My own take away here is
Pros:
- Snow is back - It keeps snow basics affordable and I do think that the snow effects are cool. Some effects like skred are incredibly welcome to some of the less powered colors.
- Changelings - I think there are a lot of lesser played tribes that could totally use a few commander playable changelings to help fill their ranks.
- Fetchable duals at common - I am totally blown away that they did this. They could have made this entire cycle of 10 lands rare and I don't think anyone would have been surprised or really even complain all that much about it. Seeing this cycle at common is just crazy.
- Runes - Auras have historically under performed and required build around strategies which equipment have not needed to nearly the same extent. Runes seem like a small buff to auras but I wonder in what frequency we will see them moving forward.
- Gods are back - People love gods, no real surprise here.
- Snow is back - While I love snow effects, I fear that we might get more towards it becoming the norm to run snow as we see more and more of it. Back when we just had ice age and cold snap there weren't many effects to push people to play snow and it felt more special. I worry as we see more returns to snow that it might become the norm rather than feeling somewhat special.
- Gods feel less godly - honestly, the flip design is cool its just that the creature side of these gods feels just like a generic mythic creature rather than a god to me. Maybe its the lack of indestructible or something but these mostly don't feel like gods to me? I feel like the gods at rare rarity perhaps should not have been gods.
- Changelings only in UG - I keep asking why all the cool things go to only. I get from a color identity perspective but I was really looking forward to some playable tribal changelings in some of the other colors like primarily red and white which need some freaking help and ohhh look its just UG again. Getting tired of getting all the cool things lately. Beyond this, stop making legendary multi colored changelings. The need of changelings in commander is mono color or colorless changelings that we can run in the 99.
- Where are all the runes? - They came out with a new mechanic, gave us a tutor for them, and then create only 5 runes all of which are uncommon rarity giving us only one per color? Am I crazy to be like, can we have a rare / mythic rune? I sure hope we see more runes soon because when I saw the dwarf rune tutor I was expecting kind of a lot more than what we actually got.
- Poison is back - I guess for some this is a pro. I think the design of Fynn, the Fangbearer is actually great, its more that like we walk a fine line where poison is kind of ok as long as it isn't super easy and achievable in this format. If poison got pushed and had a lot more viable cards its possible that commander would have to change its rules. I just don't find poison to be an overly healthy mechanic for this format even though I think that Fynn is a really cool card.