A few of us over at Coolstuffinc decided to do personalized top 10 lists this year, looking back at 2025 from our own personal perspectives. The assignment was simple: make a top 10 list. That's... it. Limitations, what it was ranking, what kinds of cards were legal were all up to us.

This is incredibly freeing, and I'm grateful to CSI for letting us, as writers, have our own voice and lane. I decided it'd be fun to go back and look at the new Commanders I built around last year which made me most excited.

As I considered the decks I built in 2025, ranking them as I went through the choices, a pattern started to emerge - maybe not a super-obvious one, but one which spoke to me right away.

I like Commanders which work like puzzles. While this may not be 100% true, I tend to see a group of bizarre abilities or an underpowered trick and think, "how can I use this in a relevant way in a game?"

No shade on a card which tells you what to do. A commander like Baldin, Century Herdmaster is pretty clear, even though at the time I thought of it as a puzzle. Sure, you have to figure out how to have cards in your Hand so you get the buff, but was there ever a question you were going to run a bunch of Creatures with high Toughness, and then, you know, attack with them? That's totally fine, and I think that deck would be fun to play (still!), but figuring out how to draw cards in White is a lot less difficult in modern Commander than it has been.

So, my honorable mention notwithstanding, I'm going to do a Top-10 Favorite New Commanders I Built Around In 2025, and if you stick to the end, I suspect you'll see - there's a lot of ways to build a Commander deck. I hope you try something new in 2026.

Honorable Mention

Not a Commander, of course, but nonetheless I got to write an article about this card as an official preview card for Wizards of the Coast. I still smile thinking about what an honor that is. It's narrow and clearly not powerful enough to have made any serious splashes, but this card will carry a special place for me for a long time. Consider sliding this into a deck somewhere, even if it's not one with a Modified theme. You might be surprised at how much the extra cards help you out.

Number 10

Wizards has been doing this thing recently where they create leaders for specific things - Kindred, but also style or other choices - and paste them onto a single card. Master Piandao is a great example of just such a thing. It feels like the obvious choice is to pick one and go with it - do Voltron with him and run a TON of Equipment, or do Allies Kindred. But this was a puzzle in looking for the right balance of all three; how do you make sure Master Piandao can attack safely every turn? How do you maximize the possibility you'll see something valuable? Since it puts it in your Hand, there are mana considerations too - it's not casting anything for free, just possibly giving you a free card. A deck like this provides a great gameplay experience for the whole table, as they wait to see what you reveal - then play around it.

Number 9

Haliya isn't, like, the world's most exciting card. I think that's why I had no competition when I said I wanted to write about it. It's a five-mana 3/3 in two colors with Enters and Attack triggers which aren't wildly exciting. You do get a draw trigger, which is great, but it requires something connecting, not just attacking, so there's a fair bit of puzzle-solving which goes into this, and it will reliably struggle against hyper-efficient decks. However, this is one of my favorite pieces of writing of the year, one of the first which started a trajectory I'm still on of understanding how to articulate what we want in a game of Commander.

Building around a Commander like this, one that makes you work for it, requires patience and grace from your friends to work (either by not killing you immediately as you set up or building similarly lower-powered decks to compete), and is a beautiful act of rebellion against our ever-increasing pace. The most efficient isn't always the right choice, and the shiniest thing isn't always the best. Suggest to your friends you each build a pile of decks like this and put them in the middle of the table, then draw straws to see who plays what. You might be surprised at what happens.

Number 8

I suspect most of you, when you looked at this card just now, immediately thought of ways you could abuse it. I call them out in the article, because I thought them too. I enjoyed building this, however, because it was a very clear example of intentionally building under power. This deck could be quite strong in the right shell, but instead, I took it as a puzzle to have fun but keep friends with a more interactive, table-forward deck. It still blows things up, sure, but deciding to not punish your friends as much as possible is an option - one we could all stand to make more often, maybe.

