How to build The Borg Queen

Every time she enters or attacks, she takes a creature off the top of an opponent's library and keeps it. So this list spends its slots on landing a seven drop early, then on making her enter and attack as many times as the game allows.

You choose whose library, and their deck chooses the creature

The trigger targets an opponent, not a creature. You never see a list and pick from it. Whoever you point it at turns cards over one at a time and stops at the first creature card, so what you get is simply the next creature in their deck. Every card turned over on the way goes to the bottom of their library in a random order, which means the trigger is not mill and costs them nothing but the creature.

That makes the choice of opponent the real decision, and it has nothing to do with who you are attacking. The attack trigger can point at the player across the table while she swings at the one with no blockers. After two or three turns you know which deck is full of big creatures and which is a spell deck running fifteen, and every trigger for the rest of the game goes at the first one. A deck built around a few enormous threats is the best target there is, because each flip is a real chance at one of them.

The creature is put onto the battlefield rather than cast, which settles two things. Anything that triggers on it entering triggers for you, because you control it as it arrives. Anything that needs it to be cast, such as a cast trigger or an "if you cast it" clause, does nothing. Nothing here ends at end of turn either. The card is yours until it leaves the battlefield, and it keeps its counter and its artifact type even if she is answered first.

She is an artifact spell, so the cost reducers cut her tax as well

Seven mana is the whole problem with this commander, and the list answers it with twelve mana rocks, Solemn Simulacrum and Smothering Tithe. Rocks rather than land ramp is not an aesthetic choice. Every one of them is an artifact, and Organic Extinction later counts them as mana. A two mana rock on turn two and Thran Dynamo on turn three is eight mana on turn four, enough for her with one left over.

The less obvious pair is Etherium Sculptor and Foundry Inspector. Each one makes artifact spells you cast cost less, and The Borg Queen is an artifact spell, so with both out she costs . The commander tax is generic mana as well, which means the same two cards take two off every recast. A Queen answered twice costs eleven to bring back with neither of them out and nine with both, and both are artifact creatures she makes 3/4 and 5/4 while they wait.

Command Chair looks like it was printed for her and is the card this list leaves out on purpose. Its second ability taps for X mana, where X is the greatest mana value among commanders you control, and you only control her while she is on the battlefield. So the seven mana it promises arrives after the turn you needed it. Before she lands, and on every turn she sits in the command zone after removal, it is a six mana rock that enters tapped and makes three.

Haste turns the turn she lands into two steals

She triggers on entering and on attacking, and haste is what lets one turn have both. Swiftfoot Boots and Lightning Greaves cost two each, and cast before her they turn the turn she arrives into two creatures instead of one. The attack trigger goes on the stack the moment attackers are declared and resolves before blockers, so she does not need to connect, or even survive combat, for it to count. Swing at whoever cannot block a 6/6 and aim the trigger wherever the creatures are.

The two pieces of equipment are not equal in this list. Greaves gives shroud, which stops your own spells targeting her too, and that switches off Ephemerate, Thassa, Deep-Dwelling, Teleportation Circle, Restoration Angel, Ghostly Flicker and Loran's Escape for as long as it is attached. Its equip cost is zero, so the habit is to move it onto something else in your second main phase before an end step flicker wants her. The Boots give hexproof instead, which only stops opponents, so they can stay where they are.

Akroma's Memorial is haste for everything else. A creature she takes before combat can attack the same turn, and the flying, trample and first strike on top are what get a board of stolen 5/5s through three opponents' blockers.

A copy of her carries the anthem too

A copy of The Borg Queen has her whole text, which means two things. It triggers on its own entering and attacking, so each copy is a steal the moment it arrives. And it gives artifact creatures you control another +2/+2. One Queen makes a stolen 2/2 into a 5/5 once its counter is counted. Two make it a 7/7, and the Queens grow along with it.

The copies that matter are the ones that are not legendary, because the legend rule would otherwise make you bin one. Spark Double copies a creature you control, arrives with an extra +1/+1 counter and drops the legendary supertype. Dominion Saboteur, from the new set, copies any artifact or creature on the battlefield and is not legendary either. Sakashima the Impostor stays legendary but changes its name, and the legend rule only cares about two permanents sharing a name, so it sits beside her as a second Queen called Sakashima.

