Happy Holidays everyone!

I've done a lot of year end columns since I started writing for CoolStuffInc.com back at the end of 2017, and this year we've each been asked to put together a personal top 10 list of our favorite cards from the past year.

These are not the 10 most powerful cards of the year, or the 10 most popular cards, or even the 10 "best" cards, whatever that means. This is my personal top 10 and if you're a regular reader, you know I'll do my best to explain how each card found its way onto my list.

Rather than just pick 10 legendary creatures, I'm going to pick three non-legendary creatures and then dive into looking at commanders. Before we get to my picks, let's look at some honorable mentions.

Honorable and Dishonorable Mentions

I often like to include honorable mentions when I put these kinds of lists together, but today I'm going to start with a look at one of the worst cards of the year and then a few of the best that didn't quite make it onto my list.

Let's start at the bottom. Jumbo Cactuar should never have been printed. In Green, it's trivial to give a creature trample, it's super easy to ramp to 7 mana, and there are loads of creature tutors available. I don't think it's likely to ever impact cEDH, so this failure on the part of Wizards of the Coast's designers will plague lower powered pods. Normally if you want to make a creature have 10000 power, you have to jump through a few hoops (usually with a combo of some sort). With Jumbo Cactuar, you just have to attack. That's it. My gut tells me that someone should have been fired for letting this ridiculous card make it to print. It will never lead to a game ending where the loser(s) don't feel cheated in some way.

Now that the biggest mistake of 2025 is out of the way, let's get to the fun stuff!

I am not generally a fan of Universes Beyond, and I haven't been shy about my disdain for having other IPs become such a big part of our game. That said, it's not something I have any control over, so why not look for some positives in these shameless cash grabs?

One of my favorite things about Magic in 2025 was some of the Spider-Man art they put out.

I've hand-painted a few "Spider-Man pointing at himself" meme alters over the past few years. I chose to alter Phantasmal Image, so when I saw Imposter Syndrome, I couldn't help but smile. Spider-Man variant arts were among my favorite card treatments ever, and I loved the comic book feel they managed to work into that set. I'm not even a huge Spider-Man fan, but it won me over. I even slightly regret buying a regular booster box of that set instead of a collector booster box.

I've still kept my Spider-Man cards apart from my regular Magic cards, and intend on adding next year's Marvel expansion to that card pool. I may do a little cross-pollination, but I feel better about keeping these cards together rather than mixing comic book heroes and villains in with Magic lore.

The last honorable mention worth sharing is represented by the enchantment Dracogenesis, but that card broadly represents the return of Dragons to Magic in Tarkir: Dragonstorm. I'll always feel like the core vibe of Magic: The Gathering is medieval fantasy, so this felt like the most "Magic" set of the year. I have had a multicolored Dragons deck for a few years and this past year I put Jodah, the Unifier into the command zone and loaded in a bunch of cards from Tarkir: Dragonstorm including Dracogenesis. When that card hits the field, good things generally happen.

I'll be honest and say that I don't love cards like Omniscience. Dracogenesis definitely edges into "unbalanced, possibly unfair card design" territory. I've only seen it pop up in games a few times. The fact that I got lucky and somehow pulled a foil Japanese language version out of a booster pack (still not sure how that happened) is what probably got this card its honorable mention in today's list. It was a strange thrill to open it up in a booster pack, and I'm always happy to draw into it if I've got enough mana available to cast it.

My Personal Top 10 Cards from 2025

While I play a lot of Commander, jamming anywhere from two or three, to as many as a dozen games every week, I do tend to lean on staples and on cards I'm familiar with. For that reason, I don't have the same level of exposure to new cards as someone that does a lot of drafts or prereleases, or someone that plays Standard. That said, I write up new decks nearly every week and I do go out of my way to play as many of these new commanders as I can.

It's impossible to really keep up with the amount of new legendary creatures that get added to our format, so these cards are just my own favorites from the past year. I tend to play in lower powered games, mostly in brackets 2 and 3, and I have been avoiding game changers in an effort to challenge myself a bit more.

10. The Wind Crystal

This first slot is a stand-in for all of the Crystal cycle, as cost reducers are a wonderful way to make less playable cards playable in today's EDH. Finding a way to make older and overpriced cards have a place in the format will always make me happy, even if some of those cards are still only playable in lower brackets and more casual games.

The Wind Crystal won the tenth spot in my list because for about a month it was a menace in my weekly Thursday night online EDH group. In truth, it's not all that overpowered, but we had a string of games where the extra lifegain was a huge factor in determining the eventual winner. It became a bit of a running joke, with many of us comically overreacting whenever it showed up.

