The Gatewatch 1(W/U)(R/G)
Sorcery
Search your library for a planeswalker card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
The Gatewatch can be your commander.
Went with hybrid mana to make it a little easier to cast, and lost the restriction on specific planeswalkers.
I'm not really interested in adding black to the card because I'm not interested in another five color commander.
In a world where Urza was a card, I imagine him as being these four colors.
Also, found better art!
Alternatively, what if it was a planeswalker?
The Gatewatch 1(W/U)(R/G)
Planeswalker - Chandra Gideon Jace Nissa
-1: Search your library for a planeswalker card that shares a type with ~, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
The Gatewatch can be your commander.
Loyalty 1
Thanks to the planeswalker uniqueness rule this is much closer to a regular commander since if you have any of the four planeswalkers in play, this will not be able to be activated (although you could sacrifice all the other planeswalkers to search up a new one.)
Why not just make it a legendary creature that sacrifices itself for the effect? I know that it has some different applications, but with black being the primary creature recursion color, i dont think it'd be a problem. Making a sorcery a commander is just - weird. Doesn't make sense flavorfully.
2 reasons come to mind. First, that creature could be pumped and get a commander damage kill. Second, a creature you can sac to do something has a lot of other synergies I didn't want to explore.
Also, because in this case your commander is a group rather than an individual, I think having a sorcery as your commander makes perfect sense flavor wise.
Thoughts: on a card-on-card comparison, this is more expensive and much harder to cast Call the Gatewatch that is a lot more limited on search targets. I get you need to balance it because of the commander recursion mechanic, but every commander card already has that mechanic without needing balance. I guess what makes this card different is that it's immediately sent to the Commander Zone and able to be recast.
Originally I was just going to use Call of the Gatewatch as the commander and only put those 4 planeswalkers in the deck but I decided it would be better to have something a little more specific with the right color indentity. I do think you're right that it is too expensive, and I considered hybrid mana as an option, but I didn't want to make it so easy to cast. (Especially since it would keep going to the command zone from the stack.)
I'm just here to point out that the Gatewatch will eventually have a black member (very soon) and this card in general not being inclusive enough to new planeswalkers regardless of color.
I admit I am hardly a storyline expert (I haven't kept up much at all lately.) but I was not able to find much regarding the Gatewatch so I used mostly what was on cards in the set. I'd love a link that points out the black planeswalker that will be joining. As for this card, think of it as The First Gatewatch since cards usually exist in the time frame of the set they appear in.
Search your library for a Chandra, Gideon, Jace or Nissa planeswalker card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
~ can be your commander.
They keep watch to protect the multiverse.
I really wanted to build a new commander deck around the members of the Gatewatch but there are no 4 color commanders so I came up with this. It's a much more restricted Call of the Gatewatch that you can cast again and again (at the cost of 2 more each time.)
Plus, the "Draft Matters" cards have a specific slot that replaces basic lands, according to the wiki. It's not like opening a Lore Seeker prevents you from potentially pulling a Dack Fayden.
Could you link to a source from where the information about replacing lands come from?
I also had trouble finding that earlier:
Quote from Wild Eep »
The draft-specific cards are in the land slot, according to this feature article (See the Let's Draft section).
From the article:
Quote from Dave Humphreys »
Without doubt, it was most fun trying to work in the space of the draft-influencing cards. After all, that was what really sets this product apart from the rest.
Ultimately, we arrived at having one draft-influencing card per pack. These cards replaced the basic land slot.
I wrote an article about a mini-cube called a "square". In it I highlighted a RtR Square I had finished. Here's an excerpt:
I first started experimenting with this concept during M13 but solidified a build during Return to Ravnica Block and by Pro Tour Gatecrash in Montreal I had a pretty good limited style Square that I would take with me to most events and play pretty regularly in the hotel or at the airport. My goal was to make every guild draftable but in the end that was not attainable due to the sheer number of gold cards, so instead I started looking at three color combinations and it started to feel a lot like how Dragon’s Maze would end up. Cards that unsurprisingly shined in this environment were the Keyrunes and Guildgates. We even discovered an unintentional 4 or 5 color draft strategy filled with removal and Keyrunes we called “Keyrune Control”. Through playtesting the Square with other friends I adapted it to this and made it possible to beat that strategy if you saw it coming, with either fast aggro or more pure control strategies. Despite that, we didn’t nerf Keyrune Control and it is still a popular and powerful archetype in the RtR Block Square.
The mechanic for GDS2 was Gold Counters, there were like Poison Counters and could only be used as colorless mana. I'm not saying there won't be more Gold Token making cards but it's unrelated to that mechanic except in name and perhaps inspiration.
The Gatewatch 1(W/U)(R/G)
Sorcery
Search your library for a planeswalker card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
The Gatewatch can be your commander.
Went with hybrid mana to make it a little easier to cast, and lost the restriction on specific planeswalkers.
I'm not really interested in adding black to the card because I'm not interested in another five color commander.
In a world where Urza was a card, I imagine him as being these four colors.
Also, found better art!
Alternatively, what if it was a planeswalker?
The Gatewatch 1(W/U)(R/G)
Planeswalker - Chandra Gideon Jace Nissa
-1: Search your library for a planeswalker card that shares a type with ~, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
The Gatewatch can be your commander.
Loyalty 1
Thanks to the planeswalker uniqueness rule this is much closer to a regular commander since if you have any of the four planeswalkers in play, this will not be able to be activated (although you could sacrifice all the other planeswalkers to search up a new one.)
It's cropped from the set's key art, available on Wizards' site.
2 reasons come to mind. First, that creature could be pumped and get a commander damage kill. Second, a creature you can sac to do something has a lot of other synergies I didn't want to explore.
Also, because in this case your commander is a group rather than an individual, I think having a sorcery as your commander makes perfect sense flavor wise.
Originally I was just going to use Call of the Gatewatch as the commander and only put those 4 planeswalkers in the deck but I decided it would be better to have something a little more specific with the right color indentity. I do think you're right that it is too expensive, and I considered hybrid mana as an option, but I didn't want to make it so easy to cast. (Especially since it would keep going to the command zone from the stack.)
I admit I am hardly a storyline expert (I haven't kept up much at all lately.) but I was not able to find much regarding the Gatewatch so I used mostly what was on cards in the set. I'd love a link that points out the black planeswalker that will be joining. As for this card, think of it as The First Gatewatch since cards usually exist in the time frame of the set they appear in.
Sorcery
Search your library for a Chandra, Gideon, Jace or Nissa planeswalker card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
~ can be your commander.
They keep watch to protect the multiverse.
I really wanted to build a new commander deck around the members of the Gatewatch but there are no 4 color commanders so I came up with this. It's a much more restricted Call of the Gatewatch that you can cast again and again (at the cost of 2 more each time.)
Really excited to play this deck next week!
Yeah the "discount" is more of joke. Should I start a twitter campaign? I'm not super concerned with such matters these days.
ON TOPIC:
Personally the Mystic Gate in the OP looks wrong to me somehow. It's probably real though. All the expedition lands look weird in pictures.
I also had trouble finding that earlier:
From the article:
And here's a link to the whole article: Presenting the Square
I'm having trouble finding the source of this info. Can you point me to a link?