Best monored commanders

[MonoRedMage]

Hey everyone, as you can all tell from my username I prefer to only play monored decks. I've never played commander before and I want to start but I know monored is not that good in this format. Are there any commanders I could play that are mono red, that would be somewhat good at a non-CEDH table that still uses good commanders like New Sisay, Meren, or Chulane?

I would also accept cards that are only red, but they have a different color identity that I could use to play some support cards i.e. card draw. Idk if anything like that exists...

Thanks in advance for your advice everyone

[void_nothing]

Three words: Zada, Hedron Grinder. There are Zada lists that can bring the fight to seriously strong commanders.

[3drinks]

Check the Kari Zev in my sig. You get a cheap low to the ground commander that provides repeatable tokens for sac outlet play, and @ two cmc with innate evasion, she makes for a great voltron choice. People don't usually "waste" removal on her (though they should) because she's not a six drop that draws 4 cards and tutours just for existing. Note that she voltrons well, but you won't get a cmdr dmg kill often nor is that the point. She racks up crazy damage crazy quick and before you know it, players are forced to play suboptimally (defensively), in fear of just dying. It's a pseudo respect.

Valduk, Keeper of the Flame provides a similar build path, though a bit more commander reliant.

[Treamayne]

Well, it would depend on what kind of R deck you are interested in. Some initial thoughts (pending input to narrow down options) based on decks I have seen or made:

Artifact:
Feldon of the Third Path
Daretti, Scrap Savant

Spells based:
Etali, Primal Storm
Wort, the Raidmother

Aggro:
Alesha, Who Smiles at Death
Márton Stromgald
Godo, Bandit Warlord
Homura, Human Ascendant // Homura's Essence

Burn:
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Syr Carah, the Bold

Combo:
Norin the Wary
Zada, Hedron Grinder

Tribal:
Lathliss, Dragon Queen
Lovisa Coldeyes
Pashalik Mons
Najeela, the Blade-Blossom
Krenko, Mob Boss
Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin

I would also accept cards that are only red, but they have a different color identity that I could use to play some support cards i.e. card draw. Idk if anything like that exists...

May I ask why you might be okay with something like Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, but not something like Melek, Izzet Paragon?

[pokken]

Golos was my only mono red deck I ever liked.

[materpillar]

Huge shot out to Jaya Ballard, Task Mage. You can make a pretty sweet artifact based control deck. Main decking Red Elemental Blast and pyroblast to blow out blue mages feels fantastic (they're never dead since you can discard them with Jaya if there's no blue mages at the table). It's almost immensely satisfying to slap Basilisk Collar on her and then gain 80+ life with her inferno ability.

[Mimicvat]

Daretti is strong and relatively easy to build to a decent level. Kurkesh is a hipster variant on daretti that is strong but gets no play. Zirda is a newer one, rw hybrid so could be mono red. Have just started mine and can already see he is totally bonkers. My red deck has been together for like 5 years, first as daretti, then kurkesh, and is currently neheb, dreadhorde general. Gives a ton of card fixing and some explosive plays, and people generally dont kill him either. My best deck and the only one that can compete at the combo tables at fnm.

[Crazy Monkey]

I'd recommend Zada, Hedron Grinder is by far the most powerful card draw enabler in monored. However, this usually results in a deck which performs similarly to a storm deck. It can play as a slower deck that plays a lot of tokens and capitalize on Fists of Flame type effects.

I've also seen a large amount of card advantage with Feldon of the Third Path to use red's discard-draw effect and play as a reanimator/value/combo deck.

I believe those are the two which best enable card advantage from the command zone. (I'm personally preferential to Zada, Hedron Grinder).

[Sinis]

I've played Homura, Human Ascendant, Ashling the Pilgrim, Daretti, Scrap Savant, Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Neheb, the Eternal and Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh and had pretty good experiences with Daretti, Jaya, and Neheb.

I've seen/heard good things about Krenko, Mob Boss, Zada, Hedron Grinder, Purphoros, God of the Forge and Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient.

I think more than anything, it depends on the kind of deck you want to play, and that there may or may not be a general that nicely dovetails with your chosen strategy.

[Mimicvat]

Thats something I wanted to mention before, but typing on my phone sucks. A lot of the good red decks are super linear - they run the same gameplan every single time and often do so in a very straightforward way while they're at it. A lot of my games with Krenko, Mob Boss devolved into "mountain, go" while I waited for a chance to cast Krenko again. Gross. This might be your style, but EDH games are a lot longer than normal magic games, so sitting there waiting for that mountain or hordeling outburst while everyone else is slinging spells might get really old really fast.

Krenko & Purphoros are the worst offenders here, though Zada is pretty straightforward too I feel there is more decision making in that deck. Daretti and Kurkesh are always "trying to do artifact things" but not necessarily in a linear fashion. Neheb isn't linear at all, though he isn't as straightforwardly powerful as the others. I use him to toss out random crap I don't need at that point in the game rather than to dig for the same pieces.

