The Commander
At the beginning of your upkeep, each player exiles cards from the top of their library until they exile a nonland card. An opponent chooses a nonland card exiled this way. You may cast up to two spells from among the other cards exiled this way without paying their mana costs.
Guide
Gameplan
You grind value off the top of every library each upkeep, casting up to two free nonland spells while only handing your opponents one card back. Build a deck stuffed with high-impact bombs and minimize lands so the spells you steal are maximally explosive, then bury the table under back-to-back free haymakers. The game is a snowball: each free cast advances your board, your mana, or your hand until you simply overwhelm everyone.
Strengths
- Generates massive card and tempo advantage every single upkeep without spending mana
- Can cheat enormous mana-value spells and creatures into play for free
- Symmetrical exile hits opponents too but you choose the lion's share of value
- Mono-red consistency makes the manabase trivial and cheap to assemble
Weaknesses
- You don't choose which cards you steal, so results are random and sometimes whiff
- Opponents pick the best card to deny you, so your biggest bomb often gets gifted away
- Mono-red lacks reliable card draw and struggles against heavy enchantment/artifact-based hate without prep
- Commander is a 5-drop that does nothing the turn it enters and dies to removal easily
Key Cards
- Apex of Power — A massive free hit that refills your hand and can dump a board's worth of spells when cast off the top.
- Etali, Primal Conqueror — Doubles down on the free-cast theme and gives you a colossal body plus its own impulse value.
- Maddening Hex — Punishes the opponent each time they cast a card you handed them, adding inevitability.
- Birgi, God of Storytelling — Turns each free cast into a Mana from the triggered ritual, fueling even more spells per turn.
- Underworld Breach — Lets you reuse the explosive instants and sorceries you exile, snowballing into combo turns.
- Jeska's Will — Burst ritual and card draw that powers out your manual casts to complement the free triggers.
Upgrade Path
Lower your land count and load up on high-value, splashy nonland cards so every free cast matters, while adding rituals like Jeska's Will and Birgi to convert triggers into mana. Add fast mana (Mana Vault, Jeweled Lotus) and tutors to find Underworld Breach for combo finishes, and include protection like Deflecting Swat to keep the commander alive. Finally, run cantrip-light card selection sparingly and lean into payoffs like Maddening Hex and extra-combat effects to close before opponents stabilize.
Core Cards
The most-played cards for this commander, built from aggregated deck data (the Mythic Graph). Build public decks to seed it.
Win Conditions
- ▸Slamming a chain of free bombs (Etali, Apex of Power, dragons) to overwhelm the board
- ▸Storm/combo turns built around Underworld Breach and rituals
- ▸Direct damage and group-slug effects like Maddening Hex grinding the table down
- ▸Cheating out a single game-ending haymaker with extra-turn or mass-damage payoffs
Archetypes
- Spellslinger — The upkeep trigger rewards a deck packed with high-impact instants and sorceries cast for free.
- Big Mana / Cheat — Free casts let you slam expensive bombs you could never hardcast on curve.
- Combo — Free spell casting plus rituals and recursion like Underworld Breach enables explosive turns.
- Group Slug — Maddening Hex and burn punish opponents for the cards Plargg forces into their hands.
Combos
No combos found for this commander on Commander Spellbook.
Related Commanders
Same color identity (R), by popularity.
