Welcome back to The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - the series where we look at every new set and analyze the new potential commanders to see whether they'll be worth building. We look at their potential power, consider whether their design looks fun or interesting, and finally give them a grade based on whether they'll be good (fun to play, a positive contributor to the format) bad (weak and/or uninteresting, not worth building) or ugly (those broken commanders that make you groan when your opponent decides to play them). And sometimes we remember that we're supposed to have a western theme. Yee haw!
We're back to Strixhaven, the plane that boldly asks the question "what if school, but magic?" It focuses around enemy pairs, some of which have substantially different takes from their classic Ravnica interpretations (like RW's Lorehold, which focuses around graveyard interaction rather than overt aggression) and some which don't (like UR's Prismari, spellslinging as always). There's a decent number of legends in this set compared to other universe-within releases, so let's go ahead and jump in.
There's a grand total of 25 colorless instants and sorceries right now. Even if that didn't force you to run a bunch of random mediocre cards, that's not enough density to make this a very viable option. Plus some of the best ones self-exile, have X in their cost, or care about the mana spent to cast them. Nope.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I've actually built a semi-successful deck around using Korlash, Heir to Blackblade's grandeur ability, but trying to do the same in colorless is significantly harder, and with a significantly less powerful payoff. Beyond that, he's just a turn 2 mana rock. Which is nice for consistency, but really not interesting enough to justify building a deck around, especially a colorless one.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This doesn't really do much. You can pair it with some other etb blink creature to keep triggering etbs, but that's already possible on a bigger scale with Yorion, Sky Nomad, and requires a lot of setup to do anything. And then the endstep trigger is pretty much nothing, and even more nothing if you're blinking this back in again. But that's uncommon legends for you.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Jadzi looks like a sweet limited rare, but she's a bit linear and telegraphed as a commander. She doesn't really offer much synergy outside of ramping as hard as possible, casting her Gelatinous Genesis for a big number, and hoping they survive to attack. Since casting the spell is your game-ender, even blinking her isn't generally very useful. If you don't get wiped (and no one else wins the game some other way), you shouldn't need another cast. I could see this being decent in a low-powered group, since she is fairly inevitable with her low cost and increasingly powerful spell, but she's going to be way too slow and predictable for anything beyond bracket 2, I think.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This is mostly a glorified Mulldrifter. Sure, you could blink it, but I think there's much better options for blue blink decks, both as a blink target or a blink enabler.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Arnyn is going to be a popular card for a lot of aristocrats decks, but I think is a bit vanilla to run the show. Being mono-black is also a big knock compared to orzhov, rakdos, or golgari commanders, which offer a lot of additional sacrifice synergy. If she was really unique or powerful, maybe she'd surpass that downside, but she's similar to a lot of existing aristocrat effects, and while she's pretty strong, she drains less overall life than something like Elas Il-Kor, Sadistic Pilgrim, and while being able to focus fire on a priority target is nice, it's not enough to make her a more appealing commander than other options.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
There is a lot going on here for a 3-drop commander. Though for commander, the first two abilities are pretty low-impact, so we're mostly focused on the endstep trigger. It's a surprisingly powerful one for a commander this cheap, copying Rodolf Duskbringer for half the mana value and no ability cost. You do need to provide your own lifegain, but you probably wanted to do that anyway. The biggest restriction here is the color, as white has more lifegain effects than black, but there's still plenty of good options to choose from, and the payoff of a free reanimate on each of your turns is well worth the setup cost. Not scary powerful necessarily, but very solid.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
For an uncommon, this isn't half bad. Sacrificing artifacts is something red does pretty well (either via expendable tokens, or eggs-style nontokens), and copying spells is a nice payoff. Red isn't the most impactful color for copying spells, but many rummaging spells become much more powerful card advantage when copied, and treasure generation can provide a dual purpose of sac fodder and pumping out big x-mana burn spells to finish the game. Probably still an uphill battle with the limited options in red, but I think an interesting one.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
With pretty minimal effort, this makes tokens equal to the number of lands you control. There's plenty of good green nonbasics. Paired with trample, it's not awful. Still kinda underpowered and a bit boring, but you could definitely do worse. And being able to activate the ability at instant speed means you can keep open mana for interaction, while this guy provides a reasonable-ish wincon, which can be scaled somewhat with some token copying effects, or just ramping out more lands. Not the most unique commander, but functional enough for an uncommon.
