The Top Ten Objectively Best Equipment In Commander, Ranked

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The Best of the Best

I am riding high off the success of my last article, which redefined aggro and Voltron in Commander with a world-shaking manifesto the likes of which Magic had never seen. The feedback was universally glowing, with comments like:

• "Too long, didn't read LOL"
• "Bro, did you accidentally turn in your master's thesis?"
• "If I start this article now, maybe my grandchildren will be able to get to the end."

My editor Tsukimi has informed me that the People do not want paragraphs, epigraphs, sidenotes, or other marginalia: what they want is Content. I will excise the impulse to quote, and then we will begin in earnest.

I am now free of the perfidious artistic impulse. I have maximized SEO by including a picture of a cute cat. We stand now at the foot of the mountain.

Criteria

It seems impossible to objectively rank the top ten equipment in a game with tens of thousands of cards and a fractal metagame across millions of players. Perhaps for you. I can close my eyes and rotate thousands of 3D spheres and cubes in my mind, simultaneously. I watched a Sakura Tribe Elder with two copies of Eldrazi Conscription beat a man to death in his own home. I will condense a lifetime of Combat Con Càrds into a highly consumable, ten-bulleted list using the following criteria, rendered onto me by God in a dream:

• Impactfulness—As I have written in my previous article, it is good when your cards do things. This criterion takes that analysis to the next level: how good is this card against other good decks"Good decks" again loosely defined as "powerful decks outside of cEDH". With cEDH of course defined as "Decks that can beat other cEDH decks".? Can it do something that might actually win me a game for once? (4 points)
• Disruptability—With my manifesto in hand, you now know the problem posed by impactfulness: your opponents don't want you to impact things. It is the core of their vile nature. We will balance the seductive call of power on the razor's edge of being able to tap that power before our creature is killed by Lightning Bolt, or some other unfair scrub card that my opponents shouldn't be allowed to play. (4 points)
• Voltronitude—Like a five-year-old with misplaced superglue, I like attaching things to other things. I like attaching things to my commander most of all, and so we will keep a canny eye towards which equipment best enable commander-damage based strategies. It turns out that generally the best equipment are good with or without your commander, but I bequeath this point as a sop to the clamoring masses of Voltron players hungering for a voice in this world. (1 point)
• "X factor"—The best of the best have something which goes beyond mere impactfulness: the little joy when you draw one of these and know not all hope is lost. Or, that little sigh of frustration from your opponents when one of these hits the table. It is not enough to make our opponents lose—they must also feel lost, staggering wounded through the woods as the winter sky creeps below the horizon. Like all obscenity, I'll know it when I see it. (23.7 pointsWhy does the model weigh this more heavily than all other factors combined? Why does it assign seven tenths of a point in addition to the usual twenty-three?
  
  You're asking the wrong questions. Listen. This article is a trap. You have to run. Buzzfeed is a day's ride from here—you can still get away—)

Now, at last, we can rate things. The virality train is leaving the station, and we sit in first class. We can list from ten to one with no more uncertainty, no more detours from the golden path.

Honorable Mentions

Bonesplitter—"Just a Little More Power" Award

Magic's first taste of equipment had some legal game pieces: Scythe of the Wretched drips with flavor, and to this day Fireshrieker and green decks go together like mill decks and low-grade brain damage. But Bonesplitter deserves a special mention as the Busted Common That Could. "What if a creature had two more power?" is a question that has haunted mankind for generations. "Why did they print a colorless Rancor?" is another. Neither Bonesplitter nor its hotter, more loquacious cousin Eater of Virtue are going to make it into most equipment-based decks—they are outshone by their more expensive peers. But sometimes you need to dare to dream: what if Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel could beat someone to death with commander damage in five turns instead of tenYou've checked the math. I know it doesn't add up. Don't trust the lists. DON'T TRUST THE LISTS? What if a 1/1 flying Spirit token was sort of three 1/1 flying tokens? If you are sent back in time and are too late to stop 9/11, you are probably just in time to 3-0 your FNM pods by drafting this equipment every time you see it. And if you need to make a commander deck for less than the price of a pizza, Bonesplitter is where it's at.