A few I missed; Feldon of the Third path as mentioned above is sick, and never seen anyone actually play it. This is one of the best red EDH cards hands down so would make a solid general. If/when I change Neheb it will likely be to this. Another is Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker. It's sort of half infinite combo and half "copy a Wurmcoil Engine, sacrifice the copy for tokens". But thats a lot of the decks here. Our best EDH effects in the colours imo are graveyard interaction (mostly just feldon, but some artifact ones), temporary token making (feldon, kiki-jiki, flameshadow conjuring etc), wheels, artifact manipulation (daretti, kurkesh, goblin welder) and for some decks various "each player" based burn effects.

Some less popular commander options;
-Akroma, Angel of Fury: I've seen this run at a very high power level. That deck ran in cEDH or borderline cEDH pods. God knows how he did it though.
-Neheb, the Eternal: You can farm his ability using earthquake type effects, very explosive.
-Najeela, the Blade-Blossom: 5c mono-red, any deck that can make 1/1s can profit off of skullclamp and similar effects.
-Heartless Hidetsugu: Has insta-win combos using life total manipulation and a damage doubler, a really cool deck for ensuring games are short and bloody. Would not recommend as a sole deck though as he distorts the normal EDH game style and will get on peoples nerves if every game was a Hidetsugu game.
-Godo, Bandit Warlord: One of the few mono-red cEDH options due to being able to tutor Helm of the Host and go infinite or semi-infinite. He's not very good outside of that as red is not set up to really benefit off of equipment.
-Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded: Haste in the command zone and sneak-attack-esk ability means this guy can potentially be very powerful, have not seen it in action though. I'm more after card advantage than explosiveness in that zone personally.
-Squee, Goblin Nabob: Mainly used to discard to red's looting effects as a way to generate card advantage.
-Zo-Zu the Punisher: Another group slug option like Hidetsugu. Pair with land destruction, blood moon and other troll red stuff and piss off the table.
-Norin the Wary: ETB effects, such as purphoros or Impact Tremors, that go off again and again with him out.
-Zirilan of the Claw: Someone on here or on mtgsalvation has a great primer for this guy. Tutor out dragons, sacrifice them for value to avoid the exile trigger, repeat.

If you need to cut through the tl:dr in this thread, just find a Daretti precon from like 2015 or whatever and start from that. This would be the easiest option and is one of the most powerful.

[rogerandover]

I'll humbly recommend looking at my Squee, Goblin Nabob build here.
It's definitely not the most powerfull, but it takes away a fair share of the wins and can b very explosive.

[Mookie]

Depends on what you're looking for. Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast is certainly one of the stronger options - cheating stuff into play is good. On a similar line is Feldon of the Third Path, who cheats out token creatures instead of artifacts. Both are pretty solid card advantage engines. Etali, Primal Storm is the third cheat-into-play commander I'd recommend, if you're interested in a bit more variance.

If you're looking for something that is a bit more of a glass cannon, Krenko, Mob Boss and Zada, Hedron Grinder are both very fast if left unchecked... but also sort of fall apart if the commander is kept off the table. Krenko goes wide with goblins and Impact Tremors effects, while Zada goes wide with tokens and transitions into a janky storm deck with targeted cantrips.

Godo, Bandit Warlord is another powerful option due to his interaction with Helm of the Host. Very predictable though.

If you want to do a more pure aggro deck, Torbran, Thane of Red Fell is a very potent lord, and nasty with Manabarbs effects. Alternatively, Golos, Tireless Pilgrim is just a busted card in general (and enables fetching up Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle every game).

Something to note is that mono-red has gotten much better in the last few years, due to the prevalence of impulsive draw effects like Outpost Siege. Its traditional weakness in EDH was lack of card advantage outside wheel effects, which isn't really true anymore. Its tendency to be a glass cannon (and thus vulnerable to disruption) is still there though.

[DirkGently]

I'm going to vote as anything other than Zada, Hedron Grinder. Zada is terribly unfun to play against. And while it's a matter of opinion, it doesn't look like much fun to play either. If he's in play, it'll combo off and win, but in a tedious way that takes a lot of time to "prove" the win. And if he's not in play, the deck does stone nothing. If your meta is the type where that's the way to play, then I guess maybe go for it, but from where I'm sitting, I don't think I've ever seen a game that Zada has contributed to making better.

For a positive recommendation, since no one has mentioned him yet, I really enjoy Zirilan of the Claw. He's quite powerful while in play, but also has a pretty reasonable backup plan of slamming dragons from hand. And having a dragon-toolbox is super fun imo, he's probably the closest thing to having Sunforger in the command zone as currently exists.

