Magic: the Gathering Artist Commander Resources

Introduction

With Magic: the Gathering reaching its 30th anniversary, I wanted to celebrate the many artists who have been central to bringing the many worlds of Magic alive... and what better way to do it than through Magic's most popular format, commander?

And so I have written a programme to process the Scryfall bulk data feeds and find artists and commanders for which decks are possible. By possible I mean they have:

• a commander
• basic lands in each of that commander's colours
• a sufficient number of non-land cards in those colours (I arbitrarily chose 60)

There is absolutely no guarantee that any of the decks will play well, due to the limited pool of cards.

I'll aim to update this list after each new set release; if I don't, give me nudge! The current set was generated at 15/11/2024, 10:45

- Stephen Tavener (mrraow)

Notes

The lists here contain all commander-legal cards for a given commander and artist combination; you may have to do some pruning to get down to 100.

For your convenience, I have tried to list the cards in a format which can be pasted into Moxfield with little effort.

I found a few corner cases for legal commanders, listed below. Let me know what I'm missing!

• Some Planeswalkers are legal commanders. I recognise these via the oracle text " can be your commander"
• Some cards are not restricted to one. I recognise these via the oracle text "A deck can have [any number of|up to seven|up to nine] cards named". As a result, you may see decks with apparently only a few legal cards - this is (probably) not a bug!
• Commanders with 'Partner' and 'Partner with...' are recognised and combined, with the two commanders ordered alphabetically to avoid duplication. There are quite a few of these.
• Commanders with 'Choose a Background' are recognised and combined with any matching backgrounds (so far only Alix Branwyn, Cristi Balanescu and Gaboleps have illustrated both a commander and background; and none of these have sufficient cards to make a deck yet).

A deck that is marked as updated has gained new cards recently. The current definition of 'recently' is on or after 01/10/2024.

The Decks

There are quite a few viable and almost-viable decks now, so I've condensed my report down to a table. Click through to the artist to see all the decks you can build. Note that I have categorised decks as follows:

Viable

A complete deck, with commander, basics, and sufficient other cards.

Near Miss

One thing is missing to make this a viable deck. When you click through to the artist, you'll get more information about what's missing.

Pauper EDH

A complete pauper EDH deck (an uncommon creature commander, and only common cards maindeck).

preEDH

A complete preEDH deck ()commander rules with no cards after the first official commander product was printed.

Collaborations

These are commander decks with two or more by artists. I include in this section artists who frequently collaborate (>= 3 cards) and have illustrated cards alone, plus a few other connected artists I have added manually. Relationships I'm aware of (tell me what I'm missing):

• Justinya Dura and Piotr Dura (married).
• Dmitry and Ekaterina Burmak (married).
• Daniel Gelon and Heather Hudson (married).
• Kaja and Phil Foglio (married).
• Terese Nielsen and Ron Spencer (siblings).
• Sam Guay and Rebecca Guay (mentorship, not related).
• Eliette Mitchell and Rebecca Guay (mother+child).
• Seb McKinnon, Erin Vest, Drew Tucker, and Nils Hamm collaborated on a playmat.
• Rebecca Guay and Seb McKinnon collaborated on a playmat.
• Rebecca Guay and Alayna Danner collaborated on a playmat.
• Nicola Leonard and Brian Snõddy (they modelled for each other in the cards Sleight of Mind and Helm of Obedience)

Note that there will be inevitably overlap between the decks in this section and the sections above.