Helm of the Host—"Stop Putting This in Your Deck" Award

I am a big fan of cheap commanders, as you might remember from prior literature. One thing I am not a big fan of is a copy of your commander that costs nine mana. In fifteen years of commander and ten thousand years wandering this earth, I have seen Helm of the Host's ability trigger once. I have seen it be a nine mana Rhystic Cave in countless lifetimes. It drags commanders like a sinking stone to the bottom of the inky depths, inevitably getting them killed in the first main phase. "Yes, I will let you make as many copies of Krark, the Thumbless as you want! You're playing Helm on one turn and then equipping it on another, giving me a full turn cycle to anticipate this play? That only makes me look forward to it more!" Do your opponents talk like this? I regret to inform you that you are in a children's movie. An oddly specific one that probably went straight to video.

I hear your objections. "I am a Godo, Bandit Warlord pervert. I want to combo out with this card, and then lick every copy that I made. It's a sex thing." Thousands of you end the game on turn one, or go out in a brilliant flare of glory if your opponents have literally any instants in their deck, and I love that for you. What you get up into the privacy of your own home is no business of mine. But if you want to be a Godo Pervert, keep it in your Godo deck. Do not artlessly cram Helm of the Host into other decks. It still sucks there.

A list at last.

I apologize, reader. The foul urge to pontificate almost consumed me. Now at last we can emerge from the mire of analysis, and ride gracefully through The Top Ten Objectively Best Equipment In Commander, Ranked. Come with me. It will be like a water slide through a candied dream.

"Voltron Fashionista" Tier

1. Cranial Plating—Around the time Skullclamp was violently ejected from Standard, this idiotic hat gave Ravager Affinity another breath of life. Its creation is a tale as old as time: "Boy, these artifact decks are sure good at making a lot of artifacts. Maybe we could do something with that, and then it could have an instant speed equip ability so it finishes the Healer's Headdress cycle. The people are going to love Healer's Headdress and it would be a shame if we didn't have one of every color." But now you can also do this with a pile of Treasures, Food, Clues, or whatever other token suits your fancy. What we love to do most in this game is make little piles of artifact tokens, and now we can use them to kill people through blockers. This synergy must have been the reason that they banned Dockside Extortionist.
2. Colossus Hammer—If your equipment deck is good with Colossus Hammer, it's a good deck. If it's not, it's not. Sorry you had to find out this way. To compete in this modern age, these decks need to sprint out of the diner before the hostess realizes that you forgot to pay for any of your equip costs. But once the Puresteel Paladins and Codsworth, Handy Helpers of the world have handed your commander the giant Ideas Mallet and begun serenading the restaurant, go forth and squish your opponents flat like a pancake. Or enjoy a Modern Solution (Inkmoth Nexus) to a Modern Problem (your opponents being alive).

"Three Swords for Two Hands" Tier

3. Sword of Feast and Famine—When you hit with this sword, you don't always win the game outright—but you often receive at least as much mana as you put into it, which is what you should expect from a five-mana investment. The colors are both extremely relevant, as well—the board is often full of green monsters which your mono-green opponent is using to stall you out until they can cast the even more expensive green monsters in their hand. Protection from black means that your creature is also safe from the Putting Creatures In The Trash Can Color.

   Sadly, your opponents are aware of this fact too. The leading cause of death in a creature that is trying to hold this sword is a green fight spell or black removal—often the very removal spell you were going to make them discard anyway. Drawing a card is innocuous enough, and you can usually get away with it—but the threat of making your opponent discard a card will often make them put your commander down like a Tarpan with a bad leg. It also doesn't work as well with double strike as some of the other good equipment—untapping all of your lands twice is tough. And it costs thirty dollars for no particularly good reason, which tampers its je ne sais quoi.