The other mono-red commanders I've built and played are:

Grenzo, Havoc Raiser - cool, though can be hard to piece together a cohesive plan
Krenko, Mob Boss - very linear but admittedly strong
Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient - boring and fragile
Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs - amusing but requires MLD to be effective imo
Purphoros, Bronze-Blooded - really fun and cool, easily my second favourite mono-red commander.
Etali, Primal Storm - bit of a glass cannon with my build, but pretty amusing. Not sure it sustains entertainment long-term but it was fun, my third pick probably.
Godo, Bandit Warlord - bit of a litmus test for what you think is fun. Imo helm ruined him. Some people think it saved him. He's probably still fun without helm, but I don't like commanders that force you to say "hey, just so you know, I'm not running X" whenever you sit down at a table to avoid becoming the archenemy.

[BeneTleilax]

lathlis

[MonoRedMage]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I wanna try out Homura, Norin, Zada, Feldon, and Pashalik Mons in the future.

[Kelzam]

Purphoros, God of the Forge has always been my favorite Mono-R Commander. Something true of Mono-R is that it's in the color with the least protection for it's Commanders. I built mine to be rather Artifact and token heavy to speed out Purphoros and as many tokens as possible, with a decent amount of disruption. You become a target quick with most red Commanders, but I really enjoyed that Purphoros was so hard to remove and moved you towards winning the game with every token you put out to block with. A lot of the better Red Commanders leave you dead in the water without them, but while building to take advantage of Purphoros's triggered and activated abilities leans you into a back up plan if he isn't on the board, for some reason.

[Sinis]

Neheb isn't linear at all, though he isn't as straightforwardly powerful as the others.

Oh, I don't know about that. My version was mostly sorceries/instants/burn/draw, and while it was explosive, it was quite linear and repetitive in its game plan.

When I played Neheb, it devolved into play Neheb and something like Flame Rift (but also Price of Progress, Slagstorm, Fiery Confluence, etc.), get to second main, do crazy stuff with the boat of mana we had, probably involving Insult // Injury, Jaya's Immolating Inferno, etc. The deck had a lot of draw (Wheel of Fortune, Reforge the Soul, Apex of Power) and Fork analogues. It had gone so far into combo land that I even played Defense Grid.

It was almost exactly the same phenomenon that you're talking about for Krenko. I ended up dismantling it because it was too explosive; you either won or you didn't, but you wouldn't meaningfully change the game being played.

[onering]

Surprised not to see Torbran, Thane of Red Fell suggested (maybe I just missed it). He puts up a ton of damage quickly, and is scary to play against.

[vandertroll]

Golos was my only mono red deck I ever liked.

Oh do tell us more!

[Guardman]

I play mostly mono-red commander decks so I have a fair bit of experience with them.

My favorite is Etali, Primal Storm. She, at least in my build, is a really fun chaos commander where you get to steal and cast other people's decks. It is a great deck also if you don't know the power-level of your play group's decks as it sort of scales to your opponents decks. Plus you get to do fun things like win via Laboratory Maniac, which I did once with the deck. My decklist: viewtopic.php?f=35&t=25452

Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion is another commander I've had a lot of fun with. You can do some silly stuff like go infinite with attacks and draw most of your deck with him. A great mono-red general if you love rummaging.

Feldon of the Third Path is one I haven't built yet, but one I do want to try since he has always been super fun in other decks I've played him in. He is really unique as he is basically a mono-red reanimator, plus since he creates an artifact token (and doesn't exile what he copies) there are a lot of cool things he can do that other graveyard commanders can't.

One thing I would recommend from experience is unless you are going combo heavy is to include Blast Zone, Ugin, the Ineffable, Meteor Golem, and Chaos Warp in most of your mono-red decks. They are a bit expensive, but I find it really important to be able to answer enchantments, and these are the best ones available in mono-red.

[pokken]

Golos was my only mono red deck I ever liked.

Oh do tell us more!

I mean I'm disassembling it because Golos has gotten pretty boring and tedious to me but I did play it a lot and like it. It's basically a pile of all the red pip heavy cards I love like Drakuseth, Maw of Flames and Boros Reckoner.

Decklist: https://deckbox.org/sets/2603527

[Cyberium]

Burn:
Purphoros, God of the Forge
Syr Carah, the Bold

Torbran, Thane of Red Fell would fit nicely here.

[Treamayne]

@Cyberium Probably, but I was only pushing out a quick reply based on decks I had made or seen. Sorry.

[Mimicvat]

This thread makes me want to change up Neheb into Feldon. The commander of the red deck always changes, the only constant is that my main deck is mono-red...

Anyone know a good primer? I can find the ones in google etc but there might be a gem someplace

[Guardman]

This thread makes me want to change up Neheb into Feldon. The commander of the red deck always changes, the only constant is that my main deck is mono-red...

Anyone know a good primer? I can find the ones in google etc but there might be a gem someplace

Actually, funny you should mention it. I was planning to put together a Feldon of the Third Path list myself and was going to start a thread myself to discuss ideas for it. I've just been too busy with work the past couple of days.