Modern Horizons 3 preview season has finished, and as we await the boosters and Commander decks to arrive on store shelves and singles to ship out, I wanted to go ahead and wrap up my reaction to the set with an eye towards Commander. I’ve covered Modern Horizons 3 in two articles so far, and if you haven’t read those yet, be sure to check them out!
All done? Let’s dive right into the final rundown!
The Eldrazi Menace
Eldrazi fans are rejoicing at their huge presence in the main set, along with another Eldrazi Commander deck so close on the heels of the Eldrazi Unbound deck from the Commander Masters release last August. Last year’s batch of new Eldrazi included only two with the incredibly unfun annihilator mechanic, while this year brings us considerably more new cards featuring the mechanic (including the Commander deck, which I’m not reviewing today). I’m not looking forward to newer players trying them out and finding just how hated that mechanic is amongst Commander players.
There’s no doubt Eldrazi are flavorful, super creepy, and tend to be big payoff cards for when you have a lot of mana available. I love the use of colorless mana required to cast or use some of them, giving an edge to decks that run fewer colors and thus have access to more colorless sources of mana in their manabases. As Wizards of the Coast (WotC) makes multicolor manabases easier and easier to pull together for three-, four-, and five-color decks, I really appreciate powerful payoffs to incentivize playing fewer colors.
Eldrazi Linebreaker is another great way to give a creature haste, though red decks have no shortage of that. Snapping Voidcraw is a sweet common that provides two colorless mana for your big Eldrazi casting pleasure, and is also a sweet mana sink if you’ve nothing better to do. Sowing Mycospawn is a nice callback to Reap and Sow. Just keep in mind you don’t have to always kick it in casual games of Commander even if that’s the most efficient play; reserve that exile effect for the most egregious lands that need answering!
Territory Culler has a whopping seven power for a five-mana creature, plus sneaky reach! The landfall trigger will be awesome in the right decks, ones that don’t mind self-milling for advantage, and ones that have a high percentage of creatures. Titans’ Vanguard features sweet Richard Kane Ferguson art and boosts your colorless creature army. Remember, that includes most artifact creatures, if you’re not necessarily going full colorless Eldrazi.
Eldrazi-ish Spells
Kozilek’s Command offers a powerful, instant-speed modal spell, with all the modes being quite useful, and you get to cobble together two of them. The first mode can create a handful of blockers if you need them, but really, you can think of them as Treasure-like ramp pieces most of the time. The second mode of scry X and draw a card is a solid value tag-along, while the third mode offers a powerful creature exile ability that’s obviously better at the higher-powered tables with lower-mana-curve threats. The last mode offers some pinpoint graveyard removal to protect against powerful reanimation strategies and other synergies with graveyard cards. This card also prompts us to wonder, when will we see Ulamog’s Command and Emrakul’s Command… maybe in next year’s Eldrazi Commander deck?
Get the Eldrazi involved, and you get an upgraded Utter End, as evidenced by the strangely named Abstruse Appropriation! Not only do you get to exile the nonland permanent, you can cast it later using whatever color or colorless mana you have available. Path of Annihilation is wild, giving you two Eldrazi Spawn tokens when it enters the battlefield, and while it’s on the battlefield, your Eldrazi can tap for any color mana. Plus, there’s a relevant lifegain rider attached to any expensive creature spell you cast.
I question the wisdom of attaching a free overloaded Cyclonic Rift to the design of Ugin’s Binding; no doubt it will be fun to see it do work in Modern, but imagine the number of eye rolls and groans it will produce at countless games of Commander.
Don’t overlook Ghostfire Slice! At a lot of Commander tables, this will be a Lightning Bolt for four damage that gets around protection from red.
Sagas
It’s nice to see a cycle of new Sagas, each of them tied to one of the “flip” legendary creatures that turn into planeswalkers. None of them really jump out as particularly amazing for Commander, but all are flavor home runs for the legendary creature they’re tied to.
Bestow Creatures
Enchantment creatures do a lot of fun things in Commander. They help fuel Enchantress-style synergies, and they also count as two different card types when it comes to cards that care about that – say, Tarmogoyf, or Baba Lysaga, Night Witch. The one that really stands out here to me is Springheart Nantuko, which has a really neat landfall copy ability when Springheart is enchanting another creature. You have to pay two mana to get the copy, so it will be difficult to “go infinite” with the ability, but I’m sure brewers out there are cooking up all manner of shenanigans with it!
Other Cards – White
Essence Reliquary has an interesting effect, especially since it doesn’t cost any mana to activate. The caveat that you can only use it on your turn limits its ability to protect your creature on other players’ turns, but I can see where bouncing a creature loaded up with cheap Auras and then recasting them all could be quite potent in Enchantress decks. You can also just use it to save one of your creatures from a battlefield sweeper before you cast it.
Ocelot Pride strikes me as a nice answer to Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer in Modern; its first strike ability means it can hold off Ragavan from attacking, and if you attack with Ocelot Pride, Ragavan can’t block and trade, and when you deal damage – and gain that life – you’ll make a 1/1 Cat that can trade off with Ragavan if it attacks. Since it’s a mythic rare with tournament power level, I expect its price will be beyond the reach of most Commander players, but if you crack one in a pack, slot it in your Cat deck!