"I tap 4 mana and play The Wind Crystal."

"Is that game?"

9. Stormscale Scion

Izzet decks are one of my guilty pleasures, so when I saw Stormscale Scion, I was excited to slot it into a deck, rack up a big storm count, and then play a Stormscale Scion and see the panic in the eyes of my tablemates. In practice I haven't seen this dragon pop up nearly as often as I would like, but I still love this card. A big storm count into wincon like Aetherflux Reservoir is yesterday's news. I'd rather play a bunch of Dragons and try to win through combat.

There are lots of dragons from Tarkir: Dragonstorm that I could easily have picked for this spot in the list. Canopy Gargantuan and Broodcaller Scourge are amazing, and make me think seriously about building an Old Gnawbone deck. Clarion Conqueror is wildly popular, though it's not my style to win games through shutting down my opponents.

Ultimately, I just had to go with a card that can be a wild, scaly payoff for a big storm turn.

8. Temur Battlecrier

I wanted to pick a non-legendary, non-Dragon card from Tarkir: Dragonstorm for this list, as I just loved that set. I ended up going with my favorite non-legendary gold card, not as much for the Orc Ranger depicted in the art as for the thicc boi he's riding. Look at that Orc. Look at that horse! Now look at that amazing cost savings. Back to the horse. Back to me. Old Spice memes aside, this is both a fantastic card and a fantastic horse.

Saving 1 mana for each creature you control with power 4 or greater in Temur colors is a beautiful thing. I've never even built an Animar, Soul of Elements deck, but I love creature decks I love big creatures, and I love this card. I slotted into my Eshki, Temur's Roar list and it's put in real work in games this year. As it turns out, big creatures love big cost savings.

7. Ultima, Origin of Oblivion

I didn't expect to have a new colorless deck in my arsenal when 2025 began, but Final Fantasy's Ultima, Origin of Oblivion has become a regular bracket 2 option to get thrown into my gym bag when I head off to an LGS to play commander. My build isn't overpowered, but it's become a refreshing way to get some use out of cards I don't normally play.

Ultima lets me add an additional colorless mana if I tap a land to generate a colorless mana. Making more mana in bracket 2 has given me an excuse to run a bunch of older cards that might be too mana intensive to be playable in 2025. As an example, Tower of Fortunes costs 4 mana to play, and a whopping 8 mana to tap to draw four cards. That's insane, but if I'm only having to tap two lands to play it and four lands to tap it, Ultima makes it much more playable.

6. Cosmic Spider-Man

I bought a box of Spider-Man to help out a store that had overbought that set, and I wrote a "deck in a box" column where I built and played a deck with only cards from that box. I'll admit that I added in an SPM Arachnogenesis and a few other cards, but it was only possible because I opened a Cosmic Spider-Man to use as my commander.

Lots of players don't care if they're mixing cards from different Universes Beyond sets, but I was grateful that Wizards gave us a few legendary creatures that could bring together a bunch of cards from that set into a single, cohesive deck that both played well and made sense to me. I play with a few people who just abhor Universes Beyond, so I haven't played my Cosmic Spider-Man deck that often. I have kept it together and I have enjoyed it as a fun Bracket 2 option if I'm with folks that aren't going to roll their eyes at that particular IP.

5. Neriv, Crackling Vanguard

I've been playing lower powered games more this year and Neriv, Crackling Vanguard might be my favorite bracket 1 deck. I built Neriv as a singleton token generator deck, with little to no overlap in the types of tokens my cards can create. It's been entertaining to see how many different tokens I can put out, and the deck has even managed to win a few games along the way.

The wins I got were often on the back of constructs that got +1/+1 for each artifact and creature I controlled. It didn't hurt that I was playing against equally janky decks, but I found that I was able to enjoy both the wins and the losses.

Putting out weird tokens became a mission in itself, though it does play into the commander's mechanics. I never expected to get any joy out of playing Fishing Pole, and going through the work to make a Fish creature token. This year I got a taste of that weird satisfaction of doing something meaningless and silly in a bracket 1 game, where the journey is more important than the destination.

4. Tifa Lockhart

Every year I end up finding one or two commanders that I build and have decent expectations for, and the deck's first games outpace even the most lofty dreams I might have had for how it would perform. This year Tifa Lockhart was that deck. I thought I had a solid list and a decent game plan, and the deck just crushed tables to the point where I was apologetic after the win and I ended up taking the list apart. I wasn't playing against rubes - the deck just fired on all cylinders and to some extent I probably also got a bit lucky that they didn't have early interaction.