Final Judgment: Bad, but good effort.
Final Judgment: Bad, but good effort.
Unfortunately, while the prepare mechanic is interesting, the uncommon commanders aren't terribly impressive. Realistically even if prepare was completely free, 2 for a +1/+1 counter at sorcery speed just doesn't really do it in commander. You could just run Jenara, Asura of War as a commander instead and not have to mess around with the mechanic at all. And the setup condition works against spellslinging, which prepare generally wants to synergize with.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This is an efficient rate for a spell-copier, although the cost of copying is pretty steep. It synergizes very nicely with token production, though, which I think gives it a fairly clear direction to head in, and lacking blue means it's not drawn towards time magic (thank god). Like a lot of Lorehold commanders, this goes in an interesting direction for RW, and I think a fun one.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
This looks more interesting than it actually is. The whole first two abilities are pretty minor - the extra stats are basically irrelevant on a creature you don't want to attack with, and getting a 1-mana rebate on a couple spells doesn't add up to much. The one thing it could do is, if you can devise a 1-mana way to add +1 counters, go infinite, but I think that's probably more effort than is worthwhile ([[Treetop Snarespinner + Training Grounds?). So that mostly leaves a guy who poops out X mana X/X tokens. Which doesn't really seem like something that's good enough in commander, though at least it's instant-speed so you could use it as a value generator for a control deck, I suppose.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Honestly, I'm impressed that WotC only put one tribal commander in the set. I know that took restraint. While none of the types are particularly effective as a tribe, the payoff here is pretty big, and especially powerful with the pest tokens from this set. I'll bet Minwu, White Mage feels pretty pathetic costing more mana, having fewer colors, and having a narrower tribe. Blech isn't really my thing, and he's probably pretty reliant on keeping the commander in play, but I'm willing to tolerate one tribal commander per set.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Much like Abigale, I can basically dismiss this just by reading the spell he casts. He's a reasonably efficient beater (at least for limited) but in terms of commander, there's way more powerful and interesting options with fewer hoops to jump through, unfortunately.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Lluwen is probably the most interesting of the prepare commanders. His spell is, while not very powerful, at least very efficient, and the enabler is both easy to do and very repeatable. If you're building a graveyard deck, I'm not sure that exiling your creature from the grave is necessarily what you want to be doing, so he's probably still not the best option for a BG graveyard deck, but there's definitely some amount of power here if you can enable it.
Final Judgment: Bad, but only a little
Final Judgment: Bad, but only a little
I'm not generally a big fan of cost cheating, because it usually results in casting the same tired bombs as every other cost-cheating commander. But Lorehold switches things up by only enabling instants and sorceries, in colors that aren't known for their big bomby spells. As a result, there's weird formerly-homeless cards like Hit the Mother Lode seeing big play. Add that into the chaotic nature of miracle, and I think he's likely a crowd-pleasing commander.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Man, this card bums me out. It's so close to being an all-timer for me, but then it trips at the finish line. Why does it have a sorcery-speed restriction on it? It makes stealing enemy counterspells borderline useless, and stealing other interaction significantly less profitable. I would gladly trade away her first ability to remove that damned timing restriction. Sigh. Anyway, she's still pretty cool, I guess. I do think the first ability drives the playstyle towards "play literally anything, whenever you can" to profit from the counter payoff while going wide, though there are definitely more efficient ways to buff a squad once you've factored in all the costs and setup required. Stealing spells is definitely fun and cool territory, though it can be pretty hit-and-miss, especially if people start sandbagging their best spells to keep you from taking them. But despite my annoyance at the design decisions and the probably middling power level, I do still think this will be a neat addition to the format.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Man, I wish storm had never been conceived. What an utterly unpleasant thing to exist in the game. Now you can point out that 7 mana is a ton for a commander with a big target on his head, and that niv-mizzet is cheaper and stronger, that his ward isn't a big deal in this format—and that's all true. But when I look at this guy, I know he's only ever going to create miserable games of magic. And for that, he's going exactly where he should.
