Commander Level-Up: Mass Removal
“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.” - Sun Tzu
Welcome back to the second installment of the Commander Level-Up series! If you’re new, this series deals with those “aha!” moments I’ve had playing commander that shifted my thinking on some aspect of the game. Head on over to our Substack page where I last wrote in this series about the secret tech of activated abilities in Commander.
This week, we’re talking about mass removal. Mass removal spells are spells that, upon resolution, remove most or all of the permanents on the battlefield. If targeted removal is a sniper rifle, mass removal is a nuke. Now, obviously, this is my series about my experiences with the game; while I believe my position is defendable and well-thought out, I recognize that these are my opinions and are subject to change or challenged or both. With that said…
The Argument Against Wraths
If not first, certainly the most iconic mass removal spell is Wrath of God. It is mass removal in its purest form: destroy all creatures. No discriminating the large from the small or the living from the undead—all are destroyed.
In modern Magic design, mass removal spells have been power crept to “truly” remove cards that otherwise dodge a wrath (via indestructibility or recursion) by changing the text from “destroy” to “exile.” This adjustment is to make mass removal spells “work” as intended: as a clean answer to sweep the board of problems.
Control strategies that seek to take the game into the later turns thrive on using these spells proactively to keep attackers away and control the game script. After all, it is truly a tempo blow to spend just 4 mana to effectively nullify what may have been 10-15+ mana worth of spells your opponents committed to the board. Wraths scale in commander for exactly this reason.
However, the secret tech for mass removal spells is to dodge them yourself. After all, you are the one building your deck, so why not select your mass removal spells such that they affect your board less than your opponents’?
This might seem obvious, but from the time I first started playing Commander, the discourse has largely remained that board wipes are to save you from dying - worrying about the impact on your own board is negligible, as you get to choose when to fire it off. And while these are not incorrect statements, here are a few counterarguments that have been part of my Level-Up on this.
Deck building slots are tight - having cards that are dead in your hand unless you are losing or about to lose feels bad.
Commander games are already long. When you have a group that commits time to play together, in a lot of ways you’ve already won. The more games that take 2+ hours on the back of multiple “reset buttons” by way of board wipes feels very invalidating. I have walked away from many games that I “won” after a collective 6 board wipes and it certainly didn’t feel like winning. Especially when we could’ve played multiple games in the same time. Sometimes, one of your opponents has earned the win and it’s the sportsmanly thing to do to shake hands and shuffle up. In fact, I’ve found myself holding back board wipes when I determine that casting it does not further my chances of winning while also elongating the game unnecessarily.
With the exception of some specific strategies—like control or stax—where forwarding their own strategy expressly involves stopping others, mass removal does not forward your own deck’s strategy. At best it’s an emergency valve when your strategy didn’t get off the ground fast enough, and at worst it sets everyone back to 0. With average decks running 4-6 slots for mass removal, it might benefit using those slots for actual furthering of your game plan than planning to be behind.
Wraths Are Weapons, Not Failsafe Shields
Consider the following scenario: you and two of your opponents have between 2-4 creatures each on board. Some are utility creatures, while others may be worthy of battle. But your third opponent is the Green player. The Green player has 2x your mana and has 5 creatures and 5 nonlegendary token copies of their best creature, and in this scenario created most of them this turn with a haste anthem on board. Life totals are in the mid-game, ranging from 18 (the greedy fetchland-into-shockland player) to 28. The Green player moves to combat on their turn. You are staring at your Wrath of God, dead in hand at sorcery speed, and wishing you had even an Aetherize or, better yet, a Teferi’s Protection.
If you’re lucky, you could politic your way out of the coming stampede, effectively using the Green player’s total power to decimate your other opponents, and then cast your Wrath on your turn. HOWEVER. Recall that the player who has outboarded you has 2x the mana and likely the full grip to do so again. In spending your turn on a Wrath, you’ve only rescheduled your execution date by another 20 minutes.
Now, I won’t pretend that sometimes, regardless of your best efforts to slow down the Green player responsibly, a board wipe will absolutely do the job. There is, however, an offensive-minded alternative to the desperation that a wrath from a losing position accompanies. Playing one-sided board wipes—either build-your-own or deck-specific—will allow you to do the opposite of dragging out a game by casting multiple board resets.
An example of both build-your-own and a deck specific board wipes comes courtesy of my Myrel, Shield of Argive deck1:
Build-Your-Own One-Sided Board Wipe
Deck-Specific One-Sided Board Wipe
And, as a bonus:
Slot-These-Immediately One-Sided Board Wipes
The most important aspect of this Commander Level-Up for me came from reevaluating what I perceived to be a solved and known quantity in mass removal. Realizing that I cared more about playing Magic often and joyfully than eeking out that extra percentage of advantage in 15-for-1’ing my friends. Validating the game that has been played up to this point and respecting the time commitment have been serious considerations in my deck building now, with mass removal playing a crucial role in both.
By my logic, the best board wipes are the ones that are followed up by an attempt to move on to the next game. Dedicating a card slot to a Spell of Mass Destruction should be one that sees you through to victory! The choice is yours as to whether that slot translates to a dead card in hand or an intentional siege weapon aimed at opening up your opponents in the end game.
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