I love when I can catch lightning in a bottle with a new deck and it has a string of very successful first games. I've had that experience with Light-Paws, Emperor's Voice and with Marwyn, the Nurturer, and it was a thrill to have that experience this past year with Tifa.

3. Eshki, Temur's Roar

While Eshki, Temur's Roar is a commander precon card, it's become one of my favorite new brews. I enjoy creature-based decks, and my Eshki list has over fifty creatures to help ensure that I'm constantly putting counters on my commander, drawing cards, and building up for the big spells that can help me win games.

My old Maelstrom Wanderer cascade deck got taken apart to build Eshki, and that deck's cascade theme has worked beautifully under new management. Eshki has also become a home for Possibility Storm, one of my favorite old Red enchantments that helps to double up your cast triggers.

2. Tellah, Great Sage

In a year where Vivi Ornitier probably made the single biggest impact on the format, my favorite Izzet () card in the Final Fantasy set was Tellah, Great Sage. I've played the deck a bunch of times over the past few months, and I've found it very entertaining and quite capable of holding its own in bracket three games. In bracket four, you'd probably just run Vivi, which I did pull from a booster and slot into my Tellah list.

My favorite thing about Tellah, Great Sage, is that it is a natural fit for Mana Echoes, an old Red enchantment from Onslaught. I love finding homes for weird old enchantments that newer players might not even have heard of. Tellah is also a great fit for Fool's Demise, an aura that brings the enchanted creature back into play when it dies. Unlike Eshki, when Tellah blows up and pushes out a bunch of damage, I have to sacrifice him, so Fool's Demise saves me the trouble of having to cast him again.

1. Spider-Punk

My top card is a bit of a surprise. Writing about Commander is an honor and a privilege, but it's also work. It takes time and effort, and in recent years I've had more than a handful of times where I've contemplated moving on from this side hustle and possibly even from Magic.

I had a moment this year where I had started writing up a resignation letter. I was ready to walk away. I was feeling done, disenchanted by Universes Beyond, and out of ideas for writing my next column. It was the closest I had come to moving on in eight years of writing about Commander.

Out of curiosity I looked up Jason Alt's final CoolStuffInc column from back in 2023 and noticed that he ended his writing on an even 500 columns. There's no reason to try to make it to 500, but I like to have something to shoot for, and at around 445 columns I'm not all that far off. Also, I enjoy writing and I still love this game. I figured I'd take another look through SPM to see if anything jumped out at me.

Then I stumbled across Spider-Punk.

Something about Spider-Punk spoke to me, and I enjoyed writing my column about that card more than any other column this year. I got to think about Punk, and about anarchy, and revolution, and it was just fun. The deck wasn't the most powerful one I brewed this year, and I never did build it in paper. It might not have been my best column of the year, but it was the one that found me standing on the edge, ready to step off.

Spider-Punk pulled me back.

Someday I will probably take that leap. I've thought about what I might do next. I've imagined writing screenplays, short stories, or something a little more creative than what I've been doing with my time. Who knows? I could write the next great American novel (hah!) but... not yet.

Final Thoughts

It's been quite a year. While I didn't include any cards from Edge of Eternities, Aetherdrift, or even Innistrad Masters in today's list, I did build and play decks from those sets.

My landfall deck is currently running under the Edge of Eternities Gruul () legend Tannuk, Memorial Ensign. I altered a bunch of copies of EOE's Vote Out with cartoony art inspired by the video game Among Us. I got to paint the Millennium Falcon on a card this year. I will always be amused when someone refers to the yellow basic lands from Aetherdrift as "piss lands". There were interesting and even good things about all of those sets, even if no cards from them made it onto my personal top 10 list.

With Marvel poised to be hitting us in 2026, I'm glad that I've kept my Spider-Man cards apart from the rest of my Magic collection. I don't know if I'll end up building a "villains" deck, or if any of my SPM cards will find their way into a Marvel "heroes" deck. I hope so. I've come to like the idea of having superhero decks, but I still recoil at some of the ridiculous things we'll be seeing in the coming year, so I'll be doing my best to keep my IPs separate, at least for the most part.

I should share a look at a few of my alters from this past year. I picked up the hobby during COVID and I've managed to keep at it. I'm not getting a lot better, but I'm still enjoying occasionally painting on cards.

I've done a Ragost, Deft Gastronaut as Zoidberg, a Homonculus Horde as a Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine, and quite a few more.

If you've enjoyed my thoughts on my favorite cards from the past year, please consider yourself invited to check out my weekly column. Every Monday my Commanderruminations column goes up here on CoolStuffInc.com, and you should check out the other writers as well.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have a great holiday season!