Alternate Command Positions

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Welcome to the second half of my review of the new commanders from the Commander 2015 preconstructed product. I hope all you Commander fans have been enjoying this Commander Theme Week on Hipsters of the Coast; since Commander can be played on so many different levels, particularly vis-à-vis power levels and competitiveness, I find it’s often interesting to hear what people who focus on other formats have to say about the rare casual format that most have played.

Earlier this week, I posted my “timeshifted” column on the experience commanders. They’re all neat, and one or two of them is amazing. This week I’m going to focus on a more mixed lot: the secondary commanders. Typically, the secondary commanders are weaker than the primary ones, which, due to their expansive use of the Commander design space and their cyclical nature, tend to be better thought out. Or, at least they appear to be, which is fundamentally the same thing.

The secondary commanders in this cycle continue that trend, but they’re still a neat bunch of cards. Let’s take a look!

Anyone else get an Uncle Vanya vibe from this one? It’s a Chekov commander.

I’ve never liked the angelic Boros commanders. In my opinion, prior to this project there were four reasonable Boros commanders: Anax and Cymede, Iroas, God of Victory, Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer, and Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. None of the other commanders offers the same power or focus of these four. Anax and Cymede are hard to take advantage of, but if you want to do anything involving Boros auras or combat tricks, they’ve got you covered. Iroas, God of Victory is basically the best Boros combat commander, offering two incredibly powerful abilities if your team plans to win the game by turning sideways… plus he kills in three hits. Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer is great for those “Blazing Boros” style equipment decks, which leverage red’s artifact synergy and white’s equipment synergy for explosive assaults.

And then there’s Gisela, Blade of Goldnight. While she’s probably the best commander for a Boros Burn deck, a) burn archetypes are the hardest thing to get right in a format like Commander (where the 40 life starting point makes it harder, even without the decks that will easily hit 100 life over the course of a game). And b) if that deck is going to be any good, I don’t think it wants an eight-drop Commander. Even with Mana Flare shenanigans, which are risky, the ideal way to treat a card like Furnace of Rath (which is basically what Gisela is) is to drop it and immediately fire off some burn to take advantage of that. Gisela makes that difficult. Were she a four-drop with significantly reduced stats, like a 2/2 for 1RWW, that I could get behind. But Boros Angels always have to be combat powerhouses, and that means they’re typically overcosted for what they do.

Side note: I wrote this paragraph without realizing Gisela was the reprinted Commander. Interesting this round of reprinted commanders are universally harder to cast than their new counterparts. That was almost certainly intentional.

What makes Anya interesting is not her Baneslayer Angel aspect (i.e. being a five-drop whose primary purpose is to win the game). What makes her interesting is her relationship to Fateful Hour and the vampiric “bloodied” condition from Zendikar. These life-dependent abilities tend to be wildly distributed in power level in Commander. Serra Ascendant, for example, is grossly O.P. Blood Baron of Vizkopa, an attempt to fix those numbers, is far weaker, likely weaker than was even intended. Bloodghast’s haste ability is occasionally relevant, but Fateful Hour is almost never relevant, since it’s almost as easy to kill a player from six life as it is from five in Commander, so people just leave you there. Anya does it simple; half starting life total, and it doesn’t require the universal clause that ruins cards like Howltooth Hollow. She’ll be good with Heartless Hidetsugu, but that doesn’t seem like a ton of fun from my perspective.

All calico fire-sphinxes are women. Some of them are also wizards.

Many decent commanders replicate the effects of a powerful spell or enchantment. They make good commanders because they ensure you have access to a powerful piece of whatever interaction you’re shooting for, which allows you to build around them to a greater degree than you otherwise might. Arjun, the Shifting Flame is a creature version of a powerful enchantment, so you would assume she’d be good. The thing is, that enchantment is Mindmoil, and I don’t know that it offers a ton of interesting interactions.

The best thing I can think to do with Arjun is to take advantage of her ability to stack the bottom of your library, perhaps for some eventual Etherium-Horn Sculptor ridiculousness. That would take some effort, though. Not a ton, but definitely some effort, and the payoff seems minimal when you’re restricted to a color combination with only a single card that cascades.

Which is not to say Arjun isn’t powerful; I imagine, in the end, she’ll show up a lot as a Storm enabler, since many of the spells in that archetype are relatively interchangeable. But I’ve never really enjoyed Storm in Commander, so I could be misassessing the archetype. Perhaps it’s a hopeful misassessment; I’m not a huge fan of decks built around the sole goal of going off.

This dude is basically perfection.

Oh my gods, I am in love with this card. One of the things that Orzhov had been missing was a good lifegain commander. I went over the eight Orzhov commanders in my last article (which, again, was written prior to the full reveal), and this was a weak spot. That they printed a commander specifically for that deck, and then that they costed that commander at two mana… it’s a good day. You don’t see a ton of excellent commanders at two mana.

Is his ability the fastest? Maybe! If you build around it, it seems like it could be. Soul Sisters, for example, is a package which gains you life often, if not a large amount at any given point. In that way, this commander may be even better than he seems; with a good Ranger of Eos package offering access to cards like Viscera Seer as well, there might be some neat things you can do to take advantage of this ability. At the very least it’s cheap, effective spot removal on a cheap stick, and that is definitely worth something.

Also, the prospect of dropping this as a 4/4 on turn two with the help of a Soul Warden tickles my fancy a bit. Add in extort, and you can trigger a lot of distinct lifegains to power this dude up lickety-split.

What was their distribution process for these fake names? Two A-names, two K-names, and an M-name? Give the back half of the alphabet some love!

Anyway, Kaseto, Orochi Archmage is a card that will see two uses. First, it will see some play as a means of pushing through damage in an Edric, Spymaster of Trest-style deck. The problem is, she’s competitive with a lot of commons if she’s just serving that function, and some of those commons are cheaper.

Her other role, and it’s her primary one, is providing the Snake deck with a commander. One of the neat things that Kamigawa got right was the Sakura-Tribe, and there are several interesting Snake lords in that block that haven’t seen total support over the years. The problem is that many of the best Snakes (like Coiling Oracle) have a Simic color identity, and there wasn’t really an ideal lord for the deck that would allow playing Lorescale Coatl and Mystic Snake alongside Shisato, Whispering Hunter.

And Kaseto and Shisato seem like they would make some terrifyingly powerful music together.

He’s tiny, right? I have difficulties making out the art in some of these heavy-on-the-hunter-green palates.

This card is gross, but perhaps not in a commander role. The immediate potential for this card should be fairly obvious… it combos rather well with Ghave, Guru of Spores. I suppose, if you’re into theme decks, it lets you play as those annoying flying things from Halo.

I could never get a bead on those damn things.

I mean, weirdly this card looks like it might be well positioned to kill with Commander Damage. Stuff dies all the time in Commander, and if you can throw a Darksteel Plate on her you can get a huge boost from a card like Pernicious Deed. The most interesting thing about this card may be its symmetry; all of the Mazireks on the table trigger together, so you can potentially ride someone else’s wake of destruction to great effect.

Conclusion

This, I think, is a good crop of second tier commanders. Interestingly, none of them were characters with whom I was already familiar, like their primaries were. Perhaps I have not delved deep enough into the lore (I find there’s minimal payoff considering the hassle of navigating the Wizards.com website), but this is a good type of product to use to expand the lore. I have no expectation of ever seeing The Mimeoplasm again, for example, but I’m still super glad they printed it.

Jess Stirba has spent some stupid amount of money on this product so far.