How to Pick the Best Ball Lightning for Your Commander Deck

Header Image: Ball Lightning, illustrated by Dave Dorman 

First, some backstory. The year is 2015. I was writing for another outlet that no longer exists; let's just say it involves trading cards for points, and I'm not an economics professor but I have been told that inflation was involved. And failure.

There was a big storm around June of 2015 that ripped through my area, knocking out power in the neighborhood, but I had a deadline to meet and an article to write. I tried writing my article on paper and gluing it to my modem in hopes it'd reach my audience, but sadly that failed, and also I learned a lot about how modems work. As I typed this article, spoilers were rolling out for the year's official Commander release, succinctly titled Commander 2015.

The storm that tore through my area inspired me when it came to building a deck that week. I should preface this with the information that back in 2015, which according to the calendar is now an entire decade ago, I wrote Commander deck techs. I don't do that much now, largely because I haven't built a new deck in months, and when I do build a new deck, it's entirely so I have an excuse to write very weird things.

Ten years ago, I created a Commander deck centered entirely on Ball Lightning. Back in the day, somewhere in the mid-90s, my mind was adequately blown by such power. I wasn't impressed with paying a measly blue mana to draw three cards. You can't kill opponents by drawing cards, after all. And yes, we're flashing back to a flashback, so technically this overlong article intro you're reading now is nostalgic for nostalgia. Getting old does strange things to the mind.

Mid-90s me, playing kitchen-table 60-card constructed at the time because Commander didn't exist, did the math, and while many, many things have changed since then, math hasn't. One Ball Lightning is SIX DAMAGE. That's a lot of damage. And if you can only have four copies in your deck (a rule I still think should never have applied to Ball Lightning) then you can deal 24 DAMAGE! Opponents start at 20! That's enough to make them dead!

So I jammed Ball Lightning into any deck I could, even splashing for it, which as we all know now isn't the smartest idea considering its triple-red casting cost. But I didn't care, I was going to live that dream, and that dream evolved over time. Would I say I worship Ball Lightning? No, that would be ridiculous. No sensible person would imagine an entire religious dogma surrounding a random red creature from The Dark. 

Here we are, decades later, and although I now know that lightning storms are not the result of a holy electrical sphere taking out its divine frustration on the local power grid, I still have that Ball Lightning-shaped dream rattling around in my now fully-formed adult brain. Will you dream with me, friends?

The Culture and Religion of Ball Lightning: An Anthropological Study

One thing that makes Ball Lightning special is that mana cost. Just three red pips. No muss, no fuss. . We could also muse about that singular printing of the card, tagged at the beginning of this paragraph featuring real-life quotations as flavor text: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Life, struck sharp on death, Makes awful lightning" from Aurora Leigh. This, if you're wondering, is the poem that English Lit professors assign for students they don't like, since it's technically a poem, but it's also around 400 pages, depending on printing. I'll need your analysis essay by Friday, thanks.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ball Lightning's had 15 printings, three different arts, and six different frames. But it's always just .

Ultimately, I created a Feldon of the Third Path deck, as I am often wont to do, and jammed the list full of Ball Lightning and Ball Lightning-adjacent cards, like Blistering Firecat, Hell's Thunder, Arc Runner, Vexing Devil, Cosmic Larva, Stingscourger, Lightning Serpent, Crater Elemental, Archetype of Aggression, Phyrexian Soulgorger, Tuktuk the Explorer, Keldon Marauders, Burnished Hart, Hellspark Elemental, and Heartlash Cinder. The definition of "Ball Lightning" isn't a literal one, so much as it's a vibe. 

The idea was, and still is, simple: play your Ball Lightnings who burn the candle at both ends, let them die, then have Feldon get to work making robot versions. Everything here is good at putting the hurt on the opponent when they come into play, and also excellent at being here for a good time, not a long time.