Helm of the Host is the expensive one at four to cast and five to equip, and the strongest card in the list once it is attached. At the beginning of each of your combats it makes a token copy of her that is not legendary and has haste. That token enters, which is one steal, and then attacks, which is another, while the Queen herself attacks for a third. That is three creatures a turn from the newest token and the Queen alone, before the older tokens attack too, and the anthem climbs by +2/+2 each time the Helm fires.

Phantasmal Image is the cheap version and plays differently. Its copy of her is legendary and has her name, so the legend rule makes you keep one of the two. The enter trigger has already happened by then, though, so two mana bought a creature, and you put the Image in the graveyard and keep the original.

Assimilate makes everything you take a Borg, which is what Roaming Throne is waiting for

Read the decklist by creature type and it looks like a pile of goodstuff with three Borg in it. That is a fact about the cards as printed and not about the board in play. Every creature she takes loses its other creature types and becomes a Borg, the tokens Locutus of Borg makes are Borg, and she is one herself. By the middle of a game most of what you control shares one creature type, and three cards in the list are chosen to cash that in. Name Borg on all three.

Roaming Throne is the best card in the deck after the commander. Any triggered ability of another creature you control of the chosen type triggers an additional time, and both of hers count, so each entry and each attack takes two creatures. It keeps working on everything she has taken, because they are Borg as well. With Panharmonicon also out, her entering triggers three times.

Kindred Discovery draws a card whenever a Borg you control enters or attacks, so she draws one as she arrives and a stolen board of five draws five every time it swings. Distant Melody counts the Borg you control and draws that many, which in the turns after a Helm or a Throne can be five or six cards for four mana. Naming anything else on any of the three would be naming a type the deck only holds a handful of.

Panharmonicon and Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines double enter triggers rather than types. Both double her own enter trigger, and both also double the enter abilities of whatever she takes, because it enters under your control. Elesh Norn adds one more line in your favour: permanents entering stop triggering anything your opponents control.

Half the flickers in this list would give a stolen creature back

Flickering her is a fresh steal every time. The flicker cards are not all alike, though, and the difference is the last words of each one.

Ephemerate and Teleportation Circle return a card under its owner's control. On the Queen that is you, so they work exactly as you would hope, and Ephemerate's rebound makes one mana into two steals over two turns. On a creature she has taken, the owner is the opponent you took it from, and the flicker hands it straight back. That is the line to remember before aiming one of them at something you did not bring.

Thassa, Deep-Dwelling, Restoration Angel and Ghostly Flicker return the card under your control instead. Aimed at a stolen creature, those keep it, but it comes back as a new object. The counter is gone, it is no longer an artifact or a Borg, and so the anthem stops counting it. What it gains in return is its own enter ability, a second time. A stolen creature with a strong enter trigger is a good target for those three. A plain big creature is a poor one, because it shrinks by three.

Thassa is the engine of the group. She flickers another creature you control at the beginning of your end step, so with her and the Queen both on the table every turn you take ends with a creature from someone's library. Her body only counts as a creature once your devotion to blue reaches five, which this list reaches only now and then, and that is fine, because the trigger is the part you are paying for.

A commander being exiled gives you the option to send her to the command zone instead. Decline it, and she returns as the flicker says.

Everything on her side is an artifact, so two of the sweepers miss it

The board this deck builds is unusual in a way that matters for mass removal. She is an artifact creature, the creatures she takes are artifact creatures, and so are Locutus of Borg, Perfection Manifest, Roaming Throne and the cost reducers. A spell that destroys every nonartifact creature is a one sided wrath here.

Crystalline Entity is a 7/7 flyer for eight, and when you cast it, it destroys every nonartifact creature on the battlefield. Organic Extinction is the same sweep without the body, at a printed ten mana that is mostly a fiction, because improvise lets each artifact you tap pay for one of its generic mana. Stolen creatures are artifacts, so they can tap for it as well. Eight untapped artifacts on the table and it costs . Restoration Angel and Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines are the usual casualties on your own side, and both have usually done their job by the turn you need a sweep.

Join the Collective is the Borg sweeper the new set prints, and it is the wrong one for this list. It destroys every creature and then makes a 1/1 Borg token for each nonartifact creature that died. Your board is artifacts, so your creatures die and pay you nothing, while their creatures die and pay you tokens. It is a reset button for a Borg deck that is losing the board, and a Queen deck that is losing the board has bigger problems.

