Another three month period, another two full Magic The Gathering sets released. Full size sets this time unlike Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The first was Secrets of Strixhaven released on April 24th and then Marvel Superheroes released on June 26th. How could Marvel Superheroes possibly be bad releasing on such an auspicious date?
In deference to chronological order I’ll talk about Secrets of Strixhaven first. I wasn’t a huge fan of the original Strixhaven. I didn’t hate it but the magic school setting did nothing for me. I’m more of Hubble man so any references to Potter which I haven’t read or seen were lost on me. That said I did find the original set mechanically interesting particularly what they did with Boros (Red+White). I picked up the Lorehold precon of the time and I really heavily upgraded it. To the point where it was honestly its own deck with Osgir at the helm. Unfortunately as it turned out it wasn’t a very good deck and I ended up taking it apart. The deck did what I designed it to, take a fuck ton of game actions. Unfortunately I forgot to design it to win. Anyway, the point is I’ve no strong love for the setting so I had zero expectations going into the Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS) preview season. I was mainly interested to see what cool new art we would see in Mystical Archives 2.
I have to say the new Mystical Archives really delivered. Nearly all the art is great, particularly the Japanese ones. It does piss me off that they don’t do English language versions of them as I dislike pulling cards I can’t read. But proxies will take care of that down the line. SOS ended up having a real smorgasbord of mechanics. Some of the new ones looked fun e.g. Paradigm and Prepared and others I just find annoying (looking at you Converge). That said I don’t think the set excited me. There were some cards that will absolute become staples like Erode. But staples by their very nature aren’t really exciting. Several archetypes and decks got a lot of interesting looking support so while not excited there were a good few cards I wanted.
The precons were by and large universally excellent both in terms of valuable reprints and fun new cards. Unfortunately with five commander decks, and another four sets to come out after it, I couldn’t afford and honestly didn’t want to get all five. I do regret not pre-ordering the Silverquill deck as Land Tax is a bonkers reprint. But I was happy enough with getting the Witherbloom and Quandrix decks. The Witherbloom deck makes for an excellent “Golgari starter kit” which worked out great for me at the time as I already had two Goglari decks built (Lathril and Jenova) and was working on both OG Beledros Witherbloom and Grist. So all the cards were useful. The Quandrix one on the other hand I had no great rationale for grabbing. I did want a Simic (Blue/Green) deck but I wasn’t necessarily thinking of Hydras at the time (especially as it vaguely steps on the toes of my Magus Lucea Kane deck). Luckily the backup commander in the Quandrix precon – Primo really caught my interest. “0/0 typal” felt fairly fresh and I wanted to build it without just going hydras. Whether I managed that you’ll see below.
It has become something of a sad joke that Magic is in endless preview season. While not strictly through it’s got closer to it this year than ever. The Marvel Super Heroes set hit me the same way as the Final Fantasy set. I was excited about it when it was first announced. I was excited when they did the early preview of some cards. I was overwhelmed and lost interest in the deluge of previews. With Final Fantasy I did very much turn around on it. I built around ten Commander decks based on cards from the set and I have at least digital lists for several more. But the Marvel previews felt even more overwhelming than the Final Fantasy ones. This is partly due to the fact that there simply were more. You had the main set, the four commander decks, the welcome decks, the beginner decks and a whole jumpstart set. As every creature at Uncommon or higher rarity was a legend everything quickly faded together. I also had some hopes going into the set that weren’t met which left me a bit disappointed. We got three different Doctor Doom cards. Two of them are bad and one of them is boring. I really wanted to build a Doctor Doom deck so that bummed me out a bit. I was also hoping we’d get a good typal commander for Villains and we didn’t. Will I still build a Doctor Doom deck? Probably. I have already started brewing a few decks. But just loosely. There is a stock delay so I won’t get any boosters or decks for at least another week. Once I pull some I imagine I’ll get hyped a bit due to the wonders of dopamine.
I had the four commander precons ordered well in advance. All of them have several nice reprints, several cool new cards and even the Marvel art of older staples is great. The price hike for Universes Beyond products does make each deck more expensive than I’d like. I did consider dropping the Wakanda and the Villains deck and just getting the Avengers and Fantastic Four deck. But the set released on my birthday so I just threw some birthday money into the pot and kept my pre-orders for all four. The next set out this year is the Hobbit set which I could not give less of a shit about. I really don’t like Lord of the Rings and find it aesthetically boring. I’m not even going to bother buying a gift box – which I usually buy for each set just to open some packs. I might buy a few singles if they’re good but I plan to spend very little on it (and that’s how you justify spending too much on hobbies to yourself.)
For various reasons, mostly health or transport related, I didn’t get much Commander played during this period. The relentless pace of new releases sort of left me feeling a bit burned out so I only made two fully new decks. I finished up Mr Negative which I’d been working on on and off for a good while. I also put my Yuriko deck back together.
