The Best Commander Cards From... Exodus

Welcome back to The Best Commander Cards From..., a series focusing on the most powerful EDH cards from across Magic: The Gathering's rich thirty-year-long history. Today's focus is Exodus, the fourteenth expansion set, which was released in June of 1998 as the final set in the Tempest block.

First-Prizes

Exodus featured several interesting firsts for Magic. It's the first set to have color-coded rarity symbols, which seems like a no-brainer today. It's also the first set to feature a collector number and the total number of cards in set, which is another fantastic change. As far as creature types, Whale and Frog are among the introduced types still in use, while Alligator and Townsfolk were later replaced. With no new mechanics in the set, we've only got some honorable mentions to cover before we get into the cards!

Honorable Mentions

Reclaim is a decent extra copy of Noxious Revival, but lacks the Phyrexian mana that makes the latter popular. Reconnaissance is a fun card, but that card could usually be better spent giving your creatures evasion of some kind. Merfolk Looter outranks a lot of cards on today's list in popularity, but in 2023 there're too many cards that loot and do other cool stuff. Forbid is fun, but it asks too much of you outside of Rielle, the Everwise. Now then, onto the highlight reel!

City of Traitors

Although it isn't the most popular card from the set, I think City of Traitors is the most overtly powerful. Although it's a fine tool in most decks, held back mostly by the pricetag, it excels in more powerful decks where the drawback is mitigated.

Coat of Arms

It doesn't take a lot of creatures to make Coat of Arms a veritable Craterhoof Behemoth that's always active, and it shows in the price history of this card. In spite of multiple core set printings, it retains a pretty high price. If you're generating a lot of one type of creature, slap this into your deck and thank me later.

Culling the Weak

Most prominently featured alongside Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh and a black partner commander, Culling the Weak usually plays out much like a Black Lotus. While you can only get black mana from it, I can easily think of plenty of things I'd like to cast with four black mana. It might be recency bias, but The One Ring comes to mind.

Curiosity

While it might not seem like much to some players at first glance, there's a special bit of old-school templating that makes this a very playable card in many cEDH and high power decks: Curiosity doesn't specify combat damage, meaning your pingers, including ones in the command zone, like Vial Smasher the Fierce, draw tons of cards very quickly.

Hatred

Not just my Magic philosophy before discovering Izzet combo (Hate-red), Hatred is a fantastic way to deal lethal damage, especially commander damage, out of nowhere. Sure, you'll spend some life to do it, but you'll also end a player on the spot. Best of all? You don't even have to target your own creatures.

Keeper of the Dead

While this can't target black creatures, it's pretty easy to turn this on in any deck that often mills itself or sends lots of creatures to the yard. Me? I'm slotting it right into Braids, Arisen Nightmare. While this is part of a full Keeper cycle, the rest of the cycle is pretty bad by comparison.

Limited Resources

This card is banned, and for good reason. Any kind of early ramp absolutely breaks this card. Burgeoning? Yes. Rampant Growth? Uh-huh. Mana rocks? Yep. Sure, a lot of decks can remove enchantments, but what if you can't even play the lands you need to cast that removal? That's quite a huge stopgap on enemy tempo for just one mana.

Mana Breach

Talk about storm hate, this card will certainly put a damper on how many spells each player is casting. That is, unless you're playing Chulane, Teller of Tales. Outside of Chulane, though, I still think this is a very annoying card to play against.

Mind Over Matter

Few cards just demand to be broken in the same way that Mind Over Matter does. Evidently the designers knew this, so they priced it at a hefty six mana. There's a ton of cards that combo with this, particularly ones that tap to draw additional cards.

Necrologia

This one-shot Necropotence effect does require you to discard to hand size, but you can probably find a way to get some extra value out of what you pitch. It really sucks to get this countered if you spent a lot of life on it, but I prefer to just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Yes, I'm spending 20 life on this every time. So what?

Oath of Druids

Hehe, I love cards like Oath of Druids. They look like a huge nuisance to play if you're letting your opponents get free creatures, but if all you're jamming is huge Eldrazi or massive bombs, you can definitely generate a ton of value.

Price of Progress

The price is right on Price of Progress to really punish greedy mana. It also, as you might expect, works wonders with damage-doublers. As far as targeted burn goes, you're not often going to get much better than this for such a low mana cost.

Recurring Nightmare

This card is also banned, and I don't think that's changing anytime soon. A repeatable Reanimate effect is a bit too much for most decks to handle, and the game starts to revolve around that player casting this card as many times as possible.

Soul Warden

Similar to its parallel, Essence Warden, Soul Warden excels at giving you repeatable life gain for a very low up-front cost, which can give a huge boost to certain decks. Life gain has rarely been a competitive strategy in EDH, but Soul Warden is still the most popular card from Exodus in spite of that fact.

Spellbook

I am on the Spellbook hate-train, as I've never liked this card. Outside of a few very specific decks, I think Spellbook is actively worse than most of the other cards that remove your max hand size. If you're not using artifacts to do valuable things, you're probably better off using something else.

Spellshock

On paper, one might assume this card gets removed before it does anything too untoward, but in practice I think removing Spellshock is folly. If someone played this at one of my tables, I'd let it slide since I like watching life totals fly. Besides, if you're casting so many spells that this is a must-remove problem, you're the baddie at the table.

Sphere of Resistance

Most playable in Grand Arbiter Augustin IV, Sphere of Resistance is a cheap artifact that makes everyone at the table groan in unison. If you're just trying to curve into progressively bigger spells, it's not a big deal. If you're trying to storm off or cast multiple spells a turn, this is a real killer. God forbid you copy it a few times.

Survival of the Fittest

This wildly powerful card enables repeatable creature tutoring for a very reasonable price. Whether you're discarding reanimation targets and fetching utility creatures or discarding useless mana dorks for late-game bombs, the only limit is your deck construction. If only the actual price tag was reasonable. (Spoiler alert: It is not.)

That's all I've got for you today. This time around I covered the honorable mentions early and had room enough for most of the cool stuff I wanted to talk about. That said, I'm sure I left out a couple of cards that you might like. If so, just let me know down in the comments, as I always read them! This finishes off Tempest block, and brings us right into Urza's block. As always, I've been Luka "Robot" Sharaska, and I hope I'll see you next time.