Simic cards are all about rewarding you for your hard work. Going to put some lands into play this turn? Go ahead and draw a bunch of cards while you’re at it. Don’t want your opponents casting all sorts of game-winning spells? Counter them and steal the mana for yourself.
There are plenty of staples among Simic cards, like Tatyova, Benthic Druid and Oko, Thief of Crowns, cards which accrue tons of value just by being in play. But, they tend to overshadow some other powerful cards which can be as good in the right deck.
Combine Chrysalis
Taking advantage of blue and green’s ability to pump out tons of tokens, Combine Chrysalis grants flying to all your creature tokens as long as it’s in play. Combine Chrysalis works best when you have tons of tokens, so use it with cards like Scute Swarm and Tendershoot Dryad so their tokens can take to the air to overwhelm your opponents.
While you likely won’t want to activate it, you can sacrifice Combine Chrysalis to create a 4/4 Beast token in a pinch, as an extra bit of protection.
Plasm Capture
Being able to counter any spell and steal its mana for yourself is a powerful ability. It can massively disrupt your opponents while catapulting you ahead in the game. Plasm Capture can counter any spell your opponents play, then add the mana spent on the spell to your mana pool during your next precombat main phase.
The casting cost for Plasm Capture is mana intensive, requiring two blue and two green mana. But once you make it past the first few turns, casting it shouldn’t be a problem. Stealing all the mana from an opponent’s Torment of Hailfire or Finale of Devastation to convert it to your own spell is one of the best feelings in Magic.
Malanthrope
There aren’t many ways to exile cards from your opponent’s graveyards in Simic colors, which makes Malanthrope an essential card if you’re struggling against graveyard-based strategies. When Malanthrope enters the battlefield, you exile all cards in a player’s graveyard.
With all those cards gone, Malanthrope gets +1/+1 counters equal to the number of creatures exiled. A well-timed Malanthrope can disrupt an opponent’s strategy while giving you a powerful attacker.
Primal Empathy
Since you’re playing green, there’s a good chance you’ll have the biggest creature in play. With Primal Empathy, you can make the most of your creature’s power. During your upkeep, Primal Empathy lets you draw a card if you control the creature with the highest power on the battlefield.
If you don’t have the biggest creature in play, you get to distribute a +1/+1 counter on a creature you control, helping you reach the level needed to start drawing cards. There are a few cards which do similar things as Primal Empathy, but rarely do they help grow your creatures grow.
Oversimplify
Another answer to a problem that Simic decks often face, Oversimplify is a mass removal spell that converts everyone’s creatures into a much more manageable force. For five mana, Oversimplify exiles all creatures in play and replaces them with a Fractal token with +1/+1 counters equal to the total power of exiled creatures each player controlled.
There are plenty of other mass bounce spells in blue, but very few ways to deal with a convoluted board state, especially in as permanent a way as exiling all creatures like Oversimplify does.
Tyranid Prime
The Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks have tons of hidden gems in it, with Tyranid Prime being a prime example. All Tyranid Prime does is give all other creatures you control evolve, while also having evolve itself.
Evolve is the perfect Simic ability, spreading +1/+1 counters across creatures you control every time you play something bigger. Combine Tyranid Prime with some beefy creatures and some proliferate effects and you’ll quickly grow your battlefield beyond control.
Unexpected Results
If you’ve ever had spare mana floating around in a game and nothing to do, then Unexpected Results is the spell for you. For four mana, you shuffle your library and then flip the top card. If it’s a nonland spell, you can cast it for free. If it s a land, you can put it into play and then return Unexpected Results back to your hand.
There’s always the risk of hitting a mana rock or other non-impactful spell with Unexpected Results, but the chance to hit a Time Warp or other game-winning spell is too large to ignore. Even if you just sift through a land, you’ll get Unexpected Results back to your hand to cast again later.
Inga and Esika
Coming right off the heels of March of the Machine is Inga and Esika, a legendary team-up card that turns all your creatures into mana dorks. With Inga and Esika in play, creatures you control all gain vigilance and can tap to add any color of mana but you can only use it to cast creature spells.
This restriction isn’t a problem at all, since when you cast a creature spell, if three or more mana spent for it came from a creature, you draw a card. This can quickly become a powerful draw engine, using your creatures to cast more creatures and draw more cards.
Kruphix, God of Horizons
Despite being one of the strongest creature archetypes in the game, Kruphix, God of Horizons sees surprisingly little play. Following traditional Theros god restrictions, Kruphix is an indestructible enchantment so long as your devotion to green and blue is less than seven but becomes a creature once you reach the threshold.
Kruphix eliminates your maximum hand size, but more importantly, you can perpetually float mana without ever losing it while Kruphix is in play. Your unspent mana becomes colorless instead of whatever it was before which is a minor downside, but it lets you stock up on mana for future spells later in the game.
Gretchen Titchwillow
Drawing cards is one of the best things you can do with a Simic deck, closely followed by cheating extra lands into play. With Gretchen Titchwillow, you can do both. For four mana you get to draw a card off its activated ability. You can then take a land from your hand and put it into play.
Since you can do this at instant speed, dumping mana into Gretchen Titchwillow just before your last opponent’s end of turn is a great way to maximize your resources while keeping everything open for a well-timed counterspell.
Ryan Hay (he/him) has been writing about Magic: The Gathering and video games for years, and loves absolutely terrible games. Send him your bad game takes over on Twitter where he won’t stop talking about Lord of the Rings.