MTG Salvation

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Den Protector seems playable as a slower, slightly more aggressive Eternal Witness. Sadly without any ETB/blink shenanigans.

I intend to shenanigan with Master of the Veil, Weaver of Lies, and Ixidron in my morph deck.

You realize that Wizards hates you and you can't flip her face-down with Master of the Veil or Weaver of Lies, right?

You can. They're making it so cards that affect morph cards affect megamorph cards. http://tabakrules.tumblr.com/post/112540475469/you-cant-cast-backslide-targeting-a-creature-with

We basically play with the normal rule set, but we're open to letting things slide if they're cool and clearly not a power level consideration, like having two copies of Brothers Yamazaki as your commander. You an throw an un-card in there if you want. Basically, the format's actual rules permit things that are so, so, so high in power level that if you're clearly doing something that's well beneath that cap and it's something that makes sense and is cool, we don't really have a problem with that. "Makes sense and is cool" is an important criteria, though; "I'm splashing black in this white-commander deck for card draw and to be able to tutor for my combo pieces" wouldn't come close to flying in my group.

Quote from Slarg232 »

I'm also kind of surprised we didn't see A) Ultimatums and B) Battlemages yet.

We almost certainly never will, not this block. They said up front that Khans was a wedge set, but not a wedge block. There's some residual wedginess in the set, especially with regards to how keywords are distributed, and there are cards with hybrid activations that form a wedge, but there's not a single card in the set that requires you to play three colors to make it work at full potential (compared to just playing two). Maro explains why they didn't do Ultimatums here: http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/97312861103/why-no-ultimatums#notes

It might be a little bit clunky, but she can get fairly high-impact things out of the yard, like Triskelion, Duplicant, and Pentavus, and largish things, like Clockwork Dragon. You can also chain through Karmic Guide to get something larger, and Karmic Guide even helpfully puts itself back into the graveyard so you can do it again next turn.

Atarka, World Render seems to be where the put the love for commander when it comes to that cycle, which makes some amount of sense, since she is red. On top of having a pretty brutal effect in general, she also only takes two swings - completely unaugmented - to KO somebody with commander damage. (One swing if you can somehow give her +5/+0.)

By "a colorless commander deck is now possible", they might just meant that it's now more feasible for them to print a colorless commander deck as a product. While they technically could do that already, it would require the deck to spend a significant amount of its built-in value just on lands, and not on lands that are making the deck more exciting - just random lands the deck can legally play and that don't have significant drawbacks. Additionally, while the commander products are clearly allowed to have a very high level of overall complexity, they probably pay some attention to complexity, and a deck where your entire manabase is made up of either lands with extra abilities (some of which, such as those on the panoramas, you're never supposed to use, and others of which are very unlikely to ever matter), might be a bit daunting. (Even for experienced players, the extra mass of additional 'live' cards on the table can slow things down a bit.) It's also not a very fun or efficient use of complexity. A colorless basic land makes a colorless commander product easier for Wizards to print.

I get what he's saying. One of the biggest and most important things about the Commander format is that you play the colors that your general is. That's supposed to be a meaningful restriction, and while I don't think that printing a handful of out-of-pie effects suddenly makes color choice meaningless - far, far from it - it certainly moves in that direction. If anything, I'd want to see more powerful, unique effects limited in color so that color choice becomes more meaningful. Commander's singleton nature makes it so that every reasonably efficient monogreen removal spell (or whatever) they print actually matters, because now decks can play two instead of one or three instead of two. If, in pursuit of "shoring up weaknesses", you let colors do things they're really not supposed to do (or expand their ability to do things they're not supposed to do, in the case of instances where there are old cards or Planar Chaos cards that do those things), you gradually slush together the capabilities of different colors.

Cards like Song of the Dryads, while certainly something I'm happy to put in a deck because it's a good effect that I wouldn't have access to much of otherwise, feel like they fundamentally miss the point of the format, more than anything else they print for it. A format where the colors that you're playing are more clearly defined than any other format is the last place they should be targeting cards that do out-of-pie things.

For people wondering why X wasn't a planeswalker in the set, Maro has been clarifying things on the blog:
- The white planeswalker was tied to artifacts from the beginning, making Serra a bad fit.
- The red planeswalker was at no point in design something that Jaya fit.
- In the story, Slobad was only momentarily a planeswalker, so they decided to use a new character instead; he was considered, though.

The PW commanders were all designed as cards, then fit to characters, because making things that function well as PW commanders has a lot of constraints.

Quote from CTNC »

I see all the awesome looking equipment abilities, but all I want to use her for is Soldier Tribal. Her +2 makes Soldiers and her -2 gets Skullclamp back from the graveyard. I'm ether in a very small minority, or the only one who wants to use her in tribal.

I'm definitely considering her for Darien, King of Kjeldor, which I run as a soldier tribal deck. I don't run all that much equipment in the deck, but she only really needs a few. (Without any equipment in play, she's a version of Elspeth, Knight-Errant, which isn't a super enviable thing to be.)

The big issue is that I suspect that the White precon will have several other cards I want for the deck, so five-drops that aren't great fits for the deck might not make it.

