The Most Underrated Commanders of 2025

Posted on January 7, 2026

Happy new year! Another year has passed us by and we're now in 2026.

However, I'm not done looking back on 2025 quite just yet. Ever since 2022, I've gone back at the end of the year and taken a look at some commanders that may have been overlooked.

With Commander being the biggest format played in Magic: The Gathering today, there's a deluge of options to choose from each and every year. Naturally, the biggest ones see tremendous amounts of play which means some cards are inevitably going to be missed along the way. I'd like to give these forgotten cards a little more time in the spotlight than they otherwise would have gotten!

I'm going to look at most of the major releases from 2025 and find some underrated Commanders (though I'll be skipping Final Fantasy since I already did a full write-up on that in 2025 shortly after the set released), and I'm measuring if a legend is underrated by pulling up EDHREC.com, checking each set from the year, and seeing what legends have unusually low numbers of decks. As I bring up each legend, I'll include the number of lists on the website at the time of writing.

The threshold amount varies, as in the past I'd look for cards with sub-200 or sub-300 lists, but as the format's popularity grows, the bar must be raised higher. This is especially true in the case of Commanders of preconstructed decks since those are how many players first get into the format and Magic overall. In my estimation, it always stands out when a particular Precon legend has less than 1000 lists, considering how commonly accessible they are.

Sometimes I include Remastered sets, as I did for 2023 when I talked a little bit about Dominaria Remastered. This time around, though, there's not really anything that could necessarily be considered "underrated" per se out of Innistrad Remastered.

For example, the commander with the lowest representation is Gisela, the Broken Blade at around 720 lists on EDHREC. That's fairly outside the range I usually look for in these underrated pieces. What's more, though, the only reason it doesn't see more play is because the companion legend, Bruna, the Fading Light, makes way more sense in the Commander slot. That one has around 1184 lists and it's safe to assume that if you're playing one in the command zone, the other is in your 99.

Lagorin, Soul of Alacria (127 Lists)

Something that stood out to me while putting together this list was how solid Aetherdrift was overall. Just about everything that was worthwhile had a modest showing among commanders. The only ones that didn't were the five vanilla creatures (only good if you want to meme) or ones that have abilities too weak to be worthwhile.

The options for "underrated commanders" was so low I almost cut out this set and leaned into some others, but I'd love for every set to get a fairly equal representation. So, I found this card. Lagorin, Soul of Alacria isn't what I'd call a top level commander or anything, but at least it does something interesting. It encourages you to play with vehicles but, perhaps more importantly, it suggests you do something with mounts as well. Dishing out counters rocks, and the low cost means you can get very aggressive with it fast.

This is a prime candidate for a low-power Commander deck-build-around. If you want to build a nice, cheap deck that can beat up on other players, this is a great way to go about doing so. As mounts are a fairly new thing, it's also a legend that you can get fresh upgrades for over time.

Pia Nalaar, Chief Mechanic (905 Lists)

Generally speaking, Commander precon legends are over-represented among legends for just about any given set. After all, many players get exposed to the format in the first place from these decks. That means they're going to inevitably play either of the legends in those decks and thus they see higher than average numbers. Every so often, though, there's an exception. That's where Pia Nalaar, Chief Mechanic comes in.

If you look at these numbers in a vacuum it seems fine. It's a good healthy number that represents a higher number of total lists compared to most other underrated legends. The difference, though, is when you compare this to other precon legends, it ends up being far below the average number of lists that you might expect to see. That's not too surprising given that energy is a narrow mechanic and the deck's face card, Saheeli, Radiant Creator offers a much flashier ability.

Despite this, I think Pia Nalaar, Chief Mechanic has a lot of excellent play to her as well. Sure, you can't get a ton of energy from her ability, but your deck should likely be running additional energy outlets. That means that with the right build you can assemble tons of easily crewable evasive threats. It's a fun build-around with plenty of opportunities to go nuts and shred through opponents' life totals.

