5 Super Powerful Commanders from the upcoming MTG Marvel Crossover

The reveals for the upcoming Marvel Super Heroes Magic: the Gathering set have been coming through thick and fast this week. Let’s take a look at some of the iconic heroes and villains who will soon be stepping into the Command Zone on tabletops near you…Thanos is the most formidable villain in Marvel’s Rogues’ Gallery.

Thanos is the most formidable villain in Marvel’s Rogues’ Gallery. While Iron Man was ultimately able to take him down in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, there’s no guarantee that your opponents will have the same luck when you bring him onto the battlefield. For only three mana, Thanos is a 4/4 with deathtouch and lifelink. While this is a fantastic statline, chances are that if you’re looking at the card, the first thing that your eyes are drawn to is its Power-Up ability.

By spending one mana of each colour and a single colourless mana, Thanos can snap half of the creatures in play out of existence. He’ll either destroy every creature with an even mana value or every creature with an odd mana value besides himself. If you lean into this during deckbuilding, then you can really draw out the hidden potential of the Mad Titan.

By making a deck that only features other creatures with either odd or even mana values, you can guarantee the safety of your own board while tearing down your opponents. If you ensure that every other card in your deck also has an odd mana value, then Thanos can synergise with the companion Obosh, the Preypiercer, enabling you to double the damage that you dish out.

If you're aiming to assemble The Avengers, the first person you should call on is Nick Fury. Fury’s five colour activated ability means that if you use him as your commander, then you can include cards of any colour in your deck. It’s a pretty powerful ability as well, buffing Nick Fury up with two +1/+1 counters and then searching the top seven cards of your deck for a Hero, Equipment, or Vehicle that you can bring straight into play without needing to pay its cost.

This set is full of double sided heroes (we’ll talk about one of them further down this list), and Nick Fury can play them on their reverse side straight away, letting them enter the battlefield at full power.

While Nick-Fury’s in play, his Power-Up Ability can technically only be activated once, but it’s easy to get around this limitation. You can blink him using a card like Cloudshift or Teleportation Circle, or simply recast him from the Command Zone after he’s left play. This fresh copy of Nick Fury will then be able to search for more heroes, vehicles, and equipment once again.

Magic: the Gathering’s head designer, Mark Rosewater, is famously a massive fan of squirrels. Perhaps that’s why there’s no shortage of excellent squirrel commanders out there: from Chatterfang, Squirrel General, to Camellia, the Seedmiser. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is the next in this illustrious line of legendary squirrels, and she’s got a lot to offer.

Whenever Squirrel Girl enters the battlefield, or attacks, she creates a 1/1 green squirrel token like a bushy tailed Sun Titan. Her second ability takes a leaf out of Krenko, Mob Boss’s book. By paying four mana, she can create X 1/1 green squirrel tokens, where X is the total number of squirrels that you currently control.

By using cards like Doubling Season or Chitterspitter, you’ll be able to race Squirrels out even more quickly and prove to your opponents that Squirrel Girl truly is unbeatable.

Many of the most impactful Commander cards are artifacts. From mana rocks like Sol Ring and Arcane Signet, to game winning threats like Triplicate Titan and Blightsteel Colossus. Ultron, Artificial Malevolence can duplicate your artifacts, letting you generate mana rocks rapidly early on to then bring out twice as many big threats during the endgame.

Ultron transforms any noncreature artifacts that he duplicates into 2/2 creatures, letting you build up your board as you gain additional copies of your utility effects. Fortunately, Ultron doesn’t mess with the stat line of any artifact creatures that he replicates. So if you copy a Myr Battlesphere, it’ll remain a 4/7, and it won’t shrink down to become a 2/2.

Whether you run a pure colourless artifacts deck by sliding Ultron into your Command Zone, or you use him to support another commander, this robot villain’s ability to copy your artifacts will ensure that the age of Ultron will never come to an end.