Black in Avatar: The Last Airbender is everything you'd hope for from the darker corners of the Four Nations. These cards lean into sacrifice, fear, death triggers, punishment, recursion, and the unsettling spiritual energy that makes the Avatar world so memorable. More importantly, they translate those themes into Commander tools that feel fresh without abandoning Black's identity.

Let's break down five of the best Black cards from Avatar: The Last Airbender and how they fit into your next EDH deck.

Koh, the Face Stealer

Koh, the Face Stealer is one of the most deceptively powerful legends we've seen in recent crossover sets. This 6/6 for six enters the battlefield, exiles a creature, and then gains any abilities the exiled creature possesses. That alone is potent. But Koh goes further: each time a nontoken creature dies, you may exile it under Koh. And by paying one life, you can choose a currently exiled creature card for Koh to copy.

This makes Koh a toolbox-y commander. You stack your exile pile with the best enters-the-battlefield triggers, static effects, combat keywords, death triggers, and activated abilities. This way, you can sculpt a Swiss-army spiritual horror in the command zone.

Great in: Ability-stacking shells, aristocrats, Black midrange with ETB value, and weird, experimental builds.

Key Cards

• Sheoldred, the Apocalypse - Absurd to copy, and exactly the kind of passive pressure Koh wants.
• The Soul Stone - an amazing artifact that may prove to be an auto-include in Black decks
• Breach the Multiverse - Fills graveyards with juicy targets for Koh's ability-steal triggers.
• Flare of Malice - choose from what your opponents will sacrifice

Day of Black Sun

This is one of the cleanest and smartest Black board wipes printed in years. Day of Black Sun is scalable, color-friendly, and precise: each creature with mana value X or less loses all abilities until the end of turn, then gets destroyed.

Creature-heavy board? You set X = 3 or 4 and wipe everything but the bombs. Facing commanders that rely heavily on abilities like the new Avatar Aang? This strips them down before killing them, shutting down death triggers, protection, indestructibility, and annoying commanders who try to dodge wraths.

The flavor is perfect. The effect is brutal.

Great in: Mono-Black control, midrange, toolbox decks, decks that rely on high-mana-value threats.

Key Cards

• Phyrexian Arena - Helps refill after your selective wipe.
• The Cruelty of Gix - Tutors for high-value creatures you won't accidentally kill.
• The Balrog of Moria - A high-MV finisher who survives most X-values and punishes opponents after the wipe.
• Sudden Spoiling - Gets around indestructible and other shenanigans when you really want the board clear

Mai, Scornful Striker

Mai, Scornful Striker is elegant and dangerous. A two-mana 2/2 with first strike is nothing to write home about, but her triggered ability - each time a player casts a noncreature spell, they lose 2 life - adds a whole new dimension to Black's punishment suite.

It's not tax... it's attrition. It punishes spell-slinger decks, loops, combos, Treasure-fueled storm turns, and Blue mages who think they can sculpt the perfect hand. Play Mai early, protect her, and she'll bleed the table dry while you stay busy deploying threats.

She also slots into aristocrats, mono-Black aggro, and stax gets. She's efficient, flavorful, and demands removal.

Mono-Black aggro, aristocrats, any deck aiming to pressure life totals quietly.

Key Cards

• Scrawling Crawler - ping 'em for drawing, too!
• Isolation Cell - make them pay mana... or pay in blood when they cast creatures
• Painful Quandary - more pain for the hate train
• Bontu's Monument - if you're creature heavy then this is synergizes well with Mai

Foggy Swamp Visions

Now this is one of the most ambitious Black sorceries of the set. Foggy Swamp Visions uses waterbend X, letting your artifacts and creatures help pay the X-cost. Then it exiles X creatures from graveyards and creates token copies of each one. At the beginning of your next end step, you sacrifice those tokens.

This is a temporary mass-reanimation effect that doesn't care about tribal restrictions, mana value, or color identities. It simply says: "Bring them all back and attack someone."

The trick is timing. You want to cast this when you can win with a combo or generate ETB value so overwhelming that it doesn't matter that the tokens die later.

Great in: Aristocrats, ETB value builds, midrange Black, any deck playing self-mill.

Key Cards

• Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER - easy to trigger with all of the tokens dying
• Lord Skitter, Sewer King - Self-contained graveyard pressure that sets up this spell.
• Mirkwood Bats - Turns your temporary board into lethal drains when they die at end step.
• Phyrexian Altar - hey, once you're done with the tokens just turn them into mana

Desperate Plea

A clean, flexible Black Lesson that asks you to sacrifice a creature and then choose one or both modes: either return a creature with power less than or equal to the sacrificed creature's power, or destroy a creature.

This creates incredibly efficient lines of play. Sac a creature, get back something like a Grave Titan or a Fleshbag Marauder effect, and kill an opposing threat. Or in true aristocrats fashion, sacrifice a fodder token and reanimate something with relevant keywords or ETBs.

Because this card asks for power, not mana value, it plays really well with counters, temporary buffs, and modular creatures. And as a Lesson, it also fits into the growing number of Black decks that use key Learn cards for recursion and toolbox plays.

Great in: Aristocrats, recursion-based strategies, sacrifice engines, midrange.

Key Cards

• Skullclamp - by now, you should already know that 'Clamping a thing before sacking it is mandatory Black player behavior
• Blood Artist - deal some damage with all the critters dying
• Liliana, Dreadhorde General - the passive ability is what we want here: death for some draw
• Buried Alive - tutors to your yard so you can pick from the cream of the crop!

...And then the Fire Nation Attacked

Black delivers exactly what you'd expect in Avatar: The Last Airbender: cards that feel like the ruthless and morally gray corners of the world. These five are flavorful, playable, efficient, and full of build-around potential.

We get a mythic that steals abilities from the dead, a scalable eclipse-themed board wipe, a low-cost life-pressure legend, a temporary mass-reanimation spell, and a flexible Lesson that ties sacrifice and removal together. None of them feel niche. All of them feel usable. And every single one opens up fun new lines of play at the Commander table.