The Best Commanders In Innistrad Remastered

Summary

• Avacyn provides quick indestructibility, if you can keep blinking her.
• Liesa offers sacrificial reuse, bringing your dead creatures back to your hand.
• Olivia Voldaren enables stealing and converting opponents’ creatures into Vampires.

Magic: The Gathering’s remastered sets give us the chance to pull some of the game’s most famous commanders. With Innistrad Remastered, we’re back to the shadowy moores and paranoid townships of Innistrad, with all of its monsters up for grabs.

Though all of these cards are reprints and have been available for years, pulling one of these commanders in an Innistrad Remastered booster pack could be the shove you need to make your next Commander deck extra spooky.

10

Archangel Avacyn//Avacyn, The Purifier

Quick And Easy Indestructibility

Avacyn has two different commanders in Innistrad Remastered, with Archangel Avacyn being the double-faced red/white version.

The front face works as a great way to protect your creatures from a board wipe or targeted removal. Unfortunately, it transforms into the back face when a creature you control dies, giving you a one-off three damage to throw at any target before sitting and not doing much else.

To make up for that, one of the best ways to build Archangel Avacyn is as a blink deck. Flickering it will always return it back to its front face, retriggering the indestructible ability for the turn. With that in mind, you’ll be able to safely swing in in combat just about every turn with a hoard of indestructible creatures.

9

Liesa, Forgotten Archangel

It’s Not Really A Sacrifice If You Get Them Back

Liesa is the long-forgotten sister of Bruna, Gisela, and Sigarda, who didn’t make an appearance in Magic until Commander Legends. It may have been a wait to see her, but this Liesa from Midnight Hunt is one of the best aristocrats commanders in the game, which makes it worth it.

Any creatures you control that die will simply come back to your hand, turning your sacrificial fodder into repeatable effects and easy creature enter triggers. On the other hand, you’ll also be turning off all of your opponents’ death triggers, by having their creatures exile instead.

Put the two together, and throw in a Dictate of Erebos, and you can repeatedly wipe the board of your opponents’ creatures by removing them from the game entirely.

8

Olivia Voldaren

A Deck To Sink Your Teeth In To

One of Innistrad’s most powerful monsters, Olivia Voldaren is the power-hungry Vampire matriarch of the Voldaren bloodline, and her card helps you conscript your opponents’ creatures in to your bloodsucking brood.

Ping a creature with the first ability to make a creature a Vampire, and then steal it with the second. Naturally you’ll need to protect Olivia as she is a lightning bolt for removal, but if you can pull it off you’ll be pinching the biggest threats on the board before your opponents can do anything to stop you.

Every once in a while, you’ll get another player also playing Vampires, and half of your job has already been done for you.

7

Sigarda, Host Of Herons

Nobody Is Getting Sacrificed Today

Sigarda is effectively the anti-Liesa. She completely turns off ‘edict’ effects – abilities that force you to sacrifice your permanents, while also being incredibly hard to remove herself thanks to flying and hexproof.

If you can give Sigarda indestructible, the only way it is getting taken out of the game is through a mass exile effect like Sunfall or Farewell. And so, the goal here is to enchant Sigarda with as many Auras and equip her with as many Equipments as possible for a big, green/white Voltron deck.

Thanks to the huge number of enchantress-type effects in green and white, like Sythis and Enchantress’s Presence, you’re more likely going to be going with enchantments of Equipment. If your enchantment decks keep getting blown up through forced sacrifice, Sigarda is the perfect way to protect it.

6

Grimgrin, Corpse-Born

Combo With A Smile On Your Face

Though Grimgrin may look like another Aristocrats deck like Liesa at first glance, this hulking Zombie Warrior is actually a Zombie kindred commander with a very specific combo in mind.

The rest of the deck will be full of Zombie synergies, like Diregraf Captain and Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver. But in reality, your main cards will be Gravecrawler and Rooftop Storm. The former is a Zombie you can cast from the graveyard as long as you control another Zombie, while the latter lets you cast Zombies for free.