Final Judgment: One copy of "ugly" for every spell cast this turn
Final Judgment: One copy of "ugly" for every spell cast this turn
Cascade has always been my biggest "not my cup of tea" mechanic. Random value was just never my thing. That said, I don't think it's bad for the game. And at 6 mana with no protection, Quandrix seems at least somewhat balanced. His condition is definitely easier to meet than Imoti, Celebrant of Bounty or Abaddon, the Despoiler, but I've never considered them particularly powerful commanders. The nastiest thing that cascade can enable theoretically is casting a no-mana-value spell like inevitable betrayal off a 1-drop, but considering you need to cast a 6-drop commander first, I don't think that's a real issue (though it might be worth throwing in). I don't think Quandrix is going to be an easy fight, but I don't think he's unreasonable either, so overall he sits in a decent spot, even if it won't be on my side of the table.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
This is an interesting spellslinger commander. At first blush, not being able to recast the spell seems like a big knock, but considering this is a toolbox ability on a commander, it's probably fair, especially when there are 2-card infinites like Turnabout + reiterate available. The real selling point, though, is the treasure production, which comes surprisingly easy. You can cast some random cantrip, interaction, or even an incoming board wipe, and get yourself a treasure. They also set up a big turn by making the steep cost of his sorcery more palatable. For a 2-drop, that seems like a pretty solid payoff, and I like that he incentivizes a turn-over-turn spellslinger rather than the "waste the next 30 minutes of your playgroup's time" like Prismari does.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
There's sure a lot of instant/sorcery copying in this set, isn't there? Much like Aziza, Silverquill is saved from the ugly bin by not being in blue and thus not enabling time magic. Black does have some fairly gnarly spells, like Exsanguinate and its variants, but realistically mono-black can still probably hit lethal values just as easily, so I don't think it's problematic. I do think it's a bit odd that they went with the casualty keyword here, though, rather than just "you may sacrifice a creature". Are there really enough 0-power creatures to make the distinction relevant, when casualty requires way more reminder text than it would take to just spell out the ability, and casualty isn't part of the set otherwise? At least it's more concise on the full art, but unfortunately the full art looks kinda…jank. Who knew dragons liked vaping?
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Do you play Tatyova, Benthic Druid and want to make your deck significantly worse? Have I got a commander for you! Joking aside, while enabling Tam is quite easy, and he does trigger spellcasting things, I don't think he's realistically capable of holding a candle to the power of the existing landfall=draw commanders. Both because of the extra cost involved in getting the draw, and because it can't trigger repeatedly from multiple landfalls at once. He's not a terrible card overall, so you can definitely make a decent deck out of him if you want, but it does feel kinda boring to get a depowered version of an eight-year-old commander.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I feel like this name had to be a joke because this doesn't look balanced at all. Affinity has always been a dangerous keyword, and this guy has it AND gives it out? I guess the idea is supposed to be that you have to balance creatures with noncreatures, but realistically there are multifarious ways to make tokens via spells, which are also often the most efficient ways to increase your number of bodies. With every creature making additional creature production more efficient (as well as any big-finisher spells), this looks like it will get out of hand quickly, and not even targeted removal will save you when he can be easily replayed for 2 mana turn after turn. The only way to even slow it down looks like board wipes, board wipes, and more board wipes, and that's not the sort of game that's likely to be a good time for anyone.
