Intro

Recently, I made a 90’s Commander deck, which is only cards printed from Alpha (1993) to Mercadian Masques (1999). The result was one of the longest and most challenging deckbuilding experiences I’ve ever had, but also one of the most interesting and rewarding as well. By building a Commander deck using the oldest cards of Magic’s history I’ve actually gotten a fresh perspective on the format as a whole, and I wanted to share that experience with you all here. Heck, maybe you’ll try out an experiment like this too!

So the reason for building this extremely weird deck is the same as most of my weird brews: it was made for our weekly Commander Clash series, in this case it was “Decades Commander” aka 1990s vs. 2000s vs. 2010s. vs 2020s. It was super fun, go check it out over on YouTube!

Fun fact: despite the 2020s only having four year’s worth of sets at the time of recording (we did it before Aetherdrift), it already has the most cards out of any previous decade! That means on average there are currently being printed twice as many new cards per year than any previous year! Yaaaaaayyy …

This “fun” fact, coupled with the ever-increasing speed of power creep, means that the majority of cards in your average Commander decks are dominated by the last few years of set releases, rather than an even distribution of cards throughout the decades.

That’s why I called dibs on building a 90’s deck, the most difficult of the decades to build. I wanted to see how the original Magic sets would stack up against 30 years of power creep. What are the cards that stood the test of time, and how janky do I need to get in order to fill out a 100-card singleton list?

Popping into Scryfall and filtering the 90s cards based on EDHREC Rank, it’s immediately obvious what the 90s are good at for Commander: ramp and tutors. The top results are dominated by ramp options with Sol Ring obviously at the very top along with the busted Ancient Tomb and so busted it’s banned Mana Crypt, but also we’ve got a bunch of Green ramp staples like Rampant Growth, Nature’s Lore, and Three Visits. Another big chunk of game changers are the tutors: Demonic Tutor and the entire instant speed Tutor cycle is here. And of course we’ve got the best dual lands in the game, the ABU dual cycle, which I honestly forget about since they are so ridiculously pricey that I almost never see them anymore. There’s a smattering of other random staples thrown in here too, like Mana Drain, Swords to Plowshares, and Necropotence.

The 90’s truly had a ton of high-powered staples! So can we slap together 100 of these top-tier cards into a deck and start steamrolling tables with ease? Well, not really. For all the powerful staples available here, there’s serious gaps here too, the most glaring being the serious lack of good creatures. Early Magic was defined by extremely powerful noncreature cards – think Power 9, Yawgmoth’s Will and the like – but extremely underpowered creatures. Two of the most iconic and powerful creatures from those – Shivan Dragon and Serra Angel – are barely worth picking as uncommons in Foundations draft, let alone hang at a Commander table.

Seriously, if you’re looking to build a classic Battlecruiser style Commander deck using just 90s cards, it’s going to be tough. There’s a smattering of beefy boys to choose from, like the classic Verdant Force, but nothing comes even close to how powerful creatures have become in modern Magic. That means we’re going to have to be more creative in not just how we decide to close out the game – can we even win with combat damage, or do we need to figure out some combo kills – but also how the heck we survive the early and midgame when our board presence consists largely of overcosted and underpowered creatures.

The other thing a 90’s cardpool can’t do is go all-in on thematic decks. Nowadays every archetype has a billion support cards so you can build a 100% on-theme deck: if you build Goblins then every creature in your deck can easily be a Goblin, your commander will obviously buff Goblins, and even the noncreature cards will be referencing Goblins. It’s Goblins all the way down! Same thing if you want to build an Artifact deck, or +1/+1 Counters, or whatever strategy. Not so with 90s! While there’s a smattering of support cards found here for say Merfolk or Goblins, there’s not close to enough to support a 100-card singleton deck. 

Instead we have to focus on more broad strategies and make our own synergies with the limited card pool that we’re working with. And that’s really hard, but also I kind of love it? It reminds me of when I first started playing in 2011 when the format was brand new and still unexplored. You’re forced to scroll through a list of random cards and then try and cobble together something cohesive out of it. While modern Magic design feels like the developers give you very specific cards and then an IKEA style instruction manual on how to assemble your deck with them, building a 90s deck feels like someone dumped a pile of random legos on the floor in front of you and you’re left to build something, no instructions given. So let’s freestyle build with legos!

Okay, first we need to decide what color we want to build with. In Commander, the most important thing for any deck is card advantage and mana advantage, basically card draw and ramp but it’s more nuanced than that. For mana advantage honestly only Green can pull it off in the 90s: it’s the only color with access to staples like land ramp cards Rampant Growth and Wood Elves, along with mana dorks like Birds of Paradise. Black actually has a few gems tied towards death magic like Black Market and Sacrifice but it’s not even close to what Green has to offer, and the other colors basically offer nothing. This means if you want access to a decent manabase you’re forced to play Green. That’s not to say non-Green decks are unplayable, but without Green you will definitely be the slowest deck at the table, and you need to compensate by playing Control and run every bit of good interaction possible to slow down the faster decks.

Now for card draw, Blue is overall the strongest: Blue has Mystic Remora and three wheels Windfall / Timetwister / Time Spiral, X draws Stroke of Genius and Braingeyser, and a smattering of other stuff like Curiosity and Opportunity. Black would be my second pick: Necropotence and Necrologia are huge burst draw, but there’s also Ambition’s Cost / Ancient Craving, then some other stuff like Greed. Green does have a handful of decent options, most notably Sylvan Library in any deck and Greater Good specifically in Stompy lists. White and Red has almost nothing.

