It’s that one set right before I originally started this series, and one I may not be too terribly excited to go through. To be fair, that might be due to everyone screaming at how stupidly overpriced this set is relative to what it has. Just as much as what it doesn’t have.

And the idea about this Masters set onto itself, well didn’t we already have previous Masters sets having at least a small focus on bringing the commanders reprints? Like literally the last one, was focused on having all three colors combinations, and that conveniently meant a lot of the commanders can be reprinted. How will that affects the reprint equity pool now?

1 Main set

Welcome to a commander draft set, where the draft booster is 20 cards instead of the typical 15 because deck sizes are bigger by… 50% so turns out these packs might not be big enough. Here’s the rarity distribution of those packs, I won’t break down the set boosters to save my sanity:

• 11 commons (technically 129 commons at “normal” rate plus the Prismatic Piper (art hasn’t been replaced yet) at 1/6 packs).
• 3 normal uncommons + 2 commander uncommons. I feel like that 55 number is as awkward as it is because of the fact that 80 just don’t divide well into 3, even when you do you would get 54. So turns out that’s the logic right?
• 1 normal R/M + 1 commander R/M. These two sets are of different sizes let me point to you. So technically the normal rare is rarer than the commander rare. Like considerably, the commander is the 121 cards sheet the rare slot used to use back in the day, the normal is… this 184 cards abomination I can’t explain at all.
• 2/3 of the packs having a normal uncommon plus 1/3 of the packs having a normal R/M. So in total, there would be a 11:6 ratio for uncommons and 4:3 ratio for rares and mythics, between the normals and commanders. Just throw all this set size numbers out of the window I suffice.
• Lastly there’s a pringle of any of these rarities. I give up.

If I were to go by this set size, I would probably put 13 commons, up the uncommons count to 90 and 60 respectively so that the 3:2 ratio makes more sense, up the rares count to also that much, up the mythic commanders count to 20 so that there’s 1 slot for each rare (strictly) and a 21st slot that has half being normal rares, a third being mythics of both sides, and a sixth to maybe precon cards, wouldn’t that be funny.

1.1 Commander mythics

Each color got two commanders, and looking at them I kinda notice a pattern. One of them belong to the more recent times (like two Amonkhets, one from MH1, one from Theros’s return and the oldest card is Conspiracy 2). And the other belong to a much older time (two came from Innistrad block, one from original Theros, one from original Zendikar and the last one is… Portal Three Kingdoms). In Bant colors, this definitely shows in how the older card obviously is way shorter so they had room for flavor texts. While the funny thing is it’s the opposite way around for Amonkhet’s colors. Would you notice however, given how in total there are two Theros gods?

And then you got the last 5 commanders which all belonged to that newer era. Namely, two Eldrazi titans from BFZ block (Emrakul isn’t here, curious how long she will take to return), another Amonkhet commander, this time Dimir so all three Bolas colors are represented, the 5 color dragon from C17 and lastly Morophon from MH1, which is also 5 colors. From that, you can definitely tell that Dimir gets the most bias, Gods dominate at three reps all not green, and ironically there’s not a single tricolor commander. Wonder what tricolor characters from these sets that could come to mind to get a reprint here.

1.2 Commander rares

Each monocolor gets seven cards, except black and green has just six each. The cycle of note here are the 5 planeswalker commanders from C14, that one time they made monocolored precons (how based not to have to get any dual lands). Actually, there’s some more C14 commanders too, three for Esper colors in fact.

About what other sets has commanders that got in here, I see stranger things:

That last part really ended up answering what I really thought about a lot of the character choices in this set, as in, wow this is kind of boring. Like you certainly would expect a more diverse selection than just a bunch of core sets and C14 alone already eating over half of the slots, and somehow those core sets managed to make this allegedly diverse set of characters blend together.

The last two cycles (thank god) are dedicated to color pairs and trios, one for each color combination, if you know Commander Legends they always work like this.

Bicoloreds see two allied pairs in a row for C18, two enemy pairs in a row for C15, two different enemy pairs “in a row (you may not see it)” for Ravnicans, the rest is an Invasion character, that Ikorian box topper whose not UB artwork was allegedly found somewhere thinking they should have used that instead of forcing this external IP upon us, a C17 cat, one of the Innistradi angel sisters. And now I finally realize, are there 8/10 women in this whole cycle?

If you think the drawback of that is that there’s too much humanoid and too little anything else, then I have the tricoloreds for you. Each of the two important tricolored worlds have just one rep each, the others are certainly way more diverse in where they came from. Four came from precons (note: not necessarily commander this time, one is actually a Planechase deck), the other four you can actually open in boosters overlap in Gruul for shards and Boros for wedges.

1.3 Commander uncommons

Each monocolor gets 9 cards, and once again let’s break it down by sets.

It’s really until now that I finally realized that I have to point out that in drafting this overpriced set do you can combine any two monocolored commanders with partner like you can literally do with the CMR commanders. Probably this late because the higher rarities don’t have these partners.

Granted, current set dominance syndrome still continues, but at least we finally got sights of some pretty old sets. Probably because the old commanders really suck compared to what we have now so downshifting them to uncommon feels really reasonable.