Tersa Lightshatter (186 Lists)

To the surprise of no one, pretty much all of the three-color legends from Tarkir: Dragonstorm are well represented among popular commanders. The mono-colored legends are another story. With the exception of maybe Taigam, Master Opportunist, all of them are pretty low in the number of lists. I find that somewhat surprising, as a bunch of them can be quite decent.

Case in point: Tersa Lightshatter. This card has been proving itself to be a real player in Standard thank to Tersa's haste, card filtration, and then later the ability to recast spells from your graveyard. That's pretty huge if you can take advantage of it. If you're building a Commander deck, that is absolutely something you should be able to make work.

You can go with the old standby of a bunch of Lightning Bolt-style effects and pingers like Kessig Flamebreather and Guttersnipe. Perhaps you might want to utilize ritual spells and go for a combo action. Or how about using something like Reckless Impulse or Wrenn's Resolve to go even deeper into your deck? Oh, and if you can hit something like a Banefire or Comet Storm? Now you're in business. It's a simple card but is bursting with potential if you can build it properly.

Anafenza, Unyielding Lineage (263 Lists)

I feel very similarly about Anafenza, Unyielding Lineage. Make no mistake: this version of Anafenza is at her best in a supporting role for something like an Orzhov Aristocrats strategy or something similar. Those decks love to sacrifice stuff and then get it back easily, which is hard to do in a Mono-White deck. Still, it's certainly not a difficult thing to do and is something you can set up pretty effectively.

Moreover, you can take it in a couple of other directions as well. The most obvious way to approach it for many will likely be to make tokens, swarm the board, and try pumping them up. What if instead of doing that you instead went in on pumping up Anafenza herself instead? From there you can use equipment to buff her further, give her indestructible (Darksteel Plate and the like), and/or give her shroud and evasion (Whispersilk Cloak).

What hurts her is the number of other cool and accessible cards a mono-color setup just doesn't have access to.

Haliya, Ascendant Cadet (374 Lists)

Edge of Eternities was pretty light on legendary creatures. Only a single returning character showed up (Tezzeret) and everyone else got a pretty small showing of cards. This made for only about 20 cards that could be played as commanders and far fewer of them are even close to being viable options. As an example, two Colorless spacecrafts and an extremely meager offering in the form of Alpharael, Dreaming Acolyte cut out a good chunk of those legends alone!

As a result, almost all of the ones that seem relevant have a pretty reasonable showing among numbers of decks built around them. In fact, there was only one card that stood out to me as being underrepresented and that was Haliya, Ascendant Cadet.

I loved getting to play this card in Limited and it seems ripe for building around. Dishing out +1/+1 counters - especially in the colors of cards like Hardened Scales - seems pretty sweet in its own right. Couple that with the ability to draw cards whenever one of your pumped up creatures connects with an opponent and you're just cooking with gas. If you can get some first strike and trample going, then you're just off to the races. I highly recommend taking her for a spin if you're looking for something very budget-friendly!

Arana, Heart of the Spider (219 Lists)

There is a lot of junk in Marvel's Spider-Man. Plenty of legends have weak abilities or barely even have abilities to speak of at all. I mean, one of them is effectively a glorified Colossal Dreadmaw with a minor keyword upside. As such, it's no surprise to see several legends from the set rank low.

Arana, Heart of the Spider stood out to me as an exception, though. She only has so many builds, but this is one hell of a legend! Let's start from the top: a three-mana 3/3 is a great rate at a base level. Not only that, but she can pump herself up or another creature if you go for an attack. But wait, there's more! Every time a modified creature deals combat damage to a player, you get a free impulse draw. Unlike Haliya, that counts for every creature too!

What this means is that Arana is an absolute value engine. If you want, you can simply have her be the only means of dishing out the counters while you reap the benefits of the card advantage. However, the more counter granters, equipment, and auras you include, the deeper you can go. This provides a lot of different directions you can take a deck in and easily makes her one of the coolest build-arounds in this list.

Agent Venom (83 Lists)

Midnight Reaper is a pretty solid Commander staple. Plenty of decks love to sacrifice stuff over and over again and as such, Midnight Reaper provides a fantastic support card for these synergies. Marvel's Spider-Man brought with it a functional reprint of it in the form of Agent Venom but with one small caveat: it's legendary.

