If you want to have some of the most fun you’ll have in Magic: the Gathering, you owe it to yourself to try a five-color commander deck. Commander is one of the most popular formats of the famous card game Magic: the Gathering. By this point, I am a veteran of a few different card games, but I always come back to commander. In it, you’ll pilot a deck of one hundred cards with one legendary creature at the helm. While there are many commanders that give access to numerous card combinations, five-color decks are some of the wildest decks you can play.

If you’re looking to get into playing five-color commander, there are some great commanders that are easy to build and some easy strategies to master. While MtG can be expensive to get into, many of these strategies can be built on a budget. At the end of the day, build whatever deck looks most fun to you!

Commanding Their Attention

There are a lot of great five-color commanders to pick from. With so much choice, it’s hard to know what’s good, what’s fun, and what’s easy to pick up. Never fear! There are some great choices available for a five-color deck, including some that you can put together without much hassle.

Legendary Power

Magic: the Gathering has a lot of legendary creatures and it prints more with every set. Legendary creatures are characters from MtG’s lore and story; these are often some of the most fun cards. Even if you’re new to MtG, you won’t have to look far to find legendary creatures that interest you. 

Due to the sheer density of legendary creatures, it’s not hard to put together a legendary creature deck on a budget. If you want to play a legendary deck, there are two commanders that might be right up your alley.

“Sisay, Weatherlight Captain” is a famous card, both in MtG lore, and in terms of gameplay. Sisay is incredibly powerful and has been seen at high power tables due to her ability to put legendary cards onto the battlefield. Regardless, if you’re new, intermediate, experienced, or just want to play your favorite legends, Sisay is a great way to do it. If you have a pet card, or a favorite character, Sisay can help you play it every game.

“Jodah, the Uniter” is a commander who can help you vomit out legendary cards. Instead of searching for the perfect card, Jodah gets you an extra legend whenever you cast a legend. Not to mention, Jodah makes all of your legendary creatures stronger equal to the amount of legendary creatures you have out. You can build a blisteringly powerful deck with Jodah without too much effort.

Have fun building your legendary decks! While there are plenty of powerful legends that can make a strong deck, consider building a legendary deck with your favorite characters. You could even build a legendary deck with only legends from certain planes, or from certain sets. The options for what you can do with a legendary deck are nearly limitless!

Guild Out Your Deck

One weakness of five-color commander decks is that it can be hard to manage all the cards you can play. If you want to build a five-color deck, but have trouble managing all the colors, there are commanders that help with that. 

“Niv-Mizzet Reborn” and the other 5 color versions of Niv-Mizzet that came after him can help you focus your deck’s colors. “Niv-Mizzet Reborn,” “Niv-Mizzet, Supreme,” and “Niv-Mizzet, Guildpact” are all commanders that care about playing cards that are exactly two colors. This offers a helpful way to narrow the focus of your commander deck. 

There are a lot of sets in MtG that print two-color cards, so you will have plenty of cards available to build a five-color Niv-Mizzet deck. If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, you may want to choose a couple of color combos to focus on. In this case, “Niv-Mizzet, Supreme,” may be your best commander option. Instead of focusing on having many different two-color cards, like the other versions, “Supreme” allows you to recast cards by discarding two-color cards.

Rube Goldberg Machine of Death

Commander is a format where you can play any card from across MtG’s expansive roster. When it comes to five-color commanders, it’s fun to assemble decks that play their own wild game and slowly assemble a strange assortment of cards that eventually wins the game. If you’re looking for a wild time when building a five-color deck, there are a few commanders that might give it to you.

“Garth, One-Eye” is not an easy commander to pilot, but what other card lets you play Black Lotus? Black Lotus is easily one of the most iconic cards in MtG. It’s so expensive that you’re not likely to ever see it in a game of commander. Except if you play Garth, One-Eye. In addition to Black Lotus, “Garth, One-Eye” gives you access to some of the most iconic cards from MtG’s earliest days. If you’re looking to build a deck that puts together crazy strategies with iconic cards, this is a great place to start.

I would be remiss if I did not mention my own personal deck, helmed by “Omnath, Locus of All.” Omnath cares about cards with three mana symbols in them. This can be anything from three-color legendaries to cards with a bunch of mana symbols of the same color. 

I use Omanth to play charms and ultimatums. Charms are generally considered a bad kind of card. Charms are the Swiss army knife of three-colored cards. They do three different things, in a narrow circumstance, pretty poorly. I love them. Ultimatums, on the other hand, are powerful cards that require a bunch of very specific mana to cast that usually never see play. With Omnath at the helm, I honed a deck that allows me to play all of them. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing MtG.

Building a Deck!

Knowing how to build a five-color deck without a little guidance can be difficult. So, let me show you! I’ll be using “Tazri, Stalwart Survivor” as an example commander to walk you through some steps to use when building a commander deck. 

This guide is intended to help you build a deck that is fun to play and won’t break the bank. Keep in mind, the deck I’ll outline here is meant to prioritize fun, not power. 

When building your own deck, Scryfall or Gatherer are useful tools to help you search for cards to collect. With their variety of ways to search for cards, you’ll be able to filter through MtG’s vast roster of cards more easily.

Tell Me Whatcha Want (Whatcha Really Really Want)

When building a five-color commander deck, I find it helpful to start with what you want the deck to do. This theme then becomes the purpose of your deck and you’ll add cards to try and make your plan work.

In my case, I love “Figure of Destiny.” “Figure of Destiny” is a low-cost creature with many abilities on it that slowly turn it into a more powerful creature. At its strongest, “Figure of Destiny” is an eight-power and toughness avatar, which is really cool. “Figure of Destiny” is not the only card that works this way. “Warden of the First Tree,” “Ascendant Spirit,” and “Tenth District Hero” are all cards that steadily grow in power and epicness by spending more mana. Why not build a deck with as many of these kinds of cards as possible?

I lovingly refer to this deck as my “Destined Hero” deck. The deck wants to play creatures with abilities that make them into powerhouses, buff them even more, and kill your opponents with your epic hero. With our theme well established, we can move on to fleshing out the rest of the deck.

By Our Powers Combined

Now that we know what we want the deck to do, it’s time to find and capitalize on our key synergies. There are a couple of key synergies to exploit with our deck. While discussing these synergies it’s important to keep in mind what our deck strategy is. This type of deck is typically referred to as a “Voltron” deck, where one creature is made stronger by attaching equipment and aura enchantments. This informs some extra synergies we can use.

Our synergies start with our commander. “Tazri, Stalwart Survivor” lets creatures with activated abilities tap for mana to activate abilities. This is great since all of our heroes have activated abilities. This means the deck can tap them for mana to activate those abilities and make them more powerful.

Since our commander helps our game plan, we can even add more powerful creatures to our deck. Cards like “Hexdrinker,” “Kargan Dragonlord,” and “Transcendent Master,” all work similarly to our heroes and can tap for mana to activate their abilities.

Assembling Voltron

When building our voltron strategy, it’s essential to keep our synergies in mind. Since we’re going to be playing lots of auras and equipment, cards like “Thran Power Suit” and “All That Glitters” are all-stars in this deck. These cards buff a creature proportionally to the number of buffs you have out. We can also use equipment that grants vigilance, leaving creatures free to tap for mana. “Forebearer’s Blade,” “Conjurer’s Mantle,” and “Haunted Mantle” all fit the bill and even have some added benefits.

We can even use synergies to keep us on theme. What hero is complete without their legendary weapon? In our case, equipment like “Blade of Selves,” “Pact Weapon,” and “Vorpal Sword” keep us on theme while also increasing the deck’s power. “Pact Weapon” keeps the deck from losing (generally) while it is attached to one of our heroes. “Blade of Selves” lets one of our heroes attack each of our opponents. Finally, “Vorpal Sword” is a win-con that can kill a player whenever the equipped creature deals any amount of damage.

Secret Scheming

Finally, we can add in some cards with some sneaky synergies. With the right setup, cards that grant all creature types essentially allow us to skip steps in the power-up process for “Figure of Destiny.”

Since many of our “Figure of Destiny” clones care about what creature type they are, cards like “Maskwood Nexus” can be powerful. In addition to “Maskwood Nexus,” cards like “Mirror Entity” and “Amoeboid Changeling” can be powerful for our deck. With “Mirror Entity” out, we can pay one mana and activate “Figure of Destiny’s” last ability first, using both creatures to add mana for the ability.

When executing your strategy, cards that let your creatures tap immediately will also be very good. While cards like “Lightning Greaves” and “Swiftfoot Boots” are staples, “Thousand Year Elixir” and “Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler” can shine in a deck like this. Both cards allow creatures to tap to activate their abilities immediately. “Tyvar, Jubilant Brawler” also lets you untap your creatures and even offers the possibility of catching one of your heroes with the minus two ability.

In order to execute your strategies more consistently, consider adding tutors to your deck. Tutors are cards that can search for other cards. While tutors can cost a lot of real-world money, there are some cheaper options that can search for narrow types of cards. “Fighter Class,” “Open the Armory,” and “Quest for the Holy Relic” are all ways to search for equipment. “Congregation at Dawn” can help you search for three creature cards. “Signal the Clans” might also be a fun card to find one of your heroes, as long as you don’t mind which hero stays in your hand.

Brass Tacks

Now let’s talk about the most difficult element of five-color decks: mana. You’ll want to be able to actually play all of the cool cards at your disposal. Fixing your mana is usually done by a combination of three elements, ramp, mana fixing, and an aggressive land base.

Ramp is a community term generally used for any card that gets you more lands. Luckily, five-color decks have access to green mana, which is the premier card for ramp. Even a card like rampant growth (which is where we get the term ramp) has a place in your decks. “Cultivate” and “Kodama’s Reach” are two pretty classic ramp spells. “Sakura-Tribe Elder” is a creature that can sacrifice itself to ramp you a card. Since that is an activated ability, it also works well with your commander.

When you have a deck that uses a lot of mana, creatures that tap for mana are very useful. In the community, these are referred to as mana dorks. Technically, our commander makes any creature with an activated ability with a mana dork, but only for activated abilities. This is always good to take into account. If we wanted more creatures that tap for mana we could add cards like “Avacyn’s Pilgrim,” since we’ll need white mana, or “Ignoble Hierarch,” which can tap for a few different colors.

Landing in a Good Spot

Finally, we need to discuss lands. Lands are the hardest part of building these decks. Generally, better lands cost more real-world money, so building the best land package can be hard on your wallet. However, you can do a lot with cheaper lands, it just might work a little slower than expensive decks do. 

“Terramorphic Expanse” and “Evolving Wilds” are two quintessential, cheap “fetch lands” that find basic land cards and put them onto the battlefield. You can also utilize the “Bountiful Landscape” cycle of cards from Modern Horizon’s 3 to find cards of specific subtypes. Cards like “Canopy Vista” are dual lands that can work with ramp spells like “Nature’s Lore.” The cycle of “Canopy Vista” lands that came from Battle for Zendikar also works well with show lands, a cycle of cards like “Port Town.” If you’re looking for low-cost dual lands, the show lands and the battle lands pair well and are both easy on your wallet.

It’s important to be aggressive with building your land base, especially if you’re using a lot of basic lands. This means calculating the percentage of cards that need a certain type of mana and making sure you have a similar percentage of lands that make that mana. This can be a little painstaking, but I’ve found it’s beneficial with low-cost decks. It’s also important to make sure that most of your lands will tap for mana on the turn they are played. Factor this in when adding in lands that can enter the battlefield tapped.

Counting to One Hundred

You may notice we haven’t assembled exactly one hundred cards for the Tazri commander deck. That’s because this is just an outline. Every deck at every play group is going to want different cards. This guide is meant to help you think about synergies and how to put a five-color deck together.

The last part is up to you. With a finished deck, you might also want to add removal and some ways to draw cards. You’ll also want more creatures and enchantments that can support your artifact theme. Whatever you build, make sure to have fun! While there are some cards that are generically powerful, half the fun of commander is finding the perfect card for your deck.

This is the true power of a five-color commander deck. You can do anything you want. Play a deck with cards that only have chairs in the art! Play a deck that has every single “you win the game” card in it, even the ones that won’t work! Play a deck with terrible cards that shouldn’t work that you make work. Do whatever you want because that is the freedom that five-color decks allow.

Rainbow Power

Magic: the Gathering is a fantastic card game, and playing five-color commander decks has become my favorite way to enjoy it. With this guide at your disposal, you should be able to start your journey to making five-color decks. So go wild! As long as you keep your synergies in mind while building your deck, you should be able to create something you love.