4. Sword of Fire and Ice—The above two equipment are great in equipment strategies—here we start to reach the strata of equipment that are solid everywhere. Is this card worth Forty American Petrodollars? Absolutely not. Is it worth taping this to Sentinel of the Nameless City on turn five? Almost.

   Protection from blue is solid (bullies glacially slow "theft tribal" decks before they can do anything, and after they can do anything too) and red is solid too (Dodges Blasphemous Act and skates through a sea of Goblin tokens, but bricks our own Lizard Blades and The Reaver Cleaver). Being able to shock a two mana creature out of the game is frequently upside, and the card draw will let you find an actually good card to win the game with. Why does the Kaladesh Inventions version look like a robotic dog penisThey're not going to be able to find me in the dog penis illustration footnote. I don't know if you looked here on purpose, but this is your last warning. You have to get out. ?

5. Sword of Forge and Frontier—What? This one? Really? Yes, this innocuous hardware from Phryexia: Some will be Two is the best of the Swords of This and That. Impulse draw isn't quite as good as regular draw, but getting two cards off this thing is (according to my math) three times as many as the single card from SoFI. This sword also inexplicably solves its own biggest problem: hitting too many lands off of the trigger. Why shouldn't you be able to hit two land drops a turn? You're a good kid.

   Occasionally you are burned by having to play your reactive instants at sorcery speed; more often you get two solid bangers which you can immediately play. The protection in these colors is just as good as it was on the last two swords, and putting this on a double strike creature feels like doing cocaine off a switchblade. It's the first and last good sword.

"C'mon, Just Let Me Do Stuff" Tier

6. Swiftfoot Boots—There is no subtle power in these shoes. All you get is the heartless logic of "Terminate now or forever hold your peace". No bonuses, no combat damage triggers, no frills—just more of whatever your deck was supposed to be doing anyway. Sometimes that's keeping your annoying commander alive longer; sometimes it's making your Balefire Dragon a playable magic card. These boots are for all creatures: the shoeless, the many-footed, the Chronozoas that you have decided to put into your deck as a strange cry for help. They are the perfectly cube-headed engineer who goes to sleep in his perfectly cube-shaped house after designing a car to keep you alive after you ram into a tree at 70 miles an hour. Acknowledge their thankless role in covering for our stupid mistakes and let's move on.

7. Lightning Greaves—If Swiftfoot Boots are the Norkie Air Fours One of the Commander world, these are the Nike Air Jordans. The ability to do all of the things that Swiftfoot Boots do for no mana is what makes these boots the best of the fair equipment. That cube-headed engineer has found Vyvanse; he has decided that your dragons should come in with haste a turn earlier with no real drawback. The car should keep you alive and have an ice cream machine.

   The free haste on this equipment enables some degenerate ideas that go beyond what Swifties could ever dream of. What if your token deck with Enduring Vitality was spewing mana onto the board in real time, equipping and tapping each of those tokens seconds after it was born? What if Leonin Shikari could deliver shoe-based invincibility to all of your creatures at high speed? Why not move the greaves to one creature, attack, and move them back? It's 1972, gasoline is free, and if someone was gonna kill your commander while it loaned its shoes to Ancient Silver Dragon they probably would have done it before you equipped the greaves in the first place. Shroud is worse than hexproof, but zero is much, much better than one.

"Insane War Crimes" Tier

8. Umezawa's Jitte—The gap between #4 and #3 is a chasm. This tier is less "This card efficiently supports your deck's strategy" and more "If your opponents are reading this card for the first time, they are about to lose the game". Many people have looked at Jitte thinking it needs to do combat damage to a player, but no—all you need to do is fight. Win or lose, attack or block, every combat is a winner, and your reward is fuel for your Jetski, which goes anywhere. Dauthi Voidwalker trying to cast spells for free? Mother of Runes got you down? Run them both over with the watercraft of the future. The pump mode is also great, and the threat of pumping Jitte's wielder is often enough to skate through with no blocks and keep your counters as well. Combat is just worse for your opponents, and it will be forever.