Beyond card advantage and mana advantage, I think most of the other staples are concentrated most in Black with stuff like Demonic Tutor and Reanimate, and Blue has countermagic like Mana Drain and also a bunch of great theft cards like Bribery. White has a smattering of good cards like Swords to Plowshares and Land Tax but it’s not much. And Red is the absolute worst color here, it offers almost nothing to Commander.

So to make a solid 90s Commander I think you want access to at least two of these colors: Black, Blue, and Green. If you go Green you have access to ramp and fixing to keep up with the rest of the table, if you don’t go Green you’re going to be slow and need to focus the bulk of your deck on slowing down your opponents. The best would be having access to all 3 colors though.

But unfortunately for us, there isn’t a single Sultai commander printed in the 90s! There are a handful of 3C commanders but no Sultai ones. The only commander that can run all those colors is Sliver Queen, which is the only 5C commander printed in the decade. I think Sliver Queen is overall the strongest commander for this restriction, and I did brew a deck around her, but ultimately for Commander Clash I wanted to go with something even more iconic so I went with Vaevictis Asmadi.

Before Commander was an official format it was called Elder Dragon Highlander based on the cycle of Elder Dragons including Vaevictis – in fact, 21 commander damage being lethal was also based on the Elder Dragons all being 7 power, so three hits was always lethal with them. So picking an Elder Dragon is about as iconic as you can get! It’s also Jund, we get Black and Green so two out of three important colors, and hey, Red is there too!

Although I’m picking Vaevictis mostly because it’s iconic and for its colors, it’s also a reasonable win condition for our deck: 7/7 flying with firebreathing means it can potentially kill people, even if the mana cost is absurdly high and it even taxes us 3 mana each subsequent turn. Obviously trying to kill people with an 8 mana commander that has no protection from removal is extremely ambitious, but at least Black provides a ton of efficient reanimation to bypass the recast cost like Animate Dead, and, well, Reanimate, and cards like Berserk and Relentless Assault can surprise our opponents with how much damage we can push through in a single turn.

In fact, we have so much good reanimation options, I decided to explore this theme further and realized we also have some great ways to get our creatures into the graveyard: there’s Buried Alive to tutor them directly into the yard, huge draw options like Necrologia to discard them down to hand size, sacrifice outlets like Greater Good that can also draw oodles of cards, and even Red is contributing here with Sneak Attack to cheat out big creatures from our hand. 

And while 90s creatures generally suck they get a whole lot stronger if we don’t have to pay their absurd mana costs: I went with Crater Hellion and Thunder Dragon as mini board wipes, Multani, Maro-Sorcerer and Verdant Force as beefy dorks, but my favorite is Zodiac Dragon, a Dragon that doesn’t even fly but has a big body and returns itself to hand each time it dies, which means you can do stupid stuff like cheat it out with Sneak Attack for one mana, then sacrifice it to Greater Good to draw 8 cards, return it to hand and repeat as much as you want!

This deck also made me appreciate the heck out of Corpse Dance, a card I rarely played with before but I think is legit good, it’s repeat instant-speed reanimation that gives the creature haste and while it does exile at end step, you can avoid this by just sacrificing the creature beforehand.

The rest of the deck is a combination of the best ramp I could find like Exploration and Nature’s Lore, the best draw like Wheel of Fortune and Necropotence, busted tutors like Demonic and Vampiric Tutor or Defense of the Heart, busted recursion with Yawgmoth’s Will and sometimes busted sometimes useless Reap, and spicy removal like Grave Pact which works so well in our Sacrifice deck. To survive we’ve got No Mercy and Elephant Grass to deter attacks, Constant Mist which is beyond busted even in 2025, and also another card I never ran before but think is actually amazing with Grim Feast which can gain you tons of life passively, super clutch when half of our card draw spells make us lose life. Even Red ended up contributing more to this deck than I expected, not just with some good creatures but also Relentless Assault to double our combat damage output, Fervor to give our stuff haste, and both Price of Progress and Pandemonium which gives the deck some reach with burn to finish off low opponents. 

There’s even a sneaky combo in the deck that uses Argothian Elder and Maze of Ith: attack with the Elder, then while attacking activate the Maze to untap the Elder. Then activate the Elder to untap the Maze and another land. You can repeat this process infinite times for infinite mana during combat. You only get this mana during combat so you’re limited to instant-speed stuff, but that means you can make Vaevictus Asmadi infinite power or perhaps reanimate a creature with Corpse Dance and sacrifice it to Goblin Bombardment infinite times for infinite damage.

I was honestly shocked at how fun and cohesive this deck ended up being. It was such a thrill going through a pile of cards that I initially thought would end up being some random pile of jank as a deck, and then finding my own win conditions, my own synergies, and making something that actually functions well. It truly felt like brewing with random lego pieces instead of assembling IKEA furniture.

That’s not to say the current card design philosophy is bad: this method of assembling a deck was way harder, and took way more time, than brewing a Commander deck using modern cards and modern commanders. The current way is far more accessible to newer players or people who simply don’t want to spend hours slogging through scryfall searches without any guide like I did with this 90s deck. But for people looking for a deckbuilding challenge, I highly recommend setting yourself a zany deckbuilding restriction, something that would be impossible to look up a guide for or see how people brewed it on EDHREC. It taps into that open-ended exciting time when the format was fresh, and if you’re like me, it makes the deckbuilding experience feel even more rewarding.

Let me know what silly deckbuilding restriction you’ve tried out and how it turned out in the comments below, I’d love to see what you all came up with. And until next time, see ya!