Dogs. Good boys. Man’s best friends. Outside of their feline counterparts, no animal occupies a larger space in the collective human heart than these four-legged fellows. Despite Magic: The Gathering’s fantastical settings, which tend to lean towards Goblins, Elves, and the like, Dogs have made a home for themselves here too.
Magic: The Gathering – The 10 Best Dwarf Typal Commanders
Whether you’re wading in with a battleaxe or making use of a fleet of Vehicles, Magic: The Gathering’s Dwarf commanders have a lot to offer.
Since Ice Age, Magic players have had the option of adding Dogs to their decks. While few of these have been competitively viable, the modern push towards Commander has created a surprisingly large number of powerful legendary Dogs, all of which are capable of leading your 99-card pack to victory.
Some of these commanders are coming in the Universes Beyond: Fallout Commander decks in early 2024. They won’t be legal in the format until then, but for now you can always start planning your deck.
10 Mowu, Loyal Companion
What Are They Putting In Those Biscuits?
Anyone familiar with the antics of Clifford the Big Red Dog will immediately understand the idea behind Mowu: he’s a Dog, and he gets very big, very fast. Each time you place a +1/+1 counter on him through any means he gets an extra one, essentially doubling the boost in many cases.
This makes him incredibly easy to build around, given the sheer number of +1/+1 counter support cards available in the Commander format. After a turn or two in play, Mowu will more than likely be able to take some serious bites out of your opponents, particularly since he comes with trample built-in.
9 Jinnie Fay, Jetmir’s Second
It’s Bring Your Pet To Work Day
While it’s rare to see Cats and Dogs living harmoniously in real life, there’s actually a small subset of cards in Magic that enable said scenario on the battlefield. Jinnie Fay is one of them, letting you transmute your newly-minted tokens into 2/2 Cats or 3/1 Dogs as you see fit.
For a Dog deck, this gives you an easy way to expand your canine army beyond its usual limited cardpool, leveraging token generators like Gleeful Demolition to swarm the board with vigilant 3/1s. And while it may run counter to a Dog deck’s core theme, you can also create some stray Cat tokens later on as well, if you need hasty bodies to close out a game.
8 Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful
The Perfect Partner For A Long Commander Game
Pretty much every commander with partner is a viable choice, given how powerful and flexible the mechanic is, but Yoshimaru is a standout even in such esteemed company. As a 1/1 for one mana, he can come down as soon as the game begins, and start racking up counters with his passive ability.
Magic: The Gathering – The 7 Best Ooze Typal Commanders
Shlorp onto the battlefield with Magic: The Gathering’s best Ooze commanders.
This ability triggers whenever another legendary permanent of yours enters play, be it Yoshimaru’s partner, or any other legendary creature, artifact, or enchantment. It’s easy to raise Yoshimaru up into a mighty beast with this effect, particularly if you run a low-to-the-ground legendary-matters style of deck.
7 K-9, Mark I
A Support Unit For Your Other Legends
It’s rare that pure support creatures make good commanders, but when they’re as efficient as K-9 here, it certainly can happen. For just one mana, the Doctor’s mechanical mutt adds a nice layer of protection to all of your other legends, while also giving you the option to slip them through the enemy lines with his activated ability.
Both of these effects are great, and open up a lot of possibilities for resilient decks that can kill opponents out of nowhere. To top it off, you also get to pair K-9 up with any of the legendary Doctor cards as well. We’d recommend the First or Third Doctors, both of which provide solid synergy.
6 Rin And Seri, Inseparable
An Unlikely Pair With Unprecedented Power
As if featuring the type line ‘Dog Cat’ wasn’t enough to make Rin and Seri an absolute slam-dunk pick for your Dog commander, it also packs some incredibly useful abilities that make the deckbuilding process really interesting. Each Dog or Cat you play with this card out gives you an additional 1/1 token of the opposite type.
Since the duo’s activated ability scales its damage based on your Dogs in play, a Dog-centric brew is your best bet here. With a full pack, this turns into a targeted death beam that can deal with problem creatures and players alike, while giving you some incidental life in the process.
5 Kroxa And Kunoros
Fetch Up More Than Bones With This Duo
Reanimator decks have, since the very dawn of Magic, been powerful, viable options in a variety of metas, ebbing and flowing in terms of power based on the reanimation methods and targets available. Kroxa and Kunoros is one of the most exciting reanimation cards we’ve ever seen, giving you recurring, zero-mana reanimation on a seriously well-statted body.
Five cards from your graveyard sounds like a steep cost at first, but many Reanimator decks aggressively self-mill to the point where it’s actually trivial. There are even some excellent reanimation targets in the Dog type itself, such as Underworld Cerberus and Dreadhound.
4 Dogmeat, Ever Loyal
Purveyor Of Surprisingly Useful Junk
Most Equipment-focused commanders encourage a Voltron style of play, wherein you focus all of your buffs on a single target, but good ol’ Dogmeat does the opposite. He rewards you with Junk, an artifact you can sacrifice to Impulse-draw a card, each time one of your equipped or enchanted creatures attacks.
Magic: The Gathering – The 10 Best Snake Typal Commanders
Slither your way to victory with a Snake deck in Magic: The Gathering’s Commander format.
Your best strategy in a Dogmeat deck is to go wide, suiting up your other Dogs with cheap Auras and Equipment so you can generate some Junk and trade it in for more cards next turn. It’s a fairly sustainable way of playing Aggro, especially when you throw Dogmeat’s own recursion-on-entry effect into the mix.
3 Kunoros, Hound Of Athreos
Keep Your Opponent’s Creatures Playing Dead
Playing a tech card as your commander may feel like a bit of a gamble, but there are so many graveyard-based Commander decks out there that taking a chance on Kunoros is a bet you’ll almost always win. For just three mana, he shuts down Reanimator decks, a huge number of Combo decks, and popular mechanics like flashback and jumpstart.
If you can protect Kunoros with Auras and Equipment, he can probably lock an opponent or two out of the game entirely, then take advantage of their weakened state by attacking them for huge lifelink damage. He may not be the most conventional commander, but in the right meta Kunoros can be one of the best.
2 Rex, Cyber-Hound
A Good Boy With Limitless Potential
Some Typal Commanders lean heavily into supporting their given type, and some are just generically good creatures that happen to come with a particular Typal tag. Rex is firmly in the latter camp, having more in common with Experiment Kraj than most of his Dog peers.
Like Kraj, Rex can rack up activated abilities as the game goes on. This makes him extremely flexible, particularly in a long game, and opens up the door for all manner of combo shenanigans down the road. Throw in a few energy generators and you’ll have little trouble winning with this one.
1 Pako, Arcane Retriever And Haldan, Avid Arcanist
One Man And His Dog, Went To Steal Some Cards
One of the most appealing aspects of Dogs is the unbreakable bond they share with their human companions. Pako and Haldan are a commander duo that embody this idea perfectly, reimagining an innocent game of fetch as a potent source of card advantage, as well as a means of stealing your opponents’ key cards.
Each time Pako attacks, he exiles a minimum of four cards from across the decks of each player. These cards can then be cast, for any color of mana, once Haldan joins him in play. The two form a powerful value engine that can easily grind out long games, as well as a wholesome partnership that will make your opponents think twice before reaching for the removal.
Magic: The Gathering – The 10 Best Commanders For A Treefolk Deck
Don’t worry, it’s free of any Lorax jokes.
Leave a Reply