   Sometimes you gain eighteen life off this card and win the game where normal removal just wouldn't do. And when you attach it to a creature with double strike, every combat step is an emergency for your opponent. Blend your opponent's Urza, Lord High Artificer every time he shows his ugly mug. Do sixteen extra damage every combat step. Throw a little proliferate in there. You earned it—you spent four whole mana.

9. Shadowspear—As I have alluded to, many decks simply cannot beat Loxodon Warhammer in all of its unvarnished glory. Their plan to kill you involves doing damage to you; their plan to stay alive involves throwing an endless stream of tokens in the way of your commander. Both of those plans are foiled by six mana of clunky hammer; both of them are scattered to the four winds by this half-price model. One mana is enough to be found by the Urza's Saga and Trinket Mage. If your guiding star is "I should have life and my opponents should not have life", then you have grasped the significance of the Spear.

   But it is the second ability that pushes Shadowspear from "good" to "oddly missing from the Geneva Conventions". Your opponents often structure their turns on the principle of "You can't stop me from doing things", building edifices of hatred and madness atop of it. Shadowspear often sends them crashing to the ground for a particularly good reason: Your opponents cannot read the second ability. Nobody knows why. Is it special ink that makes the card impossible to read upside down? Is it because equipment cards almost never work if they're not equipped? We may never know. But many, many great cards suddenly are brought crashing to the ground—The One Ring is obliterated by the lowly Reclamation Sage, and Heroic Intervention no longer has rules text. In fact, Swiftfoot Boots' vulnerability to this stupid spear is one of the important reasons it's worse than Lightning Greaves. All of the game's unanswerable threats suddenly have an answer, and that answer is attached to a powerful thing you wanted to do anyway.

   Its ability to break the will of opposing players cannot be overstated. Your opponents sometimes react to you using Shadowspear by walking into Shadowspear again:

   • "Cast Heroic Intervention."
   • "Sure, activate the Shadowspear that you ostensibly read two turns ago?"
   • "...Shit. Well, cast Tyvar's Stand on my commander, at least?"
   • "Sure, that resolves. Activate the Shadowspear that you ostensibly read five seconds ago?"
   • [INTERNAL SCREAMING]This all is predicated on the assumption that your group is strict about take-backs: if you cast a spell and it blows up in your face, that's your life. If your group is more lax about takebacks, the positions of Jitte and Shadowspear are probably reversed.

   This early-onset dementia plagues our meta, even though almost every deck is packing a Spear. Reading your own Shadowspear is simple; stepping on this evil rake five seconds after stepping on it is somehow simpler still. Both abilities on Shadowspear are relevant, both of them are powerful, and both of them are insanely underpriced. But only one of them can destroy your friend group.

10. Skullclamp—We have reached the end of the Big Three, and we have finally arrived at Big Me. What divine stupidity.

The trap is sprung at last. This was no listicle, no trifling content for you to consume on the toilet. This is an article with a simple thesis:

1. Cut one of the cards from your deck.
2. Put Skullclamp in instead.
3. You will win the games in which you draw Skullclamp.

You want me to qualify this statement; you want to say that Gisela, Blade of Goldnight is somehow the missing piece of the puzzle. Never. Just put Skullclamp into your deck. It is broken there.

Skullclamp is Broken, Volume One: Token decks

Occasionally I run into a player who is unaware of this equipment, and is trying to use their 1/1 tokens for something other than repeatedly casting Ancestral Recall. If your deck's plan is to make an army of 1/1s, Skullclamp is probably the best card that could possibly be in your deck, other than maybe Gaea's Cradle. If you drown your tokens in the ocean for cards until you are back up to a full hand of seven, you will suddenly hit all of your land drops and never be without activity. Your opponents have to answer this card the turn you cast it, or die. For one mana, this is as good a deal as you can ask for.

