Top 5 Best Black MTG Cards in cEDH

You lose life! You lose life! Life loss for everyone!

Whether you are looking for explosive card advantage, instant mana, relevant creature effects, or the right card at the right moment, Black is the perfect support color for your cEDH deck of choice. It’s no mystery as to why many of the best competitive Commander builds we’ve seen in recent times include the color, whether it be Najeela, Tivit, Kraum / Tymna, or Rograkh / Silas. It gives you a little bit of everything you want in this format and (somehow) is often the best at it. The main weakness is its ability to win independently (which is why you often see it combined with Red or Blue cards to get the job done).

But, amongst all the power that Black has at its disposal, which cards are its best? Of all the colors, I do think that Black has the most options from which to choose, and there are plenty that could feature on this list. After much consideration, here is my list (which, unfortunately, I know I should have included Tainted Pact on, but I did not, sorry).

#5 Orcish Bowmasters

Orcish Bowmasters

Universes Beyond: The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, Rare

That’s right, the Tales of Middle-earth card that I said didn’t do what it was supposed to do a few weeks ago has ended up here at number five on my list. I’ll admit, this surprised me, even as I decided to put it here. What’s changed from my recent analysis? I’m not sure that anything has. It’s more that if the card did everything people anticipated it to or claims it currently does, it would instead be more in the range of third best. However, some players are better than me and disagreed with my analysis, specifically on the point of only specific decks wanting it, painting it with a broader brush. I think this idea has merit, but I’ll hold off entirely agreeing with it when I start seeing it in successful decks outside the ones I outlined before. Also, the decks I said it didn’t belong to are a narrow band (with the main relevant one being Najeela, the Blade-Blossom)!

Market Price: $38.30

Market Price: $14.06

All that being said, Orcish Bowmasters is an incredibly powerful card. It has a low and undemanding mana cost, making it castable in even five-color decks. Flash gives the card’s controller the utility to surprise opponents and deploy a threat when it’s needed most. Once it’s on the battlefield, it often changes the texture of an entire game, turning the card advantage that most decks look to create into a liability, no matter the plan of your opponents. It cleans up the battlefield, easily removes most of the most popular Commanders you’ll see, and even has a hefty effect on life totals.

I’ve now been in more than a few games where the best thing you can do to move a game along is to make a clone of an opposing Orcish Bowmasters, just to take it off the battlefield. While combat damage is often ignored in competitive commanders, the Orc Army that Bowmasters creates can quickly become threatening. At a minimum, it makes for a great blocker against Najeela, Tymna, or other decks looking to chip in small attacks for advantage. While it may not deserve to be called the fifth-best Black card in cEDH, I think it’s close.

#4 Dark Ritual

Dark Ritual

Masters 25, Common

One of the most iconic spells of all time, here lies Dark Ritual in fourth place on my list. When mana is often the largest chokehold in competitive Commander games (which is a topic I could write an entire article about someday), Dark Ritual is the best of many options for making a lot of mana very quickly. Taking only an investment of a single Black mana to return three more, Dark Ritual is instrumental in powering out fast engines, wincons, or payoffs. In fact, it’s very often used to cast all the other cards on this list well ahead of schedule. Where it’s at its best is on turn one helping you cast a ton of mana rocks, your Tymna, or a Rhystic Study, or slightly later, maybe on turn three, where it helps you double or triple spell some of your most impactful (but more expensive) cards. Black is an incredible color to make, thanks to many of your best Black cards being so pip-intensive. In a world where decks are desperate enough to play Rite of Flame, Dark Ritual is a cut above everything else and appears here on my list.

#3 Necropotence

Necropotence

Iconic Masters, Mythic

Certainly, the most controversial placement on my list, Necropotence is too wildly powerful to ignore. People seem to consider it one of the best cards you can play or simply unusable. Necropotence gives you a great devil’s bargain: dump in a bunch of life, draw 20-35 cards in your end step, and hope to untap so you can win the game. This opens up a horrifying possibility: There are a non-zero amount of games of cEDH in which you’ll just kill yourself with Necropotence.

