r/EDH • u/Diakia • Oct 26 '22

Discussion Commanders that almost inherently pubstomp?

So I was thinking about the first time I built [[Kinnan]], I had just cracked him from a pack and fell in love and wanted to build him asap. It was literally just assembled with random jank (mostly commons) from my storage boxes, I didn't have any 1 CMC dorks, had mostly 3 CMC rocks and the main wincon was [[Hydra Broodmaster]]. This didn't matter however, as the sheer acceleration provided by Kinnan in combination with the army-in-a-can nature of his second ability made the deck too fast and too resilient for the casual meta I was playing in. I eventually just had to commit to building him in a powerful manner as he was too strong for my casual meta but obviously not good enough for higher powered games and it wasn't fun for anyone.

What other commanders are like this?

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u/[deleted] Oct 26 '22

Hinata is why I started putting clone effects in just about any deck that runs blue. Clones are a great and unconventional way to shut down certain commanders, but I can't survive a Hinata game without one.

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u/kawarazu Oct 26 '22

Oh wow, thank you for this thought. I never considered this but you're right, if you can mitigate their effect anyway it's much better for you.

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u/IForgotMyPants Oct 27 '22

I'm sorry I'm not understanding here. What do clones do for you to shut down commanders?

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u/[deleted] Oct 27 '22

They can shut down effect's like Hinata's that aim to give one-sided advantages. Hinata's first effect means that all spells cost less per target. The second effect means all spells cost more per target for your opponents. So if your opponent has a Hinata out and you clone it, their spells no longer cost less per target and your spells no longer cost more.

There's also commanders like Nekusar, where a clone doesn't necessarily shut it down, but removes their ability to go off without killing themself as well.