The last time there were five color balanced three colored precons was New Capenna, three whole years ago. And then it was chaos, you may notice now. It really took a set like this for the balance to come back, huh. And obviously no set following this will carry any of this balance, like one will have a Mardu deck, the next a Jeskai deck, and oh wait one will just skip precons outright, good.
Each deck gets their 2 commanders in the generic borderless frame, so it’s all gold with no gradients to indicate any colors. One commander is the khan you’ve already seen in the main set but now more tuned to be a value engine. The other is the spirit dragon you’ve also already seen in the main set but now also more tuned to be a value engine. That is, except for Jeskai. Allegedly due to Narset bonding better with this dragon than the other khans, her commander card is a team up which definitely stresses out the type line (not to mention the set symbol is actually wide this time), which leaves room for a different Jeskai character as the other commander. Also this team up is the only card to have flavor text, one short line but still certainly more fun than the decent chunk of reminder text telling you what prowess or mobilize do.
Now onto the question of which ability belongs to which color? Let’s pretend the flying of the dragons an innate thing untied to any color, through being wedges mean all of these dragons will touch white or blue somehow so I guess that’s why NotC hates Jund.
These decks are doing the typical 10 new designs with nothing bonus. So 8 rares are left. You see that’s the problem with having this few new cards, you don’t have 9 to give each color three cards, you certainly can’t give any four, you don’t have bonus cards to give gold cards or colorless cards, on and on and frankly I just want to remind you that the New Capenna decks had 15 new cards.
Here’s a table that provides the two most important (for me information): How the different decks used their 8 new rare designs colorwise, and where their dragons are.
| Deck | Colors | L | M | R | LM | Dragons |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abzan | WBG | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 = G+W | |
| Jeskai | URW | 3 | 3 | 2 | 3 = U+U+R | |
| Sultai | BGU | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 2 = BG+U |
| Mardu | RWB | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 = B+R | |
| Temur | GUR | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 = G+U+U+R+R |
Looking at the Golgari dragon slot gives me pain, they totally could have made anything blue in its place, just saying.
Let’s have a second table tallying those cards. This time also having three rows of how the different decks used these colors.
| Set | W | U | B | R | G | BG | T |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TDC-R | 7 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 8 | 1 | 40 |
| Triples | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 10 | |
| Doubles | 2 | 1 | 1 | 4 | |||
| Singles | 1 | 1 | 2 | ||||
| Dragons | 1 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 14 |
And just look at how there’s just one cycle: It’s the Wills of the Clans. These are like those monocolor lands in the draft set, in which is the fact they’re focused on the new color the clan gains. These things are the second iteration of the Wills from CMR, which are magecrafts that give you two options in which you pick 1 or 2 if you control your commander. Compare that to the Confluences in New Capenna precons which makes better use of the three colors and its two other cycles, this feels like a slap in the face. Maybe this is what we would have in the 8 set booster exclusive cards and designers of these precons just hate cycles that much. Maybe there’re other cycles in the Dragons.
(In case the wiki doesn’t list the new arts specifically, I’ll put them here:)
Honestly that’s a pretty light selection of new arts. To say it can replace a set of oversized cards is still having the feeling of pushing it.