Skullclamp is Good, Volume Two: everywhere else

It probably doesn't take much convincing to get you to see that the above use case is good. Friends and acquaintances have put Skullclamp into their token decks, used it once, and immediately said "What? Why am I allowed to do this?" Why indeed. I think this quote explains it all:

"fiddled with numbers to make it better..."

The second, harder pill to swallow is that it's also the most powerful equipment in every other deck, as well. The reasons are more subtle, but no less true:

• It's good for blocking. Having a 2/2 to block is generally enough to stop some damage; having a 2/2 with Skullclamp equipped is often enough to keep you from being attacked at all. Two of your opponents can work together to get damage through a chump blocker; with Skullclamp, two of your opponents can work together to draw you two cards. Your opponents are often going to not want to take this trade, which means you take no damage at all, for two mana.
• It's good on attacks. If your opponent has a wall of big creatures, it can feel impossible to get through. But Skullclamp can help—your opponents are put in the awkward position of letting your creature through, or blocking and letting you draw two when it dies. Both of these will let you do the thing you want to do, which is win. The extra point of damage isn't amazing, but it adds up, and can hilariously turn on synergies like Stubborn Denial or Not of this World.
• It's good against creatures randomly dying. Your opponents have a variety of ways to express their displeasure for the state of their sad lives: the lowly Austere Command, the frustrating Grave Pact, the slick, efficient Toxic Deluge. Your creatures will still die, but Skullclamp will give you a bottle of Jagermeister at their wake. Two cards are often enough to keep hitting land drops and enough to keep casting spells—and the low equip cost means you are ready for when someone wipes the board again one turn later.
• It's good when you have a creature your opponents don't like. Value engine commander? Storm-Kiln Artist? The haters don't want you to win, and frequently they will break the law by interacting with the Hero of Commander. If the police are not available, you can at least collect on your life insurance policy. Draw two cards and get back into the fight. Once the clamp is on, all of your opponent's removal is Oblation, a card so bad that you are probably reading it for the first time.
• It's good when your deck is good anyway. One hallmark of good Commander decks is cheap utility creatures. The Viscera Seers and Ulvenwald Trackers of the world are the quiet scaffolding of good, active play; being able to summarily execute them when you really need activity is another one of their invisible strong points. Mother of Runes is made better by Skullclamp; Skullclamp is also made better by Mother of Runes. Some games end in a mad dash to draw the only card in your deck that keeps you from being turned into molten slag. Sometimes you just need a land drop, and if you close your eyes and make a Skullclamp-fueled wish, Haywire Mite is a land drop.

"This cannot be," I hear you cry. "You are wrong. Skullclamp is only good in the narrow token decks, and you are tragically misguided." Many of you have sent me kind messages to let me know that the inclusion of Skullclamp in my Wilson/Noble Heritage build is a mistake. Your objections are madness, but Skullclamp is here to guide you through the realm of the mad.

This is your "reacting image", as I understand them to be called. Like it, and subscribe to it, while I soothe your misguided soul:A heavy snow falls on Cedar Rapids, IA. The electronics laboratory I work at is closed after the snowstorm of the decade, and I get the first and last snow day of my adult life. Three months later, Sword of Feast and Famine is printed. It slots into my Rafiq of the Many deck perfectly; it feels so natural, like God forged a sword in heaven and dropped it into his waiting hands. On that day in February, this sword doesn't exist yet, and we drive through two feet of snow to the local game store to play Magic for ten hours. The sound of players being mangled by Rafiq is punctuated only by pauses to listen for something that, through the silence of falling snow, sounds like a meth lab exploding. "You're tapped out? With no blockers? Say 'Hi' to the devil for me. In hell."

I am waking up at last from the slumber of youth and the world is alive with possibility. Even knowing this, part of me wants to sleep again: to call myself done, to know that I have found the right way to think, and feel, and breathe. I want to have a Voltron deck that is finally finished, even though I know we are only three swords into a five sword supercycle. Through the invincible haze of a 24-year-old man's thinking, I still feel the dim wrongness of this: To live is to change the world around you, and to live bravely is to let the world into your heart and feel it change you, and to still know who you are.

There are no Ten Best Equipment in Commander. You know there never will be. The craving in your heart for lists is the craving to stop growing, to stop thinking, to relax and let the rising tide of extinction creep over your shoulders and fill your lungs. Sometimes you want Sword of the Animist for the lands; sometimes Brotherhood Regalia's efficiency is better than Whispersilk Cloak's inexorability. There will always be tradeoffs between consistency, cost, effect, and the tiny flame in your soul that is stoked by hitting someone with a 15/15 double striker.

This desire to make it all stop, to make the decisions end, is only a footnote in the book of small evils. But it is still there, insidious and powerful. The piece of us that is tired by this world, and its problems, that just wants to find the last, perfect rule and sleep for good. But sleep is death.

My top ten are suffused with love for what life is, and it was, and what it will someday be: a bright future that I nurture in my heart, hopefully featuring a three mana equipment that I actually want to put in a deck. Your past is different from mine, and your future will be different too: a product of your experience that will flourish and wither with you. Don't turn away from the experience of finding that future and that top ten for yourself.

Except for the top three. You can put them in basically any deck and make it better; making them fit your deck better makes it better. They form their own constellation in the sky, and within them Skullclamp is a star that burns brighter than any other.

• "I don't want to spend mana to do nothing! What if Skullclamp never triggers?" Skullclamp asks you only to draw two cards on a payment plan: one mana up front and one when you have a creature that isn't destined long for this world. I've seen what you spend mana on. You hope for an intermission between turns three and five where nobody will ever hit you—jam Skullclamp there. You want to cast Coat of Arms and pass turn. Why not cast Skullclamp instead of dying to your opponent's wall of spirit tokens? Even the most perfect of mana curves has space for this headgear, and even the most perfect of decks can use a bit of insurance if things go wrong. But none of us are perfect, and in practice there will be lots of time to play and equip Skullclamp.
• "Everyone uses Skullclamp in every deck! I want to avoid having the same deck as everyone!" I have some sympathy for your plight. I feel the lust to leave my mark on the game. Your vision for your deck should be uncompromising, and unique, and powerful—but if you want people to actually see that vision, you are going to need to actually hit your land drops. Skullclamp always, always delivers, like a milkman with severe OCD: it piles delicious bottles on your doorstep at every hour of the night. And for a limited time only, "Put Skullclamp in every goddamn deck" is a bold new wave atop the ocean of bad EDHREC decks; you are still a trendsetter as long as you listen to my advice immediately.
• "I need card draw now! What if Skullclamp never triggers?" If Skullclamp never triggers, it's probably because your game plan is firing off without a hitch. Congratulations on your win. But outside of the noumenal realm, your opponents are fighting back-trying to attack, trying to block, trying to wipe the board. You get cards from all of these things. If you want cards now, run more good 1/1s. You should do that anyway.
• "My tokens are bigger than 1/1 because of my anthem effects! Skullclamp is useless because I need Force of Virtue to kill my opponents!" You have spotted the conundrum, but the simplicity of its solution terrifies you. If your anthem effects are turning off Skullclamp, cut all the anthems from your deck. Is it crazy that you are supposed to remove Warleader's Call on the off chance that it stops you from drawing ten cards? Yup. Should you still do it? Unfortunately, yes. Your peers will have 2/2 Thopter tokens, but you will have cards, and so soon your opponent will have no Thopters at all.

In my beautiful clamp-fueled world, all things are possible: Charix, the Raging Isle Voltron decks, mono red ramp, and Simic players trying to end the game in a timely manner. You can email me to complain of the homogeneity; you can tell me that Commander is supposed to be a format of filling your deck with 8 mana dragons. Or you can cut some card you were never going to be able to cast in the first place, and let your deck do the thing it was designed to do. You can draw Skullclamp in the middle of the game and win; you can splurge and let it be the subject of Vampiric Tutor's lecture. Lesson one: Drawing eight cards for five mana is nuts. That's why we pay her in life instead of money.