel free to reach out on Twitter! 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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