Though all five of Magic The Gathering's colours see play in the Commander format, green is easily one of the most widely played. It provides lots of things that make the format work, like land ramp and big, meaty creatures.
Whether you're only splashing into green or running a mono-green Commander deck, there are a lot of really great creatures you can run. Here are the best green creatures for the Commander format.
10 Ramunap Excavator
Green is the colour that can most easily amass a huge number of lands, and that's thanks in part to Ramunap Excavator. The Excavator allows you to play lands from your graveyard, which, at first glance, might not seem all that great. Land destruction isn't common in Commander, and there's only a few cards that let you sacrifice them, so what's the point?
With a Ramunap Excavator, you can use a fetch land every single turn. All you need is a Fabled Passage or an Evolving Wilds in your graveyard, and you'll be able to play it, sacrifice it to find another land, and then put it back into your graveyard all in the same turn, every turn. Combine this with something that lets you play more than one land a turn and you'll be fetching multiple lands and making lots of landfall triggers each and every turn.
9 Rampaging Baloths
Landfall is a scarily powerful triggered ability that triggers whenever a land enters the battlefield under your control. Considering your opponents can't counter lands, and green has a lot of ways to get more of them out each turn, having a few great landfall trigger creatures is worthwhile.
One of the best landfall creatures is Rampaging Baloths, which rewards every land you play with a hefty 4/4 green Beast token. Rampaging Baloths is great in lands-matter decks, but it's also very useful in more traditional green Stompy decks too.
8 Dryad of the Ilysian Grove
Green is all about ramp, and some of the most effective ramp in the game are cards that let you play an additional land next turn. Dryad of the Ilysian Grove does that and then goes one step further and smooths your mana out for you as well, as it makes it so every land is every basic land type. Being able to tap any land to produce one of any colour is incredible.
Even better is that Dryad of the Ilysian Grove has plain good stats even without the abilities. It's an Enchantment Creature, which synergises nicely with green Enchantress decks, and a 2/4 for three mana isn't something to sniff at.
7 Seedborn Muse
Seedborn Muse is one of green's most infamously frightening cards, because of how much advantage it gives its controller. At the beginning of every player's upkeep, you untap every single permanent you control. Creatures, lands, artifacts, all of them.
This means you're free to go all-out on your turn, attack and tap every creature and bit of land you have, safe in the knowledge a few minutes later you'll reset and have all those resources available for casting instants and blocking. You can then do it again on your opponent's turn, throwing out as many activated abilities, spells with Flash, and instants as you please.
Seedborn Muse is one of those cards that players will try to kill on sight, but if you can keep it out you'll surge ahead of your opponents very quickly.
6 Avenger of Zendikar
Big, silly creatures is green's entire thing, and one of the most popular cards for that is Avenger of Zendikar. When it enters the battlefield, you make X 0/1 Plant tokens, equal to the number of lands you control. Then, whenever a land enters under your control, you put a +1/+1 counter on all of them.
On its own, Avenger of Zendikar is great: making lots of plant tokens that get bigger just for doing the thing green does best is powerful. But it's more known for how many ways you can break it; for example, in Simic (blue/green) decks you can use Mystic Reflection in response to the Avenger's enter trigger to make all the plants enter as additional Avengers… which then make even more plants. If you control nine lands, you'll end up with ten Avenger of Zendikars and 81 Plant tokens. This card is big, silly, easily-abusable fun.
5 Craterhoof Behemoth
Craterhoof Behemoth is one of green's go-to win conditions – when the Hoof enters the battlefield, you're likely about to lose under the weight of a dozen massive creatures.
When Craterhoof Behemoth enters the battlefield, creatures you control gain trample and +X/+X, where X is the number of creatures you control. While it's not going to be a big play on a small board, any deck that can throw out lots of creatures, like a tokens or aggro deck, will suddenly become the end of the game. It's a big expensive, easily countered by everything from a traditional counterspell to a fog, and is something of a one-time play, but when it works the Behemoth can be utterly devastating.
4 Beast Whisperer
Though it does have a few great tools for it, like Harmonize, card advantage isn't exactly green's biggest strength. This is especially true for continual card advantage that gives you extra draw each turn, rather than one-off cantrip effects (spells which tack on "draw a card" as an added bonus). That's why Beast Whisperer has become a staple for green in the Commander format.
Whenever you cast a creature, you draw a card. It doesn't matter if the creature spell resolves or is countered, as long as you've cast it, Beast Whisperer gives you a card. If you're playing a creature-heavy deck, which is very likely when playing in green, this can be the fuel you need to keep your engine running.
3 Reclamation Sage
No matter what deck you make, you should be running at least a few pieces of removal in there. Fortunately for green, that cane come in the form of creatures like Reclamation Sage. Costing only a little bit more than a Return to Nature at two generic and one green, Reclamation Sage destroys a target artifact or enchantment when it enters the battlefield.
Reclamation Sage is far from the only card that does this – Scavenging Ooze is also popular, can also destroy a land, but costs a lot more. 'Rec Sage', as the community calls it, benefits from the lower mana value and by being an Elf, a highly synergistic creature type for green decks.
2 Birds of Paradise
Green has lots of small creatures that can tap to produce mana, known informally as 'mana dorks', but Birds of Paradise is by far the best one. Elvish Mystic and Llanowar Elves might also see a lot of play, and are that highly lucrative Elf creature type, but they can only produce green mana.
On the other hand, Birds of Paradise costs the same one green, has flying, and can tap for any colour. There will be times where you might opt for a Llanowar Elves or Elvish Mystic instead – a mono-green Elf deck, for instance – but Birds of Paradise provides the ramp and mana smoothing you might desperately need in most Commander decks.
1 Eternal Witness
Black might be the colour most associated with graveyard reanimation, but green can also do it pretty decently as well. With so many enters-the-battlefield triggers and scary creatures in green, it's well worth being able to pull things out of your graveyard and recast them, and one of the best cards to help you do that is Eternal Witness.
Costing one generic and two green, you can return any card from your graveyard to your hand when it enters the battlefield. The fact it doesn't specify a card type you can return is wild, and makes it better than a lot of even the black graveyard retrieval spells. On top of that, it's a Human Shaman, which are both popular creature types that see a lot of play in Commander – its effect can be doubled by Harmonic Prodigy, its cost is reduced by Bosk Banneret, Mentor's Guidance is doubled by it, and so on.
There might be splashier, scarier cards out there, but Eternal Witness fills a vital role in your deck, while adding an extra layer of synergy on top. Unconditional, creature-based graveyard retrieval is something any green deck can use, which is why it sees so much play in Commander.
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