Final Judgment: Shockingly Ugly
Final Judgment: Shockingly Ugly
See, the difference between this guy and Lorehold is that Lorehold isn't in blue. Once you get blue, you've got expropriate, you've got enter the infinite, you've got time stretch...just a whole bunch of stuff you really don't want to be cast for free. And if you're paying 7 mana to get this on the field, you'd better believe you're going to want to slam the biggest, dumbest spells to get your money's worth, leaving the only interaction point counterspells, meaning most colors can't do much to stop you. We just can't let blue have spell cheating things, I'm sorry. It's unfun every time.
Final Judgment: Ugly
Final Judgment: Ugly
Oddly, this reminds me most of The Wise Mothman. It's a flyer that becomes a huge threat by getting counters based on the number of opponents. Sure, you could put the counters elsewhere, but considering that Augusta needs to be the one attacking for anyone to get counters, you're probably going to want to put them on her so she can attack safely, and once that's already happened, you might as well make her a lethal threat. As far as how quickly she grows, though, I'm not sure it'll necessarily be reliable in the early-game, and white's mill options are pretty slim pickings. It's also just sort of a boring strategy, I feel. It's nice to get grave hate alongside your wincon, but beyond that, I don't think there's much going on here.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Of all the payoffs for x-spells in this set, this is definitely the least interesting. All he does is become a big dumb trampling beater. He acts like he's also supposed to support your other hydras or whatever by giving them trample, but c'mon, he's literally going to have the combined power of your other hydras, and he's a commander, so who cares about them? Of course, in reality, he's also going to be pretty slow to grow since he doesn't provide any enhancements to your inefficient x-spells. So he's both weak and boring, really.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Sort of a vanilla first ability here, one we haven't seen before. The once-per-turn limiter keeps it reasonably balanced (hi Korvold, Fae-Cursed King!) but most decks that sacrifice can do it on every turn, so this can easily draw 4 per turn cycle in the right context. The activated ability, on the other hand, seems pretty weak. Fairly heavy activation cost, and caring about power generally goes against what a sacrifice deck is going to want to do. I guess it's at least a backup sac outlet, in case your draw is weak. Anyway, the end result is that Dina feels pretty basic, but I think that's probably fine. If you want a GB sac deck and don't have someone else in mind, slot her in and she'll give you what you need.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
For 4 mana with haste and evasion, Excava has a pretty quick impact. The most difficult part is getting something interesting into your graveyard, as RW doesn't have many mill options, but there's lots of red rummage effects to get stuff going, and you're only generally bringing one thing back per turn anyway. It does run the risk of having a bit of a low ceiling, especially since it's actually returning the card instead of making a token that could be copied. But with its low cost and immediate impact, I think it ends up playing as more of a reliable value engine than a game-ending bomb.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Soon as I saw this, I knew what the most popular build would be. Whee, we found another commander that combos with persist. Great. And GB has a lot of persist creatures, compared to other color combos. Theoretically maybe there's an interesting build in here somewhere, but whenever I see someone playing this loathsome frog, I'm going to assume they're playing a tedious linear combo deck and act accordingly.