Number 7

Talk about a puzzle. If Taigam just copied the second spell (and probably cost more), it'd be pretty simple to build. But Taigam makes us wait for it, forcing us to either plan way ahead or put resources into manipulating the Time Counters, either of which is a fun puzzle to solve. And because we have to cast the spell before we can copy it, plus it has to be the second spell, we have to be really strategic. This sort of deck can create some wonderful tension at a table, as your various spells tick down to reappear - who will you target? What will have changed? It's a good time.

Number 6

Loot was a hoot! We have to track what abilities we've used, then we have to solve the puzzle of how to get him off the 'field so we can reuse him, then we get to use the abilities again. None of them is wildly powerful - it's a five-mana Commander and we have to pay another one for either three mana, three cards, or three damage - but it's a fun set of abilities. Plus, that guy is super cute! This is a classic Creature to build a Battlecruiser deck - one designed to have a ton of fun at a slow, big-play table.

Number 5

Here's another puzzle, encouraging us to run a variety of spells to maximize Eshki's abilities, plus it kind of points us in a Voltron direction... there's a lot to figure out here. (You've probably noticed I like Commanders that draw cards!) Lots of choices for direction here; most likely you're going to mix spells and Creatures, but how? Do you run a ton of cheap ones and try to hit the ability every turn? Go big and have the Commander be more secondary? And what spells do you run?

Number 4

Some of you might remember when Eldrazi first showed up. The thing that made them so wild was how they played with spaces we didn't think could be manipulated before. Return cards from Exile to the Graveyard? Not normal!

Sab-Sunen is similarly... strange. It feels a bit Eldrazi-esque, actually. Caring if the amount of counters is even or odd? Wild. Plus, it gives us an opportunity to see how many times we can make her have an odd number at the right time. Just exactly my kind of puzzle - get it right, you get to swing like a crazy person with a full grip and a manic smile. Get it wrong? Sit there sad. Perfect.

Number 3

I still don't know anything about this IP, but my buddy Stuart (he did these graphics for me when I did my article on who should play Chandra in the Magic: The Gathering movie) came up with this wacky interaction that goes infinite. Two quick asides: I'm normally not a huge fan of combos, and if you are going to do one, I think it should end the game decisively. The puzzle here is to do that without ruining the game for everybody. The cool thing about this Commander and its combo is it does just that - the game ends (in a draw) because you can't stop the combo once it goes off. This one isn't for everyone, but once in a while? With a group that likes wacky interactions? Perfect.

Number 2

Gwenom was a lot of things for me. I've always like Gwen and Venom from Spider-Man, and Mono-Black is one of my very favorite ways to play Commander. However, this was an example of having to pivot because my understanding of how the card works changed (from wrong to right). It does run the infinite combo of Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond, but that combo (and its various iterations) all win the game on the spot, so I'll allow it. That led to even more combos, and suddenly there was a deck with a bunch of combos and no way to search for any of them. Instead, you have to race to assemble one before the rest of the table kills you, and you never know which one you'll do! Again, the puzzle is how to balance fun and oppression. I haven't built this deck in real life, but it's next on my list.

Number 1

There was no other option for me for my favorite new Commander this year. I love Shadow - easily my favorite character in the Sonic IP - and this card is nothing but a puzzle. Talk about two unrelated abilities! Are we Flash/Haste Kindred? Are we trying to cast things with Split Second? I settled on both, and the result is an incredible amount of fun. In my playgroup, this deck is mid-level, winning less often than it loses, but it is such a blast to play! It's the only deck where I've ever gotten Replicating Ring to pop off, the only deck where I can run Ball Lightning and Spark Elemental with a straight face in Commander, and a deck where Goblin Assault actually makes sense (and I love Goblin Assault). I have enjoyed every game I've played with Shadow, and I look forward to playing him a bunch more in the new year.

I wish you and yours a very happy 2026. Be excellent to each other.

Thanks for reading.