I don't know what other people's metas are like, but at least in mine "A deck should have some reasonable answers for planeswalkers" isn't like "a deck should have reasonable answers for Helix Pinnacle". Most decks can answer a Planeswalker unless extra resources go into protecting the planeswalker, and even you can still get it by attrition most of the time if it's really important, especially if the table thinks it't important. That's on top of things that specifically destroy Planeswalkers, which I agree are more niche. A deck that can't deal with planeswalkers at all really is one that I would consider exceptional in its vulnerability to them, not the baseline. If you go out of your way to make a deck that can't hit people with creatures and also doesn't have any specific answers to planeswalkers, then sure, you're not going to be able to answer planeswalkers, but that's an exceptional deck in my eyes.

I 100% believe that the format is better when it's not the case that every deck has to pack a bunch of weird specialized answers for things like Uril-With-Flickerform-On-It or I-made-Sigarda-Indestructable, but "planeswalkers" is a broad enough category of things and one that there are so many answers for in every color that I don't feel bad at all for a deck that can't deal with them, and Planeswalker commanders do nothing to change that. If planeswalker commanders nudge the format very slightly more towards "play creatures and hit people with them", that's fine by me. Sure, it's possible to architect a situation where it's almost impossible to effectively attack you (Pillowfort/Stax/Whatever), but planeswalker commanders are just a way to take advantage of that situation (just like regular planeswalkers are), not some exceptional state of affairs.

In my (admittedly limited) experience with playing with planeswalkers as commanders (houseruled), another dynamic that turns up is that if people are really worried about a planeswalker hitting in the next turn, they prioritize dropping things that will be able to swing into it. It's the same as how you hold removal for especially dangerous creature commanders.

Moreover, even though they're recastable (and probably because they're recastable), the batch of five that can serve as commanders are on the whole a lot safer than many generic planeswalkers. (Freyalise is exceptional in only taking three turns to ult and protecting itself in the meantime.)

Is there anything particularly interesting you can put Assault Suit on? I thought of Rakdos the Defiler, but they can simply elect not to attack with it, so that does nothing. (It'd pretty neat if you coud somehow also make Rakdos have to attack each turn, but at that point you're three cards deep on something that's certainly going to get answered pretty quickly since it doesn't protect itself.) The next thing I thought of was Ulamog; not only do people want to attack with it (since it doesn't hurt them to do so), but making it immune to sacrifice on top of its indestructibility is an okay combo.

If it was Willbender or something, a reprint, I can imagine having a one-off Morph card, but it seems a little unusual to put it on a brand new card that doesn't really need to have Morph to make sense as a card if there's not at least a Morph subtheme. That doesn't mean that they're going all the way to Ixidor, but I'd be surprised if it was the only Morph card in the deck. It's possible that it's just throwing a bone to Ixidor and/or a hypothetical future Standard-legal morph legend, but given that blue has several vaguely-EDH-playable morph creatures it's probably at least a small subtheme in the deck.

There's no particular reason that the decks should have exactly one reprinted legendary creature. In last year's product, each deck had two new shard legendary creatures, but then there were a bunch of random legendary creatures scattered unevenly throughout the decks just because they fit. Each deck will have one planeswalker commander and one new legendary creature, but then it'll also have some arbitrary number of other legendary creatures. In the red deck, one of them is Tuk-tuk. It's possible that that number will incidentally be "one" for each of the decks, but there's no reason to suspect that based on history.

It's possible that Serra simply didn't fit the thematics of what they wanted to do with the white deck. We know from the article that, as originally designed, three of the planeswalker commanders were close enough to the mechanical identities of Ajani, Nissa, and Liliana that they were originally planning on using those characters. Even accounting for development tweaks, if you look at Freyalise, that could easily have been a Nissa card, and Ob Nixilis is a reasonable Liliana. It's possible that whatever the white deck was doing, it's not something that synergized well with what you would have a Serra card do, which pretty much has to be "make angels". (There are cards with Serra's name in them that do pretty much every white thing because back then things were a lot looser thematically, but I think that expectations are clearly that Serra Angel is the card you'd use to inspire what Serra does.) There's a finite number of super-exciting planeswalkers from the past to use in things like this, so it's okay to save some for down the road. (It's also possible that in the next little while they're planning to introduce a planeswalker character into modern continuity who is to angels what Sarkhan is to dragons, and they didn't want to chew up design space or undercut that character by making an angel planeswalker that wasn't them.)

Commander: Homura, Human Ascendant
Main Theme: Earthquakes.
Main Wincons: Hope that Earthquakes + flying things + stuff like Mogg Maniac can get people down before I burn myself out. In most cases, these end up being Drawcons more than Wincons. This deck does not win a lot. This deck is not "good".

Commander: Darien, King of Kjeldor
Main Theme: Soldier tribal/token "tribal", with a minor in hatebears and lifegain-matters
Main Wincons: Creature swarm, technically. This deck is mostly an exercise in trying to get players who have the greatest ability to deal with Darien/Soul Warden and related safeguards out of the game quickly.

Commander: Ghave, Guru of Spores
Main Theme: Look, I can make a good deck if I want to. Er, tokens and +1/+1 counters and sacrifice. Ghave stuff.
Main Wincons: There's technically some (fairly convoluted, but not that convoluted) game-ending combos in the deck, but I prefer to play it as just a grinding resource advantage deck. I guess when I win it's usually off of Craterhoof Behemoth or eventually assembling a close-enough-to-infinite combo.