Love the thread! Like you, this "year of Commander" has had the unfortunate timing of being during a Pandemic, and as a result after an initial blast of play around TBD (seriously I logged a lot of games post-release of that set), I effectively have barely played for the other 9 months of the year. Worse, a combination of lack of play, lack of funds, and lack of interest (spurred by product overload and the sour taste of The Walking Dead fiasco) mean I bought a fair amount of TBD and then almost nothing until Commander Legends (which I got like 9 packs of for Christmas and have barely played with yet). So a lot of cards I love this year will be cards I love in theory, minus Theros.
A few standouts:
Reprints:
Arcane Signet - I am grateful that after printing this in the Brawl decks last year, it got a ton of reprints to drive its price down to something closer to sane.
Path of Ancestry - See above but even moreso; this thing dropped from like 6-7 or whatever (too much for me to seek out more than my two copies I owned) to a buck, allowing me to own a playset. Given how much Tribal I play that's a godsend, although this is a card I'm excited to test more even in non-tribal decks as a triland that also lets me scry whenever I cast my Commander (meaning that as long as my commander isn't a Planeswalker, this ought to be strictly better than a
Nomad Outpost or
Rakdos Guildgate and comparable to a Triome or Temple). Previously, the price made this too rich for a player like me to justify ever running this outside of dedicated 2+ color tribal decks, but now I can get a little more experimental with it.
New Cards:
Underworld Breach - I haven't been able to test it a ton, but so far I've been impressed. At worse, this is a red
Regrowth but it enables so many durdly nonsense plays. It's a great card, and one I'm pumped to playtest more. Not really a hidden gem - it's one of the top 5 most played cards from Theros: Beyond Death that isn't a reprint - but it has cemented itself as a card that's worthy of that hype and adoration, and it's just a fun and interesting new effect for Red.
Heliod, Sun-Crowned - I want to rep my boy! On EDHREC's "The 600" series, Heliod was flagged by the esteemed author as being good, but "not what people want in monowhite", and destined to not break 600 decks on EDHRECs within his first year of existence. I posted to say:
Hawk wrote:I think you are wrong on Heliod - as a Commander who self-fuels Dawn of Hope and Well of Lost Dreams, easily fuels Tome of Legends, and highly incentivizes a "soul-sister"/token build to utilize alongside Mentor of the Meek, I think he sort of sneakily helps white's draw engine problems. And the combos, plus the raw power, plus all the angles - I think he'll crack 600 and I will go further and say that he'll displace Sram as most popular Mono-W commander. I do think caution is fair and I would be shocked if he cracks 1000 and puts mono-W on the map the same way that Feather did Boros, but having had the opportunity to test him our at a local Commander night last night the dude is the real deal.
Now, I may not be right about Heligod 2.0 replacing Sram as white's most played Commander (although as of today, he's within 88 decks!) but Heliod did indeed become the 2nd-most played white Commander and break "The 600" club. Sure enough, Heliod has proven a great head to Monowhite Lifegain decks, monowhite combo decks (where one can use
Enlightened Tutor,
Recruiter of the Guard, and
Ranger of Eos to easily and quickly go find
Walking Ballista,
Triskelion, or
Aetherflux Reservoir), and even a reasonable head to STAX and Hatebear decks as a cheap, resilient piece of inevitability. My own take on the deck is a terror of our local meta, attacking on a ton of angles with ruthless efficiency. He's just a great card to enable a fun archetype and make it seriously competitive, and I think he'll just keep going up as WotC keeps trying to "fix" white in EDH.
Soul-Guide Lantern: This has become my #1 favorite graveyard hate piece, and I've happily played it over and above
Relic of Progenitus and
Tormod's Crypt. While it doesn't cycle AND nuke, like Relic, it is asymmetrical which is huge and is so while also hitting all opponents (unlike Crypt) and having the option to cycle and to just surgically remove one obnoxious card while we wait for the right moment to crack. I've been really impressed and pleased with it so far, and while it doesn't replace
Nihil Spellbomb and
Bojuka Bog for B/x decks, for decks without skulls it is a great little utility piece.
War Room: This is the kind of help to monocolored decks (especially monowhite, red, and green) that I was looking for.
4 and 1 life to draw a card is still a bit steep, but in the land slot it makes for a great improvement to prior options. I'm loving my copy and want to acquire way more.
Partners: I want to close talking about the mechanic, rather than any one card. I was intensely skeptical of partners being such a focus of Commander Legends, fearing it would re-usher in an era of homogenization and "good stuff.dec" for EDH. However, so far in playing around with partners both physically (with Jeska + Faliths and Miara + Numa) and in theorcrafting (with Malcolm + Breeches and Rebbec + Glacian), they do the entire opposite. I adore how much more creativity and flexibility they offer a deck's gameplan. For instance, because Miara is "insurance against wipes and a draw engine" and Numa is "a mana sink and win condition", the deck gets to diversify more and run more fun niche cards and more interactions. It also in play improves the deck function, saving on mulligan time and increasing the number of "playable hands" by having an effective extra card. I look forward to tinkering more with partners, and will gladly accept more being printed - it was a good mechanic and a great idea.
It's too soon to judge too many other cards - I simply haven't played with them yet. I will give a few cards that have underwhelmed, though:
Whirlwind Denial - I wanted this to be good, as ability counters feel important, but it's just too narrow. It fails to break combos (they just do it again), and it's too unreliable to counter spells. I tested it in a lot of decks, but it is in no decks now.
Bala Ged Recovery // Bala Ged Sanctuary and the other MDFCs: It's very early, so I will keep testing, but my initial testing is that these are mostly not good enough. If I need a land, I should run a land. If I need a
Regrowth, I should just run Regrowth. There are a lot fewer decks than I initially believed that want a card that is "either/or". Psychologically, these have the old "Kavu Titan" problem that makes them worse in practice than a cycling land. For those unfamiliar, MaRo often tells a story of stepping out to do some playtesting in Invasion. He won a ton of games, back-to-back, with an early prototype of a
Fires of Yavimaya they were testing. Then, one of the other designers pointed out that the
Grizzly Bears in his deck were supposed to be
Kavu Titan. MaRo proceeded to lose several games in a row with this knowledge, because now he felt compelled to hold his titans for value instead of playing out the 2/2 he needed to win the game. I know, in theory, that I shouldn't be holding a situational spell when I'm about to miss a land drop...but in practice, it feels bad to lay these as lands man. I dunno, like I said I literally just started playing with them after getting some for the holidays, but so far I think they're a lot less powerful and universal than I had originally thought.
