Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog | Art by Evan Stanley

One of my favorite things to do is to take popular commanders and do a 180° turn in deck building. It doesn't work for every commander; a Goblin deck with The Ur-DragonThe Ur-Dragon isn't interesting, it's just bad. But sometimes a commander will just sing when you do something a little out of pocket with them.

In this article series I'm going to look at one of the top 200 commanders and take them on a little detour from their usual deck archetypes and try something fresh with them. This article will be looking at Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog.

The Typical Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog Commander Deck

At the time of writing, Sonic is the 115th most popular commander of the past week. This is pretty understandable; the Sonic fandom is enormous and why should that not reflect in the popularity of the commander too?

Sonic's typical builds are pretty straightforward. Of the 7,360 decks he has, the top three most popular archetypes are +1/+1 counters, Aggro and Haste. These all make sense with his Gotta Go Fast ability, but they're all pretty vanilla in terms of deck building.

The fourth most popular deck archetype is Flash. This appealed to me a bit more with the idea of playing a midrange/control deck with almost entirely instant-speed cards that I could use to block and get more mana to play more instant-speed cards with things like Torrential GearhulkTorrential Gearhulk being bulky enough to block and generate multiple Treasures over the course of the game.

But this didn't go far enough. I wanted to really make something silly, so I went with a different focus.

The Concept

I knew I wanted this deck to be completely different to what was on Sonic's EDHREC page so I looked through all of the popular archetypes and wrote off a lot of the popular cards. I also knew that I wanted a focus on Treasure tokens, so I went through the Treasure page on EDHREC to find some heavy hitters.

But this led me to a problem: most of the haste creatures are low cost and small aggressive creatures. I wanted bodies that could take a hit and keep generating Treasure for me. This is what led me to the solution: indestructible creatures with haste that could take a hit and keep on taking hits until I had a trillion Treasures in play.

The main issue here was that of all of the creatures in Magic only two of them, Hazoret the FerventHazoret the Fervent and Hazoret, GodseekerHazoret, Godseeker, naturally have both haste and indestructible. This meant I would need to not only find a good number of indestructible creatures in Sonic's color identity (), but also find a good balance between those creatures and ways to give them haste to benefit from the abilities of the deck's commander.

By utilizing cards like AngerAnger and Urabrask the HiddenUrabrask the Hidden, the indestructible cards in the deck are able to trigger Sonic's ability to create Treasures while also growing my board through +1/+1 counters.

This meant two things: I needed to find good indestructible creatures, and I needed to find ways to capitalize on the counters and the Treasure.

Key Cards for This Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog Deck

From the handful of games I've run with this deck, some cards have stuck out as particularly good.

Quicksmith GeniusQuicksmith Genius has completely outperformed my expectations on a number of occasions. Being draft chaff from the original Kaladesh set I didn't expect it to be amazing. I knew from my experiences playing it in Daretti, Scrap SavantDaretti, Scrap Savant that it would be good, but the amount of draw power you get from dropping a Blasphemous ActBlasphemous Act or even just blocking with haste creatures makes this card incredibly valuable to draw into answers or into the pieces you need to create the board state that allows the deck to really thrive.

Another really cool interaction in the deck uses two cards that were printed more than 20 years apart, The SeriemaThe Seriema printed in 2025, and Masako the HumorlessMasako the Humorless printed in 2004. The Seriema searches for Masako and Masako allows any creatures that stationed The Seriema to still block, making the sorcery speed of the station mechanic a lot more palatable since it doesn't just leave you open to attacks.

You can go really deep into this interaction too. Of course the power of this lies in the number of legendary creatures in the deck, but combined with something like The Wandering RescuerThe Wandering Rescuer, your board suddenly becomes incredibly difficult to interact with as all of your legendary tapped creatures gain both indestructible and hexproof and can still block thanks to Masako.

One of my all-time favorite cards is Brash TaunterBrash Taunter (it's number three with GriselbrandGriselbrand being at the top spot and Snapcaster MageSnapcaster Mage being second, in case you were wondering). I knew with a deck that focused on indestructible creatures I had to run it. While going through cards that work well with Brash Taunter, I was reminded of Donna NobleDonna Noble. Donna allows me to turn any indestructible creature into another copy of Brash Taunter, allowing me to effectively run a whole host of Brash Taunters.