This amount of life lost, combined with having to make it through three turns of your opponent’s before using the cards (unless you’re specifically a deck built around maximizing it, including cards like Borne Upon a Wind), makes for a dangerous game. However, no other card in the game offers such a strong advantage. Three mana giving you the ability to draw cards at a rate of one life per card is unprecedented still to this day. However, the whole having-to-wait-a-whole-turn-cycle-to-use-them is a real downside, just not one massive enough for me to knock one of the best Black cards of all time, both in and outside of cEDH.

#2 Demonic Tutor 

Demonic Tutor

Commander Masters, Mythic

Maybe I overvalue tutors in competitive Commander, but I think they are great. Other people wish that we could play more of them. Players have started trimming the worst of them, aiming to play more impactful cards in their place. Plenty of brewers have dogpiled the likes of Vampiric Tutor and other top deck tutors, but nobody can deny the ability of the granddaddy of them all and my number two card, Demonic Tutor.

Market Price: $87.40

Market Price: $39.92

One of the challenging parts of playing cEDH is that we’re working against the very initial design of Commander as a format. The 100-card singleton nation of the game is supposed to increase variance, especially when spread across four players and their unique decks. Demonic Tutor lets us cut directly through that variance, selecting the perfect card we need at the moment in return for a generic and a Black mana. This could be anything from a counterspell to stay alive through a now-coming win, an Underworld Breach to force a win, or a Rhystic Study to settle in for the long game. No matter what you need, Demonic Tutor is ready to provide it for you, right here and right now.

Market Price: $46.99

Market Price: $13.08

Market Price: $51.60

The only downside it could have is that it is a Sorcery, a fact that reduces its utility significantly to something like Tainted Pact, the aforementioned card that didn’t make it onto my list. I believe there’s an argument for Tainted Pact to be in this place instead. It’s Instant speed and combo potential may make for what is overall a stronger card, but it comes with the cost of blowing up your library in your search for the needed piece. For now, the card that set the standard for library searching back in Alpha will remain strong in this place.

#1 Ad Nauseam

Ad Nauseam

Double Masters, Rare

The figurehead of the format. The scariest art. An outrageously powerful effect in return for a powerful cost (both in mana and life). Ad Nauseam truly has it all. Nothing in our little format can be as scary as an Ad Nauseam on the stack. Hordes of players center their entire game plan around resolving one and figuring out how to win the game from there. Even if it doesn’t win the game on the spot (which it can enable, unlike Necropotence), it will load up your hand with many of the best cards in your deck immediately, helping form your game plan for the coming turn rotation.

Market Price: $194.86

Market Price: $62.73

Thanks to the 40 starting life in Commander, this card is significantly more robust than in the other formats where people have tried to make it work. We’re also allowed to play cards such as Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, and Mana Vault, which make paying the otherwise hefty three generic mana part of the five mana value cost much more trivial than it would be otherwise. Combined with the low average cost of cEDH’s best playables, Ad Nauseam might as well read “Pay five mana, draw 20 cards.” This is obviously one of the best things you could do in the entire format, especially alongside the other cards on this list (Demonic Tutor to find your last missing piece, anybody?). While the occasional resolution of this card does fail (resulting in a Sad Naus, if you will), Ad Nauseam is the best Black card in competitive Commander format. What other card will load up your hands with so many cards that you can use instantly, enabling you to often pull off a seamless, protected win? I rest my case.

There’s Too Many Good Black Cards!

Market Price: $21.51

Market Price: $12.83

While I think one or two of my cards definitely belong on this list, there are so many great Black cards in cEDH that I could see anybody making a reasonable list that varies from mine. These are just the choices that I’ve made at this point! Maybe the best cEDH Black cards in the 2024 list will look significantly different. If you want to talk to me about my list or have suggestions on what you’d like to hear next.