3.1 Color choices + Mythics

We’re back to the typical set of four precons, and you know what that meant: Color imbalance! Yay… How do I explain this time’s messes? Well, first off, you start off with white for all four decks, so you can’t have a fifth color trio to balance anything out. Then you will be left with the remaining four colors that may be closed into a loop. You do just that and use add each allied pair in this loop to one of the decks. So that way you got 3 shards and 1 wedge. So this would implies there are 4 other sets of precons that can be made this way. Or more if you try to put the enemy pairs of the small loop in, thing is you have to put both in and for the two allied pairs you have two ways, so totals to 10 more sets. Well, the actual way these decks came to be is based on the different FF games. The Mardu one is 6, the Naya one is 7 (duh), the Bant one is 10 and the Esper one is 14. These trios certainly are no strangers to commander precons and these games certainly are no stranger to nostalgia (or in case of the last one, you can just play it right now).

Because of that, you should recognize these characters, five of them women (Mardu have both being women, how fun), the other two spikey haired anime boys, and lastly a red-haired gender catboy. Six of them are humans, only the Esper pair are Cats. Three of them have two different classes (and Mardu also have two because both are Wizards), and three of them are Wizards (did I mention Mardu has two?), followed by Warrior at two, just as much as Solider and Knight combined, as in the other two swordfighting classes. Lastly you got the three women each with different classes, two for wands and one for… punching.

All of these cards function as a two stage value engine, whether in vague ways like having lifelink to later on pay life, or well most of these are very literal means. And all of these are your typical tricolor commanders, so three colors to cast, not even asking for colored mana to activate or trigger anything, so the frame is all the same gold, and yes a frame still exists because none of these are in the generic borderless frame, so that such a version can only exist in Collector’s Boosters, it’s the same mess as the MH3 precons really. Each deck have one commander at mana value 3 and another at 4, except the Naya one which depends on how you look at it, either tax each one by 1 mana each, or tax the cheaper one by 2 mana. What’s the clue? Four of the five women costs 4? Stats wise, three of them are 4/4s (Naya has two of those three, yay), two of them are 3/3s with one single word flavor word, the two Esper cats both have power 2 and toughness higher, and lastly you got a 1/5 in Bant, because she is a mana dork.

Now back to my color gutting attempt, let’s wonder how these commanders would fit a better card frame, one where you do know which color pair they belongs better in.

• Terra: For the ability sharing a name with a music genre, we got the weirdest pairing of things to do at the same time: Black’s mill and white’s flying. Then the sabotage clause is basically Ms. Alesha’s small creature reanimation clause, which got put on a white enchantment. So it really leaves a question as to what does the red do?
• Celes: The wheel clause is red. The clause to see a creature being resurrected is Black with White secondary, and the board pump is White primary Red secondary. So she could totally fit in Boros, or Orzhov to share with Terra if she moves from wheeling to sacrificing things for cards.
• Cloud: Haste is red. Free attaching is Boros’s thing. Drawing cards and that mega ferocious clause has to be the most green part of the card (I’ll count Treasures as red’s thing here). So if the draw were to be changed to an impulse draw, he could totally be Boros.
• Tifa: Melee appeared the least in green, but among the Naya the different colors are pretty close. Additional combat phases are red unless you count the untapping to be vigilance so Selesnya. If she has to be in the same Boros as Cloud, so be it, but her main set card is mono green.
• Tidus: Moving counter is Simic’s thing. Curiosity and proliferate can also be done very well in Simic. So what’s so white about this card?
• Yuna: Mana dork with counter is green’s thing (cough cough great henge). Modular is lately a white’s thing but well they originally appeared on colorless artifacts. I could see a case for Simic.
• Y'shtola: Vigilance is Azorius. Caring about life loss is black’s thing (or if that one Bloomburrow bat have you believe to be white), drawing a card is blue or white if it’s once per turn on an engine. Draining is mono black or Orzhov. It is really hard to see how blue she truly is, like the artwork doesn’t have all that much blue really. But hey, a cat girl done right from Magali, didn’t know I want that.
• G’raha Tia (not m Stark or something): Lifelink is Orzhov, prowess triggers is Azorius, paying life is Black’s thing, creating token is white’s thing. Equally a difficult case to see the blue in. Obviously in the artwork it’s a lot easier to see blue now, but unfortunately this cat boy has pink hair of all colors.

Overall, we would find a Boros ferocious deck, a Simic counters deck and two decks conflicting over the Orzhov slot, so it really the question to you, do you want old school women resurrecting creatures, or do you want new school cat peoples playing life drain?

3.2 Rares

As in the tradition of UB precons that have a draft set attached, each deck only has 25 new designs, up from 20 of LTR and certainly way less than the 40s-50s of standalone UB precon sets.

Color balance wise, obviously it would be a horrific mess, which is why in my set skeleton spreadsheets I used to just not bother with like any of the previous UB precon sets. This time it’s really easy to sort thank to the game identifiers in the bottom left, and I really managed to sort it right the first time, I bet someone better at FF could just look at the art and sort them and that way would actually have fun. Anyhow, let’s look at per deck:

So the takeaways is that all allied pairs are represented to imbalanced degrees, the missing enemy pairs are Izzet and Golgari (they would appreciate a Jeskai and Abzan deck in this white required world) and the fact only I care about is to look at White’s color pairs. Meanwhile the two white pairs in Esper would stick to one of the two precons, the two white pairs in Naya would spread themselves across both, actually it’s the Naya deck that has one of each, once again Naya infuriates me.

In total, we got the following table. It’s astonishing how the whites is more than red plus another Sultai color combined, or in another way more than the number of dual colored cards combined, well I guess they should know to add the colorless cards in to fight back.