Pair these up with a PariahPariah and you can stop yourself dying while machine gunning down the rest of the players at the table.

There is a small Legendary sub theme with cards like The SeriemaThe Seriema being at its core. Alongside this I'm also running Venat, Heart of HydaelynVenat, Heart of Hydaelyn. The front side of this card is pretty vanilla, providing a small amount of card draw and an expensive removal spell as an activated ability. But the flipped side is where the card shines with Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog.

Once flipped, Hydaelyn allows you to put a counter on Sonic which draws you a card and makes our fast friend indestructible (lots of synergies here) meaning he can attack freely not worrying about dying to blockers, giving Sonic the freedom to not only "Go Fast" but also to trigger all of his abilities.

The key to running so many indestructible creatures however is to make a ton of TreasureTreasure tokens. These can be used to generate mana but there are also other cards that work well with them. I've already talked about Quicksmith GeniusQuicksmith Genius but I've also grabbed some others that work really well in this deck.

Rain of RichesRain of Riches is great since so many of the cards in this deck have a high mana cost meaning we can cascade into some really powerful hits. Additionally, because Sonic interacts with flash cards you can also go down the route of casting cards in other people's turns and getting additional cascades.

Alongside Rain of Riches I've added Malcator, Purity OverseerMalcator, Purity Overseer. While not the most powerful card by itself it does generate a lot of board presence as long as Sonic keeps making Treasures and presents your opponents with an element of inevitability of being overrun by 3/3s if they don't deal with him.

And it wouldn't be a Paul Palmer deck if I didn't run some huge beefy goober. Darksteel JuggernautDarksteel Juggernaut ticks so many boxes for this deck: it's indestructible, it gets stronger based on how many Treasures you have, and it likes to attack. Either your opponents block and give you more Treasure to fuel your various engines or they take a huge hit. There is no good choice outside of using a removal spell that could be saved for one of the key cards like Sonic or Masako.

Sonic the Hedgehog Commander Deck List

Below is the deck as it currently stands. I have only played the deck a few times but it feels pretty strong with a few pitfalls that need fixing. The deck is a little slow and while a lot of the creatures are cheap they aren't particularly impactful until Sonic is in play or until you can cobble a few of the pieces together.

Other Cards to Consider for Sonic

While my own deck list doesn't run them (mostly because I don't own them) there are a number of cards that would be amazing additions to the deck.

Archangel AvacynArchangel Avacyn - A real standout, and only in not in the deck because my copy hasn't arrived yet. Being able to make the entire board indestructible at instant speed while also naturally having flash to trigger Sonic makes Avacyn extremely powerful. This alongside the fact that she can also flip into a damage-based board wipe that also triggers Sonic for more Treasure is completely bonkers.

Professional Face-BreakerProfessional Face-Breaker - Another card that I know should be in here but that I don't have any spare copies of so haven't been able to test yet. The ability to turn Treasures into impulse draws makes the Face-Breaker one of the best ways to utilize the Treasure to help get you to the cards that you need.

On top of this, being able to use your cheap haste creatures to get in chip damage while your opponents' shields are down works really well to help this deck keep up with the ramp that green decks get.

Ragavan, Nimble PilfererRagavan, Nimble Pilferer - Honestly, any cheap powerful haste creatures could get a shout out here, but Ragavan's Treasure synergies and the ability to get access to cards that Jeskai can't normally run makes this particular card an absolute powerhouse. This would probably be the next upgrade for the deck, but without built-in indestructibility, I'd need to have Avacyn, Angel of HopeAvacyn, Angel of Hope or The Walls of Ba Sing SeThe Walls of Ba Sing Se. Though they're powerful cards, this deck would struggle to get them into play particularly early without a really quick start.

Adept WatershaperAdept Watershaper - This new card is a perfect fit, gaining haste from all of our board-wide enablers and then giving indestructible to everything else, synergizing with The Wandering RescuerThe Wandering Rescuer to make the board incredibly hard to interact with.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed seeing this spin on Sonic the HedgehogSonic the Hedgehog. I'll be looking at more interesting spins of other commanders going forward, so if you want to see a particular commander or archetype drop it in the comments below and you might just see an article about it!