In 60-card formats, this is a much bigger deal. Running multiple copies of Midnight Reaper was helpful alongside Cauldron Familiar decks, for example. It's far less exciting when you can't take advantage of those multiple draws. In a singleton format like Commander, however, you can only ever play the one copy. This makes Agent Venom a great inclusion for a bit of redundancy in a variety of Black decks, but why not put it in the command zone instead?

Given just how popular of a card Midnight Reaper is, regardless of whether it's simply a support card or not, it's somewhat surprising to see it so underrepresented. There's a lot of overall distaste for Spider-Man in general, which may be a factor. Despite this, I think there's a lot of potential for something like this card to make for a really awesome commander if you put in some effort to make it work.

Koh, the Face Stealer (609 Lists)

I really wanted to highlight Koh, the Face Stealer among the new Avatar: the Last Airbender legends. This goes higher than my usual threshold for what I'd consider "underrated," but I'm making an exception here. The reason for this is that I simply think Koh has the potential to be pretty abusable thanks to its abilities. That makes even just shy of 600 lists feel like a number that's lower than it should be.

When I see this card, I think of Necrotic Ooze. That card is a powerful creature with some great stats and, more importantly, an ability that grants it a tremendous amount of other abilities. This has allowed Necrotic Ooze to be somewhat of a staple as far as combo-enablers go in Commander. With the right deck construction, it's easy to generate an infinite combo, as well as potentially benefitting from your opponents' graveyards as well.

Whenever I read Koh, I get an extremely similar feeling. Having only access to one color does hinder things a bit, but there's still an absurd amount of nonsense you can get up to all the same. The fact that you have to exile means your chances are limited should Koh be taken out, but stealing opponents' abilities can be huge game as well, making for a real killer of a commander that could absolutely use some more love.

Hei Bai, Spirit of Balance (306 Lists)

Wow I sure have spoken a decent amount about decks that love to sacrifice stuff. What do you know, here's a great way to utilize all of the cards I've discussed for these strategies up to now in a single deck. Hei Bai loves to sacrifice stuff turn after turn and get really huge in the process. Not only that, but if this wild spirit is taken down, he makes something else big instead.

There's lots of potential with this. Naturally, a place to start would be to find creatures that you're happy sacrificing. Of course, this means the usual fare of cards like Bloodghast and Nether Traitor. There's another interesting dynamic in finding cards that you want to put Hei Bai's counters on as well, such as an indestructible creature or something with hexproof that's difficult to deal with. A huge lifelinking creature can go a long way there as well even without the protection you might want to back it up.

This doesn't even get into the number of ways that you can make plenty of artifact tokens as well. Stick an Obsessive Pursuit in here and go to town!

Mai and Zuko (338 Lists)

A big problem with Mai and Zuko that's probably obvious for any experienced player is that there simply aren't a ton of outstanding ally cards in Grixis colors. There are some, to be sure, but ally decks are at their best when they play off of all five colors rather than just three. To make matters worse, the majority of allies to come about in Avatar: the Last Airbender were more Bant-color focused. This means only a small number of Black and Red allies show up in the set and the ones from previous sets lack the level of splash to make it a viable strategy.

But oh, wait, what's this? Mai and Zuko also cares about letting you cast your artifacts as though they had flash as well. Now we're talking! There is no shortage of great ways to take advantage of this by sneaking in powerful artifacts mid-combat thanks to this card's firebending. You can likely find some better artifact synergies elsewhere, but it's a cool way to utilize a new card and - frankly - makes it quite underrated as well for my money.

That's it for 2025! I'll admit, this year it was much more difficult to find options that seemed to fall among the potentially underrated options. Most decent legends are seeing significant amounts of play as is, so there's no reason to consider them as underrated. What made it that much harder is that the majority of cards with low representation deserve those low numbers, featuring dull abilities or simply low power as a whole. 2026 is going to be packed with lots of good stuff, though, so it'll be interesting to see what legends come along in this new year.

If you'd like to read my previous Underrated Commanders articles, you can find them here: