How I Read a Top Commander Page (And So Can You!)

I want to talk about how I read a Top Commanders page on EDHREC, and how you can do it just like me. 

But First…

Writing for a mixed audience is a bit fraught. I want to include information for new readers and more experienced readers alike, and sometimes that means going over some stuff that I’ve gone over before. That seems obvious and people just likely forgive me if I mention something experienced people will know. But what’s a less obvious struggle is that I have a tough time discerning what information is so obvious that I didn’t need to say it, even for new people. I made up everything I’m doing, so everything seems equally obvious, and by obvious I mean the result of my focus on this thing for a decade.

I don’t know what people should be expected to know and what they shouldn’t. The result is that I might insult your intelligence without meaning to. If that happens, please understand that this week I am experimenting with giving an exhaustive accounting of my thought process rather than trying to discern which of my thoughts are the good ones. If something seems obvious, just know that if you agree with me that hard, we’re probably both right and that makes you a big winner, so keep reading. 

Anyway, here’s the information I want to talk about and anything else on the page is stuff I ignore at first. 

This is the Top Commanders page for the past month. Of all of the pages on EDHREC, it’s the page I visit the least. I think that’s likely the case for lots of you. The most-built decks of the Past 2 Years (the maximum time EDHREC goes back) shows what’s happening in the format overall, and the Past Week shows you what’s happening right now. What information can we glean from the weird time frame of a month that we can’t get from one of the other two reports? Quite a lot, and it’s going to lead to some possible spec targets. Here’s what I’m looking at on this page.  

Sauron, the Dark Lord is third. That seems significant, because while Sauron is among the most-built decks on the set’s page, it’s not first. Tom Bombadil still is. There are a lot of differences between Sauron and Tom Bombadil, not the least of which being that Tom Bombadil was previewed a long time ago and Sauron very close to the end of preview season. While some people might view a deck like Tom Bombadil like a puzzle to be solved the way they seemed to with Sanctum of All, Sauron players are building the deck to play with. Bombadil still being the “reigning” most-built deck of the period of time over which we have collected the decks disguises the fact that Sauron was built so much in the last week that it completely overshadows the first three weeks, and several weeks of last month when people were making essentially the exact same Tom Bombadil list as everyone else. Sauron isn’t just coming in hot, it’s coming in VERY hot. And since the specs in it weren’t easy to see a mile away like with Tom Bombadil, going to the page is actually very worth it in this case, and there’ll still be cards that haven’t entirely sold out yet. We’ll do that together at the end.

 

Aragorn, the Uniter being fourth is not very surprising, although it’ll be much harder to build than Tom Bombadil, with less consensus, and the builders will take a bit longer to crack what makes Aragorn cracked. I think Tom Bombadil was practice for finding harder specs in the Aragorn decks. We’ll use the same logic as with Bombadil, but the Aragorn specs are like a Rubix Cube to Bombadil’s jigsaw puzzle. Bad movies use solving a Rubik’s Cube as a sign of a genius intellect, but a Rubik’s Cube is something anyone can learn to solve over a weekend. We can put our Bombadil spec techniques (“specniques,” if you will) to the test on this page in a bit.

Sauron, the Dark Lord	CardKingdom $6.99	TCGPlayer $6.40
Sauron, the Dark Lord (Showcase)	CardKingdom $4.49	TCGPlayer $3.56
Aragorn, the Uniter	CardKingdom $5.49	TCGPlayer $5.17
Aragorn, the Uniter (Showcase)	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $6.20
Aragorn, the Uniter (Borderless)	CardKingdom $13.99	TCGPlayer $16.55

 

She Lobs Sea Blobs Down By the…

Some of us fired blindly assuming Shelob, Child of Ungoliant would make some Spiders go up. The only one with any real growth potential was Ishkanah, Grafwidow, which went up a bunch. If you didn’t lock in those $3 Spiders, I wouldn’t worry - I don’t think there’s enough juice here to push any of the middling Spiders up into respectable spec range, and Arachnogenesis was already expensive because it’s an insane card. If there is one card here that has upward potential at its current price, it’s not a Spider, but rather a Spider Queen. 

I doctored the axes on the price graph of Lolth, Spider Queen to show it’s gone from a historic low to a historic high since Shelob was printed. Unlike Ishkanah, however, people are going to realize Lolth is actual nutter butters and play it. I think the Spiders have hoovered all of the metaphorical spec juice out of the desiccated carcass that is the potential for specs based on Shelob decks. That said, if you feel the need to find a spec there at all, Lolth is a card that should be in any black Aristocrats style deck, and this might help people realize it. A mythic planeswalker from a set that got glazed over is going to do more than merely go up a few bucks. I don’t think it’s too late to buy in now. $2.50 would have felt a lot better, though.  

Shelob, Child of Ungoliant	CardKingdom $0.49	TCGPlayer $0.70
Shelob, Child of Ungoliant (Extended Art)	CardKingdom $1.49	TCGPlayer $1.02
Lolth, Spider Queen	CardKingdom $7.49	TCGPlayer $6.02
Lolth, Spider Queen (Borderless)	CardKingdom $11.99	TCGPlayer $9.00

Lord of the Nazgul as a commander is one I won’t even click on here. This deck is going to be a 75/25 mix of cards that are in every single Dimir deck on EDHREC, with the other quarter being cards that are only good in Lord of the Nazgul decks. If you find a good potential spec in that list, run it by me because I skipped this one.  

Sam, Loyal Attendant and Frodo, Adventurous Hobbit having a nearly identical split after a month is telling. I feel like just looking at the data from the week might lead you to the same conclusion, but I would want to know if it was just for that week. To me, it would be significant if they had very different numbers. If they did, then one was clearly better and people were making a decision. Since they’re almost identical, it means that people are keeping them partnered which means they’re most likely playing the precon as-is. When that happens, almost all of the cards in those lists are from the precons and that much noise washes out a lot of signal. If there are any significant specs in those decks, you’ll find them by hunting through the individual commanders (not as partners). I did that and didn’t find anything.  

Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir means that a lot of people updated their Knights decks or built new ones. If you ever wonder how you can tell what people are adding to their existing decks, EDHREC tells you. Click on Sidar’s page and you see this.  

We got some decent cards for Knights decks, I guess, but the real story here is that people are going to play Nazgul just because you can have nine of them and they’re Knights. Creatures with deathtouch that also get first strike because every card in a Knights typal deck gives first strike seem solid to me. People will be adding Nazgul nine at a time. You don’t need me to write a whole article about when to get an uncommon that’s actually more rare than a mythic and has super low supply despite the second printing already being ordered. Nazgul are going to be money forever in a way that I don’t think Seven Dwarves have shown they can be. These aren’t just another Persistent Petitioners - these introduce being tempted by the Ring in decks that don’t have to run any other Tempt enablers. Jibari’s page doesn’t have much juicy on it, but it does seem like it solidly proves that Nazgul are being embraced by Knights players.  

Nazgul (0333)	CardKingdom $9.99	TCGPlayer $7.87
Nazgul (0334)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $7.88
Nazgul (0335)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $7.99
Nazgul (0336)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $8.33
Nazgul (0337)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $7.68
Nazgul (0338)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $8.93
Nazgul (0339)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $8.49
Nazgul (0100)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $7.51
Nazgul (0332)	CardKingdom $9.49	TCGPlayer $8.21

Specs

I occasionally like to map out my thought process, if only to prove I have one. Now, I promised you some specs.  

As you can see, the first thing I do if there’s a theme drop-down is click on it. Nearly half of all Sauron, the Dark Lord decks are Zombie token decks. If you look at all of the total Sauron decks, you’ll see a lot of staples in the high synergy cards. If you cut down to what the plurality of the decks are playing, though, you’ll get slightly more niche high synergy cards. While that’s usually a waste of time, it’s a good habit.  

Unfortunately, neither the master page nor the theme page coughed up anything interesting. For all of its meteoric rise to prominence, it sort of failed to deliver on doing anything except playing every Amass card from War of the Spark. You win some, you lose some, and Aragorn could be a winner.  

That said, one card did trip my spidey senses when I noticed the telltale “something is wrong here” indicator.

Can you tell what’s wrong with the price of Archfiend of Ifnir? It’s more on TCGPlayer than it is on Card Kingdom. I know without looking it’s because it’s sold out on Card Kingdom. You can read into that - I did. I think Archfiend restocks on Card Kingdom at $5 minimum. I think they’ll be paying $3.50 cash in a month or two. There are too many good uses for this card and the fact that it’s a Demon gave it just another axis. This is leveling up, imo. 

Aragorn seems to have the same consensus on how to build based on this long list of themes. That said, there’s a lot of overlap between the Humans and Legends theme. We could think about the best five Ascendancies to play, but I think foils of a card that’s going to be good in any configuration of this deck are underpriced. I refer, of course, to mana rock powerhouse Knotvine Mystic. 

According to our own data, foils of this card aren’t even at an all-time high. This is the perfect inclusion in basically just the Aragorn deck, but foils are disappearing under $2 and there’s a real opportunity here. If you don’t believe me, I’ll let the graph of a card from the same block make my point for me.  

Foils of Trace of Abundance got hot a little earlier, and they’re on their way to $10. Is Trace of Abundance played in 10 times as many decks as Knotvine Mystic? No, in fact, it’s only played in twice as many decks. I think $6 is reasonable in the near term for foil Knotvine Mystics, and if you want to mop the last few up, I bet you can buylist them for $5 soon. Check your bulk foils, too, you probably have like five Traces in there.  

Archfiend of Ifnir	CardKingdom $3.99	TCGPlayer $3.00
Knotvine Mystic	CardKingdom $0.59	TCGPlayer $0.51
Trace of Abundance	CardKingdom $1.99	TCGPlayer $1.99

That’s all of the advice that’s fit to print - tell me your thoughts on Reddit or Twitter. Until next time! 

Check out these other articles:

Where Are They Now? - June 2023 by Ryan Cole

History, Restapled - Walkers This Way by Steve Heisler

New Horizons - Lord of the Rings by Matt Grzechnik