Final Judgment: Ugly
Final Judgment: Ugly
BW auras has been something they've pushed a couple times now, and this might be the most interesting and viable option. The draw ability is somewhat limited since it can only typically trigger once per turn, but that's still a lot of card draw, and that draw will make it easier to continually draw more enchantments to keep goading creatures. The biggest risk here is that if you run out of enchantments to goad (or Killian gets removed) then you might get killed by your own auras if you overcommit. I don't think forced attacks are typically a very powerful archetype, but I do think they're reasonably fun.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Odd split that this guy wants—you need spells to trigger him, but then you also want creatures with nice ETBs (and ideally the ability to attack safely). The build-around seems a bit anemic here, since you're only copying one creature per turn for the attack trigger, and casting one random cheap cantrip each turn isn't that interesting. I do think this deck could be alright, but it feels a bit weak and a bit scattershot, so I'm just a little underimpressed.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Much like Quartwood Crasher, Primo becomes a self-sustaining machine pretty quickly, especially since he can trigger off each of your opponents, and more than once with double strike or extra combats. While hydras are the most obvious way to go, I'm more interested in cards like Bedrock Tortoise and Yorvo, Lord of Garenbrig that deal damage more efficiently. Primo himself is pretty middling with that hefty 3 mana overhead, so you're probably going to cast him for 4 most of the time just to get him on the field. Once he starts to accelerate, though, you're in perfect colors to protect your enormous board, and shouldn't even need to bother casting other creatures. It's probably not a fast enough plan for high-powered tables, but for medium power I think it's going to feel pretty cool to build a rapidly accelerating board from next to nothing.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Quintorius's triggered ability is doing most of the heavy lifting here. With fairly reasonable support, he can trigger several times a turn—even little baubles like relic of progenitus can make a token per turn on their own, and his +1 ability ensures you've got a solid amount of fodder in addition to the card advantage, and it gets even better when you're dumping flashback, retrace, and other graveyard-ability cards in that can trigger themselves. His -4 is pretty bland and telegraphed, but it's a decent finisher if you don't hit something more interesting. It is funny that a mythic commander-set planeswalker is still pretty similar to the uncommon version from his first appearance, but considering he costs less, has a powerful card-advantage ability, and a build-in finisher, he's definitely a significant step up, and seems like a fun direction for a red-white deck.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
I've looked at her for a while, and I'm just not that into Rootha. She has a reasonably powerful ability, particularly with anything that discounts itself with delve, convoke, etc, but the payoff just isn't terribly interesting. I do think it's neat that you can get additional tokens with extra combats, but RU is not the color combo where I want to tap out for a big sorcery just to get a decent-sized beater out of it. Am I being unfair? Maybe, but at the end of the day, she just doesn't speak to me.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I want to like this sort of thing, but realistically it's just painfully underpowered. The auras just don't do much of anything. Just to ensure one creature probably doesn't attack you requires multiple turns of effort. There's some synergy just from producing auras, but a lot of enchantress synergy relies on casting them, and you're lacking green for a lot of the stronger synergy pieces. I could see this basically doing nothing in a lot of games, and that's not something you want in your commander.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Theoretically powerful X-spell enabler, if fragile. I'm always skeptical of the X-spell strat because they're rarely efficient, so a commander that enhances their tempo is pretty much mandatory, which Zimone provides. And she can get downright abusive with spell burst. Notably, I think a good version of Zimone will run lots of X-cost instants, to enable ramping her up a lot faster. Counter-doubling cards could also be worthwhile, though I don't think non-doubling counter adding will be worth it considering how efficiently she can grow off X-spells. She's likely a fairly easy to build deck, but I do think she's a good enabler for her deck, and one that will generally create good gameplay because of its interactability, even if a fully-grown Zimone will probably feel overpowered.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Overall take: this set looks very high power, especially compared to TMT (which, despite my dislike of the aesthetics, was well-balanced). The mythic dragons in particular are obviously pushed, and I do suspect that they'll become the scourge of casual tables within the next coulpe weeks. But outside the dragons, there are a lot of strong options, and even the uncommons are fairly interesting. The precon commanders continue to be very dialed-in by wotc, landing within a pretty narrow band of power, none of them egregiously powerful nor particularly weak (with the exception of the mono-colored commanders, that seem to be designed exclusively as support cards).
I see a lot of hype for this set, and I can see why. There's some very splashy designs here, and aesthetically it feels great to be back in-universe. I do feel like the pendulum has swung towards pushing the power level, but I guess if it's going to happen, I'd rather it happen in-universe? At least when I get my face stomped in by some overpowered nonsense, it won't be a cartoon character.
Anyway, it's sunset time, until the next set rolls around in a couple weeks.
So long, cowpokes.
