Magic: The Gathering’s Marvel Super Heroes is absolutely packed with cards that could be your Commander, and while your mind may instantly think of the likes of Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, or any other iconic superhero, it’s Molecule Man that you should be wary of coming up against.
Molecule Man’s card is a six-cost, colorless creature with 5/5 that gives nonland cards in your hand a miracle cost of zero. The character first appeared in Marvel Comics in Fantastic Four #20. Despite the fairly goofy name, the character (real name Owen Reece) is very powerful given he’s able to manipulate molecules of just about anything.
Miracle is a tricky mechanic in Magic, but as long as a card is the first card drawn on any given turn, you can cast it for its miracle cost. Because Molecule Man’s miracle cost is zero, that means every single turn, you can play the first card you draw for absolutely free — and that applies during your opponents’ turns as well, provided you have a way to draw a card. That alone makes the mechanic hugely explosive, especially if your deck is full of other cards with high mana costs. The one major drawback with Molecule Man, however, is that with him as a Commander, your deck is limited to colorless cards. Don’t let that stop you, though.
By pairing Molecule Man with Sensei’s Divining Top, you have a Commander combo that’s more powerful than anything Doctor Doom, Thanos, or any other supervillain could concoct.
This one-cost artifact has an ability that lets you pay one mana to look at the top three cards in your library, and put them back in your chosen order. You can then tap it to draw one, guaranteeing yourself the card you want from those three. That then means as you draw that card (and provided it isn’t a land), you can play it for its miracle cost as long as Molecule Man is on the field.
It’s worth noting that Sensei’s Divining Top is banned in every format except for Vintage, Oathbreaker, and Commander — and not necessarily because of its power. In fact, it was banned in Legacy in 2017 because it slows games down too much. It also formed a mean pairing with Counterbalance that allowed for players to swat away spells with ease.
Naturally, the desire is to fill your deck with high-cost cards to cheat out, like Galactus, Devourer of Worlds (if you’re keeping things in-universe), but having something colorless in the command zone makes Eldrazi very useful.
Ulamog the Defiler exiles half of a library for free; Zhulodok, Void Gorger gives your colorless spells cascade; and Kozilek, Butcher of Truth has Annihilator 4, so your opponents will have to sacrifice a lot of cards.
My favorite, though, is It That Betrays. This 12-cost card is an 11/11 with Annihilator 2, but it also brings sacrificed cards over to your side of the field. Bring it out for free, and you’re able to remove your opponents’ board, build your own, and potentially swing big.
Molecule Man may not have the marquee appeal of Iron Man or Doctor Doom, but that only makes him more dangerous. With Magic’s most boring artifact at his disposal, he can leverage a bit of that tedium to drop some absolute monsters on the board every single turn. He might not win in a single turn, but with enough protection for Molecule Man himself and some methods of drawing cards on your opponents’ turn, he’ll be able to reshape reality into something that none of his enemies can survive.
