Commander decklist: Torbran’s Axe

Welcome to the Commander decklist series, where I build Commander decks for each of Magic’s colour combinations. For my version of the challenge, I will restrict myself to cards already in my collection, and commanders which are outside the 5 most popular commanders for that colour combination on the website EDHrec.

Today’s deck is mono-Red and our commander is Torbran, Thane of Red Fell.

The deck

Click the image above to view the full deck on Scryfall.

The plan

This deck wants to keep its commander in play while taking advantage of its numerous triggered abilities. Enchants and creatures will trigger to deal damage to each opponent whenever you do things like cast a spell or add a creature to your board. With Torbran in play, 1 damage becomes 3, making previously irrelevant cards into an inevitable threat. Other cards in the deck prevent your opponents from gaining life back, giving you the edge as life totals are whittled down.

The core

This deck’s core are your cards which trigger to deal damage, along with your cards that prevent opponents from gaining their life back. The rest of the deck supports or duplicates these functions.

Options

This deck comes in just shy of $200 USD at time of writing. As long as you stick to the core function of the deck – dealing damage repeatedly, and for free – you can feely swap cards in and out. Purphorous, God of the Forge, and Rampaging Ferocidon are two of the more expensive cards in the deck, but I view these as core and would hesitate to replace them.

Summary and links

This version of the Torbran deck comes in at a 5 on the Commander deck power level scale, but the deck can easily scale up to a 7 if you add more powerful options.

You can see more options by looking at Torbran, Thane of Red Fell at EDHrec.

Happy axe-hurling!