Toxic Deluge is the third sweeper and the one that is not one sided. The Queen's +2/+2 is what makes it usable. Paying four kills most of what an opponent has, while she and everything she has taken lose four and usually live.

A second Queen eats from the graveyard the first one fills

Borg Queen, Perfection Manifest is a different card with a different name, so both Queens can sit on one battlefield. Her anthem is +2/+0 and stacks with the first, so a stolen creature goes up by four power and two toughness. Her enter trigger assimilates a creature card from an opponent's graveyard.

That second half fits the first Queen better than it looks. A creature she takes is still owned by the opponent you took it from, so when it dies it goes to their graveyard and not yours. Perfection Manifest takes it back, as a Borg with a fresh counter. Animate Dead brings one back from any graveyard for two mana, and in this list its best target is often a creature you stole and lost.

Borg Cube is the other card in the set that assimilates. Its cost drops by one for each artifact creature you control, so with five out it costs . When it enters it exiles a creature, which is removal on the turn you need it. When it later attacks, it assimilates the card it exiled, so the removal turns into a steal. It attacks only once it is a creature, which takes twelve charge counters. Station puts counters on it equal to the power of a creature you tap, so two or three stolen creatures under the anthem get it there in a turn. At twelve, every artifact creature you control has flying.

Locutus of Borg leads a deck of his own and is the right card here too. He has lifelink, and he gives every artifact creature you control a 1/1 Borg token whenever it deals combat damage to a player. Under the Queen those tokens are 3/3s, and they are Borg for Kindred Discovery the moment they appear.

Blue carries the double pips, and black has one it can miss on turn three

She needs one pip of each colour, and the twelve rocks do a lot of that fixing for her. Arcane Signet, Coalition Relic and Commander's Sphere make any of her colours, Fellwar Stone usually does, and the three Talismans and two Signets each cover two. The source count comes to thirty blue, twenty six black and twenty five white.

Blue is highest because three cards ask for : Counterspell, Kindred Discovery and Sakashima the Impostor. Black has two that ask for , and one of them is the place the mana base is honestly short. Phyrexian Arena on turn three needs two black sources by then, and twenty six of them get there in about three games out of four. That is fine for a card that is just as good on turn five. Perfection Manifest costs six, so its second pip is never the issue. The one belongs to Organic Extinction, which is never cast before the late game.

Loran's Escape is the protection spell this list runs. Shields Up! does the same job in the new set and adds a +1/+1 counter, but it costs where Loran's Escape costs , and the turn she lands is the turn every spare mana goes to holding up an answer.

The core list

Hover any name to see the card. The price beside each one is the cheapest paper copy of that card on the market, and the hover opens that same printing, so the image you see is the copy the total was built from.

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The budget rung keeps every copy of her, and the bracket 4 rung brings her down sooner

Two rungs come off the core list, and the four jobs from the top of the page survive both of them. What changes is how many times a turn she triggers, and how early the first trigger happens.

The budget rung is sixteen swaps and takes the list from at least $652 to at least $167. The three Game Changers go first. Rhystic Study becomes Tome of Legends, which picks up a page each time your commander enters or attacks and turns it into a card for one mana. Smothering Tithe becomes Orzhov Signet, and Teferi's Protection becomes Unbreakable Formation, which saves the board from a wrath but not from an exile effect. Seven of the dearer lands become cheaper ones, and four of those always enter tapped, so this rung gives up a little speed.

The biggest single loss is Roaming Throne, and Conjurer's Closet replaces it with one more flicker at end of turn. That keeps her stealing on every turn but takes away the doubled enter and attack triggers, which were the Throne's whole value. Thassa, Deep-Dwelling becomes Soulherder and Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines becomes Brago, King Eternal. Both of the new cards return what they flicker under its owner's control, so aim them at the Queen and nothing she has taken. Sakashima the Impostor becomes Clone, a legendary copy that gets one steal and then loses to the legend rule. Crystalline Entity becomes Massacre Wurm, which is one sided in a different way, by shrinking only the creatures opponents control, and Akroma's Memorial becomes Archetype of Imagination, so the board still flies.

What the cheap list keeps is the part that makes it this commander's deck. Spark Double, Dominion Saboteur, Helm of the Host, Phantasmal Image, Panharmonicon, Ephemerate, Restoration Angel, Teleportation Circle, both pieces of haste equipment, Kindred Discovery, Distant Melody, Organic Extinction, Borg Cube, Perfection Manifest and Locutus of Borg all stay. With either piece of equipment out she still steals two creatures the turn she lands, and her copies still stack the anthem.

