3.1. Commander deck: Does this need to be 5 colors?

This is the first time a mainline (not Secret Lair) set of commander precon to be a single deck. You don’t need to choose between heroes or villains or something, you just get them all in one deck. And with that, having all 5 colors feels too obvious. To the dismay of many, I guess. But well, you can have this deck be separate or have the 5 colors commander in the draft set, which will basically rob you off a playable bomb.

3.1.1. Mythics: Character select

This deck has one normal 5 colors commander that’s just all the four main characters in one artwork. Guess what I think about them.

And how about the backup option? Here’s a set of six commanders that can partner with one another instead. This is to emulate how you choose characters in a video game, there’s a roster of this many but you can only play two. This roster is limited in this partner subset called “Character Select”, which to be honest, not a great word if seen out of context. Like surely we’ll delve into more arcade games with their own rosters eventually. But well, the word “Friends Forever” got kept on Innistrad, and it won’t be folding to this partner system anytime soon.

Which characters do you get to choose specifically? You got the four main character, except the white leader among them has a 5 colors off colored ability, to serve as the deck’s backup commander. So that all the other ones can just be monocolored. Which would leave a space for black, we decided for once it’s gonna be the rat teacher instead of the villain. And lastly, sneakily in the normal frame section instead of the generic vertical section, the blue assistant to them is here. I was expecting a mono white one to be honest, or any color combination, really.

3.1.2. Rares

Apparently, this deck is unique in the fact that it has a theme about the video games, specifically the arcade ones (we so far had two RPG UBs for context). This leads way to some cards explicitly mentioning video game tropes. I would say there’s at least one cycle of magecrafts plus two green enchantments, plus three artifacts, like an exploding barrel would be the least obvious.

Each deck then has a cycle of funny keywords, per say:

• White: Squad to this time copy an enchantment that summons mobilized tokens. So it still makes flavor sense over using replicate. There is also a colorless creature using squad too.
• Blue: Evolve for a fish to be curious. It has Warrior in the title, but not the kindred class.
• Golgari: A partner pair because none of these UB sets care about your dreaded Battlebond cycle.
• Red: There’s a thing that’s awkwardly between a charm and a command that uses flavor words, something weirdly the rest of this deck don’t use much of.
• Izzet: There’s a split card with fuse with the same moveset ethos as that red card. Does these count toward the video game trope section?

Colorless wise, there’s a tapped Command Tower so that it can gives lifelinks to modified creature, and an Evolving Static that can creates three tokens a turn, its name doesn’t reference an original dubstep label but instead explicitly call out a time of day, actually, night.

3.1.3. Reprints: Finally renamable!

Did you know there are many card names that for many IPs outside of Magic, there is literally no way to recontextualize them. For some freaks who are opposing the hybrid change, this restriction is fun and does get them to find the even deeper and more obscure cut, as Richard Garfield totally intended. For others, it just comes off as dumb trivia (which this series is very guilty off, not gonna lie) rather than building an actual skill for the player.

With that, here finally comes five reprints renamed for this word that don’t have hydras, solely slimes or abstract elementals. All in green, but one toggled to also have black too. And to be honest, what a baffling first showing, I just see giant muscle mass blobs over anything else really.

Color distribution wise, it’s crazy to see the total amount of white cards in this deck be so low. It makes for a really compelling case to cut that color out of the deck to make it… Yidris, but then what do you do about that “leader” main character? For that, we got silly things like 2 Golgari cards and nothing else in terms of reprints.

New art lands wise, we get three thriving lands in Sultai I can’t distinguish whatsoever. There are two bond lands in Gruul and Golgari, something everyone decry that they should be in every deck. Other cycles include five battle lands, three checklands forming a loop that lacks Dimir and the Simic cycling land that came out last set. Here, you notice something weird: even without white, there isn’t a single Izzet land here. Instead, we get two Evolving Wilds, a tapped painland and a Fabled Passage without flavor text.