Five-color · Color Identity
Five-Color (WUBRG) in Commander: History, Playstyle and Best Commanders
A five-color commander removes the format's only real deckbuilding restriction. Every card is legal, every answer is available, and the entire difficulty moves into the mana base.
Five-Color is white, blue, black, red and green, the five-color identity. Every card in Magic is legal. The only question left is whether the mana works.
Also called WUBRG, Rainbow, 5C.
Where the Name Comes From
No faction name: players call it five-color, WUBRG or rainbow.
Five-color decks are as old as multicolor Magic, but five-color Commander decks needed a legal commander, and for years there were barely any. The early options were the Slivers and a handful of Legends-era oddities, which meant that in practice a five-color deck was a Sliver deck. The category opened up slowly through Ramos and Sisay and then very quickly with Jodah and Kenrith, and there are now enough WUBRG legends to build a genuinely different deck around each of them.
There is also a card here worth knowing about because it is no longer legal: Golos, Tireless Pilgrim is banned in Commander. It was a three-mana artifact creature that fetched a land and let a five-color deck cast cards off the top for free, and the Rules Committee banned it because it made the color identity restriction (the format's defining rule) effectively optional. That ban is the clearest possible statement of why five-color is treated as a category of its own.
All 32 color combinations and where each name came from →How Five-Color Plays
The point of five colors is access. Every removal spell, every tutor, every ramp package and every combo piece in Magic is legal in the deck, so a WUBRG list is built by asking what the best card for a job is rather than what the best card in the identity is. That is a genuinely different deckbuilding exercise and it is why five-color decks so often end up as tuned piles of the format's strongest cards.
The commander usually supplies a reason beyond access. Cost reduction, tribal support, a cascade engine, or a way to cheat permanents into play: the five-color legends that see real play all do something that only works with the whole color pie behind it. A five-color deck whose commander is just five colors is usually worse than a good three-color deck.
The whole difficulty is the mana. A five-color base needs a genuine investment (fetchlands, triomes, the Ravnica shocklands and the Commander staples) or a deliberate design where most of the deck is colorless and mana rocks fix everything. This is the identity where a poor mana base is not a small tax but the reason the deck does not function.
What It Does Well, and What It Doesn't
Strengths
- Every card in Magic is legal. No answer, tutor, ramp package or combo piece is unavailable.
- The best possible removal suite, since there is no color whose answers you have to do without.
- Access to every ramp effect at once, which is what makes the mana base workable at all.
- Tribal and "cards of any color" payoffs that only exist in five colors.
Weaknesses
- The mana base is the deck's real cost, in money, in lands entering tapped, and in dead hands.
- Consistency suffers: a hundred singleton cards across five colors is a lot of ways to be stuck.
- A commander that only offers access rather than an ability is usually not worth the mana strain.
- Colorless utility lands are much harder to justify, which costs the deck real flexibility.
Best Five-Color Commanders
The command zones that define the identity rather than the ones winning this week: the pips beside each name are its color identity, which is what it lets you play in the other 99.
Commander Spotlight
Kenrith, the Returned King ↗
Five activated abilities (haste, draw, life, reanimation and a pump) each payable by any player. A commander that is simultaneously a mana sink, a political tool and a way to make everybody at the table owe you something.
Sisay, Weatherlight Captain ↗
Searches out a legendary permanent whose mana value is less than Sisay's power, which grows with every legend you control. A tutor chain that assembles a lock.
Jodah, Archmage Eternal ↗
Every spell can be cast for one of each color, whatever it costs. The most direct answer to "what do five colors buy you" in the format.
Morophon, the Boundless ↗
Name a creature type, and its colored mana costs are free for you. The five-color tribal commander that makes any tribe castable.
Najeela, the Blade-Blossom ↗
A red-white card whose five-color activated ability makes its identity WUBRG: the textbook example of color identity coming from rules text rather than a mana cost. Untaps everything and takes extra combats.
The First Sliver ↗
Cascade on every Sliver spell you cast, which chains into more Slivers. The tribal deck that started the whole five-color category.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you build a five-color mana base in Commander?
Two ways, and mixing them badly is the usual mistake. Either invest in real fixing (fetchlands, triomes, shocklands, the Commander-staple cycles and a full suite of mana rocks) or build the deck so that most of its cards are colorless or single-pip and let rocks and dorks cover the rest. Around 38 to 40 lands plus ten or more mana sources is normal, and expect a meaningful number of them to enter tapped.
Why is Golos banned in Commander?
Because it undermined the rule the format is built on. Golos, Tireless Pilgrim was a three-mana artifact creature that fetched any land and then let you exile the top three cards of your library and cast them for free, using mana of any type, so it turned any commander into a five-color commander for practical purposes and made color identity a formality. It was banned in September 2021.
Is a five-color deck stronger than a three-color one?
Only if the commander is doing something with the access. Five colors buy you the best card for every job and cost you consistency and a real amount of money in lands; a focused three-color deck with a clean mana base often plays better. The five-color decks that are genuinely strong are the ones whose commander needs all five: tribal cost reduction, cascade chains, or casting cards off the top for free.
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