The bracket 4 rung is ten swaps and takes the core list to at least $1,367. Mana Vault, Ancient Tomb and Chrome Mox replace a Signet, a land and Commander's Sphere, and their whole purpose is the turn she arrives. A seven drop that comes down a turn sooner gets an extra round of triggers out of every game. Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Enlightened Tutor and Mystical Tutor come in for Read the Bones, Phantasmal Image, Foundry Inspector and Ghostly Flicker, and Enlightened Tutor is the one to watch, because Helm of the Host, Roaming Throne, Panharmonicon, Teleportation Circle and both pieces of equipment are all artifacts or enchantments it can find. Fierce Guardianship takes Dovin's Veto's slot and is free while she is on the battlefield. Cyclonic Rift takes Generous Gift's, and overloaded it bounces everything you do not control while the creatures she took stay put. The One Ring replaces Night's Whisper.

Thirteen Game Changers set that rung's floor at 4. It still has no infinite combo and still wins by attacking with other people's creatures, so a single sweeper that exiles artifacts is as bad for it as for the core list. What the money buys is time, not a different plan.

Rhystic Study, Smothering Tithe and Teferi's Protection are the whole floor

Those three are on the Game Changers list and nothing else in the core list is, which sets its floor at bracket 3 and leaves room under the cap for none. The core list runs no tutors, no extra turns and no mass land denial. The Queen finds her engine pieces by drawing them, which is why nine cards in the list are there to draw.

Treat that 3 as the lowest number this deck can claim, not as a measurement of it. A commander who takes a free creature every time she enters or attacks is the kind of card that list gets revised to include. If that happens, a fourth Game Changer appears in the core list overnight and the floor moves to 4 with it.

FAQ

Is The Borg Queen legal in Commander before Star Trek comes out?

Not until 13 November 2026, the day Star Trek Commander releases. Legality is stored on each card, so a deck checker run before then refuses her and the five other new cards in this list, which are Crystalline Entity, Dominion Saboteur, Borg Cube, Borg Queen, Perfection Manifest and Locutus of Borg, and accepts the other ninety four. That refusal is about the calendar and says nothing about the list.

What does this Borg Queen list cost to build?

The core list comes to at least $652, the budget rung to at least $167 and the bracket 4 rung to at least $1,367, with each card counted at its cheapest paper printing as of 21 October 2026. Each total covers 95 of the 100 cards, because five of the new Star Trek cards have no price yet. The one that does, Crystalline Entity, is a preorder price of about $47 and is more likely to fall than rise after release.

Do creatures The Borg Queen assimilates stay yours if she leaves?

Yes. Assimilate puts the card onto the battlefield under your control with no end date, so it stays yours after she is removed, keeping its +1/+1 counter and its artifact type and losing only her +2/+2. If it dies it goes to its owner's graveyard, not yours. A flicker that returns cards under their owner's control, such as Ephemerate or Teleportation Circle, hands it back to that player.

Can The Borg Queen assimilate an opponent's commander?

Almost never. Her trigger only turns over cards in a library, and a commander lives in the command zone, so the only way one is there to find is an owner choosing to put it into their library rather than the command zone. Tokens are out of reach for the same reason, because a token is never in a library.

What happens when The Borg Queen targets a library with no creatures left?

The player exiles their whole library looking for one, nothing is assimilated, and every exiled card goes back on the bottom in a random order. They end up with the same library shuffled, so the trigger costs them nothing. Once one deck has run out of creatures, point every later trigger at somebody else.

Do two copies of The Borg Queen both give +2/+2?

Yes. A copy carries her whole text, so each one gives every artifact creature you control +2/+2 and each one triggers on its own entering and attacking. Spark Double, Dominion Saboteur and Helm of the Host make copies that are not legendary, so they stay on the battlefield beside her. Two Queens turn a stolen 2/2 into a 7/7 once its counter is counted.

Is Command Chair good in a Borg Queen deck?

It is weaker here than it looks. Its big ability counts the mana value of commanders you control, and you only control her while she is on the battlefield, so the seven mana it offers turns up after the turn you needed it. Before she lands, and whenever she is back in the command zone, it is a six mana rock that enters tapped and makes three.