In this deck, we didn't pay the echo costs of Stingscourger and we sure as Hell's Thunderdon't pay the cumulative upkeep costs of Phyrexian Soulgorger. These guys are here to do one thing, and that's show up to the party, ruin everything, and leave immediately. If you start sacrificing your lands to Cosmic Larva, then you're doing it wrong. Each of these creatures represents a function that mono-red normally does not have access to, but with Feldon's recursion, we can almost pretend we're not so under-equipped to handle the world of Magic today. 

And speaking of the world of Magic today, we've got a bunch of new honorary Ball Lightnings that we can use to update this list. Here are a few:

Hell, even the flying boat from Doctor Who could technically be considered a Ball Lightning. Like I said, Ball Lightning isn't a rigid ruleset, but a lifestyle of freedom, emotion and leaving at exactly the right time. Oh, and by the way, the "right time," speaking as a person nearing 40, is shortly after you've arrived and without saying goodbye to anyone, and on the drive home you wonder why you bothered to leave your house in the first place. 

There's a lot we can learn from a Ball Lightning. First, I guess, we should learn what a Ball Lightning even is. Let's ask Wikipedia.

"Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. Though usually associated with thunderstorms, the observed phenomenon is reported to last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt, and is a phenomenon distinct from St. Elmo's fire and will-o'-the-wisp."

Does that help? Beyond Wikipedia, we can learn that despite being very weird and apparently unexplainable, ball lightning does indeed exist. Maybe. The jury's out. It's actually pretty fascinating. We live in an age of ubiquitous recording. Lightning strikes, according to some estimates, roughly a half-billion times a year on land globally (or around 1.5 billion times if you count the strikes over the oceans). We've got millions of minutes of video of lightning, just ask anyone in Tampa, Florida and they'll show you the hours of video they've recorded from their porch. Why aren't there thousands of videos of ball lightning? And why are the videos claiming to be ball lightning actually created by people with ill intent and Adobe Premiere? But did you know tornadoes weren't recorded on video until the early 50s?

Then there's the fact that even though many people more knowledgeable than I am claim that it does actually exist, those same people have no idea how it can exist. 

We know how they exist, though. You just do a little and there you go, you've got a beautiful bouncing baby ball lightning. 

We're hewing very closely to red, for good reason, but I do want to mention that other colors are able to shirk their earthly tethers and embrace the ball. If you wanted to make your Ball Lightning deck more multicultural, there's always Lightning Skelemental, Groundbreaker, Spark Trooper, or Force of Savagery. If you're thinking that Jund is the way to go, Ziatora, the Incinerator would be a respectable pick. But does Ziatora dig through the dirt to turn all lapsed Ball Lightnings into robots in the hope that one of them might return in the visage of his dead wife? 

Maybe, I didn't read the lore of New Capenna. 

Arise, My Reactor! Electrify the Nonbelievers!

So we have our Ball Lightnings. In a perfect world, we need nothing else. We can allow ourselves to sink into them, like the ball pit at a Discovery Zone. 

Ever since Tibalt, the Fiend-Blooded was first spoiled way back in Avacyn Restored, I've wanted to play him in a deck where he wouldn't be instantly embarrassing, and this sort of build is the closest we're going to get. Random discard is never a good idea unless you like to Gamble, but at least here the possibility to gain value from it is a little higher, so dig out your Tibalts that have been gathering dust in that binder of yours and sleeve 'em up.

Beyond Tibalt, we really want to make sure we do our best to help Feldon get to work reconstituting our balls, so we've got a collection of cards to do just that. While the original ball has its own built-in eject button in the form of end-of-turn sacrifice, some of our honorary balls need a little help dying or otherwise getting into the graveyard.

This is what we call a sampling of our "Helping Feldon" collection. The cards in this collection, the full extent you'll see below, either draw cards, discard cards, or otherwise get creatures into the graveyard for Feldon to get to work.