With these two, you can infinitely sacrifice and replay Gravecrawler to Grimrin to untap it and put a +1/+1 counter on it – ready for you to swing in with a 10,000/10,000 Grimgrin. Throw in something like Springleaf Drum, or even cards like Ashnod’s Altar and Phyrexian Altar, and you immediately get infinite mana ready for a Torment of Hailfire or Toxic Deluge.

Grimgrin is a combo commander and is very likely to be a kill-on-sight for your opponents.

5

Odric, Lunarch Marshal

After a rather rubbish outing in Innistrad: Crimson Vow, the Odric everyone likes made a comeback for Innistrad Remastered, so it’s time to stock up on your keywords.

Odric is the quintessential ‘keyword soup’ commander, meaning you want to get as many keywords like flying, trample, and haste on the board as possible. Any keywords one of your creatures has is shared across your entire board when you go to combat, so anything with lots of words on it like Zetalpa, Primal Dawn; or Shrike Force is going to give you tons of value.

More than that, you’re playing white, which means tokens are a great way to go. Flood the board with a few small tokens, before buffing them with every keyword under the sun, and Odric becomes one of the most threatening mono-white commanders ever printed.

4

Gisa And Geralf

All We Want To Do Is Eat Your Brains

Though both Grimgrin and Gisa and Geralf can make use of the Gravecrawler combo, Gisa and Geralf is a much more traditional sort of Zombie commander. It throws creatures into your graveyard with self-mill, before letting you cast them again – nice, wholesome Zombie commander.

What you put in that deck may be slightly less wholesome, though. Between cards like Champion of the Perished, Fleshbag Marauder, and Grey Merchant of Asphodel, you can be forcing sacrifice and draining your opponents of their life practically every turn.

Zombies are one of the most synergistic creature types this side of Elves, and Gisa and Geralf alone feel almost quaint compared to the undead nightmares you can unleash from the graveyard.

3

Avacyn, Angel Of Hope

Unflappable

Avacyn, Angel of Hope is simply a far, far better version of the effect Archangel Avacyn offers. Instead of only being for one turn, Angel of Hope gives your permanents indestructible for as long as it’s on the battlefield – no faffing with blinking required.

Archangel Avacyn is only available in retro frames found in Play and Collector boosters, and the full-art poster treatment only in Collector boosters.

Angel of Hope even has indestructible herself, making protecting it a lot easier. Thanks to this, it’s one of the game’s go-to Angel kindred commanders, letting you safely build up a board of massive, flying Angels before giving some divine retribution to the table.

If you’re feeling really mean, and the whole table is on board with it, Avacyn also works very well with mass land destruction. All of your lands are protected, making a well-timed Armageddon an easy way to put yourself far ahead of the pod and secure a victory.

2

The Gitrog Monster

The Amphibian Atrocity

Sacrificing your own lands can feel counterintuitive, especially to those new to commander. You need lands to play spells, so why throw them in your own graveyard? The reason for that is simple: you’re playing The Gitrog Monster.

By milling or sacrificing your lands, The Gitrog Monster gives you a ridiculous amount of card advantage. It can also allow you to play more than one land per turn, and even has a built-in sacrifice outlet to make sure lands are hitting the bin.

Pair it with something like Crucible of Worlds to play lands from your graveyard, and practically any landfall effect (Scute Swarm and Rampaging Baloth go hard in this deck), and The Gitrog is a frog that nets you far more value than one measly land might.

1

Edgar Markov

The Grandfather Of All Vampires

As the headliner of Innistrad Remastered, Edgar Markov has more alternate art treatments than any other card. Its reputation precedes it as by far the best Vampire kindred commander ever printed, and it’s largely thanks to its eminence ability.

Eminence triggers even if Edgar Markov is in the command zone, so you don’t have to cast it to get profit. Cast a Vampire, and you get a token for free, no questions asked. Of course, you’re going to want Edgar out as well, as it attacking buffs up your entire swarm of Vampires with +1/+1 counters.

Having three colours means you can include not just the red/black Vampires of Innistrad, but also the white/black ones of Ixalan, giving you the opportunity to run just about all of the game’s best bloodsuckers in a single deck. Edgar is infamous as one of the most powerful kindred commanders ever printed, so being included here is a big win for Innistrad Remastered.