Build Commander
How Many Board Wipes Should You Run in Commander?
2 to 4 board wipes, paired with a way to protect your own board when you're ahead instead. The smallest category in the deck template, and it's small on purpose.
The starting number
2 to 4 board wipes is what the deck template allots, folded into its wipes-and-protection slot alongside a couple of ways to shield your own board. That's deliberately fewer than most other categories.
A board wipe is a symmetrical effect. It solves a board you're losing, but it also erases whatever progress you've made yourself, which is exactly backwards from what you want on the turns you're ahead. Too many wipes in a deck that isn't specifically built to profit from resetting the board (a control shell, a reanimator deck that wants everything in the graveyard anyway) means you're regularly undoing your own plan.
What actually moves the number
Control decks want more, sometimes 5-7. If your plan is genuinely to answer everything and grind out the last resources at the table, wipes aren't a backup plan, they're a core piece of it.
Go-wide and Voltron decks want fewer, sometimes zero. A deck whose whole plan is a wide board of tokens or a single overloaded commander doesn't want a card in its own 99 that undoes that plan. When these decks do run a wipe, it's usually a one-sided effect rather than a symmetrical one.
Reanimator and graveyard decks can treat a wipe as an enabler, not just an answer. A board wipe that puts a table's worth of creatures in graveyards is a setup for a deck that wants big things in the graveyard to bring back, which is why these decks sometimes run more wipes than their power level alone would suggest.
Protection matters as much as the wipe count. A deck that runs Heroic Intervention or similar effects can safely run a wipe or two more, since it has a way to make its own board wipes one-sided when it actually needs to.
Board wipes worth knowing
Four shapes of wipe: unconditional, scalable, cost-reducing, and modal. Which one fits your deck usually comes down to whether you need it to be cheap early or scale with a table that's gotten out of hand.
Wrath of God ↗
Four mana, destroys all creatures, no exceptions. The baseline every other wipe gets compared to.
Toxic Deluge ↗
Scalable -X/-X for X life, so it's exactly as big as the board needs it to be. Also gets past indestructible, which a lot of wipes can't.
Blasphemous Act ↗
Nine mana on the card, but it costs 1 less per creature on the battlefield, so it's routinely a one- or two-mana wipe in the games where you actually need it.
Austere Command ↗
Choose two of four modes, so it's a wipe that can also clear artifacts or enchantments instead, or split its damage by mana value.
Protecting your own board instead
The other half of this slot, for the games where you're the one ahead and someone else is about to wipe the board out from under you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many board wipes should a normal Commander deck run?
2 to 4 covers most decks. That's enough to have an answer when you're clearly behind on board, without so many that you're regularly wiping away your own progress in a deck that isn't built to profit from doing so.
Should every Commander deck run a board wipe?
Most should run at least one or two, since being able to reset a board you're losing on is one of the format's most reliable comebacks. A pure combo deck racing to win before turn seven is the main exception, since it's not planning to be on the back foot long enough for a wipe to matter.
How do I protect my own board from my own board wipe?
A handful of protection effects like Heroic Intervention or Swiftfoot Boots let you cast a wipe and keep your own creatures, turning a symmetrical effect into a one-sided one. Alternatively, time your wipes for when your own board is already empty or has nothing worth saving.
What's the difference between a board wipe and mass removal?
They're the same thing, said two ways. 'Board wipe' and 'mass removal' both describe an effect that answers every creature (or every permanent of some type) at once, as opposed to spot removal, which answers one thing.
Track when a wipe actually won or lost you the game.
TurnZero HQ's game recaps and moments log the swings that mattered, so you can tell whether that wipe was worth the slot.
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