Other Cards – Blue
Bespoke Battlewagon’s got a lot more going on than crewing up and attacking! While it could be the only energy card in your deck, I expect it will only see play in actual energy decks, since it offers a lot of options you can sink your energy into. Copycrook is a really cool Clone variant for decks that care about +1/+1 counters, drawing, discarding, or stocking the graveyard. Dreamtide Whale is huge, but lacking evasion has me questioning its viability in Commander outside of decks that specifically plan to cast multiple spells in a turn.
I’m not looking forward to Merfolk Commander decks slotting Harbinger of the Seas to hose nonbasic lands, but it will certainly be effective in juicing up any islandwalk ability!
Other Cards – Black
Put “Cr” in front of “Abomination” and you get Crabomination! Its emerge ability is wild, tied to “emerging” from an artifact, and its enters-the-battlefield ability could be huge… or a big miss, all depending on what random cards you get to choose from. I really love this effect, and I think it could lead to great stories!
We get a new spin on the old powerhouse Necropotence with Necrodominance, and it feels to me that it’s pretty darn close to being busted in competitive formats, even with the drawbacks. For casual Commander, I don’t see Necropotence getting played all that much and don’t imagine we’ll see Necrodominance either, but I’m prepared to be wrong about that.
Ripples of Undeath is quietly quite good for what it does, though it takes a turn before you start getting that value.
Other Cards – Red
We always appreciate a card that calls back to a Magic set name like Aether Revolt with Aether Revolt, and it seems quite good in an energy deck too! Party Thrasher slots right into decks that care about playing cards from exile (shout out to Prosper, Tome-Bound here), but I’m just going to have fun saying “Lizard Wizard” out loud. As a big fan of modal spells, I would have already given a good look at Siege Smash, but giving it split second too? Count me in!
Speaking of energy decks, Wheel of Potential seems quite good in those decks too, especially if you get to pay seven or more pips of energy with it!
Other Cards – Green
As a green-loving mage, my eyes popped when I saw Fanatic of Rhonas, and I instantly preordered a playset of them. Unlocking that ferocious ability is going to be incredibly easy, and wow, that’s four green mana, folks! The eternalize ability is sweet, sweet icing on the cake – and the 4/4 Zombie token you get satisfies the ferocious ability all on its own.
Then there are three powerful enchantments with Birthing Ritual, Primal Prayers, and Monstrous Vortex, with the uncommon one looking to me the most powerful, potentially chaining multiple creatures with power five or greater since you cast spells with discover.
Gift of the Viper seems very efficient for just one green mana, works great as a combat trick, and also plays well with counters synergies.
Magic players love to see the newest spin on Colossal Dreadmaw, and this time we get a sweet living weapon variant with Colossal Dreadmask! Jokes aside, the equip cost isn’t that prohibitive in big-mana green decks, and there are plenty of awesome creatures that would appreciate a +6/+6 boost with trample.
Other Cards – Multicolor/Colorless
Cranial Ram is a great callback to Cranial Plating, though as a living weapon it needed to provide a little bit of a toughness boost to the equipped creature so the 0/0 Germ token could live. Horrid Shadowspinner is a great enabler for “when you draw” your second, third, or more cards depending on whether you’ve boosted its power, and it also can fill your graveyard with fodder if your deck needs that. I really like that it triggers from attacking rather than from combat damage dealt to an opponent.
I’m totally here for Vexing Bauble, which provides a cheap and colorless way to hose some of the most broken things in Magic: casting spells without paying mana for them. At just one mana, it’s easily fetched up by things like Trinket Mage or Urza’s Saga, and if you don’t need the effect, it’s easy enough to sacrifice for just one mana to draw a card.
Other Cards – Lands
I’ve been bugging WotC’s Gavin Verhey to complete the cycle of Panorama lands, such as Bant Panorama, by making them for wedge colors like Abzan or Sultai, and dang if they didn’t just make an entirely new cycle of common lands that are just about better in every way. Like Panoramas, they enter the battlefield untapped and can tap for colorless mana, but to sacrifice to search for one of the three basic lands, the Landscapes don’t cost any mana to activate, just a tap and sacrifice. Not only that, but they cycle too! The one downside is that the colored mana in the cycling cost prohibits you from running these outside of that color identity, unlike the Panoramas which don’t actually have any colored mana in the rules text. Still, these are quite good, and I expect to play them in a fair number of decks.
Then there is the cycle of lands that tap for a particular color of mana and also have a sweet activated ability. These remind me of another strong cycle of lands, the ones like Boseiju, Who Endures from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Unlike those lands, these new ones enter the battlefield tapped unless you control a basic land type tied to the color of its abilities, but since they are not legendary, you can reasonably play more of them in tournament decks, so I expect demand for these to be quite high, as well as their singles price. Which is a shame, because all of these lands are quite good for Commander decks, especially the weird and wonderful Shifting Woodland, which can become a copy of any permanent card in your graveyard until the end of turn—how cool is that?
Now that all the cards have been revealed, which are you most excited about from Modern Horizons 3? Which new legendary creature intrigues you most to build a Commander deck around?
Talk to Me
Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter! I run polls and start conversations about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun! You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.
I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl, and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can. If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel. You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews.
And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.
Visit my Decklist Database to see my decklists and the articles where they appeared!
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