Then there's the case of Lightning Coils, a card mostly forgotten, but core to our ball lightning tenet and belief system. Every time Feldon makes a robot or one of our creatures kills itself, as they are often wont to do, Lightning Coils gets a counter, and then eventually poof, it floods the board with tiny Ball Lightnings. If that doesn't win you the game, something horrible has happened. 

Speaking of something horrible, you might think that many of the cards in this deck are "not good," or "bad." This is a matter of opinion, but not only is it also an objective falsehood, it's an archaic way of looking at reality. It's Ball Lightning's world, we're just passengers. Don't you get sick of skimming through the endless tide of new card reveals, picking the best two or three cards, theorycrafting the perfect deck to build around those cards, building that deck, then going to your LGS or a convention to sit down at the table with three people also playing that deck? 

You know how to stop that cycle? Play a goddamn Ball Lightning once in awhile. It's good for you, and tastes good, too.

Anyway, so we've established the plans for our Ball Lightning replication facility, with Feldon as the foreman. Now we have to make sure the opponents aren't going to muck it up. In this analogy, the opponents are, I guess, OSHA? Safety regulations are written in blood, as they say, and a Ball Lightning factory has no safety regulations. 

All OSHA Representatives Keep Out! 

The worst thing about playing Commander is that while we're trying to win the game, the opponents are also trying to win the game, and we all know that most games can only have one winner.

That's why Blood Moon exists. Sure, it predates Commander by several years, and most people hate it, but what is a Blood Moon other than a Ball Lightning, awash in a red filter, made of rock, and in space? The thing about mono-red is that it knows it's not as good as the other colors, but instead of trying to get better, it decides the best way to deal with that inadequacy is by dragging everyone else down to its level, so when you sit down to play this deck and your opponents reveal their commanders -- probably anti-Ball Lightning philistines, whoever's most popular in the moment -- you can delight in the knowledge that someone's about to have all his or her fancy dual lands become Mountains. And no one likes Mountains the way we love Mountains. 

Regarding Mountains, this is where the aesthetic comes into play. There's no point in playing Commander if you're just going to go slapdash with your basics, and that's doubly true for a deck like ours, a deck that only really plays basics outside of a few utility selections. And even those utility selections are basically just Mountains with extra steps, like Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle. 

Are you one of those people who just use whichever basics they might have at hand, left over from a recent draft after you "forgot" to return them to the store in which you went 0-2 drop? You should be ashamed of yourself. 

We need only the finest bedrock for the foundation of the Church of Ball Lightning. We need 28 of the best, MATCHING Mountains we can find. And there are a lot of factors we can use to determine which particular Mountain we're going to call our own. 

If we're going for price in US Dollar, the answer for Mountain is the same as every basic land: the Guru lands. Each of them are around $500, meaning if we want to gild our holy structure, it'll cost us around $14,000. Definitely worth it when it comes to our lord and savior Ball Lightning, but times are tough right now, and Ball Lightning understands that. We needn't tithe that intensely to show our devotion. 

As for border, long-time readers will know I'm old border forever, and Tempest Mountains are my go-to. I've got 30 of them sitting in front of me on my desk right now, each signed by Mark Poole. But this isn't about me. It's about Ball Lightning. We need something that captures the essence of what it means to be lightning, but round. I'll give you three options. Just remember to not, under any circumstances, mix them up:

The first two are around $5 and $4, respectively, so that might not be exactly budget-friendly when we're talking about an entire Commander deck. The last option is a nickel a piece.

Only a Fool Ignores a Letter Bearing the Official Mark of The Church of Ball Lightning

The Most Frightening Storms Are Those Not Woven by Nature's Hand

This was a very cathartic article for me. It's nice to come clean regarding my devotion to Ball Lightning. No more living my life in the shadows. 

I hope I was able to successfully proselytize, and the Church of Ball Lightning will enjoy a few more acolytes in the coming days. Start 2025 out the right way, you won't regret it.