Retired Decks
Elenda
This will come up again further down but I like vampires so for quite a while regardless of format I’ve had a vampire deck. The first commander deck I built when I came back to Magic in the 2010’s was a vampire typal deck. My problem is that while I don’t min taking some hits to performance in favour of flavour a lot of the options for vampire commanders are not great. Elenda, the Dusk Rose was one I toyed with quite a bit. I am a big fan of Ixalan’s take of vampires and Elenda has a fun effect. The problem was and is that Elenda makes a much better Aristrocrats or token commander than she does a Vampire typal one. So I never put the deck together. Then when we returned to Ixalan we got an Orzhov (White and Black) vampire precon deck. Elenda was in the deck though not as the commander. The deck and the set itself offered a good bit more support for a purely vampire typal take on Elenda. So I bought the precon. Slapped Elenda in the command zone and made some changes to tailor it to Elenda. I played it and it performed well. But there always was a tension in the deck because all the vampires in it wanted to do vaguely different things. The deck ended up with a lot of sub-themes. This wasn’t a problem when you drew the right mix of cards. But when you didn’t the deck didn’t do much and wasn’t fun to play. So I stripped the deck down to Elenda and rebuilt it with a much stronger focus on just doing Aristocrats stuff. When I was finished I had a better deck. But it didn’t feel like vampire typal. It just felt like an Aristocrats deck with a loosely linked visual motif. So I ended up taking the deck apart.
Goro Goro and Satoru
This deck was fun. Shitting out 5/5 Flying dragon spirits is just fun. The deck is more aggressive than most of my decks. If I’m being honest I just like taking lots of game actions. But that wasn’t the reason I took it apart. It was the fact that while it did make good use of ninjas it really didn’t feel like a ninja deck. If I’m being honest the deck would probably have functioned better with significantly less ninjas and significantly more cheap creatures with Haste and some kind of Evasion. So that’s why I ultimately took it apart. It was fun. It played well. I didn’t win with it but I was a threat and I made lots of dragons. I may well rebuild this deck at some point.
Queza
I think the Wheels version of Queza is a better build for the deck. But I had no interest in going with all Wheels so I concentrated more on drain effects. The deck was fun to play. A rather toxic mix of group hug mandatory card draw with drain when drawing card effects. I did enjoy it but if I include it I currently have four Esper commander decks and while they are all different both the Sefris and Y’shtola decks run several of the same cards and combos as the Queza deck. But despite using some somewhat obscure cards the Queza deck feels much more generic to play than either of those decks. It feels a lot like “generic Esper good cards” the deck. That’s not even mentioning overlap with other decks I have like the Mr Negative deck or any of the many other blue and black decks I run (they are by far my most played colours). So mechanically the deck functioned. Gameplay wise it functioned as well. It just fell down on theme or lack thereof. It’s an issue with a lot of Magic legendary creatures where literally all you know about them is whats on their card. So you get a name a creature type and maybe some flavour text if you’re lucky. Don’t get my wrong I love Queza’s art. It’s why I picked her in the first place. But it does make it hard to feel any connection to the character itself. In contrast I will probably build a Hulk deck from the new Marvel cards because I like the character but none of the mechanical stuff they do is top of my list.
Toph
I think I just don’t like Landfall as a mechanic. I have built several Landfall Commander decks over the years. I have never really enjoyed playing any of them and I ended up taking them all apart. It’s not saying much but this was by far the most fun Landfall deck I made and the shenanigans you can get up to with Earthbending and Artifacts is cool. Honestly even when writing this I’m second guessing myself. But that’s the thing. This deck is a lot more fun in my mind than it was at the table. I never had fun playing it. It either did nothing or had a million fucking triggers that were a pain in the ass to track. The latter would have got better with repeated plays but I really didn’t want to.
Olivia Voldaren
It was hard to take this deck apart. So hard I have not in fact done so yet. It’s marked as retired but physically the deck is still together. I’ll probably break and take it apart the next time I’m building a Rakdos deck and need the cards. Olivia Voldaren, in one form or another, is my longest running Commander deck. I love the character. I love how she looks. I like vampires. I hate Edgar Markov because he’s boring as fuck (I mention him because he is by far the most popular, and honestly the most powerful, vampire commander)
New Decks
Lorehold
There is a fine line between getting value out of taking actions on every players turn of a round cycle and being really fucking annoying. If you are doing loads of stuff on other players turns it often means you are taking up a disproportionate amount of the “game clock” and it makes it easy for peoples attention to drift. I think Lorehold comes in under that line. You generally just draw and discard on another players turn and sometimes cast a spell. That’s really as much as the deck want’s so you rarely do more than that. You also “make up for it” by not wanting to do much more on your own turn. Of course thats speculation as I’ve never played against it only with it.
I like it. I like taking game actions. I really like casting spells for free and top deck manipulation. Which are the three things the deck is about. Admittedly I did get very lucky with my starting hand and draws the first time I played the deck so that may have biased my opinion of it. But even with limited plays I moved it straight from the “Testing” folder (where new decks live) into the permanent decks folder.
