293 cards is a very weird number, no kidding around that. That’s because this set has DFCs and it has a very weird of distributing them. We’re looking at 5 mythics, 12 rares and 12 uncommons, yes that leaves 0 commons, I think you’ve never seen these numbers before in previous sets using DFCs. And that seems to be the justification for why the DFCs no longer have a dedicated slot to them, they’re just jumbled with the single faced cards now, which there are 15 mythics, 63 rares, 97 uncommons and 80 commons. So in total, 20 mythics and 80 commons are the normal numbers, 74 rares and 109 commons, now those are weird numbers.

Now dividing these numbers by color, we get the following. Stars will be used to represent subtle things that will trip up things like color identity when you don’t notice. And I’ll just highlight the wonky numbers in this chart.

The quick takeaway is that while I often make fun of UB sets for having horrific color imbalance, at first glance, this set gets a slight pass. Until you notice the imbalanced uncommon and yeah, this is now on the same level of nefariousness as NEO and FDN. The longer takeaway is that there are a lot of wonky spots to be analyzed, so that’s fun.

2.1 Commanders

Another thing to make fun of UB sets is how they just hand out the legendary type to so many cards without, from a Magic set design standpoint, much deliberation. I would definitely define deliberation like Dominaria drawing a clear slot to commanders, or just overall putting them in cycles so you can compare and contrast how different colors do things. Obviously from the UB perspective, there is way more deliberation, which character is popular, which one do people like, how many of them keep falling into white and black because they’re just obviously good or obviously evil, etc. And after all that, we come out to this mess:

From what I know, LTR did color balancing way better, even though it did got the help of duplicated versions of the same few big characters. I was reading a WotC design lore article today (not written by MaRo, and you can really tell), and the section talking about color balance being challenge used just green as the example, and it lasted a total of six sentences, using just two of the (lowly) seven cards. So I guess my rants aren’t going out of business anytime soon.

One more controversial distribution are for the different games. Take a guess, wouldn’t the popular games get the most mythics and the niche games scramble for some uncommons?

Well, very much it, with some nuances. Sprite era get it the worst overall, getting either 1, 3 or 6 cards, the advantage are to the SNES game. Then the PS2 era isn’t that much better, getting 2 or 4 cards. Followed by the recent era, getting 5 or 7 cards because I suffice the arts for these should be pretty accurate to what you see in the games. The PS1 era is about as high as you expect, one being 6 and the other a whopping. And lastly 14 is the peak at 12, you can go try it for free with some expansions yady yada.

Lastly, we got a few random facts about this giant set of commanders.

• 21 of these are DFCs, all 5 mythics, 10 of 12 rares and 6 of 12 uncommons. There’s only one meld pair among them.
• There are only two team ups in total, so that’s untapped space for a second FF set if they want to cram more characters.
• The number of female characters among all these are 23, 4 mythics, 8 rares and 11 uncommons. Sounds pretty low by Magic’s current day standards, but just you know spiky hair anime boys really dominate this era of character design truly.
• The most common creature type among these is Human, appearing on a whopping 63 cards. Something you notice, this franchise doesn’t really branch out into other humanoid types as much as we’re used to from Magic.
• The number of card names that lack a comma are 36, which mean they either are a team up or spell out their full name or just has a silly name. I’m not too bothered to tell you the DFCs that lack this comma on their back sides.
• 51 of these commanders have flavor texts on them. 42 of which has quotation marks because, well, they’re quotes from the character. 7 of the remaining 9 doesn’t have flavor texts on their front side, they have it on their back sides, which is a whole story on their own.

2.2 Mythics

The monocolored half sees each color getting one commander except blue gets another one in green’s place. You know what green has instead? Two normal creatures, none are Humans so maybe that’s why. Both are really gosh damn wordy for whatever they’re worth, especially compares to all the commander characters. Through I suffice, these different abilities operate together so it isn’t as bad as it seems. Then again the commanders aren’t this wordy. The other cards here are a white Summon that riffs off something Magic have already done before, a Dark Confidant reprint which definitely belongs in Magic, and lastly a boardwipe wheel with flashback in red, which is the only one not to be a creature at all.

The multicolored set sees 7 major characters from an almost 1 character/game selection. The missing color pairs are Rakdos, Orzhov, Golgari, Simic and the 9 color trios except Grixis. Through you can also add Gruul to the list because turns out the back side has mana for all 5 colors, and the fact the back side mentions Esper, which in Magic is precisely the opposite of Gruul. Counting colors overall, blue and red has 4 cards each, white has 3 cards, black and green has 2 cards. So would the last 2 cards be Golgari and Abzan? Or do you replace one blue with black and red with green?