Apparently these are our last commander precons of the year. Hooray, the UB sets doesn’t have any of them. But well, isn’t it unfortunate that this calendar year didn’t have a single precon not being three colors?
Both decks has red, one take Azorius and the other took Golgari. This is certainly the most balanced and symmetrical way to do two tricolor decks. The themes may not be too interesting on their own, Jeskai has artifacts and Jund has land sacrifice, Jeskai is as new to this theme as you consider Energy to not matter, and Jund… well do you remember when was the last Jund precon period?
Each deck has the main commander being a Spacecraft and the secondary commander being a normal creature.
Yes, a Spacecraft, because the rule now is that anything with a P/T box can be a commander, just that planeswalkers don’t have two different stat points so not now. The generic vertical frame gives the Spacecrafts pretty heavy steps in terms of opacity, and yes it’s steps because they have 2 tiers each. The last tier is a flying creature that asks for 8 charge counters. While the middle tier just ask for 1 or 2 power for the kind of abilities you expect from commanders.
The backup commanders are weirder. One has haste and tries to be an Atraxa for convoke. Then why does it needs haste, to guarantee the first trigger? And the other, it has a Crucible of Worlds and an ability to buff creatures whenever you sacrifice… nonlands. I know, if that changes to count lands then I would call this card a two step value engine, but for what it is it’s weird.
To transition to the next section, here is the table of these two decks’ set skeletons, how they used their cards.
And another table, to show how the two decks combine. There’s also a curious art column for a further section. Weirdly I don’t care about rarities for these things this time. Then again, in a singleton deck do rarities actually indicate anything?
| Deck | L | M | R | MR | LR | C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jeskai | 2 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| (URW) | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| Jund | 2* | 2 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| (BRG) | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Color | W | U | B | R | G | RG | BG | RW | C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ability | 1 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| Art | 1 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 8 |
Once again, the color distribution of each deck is different and weird in their own ways.
The Jeskai deck went for two cards for each of Izzet, just one mono white card and three colorless artifacts. All of these cards are artifact, through just one lacks the metal frame, so it’s a spacecraft, having three tiers. There’s an even split of artifacts with and without stat boxes.
The Jund deck is way weirder, it has two cards for each color except green has a third, this one being the Spacecraft, and one of black’s card is actually a land, so you may miscount that color as just having a single card. Each mono color, along with the one loose Golgari card, is an Insect, the number of classes associated is 2 minus the number of colors they have.
So what’re those two gold cards left of each deck I didn’t mention? Well, remember when the Fallout decks then the Thunder Junction decks finished the signet lands? We finally see two more dual land cycles get on the finishing track. It has been a full year, after like 4 quads of precons, 1 quint of precons and 1 pair of precons, so that’s like too much dodging to decide now it’s the time to do this thing.
It’s certainly a weird time because frankly look at this execution, they chose that each deck do get both cycles, just that they have to choose one enemy pair for those lands. Which for Jund it’s obviously Golgari, then for Jeskai it’s surely a weird dilemma, and it chose Boros. So what happens to the other three cycles? They’ll get there in future sets of precons, but well as I mentioned, that’s quite far away. And the most important part, they won’t get these matched flavor texts. Like quotes from “Antioxa, Drix elder”.
The most important point is which land cycles were picked to be finished now. It’s BFZ’s tango lands and AKH’s bicycle lands, well because neither their respective blocks’ small sets or further returns to both of those planes have decided to finish these cycles and instead both those latter things have chosen unconditionally untapped untyped dual lands, which turned out to be stronger if you don’t care that much about fetches. These are typed so they do like their fetches, after all in commander you just need the one fetchland of each pair rather than painfully pony up for four copies each.
It's definitely a thing I applaud, if for nothing else just the fact that each deck now has 12 new designs instead of the stingy usual of 10, remember when MKM did that and nothing surrounding it?
Each deck probably share their staple trio. The rest obviously not.