We are in the midst of preview season for Modern Horizon's 3 which seems to be delivering pretty heavily on its tagline "you're new forever favourites". It seems to have everything, from the return of everyones favourite eldritch horrors, the Eldrazi, to sure to be staples like Power Balance. Honestly, this does seem to be the set that has it all.

By "this set has it all," I actually mean it, there are some incredible commanders ready to build and I wanted to dedicate this article to my Top 5 commanders and how to build them ready for when this set officially drops on June 14th.

Number Five

Esper (White, Blue and Black) is usually the colour combo of holding back and really only interacting on your opponent's turn, but Modern Horizons 3 decided to ignore all that and go with an aggro strategy with Arna Kennerud, Sky Captain. This commander is a huge beater all by itself as a 4/4 Flying Lifelink but also has Ward - discard a card. If its one thing Commander players dislike doing the most, it's discarding cards to do stuff. That's not all, whenever a Modified creature attacks, we double any counters on it, and then make a token copy for each nontoken permanent attached to it, and then attach it to that creature.

I honestly think the counters thing is a little bit of a red herring, sure there are plenty of ways to get counters on our creatures but it isnt the strongest strategy in Esper. Instead, we want to lean further into our Aura and Equipment strategy. We can use the likes of Sram, Senior Edificer and Puresteel Paladin for card draw and then fill the deck to the brim with powerful cards like Assimilation Aegis or Argentum Armor to help control the board. If enchantments are more your thing, then we also have a personal favourite of mine, Eldrazi Conscription.

Having access to White, we can include token doublers Mondrak, Glory Dominus and Anointed Procession which is great at getting an additional equipment or Aura's attached especially if they nasty abilities like Sword of Body and Mind or Sword of Fire and Ice, which can really rack up the damage or mill for quite a lot if left to be doubled up.

Number Four

They finally did it, they gave us a Hate Bear in the Command Zone. And what a Hate Bear it is! Kudo, King Among Bears is

a two-mana 2/2 that turns everything else into 2/2's, which is kind of great. Kudo tells our opponents that we will no longer stand for them playing their massive threats on turn four and instead they have to play "fair magic" with the rest of us. Only that's a massive lie, because our bears are going to be Bearing Arms (pun intended) and, to paraphrase Yogi Bear, "bigger than the av-er-age Bear!"

Creatures like Esper Sentinel, Birds of Paradise, or Scute Swarm just get an instant improvement with our commander on the board, but we can also take advantage of Roaming Throne to double all of Bear triggers with Kudo making everything we cast a Bear.

What Bears you ask? Surrak and Goreclaw will make our bears 4/4s, whilst Ayula, Queen Among Bears will make our bears fight our opponents bears and Torrens, Fist of the Angels will make another two bears when we cast a bear. My god that's a lot of bears. But wait, there's more! Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite will instantly wipe all of our opponents stuff whilst cards like Reverance will lock our opponents out of attacking us all together.

Number Three

Whoever designed Jyoti, Moag Ancient has a lot to answer for. It's a four-mana 2/4 that makes a Dryad Arbor for each time you've cast your commander... but this is in Simic (Green and Blue), the colour pairing best known for getting lands and abusing them. If that wasn't enough, Jyoti also pumps each of our land creatures by its power, which at its floor is 2 but again, we are in Simic.

Initially this seems to be a blink deck with landfall synergies. Cards like Displacer Kitten, Thassa, Deep Dwelling and Conjurer's Closet will allow us to blink our commander to get more and more triggers from it. Then, we turn those land creatures that it makes into value with Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer, Titania, Nature's Force and Bristly Bill, Spine Sower, filling our board with permanents so quickly that our opponents won't be able to keep up. We can then turn those Forest lands we made into massive hitting power with Embodiment of Insight, Tatyova, Steward of Tides, and Earth Surge.

But that's not all we can do with this deck, so long as we have Concordant Crossroads we can cast our Commander as many times as we like by sacrificing it to the Food Chain. Each iteration will make enough Forest lands to pay the commander tax along with the five mana from the food chain. We can then turn that into a win with a humble Ruin Crab or make even more mana with Lotus Cobra to win with a huge Finale of Devestation.

Number Two

Want to play with two of the most broken abilities in all of Commander but in your Command Zone? Then The Necrobloom is the commander for you. For one and Abzhan (White Black and Green) we get an unreasonably big bottomed plant with the Field of the Dead trigger stapled on and also our land cards in our Graveyard have Dredge 2. For those not in the know, Dredge is a mechanic that says when you draw a card, instead put the top x cards in your graveyard and put this card in your hand instead. It's super powerful and was part of the reason why Hogaak Arisen Necropolis was banned in Modern (for the record so was Field of the Dead). Our Little shop of Horrors stand in pairs so well with Six, which gives our nonland cards in the graveyard Retrace. By filling our graveyard up we can use the dredge ability to get a land card into our hand ready to cast some huge haymakers like Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation // Temple of Civilization or classic staples like Avenger of Zendikar. There is another excellent card, but you have to be careful on how this plays out. Ashaya, Soul of the Wild is a creature that turns all our Creatures into land creatures, which is great with the dredge ability but really bad with Six who cares about nonland permanents.

Number One

My top pick for commanders to build is an absolutely absurd Commander. Nadu, Winged Wisdom is a 3/4 flyer that lets us target one of our creatures with a spell and reveal the top card of our library. If it's a land card, it enters the battlefield (doesnt say tapped) and if it isn't, it goes to our hand. It has the wording "this ability triggers only twice each turn" but honestly that's so easy to get around in these colours. The easiest way to build this is with low mana cost creatures like Ornithopter or Memnite and then target it with an equip ability that also costs 0 like Lightning Greaves to do this over and over again. We can even include Cowardice to return the creatures to our hand or Displacer Kitten to flicker them, resetting the twice per turn ruling. I genuinely feel like we can leverage value from Orvar, the All-Form to make token copies of our creatures and Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief to duplicate those spells, getting an additional trigger for each spell we use on our stuff. With all these land drops it also makes sense to include Nissa, Resurgent Animist to get more mana to keep going. This Commander is the kind where you set up and then go for it so be sure to bring counter magic to protect yourself.

There we have my Top 5 Commanders to build around from Modern Horizons 3. I am so excited for this set there are so many strong cards and I can definitely see myself getting a lot of them. New Forever Favourites is an accurate tagline if you ask me!