Witherbloom
Generally I don’t build a Commander just because it’s powerful. I find in Commander the more powerful a deck is the more boring it is. The cEDH meta gives a fairly comprehensive roadmap of what to do if you want to win in the first turn or two. So I generally aim squarely at building Bracket 3 decks. This might require ignoring or removing two card infinite combos or synergistic extra turn combos or what have you. As I mentioned above I found all the Legendary Elder Dragons from Strixhaven pretty exciting. They are perfect for Commander, they’re big splashy and powerful. The one that really jumped out to me as being bonkers was Witherbloom. Giving everything Affinity was already crazy but him himself having it was particularly bonkers. I questioned could you even make a Bracket 3 version. But I built the deck anyway because after putting it together digitally goldfishing with it was just such fun and it turned out to actually be a bit slower than I expected unless you got a good opening hand.
I still haven’t actually got a chance to play the deck myself. But I have played against several Witherbloom decks. I’ve never seen it win. The reason for that it unsurprising. The Witherbloom player gets treated as the “archenemy” and gets blown out of the game first. Witherbloom rarely manages to stay alive long enough to do much before eating removal, assuming he wasn’t countered in the first place. It’s hard to cry faulty threat assessment because the reality is that if left alone Witherbloom will run away with the game. But seeing it go down several times it has blunted my excitement about playing the deck. I still have it together for now but I would be unsurprised if it get’s taken apart.
Mr Negative
I wanted to build a deck using one of the villains from Spider-Man. I don’t really have a favourite Spider-Man villain off the top of my head. Maybe Dr. Octopus or The Lizard? I’m very ambivalent about Norman Osborn. Really that’s the way with a lot of comic stuff. It depends on the story arc in question. Venom would be a good example of that. I really liked the original storyline where he was introduced. But he was mishandled so often that in my mind all the garbage runs just blend with the good stuff to make a big pile of meh. I had no particular affinity for Mr Negative. I stopped reading Spider-Man for quite a while after One More Day. When I went back one of the first arcs involved Mr Negative and I enjoyed it. Conceptually I’m not sure there’s much depth to him. But that doesn’t really matter for a Commander deck. The card art was good and his effect was powerful (and I loved using a Mr. Negative deck in Marvel SNAP). I felt he might be a bit “all-in” when it came to playing the deck. Either you quickly win or you get blown out. It’s playstyle I do enjoy (after all that’s basically what the Marvel SNAP Mr Negative deck is). But I enjoy it more digitally when you can grind game after game. It’s different when you might have to sit there looking at other people play for an hour or so.
All of this overly long preamble is to explain that while the card came out in September last year I only actually played the deck at the end of June this year. It worked fine. I sort of feel Mr Negative didn’t do a lot. But at the same time he did take out two players. He’s not a Commander you cast to have on the board. He feels much more like a wincon in the command zone. I’m not necessarily opposed to that. But I also did take apart several decks that had the same general gameplan. We’ll see. If I had to bet I’ll take it apart. I was also tinkering with a Rodolf Duskbringer deck which is the same sort of Orzhov lifegain/lifedrain area but it has vampires and angels.
Alena and Gilanra – Primal Surge
This is a very straightforward deck. I was inspired to build it after watching a short featuring the two commanders. That build went budget and included a more diverse set of instants and sorceries. My deck is significantly simpler than that one. Though it’s not quite as budget. I think you could replace the expensive cards in this deck without hugely affect performance and honestly the first version of the deck I built didn’t include them. I’ve been wanting to build a straight forward Green/Red deck for a while and I’ve also wanted to build a Primal Surge deck. I’ve messed around with a few Commanders but if I’m being honest they were nearly all quite high cost and I just don’t feel that comfortable with high cost Commanders these days. Primal Surge doesn’t want ideally any Instants or Sorceries in the deck. I compromised with myself a little and included three. I’m sure when I get this to the table one of those three will brick my Primal Surge.
As that statement implies I haven’t got this deck to the table yet and I am a little apprehensive about it. When goldfishing it it runs very well. But I also feel that it might just fold in half to a board wipe or concentrated interaction. Still the dream of a big simple stompy deck is attractive. The gameplan changes very little every time, cast first commander, use that to ramp into second commander. The turn after that cast a 6 drop, use the second Commander to drop another 6 drop. Deep doing that and attacking till people are dead. Maybe get to cast Primal Surge and put me entire deck on the table for free (an exile based board wipe then would be truly tragic.) I’m honestly not sure if this deck can even compete at Bracket 3. It’s probably the deck I most want to get some games in with at the moment just to satisfy my curiosity.
I think in the long run the Bruce Banner deck I’m working on may replace it as my “stompy deck” but we’ll see what happens.
Yuriko
Not really a lot to say here that hasn’t been already covered while discussing why I took apart the decks I made to replace Yuriko. They either weren’t powerful enough (Splinter) or they didn’t feel like “proper” Ninja decks (Goro-Goro and Satoru). I just like this deck. It definitely leans more into the Ninja theme than the more powerful “flip big drops” build but it’s still a powerful Bracket 3 deck. Though funnily enough I got absolutely smoked the first time I played the reassembled deck.